In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: Scrutiny and Standards for Branch Campuses:
The growing trend of North American colleges creating branches abroad threatens to erode the quality of higher education and to undercut the rights of faculty members, according to a statement issued Wednesday by the American Association of University Professors and the Canadian Association of University Teachers.
"The pace of overseas expansion also threatens to affect the character of higher education in the United States and Canada. The sheer number of faculty employed in foreign operations is increasing, and most are contingent employees on temporary contracts. Because foreign programs and campuses are usually less costly, colleges and universities may make decisions favoring their development over more expensive U.S.- and Canadian-based equivalents staffed by tenure-track faculty," the statement says….
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…"Advocates of private investment now refer routinely to a multitrillion-dollar global market in educational services, and efforts to open up this lucrative market further are driving bilateral or multilateral trade agreements and negotiations. As a result, globalization has become one of the principal means of privatizing and commercializing higher education."
Further, the statement says that "education should not be a commodity, bought and sold in the international marketplace and subject to the rules of competitive trade that govern a deregulated global economy. Participating in the movement for international education can rest on laudable educational grounds. But those grounds will be jeopardized if hard-earned standards and protections are weakened rather than exported."….
WORTH READING:
Nick Kristof’s column in yesterday’s New York Times: Humanity Even for Nonhumans
2 comments:
The "business" model, eh? Will we never break loose from Adam Smith's invisible stranglehold? These "conservatives" have an unfalsifiable thesis, and they should be called at for being the pseudoscientists that they are.
Kristof's piece is heartening; thanks for posting it, Chunk. One has to think of John Stuart Mill's observation that every great social movement must experience three stages: "ridicule, discussion, adoption." We seem to have progressed from ridicule to discussion over much of this land--and adoption is following slowly, in fits and starts. I guess the country is really a mosaic of the three stages at this point. But that's a huge change for the better from when some of us began teaching twenty years ago.
It's powerful that many now can perceive the animal protection movement as a social justice movement in the tradition of feminism, abolitionism, and other progressive moral changes. I greatly appreciate your attention to this one on the blog.
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