Monthly Archives: April 2017

Latest Updates on Singapore’s SSRC

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Photo Credit: Wattpad, Your Singapore Dictionary

Hello, it’s me again — updating you on the latest developments in Singapore’s social science and humanities research landscape! In my class presentation, I mentioned that the Singapore government will be spending SGD$350 million (USD250 million) to strengthen social science research in the next five years. To achieve this, Singapore’s Social Science Research Council (SSRC) will be initiating and running a series of programmes from now till 2020. One of these programmes includes selecting and funding new social science-related projects proposed by professors and research fellows in Singapore. The SSRC is specifically interested in research projects that will enable the public to understand ‘[n]ew and complex challenges [that] confront Singapore as it progresses and matures as a nation’, says Mr. Peter Ho (Chairman of the SSRC).

The SSRC has *just* published a list of research projects that is approved in their first call for submissions. The SSRC has set aside SGD$21 million (USD15 million) as research grants for these projects:

  1. Christianity in Southeast Asia: Comparative Growth, Politics and Networks in Urban Centres by Dr Terence Chong, Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute
  2. Develop a Contemporary Theory of Harmony by Professor Li Chenyang, NTU
  3. Fostering Harmonious Intergroup Relations in Early Childhood by Assistant Professor Setoh Pei Pei, NTU
  4. Identifying Positive Adaptive Pathways in Low-income families in Singapore by Associate Professor Esther Goh, NUS
  5. Influence of Social Motivations on Cultural Learning, Adjustment, and Integration by Associate Professor Krishna Savani, NTU
  6. Making Identity Count in Asia: Identity Relations in Singapore and its Neighbourhood by Professor Ted Hopf, NUS
  7. Population ageing, old age labour and financial decisions in Singapore by Associate Professor Liu Haoming, NUS
  8. Salutogenic Healthy Aging Programme Embracement (Shape) for elderly living alone by Assistant Professor Wang Wenru, NUS
  9. Singapore’s Islamic Studies Graduates: Their Role and Impact in a Plural Society by Dr Norshahril Saat, Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute
  10. Building Human Capacity in Singapore’s Population: Testing Innovations in Human Development by Professor Jean Yeung, NUS
  11. Service Productivity and Innovation Research Programme (Spire) by Professor Ivan Png, NUS
  12. Sustainable governance of transboundary environmental commons in Southeast Asia by Professor David Taylor, NUS

More information on the SSRC’s recent approval of these projects can be found here: http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/21-million-in-grants-awarded-for-12-research-projects-on-singapore-society-identity?xtor=CS3-18

Feel free to share your take on the projects that have been selected, and the outcomes you will like to see from these projects!

Hidden Figures: Women in Higher Education

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I must admit that when I first heard about Hidden Figures I doubted going to see the movie at the theater. My first thought was: mmm a movie about space and engineers… not sure if I want to go. However, when I read about the movie and learned that it was about three women that worked at NASA in the 60’s that helped send men to the moon for the first time, I started to get curious about it. I convinced my husband and a lot of friends to go and have a nice afternoon watching the other side of the coin of how NASA developed space exploration. After 2 hours and 7 minutes, a few cries and a lot of excitement and emotions, the movie ended. Most of us, including men in the group, concluded that this was one of the best or even the best movie nominated to the Oscars for best picture that we had seen.

This movie was a huge success despite being far away from the Hollywood prototype. It is not big on special effects or science fiction, it is violence free, not a romantic comedy and not lead by men (in 2016 females made up just 29% of protagonist in the top 100 films at the U.S. box office). Instead Hidden Figures uses chalkboards, old calculators, and human computers to tell us the story of three brilliant African-American women; Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, who changed United States history despite the dominant racial segregation of the time.

It was wartime and the American government needed all the support to win the race to space. White mathematician women graduated from the best colleges in the country, found work at Langley Research Center and were part of the East Computers group. Their counterparts, the West Computers could not use the same bathroom, nor sit at the same table in the cafeteria during times of racial segregation. However, they helped send the man to the moon. They challenged the country’s educational statistics and gave more than 40 years of life to NASA. The strength and dedication of these women is incredible.  They lived in a United States in which only 2% of African American women studied a career and of them, 60% became teachers of primary and secondary public education. With a brutal self-esteem, they explained to their boss, a white man, that their calculations were more precise and that they could, in fact, reach the moon. What was most remarkable for me was to see these talented women devoted in helping their country protect the US political hegemony during the Cold War, despite the fact that each day of their lives, especially at work, they felt like outsiders in their own country. Regardless of this, they never gave up. On the contrary they worked even harder to get there since they knew that was their only way to achieve professional success.

The three of them had Higher Education. Katherine Johnson started College at the age of 14, she entered West Virginia State College (now West Virginia State University), a historically black college, from where she graduated with degrees in Mathematics and French at the age of 18. Later, she enrolled in a graduate math program and was the first African-American women to attend graduate school at West Virginia University. However, she quit after one year, because she became pregnant and choose to focus on her family. Mary Jackson earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physical science from the Hampton University from Hampton, Virginia, also a historically black University. While working at NASA with the engineer Kazimierz Czarnecki, she enrolled in a night program by the University of Virginia, held at the all-white Hampton High School. After winning her petitioning to the City of Hampton to allow her to attend classes, she took graduate-level courses in math’s and physics in order to qualify to be promoted to and engineer. Once she completed the courses, she was promoted to aerospace engineer, and became NASA’s first African-American female engineer. Finally, Dorothy Vaughan graduated with a B.A. in mathematics at the age of 19 from Wilberforce University, also a historically black college.

Today we have a more even number of women and men in higher education, even in some countries like the U.S. more women than men attend university (60.1% versus 57.6% in 2015), however when talking about STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) we see low female participation. This movie is a huge incentive to get more high school students, especially women and minorities, to pursue STEM careers. Many schools took their students to see Hidden figures in order to try to boost interest in engineering and STEM careers in general, showing them that if those three women were able to do at times of race and gender discrimination, they are more than capable of succeeding at NASA or the STEM world nowadays.

There is still a lot to achieve in terms of gender equality, and the fact that it took us more than 50 years to know this story proves that gender equality is still an underlying issue and there is much room for improvement. I would like to thank Margot Lee Shetterly, the author of the book “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race”, the book in which the movie was based. Thanks to her we were able to know this remarkable and inspiring story that serves as an example and inspiration for every woman and minority around the world, showing them that with higher education and hard work they can achieve their goals and dreams.

Press here if you would like to see the movie trailer

Source: Educational Attainment in the United Sates: 2015. By Camille L. Ryan and Kurt Bauman. March 2016. Retrieved from: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p20-578.pdf

Higher Education, MOOCs, and Illiberal Governance

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In the same way that debates are presently taking place regarding the organization and administration of systems of higher education, discussion as to the organization of states themselves and their relationship with each other is likewise occurring. In those nations where governmental power is derived through the ballot box, much attention has been paid to whether there is a correlation between a person’s education level and their support for policies that promote cultural openness and liberalism. Analysis of voter preferences in several recent polls seem to indicate that individuals who have completed higher education tend to be more positively disposed toward policies which promote openness and inclusion than those who have not. At the same time, recent elections have given rise to leaders that threaten the liberal order, as in the Philippines, and elsewhere, once-democratic leaders have tended towards illiberalism in countries like Hungary, Turkey, and the Ukraine.

Recently, these two debates came to a head in Hungary, where illiberal Prime Minister Viktor Orban used a parliamentary majority to pass a law targeting academic freedoms. One university, in particular, has been the target of Orban’s ire for several years. Central European University in Budapest, was founded in 1991 by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations to reintroduce liberal thought in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Orban, meanwhile, most often makes headlines for his government’s staunch opposition to EU migration policy and for closing Hungary’s borders to refugees. Technically, the university is accredited to award graduate and doctoral degrees in both the U.S. and Hungary, however, the sole physical campus is in Budapest. Orban’s new law forbids this practice: now foreign universities must have a campus in their country of origin to operate a satellite campus in Hungary.

Orban’s persecution of CEU has inspired outrage throughout the academic community. Michael Ignatieff, former professor at Harvard and Oxford, leader of the Canadian Liberal party, and current President of CEU, has been an outspoken critic of Orban at the global level. Outside of CEU staff, Cas Mudde, noted scholar on European populism, used an editorial in The Guardian to call upon the EU to intervene on behalf of liberal freedoms. After 70,000 people protested the move in Budapest last month, the EU presented Orban with an official notice this week, calling on his government to explain the ‘breach of EU law.’ This is considered the first step in bringing a legal penalty against Orban, however, it is largely contingent upon Hungary’s cooperation in the process. As a result, CEU’s fate remains unclear.

Orban’s effort, while posing a threat to democracy and intellectual freedom, could well be undermined by today’s unprecedented individual mobility and global technological integration. Orban can shut down an American university, but he cannot stop the flow of ideas from America and other countries to Hungary. Just take China as an example. While the Chinese government banned Facebook, Twitter and popular Western social media sites, people in China found ways to access these sites and spread their know-hows on the Internet. Meanwhile Turkey, where some 5,000 academics have been fired or arrested in response to the failed July coup, is an ongoing case study in whether the global knowledge sharing economy can actively overcome illiberal domestic policies.

In today’s technological landscape of high-speed internet and free social media sites, ideas can spread cheaply and almost instantaneously. Governments can shut down the physical form of a university, but the function of the university – a democratic hub for idea exchange and intellectual development – has been shared by the Internet, even before the rise of MOOCs. The most effective way to stop the exchange of global ideas, perhaps, is by completely shutting down the Internet, which is not something that China, Turkey, or Hungary would seriously attempt.

The Last News Post

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Hello Everyone! 🙂

For this last post, I wanted to tie in this week’s article with our earlier (way earlier) discussion of where the next leading university in Asia will be. In CJ’s presentation [link: https://prezi.com/ch9l6zynilgb/copy-of-mind-mapping-template/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy], it was concluded that Singapore and the ZhuJiang Delta Area of China (including Hong Kong) would be among the top spots for a leading university.

The World Economic Forum summarized Times Higher Education’s identification of 53 “international powerhouses” – those “institutions that have the best chance of catching up with (and even overtaking) the world’s best universities.” Here is the listing and the article link:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/03/universities-overtake-harvard-cambridge-oxford?utm_content=buffer3ecda&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Of the Asian countries, Singapore is listed first according to current world ranking, followed by China, and then three schools in Hong Kong. This lines up well with CJ’s predictions in her presentation.

Additionally, HSBC does a yearly expat survey. Over 26,000 expats were surveyed on most of the factors CJ identified as important contributions to a leading university in a given country. I think the connection between expats and universities, even if the expats did not attend a university in the country they reside in, is important. If there is a large, healthy, and productive expat community in a country and/or metropolis, it shows promise for the future for the development of the next “international powerhouse.” Singapore, unsurprisingly at this point, is number 1. Hong Kong is number 13. Here is the link their comparison. The second link is to the home survey which is super neat to explore!

https://www.expatexplorer.hsbc.com/survey/country/singapore/hong-kong

https://www.expatexplorer.hsbc.com/survey/

Based off of what I’ve learned in this class including lecture, presentations, readings, and my own research for this blog, I think I can declare with confidence that the next leading university will be in Singapore (pending any significant changes from other countries and their universities of course!)

What do you think of the connection between expat satisfaction and leading university location? Where have you concluded that the next leading university in Asia will be?

 

Foreign Student-Workers in Japan

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Hello!

I follow the Japan Times pretty regularly, and an article came up a couple days ago discussing the number of foreign students who are working in Japan.

The article states that the Ministry of Education’s plan is to reach 300,000 foreign students by 2020, a plan which is well on its way. But it also discusses the policy behind work visas (which do no exist in Japan), and that foreigners with student visas are allowed to work 28 hours a week. Most foreign students are coming from China and Korea, with an increasing number from SE Asia, and they feel compelled to work. This may prevent them from reaching their educational goals. The students in the article are going through language school in preparation for IT or engineering programs. It seems language schools are feeders for unofficial, cheap foreign labor.

What the article doesn’t explain is what proportion of foreign students are genuinely working towards their education goals, and what proportion might be exploiting the system to work in Japan? How many foreign students make it through their language programs and into their higher education program of choice? How many do not make it and have to return home? I imagine, and the article states, that there is incentive to keep these foreign students in Japan to work the low-level jobs, but what are the long term implications if this “under the table” arrangement, especially if these students’ long-term educational goals are never realized?

I’m looking at you Hiro and Sho! And anyone else, of course 🙂

The link to the article is below.

The cost of convenience in Japan: when foreign students work instead of study

 

The Universality of Literature: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

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– Angélica Creixell

Literature has the power to transport readers to different times in the history of a country. Rather than stating facts and chronological events, authors situate and educate readers about a reality through characterization, metaphors, settings and, essentially, the plot. A novel can be a form of expression for authors to subtly, or not so subtly, protest against historic periods or governmental regimes. It can enhance higher education by teaching indirectly through narratives and imagery. Such is the case of Dai Sijie.

Born on March 2, 1954, in Putian, China, he was sent to the Sichuan Providence for his re-education during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Afterward, he sought refuge in France and became a filmmaker. Years later trying to succeed in this form of art, he found the magic and universality of literature. In “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress,” he portrays the re-education reality of two young men, Luo, and the narrator, who are sent to the countryside to learn from illiterate farmers in a semi-autobiographic novel. Together they share the hardships of their new life and then fall in love with the same girl, a seamstress.  They also meet Four Eyes, another young man from the same town who has a secret trunk full of books of Western literature – banned by the Communist regime. It is through literature that they discover the meaning of love, new ideas and the power of imagination. In the novel, literature represents freedom as it gives faith to the characters to overcome any obstacle. It becomes their channel of education in the middle of the mountains.

The novel’s subtle criticism was enough for it to be banned by the Chinese government. When talking about this, Dai Sijie stated, “It wasn’t that I touched the Cultural Revolution … they did not accept that Western literature could change a Chinese girl. I explained that classical literature is a universal heritage, but to no avail.” This novel about literature and love is an ode to the universality of literature and education. After its worldwide success, Dai Sijie directed the movie of the book. For me, it is one of the rare cases where the movie might be better than the book. As a filmmaker, Dai converts the novel’s simple language into beautiful images and palpable nostalgia as the two young men discover themselves in literature, Balzac, and love for the same seamstress. The film ends differently from the novel, as the two young men meet again in Beijing years later, possibly after completing graduate degrees in the United States and Europe, as did Dai Sijie with his former companions after the Cultural Revolution.

Sources and reviews:

Allen, Brooke. “A Suitcase Education.” The New York Times. Sept. 16, 2001. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/16/books/a-suitcase-education.html

Riding, Alan. “Artistic Odyssey: Film to Fiction to Film.” The New York Times. July 25, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/27/movies/MoviesFeatures/artistic-odyssey-film-to-fiction-to-film.html

 

The share of private institution in HE across Asian countries

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Hi class,
As this class comes closer to the end, I feel like delving into another important factor of HE across Asian countries – the role of private institutions.
For comparison, I attached data from Asian Development Bank (https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/29869/private-higher-education-across-asia.pdf) about private enrollment and institutional share.
Moreover, it presents a kind of typology classifying each country in Asia into 3 categories (see below).
To me it seems that each country’s situation reflects not only on their economic situation but also on social and political contexts and government policies related to HE.
Here are questions for discussion;
1. How do you relate each country’s situation to government policies that we covered or not in the class?
2. This data is in late 2000s – do you see drastic changes to this trend nowadays and if so, what’s the driver?
Thanks for reading!
Hiro

Characterizing the Globalized African University

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This week I found an article which analyzes the station of higher education in Africa. We haven’t yet dealt with African cases in class, so I figured that this might be a topic of interest. The article “The African University as ‘Global’ University” was written by Isaac Kamola, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Trinity College.

Kamola argues that, despite a low matriculation rate of 3% in sub-Saharan Africa, it is intellectually valuable to analyze African universities as global universities. The main thrust is that the ‘globe’ has had an indelible effect on the development of the African university- whether by colonization or the international finance regime- and that the objective for policymakers today is to distinguish between what is African about the university system and what is not.

Perhaps the most interesting point Kamola raises, concerns the role of the World Bank in impeding the development of African higher education. In the years following decolonization, many African states faced financial crises, which they sought to solve with loans from the World Bank. As a condition of the loan, the World Bank mandated austerity measures targeting, among other things, higher education spending. The cuts inspired street protests by university students who were met with violent crackdowns by military and police forces. Today however, the World Bank prioritizes higher education as an essential pathway in economic development. All this provides an interesting backdrop for Kamola’s thesis: that despite it’s low domestic enrollment, lack of research, and lack of international students, African universities are wary of anymore globalization.

For me the piece raises interesting questions about the proper course of higher education policy in developing countries. Should states prioritize creating national universities, which may be directed towards addressing domestic policy problems and fostering locally-sourced solutions, or prioritize university globalization? Is it even possible to make that decision as a developing country when the Western model and its emphasis on internationalization is so dominant globally? How else do you foster a culturally-specific intellectual tradition?

With these questions, I’m reminded of the discussions we had early on this semester regarding the significance of a university’s ‘legacy’ when making admissions decisions. At the time, we were concerned with how a recently established, campus-less university would attract students compared to a similarly ranked conventional university. From Kamola’s perspective, similar questions apply to universities with a colonial legacy, and also to more recently established institutions that continue to be patterned on the Western model. While, he is less concerned with admissions decisions than with cultural cohesion, his answer is that establishing an African university is more important to the continent’s long-term development than simply establishing universities in Africa.