College students — both American and foreign — are studying abroad in record numbers, according to an exhaustive annual survey of international education.
According to the report, "Open Doors," which was released Monday by the Institute of International Education, the number of foreign students studying in the United States increased 8 percent in the 2008-2009 school year, for an all-time high of 671,616. At the same time, the number of American students studying abroad increased in the 2007-2008 school year, for a total of 262,416 — an 8.5 percent increase over the previous year.
Data on where Americans tend to study abroad and where foreign students tend to originate remain largely unchanged, according to a Nov. 16 article on the online higher education magazine Inside Higher Ed. The list of most popular study-abroad destinations for Americans was the same in 2007-2008 as it was the previous year, with Britain, Italy, Spain, France and China topping the list.
Like in the previous year, India, China and South Korea were the top three countries sending students to study in the United States.
Assault over ‘white privilege' by Columbia prof
A Columbia professor has been charged with assaulting a female colleague after a discussion about race relations between the two turned violent at a bar on the night of Nov. 6, the New York Post reported last week.
According to the Post, Lionel McIntyre, who is black, was engaged in a conversation about white privilege and racial issues with Margaret Camille Davis, a production manager who works in Columbia's theater department, and another white male, who has not been identified.
McIntyre allegedly began to shove Davis, and when onlookers attempted to restrain him, punched Davis in the face.
McIntyre is a 59-year-old associate professor in Columbia's urban design program, part of the University's architecture school, according to the Columbia Spectator, which also reported the story.
The professor was released the night of his arraignment without bail. "It was a very unfortunate event," McIntyre told the Post. "I didn't mean for it to explode the way it did."
UMass backtracks on terrorist invitation
The University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which incited a controversial debate about free speech earlier this month when faculty members invited a convicted terrorist to speak at an on-campus event scheduled for last Thursday, has announced that the terms of the prospective speaker's parole prevent him traveling between states, according to the Boston Globe.
The school's Social Thought and Political Economy program invited Roy Luc Levasseur, co-founder of the extremist United Freedom Front and a convict in the 1980s of terrorism and bombing. The decision incited the criticism of university administrators and state officials, the newspaper reported.
The institution had already officially revoked the invitation earlier this month, but within several days of the university cancelling Levasseur's appearance on campus, members of the faculty re-invited him, raising questions about free speech and drawing the ire of many, including the state's governor, Deval Patrick, according to the Globe.
"I fully get the point and respect the idea of free speech. But I think it is a reflection of profound insensitivity to continue to try and have this former terrorist on campus," Patrick said, the Globe reported last week.
In an interview with the Globe published Nov. 12, Levasseur said a free speech issue was at stake. "They just don't want me to do it. It's the voice that they want to silence," he said .
ADVERTISEMENT
