International Higher Education--13/News

The Center is pleased to announce its collaboration with the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information of the Open University, United Kingdom. Previously called the Quality Support Centre, the Centre is concerned with issues of quality in higher education, including an EC-funded project focusing on Central and Eastern Europe, and an OECD project on quality management and decision making. The Centre's informative publication, Higher Education Digest, reprints material from International Higher Education. IHE plans to use material from their publications as well. We look forward to a mutually productive relationship. We are also pleased to report our informal collaboration with the new Center for the Study of Higher Education at Nagoya University in Japan.

Our Center has received support from the Ford Foundation for its programs. This assistance will help us to expand the scope of International Higher Education. For further information, please contact the Center for International Higher Education, 207 Campion Hall, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA. Fax: 617/552-8422.

Altbach Named Guest Professor at Peking University
At a ceremony at Peking University on September 18, 1998 in Beijing, China, Philip G. Altbach was appointed Guest Professor of Peking University. In making this appointment, Dr. Min Weifang, executive vice president of the university and director of the Institute for Higher Education, noted Professor Altbach's impact on the study of comparative education and higher education in China through his writings that have been translated into Chinese, and expressed the university's commitment to international cooperation. He spoke of his hopes for collaboration between the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College and the Institute of Higher Education in Peking. Other speakers discussed Altbach's commitment to international cooperation in education and his research on Asian higher education and related issues.

During his visit to Beijing, Dr. Altbach gave two lectures at the Institute of Higher Education, and also lectured at the Institute of Comparative Education at the National Center for Educational Research, a division of the Ministry of Education. He met with the editors of Educational Research, China's main academic journal in education, and discussed collaboration with editors at the People's Education Press. He also visited Tsinghua University, known as the "MIT of China."

Peking University is China's oldest and most prestigious university. It is celebrating its centenary this year. Its 20,000 students study on a park-like campus in the western "university district" in Beijing. The Institute of Higher Education, which offers both master's and doctoral programs in the field, is one of only three such centers in China offering advanced degrees. The Institute also does research on key issues of higher education and works with the Peking University administration.

In Memoriam: Thomas O. Eisemon (by Philip G. Altbach)
On April 21, 1998 Thomas O. Eisemon, a pioneering scholar and World Bank officer in international higher education, died after an illness. Tom completed his doctorate in comparative education at the University of Wisconsin in 1973 under my direction, and I had the pleasure of working with him in the subsequent years. He had a distinguished career, first with the Unesco Institute for Education, then for almost two decades as a professor at McGill University in Canada, and finally at the World Bank, where he was a Senior Education Specialist, and most recently head of the Bank's office in India.

Tom's doctoral dissertation concerned India, and he had a lifelong interest in and commitment to India. His work on Indian higher education added significantly to the literature. While at the World Bank, Tom was instrumental in several higher education reform efforts in Central and Eastern Europe, and he wrote cogently on post-Soviet higher education developments in that region. Tom Eisemon had a lifelong dedication to scholarship and to the practical improvement of education. He was, for example, research team leader for a project on the external efficiency of education for the Harvard Institute for International Development.

Few people combine Tom's commitment to educational improvement and reform with an ability to engage in thoughtful research and publication. I counted Tom as a friend and will also miss him as a colleague as well as for his contributions to the field of international higher education.

Letter to the Editor
There are some important factual errors in Edward Vargo's article, "Thailand's Economic Crisis Slows Down Public and Private Higher Education" (no.12, summer 1998). He describes the current situation in such a dismayingly pessimistic way that I feel it necessary to offer corrections.

While it is true that the Thai government has imposed austerity measures and that universities are facing financial difficulty at this time, the government's policy is to minimize the negative effects on education and health care. Therefore, there has been no pay cut or freeze on salary increases of public university professors, nor has there been an outright ban on seminars or conferences, either overseas or within the country.

Moreover, what is a crisis for some is an opportunity for others. Thai public universities have been asking for autonomy from the government for more than two decades, almost succeeding five years ago when a bill to accomplish just that went to Parliament but did not pass. So now Thai universities are using this financial crisis to ask the government again to let them become state universities that are not part of the government bureaucratic system, and hence not within the civil service system as well, just like Suranaree University of Technology and two other state universities. So, it is not the case, as stated by Edward Vargo, that "Thailand's public universities have finally agreed to privatize by the year 2002." We are the ones who want to change our administrative status, and this is not exactly privatization as the term is generally known.

Sakda Prangpatanpon, Associate Professor and Chair, Educational Foundations Department, Faculty of Education, Burapha University, Bangsaen, Chonburi, Thailand

Erratum: There was an editing error in Edward Vargo's article. The sentence: "Academic seminars and conferences canNOT be organized on campus, within Bangkok, or up-country," should read: "Academic seminars and conferences can NOW be organized ONLY on campus or within Bangkok, BUT NOT up-country."