Article of The Telegraph, "Good universities are worth paying" for 19 March 2010

Any attempt to link a degree in history, classics or philosophy to the "utility" of our commercial future misses the point of university education.

Something of world historical significance happened this week. Chris Patten ... that the cap must come off university tuition fees if our best establishments are to remain internationally competitive. Universities are having to subsidise their students to the tune of thousands of pounds each per year, and the cash is starting to run out. The alternative to higher fees is many fewer places, and quite possibly fewer universities...

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Article of Ray B. Williams of The National Post (Canada), "Why a Liberal Arts degree can best prepare business leaders", 17 March, 2010.

...The solution to the problem of business school programs in preparing leaders and managers may lie in returning to the concept of a Liberal Education. The term "Liberal Education" was first used in classical Greek and Roman times, chosen to emphasize the fact that it helped people deal with their rulers critically. Through time, a liberal education was thought to help a person become wise.

Does a broad, idealistic, liberating education also prepare a person to be valuable to a company? Many business leaders argue that it does. The workplace has changed. Workers no longer stay in one company doing the same job until retirement and most young Generation Y workers today are not reticent to question authority...

http://boinc.berkeley.edu, Wikipedia entry

Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. It's safe, secure, and easy: Active: 322,893 volunteers, 611,890 computers (including PS3). 24-hour average: 5,153.65 TeraFLOPS.

http://folding.stanford.edu, Wikipedia Entry

Folding@home does not rely on powerful supercomputers for its data processing; instead, the primary contributors to the Folding@home project are many hundreds of thousands of personal computer users who have installed a client program. The client runs in the background, utilizing otherwise unused CPU power.

Competitive Advantage of Corporate Philanthropy, HBR, Michael E. Porter, Mark R. Kramer Dec 2001.

When it comes to philanthropy, executives increasingly see themselves as caught between critics demanding ever higher levels of "corporate social responsibility" and investors applying pressure to maximize short-term profits. Increasingly, philanthropy is used as a form of public relations or advertising, promoting a company's image through high-profile sponsorships. But there is a more truly strategic way to think about philanthropy. Corporations can use their charitable efforts to improve thei...Read More »

"Cisco's Networking Academy exemplifies the powerful links that exist between a company's philantropic strategy, its competitive context and social benefits".

Cisco Networking Academy

www.academynetspace.com (see "Interactive Network Map")

Click here for the article of The Economist "Professionalising the professor", February 25, 2010

THIS subtle and intelligent little book should be read by every student thinking of applying to take a doctorate. They may then decide to go elsewhere. For something curious has been happening in American universities, and Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard University, captures it deftly.

His concern is mainly with the humanities: literature, languages, philosophy and so on. These are disciplines that are going out of style: 22% of American college graduates now major in business compared with only 2% in history and 4% in English. However, many leading American universities want their undergraduates to have a grounding in the basic canon of ideas that every educated person should possess. But most find it difficult to agree on what a ?general education? should look like. At Harvard, Mr Menand notes, ?The great books are read because they have been read??they form a sort of social glue.

One reason why it is hard to design and teach such courses is that they cut across the insistence by top American universities that liberal-arts education and professional education should be kept separate, taught in different schools...

Related article of Slate, "The Opening of the Academic Mind", January 17, 20010

The state of higher education in America is one of those things, like the airline industry or publishing, that's always in crisis. The academy is too distant from the concerns of everyday life, or else it's too politically engaged. The academy has become completely irrelevant, except for the fact that it's too relevant. We ought to be grateful to our universities for this. Academic wrongheadedness is one of the few things people across the political and cultural spectrum can agree upon...

www.broadband.gov

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A broadband catapult for America, Monday, March 15, 2010, Eric Schmidt, CEO.

...But we also need even more ambitious objectives -- or ?stretch goals? -- that test the limits of our ingenuity.

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http://reboot.fcc.gov/

Article of New York Times, March 12, 2009

Like most other academic researchers, Dr. Pasche knows little about starting a business or courting investors...

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The turnaround started at a trade show of BIO, the world?s largest biotechnology organization...

Among the accomplishments after the trade show was a statewide program called Propel, modeled after an effort that helped turn San Diego into a biotechnology powerhouse.

?Propel is to train and educate entrepreneurs, to take innovation out of academic centers and place it into tech parks and allow it to flourish,?...

Article of New York Times, The Choice, March 11, 2010.

Brown University is known for many things: its core-less curriculum, its freewheeling ethos of diversity and inclusion, and its popularity as a destination for fictional characters on teenage soaps.

But it is not known for the study of business. In fact, it has never offered a master?s degree in business administration. Last week, however, the university announced that it will join with the European IE business school to offer the university?s first executive M.B.A. for mid-career managers in the spring of 2011...

Cisco has announced a new routing system that it says is going to speed up the Internet in a big way. According to the company, Cisco CRS-3 ? currently being tested by AT&T ? is three times faster than its predecessor, which was introduced in 2004.

The company offers a few intriguing sound bites about the CRS-3 and what it enables:

- the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second

- every man, woman and child in China to make a video call, simultaneously

- every motion picture ever created to be streamed in less than four minutes.

http://mashable.com/2010/03/09/cisco-crs-3, 9 March, 2010

Download "Focus on Higher Education in Europe 2010" (165 pages)

Focus on Higher Education in Europe 2010: The impact of the Bologna Process, 8 March 2010

About Eurydice

The Eurydice Network provides information on and analyses of European education systems and policies.
It consists of 35 national units based in all 31 countries participating in the EU's Lifelong Learning programme (EU Member States, EEA countries and Turkey) and is coordinated and managed by the EU Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency in Brussels, which drafts its publications and databases.