Painter Karim Traore, 40, puts the finishing touches on a gate at a newly refurbished university in Abidjan. Credit: Robbie Corey-Boulet/IPS

By Robbie Corey-Boulet
ABIDJAN, Sep 4 2012 (IPS)

Yacouba Coulibaly was pursuing a doctorate in education at Cocody University in Abidjan before Côte d’Ivoire’s post-election violence started in 2010. But his classes were routinely disrupted by armed members of a powerful student federation that wished to hold meetings instead.

Later, the country’s public universities were closed in 2011 at the end of the post-election violence and Coulibaly was unable to continue his studies.

But now he is one of an estimated 61,000 students who are expected to start classes soon in the new academic year, as the country’s five public universities reopened on Monday Sep. 3.

“I hope we will have a peaceful university, where people do not behave like we’ve seen in the past,” he told IPS.

“I don’t want my younger brothers and sisters to suffer this same way,” he said, referring to the West African nation’s future crop of students.

Coulibaly said that the reopening of the universities, marked by a ceremony on Monday at Cocody University (which has been renamed after the country’s founding president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny), would help the country develop.

“When you see a country without universities, there is something wrong. You cannot talk about development without universities,” he said.

Côte d’Ivoire’s President Alassane Ouattara is also hoping that large-scale investment in the education sector can help his country’s universities shed a legacy of violence and corruption that contributed to recent turmoil. But concerns persist that higher education could again be corrupted by politics.

Speaking at Monday’s ceremony, Ouattara pledged to nurture a university system that would rival the best in the world, and also vowed to implement reforms at the primary and secondary levels.

“As an economist, I am convinced that investment in universities brings the highest yield in development,” he said.

The president lamented the role universities played in the nation’s 2010 to 2011 post-election crisis. He said they had become places “of violence and corruption” during the administration of former President Laurent Gbagbo.

Ouattara defeated Gbagbo in the November 2010 election, but the incumbent refused to cede office, sparking violence that claimed at least 3,000 lives. Gbagbo, who has since been transferred to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, used to be a professor. He garnered strong support from university faculties and the Student Federation of Côte d’Ivoire (FESCI).

For years leading up to the violence, FESCI had become associated with extortion and racketeering, often resorting to violence. A 2008 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report implicated FESCI members in assault, extortion and rape, saying members targeted Gbagbo’s political opponents with impunity. HRW and other groups have also said FESCI members were involved in the 2010-2011 conflict.

Augustin Mian, FESCI’s secretary general, told IPS the group had been turned into a scapegoat for the country’s past problems, and claimed FESCI members have been targeted for abuse by pro-Ouattara forces since the conflict ended.

“We are protesting against the fact that people say we are militias,” he said. He added that the group would continue to advocate on behalf of students, and planned to protest a pending increase in registration fees.

Ouattara has defended the move to close the universities in the first place, which was unpopular with many Ivorians.

Rene Legre Houkou, president of the Ivorian Human Rights League, was among those who thought the decision wrong.

“For us, this decision stopped the normal process of teaching and training,” he told IPS.

“We thought that this violated the right to education, and we were worried that all of these students would be left doing nothing.”

Houkou said officials would face a number of challenges as the universities resumed classes, including finding replacements for the many professors who were allies of Gbagbo and are now in exile.

Meanwhile, students in Abidjan said they hoped the five university campuses – refurbished at a cost of roughly 210 million dollars – would be peaceful from now on.

Most students said they were just happy the existing universities were open again. Kone Pranhoro, a 30-year-old pursuing a PhD in economics, said it was “a good opportunity for the future generation.”

“We hope that politics will never be involved in the universities again,” he said.

Asia has surpassed Latin America as the largest source of new immigrants to the United States, according to a major new report that found that Asian-Americans also enjoy the highest incomes and best education of any racial group in the United States.

The 214-page report, released Tuesday by the Pew Research Centre, said Asian-Americans now constitute nearly six percent of the total U.S. population, or some 18.2 million people. That’s a more than five-fold increase since 1965, when immigration laws were liberalised to permit more non-Europeans to come to the United States.

Asian immigration has risen steadily since 1965, according to the report, entitled “The Rise of Asian Americans”, but the growth rate appears to have accelerated in the last few decades, with nearly three out of every four-Americans with Asian ancestry having been born abroad. Japanese-Americans are the only sub-group in which the majority was born in the United States.

“A century ago, most Asian Americans were low-skilled, low-wage laborers crowded into ethnic enclaves and targets of official discrimination,” the report stated. “Today they are the most likely of any major racial or ethnic group in America to live in mixed neighborhoods and to marry across racial lines.”

This shift is part of a trend that would seem to indicate that Americans are becoming more tolerant towards immigrants, especially Asian-American ones. A 2010 Pew survey found that among white Americans, 62 percent “would be fine” with a relative marrying interracially, particularly someone who is black, Hispanic or Asian, up from 51 percent in 2001.

Chinese-Americans comprised the largest sub-group of all Asian-Americans, with about four million people, or about 23 percent of the total. They were followed by Filipino-Americans (3.4 million), Indian-Americans (3.2), Vietnamese-Americans (1.74), Korean-Americans (1.71) and Japanese-Americans (1.3). Together, those six sub-groups are the vast majority of the total Asian population in the United States.

Traditional values: Education and hard work

“Many Asians come to the United States because they still perceive it as a land of opportunity,” Andrew Lam, an editor at New America Media, an umbrella group of ethnic news organisations, told IPS.

The report, based in part on recent telephone interviews in English and seven other languages with a nationally representative sample of more than 3,500 Asian-Americans, also found that Asian-Americans place significantly more emphasis on attaining higher education and working hard than other racial groups in the United States.

While 93 percent of respondents in the poll said they believed that Americans who hailed from the same country of origin are “very hard-working”, only 57 percent of those respondents agreed that the same held true for their American counterparts as a whole.

Asian-Americans stand out for their educational achievements, in particular. While 26 percent of the U.S. population has a bachelor’s degree or higher, the comparable figure for Asians is 49 percent – nearly twice as high – and 18 percentage points higher than white Americans. The more recent arrivals have an even higher percentage – 61 percent among adults aged 25 to 64.

Asian-Americans also stand out compared to their cohorts in their home countries. On average, about 26 percent of Japanese and South Koreans in the same age group have a bachelor’s degree, compared to nearly 70 percent of comparably aged recent immigrants from those two countries.

Financial and economic aspects

According to the Department of Labour, the unemployment rate among Asians as a group is less than in America as a whole. The Asian-American unemployment rate stands at about 7.5 percent, lower than any other demographic, including white (8.7 percent), black (16) and Hispanic (12.5) and lower than the national unemployment rate of 8.2 percent.

The view among various Asian groups can differ significantly in terms of education and income. Indian-Americans, for example, lead all other sub-groups in both categories. Americans with Korean, Vietnamese or Chinese ancestry suffer higher poverty rates than does the general public, while those with Indian, Japanese or Filipino origins have lower rates.

And while the median household income in 2010 for the general U.S. population was nearly 50,000 dollars, for Asian-Americans the median figure was 66,000, according to the report.

Findings from the U.S. Census Bureau fall along the similar lines: between 2002 and 2007, Asian-owned businesses increased 40.4 percent – nearly twice the national rate – amounting to 1.5 million total businesses, generating more than half a trillion dollars in receipts and employing nearly three million people.

“Asian-owned businesses continued to be one of the strongest segments of our nation’s economy,” said Census Bureau Deputy Director Thomas Mesenbourg.

Asians’ success, however, has no helped alleviate racial tensions. In April, D.C. Councilman Marion Barry was caught on tape making derogatory comments about Asian-Americans and their businesses.

“We’ve got to do something about these Asians coming in, opening up businesses – those dirty shops,” Barry said, after winning his city’s Democratic primary, “They ought to go.”

Census data compiled by Pew suggests that Asian immigrants outnumbered Hispanic immigrants at some point between 2007 and 2010. In 2007, about 540,000 Hispanics – both documented and undocumented – came to the United States, while only 390,000 Asians did so.

But by 2010, about 430,000 Asians – or 36 percent of all new immigrants – arrived here, compared to about 370,000 Hispanics.

The reversal appears to have resulted primarily from a decrease in Hispanic immigration, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis, when a combination of harsh anti-immigrant legislation at the state level, tighter border security, and the slump in the U.S. economy (especially its construction industry, where many male Hispanic immigrants have found work) discouraged many would-be immigrants from crossing the border.

Former university graduates, current students and professors are embroiled in an unusual scandal this exam season, as news reports filtering in from around the Balkans reveal a major online trade in stolen final papers.

“I was shocked when I recognised my final paper, with only its title changed, posted on the website of my (Alma Mater) and credited to another person,” said Jelena Stojanovic (31), who graduated from the Belgrade Technology Faculty six years ago.

“I contacted the girl listed as the author and she admitted to buying the paper for 3,000 dinars (33 dollars) on a site that offers a database of final papers in all areas (of study),” Stojanovic told IPS. “I protested to my faculty, but they said it’s currently impossible to establish if the graduation paper is forged or not.”

Under the current education system, high schools and most university faculties require students to complete extensive final papers in order to be eligible for graduation. But the requirement appears to be too much effort for many, who are turning to the digital world for a quick fix to their end-of- semester blues.

Stojanovic is just one of thousands of graduates whose final papers have appeared on the seemingly enormous number of sites that offer term papers for a sum of 33-110 dollars, depending on the area of expertise. Short midterm papers or high school essays are sold for about five dollars.

‘Customers’ are offered the option of paying online using Serbian dinars, Croatian kunas, Bosnian marks and euros for Montenegro, as the database is easily able to serve Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Montenegrins due to the similar language spoken throughout the region.

The market is huge and covers an area of more than 15 million people. Serbia alone has a population of a million students at all levels of education.

“I believe that the universities’ practice of posting graduation papers online is being abused,” Stojanovic said. “But there’s no way to prove it or take legal action.”

So far, there is no clear law governing this kind of scheme in Serbia or anywhere else in the region. Experts say the laws are slow to follow the developments of modern technology.

“For the time being, the only way (to avoid the scandal) would be to register one’s graduation paper as intellectual property and sue those who use it illegally,” according to Vladimir Maric, from the Institute for Intellectual Property.

In the meantime, the business of obtaining online final papers appears to be flourishing.

Creators of the databases seem to have access to some of Serbia’s biggest Internet providers – thousands of netizens recently received an e-mail offering a shopping spree at a site with readymade graduation papers for high schools and various university faculties.

The papers on offer covered 44 areas, ranging from short essays on Serbian writers to highly sophisticated works on the history of Serbian international relations to analyses of technological processes in the textile industry.

Users must register and pay a small membership fee in order to gain access to the site, but they in turn are given no information about the site’s operators.

It was only recently that Serbia was “able to ban mobile phones and ensure that sophisticated equipment such as bugs were excluded from final exams,” said economics professor Rade Mitrovic.

“But we seem to be one step behind the imagination of students and their helpers,” he added.

Though there are no formal laws on cheating in Serbia, students caught doing so can be prevented by teachers at any education level – be it high school or university – from sitting the exam. They are usually allowed to take the exam the following semester.

So far, only one site with contents described as “illegal” has been shut down in Serbia and that too only because the Association of Serbian Publishers decided to push for closure of the site, which contained e-books by both domestic and international authors; universities and high schools have yet to take action.

Meanwhile, the public was recently stunned by the discovery that various degrees were forged as well.

“We recently checked some 2,000 diplomas (belonging to workers at) the electricity company of Montenegro,” said Velimir Tmusic, head of the inspection in Belgrade. “About 10 percent were forged, mostly from the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Economics in Pristina.”

In the past decades, many Montenegrins studied in Serbia or in Kosovo, so the check had to be carried out in Belgrade. Pristina, now Kosovo’s capital, was under the Serbian education system until 1999.

“Most of the forgeries were from the 90s,” Tmusic added, referencing the decade when lawlessness was common in the war-torn region.

Now, a simmering scandal about the newly elected president Tomislav Nikolic (60) is adding to the confusion.

Nikolic’s official biography says he graduated in 2007, and obtained a Master’s degree in 2011 at the Faculty for Management in the northern town of Novi Sad.

However Nikolic himself claimed that in 2007 he was studying at the Faculty of Law in his native Kragujevac. He was also unable, during a recent TV interview, to name a single professor at his alleged alma mater in Novi Sad. The public is still waiting for the president to clear these lingering doubts.

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