3 janvier 2017

The appointment of Michel Deneken, a Roman Catholic priest and theology professor, to lead the University of Strasbourg has attracted controversy among some who argue that the choice violates the spirit, if not the letter, of French laws calling for separation of church and state, writes Elizabeth Redden for Inside Higher Ed.
According to France 24, the public university in eastern France announced the election of Deneken as its new president last Tuesday. In a vote by the university's Council of Directors, Deneken – the interim president since September – received 26 votes while his opponent received nine.
The France 24 article published prior to his election quoted both the SNESUP higher education union and the UNEF national students' union expressing concerns about the selection of a priest for Strasbourg's presidency, with the latter group saying, “The appointment of someone who owes allegiance to both the state and the Vatican will not be good for the image of the university.” Read more...

By Johanna Harris. Given this, the report that a Dutch nursing home has established a programme providing free rent to university students in exchange for 30 hours a month of their time “acting as neighbours” with their aged residents is unusual. Read more...

By Maria Elena Hurtado. An Analysis of the Quality Ranking of Chilean Universities 2016, published on 24 November by Universitas: Grupo de Estudios Avanzados en Educación Superior, a Chilean think tank on higher education since 2012, reveals that over the past five years the quality of first degrees went up for all universities. Read more...

By Patrick Blessinger. The Cyrus Cylinder is widely considered to be the world’s first charter of human rights. Created in 539 BC by Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, it declared religious tolerance for all. Read more...

By Ellen Hazelkorn and John Goddard. The recent Brexit vote and the United States presidential election, as well as votes in Italy and Austria, highlight a growing gap between elites and others in society. Read more...

By Hamish Coates. Is higher education worth the cost, time and effort? Does it improve people, make them better citizens and create a more open and more scientific society? Does academic research serve as a catalyst for innovative change. Read more...

By John Aubrey Douglass. The concept of the public 'Flagship University' as a leading national or regional public university has its origins in the emergence of America’s network of public universities in the mid-1800s. It included a devotion to the English tradition of the residential college as well as the emerging Humboldtian model of independent research and graduate studies, in which academic research would, in turn, inform and shape teaching and build a stronger academic community. Read more...

By Bruno Morche. In the past few decades we have witnessed the growing importance of so-called ‘emerging’ countries on the world stage. A large group of countries that were traditionally described as ‘developing’ became known as ‘emerging countries’ or ‘emerging economies’. Read more...

By Victoria Herrmann. I began on 1 January 2016 in American Samoa on a grant from National Geographic. I would spend the next month on the archipelago some 5,000 miles southwest of Hawai’i to kickstart a much larger project that examines the cultural and societal impacts of sea level rise on the United States and its territories. Read more...

By Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Scientists, librarians and digital historians from a growing number of universities have begun a crowdsourced effort to copy and archive thousands of federal government websites and data sets related to climate change, the environment and other areas of scientific research that they fear could become compromised or inaccessible under the incoming Trump administration. Read more...