University administrators have been joined by a coalition, including business organisations and conservative groups, in a renewed call to reform US visa requirements to make it easier for students and scholars to enter the country. The recommendations, including a call to waive the requirement that applicants have personal interviews at US embassies or consulates at the discretion of local officials, come from organisations normally supportive of George W. Bush’s government.

But despite the administration’s insistence that the bureaucratic visa process is improving, delays and red tape are jeopardising the economy, complains the head of the National Foreign Trade Council, a staunchly pro-business lobby. Comments Bill Reinsch, its president: "For 250 years America has welcomed people from all over the world. Our visa policy jeopardises all that."

He adds that because of post 9/11 restrictions "we are encouraging businesses to move their innovation capabilities outside the US so their engineers do not have to run the visa gauntlet. We need to change our policy before more damage is done."

University officials have long complained about visa policies. But now the Association of International Educators and the Alliance for International Education and Cultural Exchange have been joined by business lobbies and the conservative Heritage Foundation. According to Marlene Johnson, chief executive of the Association of International Educators, "the diverse voices of this coalition urge the government to take a number of key steps" to change visa processes.

New president sets Harvard agenda

Only a year after its combative president stirred worldwide controversy with remarks about the academic qualifications of women, Harvard University has replaced him with the first female chief executive in its nearly 400-year history. The university has confirmed Drew Gilpin Faust its 28th president. She was selected by the governing Harvard Corporation and board of overseers to lead the university through a long-planned multi-billion-dollar expansion that will vastly enlarge its campus.

Dr. Faust (59) will also face the challenge of encouraging further interdisciplinary research — something that Harvard’s notoriously independent schools and departments have done with notably less success than rivals elsewhere in the US and abroad. For its future to live up to its past, says Dr. Faust, a historian, Harvard will have to build on what it already does well. This "will also mean recognising what we don’t do as well as we should, and not being content until we find ways to do better," she says. "We need to break down barriers that inhibit collaboration among schools or among disciplines."

Attempts by the university’s previous two presidents to centralise control over Harvard’s separate schools ended in failure. Dr. Faust’s immediate predecessor Lawrence Summers, left in June last year after a faculty vote of no confidence in response to the remarks in which he questioned the innate ability of women to succeed in science and maths.

Dr. Faust is an expert on the American south who served for 25 years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, including as chair of the department of American civilisation and director of the women’s studies programme. She came to Harvard seven years ago as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Dr Faust’s appointment will be effective from July 1.

Rising varsity admission applications controversy

The news that Ontario, Canada’s most populous province and home to upwards of 40 percent of its university students, is experiencing a higher than expected flood of university applications has generated a storm of controversy. The Council of Ontario Universities (COU), a consortium of 19 institutions, recently sent out a press release saying that applications had risen by 5.2 percent, or about 4,000 students.

This means that over three years some 14,000 more students will enroll than the government had forecast. The flood of entries translated in a C$100million (Rs.370 crore) funding shortfall for 2006-07, which the COU projects will grow to C$300 million (Rs.1,100 crore) for 2009-10. Comments James Mackay, COU’s vice-president of policy and analysis: "There is more interest in university education than anyone predicted, yet because the per-student funding hasn’t been adjusted to keep up, we are having to accommodate students by cramming them into classrooms and limiting their contacts with faculty."

Some university presidents suggest that students will either be turned away or admittance criteria will be raised. Says Sheldon Levy, president of the Toronto-based Ryerson University, where applications jumped by 17 percent, "This means there will be many students who want to study at Ryerson who can’t be accommodated."

However, within a week David Foot of the University of Toronto told a conference of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations that the increase is probably a demographic blip that will correct itself. "Don’t presume that today’s situation will persist. Demand may well be going down as the baby boom echo leaves our system," says Prof. Foot, an economist and the author of several books on the economics of the baby boom. "Ten years from now we may be talking about a whole new era… trends may even reverse."

Three days later COU issued a press release attacking Prof. Foot’s forecast. It pointed out that Ontario’s population of 18 to 21-year-olds is scheduled to grow by 53,000 from 2006 to 2014 and would still be higher in 2021 than it is today. It also argued that, despite any falls in the absolute number of young people, steady increase in the percentage of high school graduates entering university — this rose from 28 percent in 1990 to 33 percent in 2006 — will also push enrollments upward.

RQF boost to varsity research

Australian universities have begun retrenching academics with poor research records while offering top professors from other institutions salaries of up to A$250,000 (Rs.85 lakh) per year. The move comes as universities try to recruit high-profile staff from around the world in readiness for the introduction of a new system for allocating more than A$600 million (Rs.2,080 crore) a year in federal funding.

Poaching senior academics at double the usual professorial salary and dropping largely teaching-only lecturers is rife as the sector prepares for Australia’s new Research Quality Framework (RQF), the equivalent of the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise. Trials of the controversial RQF will begin this year before its full introduction in 2008.

But serious divisions have emerged over the way research impact should be assessed, with critics claiming that no other country has tried to measure it. The Group of Eight (Go8) research-intensive universities claims that under the original impact model, poor-quality research could still win funding, while the five-member Australian Technology Network group believes that research impact can be credibly defined, validated and assessed.

The Go8, in its tenth submission on the RQF since former education minister Brendan Nelson proposed a new method to allocate research grants, estimated that research impact statements of up to ten pages for each research grouping would create 16,000 pages of reading or the equivalent of 160 Ph D theses.

Michael Gallagher, a former head of the education department’s higher education division, said at the time that assessing impact seemed more likely to reward mediocrity than research strengths. "Universities are trying to position themselves by poaching staff and using creative recruitment tactics, without adding to Australia’s capacity," he says.

Meanwhile Glyn Davis, chair of the Go8 says it will work with the government in the next phase of the framework’s development. "It is important that the model is robust and provides an accurate and internationally respected measure of research excellence," he stresses.

Declining number of qualified varsity entrants

The proportion of pupils leaving school in South Africa with the qualifications to enter university has fallen for the fourth year running. This has forced the higher education sector, which has struggled to lower its 50 percent student dropout rate, to deliver remedial education to the disadvantaged. This year, 66 percent of some 530,000 pupils who took the national state school-leaving exams (the matric) passed.

This is a seven point drop below the pass rate of 73 percent in 2003, although the figure is still higher than the 58 percent of 1994, the first year of post-apartheid democracy. But the absolute numbers of passes has grown year on year as more pupils take the matric.

The class of 2006, or Madiba’s (Nelson Mandela’s) Children, the first cohort to have been schooled fully in post-apartheid South Africa, performed poorly in state school-leaving exams late last year. Further concern stems from the fact that only 16 percent, or 85,830 pupils, achieved a university exemption, the minimum requirement for university entry. This is lower than the 17 percent figure of 2005 and 18 percent of 2004. Last year produced about 1,000 fewer exemptions than 2005, and 3,000 fewer than 1994.

Pupils who took the Independent Examination Board (IEB) matric, which caters to some 150 private schools, performed better. The pass rate was 98 percent, and 79 percent of those eligible obtained university exemption. But the number is tiny: some 7,000 pupils took the IEB exams and 4,729 got exemption.

While a small proportion of university-qualified school-leavers will enter South Africa’s private higher education sector — and public universities of technology do not require an exemption for diploma courses — tens of thousands of students lacking the requisite skills will again be admitted into degree programmes.

Internet harassment epidemic

Academics are increasingly being singled for abuse and harassment by their own students on the web, an investigation by The Times Higher Education Supplement has found. On hugely popular social networking websites, with potential international audiences of millions, lecturers are being attacked as "useless" and have been subjected to personal insults over their professionalism and appearance, as well as to sexually explicit abuse. One lecturer is branded a "waste-of-space bitch".

Sally Hunt, the joint general secretary of the University and College Union, says she is "appalled" by the findings. "Universities must do more to ensure that staff and students are able to work in tolerant and intimidation-free environments. The growth of the web means employers and unions need to revisit existing dignity-at-work procedures to ensure they cover all aspects of bullying."

Roger Kline, UCU head of employment, says he will immediately seek to work with the National Union of Students to help tackle this "worrying development". "This sort of behaviour is clearly harassment. It is extremely upsetting for lecturers to be pilloried in this way." In recent weeks, Huddersfield University has discovered three separate cases of abuse of female lecturers on the website MySpace. This included comments about a lecturer’s hairy legs and smelly feet and speculations about an academic’s sex life.

A video of one lecturer from Essex University, whom The Times Higher agreed not to name to avoid adding to his distress, had been viewed by almost 800 people. It shows him repeatedly scratching his crotch, criticises his personal hygiene and describes his lectures as "rubbish". Essex said that the abuse of one of its lecturers is "regrettable" but adds that such sites included many positive depictions of the university. Says Bryan Lowed, a senior lecturer at Bradford University, who is named in association with a video of a student asleep in his lecture: "We are all still learning about the opportunities and the pitfalls that technology brings to the lecture theatre."

A spokesman for the University of Central Lancashire, which is named in a series of videos of students sleeping in lectures, says: "If the university feels that these sites are compromising the academic reputation of the university or putting the staff at risk in anyway we will consider taking action to minimise the use of mobile phones during lectures."

MacArthur Foundation’s helping hand

The independent US-based Macarthur Foundation has given $11 million (Rs.484 crore) support to four Nigerian institutions: the universities of Ibadan and Port Harcourt, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and Bayero University, Kano.

Kole Shettima, the foundation’s country director, says the support came under its programme on global security and sustainability, which covers higher education alongside issues such as human rights and international justice, migration and peace and security.

The foundation recently sponsored fellowships for 63 lecturers from the University of Ibadan to train overseas and was gratified that on completion of training everyone returned home. "In Kano the university told us that despite the fact that the state is known for agriculture, the university did not have a faculty of agriculture and the foundation helped establish one," says Shettima.

He also spoke of the foundation’s collaboration with companies operating in Rivers and Bayelsa states to assist the University of Harcourt to get better equipment for its petroleum and energy department. "We have worked in this country for 17 years, awarding $68 million (Rs.300 crore) in grants," he adds.

Brass brand exemption

Austria’s education ministry is considering a bizarre plan to exempt students from paying university fees if they agree to join one of the country’s lederhosen wearing brass bands. Says horst Wiedenhofer, head of the Styrian Brass-Music Association: "Austria is famous all over the world for this type of music — and we need to support it, encourage it and make sure it remains a vibrant part of our way of life."

Under the government plan — a somewhat bizarre bid to end a countrywide wave of student protests over a broken election pledge to scrap fees — anyone who plays in a traditional brass band will be exempt from paying tuition fees. Other activities that would exempt students from fees include being boy scout leaders, volunteer fire-fighters, or working with the Nature Lovers’ Society or the Alps Society.

Austria’s 2006 general election gave the social democrats the largest number of seats, but they did not win a sufficient majority to form a government. The party eventually formed a coalition with the Conservatives, but to secure the deal it had to agree to drop an election pledge to scrap the widely unpopular student fees.

In a bid to defuse student anger over the broken promise chancellor (prime minister) Alfred Gusenbauer announced the plan to offer exemptions after looking at the Israeli example: under the Perah programme, students who do 60 hours of social work in a semester are exempt from paying fees.

Rising xenophobia tide

Racism in Russia and a wave of xenophobic murders and attacks on students and immigrants that has left more than 50 dead and hundreds injured in the past year, were under the spotlight at an international workshop held recently in St. Petersburg.

Research into the rapid rise of neofascism, intolerance and racism across Russia — including latest field studies of extreme right-wing skinhead gangs, conducted jointly by Warwick University and Ulyanovsk State University — were aired during the two-day workshop at St. Petersburg University’s Centre for German and European Studies, held on February 16-18.

The Moscow Sova Centre, a monitoring group that works with Britain’s Amnesty International logged 54 murders and 478 attacks in 2006. This represents a sharp increase over 2005, when 31 murders and 400 attacks were recorded.

Elena Omelchenko, director of the Region Research Centre at the Ulyanovsk, who has been studying Russian racists and skinheads for the past five years, says the workshop came at a critical point. "Russia is at a sharp cultural and political point in its history. The country is experiencing immigration and territorial changes, and young people are reacting in acute ways. It is essential that we understand not only extreme groups, but also the foundation and basis for the racism and intolerance that exist generally in Russia and the political uses to which this is being put."

(Compiled from Times Educational Supplement and Times Higher Education Supplement)