Academic Freedom Media Review
May 22 – 28, 2010
Below is the weekly compilation of news articles addressing issues of academic freedom that is put together by Scholars at Risk.
MLA Pushes for End to Ideological Denials of Visas
Inside Higher Ed, 5/28
Groups protest Israel denying US student’s entry
Jeff Karoun, The Associated Press, 5/27
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Midlothian High School students planted trees in honor of their guests. | photo courtesy of Jamie Schlais Barnes
Two weeks ago, three men walked into Midlothian High School looking for a better understanding of American culture. Ten days later, they left having changed their own perceptions of U.S. citizens and their students’ perceptions of Arabic culture. Their challenge and that of the students at Midlothian High School is to continue spreading what they learned.
Abdulwahab Albaadani, a teacher at Ibn Majed in Sanaa, Yemen, Amine Slimani, a teacher from the Secondary School of Nedroma in Nedroma, Algeria and his pupil, Mohamed Belmeliami, traveled to the U.S. as a culmination of nearly a year’s worth of video conferencing, cultural lessons, and web logging with social studies classes at Midlothian High School…
“The internationalization of higher education is inevitable,” Mr. Levine, a former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, said in a speech on Wednesday to the Association of International Education Administrators whose members are meeting here this week.
In internationalization, “some bold universities will lead,” Mr. Levine said. “Others will be populizers. And others will hold onto the past and will be destined to fail.”
via “Internationalized Academe Is Inevitable, but Its Form Is Not,” The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The quotation above is from a short version of a longer article the was published in the February 26 print edition of the Chronicle. A recurring point of tension at that meeting, and one that is also clear from the comments on the report linked above, is that there is a tension between the need to internationalize curricula and the costs of doing so. Like so many sectors of the economy, higher education is experiencing significant financial challenges and this is the problem.