The Rise of Research Universities: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Before the end of the 19th century, the president of Harvard University, Charles Eliot, counseled John D. Rockefeller that US$50 million (about US$5 billion in today’s currency) and 200 years would be required to create a research university (Altbach 2003). After the turn of the century, and with Rockefeller’s more than US$50 million, the University of Chicago needed only 20 years to attain top standing. In Asia just before the turn of this century, the newly established Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) took only 10 years and less than a tenth of Eliot’s figure to become one of Asia’s top 10 research universities

The Past, Present, and Future of the Research University

Research universities stand at the center of the 21st-century global knowledge economy and serve as flagships for postsecondary education worldwide. The Road to Academic Excellence analyzes how research universities have developed and matured in 10 countries. They are elite, complex institutions with multiple academic and societal roles. They provide the key link between global science and scholarship and a nation’s scientific and knowledge system. Research universities produce much of the new information and analysis that not only leads to important advances in technology but also contributes, just as significantly, to better understanding of the human condition through the social sciences and humanities. They are both national institutions that contribute to culture, technology, and society and international institutions that link to global intellectual and scientific trends. They are truly central institutions of the global knowledge society (Salmi 2009). This chapter provides a historical and global context to understand the development of the research universities reviewed in the case studies in this book.

Singapore’s response to the global war for talent: Politics and Education

Pak Tee Ng ABSTRACT This paper describes and analyses how Singapore engages in the global war for talent. The paper discusses how Singapore demonstrates a Foucauldian perspective of '‘governmentality’ in trying  to mould citizens into a way of thinking that is geared suitably to an engagement in a global talent war. It first examines the [...]

The Long Road Ahead for China’s Universities

Last September, Wang Yin wrote an open letter to Tsinghua University, explaining his reasons for dropping out of its doctoral program in computer science. He was just nine months short of graduation and the start of what should have been a successful career in China’s high-tech business sector.

As soon as he posted his 15-page “The Smashing of the Tsinghua Dream” on his blog, the essay started zipping around the nation via the Internet. Newspapers jumped on the story, and the boyish-looking, 26-year-old computer engineer was flung into the national spotlight.

Students who drop out of Ph.D. programs are normally not front-page news. But this student had openly and boldly attacked one of the country’s premier educational institutions, one that has been dubbed the MIT of China.

China Spending Billions to Better Universities

SHANGHAI When Andrew Chi-chih Yao, a Princeton professor who is recognized as one of the United States’s top computer scientists, was approached by Tsinghua University in Beijing last year to lead an advanced computer studies program, he did not hesitate.

Why would a leading scientist at one of America’s top universities leave a prestigious program for a university that is little known outside of China? One reason is loyalty to the country where he was born, although he spent his academic career in the United States and was raised in Taiwan.

Less Politics, More Poetry: China’s Colleges Eye the Liberal Arts

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India’s Faltering Education System

On the one hand, India’s higher education system is widely acclaimed.
With Indian managers and consultants crowding investment banks, Indian computer scientists sighted in Silicon Valley with the abundance of wildebeests in an African safari and IIT-trained engineers not only working all over the world but appearing in Dilbert cartoons, there seems to be good reason for this.

India’s Seeks Help From Britain In Opening World-Class University

New Delhi — India has asked Britain for help in setting up a world-class central university in what one local newspaper reported is the first such request for foreign assistance in almost 50 years. India has not asked for foreign help to establish a university since it sought assistance in the late 1950s and early [...]

Redefining Public And Private In Asia Pacific Higher Education

INTRODUCTION

Higher education institutions throughout the world are engaging the challenges they face within a context of competing public and private spheres. As we have indicated in other chapters, the core concepts of “public” and “private” carry a set of critical meanings concerning the conduct of life within the state and the ways authority is constituted in a society and given issue through the rule of law. These concepts also have a reality in social life—a way of being in practice—that is far more complex and ambiguous than suggested by their formal and legal constructions. This often has been the case in most societies, as the needs for institutional flexibility at a given historical moment cannot be readily resolved at the interface between formal public or private institutions as constituted.

Knowledge And Education As International Commodities: The Collapse of The Common Good

A revolution is taking place in education. Education is becoming an internationally traded commodity. No longer is it seen primarily as a set of skills, attitudes, and values required for citizenship and effective participation in modern society-a key contribution to the common good of any society. Rather, it is increasingly seen as a commodity to be purchased by a consumer in order to build a “skill set” to be used in the marketplace or a product to be bought and sold by multinational corporations, academic institutions that have transmogrified themselves into businesses, and other providers. Nowhere is this trend more clearly exemplified than in the current debate about GATS, the General Agreement on Trade Organization (WTO).