As a result of the work of Boston College's University Academic Planning Council, the program in higher education has been recognized for potential as a leading national program and awarded new faculty resources. In Fall 1998, Dr. Kathleen Mahoney and Dr. Ana Martinez Aleman will join Monan Professor Philip Altbach, Professor Diana Pullin, and Associate Professors Ted I. K. Youn and Karen Arnold on the Higher Education faculty at Boston College.

Dr. Kathleen Mahoney is a historian of higher education. She received her Ph.D. from Rochester University and is now a Lily Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. Dr. Mahoney's dissertation in the area of Catholic higher education investigates a controversy, around the turn of this century, in which Harvard Law School denied automatic admission to Boston College graduates. The ensuing debate between Jesuit educators and President Charles Eliot about the relative merits of nonsectarian and Jesuit higher education illuminates important larger issues about the rise of the university, sectarianism, and Catholics in America.

Dr. Ana Martinez is currently a faculty member at Grinnell College, Iowa, where she teaches in both education and women's studies. A philosopher of education, Dr. Martinez received her doctorate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has also worked in student affairs at Amherst College. In addition to publications about John Dewey, the subject of her dissertation, Dr. Martinez has taught and published in the areas of women in higher education, social context of higher education, and cross-cultural and ethnicity issues.

The Center for International Higher Education is sponsoring an international invitational conference on private higher education in international perspective at the end of May, 1998. With the support of the Ford Foundation, 30 key academic leaders from Latin America and other parts of the world will convene at Boston College to discuss the challenges of private higher education. We have commissioned papers on various aspects of private higher education that will be discussed at the conference and then published as a book.

Fr. Xabier Gorostiaga, SJ, the rector of the Universidad Centroamericana in Managua, Nicaragua, and former Minister of Education of Nicaragua is joining the Center as a visiting scholar for a year. Fr. Gorostiaga will pursue several writing projects and participate in the Center's seminar program.

Professor Philip G. Altbach, director of the Center, recently returned from a lecture tour in Hong Kong. His visit was sponsored by the Hong Kong Institute of Education, and he lectured there as well as at the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He also participated in a seminar for leaders of universities in Russia and eastern Europe at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria.