Universitatea "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" din Iasi anunta programul "Investeste in Tine"
Universitatea "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" (UAIC) din Iasi anunta programul "Investeste în Tine". Este vorba de o initiativa guvernamentala destinata incluziunii socio-profesionale a tinerilor si ofera oportunitatea materializarii unor planuri personale de dezvoltare: fie ca este vorba de proiecte legate de educatie, cultura, sanatate, fie de sport sau habitat, pot fi accesate credite cu costuri 0, cu durata de pana la 10 ani si perioada de gratie de pâna la 5 ani.
Totul se face prin Fondul National de Garantare a Creditelor pentru Intreprinderile Mici si Mijlocii (FNGCIMM SA-IFN), care este o institutie financiara nebancara, cu capital de risc, infiintata in scopul facilitarii accesului IMM-urilor la finantari, prin acordarea de garantii pentru instrumentele de finantare contractate de la banci comerciale sau din alte surse.
"FNGCIMM instrumenteaza programe guvernamentale destinate relansarii economice, dezvoltarii mediului de afaceri, precum si crearii si sustinerii de locuri de munca, functionand ca o societate comerciala pe actiuni, cu actionar unic statul roman, sub supravegherea prudentiala a Bancii Nationale a Romaniei. Garantia FNGCIMM SA - IFN este de maxim 80 la suta din valoarea imprumutului, fara a depasi suma de 2,5 milioane euro/beneficiar si se emite la solicitarea institutiilor finantatoare partenere, pentru finantari aprobate, pe baza analizei documentelor prezentate de catre finantator", au transmis oficialii UAIC.
Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași
Interesantă conferinţă internaţională se va ţine anul acesta la Iaşi
Conferinţa internaţională „Dezvoltarea Economico-Socială Durabilă a Euroregiunilor şi a Zonelor Transfrontaliere“ va avea loc la Iaşi în acest an, pe 25 octombrie 2019, în Aula Magna a Academiei Române, filiala Iaşi, situată pe bulevardul Carol I. Conform organizatorilor, tematica se axează pe mai multe domenii, cum ar fi economie, sociologie, juridic, agricultură, silvicultură, mediu, geodezie, sănătate, învăţământ, cultură, turism, artă, inginerie aplicată, respectiv „structurarea, fundamentarea, testarea şi aplicarea unor noi modele matematice şi strategii de dezvoltare a Euroregiunii Siret-Prut-Nistru
Termenul limită pentru trimiterea rezumatelor este 15 august, iar articolele în limba română sau engleză vor fi publicate în volum la o editură acreditată de Consiliul Naţional al Cercetării Ştiinţifice. „Cele mai valoroase lucrări în limba engleză, selectate de către referenţi, vor fi publicate în Yearbooks of «Gh. Zane» Institute of Economic Research, publicaţie cotată BA şi indexată RePEc, EBSCO şi ProQuest“, au mai precizat organizatorii. Conferinţa este organizată de Academia Română, Filiala Iaşi - Institutul de Cercetări Economice şi Sociale, „Gheorghe Zane“- Colectivul de Cercetări Economice, Asociaţia „Euroregiunea Siret-Prut-Nistru“, AGER - Filiala Iaşi, Universitatea de Stat „Alecu Russo“, Bălţi - Republica Moldova, Universitatea Cooperatist-Comercială, Chişinău, Republica Moldova.
Publicație : Ziarul de Iași
University of Cambridge to investigate how it benefited from slave trade
'We cannot change the past, but nor should we seek to hide from it,' says vice-chancellor
The University of Cambridge will launch an inquiry to uncover how the prestigious institution may have benefited from and contributed to the slave trade.
A two-year investigation will acknowledge the university’s “role during that dark phase of human history”, vice-chancellor Professor Stephen Toope has said.
It is hoped the in-depth study will uncover how the institution may have gained from slavery and the exploitation of labour during the colonial era through donations, gifts and bequests.
he investigation, by two post-doctoral researchers, will also examine the extent to which Cambridge scholars reinforced race-based attitudes which helped shape public opinion.
It comes amid a wider "decolonise" movement sweeping university campuses in both Britain and the US.
Police at the scene in Fulham, west London where a 29-year-old man was stabbed to death this morning. The Metropolitan Police said it was called "to reports of a fight in progress" by ambulance crews and arrived on the scene at about 12.27am. The victim was found with stab wounds and died at the scene at 12.56am despite attempts by paramedics and members of the public to save his life
Schoolchildren gather around Queen Victoria Memorial at Buckingham Palace as they take part in a student climate protest in London. Thousands of pupils from schools, colleges and universities across the UK will walk out in the second major strike against climate change this year. Young people nationwide are calling on the Government to declare a climate emergency and take action. Similar strikes are taking place around the world today including in Japan and Australia, inspired by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg who criticised world leaders at a United Nations climate conference
Families of those killed during Bloody Sunday march through Bogside in Derry, Northern Ireland. The Public Prosecution Service announced only one former British soldier is to be put on trial in connection with his role in the shootings that left 13 people dead in Derry on 30 January 1972. Families of those killed gathered outside The Museum of Free Derry, yards from where the killings took place, before marching to the city centre hotel to hear the announcement Charles McQuillan
Getty
Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond leaves 11 Downing Street as he heads to the House of Commons, to deliver his Spring Statement. He announced he was slashing the UK growth forecast and warned no-deal Brexit will destroy pledge to end austerity
PA
Oriel College at Oxford University decided to keep its statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes in 2016 despite widespread student demands to remove it.
Last year, Glasgow University announced it would launch a "reparative justice programme" after discovering it benefited by tens of millions of pounds from racial slavery.
Professor Toope said: “There is growing public and academic interest in the links between the older British universities and the slave trade, and it is only right that Cambridge should look into its own exposure to the profits of coerced labour during the colonial period.
“We cannot change the past, but nor should we seek to hide from it. I hope this process will help the University understand and acknowledge its role during that dark phase of human history.”
The findings of the inquiry are expected to be submitted to the vice-chancellor in autumn 2021.
know at this stage what exactly it will find but it is reasonable to assume that, like many large British institutions during the colonial era, the university will have benefited directly or indirectly from, and contributed to, the practices of the time.
“The benefits may have been financial or through other gifts. But the panel is just as interested in the way scholars at the university helped shape public and political opinion, supporting, reinforcing and sometimes contesting racial attitudes which are repugnant in the 21st centur”
Publicație : The Independent
Universities must 'decolonise' the curriculum to boost black students' grades, vice-Chancellors say
Universities must “decolonise” the curriculum in order to help black students close the attainment gap with their white peers, vice-Chancellors say.
Campuses need to become “racially diverse and inclusive environments” if black, asian and minority ethnic (BAME) are to succeed academically, according to a new report.
Universities UK (UUK), which represents vice-Chancellors, commissioned a review into how institutions can ensure more BAME students graduate with top degrees.
Institutions should consult with students and “evaluate where it might be necessary” to review courses and assessments to ensure that they are not overly white and euro-centric, UUK said.
The report’s recommendation comes amid growing calls to “decolonise” the curriculum, as students urge their professors to examine whether courses are too dominated by white, male, Euro-centric perspectives.
Baroness Valerie Amos, who led UUK’s review, said that many BAME students do not feel a “sense of belonging” at university.
“Part of that was about not seeing their history [and] their experiences reflected in the content of the courses that are being taught,” she told The Daily Telegraph.
Reading lists and course structures in all subjects should be scrutinised to ensure there is no racial bias, according to Baroness Amos, who is director of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the country’s first female black university leader.
“There are things like who is on the reading lists, how much are you enabling a critique of different approaches to subjects, who is being recognised as being someone who can make a valuable contribution on this? That applies as much to science subjects as much as it does to arts and humanities subjects,” she said.
“Scientists come from all over the world, they don’t just come from the UK, the United States and other countries in Europe. It is really just about broadening our perspectives.”
Over the past decade, the number of BAME undergraduate students has increased by more than 50 per cent. But just 57 per cent of black students who graduated in 2017 achieved a first or a 2:1 compared to 81 per cent of white students.
Qualifications before attending university can explain some but not all of the differences between degree class differences between ethnic groups.
The report said that vice-Chancellors must foster environments where issues surrounding race and racism can be discussed more openly, and added that they should gather data on which approaches are effective in tackling the attainment gap.
Earlier this week, Cambridge University announced it is launching an inquiry into how it benefited from the slave trade.
It will also probe how far Cambridge academics “reinforced and validated race-based thinking between the 18th and early 20th Century”.
Other leading universities have refused to bow to pressure from decolonisation campaigns aimed at names of buildings and statues, as well as their curriculum.
Oxford University refused to bow to pressure from the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, which called for the statue of Cecil Rhodes to be taken down from Oriel College over his links to imperialism.
Meanwhile, Bristol University announced that it will not rename the Wills Memorial Building despite campaigners claiming it is named after a slave trader.
Publicație : The Telegraph
The state of the discipline: English studies
English studies is a traditional big beast in the academy, but there are concerns that changes in student behaviour could put it on the endangered list. Seven academics give their views on whether and how the discipline needs to evolve
English studies is arguably the archetypal humanities subject in the anglophone world, steeping its students in the English language’s central cultural landmarks and preparing them for all manner of interesting careers in the arts, media and civil society.
Yet, in an era of increasing fees and instrumentalism, concern about how much the subject really contributes to employability has combined with growing distaste for long, difficult texts written by dead white authors to push down enrolments and endanger departments.
Meanwhile, technology, literary theory and the growth of identity-based subdisciplines have driven such a ramification of research directions that some question what, if anything, defines English studies. Is it really a discipline at all, or just a bundle of more or less related intellectual interests, all obliged to dwell under one historic roof? And is that multifariousness a strength or a weakness?
Here, seven academics from every corner of the English-speaking world give their views on where their discipline is headed – and whether, with that destination in mind, it would be better to step on the accelerator or the brake.
‘Being an English professor has increasingly become a misnomer’
Studying English isn’t what it used to be. The classes many of us of a certain age had in our college days – a survey of Shakespeare or Milton, the 18th-century novel, literary criticism and theory and the like – have given way to courses on identity, Marxism or the global south. In addition, film, television and digital media have come under the English department's capacious aegis. Because of austerity measures, many other disciplines have also come to be housed in English, including creative writing, non-fiction prose, rhetoric, global anglophone literature and linguistics.
It’s probably true that being an English major or an English professor has increasingly become a misnomer. English departments have responded to dwindling student recruitment by not only treating all global anglophone literature in the same course, as my own has done, but also by incorporating literature from other languages in translation – without considering themselves to be comparative literature departments. A better, though inelegant, name might be the Department of Literature and Other Non-literary Things in Many Languages.
English departments might be seen, also, as semiology departments involved in studying the signs and meanings of such things. Cultural studies, which was often housed in English, has risen and fallen as a trendy topic. Now the idea that one should study the semiology of culture is so built into the system as to be invisible to the ordinary student.
The inclusion of transgender, queer and disability studies into the curriculum has broadened the longer-standing categories of race, class and gender, as well as LGBT studies. Intersectionality has become a watchword, if even now increasingly contentious, for identity studies in English. The area of tension is between those who would anchor the origin of the term in the politics surrounding black women and those who seek a wider application to a variety of subject positions. However, the general principle involved in intersectionality seeks to link practitioners to a broad array of political and interpretative activities. You can’t be an English professor in your ivory tower. Rather, the imperative is to fight for and with all the struggles of marginalised or oppressed people. That can be difficult at best and exhausting at worst.
In some senses, therefore, intersectionality goes against a narrowly defined intellectual activity like English studies. To some, English (and the language to which it is linked) is seen as yoked to an oppressive history of conquest, enslavement and imperialism. Hence, another feature of the moment is decolonising the curriculum. This reshaping of the canon of literature now includes paying attention to the global south. It also means reconsidering the European basis of English culture, to the extent that foundational texts like those of Plato or Aristotle are being challenged as “white” and “Eurocentric”.
There have been some reactions against this whirlwind. One approach is to focus on the data aspect of texts. Using algorithms, scholars investigate what kind of signals appear under which conditions. Commonalities between texts can be verified by counting the frequency of certain words, and questions of authorship can be settled by coming up with verbal fingerprints, as it were, for individual authors.
Another reaction is to go back to what Roland Barthes called “the pleasure of the text”. With the advent of “new criticism” in the 1950s, the role of the reader’s enjoyment of the text was eschewed in favour of formalist rigour. It had become a common move on the part of professors to repress a student’s statement “I liked this text” or “I didn’t like this text” by saying, “It’s irrelevant whether you liked or disliked the text. What’s important is to analyse the text.” Close reading is the particular modality of some scholars’ re-embrace of pleasure, and since it is formalist in nature, it seeks to dodge political bullets.
But the days when theory was king were heady days indeed, with students flocking to learn the secrets of complex postmodern orthodoxy. It is hard to see what flagship ideas now lead the way to the seas of enlightenment, and this lack of direction may have been a factor contributing to declining enrolments in English graduate programmes.
Another discouraging factor might be tied to the incredible level of student loans accumulated by would-be English PhDs. After graduation, there are few attractive avenues for erasing debt. Teaching jobs in English tend to be low-paying ones, further degraded by crushing workloads. It has become a routine part of PhD training, therefore, to promote jobs in other professions – editing, marketing, advertising and the like, in what might be seen as a bait-and-switch for those who thought they’d end up teaching in institutions of higher education.
All of that notwithstanding, there are still many students who do find teaching jobs that remind them why they went into the profession in the first place. And the rise of unions for graduate students, teaching assistants and faculty hold out hope for better working conditions. That might well improve the state of English in general.
Lennard Davis is distinguished professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago
Diminishing numbers: number of US English degrees awarded, 1970-2016
n Australia, as in the US, the discipline of “English” remains a surprisingly resilient colonial residue. Its very name evokes the literature of empire, and it is still often taught in periods whose names tell a triumphant tale of Western progress, from the “Dark” Middle Ages, through the Renaissance, into the Enlightenment and beyond.
Decolonising this curriculum involves, in the first instance, reading and teaching Aboriginal literature. This seems only the most minimal recognition due to the original custodians of the land our universities occupy, and it carries with it the benefit of introducing students to Indigenous stories and ways of knowing that have sustained this country and its ecosystems for more than 100,000 years.
In order to understand how the canon of English literature was (and continues to be) produced, however, it helps to view that process as contingent, as subject to historical forces, rather than independent of them. The past 50 years have seen curricula expand cumulatively, via the addition of a multitude of modules, including women’s, queer and hyphenated literatures (such as African-American or Asian-Australian). But unless we interrogate the claims of the canon itself, this process can end up merely supplementing a centre whose white, Western maleness remains relatively unchallenged. Ironically, the decline of the discipline itself, with English departments only a fraction of the size of those many of us trained in, has done more to destabilise the canon than many more purposeful and politically driven reforms have done: shrinking staff numbers make it impossible to do justice to both the classics and the so-called special interests, creating unavoidable holes in our coverage.
Yet the loss of a mythically comprehensive curriculum has been bemoaned at least since the Renaissance (my own period of specialisation), and no doubt earlier still. So, too, has the loss of that beloved object, the book. In Tudor England, the advent of the printing press was heralded as a cultural catastrophe that threatened the manuscript in much the same way as the digital revolution has been thought to imperil the printed book.
And the declining reading habits of our young people? Fake news, people! Unfortunately, this accusation is bandied about by universities themselves, in justification of their efforts to economise on things such as library facilities and face-to-face teaching. The proverbial short attention span of millennials might well be a myth expressly fabricated by university administrators intent on flipping our classrooms out of existence.
If we flip this mindset instead, we might consider that millennials, and their younger siblings, are actually prodigious readers. It’s just that the objects they read are not necessarily, and certainly not only, conventional books. This does not mean that they categorically refuse to read books. A brilliant long novel, or even a fascinatingly bad one, will probably always find a place on a carefully curated syllabus. A course filled entirely with triple-decker tomes, however, is unlikely to attract big undergraduate enrolments. The challenge today is to situate the novel (or the play, or the poem) in a continuum of textual production that takes into account a variety of modern literary forms, including the digital.
For university English departments to attract and retain these students, we need to realise that reading – like the book-as-object and university-as-institution – has a long history of cultural change: a history about which, not incidentally, cognate disciplines such as cultural studies, the history of the book and the digital humanities, have much to teach us.
If we insist on a limited and limiting idea of the textual object, we risk misrecognising and underestimating the digital reading habits of new generations of readers. If this discourse is not as economically and cynically motivated as I’ve suggested (although the jury is still out on that), it is at least misguided in the extreme: one may as well berate baby boomers for casting off papyrus in favour of paperbacks.
Trisha Pender is an associate professor of English at the University of Newcastle, Australia
English, a three-legged stool made up of the study of English literature, language and creative writing, is in fine intellectual health.
The study of literature – my neck of the woods – lives through controversy and dialogue: its image, a legacy of the “theory wars” of the 1980s, is that there are wave after wave of new critical ideas, each one sweeping in with a new generation. But under the waves are older, more powerful and more stable currents: the two great streams are (roughly speaking, because the names metamorphose) historicism (“context is all”) and formalism (“read the words on the page”). For the past 25 years or so, the historicists have been dominant: in part, this is because historicism goes with the grain of prevailing intellectual trends – critiquing, contextualising – and in part because it’s easier to get a grant for archival research than for more “blue sky” conceptual rethinking or literary revaluation.
But perhaps the tides are changing. Books like Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique, Deidre Shauna Lynch’s Loving Literature: A Cultural History, Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (all published in 2015) and Joseph North’s polemical Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017) have all been making a case against historicism and “critique”, and for something like an updated version of old-fashioned criticism: a practice, as North writes, concerned with art, form and feeling, less interested in exposing what a text fails to do and more about using literature to reconfigure our own perceptions.
How this goes along with “decolonising the curriculum” is a matter for critical debate – as in, for example, Ankhi Mukherjee’s prizewinning What is a Classic? (2010). It is hard to tell, too, quite where digital humanities sits between these sides: Martin Eve’s forthcoming Close Reading with Computers uses the best of both – as all great criticism does, really. The critical interest lies where the turbulence of two currents meeting disturbs the sediment.
The study of language is thriving, too, aided, of course, by the digital revolution. There is especially interesting research in stylistics, which crosses over between literary and language study and in sociolinguistics. Creative writing is also transforming English. Traditionally, it brought big beasts into the academy (“What next?” asked linguist Roman Jacobson on hearing that Vladimir Nabokov was being offered a chair at Harvard University. “Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?”), but the huge recent influx of writers has begun to shift the critical question from “what does a text mean?” to “how does it work?”. And there is a crossover between creative and critical writing: new master’s degrees and successful small presses like Norwich’s Seam Editions (“Creative-critical publishers”) experiment with ideas of what literature is, or might be.
Institutionally, however, English in the UK is a little less rosy. While still the biggest arts and humanities subject, there has been a decline in student numbers from 2010’s high of 60,390 applications and 10,020 acceptances to 47,110 and 8,810 respectively in 2017. This drop is steeper than the current “demographic dip” although it is far from confirming the media’s beloved “death of the humanities” narrative. At a workshop on recruitment organised by the UK’s English Association last year, we found three things.
First, there’s evidence that, at GCSE (school exams at age 16), the current focus on assessment, at the expense of a broader literary experience, puts students off. Could we in higher education do more to help schools engage with the wealth of the discipline, and campaign for a richer variety of texts and the return of coursework – traditionally a strength of the subject?
Second, the removal in 2015 of the cap on the number of undergraduates that English universities can recruit, combined with students' over-reliance on league tables – which serve English less well – has meant that higher-tier institutions have hoovered up undergraduates from lower-tier ones. English is cheap to teach – no labs or expensive equipment are required – so it is a prime vector for quick expansion (even though such growth can have a negative effect on National Student Survey scores).
Finally, while our students are passionate about the subject, we need to stress how employable they are by correcting wider misconceptions. As the below graph shows, English graduates perform very well in sustained employment in the longer term: over the same period, while their salaries are less than some directly vocational courses, they have parity with many similar subjects. Even more encouraging was “Project Oxygen”, Google’s huge study of the most significant skills for a successful career. These include empathy, communicating, listening, critical thinking, problem solving and connecting complex ideas – all of which are embedded in the study of English.
Coding might get you a first job, but an English degree makes your career.
Robert Eaglestone is professor of contemporary literature and thought at Royal Holloway, University of London, and co-editor, with Gail Marshall, of English: Shared Futures (2018)
The big picture: patterns of applications, qualifications, staffing and earnings for English studies in the UK
Ask many UK English literature academics a question about the future of the discipline and they will turn their eyes skywards in exasperation and despair. Numbers of applicants to most English studies degrees are falling. And while the removal of the cap on student numbers in 2015 has allowed some departments to stem the decline, the knock-on effects have also only hastened it elsewhere – prompting regular worried huddles over the departmental coffee machine.
Target grades are lowered, but still courses are closing down – and so, inevitably, jobs are under threat. English literature, one of the most popular areas of the humanities until very recently, now struggles in particular to attract male students, and those from ethnic minorities especially. There are no jobs in studying English, I hear again and again from my students, even at a privileged institution such as mine. How, they ask, does reading books prepare us for careers in the real world? How do these long poems you prescribe set us up to deal with pressing social issues in the ways that “real disciplines” like law or even history do?
As if these were not body blows enough, in recent times the subject has been hit by a further set of challenges from a different direction. However, I’d like to suggest that these represent more of an opportunity than a matter of concern. Approached as a prompt genuinely to consider how English studies might matter (or matter again) to today’s young British readers, they provide us with a way of refreshing – if not completely overhauling – our subject and mode of textual interpretation. And this could be a really good thing.
I am speaking, of course, of the actions and questions generated by the loosely related “decolonial” movements that have emerged since 2015, including “Why is my curriculum so white?”, Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall. And while their reach has been cross-disciplinary, the English students involved have invited us to ask fundamentally important questions about what might be called the diversity of our syllabus, and the representativeness of the texts we teach.
How might English literature count to those outside its traditional provinces of cultural and national appeal? How is it that a syllabus excludes by merely reflecting the image that a certain national elite in power around six decades ago projected on the discipline?
Lying behind words such as “decolonial” and “diversity” are crucial concerns about how we identify through our reading, and how our reading might guide us in addressing current issues of social inequality and injustice. Those black British students who have not yet deserted the subject for more obviously “useful” ones have raised questions about how their reading speaks to their experience of the world. Many students now feel that they cannot “find themselves reflected” in standard “Englit” course content. Even in 20th-century courses, there are not enough texts by black and other minority writers. There are certainly insufficient theoretical approaches of non-European provenance – 18th-century black readings of Coleridge and Wordsworth, for example.
Yet in this gap between expectation and delivery lies the opportunity for English that the decolonial movement represents. Indeed, we might feel grateful to the students exercised by these matters for raising the question at all. They show us a new way of opening out English studies – or, some might say, of reasserting the importance of the kind of postcolonial work that some critics have been doing for decades, even if it was never in the interests of the mainstream properly to recognise it.
“If we open the canon,” the British Pakistani author Hanif Kureishi recently wrote, “we also open our minds.” On top of that, we reopen our field for a new generation of students who may well be drawn back to it if it speaks to their subjectivity and hopes of changing the world.
Elleke Boehmer is professor of world literature in English and director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, based at Wolfson College, Oxford. Her most recent book is Postcolonial Poetics
During the past five years, the English curriculum at the University of British Columbia has expanded into transnationalism, media studies, film, science studies and genre fiction. We have also introduced a new programme in language and literature, and have developed an introductory course using a dynamic collaborative pedagogy. We started programmes that include practical work experience for undergraduate and PhD students. We hired colleagues in Canadian, modernist, transnational and indigenous literatures and are now hiring in media studies, cognitive linguistics, critical race studies and African diasporas. We produce field-defining research, placing us in the top 30 English departments in the world.
But enrolments have slumped. Since 2005, our total majors have reduced by 41 per cent. Our university’s commitment to scientific research and international recruitment does not favour the humanities, but such declines are common across many English departments.
It is often suggested that the economic recession of 2008 led many parents to encourage their kids to enrol in programmes that ensure reliable and steady jobs. But is this the only reason for the current crisis?
Last year, we surveyed a cross section of our students to ask why they decided to become English majors. Overwhelmingly – at a rate of close to 100 per cent – they said it was because they “loved literature”. In contrast, only 50 per cent of majors and honours students selected “potential career pathways”, suggesting that, at the time of declaration, students were more likely to select the English major out of enjoyment, without considering career potential. Training in writing and research and the opportunity to participate in work experience were among the least selected reasons.
Yet, when we asked our majors which classroom activities they thought were “most effective helping to achieve academic goals”, they selected essay writing and class discussion. The difference here is striking: at the point of declaring the major, only half of our students are aware of the skills they will develop; once in the programme, they become fully aware that they are learning these skills.
Responses to another survey of close to 400 first-year students from across the university enrolled in our introductory courses were also interesting. Asked if they would consider becoming English majors or minors, more than half said they would never consider English as a primary major, citing a perceived heavy workload, high expectations (especially around writing ability) or personal unsuitability. Only a quarter said yes, with love of literature again being the main reason. But a third said they would consider English as a secondary major or minor because they found the material intriguing, because the professor was enthusiastic and engaged, or because they sensed that the programme would help them develop practical skills.
After assessing these results and comparing them to recent research in the psychology of major selection, we concluded that declining enrolments in English have little to do with the content of what we teach or the methods we use to teach it. Students’ choice of major is an affective choice, as well as an intellectual and practical one.
What is to be done, then? Despite our extensive curricular revisions, we are convinced that neither they nor “skills-oriented learning objectives” will bring students back to English – especially after 2021, when our Faculty of Arts has decided to cancel its long-standard literature requirement. We recognise that students who select a major because they love the subject do so because they also have the economic wherewithal to assume the employability risks that such a choice might entail. We also know that other students are reluctant to enrol in English because they are anxious about the discipline’s usefulness for their careers – even if they stop worrying about that once they have selected English as their major.
Our students become particularly animated when we expose them to the diversity of our research practices. When we are confident about the value of literary, linguistic and humanities research in our increasingly complex, uneasy world, our students feel confident about it too. What we need to do, then, is to find ways to make students feel that they will gain skills, knowledge and, above all, confidence just by being in our programmes.
Encouraging such feelings won’t be easy. Happily, though, we are familiar with the techniques. In our work and in our teaching, we value the complexity of literary and other forms of representation and show how that complexity can be marshalled to positive, social ends. Whether this comes about through academic critical essays or creative group presentations, it still models the kind of engaged work that university graduates will be expected to do.
Sometimes our teaching involves admiration, even love, for the literature – love has been a feature of literary discourse since the 18th century – but it is not all that we teach. We need to communicate intellectually and embody affectively the confidence that what we already teach – complex knowledge and practical skills – will enhance students’ lives every bit as much as it does ours.
Alexander Dick is an associate professor and chair of the majors programme and Patricia Badir is a professor in the department of English language and literatures at the University of British Columbia
Hong Kong society often prides itself as the centre of English proficiency in eastern Asia. Its universities’ English syllabi, accordingly, delved much deeper than elsewhere on the continent into the traditional literary canon.
In terms of international perspective and academic freedom some of Hong Kong’s English sections may still be second to none in Asia. But two things have changed. One is the rise of the top Chinese universities, some of whose English syllabi are now, possibly, more intense than those at Hong Kong’s best institutions. The other is the broadening out of curricula in Hong Kong, in pursuit of student enrolments.
Even though a minuscule number of Hong Kong students take English literature as a subject for the state exams at the end of secondary school, English still has the second highest intake each year among all humanities subjects in my university, with only Chinese language and literature taking in more students. Most English departments have both literature and linguistics sections; students take courses in both and can specialise in either. However, in the English literature sections, the main focus may no longer be on bringing students up to speed in terms of the traditional canon.
While elective and compulsory courses in traditional areas such as Romanticism and modernism are still quite popular, change is being driven by the fact that English departments must shape their offerings to the needs of society and students. For instance, they now get money for attracting students from outside their discipline. Hence, they must devise general education courses that can attract such students; we now have very popular modules in superheroes, crime fiction and popular song. Courses in topical cross-disciplinary areas, such as the medical and digital humanities, are also popular.
Whether they boost student employability is another matter, but that is certainly universities’ hope. Both staff and departments must now demonstrate the “impact” of their work, leading to a rise in courses that give students an advantage in the workplace. But it is complicated. With the glut of new MAs in Hong Kong and new short transfer programmes, their primary degree is no longer a great predictor of where someone will work, and surveys suggest that English graduates end up scattered across the employment sector. Still, all programmes are being asked to start internships for students, so we in English try to work with charities, galleries and other cultural organisations where we have connections.
Impact has also become the big determinant of research success. Since impact can be demonstrated by testimonials and outreach activities, research that engages with the public is increasingly important. However, since English is not integral to life outside the university, either in Hong Kong or mainland China, proving impact is difficult. Outreach activities for English department lecturers, for instance, are often limited to school visits and readings at the vibrant local creative writing groups.
Another major factor determining the nature of research in Hong Kong English departments is relevance to the Hong Kong and China context. Nearly all research funding in Hong Kong comes from the University Grants Committee (UGC), and all eight UGC-funded universities compete for the biggest cut of the budget. However, it is almost impossible to win a research award by focusing solely on an anglophone writer.
Between 70 and 80 per cent (sometimes more) of research grants awarded each year in the humanities focus on topics related to Hong Kong or China. The Belt and Road project, for example, has been targeted from all kinds of research perspectives in Hong Kong humanities departments. Academics with specialisms in English literature and language must likewise be very creative in terms of fitting those specialisms into the needs of communities in both Hong Kong and China – especially with the Chinese government now making more funding available to Hong Kong researchers.
English departments also offer important spaces for work in creative writing, comparative literature, world literature and world Englishes. And lecturers and teachers are creatively enhancing the role that it can play in the community through creative writing, practical skills workshops and comparative cross-cultural projects.
English will, of course, never occupy the place it once did, when Hong Kong was a British colony. But the fact that the academy itself still prioritises research in English over, for example, research in Chinese means that English will always have an important place in the Asian university.
Publicație : The Times
The push for open access is finally reaching a tipping point
Elsevier’s open access deal with Norwegian universities is the latest evidence of a shifting balance of power, says Jeffrey MacKie-Mason
Last week, Norway signed a landmark open access agreement with Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher. It came barely a month after the country cancelled its subscription contract: a step that several other countries and organisations had already taken.
In early 2017, a consortium of about 700 German universities and research organisations cut ties with Elsevier because the publisher would not agree to what would have been a transformative open access deal. In spring 2018, Swedish universities followed. And in December, Hungary and the powerful Max Planck Society took their stand.
We at the University of California also ended our Elsevier subscription in December and terminated negotiations in February.
We are not small customers. The California contract reached nearly $11 million (£8.5 million) in 2018, and the German contract was considerably larger.
Others are considering following suit, insisting on unrestricted access to scholarly articles so that anyone, anywhere can read them. The president of the University of California, Janet Napolitano, has called on other US systems to follow our lead, and already several (including the University of North Carolina, the University of Washington and the seven public Virginia research universities) have announced that they are actively considering similar moves.
In the 25 years since open access pioneer Stevan Harnad issued his call to action, progress, although steady, has been slow. But I believe that the tipping point many of us have been hoping for is near.
In the print era, there was a single gateway to publishing academic research, and publishers held the key. In exchange for editing, publishing and distribution, the author gave the publisher the complete copyright – a legal monopoly to reach readers. But in the networked, digital world, there are alternative ways to access and share scientific articles.
One is to read the author’s accepted manuscript (the final version after peer review but before the author turns over copyright) on an open access repository. Many funders, such as the National Institutes of Health and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as research universities, including the University of California, now require authors to post their accepted manuscripts on repositories. And by one recent estimate, about half of all published scholarship is now available this way.
There are other legitimate ways to access articles, such as through interlibrary loan or by requesting a copy directly from the author. Then there are the illegal pirate sites, such as Sci-Hub, which obtain copies of copyrighted publications through various means and make them available from servers in countries that do not adhere to international copyright conventions.
The more ways there are to read academic literature, the more academic institutions will be empowered to reimagine or cancel subscriptions. Experience in Germany and Sweden – whose institutions lost access to articles via Elsevier’s journal websites in July 2018 but whose faculty are not rising up in protest – indicates that alternative access is sufficient. The University of California Libraries, too, are prepared to assist with legal alternative ways to access Elsevier journal articles.
I believe that enough pressure is being exerted on commercial journal publishers from enough different directions that they will have to flip their business to open access pay-for-publishing. Global giant Wiley recently announced a series of deals that include open access publishing, proving that this is possible. The University of California and Cambridge University Press signed a cost-neutral open access agreement just last month.
And then came Elsevier’s Norway agreement, which bears a striking resemblance, in many ways, to the offer from us that the publisher rejected. These transformative contracts are further evidence that change is accelerating, and that power is shifting from major for-profit publishers towards universities. Society will benefit.
Academia is already exploring a number of ways to convert the scientific publishing industry to a pay-for-publishing model. One approach is for government agencies and philanthropic foundations to directly pay the costs of publishing the research they fund. Another is for authors or their employers to pay a publication charge when an article is accepted. Universities, which used to administer most journal publishing themselves, are also exploring ways to take back control.
There are pros and cons to each approach, and the most likely outcome is a mixed ecosystem. At the University of California, we’re not saying the days of paying for subscriptions are over – yet. But we are working to hasten their demise, and we think it is coming soon.
No one is saying that publishing can be done for nothing. Research institutions and funders have always been prepared to cover the costs of publishing, formerly by paying for reading access. That is what a subscription is. The difference is that by paying publishers to publish, with no charge for reading, everyone in the world – not just academics at wealthy institutions – can benefit from new scientific discoveries, immediately.
Publicație : The Times
Renowned trio lose out in Russell Group student recruitment race
Shrinking enrolments at Southampton, Manchester and Sheffield suggest English elite are not immune to pressures of marketisation
Student recruitment has nosedived at three Russell Group universities since number controls were fully abolished in England, in a sign that the country’s elite are not immune to mounting competition and demographic decline.
The abolition of student number controls in 2015 was known to have had led to big falls in undergraduate enrolment and consequent financial problems at some post-92 universities. But Times Higher Education analysis of Ucas acceptance figures up to 2018 shows that three of the Russell Group’s 20 English members – the universities of Manchester, Sheffield and Southampton – have seen big declines in recruitment too. All three grew under the system of unlimited recruitment of high-grade students, then saw numbers reduced when the cap was fully removed.
While Southampton said that its 29 per cent reduction in student acceptance numbers reflected a strategic choice to raise “quality”, Manchester and Sheffield both explained their falls of about 10 per cent by referring to the new competitive market in student recruitment created by the abolition of number controls.
Among those mounting expansion, the universities of Bristol and Exeter, plus UCL, have long been known to be pursuing growth. However, the rapid growth of around 14 per cent since 2015 at institutions such as Newcastle University and the University of Leeds has not been so widely understood.
One vice-chancellor said that whereas, in the past, the English sector was a continuum, under the new policy it was divided into something resembling the divisions of English football – and among the “Premier League” of the Russell Group there were several small competitor groups fighting among themselves for students.
Some suggest that a number of Russell Group universities have responded to the new market by dropping their entry tariffs to boost numbers – putting a recruitment squeeze on counterparts that opt not to drop tariffs.
Overall, the average increase in acceptances across the 20 English Russell Group institutions was a modest 2.9 per cent between 2015 and 2018.
Liz Carlile, Sheffield’s head of admissions, said: “In recent years the UK’s demographic dip has meant the number of potential higher education applicants has declined, while the number of higher education providers and post-18 alternatives has risen.
“As a responsible recruiter, we have chosen to admit fewer students in order to maintain our rigorous standards and ensure our students are confident and ready to meet the demands of studying with us.”
The UK’s decision to leave the European Union – which has put pressure on EU student recruitment – and a decline in the population of British 18-year-olds were among the factors cited by Manchester.
“External factors and uncertainties, such as Brexit, plus a change in demographics and more competitive recruitment by universities have all presented challenges and impacted on recruitment over the past few years, but we are able to recruit to overall targets by having a responsive approach to these issues,” a Manchester spokesman said.
Manchester’s non-EU student recruitment increased by 9.8 per cent between 2014 and 2017.
A Southampton spokesman said that the university “has been through a period of transition in recent years, with changes to strategy placing an increased emphasis on the quality of the student experience. The planned reduction of acceptances since 2015 is a reflection of that strategic approach.”
Others at Southampton suggested that the university had pursued a strategy of expansion under former vice-chancellor Don Nutbeam, then abruptly switched to one of higher entry tariffs to secure higher placings in domestic newspaper league tables – which reduced student recruitment – under his successor, Sir Christopher Snowden (now also departed).
Bob Rabone, a former finance director at Sheffield who served as chair of the British Universities Finance Directors Group, said of the general picture: “The diverse range of changes that Russell Group universities have experienced almost certainly says something about their intentions, the reality of their specific positions, a better informed and motivated view from students – all against the demographic downturn in progress. This seems like a perfect recipe for making predicting and [financial] planning even more difficult than before.”
Colin McCaig, professor of higher education policy at Sheffield Hallam University, who has researched the impact of the lifting of number controls, said that “we have seen in recent Ucas cycles since the numbers cap came off that selective institutions have begun to outstrip post-92s in terms of number growth”.
But Professor McCaig also suggested that some Russell Group institutions could be consolidating ahead of the government’s post-18 review, in case it results in a cut in funding per student. Some institutions “may be thinking that incentives for [domestic undergraduate] expansion are no longer there” and “some may decide to expand international or postgraduate student numbers” instead, he said.
Publicație : The Times
Engage with climate deniers and anti-vaxxers, says science chief
Peter Gluckman, president-elect of the International Science Council, says ‘Dr Google’ poses a bigger threat to evidence-based policymaking than populist politicians
“Dr Google” is a bigger threat to evidence-based policymaking than the anti-science polemics of populist politicians, according to the incoming head of the International Science Council.
Paediatrician turned science diplomat Sir Peter Gluckman said that science faced a challenge from Donald Trump’s questioning of the consensus on climate change, and former UK education secretary Michael Gove’s pronouncement that Britons had grown tired of experts.
But Sir Peter said that such attitudes were symptoms of a broader problem spawned by the internet. “Everybody now has access to information. Whether it’s reliable or unreliable is beside the point,” he told Times Higher Education.
“That’s led many to think they no longer need experts. There’s a hubris [in] that people think ‘Mr Google’ or ‘Mr Wikipedia’ are enough. That’s not the case. Data needs analysis and interpretation.”
Sir Peter said that science needed to engage with climate change deniers and the “anti-vax” movement. “There’s no point screaming at these people and saying they’re idiots. We need to understand what leads people to particular positions, and recognise that science has a challenge here.”
Sir Peter added: “It doesn’t matter how much we plead to people to have a measles vaccine. The anti-vax movement continues to believe that there’s no need to do so. It doesn’t matter how much the evidence is robust around climate change; there will be people who for whatever reason don’t want to accept climate change is a challenge that must be addressed. There are various reasons why that happens. We need to understand that. It’s not just a matter of better science communication. That’s a trivial way of putting it.”
Sir Peter’s nine-year spell as New Zealand’s chief science adviser ended last year, shortly before he was named president-elect of the ISC. His selection as chief-in-waiting – to be consummated in 2021, when inaugural president Daya Reddy’s term concludes – coincided with the global body’s fusion from two separate bodies, the International Council of Scientific Unions and the International Social Science Council.
The merger “brings the full range of knowledge disciplines into one forum” and will “allow commonality of language to emerge”, Sir Peter said. It also marked a greater focus on the “interplay” between science and policy.
“There needs to be a far more pragmatic way of dealing with issues where evidence is needed to make better decisions for the planet and its citizens. Scientific evidence is one of the inputs into a much more complex equation. Ultimately, at least in a liberal democracy, values such as public opinion, public priorities and electoral context come into play,” Sir Peter said.
Sir Peter said that governments would always do things that “frankly are sometimes stupid. But my experience is [that] when you explain what science can do, acknowledge what science cannot do and recognise the many other domains in a policy community, most governments are more willing to have science at the table. That’s what this is all about.”
Spearheading the effort will be the International Network for Government Science Advice, which Sir Peter helped establish five years ago when he convened the world’s first global meeting of high-level science advisers.
He said that he expected some of the group’s current work to be presented to the United Nations this year, including attempts to give the Sustainable Development Goals more policy clout.
The ISC has also appointed Flavia Schlegel, a former assistant director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, as its special envoy for science in global policy. “It’s not a matter of just turning up and knocking on the doors of international agencies,” Sir Peter said. “We will have an ongoing interaction with them.”
Sir Peter said that science needed to recognise its limitations as well as its strengths. “Science can explain complex systems. When there are many unknowns, we can reduce the level of uncertainty. We can say where it is desirable to get a different outcome and what options are likely to achieve it, and analyse the pluses and minuses of any action,” he said.
“Then we leave it for the policy community to choose between the options. What we cannot do – and what is the wrong thing to do – is to say that because A causes B, therefore government must do C. That is where the hubris of science has been a problem.”
Publicație : The Times
Scholar takes students’ phones and makes them read for four hours
David Peña-Guzmán says philosophy undergraduates have enthusiastically embraced experiment designed to ‘reignite their love of attentive reading’
Forcing students to part with their phones and laptops and confining them to a classroom to read Nietzsche or Sartre for four hours doesn’t seem the best way to win over students at your new university. However, that’s exactly what David Peña-Guzmán, an assistant professor in humanities at San Francisco State University, has done – and it appears to have been a success.
Every other week, students signed up to the class “The Reading Experiment: The Power of the Book”, are given a short introduction to the day’s work and then asked to put their phones in a bag. They then read for four hours – with short breaks every 55 minutes – before an hour-and-a-half discussion about the reading material.
Dr Peña-Guzmán said that he designed the unique class to counteract the distracting effects of technology and to help students “reignite their love of attentive reading”.
Dr Peña-Guzmán told Times Higher Education that he did so after noticing how technology was increasingly affecting his own reading habits. “It’s now so easy to pick [your phone] up and check for messages or alerts and I realised that would be affecting students too,” he said.
There is one piece of technology in the classroom: a white noise machine to remove outside noise. “It’s about a distraction-free environment; I incorporate technology that is conducive and confiscate what is not conducive,” he said.
Dr Peña-Guzmán said that he had been surprised at how students had taken to the class. “A couple of times after the class introduction I’ve forgotten to collect their phones, and every time they remind me,” he said. Some students have even asked how to recreate the environment at home. He admitted, however, there is some self-selection bias because students who like to read are more likely to choose the class.
The concept is important because students are typically not taught to read any more, according to Dr Peña-Guzmán. “We simply assume that reading is something [students] mastered when they were five or six…they aren’t being asked to reflect upon their reading habits and what it means to read attentively, intentionally, and purposively,” he said.
Dr Peña-Guzmán, a philosopher, explained that the course’s theme, existentialism, fitted well with the self-reflection that the class design forced students into.
Other faculty at San Francisco State have expressed interest in replicating the experiment, Dr Peña-Guzmán said.
“It’s important to be honest about why you are conducting this class in this way from the beginning,” he explained. “It’s not about not trusting them, it’s not arbitrarily taking their phones…the format is motivated by concern [over] the ever-increasing influence of technology in our everyday lives – and I am implicated in that too. I give up my phone as well.”
Publicație : The Times
Ces étudiants américains qui s’engagent à reverser une partie de leur salaire pour payer leurs études
Comment parvenir à financer des études coûteuses? La dette étudiante est, en effet, un fardeau aux États-Unis. Il existe désormais une nouvelle solution: une avance de l’école en échange d’un pourcentage fixe du futur salaire de l’étudiant.
Certains étudiants travaillent à côté de leurs cours pour financer leurs études. D’autres reçoivent une aide pécuniaire de leurs parents. D’autres encore ont recours à un emprunt bancaire. Mais, aux États-Unis, il existe une nouvelle alternative pour payer de coûteuses études: l’Income Share Agreement, ISA, ou «contrats de partage de salaire.
Autrement dit, l’école avance la somme requise en échange d’un pourcentage fixe du futur salaire de l’étudiant pendant plusieurs années. Les «ISA» ne sont, pour le moment, proposés que par quelques universités et centres de formation privés. Mais, ils attirent l’attention des étudiants. En effet, aux États-Unis, la dette étudiante s’élève à 1.500 milliards de dollars.
10% du salaire pendant quatre ans
Les étudiants signant un ISA ne paient rien, mais s’engagent à reverser 10% de leur salaire pendant quatre ans s’ils gagnent au moins 40.000 dollars par an, jusqu’à une fois et demie le montant de la scolarité. De plus, cette mesure s’adapte à la situation future de l’étudiant: s’il ne trouve pas de travail ou que sa rémunération reste en dessous d’un certain seuil, les remboursements pourront être suspendus.
L’université Purdue a été la première grande institution publique à proposer des «ISA». Depuis 2016, environ 9,5 millions de dollars ont été avancés, à 759 étudiants. D’autres établissements lui ont emboîté le pas, avec leurs spécificités. Le Colorado Mountain College réserve par exemple ce programme aux étudiants ne pouvant pas accéder aux prêts subventionnés par le gouvernement. Des centres de formation privés ont aussi adopté ce système, à l’image de General Assembly, qui propose des formations intensives en informatique de trois mois, à 40.000 dollars.
Certains établissements «financent les ISA eux-mêmes, quand d’autres ont recours à des dotations, des administrateurs et des investisseurs», détaille Tonio DeSorrento, fondateur d’une société aidant les écoles à concevoir leurs propres contrats puis à en assurer le suivi, Vemo Education.
Une législation encore floue
Ce nouveau système, qui existe déjà en Amérique latine, n’est pas une solution miracle, préviennent plusieurs experts. Certains établissements peuvent les utiliser pour attirer toujours plus d’étudiants, au risque de nourrir l’explosion des frais de scolarité. Les «ISA» renforcent par ailleurs les inégalités, affirme Jessica Thompson, de l’Institut pour l’accès et le succès aux études supérieures: les conditions financières sont souvent plus favorables aux étudiants engagés dans des spécialités a priori plus lucratives.
Ces nouveaux contrats ont en tout cas ouvert un nouveau marché plébiscité par Wall Street. Une nouvelle plateforme, Edly, permet aux investisseurs accrédités de parier sur les programmes d’établissements présélectionnés. Elle a déjà levé deux millions de dollars pour le centre de formation d’ingénieurs informatiques Holberton, à San Francisco. Pour des investisseurs en quête de placements nouveaux, les «ISA» offrent un rendement relativement attrayant, affirme le cofondateur d’Edly, Charles Trafton.
La législation autour des ISA est pour l’instant floue, même si des textes sont en discussion au Congrès et dans plusieurs Etats. Mais «une fois que les établissements et les investisseurs connaîtront vraiment les règles du jeu», prédit M. Trafton, «la popularité des ISA va encore s’accélérer».
Publicație : Le Figaro
Une journée nationale contre le racisme dans les établissements d’enseignement supérieur
La ministre de l’Enseignement supérieur, Frédérique Vidal, a proposé, ce mardi, d’instaurer une «journée nationale» contre le racisme dans les établissements d’enseignement supérieur.
Des propos racistes visant des étudiants noirs auraient été prononcés par des étudiants en sociologie de l’Université de Lorraine, via Facebook, la semaine dernière. En réaction à ces comportements et en vue d’éviter des incidents similaires à ceux de l’Université de Lorraine, la ministre de l’Enseignement supérieur, Frédérique Vidal, a proposé ce mardi d’instaurer une «journée nationale» contre le racisme dans les établissements d’enseignement supérieur.
En effet, la ministre a organisé une réunion de plusieurs dirigeants d’associations antiracistes (SOS racisme, Licra, Mrap, LDH...), juste après la révélation, la semaine dernière, de propos racistes à l’Université de Lorraine. Un signalement a par ailleurs été fait auprès du parquet de Metz et l’université a annoncé une enquête interne. Même si cette affaire est «malheureusement» un exemple d’événements «qui se produisent de plus en plus régulièrement dans les établissements d’enseignement supérieur», a regretté Mme Vidal.
«Une obligation de visite d’un lieu de mémoire»
Il faudrait «travailler à une journée nationale dans les établissements d’enseignement supérieur, en s’appuyant sur les questions de mémoire», a affirmé la ministre lors d’un point presse. Elle a souhaité pour cela «qu’on fixe une date, une journée» durant laquelle «dans tous les établissements» il y aurait «un travail conduit avec les étudiants». Le but serait de les sensibiliser aux «risques de tomber dans des stéréotypes» racistes, de leur montrer «que ce n’est pas anodin, ce ne peut jamais être de l’humour», et «rappeler pourquoi ce sont des crimes punis par la loi», a ajouté la ministre. «Ça reste même dans le cadre de conversations privées quelque chose de puni», a souligné Mme Vidal, qui a appelé à «un vrai travail sur l’éducation aux réseaux sociaux».
La ministre a également souhaité instaurer «une obligation de visite d’un lieu de mémoire» pour y «confronter» les jeunes «qui ne voient pas la gravité de ce qu’ils font», afin «qu’ils comprennent la gravité de leurs actes».
Alors que la lutte contre le racisme a pris de l’ampleur dans le secondaire ces dernières années, «paradoxalement à l’université on est un peu sur le chemin inverse» a déploré Dominique Sopo, le président de SOS racisme, en se félicitant de la perspective d’une journée nationale qui pourrait donner lieu à «des conférences, des happenings...»
«L’idée d’une journée banalisée dans toute la France est un symbole fort, il faut trouver une date forte pour marquer les esprits», a de son côté estimé Stéphane Nivet, le délégué général de la Licra.
Publicație : Le Figaro
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