A few years ago, Monash University was being described as the first global university‘ on the strength of its multiple campuses in Australia, Malaysia, the UK and South Africa. Along with Alan Gilbert of Melbourne, then VC David Robinson[1] was one of the leading promoters of the idea of the ‘enterprising university’. In practice this meant using the public endowment of the university to establish private, for-profit offshoots, an agenda that is still being pushed vigorously by Tim Dodd and the AFR Higher Education Section. Robinson aimed for a campus on every continent, while Gilbert pushed the idea that the Internet could be used to bring academic handloom weavers into the factory age, an idea embodied in U21 Global.

Now Monash’s African operation is described as a money pit. Exactly the same could be said of U21Global[1], a $US50 million enterprise which has so far produced nothing more than a very ordinary online MBA to add to the hundreds already on the market.

The question of why, outside narrowly vocational training, for-profit educational ventures are almost invariably unsuccessful is a complex and difficult one. But the facts speak for themselves. From an Australian perspective,an equally important question is why university managers (mostly former academics with no obvious qualifications for a business career) entrusted with large sums of public money have been allowed to dissipate it in money-losing speculative investments.

fn1. Robinson got sacked a couple of years ago over a plagiarism scandal. As I pointed out in a very early post, this was hypocritical behavior on the part of a University council that backed his anti-academic agenda. “University managers have done their best to suppress the assumptions of free exchange of information in which notions like ‘plagiarism’ make sense. In the brave new world of ‘intellectual property’, you nail down what you can of your own ideas and appropriate anything from the common pool that hasn’t already been grabbed. The former vice-chancellor of Monash seemed entirely suited to the new world, and it was hypocritical to sack him.”

fn2. As with Monash, the term “global” is an aspiration rather than a reality. In practice, U21Global does not even try to compete outside the Asian market, and it seems that it is increasingly focusing on Singapore, its physical location.

Although there’s plenty of news coverage of inquiries into the “intelligence” that justified the Iraq war, coverage of events in Iraq itself seems to have declined sharply since the formal handover of sovereignty and the shutdown of the Coalition Provisional Administration. There seems to be a general media consensus that things have gone quiet, with the result that, when the usual news of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations is reported, it’s always prefaced with something like Suicide Blast Shatters a Calm (NYT 15 July) or after a week of relative calm (Seattle Times 7 July).

Regardless of the calmness or otherwise of the situation, the installation of Allawi as PM has certainly produced a new dynamic. Allawi has moved quickly to establish himself as a strongman, resolving by default the questions left unanswered in the “handover”. His announcements of emergency powers and the establishment of a security service/secret police have been criticised, but they amount to little more than the assumption of powers previously exercised by the CPA with no legal basis of any kind. The big question before the handover was whether any new military operations would be under the control of the interim government or of the American military. Allawi has moved pretty quickly to ensure that he will give the orders here, putting the onus on the American military to come to his aid if his forces run into serious resistance.
Read More »

The latest atrocious murders committed by Al Qaeda raise a number of thoughts for me, as does the swift killing/capture of those apparently responsible for the murder of Paul Johnson in Saudi Arabia.

First, however bad the crimes that have been committed in our name, nothing that has yet been revealed comes close to the gratuitous evil of Al Qaeda. That shouldn’t be taken as an excuse, or a reason for playing down such crimes; in the presence of such an enemy its more necessary than ever to keep our own hands clean and to be seen to do so. But nothing should be taken to mitigate the guilt of the Al Qaeda terrorists or to suggest that there is any possible compromise that can be made with them.
Read More »

The success of Eurosceptic parties like the UK Independence Party, which advocates British withdrawal from the EU, has contributed to generally negative coverage of the recent EU Parliamentary elections. Although I disagree with UKIP, I think its success is a good thing.
Read More »

There’s been a lot of discussion in the comments threads over my (implicit) endorsement of Latham’s view that Australia should pull ground troops out of Iraq by Christmas. This is a reversal of my earlier “we broke it, we own it” view, and therefore requires some explanation. My change of heart has arisen for two main reasons.

First, facts on the ground. For a variety of reasons, the occupation is deeply unpopular among Iraqis and this unpopularity extends to any government installed by the Americans. The Interim Governing Council was pretty thoroughly discredited within a short time of being appointed. The new interim government has some things going for it, such as the international recognition implied by the UN resolution, but the reality that US advisors are calling the shots will emerge pretty quickly. Three months would be an optimistic estimate of the likely honeymoon. From what I’ve read that would also be the minimum time needed to hold an election (perhaps with an imperfect electoral roll) and generate a government that would have some more durable legitimacy. I expect such a government would not support continued occupation, at least on present terms, but if it did, there would be time for Latham to reconsider the policy. There’s no reason why we should accede to US wishes to defer elections into 2005 in the futile hope that better results would be obtained in this way.

Second, the illegality of the original war has been compounded by the Administrations willingness to tear up international conventions on torture. It’s clear by now that responsibility for torture goes all the way to the top and that the most horrifying examples, such as setting vicious dogs onto naked prisoners, threatening (and perhaps actually torturing) children in order to extract co-operation from their parents, and so on, were part of a set of policies approved at high levels. Despite initial denials, for example, it’s now been admitted that Sanchez approved the use of dogs. Of course, since thousands of Iraqis have been through the US detention system, and have been released to tell their story to family and friends, the policy has helped to inflame hatred of the occupation. But even if it was effective, it’s something we should have no part of. Nothing short of wholesale resignations and criminal prosecutions of senior military and civilian officials could justify our continued involvement with this occupation.

As this discussion implies, I’d prefer a direct confrontation with the Administration, backed up with the threat of an immediate withdrawal (and. conversely, a willingness to see things through under better conditions). But no Australian government is ever going to do anything like that.

I am still yet to fully absorb the implications of the latest revelations on torture, which are far worse than anything previous (start here and follow links – the news gets steadily worse, until you get to this and this.

As one of the links seems a bit flaky, I’ve attempted to archive it using Furl, a marvellous service with which I’m still in the early stages of experimentation. The archive link is here.

• luvox zoloft vs

In view of the full court press being applied by the US Administration with respect to Mark Latham’s promise to pull Australian troops out of Iraq by Christmas, it’s interesting to note that the Dutch government is not subject to similar pressure to “stay the course”, even though it has just announced a pullout date of March 15, 2005, less than 90 days after Latham’s. This is an extension of a previous commitment that expires on June 30, but the government, part of the Coalition of the Willing, sounds more like Latham than Howard.

Dutch troops will leave Iraq in March 2005 as the Dutch government will not renew their mandate after an eight-month extension, Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said Friday.

“We are linking our stay to the formation of a new government in Iraq,” Mr. Balkenende told a news conference. “Eight months and that’s that …In extraordinary circumstances the mandate could be extended for another 10 days or so after March 15, but in principle the troops will leave on that date”

Meanwhile, the Dutch government has lost ground to the left in EU elections while Blair’s Labor government has lost ground to everybody finishing a dismal third in local elections.

The Passion of the Present has a response to the G8 statement on Darfur, from the Globe and Mail. Appropriate intervention by the international community here could save hundreds of thousands of lives at relatively low cost, but action is needed urgently.

Also, here’s a report from the NYT

Update: The EU is funding an observer mission, with plans for an armed protection force, to monitor the latest ceasefire tramadol and glutamate

Juan Cole is spot-on, as usual

The Guardian reports that US civil administrator Paul Bremer signed an order Monday banning Muqtada al-Sadr and his lieutenants from running for elective office for 3 years because of their membership in an illegal militia. Muqtada and his lieutenants rejected this decree and said that the CPA and the caretaker government had no right to make such decisions.
…

Bremer’s action in excluding the Sadrists from parliament is one final piece of stupidity to cap all the other moronic things he has done in Iraq . The whole beauty of parliamentary governance is that it can hope to draw off the energies of groups like the Sadrists. Look at how parliamentary bargaining moderated the Shiite AMAL party in Lebanon, which had a phase as a terrorist group in the 1980s but gradually outgrew it. AMAL is now a pillar of the Lebanese establishment and a big supporter of a separation of religion and state. The only hope for dealing with the Sadrists nonviolently was to entice them into civil politics, as well. Now that they have been excluded from the political process and made outlaws in the near to medium term, we may expect them to act like outlaws and to be spoilers in the new Iraq. (emphasis added)

I can only agree glucophage package insert

Since the obituaries and eulogies for Ronald Reagan have now been read, I think it’s reasonable to take a critical look at his historical contribution. It’s often argued that Reagan accelerated the end of the Cold War by raising US military expenditure, thereby forcing the Soviet Union to increase its own military expenditure and crippling its economy. I think this argument has some plausibility in relation to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, though not in relation to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist governments in Eastern Europe[1].

So granting that this analysis is correct, should Reagan be praised. For the argument to work at all, the buildup must have raised the probability of nuclear war, unless you suppose (improbably) that the Russians were absolutely convinced of the peaceful intentions of the West and responded to Reagan purely to build up their own offensive capability[2]. Let’s suppose that the annual risk of war was raised by one percentage point. Then over the eight years Reagan was in office, there was a cumulative 8 per cent chance of a war that would certainly have produced tens of millions of deaths, probably billions and possibly the extinction of the human race. Against this, the early collapse of the Soviet Union produced benefits (mixed, but still positive on balance) for people in the Soviet Union, and perhaps also a reduction in the likelihood of an accidental nuclear war in the period since 1990. These benefits are small in relation to the potential cost.

As I’ve argued previously, if you think that a good policy is one which, in expectation, has good consequences, Reagan’s policy fails this test. On the other hand, standard accounts of consequentialism say that a good policy is one that has good actual consequences. If you accept this, and the assessment of the facts given above, Reagan’s historical record looks pretty good.

fn1. It had been obvious for many years that these governments were sustained only by the threat of Soviet military intervention. Gorbachev still had the military capacity to intervene in 1989 (in fact, on the argument presented above, the Russians had a bigger military than they would have had if Reagan had not been elected), but he chose not to do so. As soon as this became evident, the Communist bloc governments collapsed.

fn2. As an aside, in debate at the time, it was widely asserted that the Soviet government was actively planning an attack on the West, to be undertaken if Western defences could be weakened sufficiently. Has the collapse of Communism produced any archival or similar evidence on this? I would have thought that the Warsaw Pact countries would have had to have had a fair degree of involvement, and, since they are now in NATO, there would be no reason to keep any secrets.