The Indian economy has expanded at a fairly steady and rapid rate in the past fifteen years, and part of that expansion has been a greatly increased demand for university graduates, particularly for those in technical fields. As of 2008, India was the largest producer and exporter of IT enabled services in the developing world. At the same time, Indian higher education has also expanded rapidly, both in the number of students enrolled and number of institutions—now four times the number in the US and Europe and more than twice that of China. The growth of private colleges in technical and business fields is an important feature of India’s higher education expansion, but it needs to be interpreted carefully. The rapid expansion of unaided colleges affiliated with universities is gradually transforming the role of public universities into regulating, degree-granting institutions and away from teaching or research (Kapur, 2009). Further, the form that higher education expansion took in India in the 2000s resulted in a steady reduction in public spending per student in higher education in the early 2000s. 

State authorities appear increasingly willing to grant support for private unaided colleges to become autonomous universities, thereby loosening the regulatory power over the institutions’ decision making.  At the same time, many signals (including the government’s 2012 higher education enrollment target of 15 percent of age cohort—approximately 21 million students) point toward considerable expansion of public universities and colleges over the next 4-5 years. The total number of students in all these institutions together, however, will be small compared to the total output of India’s technical colleges.

Given this background and some preliminary data we have from student and institutional surveys and interviews in Indian technical colleges and universities, we try to address several important issues in Indian higher education:

1. What is the essence of the higher education financing system established by government policies and what can we infer from that financing system about government goals for higher education in the next ten years?
2. How are colleges, their faculty, and their students reacting to these policies?
3. What can be said about the current quality of Indian technical/engineering education and its prospects for the future?
4. What can we conclude from the Indian case about the driving forces shaping higher education and where they are likely to take it?

Presenting at the lunch seminar will be Clayman Institute
Faculty Research Fellow, Helen M. Stacy, Senior Lecturer in Law and Senior
Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford
University. Lunch will be served by 11:45am and we will begin promptly at
12:00pm and end by 1:00pm. An RSVP is required for purposes of catering.

You may RSVP to Ann Enthoven at ann.enthoven@stanford.edu.

These seminars are aimed at faculty; all faculty are welcome to attend.

Professor Fujitani’s presentation will be drawn from his forthcoming book, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans in WWII. The book is a comparative and transnational study of ethnic and colonial soldiers during the Asia-Pacific War (or the Second World War in the Asia-Pacific) that focuses specifically on Japanese Americans mobilized to serve in the United States army and Koreans who were recruited or drafted into the Japanese military. His research utilizes the two sites of soldiering as optics through which to examine the larger operations and structures of the changing U.S. and Japanese national empires as they struggled to manage racialized populations within the larger demands of conducting total war. He seeks to show how discussions about, policies, and representations of these two sets of soldiers tell us a great deal about the changing characteristics of wartime racism, nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, gender politics, the family, and some other related issues on both sides of the Pacific that go well beyond the soldiers themselves, and whose repercussions remain with us today. The seminar will focus on the Korean Japanese side of his research.

Takashi Fujitani is Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. His primary areas of research are modern and contemporary Japanese history, East Asian history, and transnational history (primarily U.S./Japan and Asia-Pacific). His publications include: Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (UC Press, 1996; Japanese version, 1994; Korean translation, 2003);  Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (co-editor, Duke, 2001); and  Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans in WWII (forthcoming, UC Press; Japanese version, Iwanami Shoten); as well as numerous book chapters and articles published in Korean, Japanese and English. His recent research has been funded by the John. S. Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Social Science Research Council.

This seminar is supported by a generous grant from Koret Foundation.

Proponents of public subsidies to renewable energy technologies often claim that subsidizing renewables today accelerates their realization of cost reductions in the future on account of learning-by-doing. A number of previous studies claim to find evidence that certain renewable energy technologies are characterized by statistically and economically significant learning effects; however, these studies assume away potentially important channels of cost reductions besides learning. John's paper uses data for the U.S. wind energy industry to show the implications of the assumptions implicit in previous studies of learning in renewable energy technologies.

PESD Assistant Director Mark Thurber will be presenting a paper on oil governance at the International Studies Association 51st annual convention, "Theory vs. Policy?  Connecting Scholars and Practitioners."

In the paper, which is entitled "The Limits of Institutional Design in Oil Sector Governance: Exporting the ‘Norwegian Model,'" Mark and his co-authors (PESD affiliated researchers David Hults and Patrick Heller) draw examples from PESD's larger study of national oil companies to argue that separating policy, regulatory, and commercial functions in oil administration works well in Norway but is not the best prescription for all oil-producing countries.  As the premiere annual event of the ISA, which is the most widely known and respected scholarly association in the field of international studies, the conference in New Orleans attracts participants from around the world.

With the rapid growth of the Chinese economy and transition from central planning to a more market-oriented structure since the 1980s, private health care providers have gained market share, especially in provision of primary health care, despite legal and administrative obstacles.  To reach the goals for universal health care coverage, access and quality announced in April 2009 as part of China’s new health reforms, effective government stewardship of non-state health care providers will be crucial. This presentation will give an overview of private providers in the grass roots health delivery system in urban and rural China, as well as evidence from field study. Policy trends in stewardship, contracting out and how private providers can better participate in universe health insurance are discussed.

Yan Wang is deputy director of the Disease Control Division for the Shandong Province Health Department, China, and a visiting scholar with the Asia Health Policy Program at the Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center at Stanford University in 2009-2010. She received her Ph.D. in public health from Shandong University and has been in charge of managing rural and urban community health services for Shandong’s 90 million residents for 10 years. Her research interests focus on evidence to improve policies for primary health care, health insurance, and health promotion.

As one of the core features of modern states, universal schooling provided a tool with which to disseminate the skills and knowledge demanded by the new era of industrialization and interstate competition, as well as to impart what it meant to be a citizen. Citizenship education, in fact, or "civics," lay at the heart of the education enterprise in the modern world, reflecting the new circumstances of competing nation-states and hence prioritizing the cultivation of the population’s identification with and allegiance to a particular nation and/or the state.  An education system, then, came to be regarded as a strategic necessity if not entirely an idealistic or humanitarian one. 

This presentation explores modern Korean state making through an examination of citizen education at the turn of the 20th century.  How did the larger purpose of universal schooling and citizenship education evolve as the Korean state underwent so many dramatic shifts in form, function, and even sovereignty?  What role did the educational institutions, from the state bureaucracy to the schools themselves, play in spreading the lessons of loyalty, allegiance, and identity?  And finally, How did Confucian ethics and statecraft affect the demands of the modern schooling system?  Indeed the legacies of pre-20th century Korea extended well into the colonial era (1910-45), including the period of wartime mobilization in the 1930s and 40s, when schooling became central to the intensified, radical assimilation policy of turning Koreans into "imperial subjects."

Professor Hwang conducts research on the modern transformation of Korea, broadly conceived.  He is the author of Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence of Modern Korea (2004), and co-edited, with Professor Gi-Wook Shin of Stanford, Contentious Kwangju:  The May 1980 Uprising in Korea's Past and Present (2003).  His latest book, History of Korea: An Episodic Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan) is expected to be published in 2010.  He teaches courses on Korean history and society, East Asian and world history at the University of Southern California.  He is a graduate of Oberlin College (AB) and Harvard University (Ph.D).

This seminar is supported by a generous grant from Koret Foundation.

Can anyone say that South Korean society and politics have become "transformed" since the 1987 democratic opening and transition? This statement is "admittedly ambitious" as a claim "because an endpoint of transformation can never be attained with certainty," the speaker argues.  After a successful democratic transition, South Korea’s next challenge lies in consolidating its democratic gains and building durable political institutions, requiring full compliance with democratic norms by all major political forces and interest groups in civil society. This on-going quest for liberal democracy, not easy for South Korea’s Sixth Republic, will be explored in Professor Kihl's presentation.

Young Whan Kihl is currently a visiting scholar in the Korean Studies Program at APARC. He is Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, at Iowa State University. Professor Kihl taught courses on International Relations, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Behavior, and Comparative Foreign Policy at Iowa State University, 1974-2006, and served as Chair of the Department of Political Science, Juniata College, 1963-1974.  He was editor-in-chief of The International Journal of Korean Studies from 2004 to 2008 and was on the editorial advisory board of International Studies Quarterly from 1998 to 2004.  He has written numerous books on Korean politics, both North and South. Included in the list of his recent books are: North Korea: the Politics of Regime Survival, 2006 (coeditor) and Transforming Korean Politics: Democracy, Reform, and Culture, 2005.

Professor Kihl received a BA in Political Science and Economics from Grinnell College and a Ph.D. in International Politics and Organizations, Comparative Politics (Asia), and Political Behavior from New York University.

In 2005, a national referendum returned Uganda to multi-party competition, lifting a ban on the activities of political parties that had been in place since the National Resistance Movement took power in 1986.

The decision to restore formal pluralistic competition was arrived at in large part by international pressure on the government of President Yoweri Museveni.

However, five years later, as Uganda heads into its second round of elections under a multi-party system next year, the country is less “democratic” and has been described as a virtual one party state.

In some instances, observers have commented that the Ugandan parliament under the single-party “Movement” system had more bite than the current multiparty plebiscite, which is little more than a rubberstamp of the ruling National Resistance Movement.

What explains the apparent failure of the multi-party era to advance real democratic reforms in Uganda?

Angelo Izama is an investigative reporter at the Daily Monitor, Uganda's only independent newspaper, as well as a radio talk show panelist, researcher, consultant and analyst on security and governance in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa. In his 7-year career in the media he has also worked as a radio producer, host, news manager and multi-media journalist for the Nation Media Group in Uganda. He has been a frequent commentator on current affairs for international news agencies including the BBC, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, AFP and African-based organizations. Mr. Izama was a fall 2007 Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, where he proposed and assessed regional options for peace in Northern Uganda regarding the Lords Resistance Army. In 2008 he founded Fanaka Kwa Wote, a Ugandan-based think tank, to advance research on human security and democracy in the Great Lakes region.

In the course of his career, Mr. Izama has covered topics including national elections in 2001 and 2005, the conflict in Northern Uganda, internal security, corruption, and most recently, issues surrounding the discovery of oil in western Uganda. In 2009 he filed a case using Uganda's Access to Information Act to compel the government to make public the details of oil Production Sharing Agreements signed with foreign oil companies. The case was dismissed in February, on the same day Mr. Izama was arrested and charged with criminal libel in Ugandan courts over his critical writing.

Kevin Hartigan is the Regional Director for Asia for the Catholic Relief Services (CRS).  Based in Islamabad.  He oversees 350 staff in Afghanistan and has visited the country approximately 15 times in the past six years.  He has 23 years of relief and development experience in Latin America, Africa and Asia.  He was previously CRS Regional Director for Central Africa and has been posted in the DRC, Angola, Cameroon and Haiti.  He sits on the Humanitarian Advisory Council of Caritas Internationalis.  Kevin has an M.A., and long-lapsed doctoral candidacy, in Political Science from Stanford.