Letter from London

Stormy top-up fees debate

It is amazing how quickly subjects which dominate the British press for a time, suddenly disappear from the front pages of newspapers. A case in point is the stormy ‘top-up’ fees for university students debate which almost brought down the Tony Blair government.

The objectives of the Bill as enunciated by education secretary Charles Clarke are to place Britain’s somewhat down-at-heel varsities on a sound financial footing; to give institutions the freedom and resources to compete with the best universities around the world, and to make university education accessible to all regardless of income.

Currently tuition fees payable to attend any university in the UK are £1,125 (Rs.92,250) per year. The introduction of top-up fees (in other words topping up the mandatory £1,125 fees they already receive) means university managements will be free to levy any fee between this price point upto a maximum of £3,000. The general expectation is that top rung institutions will demand the highest amount permitted by the government.

Despite the narrowness of the government majority, there’s general agreement that British universities have suffered from many years of under-funding, even as student numbers have increased dramatically following a government commitment to facilitating 50 percent of young people to pursue higher education. The percentage of students of university age has risen to 43 even as investment in higher education has continued to fall. Therefore even those resolutely set against the idea of top-up fees agree that supplementary funding has to be found from somewhere.

Inevitably given its working class traditions, the Labour government has made provision for means testing students. Under the new system due to come into force in 2006, students from less well-off families will receive grants of £1,500 (Rs.1.20 lakh) for living expenses. Simultaneously the government is encouraging universities to offer bursaries so that students from poor backgrounds could effectively pay nothing, even for courses priced at the maximum £3,000 (Rs.2.46 lakh). However all students will have to pay back their fees after graduation though under the new system repayments will begin once they earn over £15,000 (Rs.12.30 lakh) per year, rather than the £10,000 (Rs.8.20 lakh) currently, and repayment instalments are directly linked to income. Any unpaid debts will be written off after 25 years. As is often the case in Britain, middle class families which are neither poor enough to qualify for assistance, nor wealthy enough to be able to pay up without a struggle, will be worst hit.

Meanwhile there is considerable speculation about which universities will charge full permissible fees. Critics fear this will result in a two-tier university system, with poorer students more likely to opt for less popular universities charging lower fees.

Thus far little reference has been made to the impact of the bill on international students. In the long term they will presumably have to pay far higher fees to maintain the gap between themselves and domestic students. At the moment international students pay between £7,000-10,000 (Rs.5.47-8.20 lakh) by way of tuition fees although they vary considerably. Critics of the bill say that the hike in fees for British students will result in higher fees for overseas students as universities try to make up lost revenue from domestic students put off by the higher cost of university education.

(Jackie Thomas is a London-based journalist/ academic)

Japan

Rising toll of stress-related teacher suicides

Every February brings news of a dismal woodland crop when police release the figures on the number of deaths in ‘Suicide Forest’ at the base of Mount Fuji. More professionals, including teachers, were among the 78 names reeled off last year. The Japan Teachers’ Union claims they were victims of the recent massive changes in the country’s education system.

A record 102 teachers (70 male and 32 female) took their own lives in 2001, accounting for almost 0.5 percent of Japan’s total. Suicide now ranks as the sixth leading cause of death among Japanese people, with 32,143 suicides recorded in 2002, up from 15,000-25,000 in the 10 years before 1997. For people in their twenties and thirties in Japan, it is now the leading cause of death.

Some pundits blame Japan’s prolonged recession, which took a hold in the early 1990s. For educators, the increase in teacher suicides is linked to added pressures of work caused by the government’s overhaul of the curriculum and the huge rise of discipline problems within schools. The school week has been cut from six days to five, but this has actually increased teachers’ workload.

“It is true that the number of teacher suicides has been gradually increasing,” says Tamaki Terazawa of the Japan Teachers’ Union (JTU) adding, “It is no doubt linked to an enormous jump in the number of our members who suffer from stress-related mental illness. They made up nearly half of all teachers at the nation’s state schools who took sick leave during last year.” Remarkably, the education ministry agrees with the union that teachers are now more likely to suffer stress at work, attributing this to “classrooms in disarray, truancy and increased government control over the workplace”.

Those faced with high depression scores are advised to take leave immediately or seek medical treatment. It is advice that came too late for the three principals who killed themselves last year. However, doubts have been raised about whether educators could even act on such advice. The head of Takasu elementary school in Hiroshima, Kazuhiro Keitoku, who killed himself in 2001 at the age of 56, was denied leave even though his doctor advised his education board he needed a break. So strong is Japan’s work ethic that sometimes the only way out is suicide. A glimpse into Mount Fuji’s forest of doom would tell anybody that.

Germany

Ambitious plan to create super universities

Germany aims to create a university to rival Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard. The ruling Social Democratic Party admits that even Germany’s oldest university, Heidelberg, cannot compete at a global level. Comments Peter Ziegler, education ministry spokesman: “Not only do universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge attract the best professors and researchers from across the globe, they also produce the most Nobel prizewinners — something Germany needs more of to help improve research and bring more money into the country.”

The proposal means at least one university will become an elite school. Edelgard Buhlmann, education minister, hopes to create upto ten such institutes by the end of 2010.

“There are no plans to build a new university. Instead we will transform existing ones by giving them more funding, applying international standards and joining the international system of ranking,” says Ziegler. The ministry plans alliances with established German research institutes such as the Max Planck to attract experts and students.

Berlin’s Humboldt University has been named as the most likely choice to become the first elite institution as it has produced 29 Nobel prizewinners. Humboldt economics professor Herald Uhlig, who spent five years teaching at Princeton and Stanford, welcomes the proposal but is concerned about how the ambitious plans will be implemented with insufficient numbers of top academics. “Of the 500 professors working at Humboldt University, not even two dozen would be good enough to work at Harvard,” says Uhlig.

Canada

US restrictions boost foreign student inflow

Increased restrictions on foreign students entering the US have boosted international student numbers in Canada by more than 15 percent. The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada says that foreign student enrollment is up more than 15 percent, with several institutions reporting a rise of 25 percent in autumn 2003, compared with 2002.

The biggest rise was at the University of Manitoba, where foreign enrollments jumped more than 40 percent and the number of applications was up 75 percent over the previous year. After five years of steady rises in the US, the number of international students in 2002-03 showed only a slight increase over the previous year, up less than 1 percent.

Many Canadian universities attribute their success to recruitment efforts in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, but others cite tougher restrictions on foreign students applying to the US as a factor that makes Canada a more foreigner-friendly option. Ulrich Scheck, dean of graduate studies and research at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, is of the opinion that the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and “the subsequent more restrictive US policies” have encouraged the inflow.

Rebecca Wasseman, president of the United States Student Association, says there is a connection between low numbers in the US, high numbers in Canada and the difficulties facing foreign students in her country. American universities have been fighting “racial profiling” of foreign students and the Border Security Act, which places a “higher standard of scrutiny” on countries the state department believes to be “sponsors of terrorism”, such as Cuba, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, Libya and Syria.

United States

Wellesley frowns follow Mona Lisa Smile

A month after the us release of the movie Mona Lisa Smile, the president of the all-female college in which the film is set, says it is a “distorted and demeaning portrayal” of the institution.

Diana Chapman Walsh, president of the highly regarded Wellesley College, concedes that university officials had been given the script in advance and agreed to allow filming on campus for ten days in exchange for an undisclosed payment from the production company. But, in response to protests from alumni she says the finished product, “to a far greater extent than the screenplay we originally read, characterises the college as rigid and hidebound, and the students as rich and spoiled”.

The movie is set in the 1950s and stars Julia Roberts as an art history professor who invites the wrath of administrators by encouraging her students to choose careers over marriage. “The film attempts to raise genuine questions about women’s life choices: whether one must choose between career and family and how to find one’s own path when it may conflict with society’s expectations or those of parents, professors and friends,” Walsh says in a letter to alumnae. “Seeing the movie is vastly different from reading the dialogue. I confess I hadn’t had much experience with Hollywood or movie screenplays, and the producers tell me now that these differences are a normal part of the production and editing process,” she says.

Israel

First private medical school project nixed

It’s not only in india that private initiatives in medical education are discouraged. Israel’s Council for Higher Education has refused to grant a licence for Israel’s first private medical school.

The plan for a private school originated in a 1990s report by Amnon Pazy, former chairman of the council’s planning and budgeting committee, which confirmed a need for more doctors by 2020. Shachar, a non-profit organisation, submitted a proposal for a medical school.

Haim Eliash, Shachar’s general manager, says the aim was to promote the Ashkelon Medical School with the support of Poland’s University of Gdansk medical school. Students would spend three pre-clinical years in Israel with classes taught in Hebrew and English and three years in Gdansk. Funding for the school was to come from a group of Australian Jewish businessmen.

But the proposal sparked opposition from many senior medical professionals, including the heads of all four of Israel’s existing medical schools. “The opening of a branch in Israel of a medical school from Eastern Europe would be an embarrassment to higher education in Israel,” says Avram Hershko, a member of the faculty of medicine at Technion — Institute of Technology in Haifa.

The council claims it has postponed the request for a licence, but Eliash feels that the real reason is that the council is afraid that “many others will follow”.

France

Headscarves ban debate gathers steam

Muslim girls who follow their conscience will stop going to class if France bans students from wearing the headscarf in public schools, a senior French Muslim leader has predicted. Following the release of a Bill promoting secularism in schools last month, Lhaj Thami Breze says girls will face a choice between their education and their conscience.

Breze, president of the influential Union of Islamic Organisations of France, says some Muslim girls are likely to transfer to private schools, including Catholic establishments. “I know that our Catholic brothers are very tolerant,” he was quoted as saying in the daily free newspaper Metro.

In December, President Jacques Chirac asked parliament to ban headscarves. However unlike Germany the proposed law also bans other conspicuous religious symbols such as Jewish skullcaps and large crosses, in public schools to protect secularism in a changing France. The legislation goes before parliament shortly.

The bill has broad support in France, but many of the country’s 5 million Muslims believe it will trample their freedoms. At a demonstration in December, protesters sang the Marseillaise, waved the flag, and shouted “Beloved France, where is my liberty?”

The move has also drawn criticism and protests from numerous Muslim countries and from US State Department officials. John Hanford, US ambassador at large for International Religious Freedom, says the Bush administration believes that “all persons should be able to practice their religion and their beliefs peacefully without government interference, as long as they are doing so without provocation and intimidation of others in society.”

There were protests by children outside the French embassy in Lebanon as well. Top Muslim Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, says President Chirac’s proposal “confiscates” a woman’s freedoms and attacks human rights. In an open letter to President Chirac he said that wearing the headscarf is a “religious duty” for Muslim women.

But Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, Grand Sheik of Al-Azhar in Cairo, the world’s most prestigious Sunni theological institute says that “if a Muslim woman lives in a country where laws do not permit (the scarf), then she has to comply with those laws.”

Russia

Former comrades show true colours

There was always a forced unreality about the communist Soviet Union’s solidarity with the third world nations of Afro-Asia. Following the collapse of communism in the mid-eighties, former comrades are increasingly venting their true feelings about foreigners in Russia.

The slogan “May our native capital flourish!” is blazoned over the dismal university building that for 30 years symbolised the influence of Soviet ideology in the third world and trained Latin American revolutionaries, the terrorist Carlos and Palestinian activists. Set up in 1960 as Patrice Lumumba University, the institution ceased in 1992 to make any reference to the man who led the campaign for Congo’s independence in the late 1950s. It is now known as the Russian Peoples’ Friendship University.

The distinction is an important one. An African woman student says: “The ‘native capital’ concerned is of course Moscow. There’s no reference to the capitals of the countries of foreign students. We are in Russia. The Russians put themselves first.”

In the entrance hall, a discreet poster reminds the visitor of the tragedy that took place at 2 a.m on November 24 last year, when a fire swept through Hostel 6, killing 42 foreign students. It left a deep trauma on the 2,600 students from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East who form about a quarter of the university’s total student population. “We’re convinced it was arson,” says a medical student from Benin, who is “relieved” at the idea of moving to France soon, away from Russia and its extreme nationalism. “In my nightmares I can still see bodies falling from the windows of Hostel 6 and crashing into the snow,” he says.

Sidonie, a Chadian sociology student, feels that “living in Russia means being constantly on the lookout”. Everyday racism involves being jostled or insulted. “For the Russians, any black man is automatically a drugs pusher, and any black woman a tart.”

Only a few hours after the November tragedy, the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, said the fire had been caused by “a short-circuit in room 203”. His remark caused considerable indignation among foreign students. A special committee of 16 students from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Indian subcontinent and Arab countries was formed to demand a thorough inquiry into the fire and financial compensation for the victims (about 180 are still in hospital). “The ambassadors of our countries joined the movement,” says a Chadian student. “The rector was forced to offer his resignation, but it hasn’t yet been formally accepted.”

In Russia’s general election held on December 7 last year, nationalist parties made gains. Racism has been getting worse, as a result of the war in Chechnya, mounting nostalgia for the imperial Russia of old, and a crackdown prompted by “the international war against terrorism”.

There are two reasons why Moscow still attracts foreign students, says a student from Benin: “First, courses here remain inexpensive. But, above all, Russia is a country of transit for us. After two or three years of being registered as a student here, you can obtain a visa for Europe or America more easily,” he says.

Kuwait

Islamists warn against school texts revision

Islamist MPs have warned the government in Kuwait of unspecified consequences if it revises schoolbooks to eliminate phrases deemed to promote religious extremism.

“We warn the (education) minister, and all officials, against touching anything that has to do with curricula, especially religion,” Abdullah Akkash, MP told parliament. Since elections last July, religious fundamentalists have formed the largest bloc in the Kuwait parliament. But Kuwait is one of six Western-friendly Gulf states (the others are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates) that last month agreed to try to combat religious intolerance and fanaticism through educational reform.

The United States has been pressing for such changes in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, which are blamed on Al Qaeda. Dozens of Kuwaitis trained in Al Qaeda’s ranks in Afghanistan.

The need for change was highlighted in the recently published UN Arab Human Development Report which commented on “an alliance between some oppressive regimes and certain types of conservative religious scholars”. The report said this led to “interpretations of Islam which are inimical to human development with respect to freedom of thought”.

The UN survey concluded that the teaching of a distorted interpretation of Islam is a major factor contributing to the poor quality of education at all levels in the Arab world. UNESCO, the UN education body, is planning a conference of Arab education ministers in Beirut in a bid to co-ordinate efforts towards reforming and modernising curricula in the region.

Sudan

Switch back to English

At dawn the children begin their hike down the bushy hills of the Nuba Mountains. Some ‘went footing’, as they call it here, for 40 minutes, others for a good two hours. But all make the journey because they want to get to school. Inside one of the dark mud huts they squat on straw stools and are greeted with the word “Ethnicity” written on the blackboard.

What’s surprising isn’t the political nature of the lesson, which uses a textbook written by the country’s main rebel group. It’s the language of instruction: English. As Sudan’s Arabic-speaking northerners and black African southerners come close to signing a peace accord after a long-running civil war, what language to speak in the centre of the country is one obstacle to a deal.

The people of Nuba, through centuries of slave trading and forced migration, speak Arabic, the official language of Sudan. But they are closer ethnically and culturally to the south, where English was commonly used when the region was under British control. Sudan became independent in 1956.

So the community voted two years ago to make English the lingua franca for the more than 25,000 students in areas of the Nuba Mountains held by southern rebels, a golden, sun-swept and fertile region in central Sudan.

“Is it risky? No. In Nuba, Sudan we know that we are Africans, not Arabs. This will be the new Sudan and we will decide our fate,” says Simon Kalo, regional director of education for schools in the Nuba Mountains. “All of the Nuba people really want this shift,” he says.

Few other areas of Sudan show as clearly how the largest country in Africa sits uneasily between black sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa’s largely Arab and Muslim populations. Civil war has been a near constant since independence. The current round began in 1983 when then president Jaafar Nimeri decided to end the south’s autonomous status and enforce Islamic law. An interim agreement signed in July 2002 in Machakos, Kenya, outlines a plan for Sudan in which the south would vote for unity with the north or independence after a six-year period under a transition government.

From the straw-roofed tea and brew houses to mud-walled classrooms, Nuba’s citizens say they see switching to English as the first step in defining their new role in Sudan as separate from the north. “It’s perfectly understandable that the change to English would happen at this moment in their history,” says Alex de Waal, director of Justice Africa and author of the book Facing Genocide: The Nuba Of Sudan. According to De Waal, the people of Nuba were victims of a programme that “can only be described as systematic ethnic cleansing. The whole experience of mass relocation affected people in a profoundly negative way and is seared into their consciousness”.

An estimated 20 percent of the population in Nuba are Muslims. But they oppose the strict form of Islam that Sudan’s government pushed during the 1990s.