International News

Letter from London Summer break musings After a long academic year summer has finally arrived in the UK, and students are heading home for a well-deserved break. The lecturers’ pay dispute which provoked some academics to disrupt examination marking, has mercifully been settled with a generally satisfactory agreement which will go some way to make up for continuous underpayment for academic services. Comments Diana Warwick, chief executive, Universities UK, the representative association of vice-chancellors: “We are pleased with the agreement. This dispute has caused uncertainty and anxiety for students and parents. The priority is now to ensure that affected examination and graduation timetables are quickly amended.” So after only the briefest sigh of relief, organisational and administrative staff in universities will soon be gearing for the new academic year and preparing to receive the first round of students who will be paying the new ‘top-up’ fees which kick in this September. Heads of institutions will also have to study the first of the global university league tables, recently published by Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University, whose results clearly show that the world’s best universities are in the US. Although evaluation criteria of assessor organisations vary, a monograph published by the Centre for European Reform confirms Jiao Tong’s conclusion. Of the top 50 universities, only nine are in Europe, of which five are in the UK and one each in Switzerland, Sweden, France and the Netherlands. Richard Lambert, former editor of The Financial Times, and Nick Butler of British Petroleum, authors of the monograph, cite data which show that America is far ahead of Europe in many subjects. “This shows a grim story for Europe. How can it hope to become ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world’ when most of its best universities are so clearly in the second division?” query Lambert and Butler. Of course in sharp contrast to American institutions, which receive generous private funding, European universities are run by governments with modest supplementary funding by way of fees and grants. Comment Lambert and Butler: “There is a drab uniformity across the sector; many institutions are struggling to cope with growing numbers of students and inadequate resources, delivering uninspiring teaching in dilapidated buildings.” Changing fee structures as per the British example will go some way towards helping European institutions improve their ratings, although a complete mindset change is needed to persuade people on this side of the Atlantic to make the magnificent private donations and endowments Americans routinely make to universities and institutions of education in general.   (Jacqueline Thomas is a London-based academic) United States Rising commencement season protests As the commencement (graduation) season reaches its peak, speakers and honorary degree recipients selected by US universities have prompted protests over issues ranging from the Iraq war to labour disputes and religious rifts. These otherwise happy occasions, at which degrees are conferred on graduates, are expected to be marred by noisy demonstrations. Some students and faculty members have vowed to turn their backs on controversial speakers. One adjunct professor of English…