Tag: World

  • The importance of Ukraine to the world

    The importance of Ukraine to the world

    A radical violation of international law

    Daniel Warner: Since the end of World War Two in 1945, the relations between countries have been more or less governed by certain norms. The United Nations and international law have been the foundations for over 70 years of relative peace. While there have been small outbreaks of violence, there have been no major violent confrontations. The Cold War was not a hot war.

    The Russian attacks on Ukraine violate numerous parts of that established order. While the Russian president claims that Ukraine is not a real state and is part of Russia, Ukraine, since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, is a country recognized by the international community. A country bombing another country is a radical violation of international law.

    How to respond? While the government of Ukraine will attempt to respond militarily, other countries will try to impose sanctions on Russia in order to stop the fighting while not engaging in a major conflict.

    The implications around the world will vary. But the most damaging implication for everyone will be the lack of respect for international norms that have been the bedrock of peace for over 70 years.

    Inconsistent champions of international norms

    Alistair Lyon: Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is an unconscionable violation of international law, the integrity of national borders and any respect for the rules of the United Nations, where Russia sits as a veto-wielding member of the Security Council.

    Anglo-Saxon outrage at the Russian leader’s use of military power would carry more weight if the United States and Britain had themselves proved consistent champions of international norms since the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

    The U.S.-British invasion of Iraq in 2003 punched a huge hole in the post-Cold War security system. The war, launched on spurious grounds and without U.N. authorisation, was opposed not only by Russia and China, but also by France and other NATO allies such as Germany.

    The assault on Ukraine might seem more shocking to some because it threatens peace in Europe, but the Iraqi debacle helped destabilise the Middle East, spurred Islamic militancy and crippled U.S. influence in the region, leaving a vacuum filled by others, including Turkey, Iran and Russia.

    The commitment of the United States to international law also came into question when former President Donald Trump endorsed Israel’s 1981 annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights and recognised Jerusalem as the Jewish state’s capital, including the city’s occupied eastern sector, which Palestinians see as their future capital. President Joe Biden has not reversed those moves.

    A fear of democracy

    Julian Nundy: What if the reason for invading Ukraine was nothing to do with NATO after all? What if it was just a fear that the functioning democracy that has developed in Russia’s southwestern neighbor could be contagious?

    Amid all the media attention given to Moscow’s calls for NATO to renounce any idea of admitting Ukraine into the western military alliance, there have been commentaries, stirring less debate, that it is President Vladimir Putin’s obsession with “color” revolutions in former Soviet republics — especially the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine that led to a re-run of a presidential election and the final inauguration of a westward-looking government — that prompted his decision to use force to bring Ukraine into line.

    “On the whole, strategic stability is maintained … NATO forces are not building up, and they are not showing threatening activity,” wrote one commentator at the end of January. And not just any commentator. It was retired Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, chairman of the All-Russian Officers’ Assembly, who as a serving general occupied several of the most senior command posts in the Soviet and Russian armies.

    The statement was given prominent coverage on Ekho Moskvy (Moscow Echo) radio, which is owned by the Gazprom gas giant’s media arm, suggesting that Putin had less than total backing for his policy in very high places. Ivashov said Putin threatened to make “Russians and Ukrainians mortal enemies” and turn Russia “into a pariah of the world community.”

    If the invasion really was motivated by a fear of democracy, then Russia itself — where there are now reported to be more political prisoners than in the Soviet Union 40 years ago and where free speech and other rights are being reined in on a regular basis — can expect yet more erosion of basic freedoms. And if Putin succeeds in bringing Ukraine under control, who will be next? The former communist states of eastern Europe, most probably, and then, perhaps, the rest of Europe.

    Climate change will go on the back burner.

    Helen Womack: Quite apart from the suffering of Ukraine, this war may go well beyond its borders. If Putin attacks the Baltic States or Poland, NATO will be obliged to come in militarily.

    NATO member Hungary, which under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has in the past sought friendly relations with Putin, will be forced to make clear where it really stands.

    War between Russia and NATO would amount to a third world war, and let us not forget that Russia has nuclear weapons. But Putin is NOT Russia, and his war is not likely to be popular with ordinary Russians. The only hope is that internal opposition will grow.

    Ultimately, this war will bring Putin down but at what cost? The world has better things to be thinking about than war, but again climate change will go on the back burner while we focus on this.

    Ukraine does matter.

    Alex Nicoll: Does Ukraine matter to the wider world? Well, if armed gangsters took over your neighbour’s house, what would you do?

    Would you, like Donald Trump, say “genius move,” shrug your shoulders and go back to your golf game? Or might you think that your house, and your friends’ houses, could be next?

    This is the situation facing all western governments today as they watch the invasion of a democratic European country. We live in a sophisticated, digitised world. But we can see plainly that our comforts can be undone by old-style tanks, missiles and bombs. The atrocities of war have not been consigned to history.

    If you are American, your reaction might be that this is happening a long way away, so why should I care? Someone else’s problem! But remember that the United States too was attacked in 1941 and 2001, resulting each time in American involvement in long global conflicts and the loss of many American lives. Because of past traumas, the U.S. is party to numerous alliances, agreements and friendships. These benefit Americans just as much as other people around the world. Thanks to strong alliances, a third world war has been averted.

    So far. It is for mutual self-preservation — leaving aside moral outrage at Russia’s attack on Ukraine — that Western countries now need to unite to starve Putin of money and support, so that the venture in Ukraine fails and global conflict is averted. It does matter.

    None of this bodes well economically.

    Bryson Hull: The conflict in Ukraine is already raising energy prices and that in turn will make climate change policies, which entail higher costs or wholesale energy system changes such as eliminating oil and natural gas, less palatable to voters. Politicians will correspondingly find it less attractive to support aggressive steps to mitigate climate risks until energy prices trend lower.

    The realities of war in Ukraine and the global economic spillover will necessarily put more aggressive carbon-zero efforts to the wayside because of cost concerns. The tradeoff there is that practical, achievable energy and climate policies will fall back into vogue with politicians — who fear high energy costs as the election risk they are — instead of activist/pressure group-driven policies like those that are faring disastrously in the UK and Europe. Good sense and appropriate urgency may now be able to coexist in the sphere of energy prices versus climate ambitions.

    There are already about 20 U.S. liquified natural gas cargoes diverted to Europe from Asia on a pure arbitrage market play because of Ukraine. Already they’re running up against offloading capacity issues. High crude prices fund the war, and you can already see the Biden Administration greens doing everything they can to avoid the U.S. stepping into the gas supply breach with Democratic Senators urging a liquefied natural gas export ban.

    With the highest inflation in 40 years and gasoline (petrol) back at seven-year highs, none of this bodes well economically unless Biden goes Keynesian and cranks up the war machine.

    Europe needs Russian gas.

    Jeremy Lovell: Putin has very openly been using energy as an economic and political lever on Europe for some time. I reckon Europe needs Russian gas on balance rather more than Russia needs Europe’s gas market. It has VAST resources of untapped gas such as the Shtokman field and can always supply elsewhere given time. China is a good option there.

    But both Putin and Xi appear to have megalomaniac tendencies — although one is rather more thuggish than the other, at least on the surface — and an alliance between the two might be a bit fragile in much more than the immediate term.

    Given that the Ukraine venture seems rather unlikely to have been a spur-of-the-moment thing, I assume Putin calculates Europe will fold quietly in a relatively short time, giving him carte blanche to act at will and isolating the U.S. even further.

    The Brits may crow about the fact the UK does not import much if any Russian gas. But gas is a pure commodity. Supplies of floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) frequently change destination several times on any given voyage. So if Russia fiddles with gas supplies — or Ukraine taps off even more than it usually does — then Qatari LNG heading for South Wales or London will simply divert to Belgium or France, and the UK, which has minuscule storage facilities, will be left hanging.

    No legal standing

    Robert Holloway: Putin’s legal justification for the invasion is very flimsy, to say the least. He said he acted “in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter” after two provinces in eastern Ukraine sought Russia’s help.

    The UN Charter recognises the right of a member state to self-defence in case of armed attack. Even allowing Putin’s breath-taking claim that Ukraine was the aggressor, the breakaway provinces are not UN member states and have no legal standing under the Charter. And Russia, which is a member, is not under attack.

    The Charter goes on to say that an attack on a member state must be reported to the UN Security Council so it can take measures to maintain international peace and security.

    But even if Ukraine reports the invasion to the UN, Russia is one of the five permanent members of the Security Council with the power to veto any of its decisions.

    A carnivore among herbivores

    Tom Heneghan: Before leaving Paris last week, I heard the French philosopher Luc Ferry say on French radio: “Putin is a carnivore in a world of herbivores.” That goes to the heart of what is happening now. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it seemed that most countries were playing by the post-World War Two rules that say borders are inviolable and problems between countries should be solved peacefully. That has not always been the case, of course, but all knew the rules and mostly kept by them. The speech by the Kenyan ambassador to the U.N. the other day was a good example of that.

    Biden keeps on saying we will not send U.S. troops to Ukraine, and that’s both a recognition of reality in U.S. politics and admission that Russia should not be unduly provoked. But the U.S. has been willing to send U.S. troops to a lot of countries in recent decades, like Kuwait, Iraq, former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. They were smaller and the wars were theoretically winnable. The wars did not always turn out as planned. Both the U.S. and its adversaries in those countries were carnivores — think Saddam Hussain or Slobodan Milosovic — but the forces were unequal and politics messy.

    Russia has been a carnivore in recent years — Georgia, Crimea, in a lesser way Belarus — and continues now. NATO now shows admirable resolve in standing up for the rules-based world order. But how long will that last? Putin is thinking of history and ready to play a long game here. The West — for lack of a better term — has to adjust to the long term too. This doesn’t mean the West has to become a carnivore as well, but it has to think far more strategically about Russia than it has so far. Ukraine is bigger and more central than those smaller wars. That Putin opted for a full invasion rather than more green-man salami tactics tells us that his goal is to turn the clock back to bloc-style divisions.

    A lot of commentators have been saying this crisis is like the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and in many ways that’s true. But I think another important comparison is with the 1948 Berlin Blockade, when the USSR blocked Allied rights to ship goods through East Germany to West Berlin. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a perilous standoff that ended quickly. The Berlin Blockade lasted about a year and a half and required sustained Allied solidarity and the famous airlift to West Berlin. We’re going to need that kind of sustained solidarity to ensure we can hold the line on the rules-based world order.

    One of the elements in any sustained strategy is weeding the Russian oligarchs out of the Western economic system. Suspending Nordstream 2 was a good start. How about stopping all the money laundering the oligarchs get away with in Western countries? All the property they’ve bought up in London, New York and elsewhere to squirrel their money abroad? And what about their relatives, like the children who get to study in the best universities we have? Part of Putin’s power lies in the way he has allowed oligarchs make money as long as they do not play politics and contribute to soft-power causes he likes, such as the “Russkii Mir” (Russian World) projects promoting Russian culture and the massive church-building of the Russian Orthodox Church? These non-governmental organizations are not non-political.

    A carnivore among herbivores. Not all carnivores have won against smart herbivores, but Moscow has a far more crafty carnivore in power this time around. We need sustained solidarity now to deal with this challenge, probably more than we seem to be capable of these days. Let’s hope we can do it.

    A major blow to Pax Americana

    Jim Wolf: Russia’s armed thrust into Ukraine marks a major blow to the so-called Pax Americana, the state of relative peace since the end of World War Two. That’s when the United States became the world’s top economic and military power.

    The land, air and sea attack on an increasingly pro-Western Ukraine supercharges a Great Power rivalry as U.S. clout has been slipping and China-Russia solidarity is growing.

    The old Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 after a 40-year “Cold War” with the U.S. — a geopolitical struggle that also dominated the world view of both powers’ respective allies and blocs. With the Soviet Union’s collapse, its 15 former Communist-controlled republics gained independence, leaving the U.S. the sole remaining superpower.

    Russian leader Vladimir Putin has called that fall “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of a 20th century that was also wracked by two world wars. In launching the biggest attack by one state against another since the end of World War Two, Putin said he was protecting Russian citizens among others subjected to “genocide” in Ukraine, which has infuriated Moscow by aiming to join the U.S-led NATO military alliance.

    Putin warned against outside interference, saying Russia is “a powerful nuclear state.

    Off the Earth, for the Earth

    Tira Shubart: At the moment onboard the International Space Station is a crew of seven: two Russians, four Americans and a German. Other than the German and one American – who is a doctor – they are bred and trained in the military.

    The crew all speak English and Russian.

    In fact, one of the Americans, Kayla Barron, is a Submarine Warfare officer. The doctor has been working with Russians — and on joint missions with the Russians since 1997. His Russian is particularly good.

    The United States and Russia — NASA and Roscosmos — were in the process of negotiating more crew exchanges. And at the moment there are three Russian cosmonauts — who are certainly military as all cosmonauts are — training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

    Finally, on March 30, one of the Americans, Mark Vande Hei — also a professor at West Point — will be landing in Kazakhstan with the two Russians. Traditionally, a NASA team flies in through Russia and joins their recovery team, then bounces back through Russia to the United States. It will be interesting to see what happens.

    Twitter posts today from the international space community were saddened and alarmed by the Ukraine crisis but agreed that solidarity in space, which one called “the pinnacle of human cooperation” would not be threatened. After all, the U.S. Astronauts and the Russian Cosmonauts of the Cold War era held each other in high regard and the crew members onboard “have trained together for years and are personal friends.”

    There is a club of Space Explorers which are all the astronauts and cosmonauts who have flown. They say they simply regard themselves as earthlings after looking down and seeing no borders on our planet. But surely the ISS motto of “Off the Earth, For the Earth” will be in their minds now.

    Embers of dead empires

    Jeremy Solomons: An immediate African perspective on the Ukraine invasion was shared by Kenyan U.N. Ambassador Martin Kimani, who used a speech at the UN Security Council on Tuesday to warn Russia to respect its border with Ukraine, using Africa’s colonial past to highlight the dangers of stoking the “embers of dead empires.”

    More controversially, he went on to say: “At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later. Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders that we inherited. But we would still pursue continental political, economic and legal integration. Rather than form nations that looked ever backwards into history with a dangerous nostalgia, we chose to look forward to a greatness none of our many nations and peoples had ever known … not because our borders satisfied us, but because we wanted something greater, forged in peace.”

    For some commentators, who are concerned about neo-colonialism on the African continent, this invoked the somewhat cynical conclusion of the late Tanzanian leader, Julius Nyerere, who said: “You multiply national anthems, national flags and national passports, seats at the UN and individuals entitled to 21 guns salute, not to speak of a host of ministers, prime ministers and envoys, you have a whole army of powerful people with vested interests in keeping Africa balkanised.”

    Floods, COVID-19, Ukraine

    Robert Hart: Obviously the UK government, as a committed member of NATO and a devoted ally of the United States, has joined the international clamour denouncing Russia’s attack.

    Prime Minister Boris Johnson has labelled the Russian offensive as “a tidal wave of violence” and declared that a “massive package” of sanctions will be introduced against Moscow.

    No doubt many young UK graduates and university students will see the Russian attack with alarm and deep concern about where this will all lead and how it may affect their future. But many others, young and older, will be reaching for an atlas to check where Ukraine is and wondering how much this matters.

    The UK itself has just come through a period of three consecutive typhoon strength storms which have caused major damage and severe flooding in many parts and given millions of people, young and old, plenty to worry about in their own lives.

    And those who follow national politics at all will have been hooked by the still ongoing saga of the prime minister’s involvement in a string of illicit drinks parties held in No.10 Downing Street during the peak months of COVID-19 lockdown. Smart young people don’t have to be super-cynical to see how the floods and now the Ukraine drama could divert public attention from Boris Johnson’s role in the lockdown parties scandal.

    Russian nuclear missiles feel very close to home.

    Tiziana Barghini: News of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an awful awakening. Putin has shown total disdain for international borders, agreements and customs. I wonder what his real motivations are – a way to build domestic consensus? I do not understand who is benefitting from this.

    This morning at a bakery in Milan, someone attached a sign – “Putin = Hitler”. World War Two — a story often told by my parents and grandparents. I feel relieved that I am burying my Mom today. My parents are not here anymore to see the world going on that path again. They were sincerely convinced that wars were something of the past.

    I feel thrown back into the Cold War years. Russian nuclear missiles feel very close to home in Milan and even closer to Germany, where my son lives. First the pandemic and now the war. I can’t believe we are really living this.

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. What reasons did Russian President Vladimir Putin give for invading Ukraine?
    2. How has the West and its allies reacted to the Russian aggression?
    3. Does the conflict in Ukraine matter to you, and if so, why?

     

    Source link

  • Data, Decisions, and Disruptions: Inside the World of University Rankings

    Data, Decisions, and Disruptions: Inside the World of University Rankings

    University rankings are pretty much everywhere. Though the earliest university rankings in the U. S. date back to the early 1900s and the modern ones from the 1983 debut of the U. S. News and World Report rankings. The kind of rankings we tend to talk about now, international or global rankings, really only date back to 2003 with the creation of the Shanghai Academic Rankings of World Universities.

    Over the decade that followed that first publication, a triumvirate emerged at the top of the rankings pyramid. The Shanghai Rankings, run by a group of academics at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Quacquarelli Symonds, or QS Rankings, and the Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings. Between them, these three rankings producers, particularly QS and Times Higher, created a bewildering array of new rankings, dividing the world up by geography and field of study, mainly based on metrics relating to research.

    Joining me today is the former Chief Data Officer of the Times Higher Education Rankings, Duncan Ross. He took over those rankings at a time when it seemed like the higher education world might be running out of things to rank. Under his tutelage, though, the Times Impact Rankings, which are based around the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, were developed. And that’s created a genuinely new hierarchy in world higher education, at least among those institutions who choose to submit to the rankings.  

    My discussion with Duncan today covers a wide range of topics related to his time at THE. But the most enjoyable bit by far, for me anything, was the bit about the genesis of the impact rankings. Listen a bit, especially when Duncan talks about how the Impact Rankings came about because the THE realized that its industry rankings weren’t very reliable. Fun fact, around that time I got into a very public debate with Phil Beatty, the editor of the Times Higher, on exactly that subject. Which means maybe, just maybe, I’m kind of a godparent to the impact rankings. But that’s just me. You may well find other points of interest in this very compelling interview. Let’s hand things over to Duncan.

    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 3.20 | Data, Decisions, and Disruptions: Inside the World of University Rankings 

    Transcript

    Alex Usher: So, Duncan, let’s start at the beginning. I’m curious—what got you into university rankings in the first place? How did you end up at Times Higher Education in 2015?

    Duncan Ross: I think it was almost by chance. I had been working in the tech sector for a large data warehousing company, which meant I was working across many industries—almost every industry except higher education. I was looking for a new challenge, something completely different. Then a friend approached me and mentioned a role that might interest me. So I started talking to Times Higher Education, and it turned out it really was a great fit.

    Alex Usher: So when you arrived at Times Higher in 2015, the company already had a pretty full set of rankings products, right? They had the global rankings, the regional rankings, which I think started around 2010, and then the subject or field of study rankings came a couple of years later. When you looked at all of that, what did you think? What did you feel needed to be improved?

    Duncan Ross: Well, the first thing I had to do was actually bring all of that production in-house. At the time, even though Times Higher had rankings, they were produced by Clarivate—well, Thomson Reuters, as it was then. They were doing a perfectly good job, but if you’re not in control of the data yourself, there’s a limit to what you can do with it.

    Another key issue was that, while it looked like Times Higher had many rankings, in reality, they had just one: the World University Rankings. The other rankings were simply different cuts of that same data. And even within the World University Rankings, only 400 universities were included, with a strong bias toward Europe and North America. About 26 or 27 percent of those institutions were from the U.S., which didn’t truly reflect the global landscape of higher education.

    So the challenge was: how could we broaden our scope and truly capture the world of higher education beyond the usual suspects? And beyond that, were there other aspects of universities that we could measure, rather than just relying on research-centered metrics? There are good reasons why international rankings tend to focus on research—it’s the most consistent data available—but as you know, it’s certainly not the only way to define excellence in higher education.

    Alex Usher: Oh, yeah. So how did you address the issue of geographic diversity? Was it as simple as saying, “We’re not going to limit it to 400 universities—we’re going to expand it”? I think the ranking now includes over a thousand institutions, right? I’ve forgotten the exact number.

    Duncan Ross: It’s actually around 2,100 or so, and in practice, the number is even larger because, about two years ago, we introduced the concept of reporter institutions. These are institutions that haven’t yet met the criteria to be fully ranked but are already providing data.

    The World University Rankings have an artificial limit because there’s a threshold for participation based on the number of research articles published. That threshold is set at 1,000 papers over a five-year period. If we look at how many universities could potentially meet that criterion, it’s probably around 3,000, and that number keeps growing. But even that is just a fraction of the higher education institutions worldwide. There are likely 30,000—maybe even 40,000—higher education institutions globally, and that’s before we even consider community colleges.

    So, expanding the rankings was about removing artificial boundaries. We needed to reach out to institutions in parts of the world that weren’t well represented and think about higher education in a way that wasn’t so Anglo-centric.

    One of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered—and it’s something people inevitably fall into—is that we tend to view higher education through the lens of our own experiences. But higher education doesn’t function the same way everywhere. It’s easy to assume that all universities should look like those in Canada, the U.S., or the UK—but that’s simply not the case.

    To improve the rankings, we had to be open-minded, engage with institutions globally, and carefully navigate the challenges of collecting data on such a large scale. As a result, Times Higher Education now has data on around 5,000 to 6,000 universities—a huge step up from the original 400. Still, it’s just a fraction of the institutions that exist worldwide.

    Alex Usher: Well, that’s exactly the mission of this podcast—to get people to think beyond an Anglo-centric view of the world. So I take your point that, in your first couple of years at Times Higher Education, most of what you were doing was working with a single set of data and slicing it in different ways.

    But even with that, collecting data for rankings isn’t simple, right? It’s tricky, you have to make a lot of decisions, especially about inclusion—what to include and how to weight different factors. And I think you’ve had to deal with a couple of major issues over the years—one in your first few years and another more recently.

    One was about fractional counting of articles, which I remember went on for quite a while. There was that big surge of CERN-related articles, mostly coming out of Switzerland but with thousands of authors from around the world, which affected the weighting. That led to a move toward fractional weighting, which in theory equalized things a bit—but not everyone agreed.

    More recently, you’ve had an issue with voting, right? What I think was called a cartel of voters in the Middle East, related to the reputation rankings. Can you talk a bit about how you handle these kinds of challenges?

    Duncan Ross: Well, I think the starting point is that we’re always trying to evaluate things in a fair and consistent way. But inevitably, we’re dealing with a very noisy and messy world.

    The two cases you mentioned are actually quite different. One is about adjusting to the norms of the higher education sector, particularly in publishing. A lot of academics, especially those working within a single discipline, assume that publishing works the same way across all fields—that you can create a universal set of rules that apply to everyone. But that’s simply not the case.

    For example, the concept of a first author doesn’t exist in every discipline. Likewise, in some fields, the principal investigator (PI) is always listed at the end of the author list, while in others, that’s not the norm.

    One of the biggest challenges we faced was in fields dealing with big science—large-scale research projects involving hundreds or even thousands of contributors. In high-energy physics, for example, a decision was made back in the 1920s: everyone who participates in an experiment above a certain threshold is listed as an author in alphabetical order. They even have a committee to determine who meets that threshold—because, of course, it’s academia, so there has to be a committee.

    But when you have 5,000 authors on a single paper, that distorts the rankings. So we had to develop a mechanism to handle that. Ideally, we’d have a single metric that works in all cases—just like in physics, where we don’t use one model of gravity in some situations and a different one in others. But sometimes, you have to make exceptions. Now, Times Higher Education is moving toward more sophisticated bibliometric measures to address these challenges in a better way.

    The second issue you mentioned—the voting behavior in reputation rankings—is completely different because it involves inappropriate behavior. And this kind of issue isn’t just institutional; sometimes, it’s at the individual academic level.

    We’re seeing this in publishing as well, where some academics are somehow producing over 200 articles a year. Impressive productivity, sure—but is it actually viable? In cases like this, the approach has to be different. It’s about identifying and penalizing misbehavior.

    At the same time, we don’t want to be judge and jury. It’s difficult because, often, we can see statistical patterns that strongly suggest something is happening, but we don’t always have a smoking gun. So our goal is always to be as fair and equitable as possible while putting safeguards in place to maintain the integrity of the rankings.

    Alex Usher: Duncan, you hinted at this earlier, but I want to turn now to the Impact Rankings. This was the big initiative you introduced at Times Higher Education. Tell us about the genesis of those rankings—where did the idea come from? Why focus on impact? And why the SDGs?

    Duncan Ross: It actually didn’t start out as a sustainability-focused project. The idea came from my colleague, Phil Baty, who had always been concerned that the World University Rankings didn’t include enough measurement around technology transfer.

    So, we set out to collect data from universities on that—looking at things like income from consultancy and university spin-offs. But when the data came back, it was a complete mess—totally inconsistent and fundamentally unusable. So, I had to go back to the drawing board.

    That’s when I came across SDG 9—Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure. I looked at it and thought, This is interesting. It was compelling because it provided an external framework.

    One of the challenges with ranking models is that people always question them—Is this really a good model for excellence? But with an external framework like the SDGs, if someone challenges it, I can just point to the United Nations and say, Take it up with them.

    At that point, I had done some data science work and was familiar with the tank problem, so I jokingly assumed there were probably 13 to 18 SDGs out there. (That’s a data science joke—those don’t land well 99% of the time.) But as it turned out, there were more SDGs, and exploring them was a real light bulb moment.

    The SDGs provided a powerful framework for understanding the most positive role universities can play in the world today. We all know—well, at least those of us outside the U.S. know—that we’re facing a climate catastrophe. Higher education has a crucial role to play in addressing it.

    So, the question became: How can we support that? How can we measure it? How can we encourage better behavior in this incredibly important sector?

    Alex Usher: The Impact Rankings are very different in that roughly half of the indicators—about 240 to 250 across all 17 SDGs—aren’t naturally quantifiable. Instead, they’re based on stories.

    For example, an institution might submit, This is how we combat organized crime or This is how we ensure our food sourcing is organic. These responses are scored based on institutional submissions.

    Now, I don’t know exactly how Times Higher Education evaluates them, but there has to be a system in place. How do you ensure that these institutional answers—maybe 120 to 130 per institution at most—are scored fairly and consistently when you’re dealing with hundreds of institutions?

    Duncan Ross: Well, I can tell you that this year, over 2,500 institutions submitted approved data—so it’s grown significantly. One thing to clarify, though, is that these aren’t written-up reports like the UK’s Teaching Excellence Framework, where universities can submit an essay justifying why they didn’t score as well as expected—what I like to call the dog ate my student statistics paper excuse. Instead, we ask for evidence of the work institutions have done. That evidence can take different forms—sometimes policies, sometimes procedures, sometimes concrete examples of their initiatives. The scoring process itself is relatively straightforward. First, we give some credit if an institution says they’re doing something. Then, we assess the evidence they provide to determine whether it actually supports their claim. But the third and most important part is that institutions receive extra credit if the evidence is publicly available. If you publish your policies or reports, you open yourself up to scrutiny, which adds accountability.

    A great example is SDG 5—Gender Equality—specifically around gender pay equity. If an institution claims to have a policy on gender pay equity, we check: Do you publish it? If so, and you’re not actually living up to it, I’d hope—and expect—that women within the institution will challenge you on it. That’s part of the balancing mechanism in this process.

    Now, how do we evaluate all this? Until this year, we relied on a team of assessors. We brought in people, trained them, supported them with our regular staff, and implemented a layer of checks—such as cross-referencing responses against previous years. Ultimately, human assessors were making the decisions.

    This year, as you might expect, we’re introducing AI to assist with the process. AI helps us filter out straightforward cases, leaving the more complex ones for human assessors. It also ensures that we don’t run into assessor fatigue. When someone has reviewed 15 different answers to the same question from various universities, the process can get a bit tedious—AI helps mitigate that.

    Alex Usher: Yeah, it’s like that experiment with Israeli judges, right? You don’t want to be the last case before lunch—you get a much harsher sentence if the judge is making decisions on an empty stomach. I imagine you must have similar issues to deal with in rankings.

    I’ve been really impressed by how enthusiastically institutions have embraced the Impact Rankings. Canadian universities, in particular, have really taken to them. I think we had four of the top ten last year and three of the top ten this year, which is rare for us. But the uptake hasn’t been as strong—at least not yet—in China or the United States, which are arguably the two biggest national players in research-based university rankings. Maybe that’s changing this year, but why do you think the reception has been so different in different parts of the world? And what does that say about how different regions view the purpose of universities?

    Duncan Ross: I think there’s definitely a case that different countries and regions have different approaches to the SDGs. In China, as you might expect, interest in the rankings depends on how well they align with current Communist Party priorities. You could argue that something similar happens in the U.S. The incoming administration has made it fairly clear that SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) and SDG 5 (Gender Equality) are not going to be top priorities—probably not SDG 1 (No Poverty), either. So in some cases, a country’s level of engagement reflects its political landscape.

    But sometimes, it also reflects the economic structure of the higher education system itself. In the U.S., where universities rely heavily on high tuition fees, rankings are all about attracting students. And the dominant ranking in that market is U.S. News & World Report—the 600-pound gorilla. If I were in their position, I’d focus on that, too, because it’s the ranking that brings in applications.

    In other parts of the world, though, rankings serve a different purpose. This ties back to our earlier discussion about different priorities in different regions. Take Indonesia, for example. There are over 4,000 universities in the country. If you’re an institution like ITS (Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember), how do you stand out? How do you show that you’re different from other universities?

    For them, the Impact Rankings provided an opportunity to showcase the important work they’re doing—work that might not have been recognized in traditional rankings. And that’s something I’m particularly proud of with the Impact Rankings. Unlike the World University Rankings or the Teaching Rankings, it’s not just the usual suspects at the top.

    One of my favorite examples is Western Sydney University. It’s a fantastic institution. If you’re ever in Sydney, take the train out there. Stay on the train—it’s a long way from the city center—but go visit them. Look at the incredible work they’re doing, not just in sustainability but also in their engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. They’re making a real impact, and I’m so pleased that we’ve been able to raise the profile of institutions like Western Sydney—universities that might not otherwise get the recognition they truly deserve.

    Alex Usher: But you’re still left with the problem that many institutions that do really well in research rankings have, in effect, boycotted the Impact Rankings—simply because they’re not guaranteed to come first.

    A lot of them seem to take the attitude of, Why would I participate in a ranking if I don’t know I’ll be at the top?

    I know you initially faced that issue with LERU (the League of European Research Universities), and I guess the U.S. is still a challenge, with lower participation numbers.

    Do you think Times Higher Education will eventually crack that? It’s a tough nut to crack. I mean, even the OECD ran into the same resistance—it was the same people saying, Rankings are terrible, and we don’t want better ones.

    What’s your take on that?

    Duncan Ross: Well, I’ve got a brief anecdote about this whole rankings boycott approach. There’s one university—I’m not going to name them—that made a very public statement about withdrawing from the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. And just to be clear, that’s something you can do, because participation is voluntary—not all rankings are. So, they made this big announcement about pulling out. Then, about a month later, we got an email from their graduate studies department asking, Can we get a copy of your rankings? We use them to evaluate applicants for interviews. So, there’s definitely some odd thinking at play here. But when it comes to the Impact Rankings, I’m pretty relaxed about it. Sure, it would be nice to have Oxford or Harvard participate—but MIT does, and they’re a reasonably good school, I hear. Spiderman applied there, so it’s got to be decent. The way I see it, the so-called top universities already have plenty of rankings they can focus on. If we say there are 300 top universities in the world, what about the other 36,000 institutions?

    Alex Usher: I just want to end on a slightly different note. While doing some background research for this interview, I came across your involvement in DataKind—a data charity that, if I understand correctly, you founded. I’ve never heard of a data charity before, and I find the idea fascinating—intriguing enough that I’m even thinking about starting one here. Tell us about DataKind—what does it do?

    Duncan Ross: Thank you! So, DataKind was actually founded in the U.S. by Jake Porway. I first came across it at one of the early big data conferences—O’Reilly’s Strata Conference in New York. Jake was talking about how data could be used for good, and at the time, I had been involved in leadership roles at several UK charities. It was a light bulb moment. I went up to Jake and said, Let me start a UK equivalent! At first, he was noncommittal—he said, Yeah, sure… someday. But I just kept nagging him until eventually, he gave in and said yes. Together with an amazing group of people in the UK—Fran Bennett, Caitlin Thaney, and Stuart Townsend—we set up DataKind UK.

    The concept is simple: we often talk about how businesses—whether in telecom, retail, or finance—use data to operate more effectively. The same is true in the nonprofit sector. The difference is that banks can afford to hire data scientists—charities often can’t. So, DataKind was created to connect data scientists with nonprofit organizations, allowing them to volunteer their skills.

    Of course, for this to work, a charity needs a few things:

    1. Leadership willing to embrace data-driven decision-making.
    2. A well-defined problem that can be analyzed.
    3. Access to data—because without data, we can’t do much.

    Over the years, DataKind—both in the U.S. and worldwide—has done incredible work. We’ve helped nonprofits understand what their data is telling them, improve their use of resources, and ultimately, do more for the communities they serve. I stepped down from DataKind UK in 2020 because I believe that the true test of something successful is whether it can continue to thrive without you. And I’m happy to say it’s still going strong. I kind of hope the Impact Rankings continue to thrive at Times Higher Education now that I’ve moved on as well.

    Alex Usher: Yeah. Well, thank you for joining us today, Duncan.

    Duncan Ross: It’s been a pleasure.

    And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan. And you, our viewers, listeners, and readers for joining us today. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at [email protected]. Worried about missing an episode of the World of Higher Education? There’s a solution for that. Go to our YouTube page and subscribe. Next week, our guest will be Jim Dickinson. He’s an associate editor at Wonkhe in the UK, and he’s also maybe the world expert on comparative student politics. And he joins us to talk about the events in Serbia where the student movement is challenging the populist government of the day. Bye for now.

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.

    Source link

  • Higher Education Inquirer : “DOGE Eat DOGE” World

    Higher Education Inquirer : “DOGE Eat DOGE” World

    Every day brings revelations about how corrupt the US government is. Every day the Department of Government Efficiency ( DOGE) reports on one agency or another that they have taken over and plan to eliminate or downsize. The first targets were the USAID and the US Department of Education. 

    But this is just the beginning. 

    Every day is a spectacle, with Elon Musk and a  handful of young men taking control over federal agencies. Some call it a coup, though President Trump has granted them the power through executive privilege. Others may call it a mission from God. 

    There is no telling how far this DOGE takeover will continue, but as long as folks are not protesting, we can expect it to last indefinitely.  President Trump has recently mentioned corruption in the Department of Defense, which would be an interesting target to investigate. 

    In the meantime, President Trump has relaxed enforcement of US law banning bribery of foreign officials.

    You can watch the DOGE boys in action through the DOGE tracker.  You can also follow crypto trading and prices, which appear to be a key part of the DOGE movement. 

    Source link

  • The world will be very different soon… (Pursuit of Wonder)

    The world will be very different soon… (Pursuit of Wonder)

     

    Source link

  • Living HAPPILY in a World Without Meaning (Albert Camus)

    Living HAPPILY in a World Without Meaning (Albert Camus)

    Albert Camus’s philosophy of Absurdism provides a unique approach to the meaning of life. He explores the tension between humanity’s deep desire for meaning and the universe’s lack of answers, coining this contradiction as “the absurd.” His philosophy rejects nihilism and encourages us to embrace life’s limitations, living fully in the present and finding purpose through personal choices rather than ultimate truths. 

    In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus likens life to Sisyphus’s endless task of pushing a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down—a metaphor for the repetitive, sometimes purposeless cycle of human existence. Instead of succumbing to despair, Camus suggests that we imagine Sisyphus finding joy in the struggle itself, symbolizing a resilient, defiant spirit.

    Source link

  • Is England really the world champion in overqualification?

    Is England really the world champion in overqualification?

    By Golo Henseke (LinkedIn) Associate Professor in Education, Practice and Society at the Institute of Education (IoE), UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, and Francis Green, Professor of Work and Education Economics, also at the IOE.

    A recent report by the Organisation of Economically Developed Countries (OECD) claims that nearly four in ten employees in England are overqualified for their jobs, the highest rate among OECD countries. If accurate, this statistic seems to reflect a substantial waste of human capital and raises questions about the state of the UK labour market and education system. However, closer scrutiny suggests that the figure may be misleading, stemming from methodological quirks specific to the English data rather than an alarming surge in overqualification.

    Dubious Comparisons

    The OECD findings are based on a once-in-a-decade survey of adult skills, an ambitious international undertaking aiming for comparability across countries and economies. Yet, qualifications are inherently tricky to standardise internationally. For example, how does an English GCSE compare to a US high school diploma? The nuances of national education systems can render such comparisons tenuous.

    England’s reported 37% overqualification rate, up from under 30% a decade earlier, is at odds with other data. Our surveys of the British workforce, which employ similar methodologies, show a modest drop in overqualification rates between 2006 and 2017, from 30% to 26%.  If the reported OECD figures are to be believed, the rise would imply an extraordinary shift since 2017: approximately 2.5 million additional workers would have been relegated to roles beneath their qualifications within just a few years. This appears implausible. It is also at odds with a decline in graduate overqualification from 34% in 2012 to 30% in 2023, as our independent analysis of OECD’s data shows.

    A more likely explanation lies in changes to the OECD’s survey design for England. In 2012, UK respondents were presented with a comprehensive list of nearly 60 qualifications when reporting job requirements and personal attainment. In 2023, this was reduced to just 19 options, with significant alterations to how response options were presented. The switch to a simplified classification may have skewed the responses, particularly below degree level, contributing to the measured overqualification rates.

    This issue is not confined to England. A similar methodological shift occurred in France, where the reported overqualification rate fell from 30% to 19%. Conversely, in the US, where questionnaires remained broadly consistent, the reported increase was a more credible five percentage points.

    A Structural Issue, Not a Graduate Problem

    Apart from this problem of potentially inconsistent measurement over time, the rush to attribute England’s supposed peculiar problem of overqualification to an oversupply of graduates is misplaced. Our re-examination of OECD’s survey data shows that, in England, graduates face lower risks of overqualification than non-graduates: the overqualification rate among non-graduates is 17 percentage points higher than among those with a degree. This gap between graduates and non-graduates broadly aligns with our own data from the British Skills and Employment Surveys.

    The Director for Education and Skills at the OECD, Andreas Schleicher, has been quoted saying that the UK’s higher education sector is “overextending” itself, with universities offering credentials that lack substantive value. However, with this oversimplified reaction, he is surely aiming at the wrong part of our education system.

    A Misguided Narrative

    In addition, he is almost certainly targeting the wrong side of the labour market. Overqualification in the UK is likely driven, not so much by an oversupply of graduates as by a failure to create enough middle-skill jobs and robust vocational pathways outside universities.

    Overqualification is indeed a pressing issue. Even at a rate nearer 3 in 10, overqualification in England is higher than in most other advanced economies in the OECD. Overqualification depresses wages, diminishes job satisfaction, and undermines long-term productivity as underutilised skills atrophy. But this knee-jerk pinning of blame just on education, particularly on higher education, misses the mark, and forgets about the external benefits that education brings for society and the economy. Instead, England’s policymakers must address the structural deficiencies in the labour market, particularly the lack of opportunities for those with intermediate qualifications.

    Simplistic diagnoses risk distracting from the real challenges. England’s education system is not producing “too many” graduates. Instead, its economy and further education system fail to provide sufficient opportunities to harness the potential of those not bound for higher education. To strengthen qualification pathways outside universities, a targeted strategy to foster middle-skill employment (while addressing skill shortages) is urgently needed. Without some recognition of these complexities, public discourse about overqualification will continue to generate more heat than light as university fees are set to surpass £10,000.

    Source link

  • Seeing, Recognizing, Understanding, Thinking, Assessing, and Acting in and about the World Cannot Be Separated from the Term “Reading” | A Conversation with Patrick Shannon

    Seeing, Recognizing, Understanding, Thinking, Assessing, and Acting in and about the World Cannot Be Separated from the Term “Reading” | A Conversation with Patrick Shannon

    I spoke by email with with Patrick W. Shannon, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education, at Penn State, about his 2011 book Reading Wide Awake: Politics, Pedagogies, & Possibilities (New York, NY: Teachers College Press). I am grateful for and glad to share his in depth responses to my questions, starting with my final question which he answered first.

    CORRIGAN: Is there anything else you’d like to share about reading, teaching, or Reading Wide Awake that I haven’t asked you?

    SHANNON: I’ll start here.  Reading Wide Awake examines reading as flexible practices of personal and social agency necessary for the continuous remaking of ourselves and democracy in and across changing times and contexts.  By telling stories of my reading social objects (including printed texts) in everyday life, I invite readers to awaken to the ways these ‘texts’ work for and against their interests and the promises of democracy.  By analyzing my reading experiences critically, I demonstrate how to take up these practices and why they are vital to acting in and on the world. I hope I wrote with some intelligence and humor. 

    This short book is organized according to paraphrased questions that people asked me across the first forty of my now fifty years as an educator:  Why read?  What is text?  How do texts work?  Where is meaning?  Isn’t reading out of date?  Can reading like this get me in trouble?  Do regular people read like this?   Fifteen years prior to this book, I offered a different structure in text, lies & videotape, a book about whose stories get told in and out of school. That text began with a reading of my junior high principal enforcing “school integrity” with a ping pong ball down my pant leg and a wooden paddle on my backside.  My (our) reading practices are always in-the-making, and I’m only five years away from the next installment!

    CORRIGAN: In Reading Wide Awake, you seem to use the words “read” and “reading” loosely and expansively—to mean not just looking at written texts but more broadly seeing, recognizing, understanding, or thinking about the world. I’m wondering, how do you define “reading” and why use the word “reading” instead of something broader like “thinking”?

    SHANNON: Originally, my choice of the term reading was purely tactical.  If seeing, recognizing, understanding, thinking, assessing, and acting in and about the world through the production of social things can be separated from the term reading, then they can be excluded from school curricula.  If they are inseparable moments of reading, then they remain basic skills (See Herb Kohl’s pre-TikTok Basic Skills – 1982).  My route to this realization maps my development as a critically pragmatic reader with a sociological imagination.  That is, the choice stemmed from reading personal experiences (my problem?) and eventually recognizing that they are actually social issues produced and maintained through the texts of powerful discourses in and out of schools (K-20).

    By the early 1970s when I was a history graduate student, Americans had been lied to about the Bay of Pigs, Tet Offensive, and bombing of Cambodia; two Kennedys, Malcolm X, Salvador Allende, Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King assassinations; the “collapse” of Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers; and the Angela Davis and the Chicago 7 trials.  Official and mainstream representations of these events across time and media led to Richard Nixon being elected and re-elected with an agenda to win the cold war militarily and to bring law and order back to American streets.  I lost faith in the path I had chosen at the end of college to become a historian of societal outsiders, which I believed would help more people to develop their “sociological imaginations” (C. Wright Mills), overcoming the “repressive tolerance of a one-dimensional society” (Herbert Marcuse), and thus, freeing their minds to rationally pursue the truth (J. S. Mill).  Although certainly necessary, more historically accurate information (reconstructed history books) about the neglected in society no longer seemed adequate.  Rather I thought what would be vital, but lacking, was the habitual practice of accessing, interpreting, assessing, and acting upon daily information, artifacts, and events to secure the original promises of liberal democracy.  To me, that practice was the act of reading which could be extended and spread through public schooling.  I joined the Teacher Corp and set my sights on the first R.

    Despite the economic, racial, cultural, and religious diversity among the families of my first class of kindergarten students, the school district supplied me with the DISTAR Language and Reading program and required me to “teach reading” by following the scripts in its teacher’s manual for a specified amount of time daily.  The authors of DISTAR assumed that my students had little or no prior experience with reading, phonological or syntactic command of English, or interest in learning to read or in the world around them.  They argued their approach was scientifically based.  Lessons consisted of small groups articulating phonemes in unison with me.  When those articulations were “mastered”, I was to point to manipulated letter symbols arranged randomly on a page in the teacher’s manual and groups were to produce the corresponding sounds (pretending that English has one-to-one letter to sound correspondence).  When mastered, I was to point to a symbol to elicit the assigned sound from all, and then, run my finger to another symbol to “make a syllable or blend” as students slurred the first with second phoneme.  Eventually, we all graduated to words, phrases, short sentences, and sentence strings (called stories). 

    All materials were black print on off white newsprint with no illustrations.  To ensure that parents participated in these reading instructions, students were to bring home half-sheet “student copies” of the stories to demonstrate their mastery of reading.  Standardization through teacher and student fidelity to the program assumptions and scripts were presented as the keys to success in reading, in school, and in life. There were no expected discussions of the meaning of the program’s texts or the practices encouraged in or outside of the classroom.  When the students finished the last DISTAR lessons, they and I began the daily lessons supplied in commercially prepared reading materials, (called basals), following more loosely scripted lessons as we worked our way through anthologies, workbooks, worksheets, and criterion reference tests across grades 1 through 6.  This defined learning “to read at school.”

    Because the remainder of the kindergarten curriculum was not prescribed except by name of subjects, the students and I had time to discuss their lives outside of school, their interests, habits, family traditions, ideas about how the world works, media use (TV and radio)….Later, I came to recognize these discussions as examples of what William James meant by “pluralism:” there will always be different perspectives and interpretations of any idea, event or artifact – all work in some situations and none are superior in all.  We used these talks and their surroundings to read their worlds to consider how people use symbols to make meaning and get things done.  While emphasizing the “why” of reading, we engaged in the “how”, attending to salient features (color, size, position) in images and things and studying phonics by recognizing and using Sylvia Ashton Warner’s Key Words techniques (Zoo), examples from Septima Clark’s and Beatrice Robinson’s Freedom Schools (“What’s a good a word?  Amendment”), local store signs (Red and White), and learning to recognize everyone’s printed name (from Abby to Zimbalist) posted on their cubbies and supply boxes.  To varying degrees, all participated in what Allan Luke and Peter Freebody would later call the four-resource model of reading – code cracking, meaning making, determine use and effects of genre, and social analyses – without any of us knowing these labels.

    I found willing confederates among the music, art, and gym teachers to help us study how sounds, images, and bodies can be used symbolically to represent our intentions to mean.  We called this “reading”, and because I lived in the neighborhood and looped with many of these students through the primary grades (K-3), I had time to demonstrate how this reading blended with their family members’ reading outside of school.  By our third year together, we had convinced our building administrator that DISTAR was not appropriate for our community; unfortunately, my fellow teachers chose to replace DISTAR with a single K-6 set of commercial reading materials (with significant amounts of promised free components and staff development promised by their publishers) for reading instruction at our school.   That “other stuff” that we employed daily as reading, while not necessarily harmful, was considered “beside the point”.  Those practices, you see, were not essentials in an elementary school curriculum…

    I finished my four-year commitment to shepherd those students and families through the primary grades and enrolled at the University of Minnesota (then famous for its reading research program) to try to understand how my colleagues’ decision could make sense.  The best outcome of that move was that I read my first-day schedule incorrectly, went to the wrong office, and met Kathleen (I’m married to Kathleen).  Another outcome was that I began to develop an understanding of reading at school.  My first course – History of Research on Reading – assigned titles such as The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (Huey, 1908), Reading as Reasoning (Thorndike, 1917), Remembering (Barlett 1932), Literature as Exploration (Rosenblatt, 1933)….These texts and my peers’ discussion of them taught me that my interpretation of reading was not wrong or beside the point because reading was information processing, not ever mastered or easily transferred among situations or tasks, colored by cultural attitudes and personal habits, and involved emotions as well as reason. 

    Buoyed with those insights, I used the intellectual tools I brought with me to class (Marxism/critical theory) and began to develop new ones (pragmatism – old, new, American and French – Richard Bernstein) to understand my experiences with past colleagues (and continued experiences in and around reading education over 40 years).  Marxism directed me toward analyses of the social relations embedded in those commercially prepared basals.  Critical theory honed my attention to how power was/is used in reading education (in at least the U. S.).  The pragmatists pointed toward the language school personnel use to represent and reflect upon their interests and experiences while teaching reading, and then, to follow the consequences of their acting on those reflections.  I concluded initially that three hegemonic discourses (science, business, and the state) speak through school personnel’s words and actions (Broken Promises, 1988).  I’ve tracked the consequences of those discourses over time (e.g., Reading Against Democracy, 2007; Closer Readings of the Common Core, 2013; and Reading Poverty in America, 2014).*

    You can read current consequences of the continued power of those three discourses in the recent struggles over the definitions of reading and reading instruction as it played out in the New York Times this spring – insisting reading is a psychological, not a set of social, cultural, and historical practices; treating reading instruction as a market and reading as human capital, not creative, contextualized, human endeavors; and mandating guidelines for schools and teachers to overcome social and economic inequalities, not social problems in need of collective democratic solutions. 

    For example, the New York Times reported that the COVID pandemic resulted in a “reading crisis” across the country as systematic reading lessons moved online render the lessons to be parents’ responsibility (Jonathan Wolfe).  Reflecting on his struggles with learning to read at school, the new mayor of New York City mandated that city teachers be “trained” to use phonics-based commercial reading programs to teach reading in order to overcome the crisis (Lola Fadulu).  Ten days later, a Times reporter described how Columbia University professor Lucy Calkins “retreated” from meaning centered lesson to a more sound oriented position in her commercial materials (which occupies one quarter of the US market for reading education) (Dana Goldstein). 

    And the beat (down) goes on… Emily Hanford, Elizabeth Harris and Alexandra Alter, Jeremy C. Young and Jonathan Friedman, Peter Coy.

    *I address a history of counter-discourses in The Struggle to Continue, 1990; Progressive Reading Instruction in America, 2017.

    CORRIGAN: Throughout the middle chapters of the book you discuss reading specific types of social texts (like NPR and Google Maps), and you also present a more general theory of reading (regarding sociological competence, sociological imagination, pluralism, etc.). In other words, these chapters take up the somewhat traditional matters related to reading: texts, ideas, the life of the mind. But all of that appears bookended with two case studies from “real life,” a less traditional concern for reading: one case is about the fate of a canyon wilderness area and the other is about a dying town being revitalized and the questions are about what to do and what is being done in each situation that affects real lives of real people and environments. Through this bookending, the reading life gets anchored in the life of action—even activism—such that reading is not just about thinking and feeling but also about doing. Can you elaborate on that?

    SHANNON: Bear with me…I find it not useful to consider ideas separately from actions because we must experiment to adapt to continuously changing physical and social environments. That need to adapt, to experiment, induces our ideas; not the other way around. Wide-awake reading is an array adaptation practices – ways for Americans to enhance our “self-evident” right to participate as peers with all others in the making of democratic social life.  Perhaps, that is what could be meant by reading as activism – wide awake readers refuse to cede that right to others and exercise ‘intelligent action.’  I didn’t make this up – see quotes below – listed in chronological order, not the order of my ‘discovery’ of these authors (Marx, Foucault, Dewey, Emerson).

    Emerson:  Circles 1841

    In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

    I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.

    Marx:  Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, 1888

    The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. 

    Dewey: Democracy and Education (1916)

    We can definitely foresee results only as we make careful scrutiny of present conditions, and the importance of the outcome supplies the motive for observations. The more adequate our observations, the more varied is the scene of conditions and obstructions that presents itself, and the more numerous are the alternatives between which choice may be made. In turn, the more numerous the recognized possibilities of the situation, or alternatives of action, the more meaning does the chosen activity possess, and the more flexibly controllable it is.

    Foucault:  “On the Genealogy of Ethics’ (1983)

    My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is danger­ous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apa­thy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.

    Human agency begins in the deep and critical reading of the present conditions in our attempts to adapt to continuously changing environments.  Marx directs Emerson’s experimenters to collective action within their historical contexts, and toward equality; Dewey engages experimenters in intelligent actions to address social problems to move closer to the realization of the promises of democracy; and Foucault warns experimenters that consequences of all alternatives are dangerous, at least to some group(s), regardless of experimenters’ aims. He rejects cynicism and passivity, setting individual and collective daily agendas to decide and act on the main dangers.

    CORRIGAN: In Reading Wide Awake, you connect reading to an embrace of such values as democracy, dissensus, difference, pluralism. The idea is that reading can enable and motivate readers to genuinely dialogue with those who are different and who hold different values, beliefs, opinions. But Reading Wide Awake came out in 2011, a few years before what appeared to me to be a remarkable intensification of conflict, fake news, and bad faith arguments in the United States—the Trump era. Has your hope for the possibilities of collaboration, dissensus, and dialogue changed since?

    SHANNON: My short answer is “no.”   If anything, the last decade has made me more committed to those values, and I thank you for considering that “reading wide awake” could serve as a tool in the on-going “real utopian project” of the making of democracy for these times.  Many share your interpretation (although they vary in readings of the problem): Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Michael D. Shear, Sarah Vowell, Max Fisher.

    Liberal democracy is not a thing or a template to be applied; rather, it is a method for identifying and solving the common problems of securing the rights of life and pursuit of happiness for all, across time and contexts.  According to John Dewey, “The democratic faith in equality is the faith that each individual shall have the chance and opportunity to contribute whatever he is capable of contributing, and that the value of his contribution be decided by its place and function in the organized total of similar contributions: —not on the basis of prior status of any kind whatever.”

    For the individual, democracy means having a share in directing the activities of the group – participatory parity; for the group, democracy demands the development and maintenance of social arrangements enabling the liberation of the potentials of each individual member.   Those are unmet promises made in the second sentence of The Declaration of Independence.  Democratic patriots are keepers of that faith, acting to ensure that this country lives up to those principles within and across its borders.  I am a patriot.

    Other patriots and I read the texts and contexts to name, resist, dismantle barriers to democratic possibilities and to develop and maintain social arrangements which would enable greater participatory party among all groups and individuals.  Even among patriots, however, conflict is likely because we begin our searches for just social arrangements from differing historical positions, and therefore, while we share at least a rhetorical goal, our interests and strategies will differ necessarily.  Chantel Mouffe (2018) argues “in a democratic polity, conflict and confrontation, far from being a sign of imperfection, indicate that democracy is alive and inhabited by pluralism.”   What we patriots need then are ways to keep that agonism from becoming antagonism.  Many imply that it might already be too late for dissensus – a process of identifying differences and locating these differences in relation to each other, leading to collective explanations of how people differ, where their differences come from, and whether they can live and work together with these differences.  However, unless individuals and groups have given up entirely on democratic faith, I believe dissensus is possible and necessary to build coalitions among disparate groups to continue the search for and reality of democratic social arrangements. 

    If we engage in real utopian projects for liberal democracy within pluralistic societies, then patriots must engage in practices of dissensus to support others and ourselves as we sort through our repertoires of social discourses to find points of, at least temporary, agreement.  Dissensus affords the possibility(ies) for coalitions to form around specific goals and strategies to act intelligently toward the promises of democracy.  As Eric Olin Wright (2010) explained, these projects are utopian because we are thinking about alternatives that embody our deepest aspirations for a just society, and each is real because we continue to experiment with and deliberate within our associated ways of living as we struggle toward the just (and flexible) social arrangements across contexts and time.  Reading wide awake can alert us to the ways power works through the “texts” of our lives, enabling us patriots to tame the harm caused by barriers to participatory parity, to erode those barriers through our actions, and to experiment toward just social arrangements.  Keep the democratic faith!

    CORRIGAN: Since you are on one hand a college professor and on the other hand a scholar who studies K12 education and a teacher who teaches (future) K12 teachers, it seems you have an unique view into both worlds: education in college and education before college. Traditionally and unfortunately, there has been, at least in my experience, little exchange of pedagogy across that line. But I think there are things we could learn from some cross pollination. So in that spirit, I’m curious if you might comment on what commonalities and what differences you see between what we ought to be teaching about reading before college compared to in college.

    SHANNON: Most texts I encounter are institutionally produced to teach me who I am, what I should know, value, and do.  Unfortunately for me, but certainly by design, they are intended to position me as a consumer, not a producer.  Government, business, media news and entertainment, church, science, sports, and other institutions teach me not only to consume goods and services, but also, to swallow expert opinion, idealized representations of the past, and the spectacle of celebrity and success, as if their texts were representations of the way things are and should be.  I am to receive from others and not create for myself and contribute with others; I am free to choose among, but not to determine, alternatives.  These institutional texts leave little space for me to think outside their intended parameters or to imagine what they left unstated.  Their intentions are not my personal problems alone; they are social issues affecting many if not all.  These texts, most texts, intend to teach us that civic life is complex and boring, we’re not smart enough to understand or change it, and therefore, we should seek only comfort and security for ourselves and family. These lessons are dangerous for our individual and collective identities and agencies, and I believe, main dangers for the health of our pluralistic democracy. 

    Except for middle school/junior high, I’ve taught at every level from preschool to doctoral study.  (I am afraid of tweens and early adolescents for reasons obvious to anyone who has personal knowledge of this age group.) Reading the texts of my teaching experiences tells me that schools participate in limiting the potential power of reading through decisions surrounding the social arrangements of school curricula and pedagogy.  From my first encounter with official reading instruction as a teacher (and a student in the 50s) to the assigned reading list for the History of Reading Research which began my focused study of reading, to my assignment to teach a course on reading and teaching to 300 or more students each semester, schooling has undersold readings’ personal, social, and civic potential.  The result, I fear, is that school teaches our students that they are consumers of social life, and not active, equal participants in its continuous making.  So my comment to preK-25 teachers about reading is a question (an on-going inquiry really).  How can we tame and erode the intentions behind school texts in order to disrupt the production of ‘sleepy’ readers, to develop the social arrangements of our classes, engaging all our students in reading wide awake; and to encourage participatory parity in the making of pluralistic democracies in and out of school?

    My recommendation is to trust our students, to see them as interesting and interested, to arrange our courses and readings to enable participatory parity across the differences they bring to class, to seek real reasons for them to engage in dissensus, and to act on their new knowledge and convictions through the discourses we represent.

    I’ll share one effort to address this question.  During the decade before I retired, I worked with others to reorganize our university’s K-12 reading specialist certification coursework. We sought to add secondary discourses to our students’ repertoires so that they could choose to critique, tame, and erode the typical specialist habitus. Specialists are assigned officially to support students at any grade level who have been labeled as struggling to learn to read and write at school.  By law and tradition, these public-school programs are typically organized around assumptions that during their cognitive development of the reading process to date, strugglers have failed to learn one or more code-breaking skills and/or mechanical strategies for extracting meaning from passages – that is their cognitive development of the reading process is incomplete for the demands of their schooling.  Specialists are to repair these failures by diagnosing and remediating these problems, bringing students to mastery through scientifically-based reading instruction, and then, to send repaired students back to regular classes able to complete reading assignments.  Often, specialists are taught to focus primarily on the how to read and to devote less or little attention to:  why read; how texts work; why and how struggling students should assess texts’ intentions; or how struggling students make sense of (all types of) texts outside of school.  If these typical reading specialist assumptions, practices, and absences brought the desired consequences, then perhaps, all these explicit and implicit lessons would be warranted.  However, beyond the immediate contexts of those lessons, desired outcomes have been scarce – even by their gold standard measure, annual reading test scores. *

    Our efforts were complicated by the accreditation processes legally and professionally required for all specialized certification courses.  We could not just “do as we pleased.”  We proposed our changes as a design experiment with the expected outcome of specialists with competence and imagination.  We were approved with “some” concern from the state and some accolades from the profession.  Our graduates would be competent (all would pass the state certification licensing exam for reading specialists and be recommended by practicing specialists based on a practicum experience) and imaginative (able to design and act upon social arrangements for learning to read that are not yet, but could be, if specialist focused on the roles for reading in the development of self and democracy).  Our assumption for the experiment was that if the specialist could see themselves as reading agents – participants as peers with all others in the decisions of reading programs – they could demonstrate that agency for their students and negotiate/develop social arrangements in their classroom that immersed their students in participatory parity of its social life.

    This is getting long and you’re probably now sorry you asked.  I’ll be brief.  We tripled our teaching workloads to develop three discourses for reading specialists:  cognitive, socio-cultural, and political – creating three identity kits of how to speak, think, value and act accordingly across issues of pluralism, policy, scientific warrants, curriculum, and pedagogy.  We arranged students in groups of at least three, encouraging the members to deliberate over meanings and likely consequences of their readings of the social things of reading specialists (e.g., cultural differences of experiences, ability grouping, technical reports, time scheduling, state mandates, book chapters, room arrangements, journal articles, pedagogical strategies, tests and assessment procedures, parents/guardians…).  Whole class discussions became purposeful exercises of dissensus – always with obligation to move forward toward our state obligation to enter schools to demonstrate reading specialist competence (equipped with multiple discourses with which to read the intentions behind existing school texts), and then, to use our individual and collective imaginations to design, construct, and implement the social arrangements we thought most likely to support our  first through eighth grade struggling students as wide-awake readers.  From the first course to the tenth, university instructors and school supervisors worked to communicate to each cohort of university students that we expected them to be successful and we were there to support them.

    Early in our efforts to remake the reading specialist courses, the students and the instructors decided that a museum was most likely to enable us to develop social arrangements that would afford struggling students the opportunity and support to develop wide awake reading. (There are ten museums on campus of various sizes and budgets.)  Each university student cohort began its courses with severe doubts that such students were capable to produce exhibits individually and a museum collectively based solely on their readings and actions.  Before the final imagination practicum, we worked collectively to develop our students’ language to discuss, if not believe, that a museum was possible.  Doubling down on the university instructors’ belief that our (now) Teachers and their Curators could and would indeed engage actively in the inquiries and production, we scheduled a grand opening for the museum on the last day of practicum.

     Following John Dewey’s (1938) notion that the realization of any ideal must be based on experience, Teachers organized practicums’ social arrangements to reduce, if not eliminate, barriers to each Curator’s participation as a peer in the design, construction, and presentation of multimodal museum exhibits on a central topic (e.g., habitats, transportation, weather).  Prior to the practicum, neither Teachers nor Curators were experts concerning museums or the central topic, although each brought differing amounts of experience with each.  They would learn both together.  Teachers provided support for Curators as they read to become experts on the topic (“What do you know about . . . ? How do you know that? What would you like to learn about? Would you like help with that?”), and then, write and with the assistance of a resident community artist create multimodal texts to represent their new knowledge for the expected visitors to the museum (“What caught your interest in the museum we visited? How was it interesting? What would you like to write and show about your new knowledge? Would you like help with that?”).

    Scores of family members, university personnel, and former participants visited the two-hour museum opening each year. We never had to defend our goals and methods to visitors, parents or Curators because our practice-based events (process and product) trumped the evidence-based practices that Curators (and their parents/guardians) experienced at school. Although the thick school folders that accompany Curators label them as autistic, behind, ELL, learning disabled, dyslexic, or ADHD, every Curator demonstrated her/his/their literate competence by producing and presenting (proudly) an exhibit situated prominently within the museum (two university classrooms and a connecting hallway). And every Teacher showed some signs of reading wide awake. Here’s an excerpt of Teacher Joshua’s final report on Curator Tim. 

    What does Tim need? It depends: 

    If you read his folder….

    If you watch him during independent reading,…

    If you sit next to him and listen to him read a book you picked for him….

    But if you work with him on his model train, then….

    The first three “ifs” suggest that Tim can’t read well enough to engage in inquiry, and therefore, he needs preliminary skill lessons before you start. The last one shows you that you don’t know Tim or his capabilities unless you let him participate (2014).

    * Despite a century of reading research and billions of dollars invested annually in reading education, students from low income families (Carnoy & Rothstein, 2013)— confounded by race (Vigor, 2011), immigrant status (Swartz & Stiefel, 2011) and segregated location (Burdkick-Will et al., 2011)—continue to “struggle” with school literacy. Although some schools have made modest improvements (Rowan, 2011), the overall income achievement gap has increased by 40% since the Reagan Administration (Reardon, 2011).

    CORRIGAN: You stress in Reading Wide Awake that you’re still learning how to read. So what have you learned since writing this book?

    SHANNON: In 2017, Penn State offered the ARod-deal to all employees of a certain age and length of employment.  We had lived in the Happy Valley since 1990. I qualified, took the year’s salary to not come back (the NY Yankees offered this deal to Alex Rodriguez to induce his retirement), and began to write an operetta entitled ‘Bourne in the USA’ (while trying vainly to read ‘flow offense’ during noon basketball games).  I’m working on a third draft, learning how to read many genres of musical theater in front of and behind the curtain as well as popular music at the turn of the 19th century and symbols of American social, economic, intellectual, and political history between the depression of ’93 and the end of WWI.  It continues to be a thrilling, and humbling experience.  When I admit to others what I’m doing “these days”, they often ask:  “How are you prepared?” “Who’s Bourne?” “Why now?” “What will Bruce say?”

    I have played in a garage band since 1966 (The Root Beer Beaver), appeared in several musicals as a high school student (portraying a sailor in the South Pacific, a Jet, and Conrad Birdie), and maintained a dozen or so pages of decades-old notes on Randolph Bourne.  I have formal training in neither music nor theater.  When Kathleen and I visit theaters now, we are becoming “wide awake” to ways in which all involved work collectively to produce that play on that “stage” in these times to teach the audience who we are, what we should know and value, and what we should do.  In State College, NYC and the Twin Cities, these lessons have changed our theatering experiences, making us attentive differently than my pre-Bourne afternoons and evenings. 

    I declare that I’m a playwright in the making who is sampling the melodies from popular songs of Bourne’s times, rewriting lyrics to “teach” audiences Bourne’s democracy faith, and drawing images of staging for each scene, both acts, and the whole play.  This is shorthand for the new ways I’m reading:  new technologies, musical notation, emotional effects of auditory, physical, and visual symbols, historical presentism, lyricism across time, and technical, kinesthetic, physical, and aesthetic practices and objects of musical theater.  Keeps me busy.

    I picked Bourne as a subject because his life offers remarkable examples of reading wide awake and the challenges of patriotism.  Bourne was a social critic and essayist who died in 1918 at the age of 32.  I “discovered” Bourne (and began my notes) while reading about John Dewey and the counter-hegemonic discourse of progressive education (unassigned, but necessary texts for that first course in the UMN doctoral program).  Bourne was Dewey’s student at Columbia University and wrote two books on education (and another concerning youth culture).  I reconnected with Bourne when I read Jeremy McCarter’s 2017 New Yorker piece “The Critic Who Refuted Trump’s World View, in 1916.”  McCarter called Bourne, the “Anti-Trump” for Bourne’s essay “Trans-National America” (published in The Atlantic Monthly).  Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen devoted three pages to that essay in her 2021 book American Intellectual History:  A Very Short Introduction (Thomas Jefferson gets two pages and Dewey none in the 130 pages of prose).  Between 1911 and 1918, Bourne wrote over 1400 essays that were published in regional and national magazines (e.g., Columbia Review,  The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Masses, The Dial, Seven Arts).

    In its current form, the operetta has two acts.  I’ve structured the first around Bourne’s writing of his first national publication “The Handicapped by One of Their Own” (The Atlantic Monthly, 1914).  The attending physician misused forceps during Bourne’s birth, changing the shape of his head and altering his breathing, voice, and hearing.  At four, Bourne contracted spinal tuberculosis, which over three years curved his spine and limited his gate and height.  The Atlantic publisher asked Bourne to write an autobiographical piece to explain his life “struggles.”  That essay is often cited as a founding manifesto of the disability rights movement in America.  It ends: “Do not take the world too seriously, nor let too many social conventions oppress you. Keep sweet your sense of humor, and above all do not let any morbid feelings of inferiority creep into your soul.”

    Floyd Dell’s obituary for Bourne (1919) frames the second act, highlighting Bourne’s participation in the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village, his “Trans-National America” argument for cosmopolitanism over melting pot assimilation to adopted Anglo Saxon cultural expectations, and his vanguard leadership of the anti-war movement (See Twilight of Idols, 1917).  In the latter, Bourne explained that Americans couldn’t “make the world safe for democracy” by suppressing it at home or through military force abroad.  Bourne’s positions proved unpopular with business and the state, and Bourne died of the Spanish Flu penniless and sleeping on his fiancee’s divan.  As Dell (1919) explained:

     “There are few avenues of expression for protest, however sane and far-seeing, against the mood of a nation in arms; and one by one, most of these were closed to him as he went on speaking out his thought. It is one of the more subtly tragic aspects of his death, a misfortune not only to a fecund mind that needed free utterance, but to a country which is nearly starved for thought, that he should in these last years have been doomed to silence.” 

    Oh, and I anticipate Springsteen and E Street will play the opening bars of the overture…

    Source link

  • The UK University-Territory Relationship in a Post-Brexit World – GlobalHigherEd

    The UK University-Territory Relationship in a Post-Brexit World – GlobalHigherEd

    This entry is also available via Inside Higher Ed in a format more amenable for sharing or printing.

    ~~~~~~~~~~

    Post-EU Referendum turmoil in the UK (and the EU) continues, for all sorts of reasons, but soon more serious and sustained assessment of the post-Brexit landscape for UK universities will occur. This blog entry is an exercise in thinking future-forward, brainstorming-fashion (so all caveats apply!), about one possible risk-reducing option.

    In such a context here is the question to consider: is an Oxbridge-Lille (a joint Cambridge-Oxford university) or equivalent (e.g., Imperial College-Lille; Birmingham-Nottingham-Warwick-Lille) campus in the Eurostar hub city of Lille an institutional-organizational level option to reduce risk and ensure stable access to EU nationals (including staff and students), creative UK staff with EU citizenship dreams (for themselves, and their children should they have any), EU research monies, EU-funded research infrastructures, and relevant EU policy-making fora and bodies? Or might the Euro-UK equivalent of Singapore’s Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), in a similar location, be a creative post-Brexit option? Or might an equivalent of Cornell Tech NYC be worth creating in European higher education and research space?

    In other words, is it time for the UK university-territory relationship to be reconsidered, or at least debated, vs simply waiting and seeing what might emerge over the next 2-4 years via the ‘leadership’ of Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, et al?

    Context

    The implications of ‘Brexit’ for UK universities are many, hence their leaderships’ unified argument and vigorous engagement in the pre-EU Referendum campaign. We heard, for example, about the over-dependence of UK universities upon EU students and staff, and the critical role of EU research monies (especially via Horizon 2020 and the European Research Council) in supporting one of the most research-active higher education systems in the world.

    A glance at any of the backgrounders below makes a patently obvious point – the UK is deeply integrated into the European Union, the European Research Area (ERA) and the European Higher Education Research Area (EHEA), both formally and informally:

    For example 46,230 postgraduate students and 78,435 undergraduates originating from the European Union (excluding the UK) studied in the UK in 2014-15 according to WonkHE, making up 5.5% of the total student population. This is a significant and relatively stable stream of non-UK students at the undergraduate level, as is evident in this figure from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA):

    ScientistsEU

    Needless to say, UK university-based researchers also participate in numerous research consortia coordinated out of continental European universities, as well as exercise leadership at multiple scales in the EU-supported research and teaching policies, programs and projects.

    Cm2JXVSVMAEbRx8

    Given that service exports (including education) generate localized expenditures (e.g., housing, food, entertainment) expenditures related to students from non-UK EU countries in the UK was estimated to “generate £3.7 billion for the UK economy and support over 34,000 British jobs.” All in all, the UK is an overall beneficiary when it comes to EU-related research money and EU-sourced or supported student and staff mobility. And this does not even begin to factor in the positive intellectual impacts of enhanced cooperation between UK and other EU universities, a phenomenon discussed in some detail by the Royal Society in 2016, and very much evident to US-based collaborations like myself.

    Brexit, Transition Politics, & Risk

    It is no exaggeration to state that the Leave win in the EU Referendum was a shock to most stakeholders associated with the higher education community in the UK, in other EU nations, and in regional associations (e.g., the European Students’ Union; the European University Association; League of European Research Universities). In short order, major expressions of discontent and concern were expressed in the UK by university associations, individual university leaders, the higher education media (especially Times Higher Education), and individual staff and students. Concerns emerged about the potential loss of research monies (a prediction apparently being brought to life already due to the marginalization of UK researchers from project proposal consortia), the ability of UK universities to guarantee right of residency for the many EU staff they depend upon; difficulties in student recruitment,  access to or possible relocation of EU research infrastructures (broadly defined), and the unleashing of xenophobia that has made many non-UK European researchers and students feel discriminated against and unwelcome. On the last point, part of the issue is that non-UK EU nationals are being effectively being told, via coded language, that they are bargaining chips in what will be multi-year UK-EU negotiations about the human mobility and the free movement of workers.

    More broadly, Science and Technology Committee chair Nicola Blackwood told Science Minister Jo Johnson this week: ‘I think this [Brexit] will be make or break for our knowledge economy.’ More specifically, Blackwood said:

    Can I … plead with you to make the case within Government, not only that issues such as continued access to Horizon 2020 [a funding scheme] are maintained and collaboration [is maintained] and the right kind of immigration system that benefits our science and higher education sectors are in place, but also that the science and innovation community is at the heart of the exit negotiations, as you’ve been saying is important, because I think this will be make or break for our knowledge economy going forward.

    Blackwood raises an important issue, for in a multi-year period of tumultuous change coming up, all subject to political machinations, just how important of a priority will universities be in the big picture? This is a point Martin McQuillan also raised just prior to the referendum vote when he stated:

    The chaos created in the intervening years by the gravitational pull of the right wing of the Conservative Party and their UKIP allies will be the legacy of the Cameron and Osborne governments. It is unlikely to be an environment in which our universities will flourish.

    The governmental context shifted today, too, for UK “universities are on the move to the Department for Education” from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) which is itself being refashioned into the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (where research matters will be managed in the future). As Mark Leach of WonkHE put it:

    Breaking up the family like this will be unpopular with vice chancellors who will now need to lobby two departments on overlapping issues. It also separates universities from the department with responsibility for infrastructure, growth and industry and takes HE policy further away from the industrial policy ‘action’ at home, and limits universities to some of the exposure to Britain’s international trade links that BIS used to pursue.

    On the Future of UK universities in a Post-Brexit World

    What will be the future of UK universities in a post-Brexit world? Will they all (or the vast majority of them) wait and see what emerges from the negotiations, focusing their lobbying efforts on strategic units, politicians, and officials? Perhaps. There is plenty of uncertainty to factor in, though, as Nick Hillman (Director, The Higher Education Policy Institute) put it in a 5 July 2016 speech to the University of Nottingham’s executive board:

    No one knows what is going to happen for certain, so we can argue and act in favour of the future we desire. We can, to coin a phrase, take back control of the argument… We are only now coming to think about all the questions and not all the possible answers are obvious.”

    In this section, I’d like to suggest that UK universities take seriously the words of Jo Johnson (Minister of State for Universities and Science) on 13 July 2016 when he stated:

    Brexit does not mean that we are becoming insular and inward-looking in any way, but, on the contrary, we are going to be more outward-looking, more open and more globally minded than ever before.

    but in a manner that builds upon global regionalisms (including the development of the ERA & the EHEA) that have helped enable the creation of a more resilient and outward-looking higher UK educational and research system over the last decade plus.

    Could an ‘outward-looking’ UK university deal with Brexit-related risk, take advantage of progress in developing the EHEA and the ERA, and contribute to refashioning its future structure and identity by creating a new and deeply embedded campus in a nearby (commuting time-wise) Eurostar station city like Lille, France, safely in EU-space? Commercial presence in the EU, to use GATS parlance, would enable a multi-campus model to emerge like the one visualized in the bottom of the figure below.

    Version 2: Import Model | Export Model | Academic Joint Venture Model | Partnership, Alliance, & Consortia Model | and Foreign Campus Model

    Models for the Globalization of Higher Education

    Source: based on Hawawini, G. (2011) The Internationalization of Higher Education Institutions: A Critical Review and a Radical Proposal (November 2011).

    In such a model, students and faculty regularly travel between campuses; indeed programs tend to be designed such that components are held in multiple locations. The nodal location also enables the university to leverage these flows. This model is not one associated the creation of offices or small outreach campuses where teaching occurs, with minimal basic research; rather, these campuses broadly replicate the terms and conditions of faculty and staff in the main (origin) campus. Indeed the replication of such employment conditions is required in some contexts (e.g., Singapore) where state largesse, subject to contractual agreements, facilitates the new campus development process.

    Imagine, for example, a Lille- or Amsterdam- based version of Cornell Tech in New York City, currently being constructed in New York City and primarily associated with Cornell University and Technion in Israel (photo below courtesy of Cornell Tech):
    Campus View from West Loop Road

    Campus View from West Loop Road. The Bloomberg Center, Residential Building, The Bridge (listed from left to right) – Credit Kilograph, Weiss Manfredi, and Handel Architects

    In a process that began in 2010 (see my Unsettling the University-Territory Relationship via Applied Sciences NYC) a long-term experiment in reconfiguring the university-territory relationship was launched. This initiative is noteworthy from a post-Brexit perspective because it is generative of the formation of deep partnerships between universities from different countries, but in a new & strategically valuable setting. In so doing, partner universities have no choice but to forge deep and relatively trusting relations, thereby going beyond traditional international partnerships that are all too often associated with ghost Memorandum of Understandings (MOUs) with little follow-up.
    In the case of Cornell Tech, the creation of a partnership node can be opened up, at will, to new partners, while also serving as a prospective site of engagement between Cornell and Technion’s existing partners in the US, Israel, and abroad. This is, indeed, the value of drawing in research-active universities like Technion and Cornell.

    Other models also exist, including the Euro-UK equivalent of Singapore’s Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), an option several of us from US universities (including UW-Madison, MIT, Georgia Tech, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon) recently discussed at a workshop on International University Research Ventures: Implications for US Economic Competitiveness and National Security. Most international research university ventures are STEM-related, though given what’s happening in Europe and the broader region, a case could certainly be made for an innovative UK-EU-Other campus that focuses on global challenges/problems including terrorism, climate change, financialization, refugee crises, risk/uncertainty, and the like. In short, an Oxbridge-Lille (or equivalent) campus is in the realm of the possible, potentially leading to educational innovation within the UK and EU irrespective of what Boris and Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (David Davis) are able to pull off over the next 2-6 years.

    In Conclusion

    I was in Copenhagen the week before the EU Referendum vote was held participating in a UNIKE conference regarding University Futures. This event, as well as the EU-funded project it is an outcome of, is an excellent of what UK university engagement in EU research and professional development programming can engender. The network structure of the project brought together UK, continental European, and European Higher Education Area-scale faculty, (post)graduate students , postdocs, and staff to explore various dimensions of universities and the knowledge-based economy. The network also extended into Asia and North America. Compared to many North American events focused on similar topics, this was a relatively cosmopolitan gathering; a sign of how 21st century regionalisms are indeed open regionalisms; they are not closed and inward looking, but instead use the phenomenon of global regionalism to build up capacity of constituent parts to engage globally.

    As Anne Corbett recently stated in University World News:

    It is not going to be an easy time for higher education. Nothing can be the same. But as the UK higher education world reflects on how it is to continue on the post-Brexit path, it is surely time to take a deep breath and return to fight with renewed energy for the values of European cooperation, as well as the money that has come into the sector from the EU.

    In this entry I am arguing UK universities might want to rethink their territorial relationship(s) and consider options for becoming more deeply embedded in EU-space in preparation for a post-Brexit non-EU world. And in doing so UK universities might help stabilize and hopefully further not only their own institutional-organizational development futures, but also contribute to the development of the Europe educational and research space they are unquestionably dependent upon.

    There are, no doubt, dozens of challenges (many legal) for why the ideas put forward above might be enormously difficult if not impossible to operationalize, though they’re posed here in the context of recognition that, as Nick Hillman put it last week, “not all the possible answers are obvious.”

    Kris Olds (with thanks for input on this topic from numerous colleagues in Belgium, the UK & the USA)

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     



    Source link