Biography of Dr. Sam Rany, Cambodia

Dr. Sam Rany was born on March 11, 1982, in Kampot province, Cambodia. He is currently the Vice-Rector of the National University of Battambang (NUBB), which is a public university in the northwestern part of Cambodia. Dr. Rany is the former Director of the Institute of Foreign Languages at UBB, from September 2008 to May 2017. He has also been a co-director of the Confucius Institute of the National University of Battambang (CINUBB) since 2019. 

He earned his Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration from the School of Educational Studies, University of Science Malaysia (USM) in 2016. His doctoral thesis is entitled "The Influence of Institutional Integration Factors on Students’ Intellectual Development: A Case Study of Three Cambodian Public Universities". He obtained a Certificate of General Administration from the Royal School of Administration, Cambodia in May 2017, and he received a Certificate of E-Teacher Certificate of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) from Oregon University and a Certificate of Using Educational Technology in the English Language Classroom from Iowa State University, sponsored by the U.S. Embassy to Cambodia in 2010 and 2021 prospectively. He graduated with Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Law (LL.B & LL.M) from the Royal University of Law and Economics (RULE), Cambodia in 2004 and 2007 respectively. His bachelor's thesis is entitled" State Responsibility in the International Law", and his master's thesis is entitled" The Notions of Goodfaith in the International Sale of Goods."

 

He has also been a lecturer at NUBB since 2008; he has worked closely with the US Embassy in terms of educational cooperation since 2009. He had hosted three US English Fellows, Mrs. Connie Leonard, Dr. Virginia Simmons, and Mr. Adam Aultowski, who had been sent by the US Embassy to work at the University of Battambang. He has successfully completed a two-year project with 25 disadvantaged students funded by the US Embassy, namely, the English Access Micro-scholarship Program from 2015 to 2017 at NUBB. He is also actively involved in some project coordinators' work, including Erasmus+, KOICA, JICA, USAID, and World Bank (HEIP). His areas of interest included English for Specific Purposes (ESP), Legal Studies, Public Policy and Public Administration, Cambodian Educational History, Higher Education Leadership and Administration, Educational Assessment, and other Social Science Research.

JENESYS 2016 Home-Stay Program for Young Cambodia Government Officials in OSAKI City

Japan (5-6 November 2016): It was my great pleasure and privilege to attend the homestay program organized by the JICE in Osaki City and Miyagi Prefecture. I and two other colleagues, Mr. Sun Sokhet and Va Vannak, from the Royal School of Administration had stayed with a Japanese family, Mr. Aoki Akira and Mrs. Aoki. Mr. Akira is retired high school teacher and a member of the BoD of the Non Profit Organization (NPO) in Osaki. 

During our stay with their family, we have learned a lot about Japanese cultures, living styles, and other routine activities. The most remembered activities are playing with autism children, walking around the village, farming some vegetables, and practicing mediation (concentration). Our sincere thanks go to their family who accepted us to stay in their house and treated us very well.

#JENESYS 2016
#JICE
#CAMBODIA

Young Cambodian Government Officials attended JENSYS 2016 (2nd Batch, Politics)

Japan (November 17, 2016): Twenty-five participants from the Royal School of Administration attended the Japan-East Asia Network of Exchange for Students and Youths (JENESYS 2016) that had been organized by the Japan International Cooperation Center (JICE) on the Theme of Politics from November 1, 2016, to November 2016. This program aims to provide good cooperation and understanding of Japanese culture and society to strengthen the spirit of solidarity with Asia through youth exchange activities.

Out of 550 students in the Royal School of Administration, I was selected to attend this crucial program among other 24 participants in Japan. I have obtained new knowledge and experiences of Japanese culture, public administration, national infrastructure, modernization, and people. I have attended one lecture on "National Public Employees in Japan" offered by Associate Professor Watanabe Yasuyuki, from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), Japan. I have learned a lot from his perspectives and experiences on how to reform the civil services in the country. Also, he mainly focused on the professional code ethics of the civil servants or national public employees and other regulations. Japan is a good model country in terms of transparency and accountability. I also visited the National Diet of Japan (the House of Councillors), and the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

Most interestingly, I visited the region of MINAMI SANRIKU which was destroyed by Sunami on March 11, 2011. The counselor has shared experiences on how to manage the national disasters and restore this region.

Moreover, I experienced two days of a homestay program with a Japanese family in Osaki City. I have learned Onseb Somuries at the Sebsyokan Hotel.

Taking in this blogger, I would like to express my profound thanks to the JICE and the Japanese government that provided me golden opportunities to explore Japanese culture, politics, and people. 

China’s Back Yard Cambodia

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2015/09/05/the-push-and-pull-of-chinas-orbit/

CHINA: Foreign student scholarships spark anger as fees rise

Yojana Sharma24 October 2014 Issue No:340

 

 A new plan to lure foreign students with generous scholarships by China’s eastern Jiangsu province, host to a number of foreign branch campuses, has sparked anger in the province over resources being directed towards “wealthy foreigners” while Chinese students struggle with a rising fee burden.

Resentment has also grown as foreign students are provided with what is seen as far superior accommodation to that available for local students.

In mid-August, the province’s education bureau launched a ‘Study in Jiangsu’ programme to develop the province into a major destination for foreign students. Under the programme, annual scholarships of 50,000 to 90,000 yuan (US$8,200 to US$14,700) will be made available to applicants from overseas wanting to study at universities, including joint overseas ventures such as Duke Kunshan University and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University.

Another 50 publicly funded universities in Jiangsu, many in the popular student cities of Nanjing and Suzhou are permitted to take foreign students.

Yang Shubing, director of publicity at the Jiangsu education bureau said the province had some 18,700 foreign students by the end of last year. “To encourage more such students, the provincial scholarship total has reached 15 million yuan each year,” he was quoted in official media as saying.

But the plan has sparked outrage, with local residents criticising the scheme on China’s microblog site Weibo, in particular because it was announced at a time when universities in at least nine Chinese provinces were introducing steep tuition fees rises for local students this year.

In some cases fee rises for locals will be as much as 50% compared to last year or even 75%, as was reported for Ningxia Autonomous Region – a poorer region in western China.

Scholarships and grants for local students have not risen in line with these sharp increases, angering students and families, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported in August.

Fees burden

University tuition fees for local students remained at around 5,000 yuan (US$817) a year since 2006, when the government imposed a five-year moratorium on raising university fees.

Education commentator Bing Qi said 5,000 yuan today was around 18% of urban residents' per capita disposable income and 56% of rural residents’.

“Therefore, tuition fees should be reduced, not increased,” Bing said, adding in a commentary in Beijing Youth Daily that “the burden on households remains high despite rising incomes in recent years”.

Official figures show that in 2013, the overall value of scholarships totalled 57.41 billion yuan (US$9.38 billion) for 2.65 million Chinese students – or around 1500 yuan (US$245) per student.

“Contrast this figure with the sum Jiangsu is prepared to grant foreign students and it does appear that the concern about ‘discrimination’ or ‘double standards’ is not entirely misplaced,” Shanghai Daily commented.

Jiangsu’s “quest for a leading position in the global education landscape was justified only if it did not come at a cost to locals”, the paper added.

Citizens vented their anger online saying if the government had money for education scholarships it should not be spent on ‘foreign elites’ when many students in poor rural areas were unable to afford fees.

Boosting foreign student numbers

Jiangsu is not alone, however: Shanghai is aiming to attract 70,000 foreign students by 2015, up from 40,000 this year and will increase the number of scholarships for those on longer degree programmes.

Some will be worth 200,000 yuan or US$32,700 over four years of study, including accommodation costs – a huge sum compared to loans and grants for local students, even when taking account of the higher accommodation costs for foreigners.

The Beijing government is actively trying to attract more foreign students and has said it will provide scholarships for as many as 50,000 international students by 2015. Some 18,000 scholarships have been made available for students from Africa since 2013.

Although the majority of foreign students in China are currently from the US and South Korea, Liu Jinghui, secretary-general of the China Scholarship Council, has said Chinese higher education would be promoted more strongly in Europe. Liu said he hoped to increase the 1,087 scholarships provided to European students last year.

As the barrage of online criticism against funds being “diverted” to foreign students rose, the China Development Bank last month announced 14 billion yuan of “new loans” for local students this year through the state loan scheme that benefits some 2.5 million students.

The bank said the cap on the loan amount would be increased by 33% to 8,000 yuan (US$1,300), up from 6,000 yuan previously for each undergraduate applicant. Graduate students will receive up to 12,000 yuan.

The increase of 2,000 yuan per undergraduate student is the first such increase since 2002, with official inflation running at an annual rate of 5 to 6% in recent years. Students in some provinces, including Hainan, held protests last year about the rise in fees and other costs, including canteen food.

"The previous [loan] standard was implemented for more than a dozen years, and many students with financial difficulties said it was far from enough," said Zhang Guangming, director of the China National Centre for Student Financial Aid under the Education Ministry.

FRANCE: Low fees but jobs needed to meet costs

Jane Marshall24 October 2014 Issue No:340

 

Students in French universities pay among the lowest fees in Europe. But although education ministers claim that, despite austerity, funding for student benefits has kept up with purchasing power, student organisations say the cost of starting the new academic year for students is up to 2% higher than last year.

The government has not gone down the route of charging students high sums for university studies, and fixes the modest rates by decree. For the 2014-15 academic year, enrolment fees have increased by 0.7%, to €184 (US$236) annually for a three-year licence (bachelor equivalent) course, €256 for a masters, €391 for a doctorate and €610 for an engineering diploma.

But while students do not have to worry about high fees, they need money to live on during the university year. In its inquiry La Vie Étudiante: Repères, the Observatoire de la Vie Étudiante, or OVE, identified the main sources of student income.

The most common was family support, accounting for 30% of student resources and paying an average of €308 a month. This was followed closely by wages from paid work, at 29%, providing €618 on average; then public benefits such as those from the government and from local and regional authorities, representing 25%, and an average of €307 monthly.

Other sources, each representing 6% or less of student income, included contributions from a spouse or partner, savings, and, at a bare 1%, student loans, which are available from some banks under government guarantee.

Nearly one in two students did paid work during the university year, according to OVE, which found that 20% who had a job considered it had a ‘negative impact’ on their studies. More than half considered their employment essential for survival.

OVE reported that a third of the students lived with one or both parents, a third in rented accommodation either alone or in a couple with or without children, and 12% were in private rentals shared with others. Only 11% lived in subsidised university housing. Rents averaged €426 across the country, and were highest in Paris at €597.

The 2015 budget allocated €2.5 billion (US$3.2 billion) for ‘student life’, an increase of €42 million, or 1.7%, over last year.

In September, marking the start of the university year, the Minister for Education, Higher Education and Research, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, and State Secretary for Higher Education and Research, Geneviève Fioraso, stressed their first priority was to ensure academic success for the greatest number of students, with more help for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Among measures they announced were increased grants for more students, continuation of an intensive student housing construction plan and government rental guarantees for those looking for accommodation in the private sector.

However, the government has this year discontinued merit grants, previously awarded to about 7,000 new students each year for three years, in favour of increasing grants paid according to social criteria.

In spite of more generous benefits, students and their families face stiff cost-of-living increases at the start of this academic year, according to the Fédération des Associations Générales Étudiantes, or FAGE, and the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France, or UNEF.

FAGE calculated a student had to spend an average of €2,525 to start the university year, 1.5% more than last year while UNEF reckoned the increase was 2%, “four times the rate of inflation for the past year”. The main causes were higher rents, and increases in unavoidable expenses such as enrolment fees, university meals and social security payments.

While previous reforms had improved the purchasing power of 160,000 students by cutting their study costs by 7.4%, the remainder faced substantial increases of 5.5% for those on grants, and 3.6% for the others, claimed UNEF.

The union said grants reform was “still far from the promise of a student autonomy allowance” made by François Hollande during his presidential campaign, and it urged further benefit increases and widened access for more students.

FAGE asserted that 28% of students had to take paid work to get by, and that there was a 50% risk of academic failure for those who worked more than 12 hours a week. It called for the government to open urgently a “comprehensive and ambitious plan for students’ living conditions”. 

SINGAPORE: Rising fees cloud international hub status

Emilia Tan24 October 2014 Issue No:340

 

Rising university fees for international students are casting a cloud over Singapore’s future as an Asian regional hub for international students – particularly from the rest of Asia. This is despite many parents in the region believing that paying for education is a good investment.

A report by the HSBC Bank The Value of Education found that families in Asia were willing to pay high fees, but recent developments in the city state have shown that tolerance levels for high fees are being reached.

Singapore is now one of the most expensive countries globally to obtain an undergraduate degree once the high cost of living in the city state is taken into account. Foreign student numbers have fallen as fees have been rising – and at a much faster rate than those for locals.

At Singapore’s top-ranked public universities, undergraduate fees for foreign students are around S$15,300 (US$12,000) for humanities and social science degrees, an increase over last year of more than 11%, compared with an 8.6% increase for Singaporeans.

The cost of a business degree or management degree has risen in the past year by as much as 15% for foreign students – to S$31,200 (US$24,500), compared with a 6% increase for Singaporeans that allows them to obtain the same degree for S$9,250 (US$7,200).

Fees for undergraduate law degrees have risen by an eye-watering 17% in the past year compared with 8% for Singaporeans, according to official figures. The fees rise coupled with high living costs has been exacerbated by a strengthening of the Singaporean currency, HSBC notes.

With undergraduate tuition fees and living costs per year combined, Singapore is second only to Australia in terms of cost among 15 major higher education destinations for foreign students.

HSBC puts Singapore at US$39,229 a year compared with US$42,000 in Australia. Comparable amounts for the US and UK are US$36,500 and US$35,000 respectively.

Drop in numbers

Despite higher fee rises for foreign students and the indication that their enrolments had dropped, Singapore’s Education Minister Heng Swee Keat noted that the amount collected in tuition fees from international students had barely increased between 2012 and 2013.

In 2013, the amount was S$176 million (US$138 million) compared with S$172 million (US$135 million) in 2012 – after jumping significantly from S$158 million (US$124 million) in 2011.

Immigration authority figures show that some 75,000 foreign student pass holders were issued in July, compared with 84,000 two years ago. The number will be even lower for university students as these figures include those attending secondary schools in Singapore.

Singapore had set itself the headline target of attracting 150,000 foreign university students by 2015 compared with about 30,000 a decade ago. But it is now clear it will fall well short of its ambitions.

The education ministry announced a drop from 18% to 15% in the proportion of places for foreign students overall in Singapore. Nonetheless, in some institutions such as the National University of Singapore, the proportion of foreign students at around 35% of the intake, has not changed since 2011.

The Economic Development Board, which has been promoting Singapore as a hub, declined to comment on whether the 2015 target of attracting 150,000 foreign students had been abandoned.

Jobs situation

Foreign students hoping to stay on after graduation also say that finding a job in Singapore has become more difficult, making it harder to justify the increased costs. Singapore has offered generous scholarships to foreign students but public funding of such scholarships has recently been questioned.

The government revealed earlier this year that foreign graduates who receive Singapore government scholarships and are bound to work in the city on graduation, were taking longer to find jobs. This had led to ‘repayment holidays’ that weigh on the public purse.

The climate has changed in the past two years and now there is rising local hostility towards immigration as jobs have become harder to find, in part due to slowing economic growth. According to official figures, overall graduate unemployment rose from 3.3% to 3.6% in the first half of 2013, higher than the average unemployment rate in Singapore of around 2%.

While no longer speaking of targets, Heng told Parliament in March only that Singapore welcomed foreign students and that it was good for local students to mix with foreign peers.

Fewer places

As part of Singapore’s desire to promote itself as an international hub for education, a number of top overseas universities have been drawn to its shores in the past decade. Almost a dozen foreign branch campuses have been established along with a large number of joint degree partnerships with international institutions.

For example, some 23 Australian institutions are offering courses in Singapore – the largest number offered by foreign universities. Around a third of the intake is comprised of foreign students.

Bringing in foreign students was one of the stated aims of Singapore’s Global Schoolhouse initiative that started in 2002 and included start-up loans and subsidies to foreign institutions to set up branch campuses.

But a tightening of regulations on foreign institutions has led to a number of international institutions shutting down, while others have abandoned Singapore, finding their operations unviable once Singaporean subsidies ended. Local Singaporean students also found the fees too high compared with local universities and overseas students failed to arrive in the numbers hoped for.

The University of New South Wales closed its Singapore branch in 2007 after just one semester after it attracted far fewer students than predicted. In July this year, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business announced it was pulling out of Singapore in favour of Hong Kong.

In November last year, Tisch Asia, New York University’s arts school, shut its Singapore branch, reportedly because of huge deficits due to high running costs, while a joint law course with NYU failed to attract enough students, even after offering scholarships.

Against these mini-disasters, the long-planned Yale-NUS, a liberal arts college, opened its doors last year and a new joint medical school with Imperial College London has come on stream, both charging high fees to international students. 

MALAYSIA: Loan defaulters barred from leaving

Emilia Tan24 October 2014 Issue No:340

 

With the cost of university education rising faster than inflation and increasing sums taken out in loans, more and more students are defaulting on their loan repayments. For some, this means being barred from leaving the country.

In fact, almost 85,000 recipients of student loans from the government’s low-interest National Higher Education Fund Corporation have to date been stopped because of loan arrears. They join criminals, tax dodgers and pension fund defaulters in facing departure bans.

Rising costs affect even students from middle-income families who are now graduating with a large debt after a three-year undergraduate degree that costs more than RM60,000 (US$18,000).

The outlay is much higher at a private university or a foreign branch campus. In a public university, a medical degree can cost as much as RM300,000 (US$92,000) whereas private colleges charge three times that much.

Generally, private sector costs have increased by 20% to 25% in the past five years where there are now more than 100 colleges and foreign branch campuses. HSBC Bank estimates the total annual cost of an undergraduate degree, including living expenses, at around US$13,000.

Earlier this year, Yemen’s higher education and scientific research ministry said it would end new government scholarships for its students to enrol in private Malaysian universities because of “poor educational quality and high costs”. Some 9,000 Yemeni students are enrolled in Malaysia, 4,000 of them in private universities.

Although the Yemeni case is unusual, the decision attracted wide publicity and dented the government’s attempts to portray Malaysia as a low-cost alternative to universities in the West and in Singapore.

Loans

While students are able to get low-interest government loans – loans for private university courses are about a third of all government-backed loans – these do not cover the whole cost at private institutions. Yet more and more students are enrolling in the private sector because of a lack of places in the top public universities.

Overall cost of living rises are also putting financial pressure on families. The Keadilan Youth or KeADILan, the youth wing of the National Justice Party of Malaysia or PKR, said that with low starting salaries, Malaysian graduates “cannot make ends meet”.

“Many local graduates have the added burden of repaying their PTPTN [National Higher Education Fund Corporation] education loans and this can cost up to RM300 a month," the group said in a statement.

PTPTN chief executive officer Agos Cholan said the corporation had to resort to barring the defaulters from leaving Malaysia because they had ignored repeated reminders to repay their loans. To have the ban lifted, Agos said defaulters would need to make some payments immediately, depending on their income, and would need to sign papers committing them to pay monthly sums.

Rapidly shrinking fund

Although the number facing bans is unacceptably high, it is down from some 130,000 in 2007 after the government converted some loans to grants for top performing students. More than 14,000 blacklisted PTPTN borrowers paid back their loans in 2013 compared with some 10,000 the year before.

In a statement, PTPTN said as many as 500,000 borrowers had defaulted on their loans since the fund was established in 1997. While not all have been barred, it means the amount of money in the fund is rapidly shrinking and affecting the PTPTN’s ability to lend to new students.

Fund chairman Shamsul Anuar Nasarah said the corporation was finding it too difficult to finance new students because of the high number of defaulters and with RM1.2 billion (US$367 million) in unpaid loans outstanding.

The 2015 budget announced this month gives PTPTN borrowers an incentive to make lump sum payments by March next year when they will receive a 20% discount on their loans. Those who pay consis¬tently for 12 months until the end of 2015 will be offered a 10% discount.

But student groups criticised the government for being more concerned about propping up the loan corporation than easing the fees burden on students with more scholarships.

Their criticisms of the government came after Malaysia’s second Education Minister Idris Jusoh said PTPTN loan defaulters stretching back to 1998 could be blacklisted on a bank database used to sanction new loan applications. This would have an effect similar to being declared bankrupt and could affect graduates’ ability to buy a house, for example.

PTPTN has disbursed RM5.3 billion (US$1.62 billion) to more than 990,000 students since 1998.

GLOBAL: Public higher education versus private

24 October 2014 Issue No:340

At the tertiary level, public expenditure per student in both public and private institutions averaged US$9,221 in OECD countries in 2012, the Education at a Glance report says. But the amount varied from about US$2,000 in Chile to more than US$17,000 in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden – the four countries where the share of private spending is small or negligible.

In all countries with available data, except Hungary and Latvia, public expenditure per student is greater for public than private institutions. But patterns in the allocation of public funds to public and private institutions differ, the OECD analysts say.

In Denmark and the Netherlands, at least 90% of students are enrolled in public universities and most public money goes to these institutions. In the two countries, private funds complement public spending to varying degrees although private expenditure is less than 6% of total spending on public and private institutions in Denmark but above 28% in the Netherlands.

In Belgium, Estonia, Hungary, Iceland and Sweden, public expenditure goes to both public and private institutions. Government allocations per student in some private institutions is at least 58% and more than 100% of the level of public spending per student in public universities.

However, these countries also have different participation patterns. In Hungary, Iceland and Sweden, at least 80% of students are enrolled in public universities, whereas in Belgium and Estonia, they are mainly in government-dependent private institutions. In all three first-mentioned nations, the share of expenditure on private tertiary institutions is below the OECD average, while in the remaining two countries, taxpayers’ money goes mainly to private universities.

Public expenditure on tertiary education amounts to nearly one-quarter of total public education spending on average across OECD countries. But in the OECD and partner countries, the percentages range from less than 16% in Korea, to 32% in Finland, 36% in Canada and 38% in Turkey.

Grants and loans to students

OECD research indicates that a robust financial support system is important for ensuring good outcomes for higher education students, and that the type of aid is also critical, the report says. A key question in many OECD countries is whether financial support for students should be provided primarily in the form of grants or loans. Advocates of student loans argue that these allow available resources to be spread further.

If the amount spent on grants were used to guarantee or subsidise loans instead, aid would be available to more students, and overall access to higher education would increase. Loans also shift some of the cost of education on to those who benefit most from higher education, namely the individual student, and reflect the high private returns of completing tertiary education.

Opponents argue that student loans are less effective than grants in encouraging low-income students to pursue further education. They also argue that loans may be less efficient than anticipated because of the various types of support provided to borrowers or lenders and the costs of administration and servicing.

Finally, the report notes that a high level of student debt may have adverse effects both for students and for governments if large numbers of students are unable to repay their loans.

Allocations to higher education

OECD countries spend an average of about 22% of their public budgets for tertiary education on support for students “and private entities”. In Australia, Chile, Denmark, Iceland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the UK and the US, government support for students accounts for more than 25% of public spending on tertiary education.

Only Argentina, the Czech Republic and Indonesia spend less than 7% of total public spending on the tertiary sector in supporting their students. In the Czech Republic, subsidies for students’ grants are sent directly to institutions which are responsible for distributing them among students.

A dozen of the 36 countries for which data are available rely exclusively on scholarships, grants and transfer payments to private institutions. Iceland provides only student loans while other countries make a combination of grants and loans available. Both types of support are used extensively in Australia, Chile, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US.

In general, the countries that offer student loans are also those in which public support for students comprises the largest proportion of all public spending on tertiary education. In most cases, these countries also spend an above-average proportion of their tertiary education budgets on grants and scholarships, the report says.

MYANMAR: Students to hold emergency meeting over education law

Mizzima17 October 2014 Issue No:339

 

 

Myanmar students are planning an emergency meeting to deal with concerns over the draft higher education law. Here students protest at Dagon University on September 2 against the proposed law. Photo: Nyain Thit Nyi/Mizzima

 

 

(MANDALAY) – The All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU) is planning to hold an all-Myanmar students’ emergency meeting in November, said ABFSU central working committee and research committee official Aung Hmine San.

“The ABFSU, in cooperation with other organizations, needs to oppose the national education law,” Aung Hmine San said. “We think other students organizations also need to collectively oppose it. That’s why we plan to organize the students emergency meeting so that ABFSU, the University Students Union and other students organizations will be able to work together to make plans.”

Students and civic groups say the proposed law allows centralized control of universities and curtails efforts to bring about autonomy of the country’s institutions of higher learning.

An organizing committee was set up on October 4 to arrange the students’ emergency meeting. The committee comprises of 10 members of the ABFSU and 10 members of the University Students Union.

Students and education experts will discuss the national education law on the first day of the two-day meeting.  On the second day, the students propose making plans as to how to proceed.

The time, date and venue for the students’ emergency meeting have not yet been announced.

CHINA: Universities to get more autonomy

Global Times17 October 2014 Issue No:339

 

Pessimism lingers regarding effectiveness

China's top education authorities have approved new regulations for nine top universities, which seek to increase the schools' autonomy, while observers have expressed concern about their effectiveness.
The nine universities include the country's top two universities, Peking University and Tsinghua University, the Ministry of Education announced on its website on Wednesday, adding that the newly established regulations will help the systematic reform of higher education and aid academic development.

Since 2013, a total of 32 universities have already seen their new regulations, which were drafted by the universities themselves, approved by the authorities.

All other Chinese universities are scheduled to establish their own regulations by the end of next year, according to the ministry.

To run a university according to its own regulations is the foundation of academic independence, Professor Xiong Bingqi, an expert in higher education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, told the Global Times.

With these new regulations, the universities' management is supposed to operate with a higher-level of academic autonomy than previously, he added.
Peking University's new regulations indicate that more power over school management should be delegated to students.

The university set up a supervision committee for the first time to deal with disciplinary violations by students and school staff. The committee consists of students, teaching staff, members of non-Communist parties and the university's disciplinary watchdog.

Under its new rules, Peking University students also have the chance to become members of the school's academic board, allowing them to supervise the election of academic staff and investigate academic corruption, along with professors and delegates appointed by the university president. The number of delegates appointed by the president cannot surpass 15 percent of the board members.

No details have yet been revealed regarding any selection standards or what proportion of the board will be made up of student delegates.

Although the university is encouraging students to join these new bodies, students seem to be less enthusiastic, judging by the responses of students reached by the Global Times.

"We know very little about how those student delegates will be selected and who will select them. Even if we can participate in discussions about university affairs, the administrative staff will still be in charge of making any decisions," a history postgraduate student studying at Peking University, surnamed Huang, told the Global Times.

Tsinghua University has also emphasized its autonomy as it highlights the importance of budget independence.

Xiong expressed pessimism about the enforcement of these regulations as these universities' officials are still appointed by the government and universities are still entirely government-funded.
 

GLOBAL: How Germany managed to abolish university tuition fees

The Conversation17 October 2014 Issue No:339

 

If Germany has done it, why can’t we? That’s the question being asked by many students around the world in countries that charge tuition fees to university. From this semester, all higher education will be free for both Germans and international students at universities across the country, after Lower Saxony became the final state to abolish tuition fees.

It’s important to be aware of two things when it comes to understanding how German higher education is funded and how the country got to this point. First, Germany is a federal country with 16 autonomous states responsible for education, higher education and cultural affairs. Second, the German higher education system – consisting of 379 higher education institutions with about 2.4m students – is a public system which is publicly funded. There are a number of small private institutions but they enrol less than 5% of the total student body.

Back and forth with fees

Until 1970-71, West-German higher education students had to pay tuition fees at the level of about 120 to 150 German Marks per semester. There were needs-based exceptions but basically these fees had to be paid by every student.

When they came to power in the late 1960s, Germany’s Social Democrats supported higher education expansion by promoting widening participation and equal opportunities and by increasing the number of higher education institutions. From 1971 onwards, a system of state financial assistance for students was established and tuition fees were abolished. The assistance came first as a grant, later as a mix of half repayable-loan and half grant.

During the peak period of higher education expansion in the late 1960s, exclusive funding of higher education by the states became too much of a burden. New provisions were introduced for a framework law laying down the general principles governing higher education across West Germany. The first law, introduced in 1976, included a prohibition of tuition fees.

Despite a flirtation with the idea of re-introducing tuition fees under the conservative-liberal coalition government in the 1980s, a stalemate ensued over whether tuition fees would lead state governments to reduce their regular funding to universities.

Fees win out in late 1990s

The fall of the Berlin Wall and German Unification put all reform plans on hold for several years until the whole East German system of higher education institutions and academies had been evaluated and reformed. A new discussion about tuition fees then started around the mid-1990s, with their re-introduction seen as a solution to a number of existing problems in the higher education system.

Around the end of the 1990s, the dam of resistance broke by allowing the introduction of fees for so-called long-term students: students who had been enrolled several semesters past the regular duration of their study programme and had not finished.

Those states with a conservative government filed a law suit in 2002 against the framework law of higher education, arguing that its prohibition of tuition fees was an illegitimate intervention into the legal authority for educational matters of the states. The Federal Constitutional Court upheld the complaint in 2005; immediately, seven states introduced tuition fees.

In 2006, the framework law was abolished under wider reforms of German federalism. Tuition fees were capped at 500 Euros per semester, but Berlin and all East-German states refused to introduce them.

Excellence and crisis

Yet the same reform of federalism led the states to reclaim complete authority and responsibility for their higher education. This led the Federal Ministry for Education and Research to refuse any further co-funding with states on higher education. And it left the federal ministry with a lot of spare money. A large part of this was eventually invested into the German Excellence Initiative, a competitive funding programme launched in 2005 to support a group of universities to become global players.

But this also meant that the poorer states faced a funding crisis for their higher education institutions. The problem was aggravated by the fact the a number of the poorer states were located in East Germany, where all states had decided not to introduce tuition fees in the hopes to attract more students.

Gradual abolition

In successive years, as soon as state government elections have elected social democratic or green party governments, tuition fees have been abolished. The state of Hesse, for example, had tuition fees for only a single year. In the end only two states were left with tuition fees: Bavaria and Lower Saxony. The conservative government of Bavaria gave into the mainstream and abolished tuition fees in the winter semester 2013-14, with Lower Saxony abolishing fees in the winter semester 2014-15.

But the heads of higher education institutions negotiated with their ministries, arguing that they could not properly do their job of offering high-quality student experience if the loss of income from tuition fees was not compensated one way or another.

So most states have agreed to compensate their higher education institutions with extra money – not quite covering the loss in fees though – which was to be invested exclusively into the improvement of the quality of studies and teaching. Most ministries decreed that students had to be involved in decisions about how and for what purposes the money was going to be spent.

How funding works now

The present situation is that all higher education institutions receive a budget from the responsible ministry of the state in which they are located, based on annual or biennial negotiations. This basic budget is complemented by additional agreements between higher education institutions and the state concerning the intake of additional numbers of students and the money to compensate the loss of income from tuition fees.

There are additional funding programmes – some funded jointly by the states and the federal ministry – for supporting and promoting research, in the competition for excellence.

Of course, most higher education institutions continue to feel underfunded. The pressure on academic staff to attract external research funding has increased, as has competition for such grants. Still, compared to other countries in Europe, German higher education institutions continue to be rather generously funded by their states – an estimated 80% of their overall budgetary needs. There are also ample opportunities and considerable amounts of external research funding available.

Publicly funded, but for how long?

Despite the fact that competition for funding and accountability has increased in German higher education, there is still a general consensus that it is a public system and should be state-funded. The abolition of tuition fees, even by conservative state governments, reflects this consensus too. In fact, the new Federal Minister for Education and Research, a member of the Conservative Party, recently announced a major increase in the levels of needs-based state financial assistance to students that will start in the 2016-17 academic year.

But funding varies considerably depending on different institutional and regional factors. The winners of the German Excellence Initiative have received and are receiving considerable amounts of additional funding in the hope that more German universities will be able to achieve better positions on world university rankings. There were 12 German universities in the 2014-15 Times Higher Education World University Rankings, up from 10 the year before.

Higher education institutions in the poorer states (most of them in the east of Germany) receive less money and academic staff are being paid lower salaries while higher education institutions in the richer states (typically in the south) are better funded.

The debate about tuition fees – though dead for the moment – can easily be revived in the future. It has not been dropped from the agenda once and for all. Government policies continue to be in favour of tuition fees, most representatives of institutional leadership are as well, though for different reasons. But there is currently a lack of general public support. Once this has changed – and influential advisory bodies and think tanks are working towards such a change – the idea of tuition fees will be introduced again.
 

GLOBAL: Academic reputation affects citation count

Geoff Maslen15 October 2014 Issue No:339

 

An academic’s reputation plays a key role in generating increases in a scientific paper’s citation count early in its citation life cycle, before a tipping point, after which his or her reputation has much less influence relative to the paper’s citation count. This is the intriguing finding from a study by a team of collaborating social science analysts in Belgium, Finland, Italy and the US.

Using data compiled by Thomson Reuters Web of Science, the team studied 450 highly cited scientists, nearly 84,000 articles in scientific publication, and 7.6 million citations tracked over the equivalent of 387,000 publication years!

The scientists studied included 100 top-cited physicists, 100 highly prolific physicists, 100 assistant professors in physics, 100 top-cited cell biologists, and 50 top-cited pure mathematicians.

In a paper published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describe how they analysed, for each central scientist, his or her production as measured by the number of publications in a year, the cumulative number of citations received by publications, and a quantitative reputation measure defined as the net citations aggregated across all publications.

Combining several empirical features of the analysis, the researchers then investigated the role of the reputation effect, showing that author reputation accounted for a significant increase in the number of citations an academic could attract.

“Over a scientist’s career, a reputation is developed, a standing within a research community, based largely on the quantity and quality of his or her publications. Here, we develop a framework for quantifying the influence author reputation has on a publication’s future impact,” they write.

“We find author reputation plays a key role in driving a paper’s citation count early in its citation life cycle, before a tipping point, after which reputation has much less influence relative to the paper’s citation count. In science, perceived quality, and decisions made based on those perceptions, is increasingly linked to citation counts. Shedding light on the complex mechanisms driving these quantitative measures facilitates not only better evaluation of scientific outputs but also a more transparent evaluation of the scientists producing them.”

The researchers say that scientific reputation has emerged as a key “signalling mechanism” to address the dilemma of excessive information that arises in tasks such as evaluating, comparing, and ranking publication profiles in academic competitions. As well, a scientist’s reputation plays an important role as a signal of trustworthiness and quality, “a role that addresses directly the ‘agency problem’ characterising the reward system in science”.

“With little time to read every paper on a given topic, this trustworthiness signal is anecdotally consistent with the common practice of perusing the author names when preliminarily evaluating the relevance of a newly found publication,” the team says.

“In the past, an author’s identity and associated reputation was mainly linked to reference lists and personal interactions. Nowadays, an author’s reputation is becoming increasingly visible through searchable publication databases, laboratory websites, press, and other media, in addition to citations.”

In their introduction to the paper, the researchers say that citation counts are widely used to judge the impact of both scientists and their publications. Although many factors outside the pure merit of the research or the authors influence such counts, few investigations have been made into identifying and quantifying the role of author-specific factors.

They note it is also likely that institutional affiliation and journal reputation play a role in the citation dynamics. But they suggest that disentangling the interaction between the multiple reputation sources will likely be challenging and remains an open avenue for investigation.

Nevertheless, as measures are becoming increasingly common in evaluation scenarios throughout science, the researchers say it is crucial to better understand what the citation measures actually represent in the context of scientists’ careers.

“Moreover, how does reputation affect a scientist’s access to key resources, the incentives to publish quality over quantity, and other key decisions along the career path?” they say. “In addition, what role does reputation play in the mentor-matching process within academic institutions, in the effectiveness of single/double blinding in peer review, and in the reward system of science?”

They note that it is also important to consider the role of reputation in light of the increasing orientation of science around team endeavours with “multiple levels of hierarchy and division of labour”. But, because it is difficult to evaluate and assign credit to individual contributors, they say there may be an increase in the role and strength of the reputation in overcoming the problem associated with asymmetric and incomplete information.

“In addition to the collaboration network, reputation also plays a key role in numerous other scientific inputs such as money, labour, knowledge, and so on, that inevitably affect the overall quantity and quality of scientific outputs.”

Young scientists lacking a reputation can be negatively affected by the social stratification in science, the researchers say, adding that the “appealing competitive advantage gained by working with a prestigious mentor may be countered by the possibility that it may not be the ideal mentor-advisee match”.

Nevertheless, they say that their results have broad implications across the scientific community, given the numerous careers that interact with top scientists via collaboration or mentorship. 

AUSTRALIA: Graduates of top universities earn more

Alexandra Hansen15 October 2014 Issue No:339

 

Bachelor-degree graduates from Australia’s prestigious Group of Eight, or Go8, and technology universities earn a greater amount over their lifetimes than those from the lesser known and regional universities, according to a new analysis that found their total income was 6% more over a 40-year career.

For graduates with degrees in science or commerce, this equated to about A$200,000 (US$175,000) more over their career. The data showed that bachelor degree holders from top universities actually earned about 10% more over their lifetime, but this dropped four percentage points when social advantages were accounted for.

Go8 universities were more likely to enrol students with better previous school grades, students from private schools, and students with parents who had degrees and high profile jobs, says a report by an independent think tank, the Grattan Institute.

This means some of the difference could have been attributed to the fact that Go8 and technology universities enrol students who would have performed better anyway, rather than it being the effect of the university itself, the report states.

A much larger discrepancy was found in chosen course of study, with a law graduate earning A$300,000 (US$262,000) more than a science graduate over their career, and a science graduate earning up to A$1 million (US$875,000) more than a creative arts graduate.

“The report shows that when it comes to earnings, what you study matters more than where you study,” Grattan Institute researcher Andrew Norton said. “Studying engineering at any university is likely to lead to a higher salary than studying arts at a sandstone university."

Vice-chancellor of the regional Southern Cross University, Peter Lee, said he rejected any proposition that the quality of the education experience at a regional university was less than that at a city university, leading to lower salary outcomes.

Lee said there were many other factors, such as gender balance and salary differences between cities and regions, which could have explained the difference. For instance, Southern Cross University was made up of 73% female students, and females consistently earned less than males even when allowing for career gaps while family-raising.

Lee also said there are large salary differences between the city and the regions, attributing to some of the difference: “A lawyer in a big city law firm does earn more than a lawyer practising in a smaller firm in the regions.”

A higher education analyst at the University of Melbourne, Dr Geoff Sharrock, said the report’s most important finding where earnings are concerned, was that a student’s field of study was far more important than the university itself.

“Some fields pay much better than others, regardless of which university conferred the degree,” Sharrock said. “This suggests that students should choose their field of interest and ability first, and their institution second. In doing so, they may also factor in price differences and how much debt risk they are prepared to take on.”

In a comment on the report, Rosemary Stanton, a visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales, asked why was there an assumption that “earning a little more over a lifetime was a good thing?”

“It may mean that these people work longer hours and thus spend less time with their families, possibly impoverishing them in ways that have nothing to do with money,” Stanton said.

*Alexandra Hansen is an editor with The Conversation where this article was published. 

SOUTH KOREA: Lowest-ranked universities to see cut in funding

Korea Joong Ang Daily05 September 2014 Issue No:333

 

The Ministry of Education yesterday designated 19 universities and colleges in the lowest 15 percent in terms of their operations, restricting government financial support starting next year.

In an assessment of the nation’s 334 universities and colleges, the education authority singled out the schools in the poorest condition and suggested a restructuring via a reduction in their admissions quotas.

The ministry has sought to reduce university entrance quotas after it was discovered that XXX that there were too many universities in Korea based on the country’s number of college students and that many of them were operated irresponsibly.

Earlier this year, the government also began to invest 1.2 trillion won ($1.1 billion) in making universities more specialized in order to reduce the number of freshmen.

The assessment, which looks at nine criteria, including alumni employment rates and the number of students who received scholarships, encouraged schools to shrink admissions quotas by providing extra points.

“By suggesting a quota reduction in exchange for additional points, some universities and colleges … reduced their quotas by a total of 4,244 for next year,” a ministry official said.

One college went so far as to cut its entrance rate by 28 percent for next year to escape falling into the lowest 15 percent.

The ministry initially selected 35 universities in the lowest group and notified school officials on Aug. 22, explaining they could move out of the bottom tier if they shrank their admissions for next year by a certain extent.

Sixteen gave up admitting a total of 2,801 new students next year. The 19 remaining schools announced by the ministry yesterday rejected the suggestion to shrink their quotas.

Cheongju University, for instance, said it opted to forego some financial support from the government and maintain its entrance quota because a decrease in the number of its incoming freshmen would worsen its financial situation.

Those schools are excluded from being able to bid for government-run projects for financial support from next year. They will also be prohibited from increasing their admissions in certain departments. Additionally, new students at those institutions will be barred from receiving specific government scholarships based on their schools’ performance.

Seven out of the 19 universities and colleges in the bottom 15 percent in the poorest condition were dealt even harsher financial penalties.

Freshmen at those seven schools will be restricted from receiving government scholarships, and some will not be eligible for student loans in full.

BY KIM BONG-MOON AND YOON SUK-MAN [bongmoon@joongang.co.kr]

GLOBAL: Different ways of learning for students abroad

Hans de Wit05 September 2014 Issue No:333

When the European Commission recently published the results of the Erasmus programme for 2012-13, it was proud to announce an overall increase in numbers of students by 6% to nearly 270,000.

The numbers and trends presented in the press release are indeed impressive: the overall numbers, the percentage of European Union students who are spending part of their study abroad with the support of Erasmus – 10%, still only half of the target of 20% set by the Bologna ministers of education, though – the top receiving and sending countries (Spain is number one for both), as well as increases in staff mobility (13%), in teaching assignments (8.5%), in university cooperation projects (25.4% success rate) and in intensive language courses (9%).

What was in my view the most revealing information, but which received little attention, was the increase in job placements: 16%, compared to 3.8% in study placements.

Job placements vs service learning

Since 2007, Erasmus has offered students the opportunity for European traineeships, also referred to as internships or job placements. Since then, the numbers have increased and currently one out of every five Erasmus students does work experience in another country.

According to the commission, the largest group of students on Erasmus placements has either a social sciences, business or law background (31%), while students in humanities and the arts, engineering, manufacturing and construction counted for 17% each. France, followed by Germany and Spain, was the greatest sender; the United Kingdom, followed by Spain and Germany, the biggest receiver.

The inclusion of job placements in the Erasmus programme reflects the increased focus on employability within internationalisation: how can we prepare graduates to become European and global professionals?

If we compare this to the United States, we see less attention being given to traineeships in companies there, but more attention to International Service Learning, or ISL, stimulating students to have an international community service experience.

ISL is seen in the United States as an important part of study abroad and internationalisation, although not much quantitative information on ISL can be found, partly because it is in many cases integrated into study abroad.

In general there seems to be little quantitative data about international job placements and service learning beyond the data for the Erasmus programmes, while it appears as if a lot of activity in this area is taking place on both sides of the Atlantic.

Different rationales

The distinction between the increased emphasis on international job placements in Europe and on ISL in the United States reflects the different approaches to study abroad on the two continents.

While in the United States the main driver for study abroad at the undergraduate level is to make students less parochial and more interculturally and globally competent, in Europe academic rationales and – increasingly – the employability rationale are more dominant.

Global citizenship development versus global professional development, one could say.

At the same time, both in the United States and in Europe, the main focus is on study abroad and not on international job or community placements.

These two experiences might, though, have an even stronger impact on the development of intercultural and international competences than the study abroad experience because the student is confronted more intensively with society as a result and its population at large than within a purely academic environment.

Also little attention, certainly in Europe, is given to the opportunities that a combination of job placement and-or service learning with study abroad can provide.

Although the inclusion of job placements in the Erasmus programme has stimulated the interest of international officers for this aspect of mobility, in most cases international internships are dealt with either by units that manage local internships or by teaching staff and not by international offices.

This results in a situation in which international job placements are a marginal focus point for all three parties involved. This is also because international job placements are difficult to find, costly and time consuming to monitor.

In many cases, where the student manages to find a placement abroad, guidance and advice from the home institution is marginal.

To give only one small example: over the past month, after a desperate call from a student’s grandparents, my French wife helped a French student doing a two-month internship in a company in a small town in The Netherlands without any support from the home institution to solve the difficult communication problems she faced on her assignment and her living conditions.

This is, unfortunately, still more the rule than the exception in internships, certainly at the undergraduate level. Having a local supporting partner institution involved might make the experience more rewarding.

Need for a new approach

The current call for more employability, for more global citizenship development and for innovative ideas to enhance the internationalisation of higher education might make it a good idea to look for a new approach to old forms of work experience and community service and to integrate them into existing models of mobility and study abroad.

Over the years I have encountered very few examples in which universities include cooperation on job placement and community service learning in their agreements. Finding internships or community service opportunities abroad is left in most cases to the students themselves, teaching staff with personal contacts or commercial agencies.

Why not make use of the local network of partner institutions to find, monitor and evaluate internships and community service opportunities for students of the other university and vice versa?

Why not combine job placements and service learning with a summer course (for instance, in language and culture) and-or study at the partner institution, making the most out of this twofold experience?

A counter-argument might be that it is already difficult to find internships for local students – but more options could be opened up abroad for them via international partners to compensate for that. Also, internships could help to confront the frequent imbalance in student exchange-based study placements.

I cannot imagine that there are not already such forms of cooperation taking place and it would be interesting to receive some innovative examples in this area.

I have always found it surprising how little attention is given to service learning and in particular job placements as part of international learning experiences for students.

When we speak so frequently nowadays about global citizenship and global professional development, these two strategies are more important than ever.

* Hans de Wit is director of the Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation, CHEI, at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy; professor of internationalisation of higher education at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands; and research associate at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Email: j.w.m.de.wit@hva.nl.

Vietnam: Universities still have little autonomy

Last update 16:02 | 31/08/2014 by Vietnam net bridge

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has bemoaned the slow process of delegating more power to universities to enhance their autonomy, saying relevant agencies should accelerate the process to increase the quality of education.

Chairing a meeting on autonomy at public universities in Hanoi Tuesday, Prime Minister Dung said that making universities responsible for all their operations is a right policy and has delivered initial positive results.

According to Dung, their autonomy aims to create a motivation and a breakthrough to improve the quality of education and facilitate sustainable development of universities.

However, the process has been moving slowly and should be speeded up so that universities can soon be autonomous in terms of finance, organization, training, curriculums and issuance of degrees and diplomas, Dung added.

At the meeting, participants also discussed the implementation of such a policy. Professor Dr. Le Vinh Danh, president of Ton Duc Thang University, said the tuition cap should be removed. Tuition fees should be decided by factors such as training quality and demand of learners, he added.

President of Vietnam National University of Hanoi Phung Xuan Nha shared the same view, saying the quality of education and learners’ needs should be used as criteria for setting tuition fees and that the quality of universities should be judged independently and publicly.

According to some university leaders, they have limited professional autonomy in terms of issues like providing new courses and curriculums, so they want more autonomy regarding these matters.

Dung told the Government Office and the Ministry of Education and Training to gather opinions of ministries, agencies and universities presented at the meeting to improve a draft resolution on autonomy for universities before it is discussed at the Government’s regular meeting this month.

According to Dung, the draft resolution needs to pay special attention to personnel, enrollment, new curriculums and scientific research.
SGT/VNN

MALAYSIA:Not guilty, says first academic charged with sedition

Emilia Tan02 September 2014 Issue No:33

Azmi Sharom, a law professor at the University of Malaya, was on 2 September charged with sedition in a court in Kuala Lumpur. The public galleries were packed with academics and students from the university, and other supporters and rights activists. He pleaded not guilty.

Azmi is the first Malaysian academic to be charged under the 1948 Sedition Act, although a number of opposition politicians have faced sedition charges in recent weeks under the law that dates back to the British colonial era.

The professor, who was granted bail during the Tuesday hearing, will appear again before the court in October. He said in a statement later that he would fight the charge, saying it was a blow to academic freedom and freedom of expression.

“I hope reason will prevail,” he told well wishers at the court. Sedition can carry a jail term of up to three years.

Shocking charges

Azmi said he was “shocked” at the charges for comments he made relating to a Malaysian online newspaper on 14 August, on a 2009 crisis in the state government of Perak, describing the events of the time as “legally wrong”.

“My statements were based on established case law and democratic principles. They were given in my capacity as a law lecturer of 24 years standing,” he said.

Academics have been horrified at the charge, which they see as being used to silence anyone who criticises the government.

“If you believe in world-class universities, academics should be allowed to make professional comments. He [Azmi] is from the law faculty. He shouldn't be charged,” Rosli Mahat, vice-president of the University of Malaya academic staff association, told The Malaysian Insider online newspaper.

Rosli, who was at court with many other university staff and students to observe the proceedings, said the charges were “an affront” to the university.

Lau Yi Leong, secretary for national affairs for the Malaysia Youth and Students’ Democratic Movement, said academics were simply expressing their opinions in their professional capacity. Students fear they could be next in the firing line.

“Furthermore, it is undoubtedly clear that, at a time when new students are being enrolled into universities, it is the government’s intention to also warn the new students not to be too keen in applying their knowledge to social, political and economic issues,” Lau said.

Vince Tan, secretary-general of Progressive, University of Malaya – a student group – said in a statement last Tuesday: “Such charges show that the authorities have no regard for academic freedom, when an academician can be punished for commenting on an issue related to his field of study.

“When the intention of the government [is] to repeal a particular legislation, it should no longer be used to prosecute anyone. Such prosecution is also in utter disregard of the intention of the government of the day,” Tan added.

PM promised to repeal the law

Two years ago Prime Minister Najib Razak promised to repeal the 1948 Sedition Act and said it was to be replaced by a new National Harmony Act.

In a statement this week, the prime minister's office reiterated that the act would be repealed and replaced with the National Harmony Bill, which was currently being drafted. No timetable was given.

The Centre for Independent Journalism, or CIJ, added to the criticism, saying the continued use of the Sedition Act “makes a mockery” of the prime minister’s legislative reforms and pledge to repeal the act more than two years ago.

CIJ said in a statement from its directors Sonia Randhawa and Jac SM Kee that “too liberal” a use of the Sedition Act would stunt the function of universities and institutions of learning to the point that they would not be able to function appropriately.

“Restrictions must be necessary and proportionate. To censure legal opinion without demonstrating the threat to national security, public order or public morality is unnecessary and disproportionate,” the statement read.

Some activists believe that the move could backfire on the government and lead to stronger demands to bring forward the repeal of the Sedition Act just as the government previously changed the Internal Security Act that affected students’ political activities and academic freedom.

A government spokesperson said that academics, like other citizens, must adhere to the law. 

Cambodia: More Than 70 Percent of Cambodia’s High School Students Fail Key Exam

Source: Radio Free Asia 

Students leave an examination center in Cambodia's Svay Rieng province, Aug. 4, 2014.

More than 70 percent of nearly 90,000 of Cambodia's high school students who sat for this year’s national examination have failed, the Ministry of Education announced Friday—the result of a government crackdown on bribery and cheating that had tainted previous exams.

It was a stunning reversal of the 80 percent pass rate last year and the previous year, forcing Prime Minister Hun Sen to give a “second chance” to unsuccessful candidates who have to sit for another examination around mid-October.

The ministry said in a statement that only 25.72 percent or 23,126 of 89,937 students passed this year’s Grade 12 examination held early this month under the watchful eyes of thousands of monitors recruited by the Anti-Corruption Unit.

Ministry spokesman Ros Salin said the result of the examination—a prerequisite for students wishing to pursue university level studies—underscored the government’s move to check cheating as part of deep reforms implemented at the ministry.

“This year’s examination was the first test of deep reforms that have been carried out at the ministry,” he told RFA’s Khmer Service.

Cambodia's Anti-Corruption Unit chief Om Yentieng this week praised high school teachers for overseeing the "cleanest-ever" national exam but warned that jail time awaits anyone who is found to be corrupt at the second round of exams, the Cambodia Daily reported.

He said that less than 500 of the more than 10,000 teachers who oversaw the exam were noted by ACU officials as not having done their job properly.

“There will be no exceptions at the second exam. At that time, you will at least be held in pretrial detention for one month—that would be long enough to remove your name from the payroll,” he was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

“You are the teachers and if you mistreat or cheat your own students it would not be different from a father raping his daughter.”

'Wake-up call'

Phann Nil, the principal of Chea Sim Samaki high school in the capital Phnom Penh, said the examination result was a “wake-up call” for students.

“This result will encourage students to study hard and parents must also pay attention to their children,” he said.

Cambodian Independent Teachers’ Association deputy president Ouk Chhayavy said the association endorsed the examination result but was not supportive of the decision to give students who failed a second chance, citing the financial strain on the government.

“I congratulate the students because the result they obtained was based on their own knowledge,” she said.

Sorn Chovorthey, a student who excelled in the examination, said it was the result of hard work.

“My advice to those students who failed: don’t be discouraged because you have a second chance. You have another month to study. Please study hard, day and night, and be confident,” he said.

Minister of Education Hang Chuon Naron, who has been credited for the reforms at his ministry, said strict measures had to be taken to eliminate irregularities in the examination.

He said the ministry would provide additional classes for key subjects to students who failed in preparation for the re-test, which he pointed out would be as vigorous as the earlier examination.

“Even though we have only one and a half months left, you must study hard,” he told the students.

Reported by RFA’s Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Parameswaran Ponnudurai.