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/ 17 October 2007
The crucial, invigorating idea about higher education is continuity. No matter how much the outward appendages of the university change, nothing changes. Above the allure of an esoteric discipline, one idea reigns supreme. The sense that one belongs to an age-old community of bickerers is the joy of academe.
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/ 17 October 2007
Heads of universities and their senior staff will converge in Tripoli, Libya, later this month to discuss issues under the theme, "The African Brain Drain — Managing the Drain: Working with the Diaspora". This is the biennial conference of rectors, vice-chancellors and presidents of African universities of the Association of African Universities.
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/ 17 October 2007
Academics in the sciences must realise that they are also entrepreneurs, according to a range of speakers at the annual Bio2Biz SA conference in Cape Town last month. But researchers must be prepared to fall and pick themselves up again in a real-life experiment, said Dr Joe Molete, conference organiser and CE of the BioPAD innovation funder in Gauteng.
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/ 17 October 2007
Science is supposed to be about proof, numbers, evidence, data. Not heart — unless you’re a cardiologist. But Phil Campbell, editor-in-chief of the peerless peer-review journal, Nature, recently got soft and sentimental at the Astronomical Observatory in Cape Town as he honoured two leading South Africans for quietly doing something emotional and inspirational: nurturing the next generation of scientists.
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/ 17 October 2007
If you are of a sensitive disposition, I advise you stop reading now. I am about to break the last of the universal taboos. I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises. I recognise that recession causes hardship. Like everyone I am aware that it would cause some people to lose their jobs and homes. I do not dismiss these impacts or the harm they inflict, writes George Monbiot.
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/ 17 October 2007
Ventspils University College (VUC) is in the port city of Ventspils, Latvia, off the coast of the Baltic Sea. Latvia has been a member of the European Union since 2004. Ventspils is 200km west of the capital of Latvia, Riga, and 360km south-east of Stockholm, Sweden.
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/ 17 October 2007
Too many universities in developing countries sustain an image of themselves as elitist institutions, cut off from the needs of the society that surrounds them. Ironically, this model is still being pursued at a time when it is being abandoned in the developed world that created it.
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/ 17 October 2007
The University of Limpopo is crumbling under poor management and governance practices, a ministerial report has disclosed. Drafted by ministerial appointee Professor Bennie Khoapa, the report recommends that he and his task team help the university fix wide-ranging problems in the next eight to 12 months. These exist in areas such as financial administration, human resource management, academic planning, governance and management.
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/ 17 October 2007
Parents and children are not equipped to be internet-safe. So says a study conducted among MBA students and lecturers at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on "whether parents are aware of online dangers and if they are doing enough to protect their children online".
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/ 17 October 2007
The flow of students between South Africa and China is set to increase following a high-level meeting between Education Minister Naledi Pandor and her Chinese counterpart in Beijing a few weeks ago. An offshoot of the tighter bilateral cooperation between the two countries will be a R180million injection from China into modernising three further education and training colleges.