Honey Singh Virdee and Yojana Sharma
19 December 2010, University World News
Issue: 152
Universities and professors will join the ministry of education to support Malaysia's much-vaunted 'Talent Corporation', officially launched this month by Prime Minister Najib Razak to woo skilled workers to the country, particularly in the science and research sectors.
Higher Education Minister Mohamed Khaled Nordin has said the ministry would provide guidelines to public universities on how to spot and bring home academic talent.
"It will be a key performance indicator for public universities as we can gauge the strength of their [international] networking," Nordin said.
He added that the country would benefit from overseas academics' extensive networks and also their "publishing history", a key measure in international university rankings. They would also "improve the local academic culture and raise the rankings of local universities".
Ministry guidelines already say that foreign academics must constitute 20% of a research university's faculty.
The academic community will advise the government through the National Professors' Council formed by the prime minister in April this year. The Council comprises some 1,426 professors from all of the country's public higher education institutions.
Council chairman Zakri Adul Hamid, who is also Science Advisor to the prime minister, said he hoped the Talent Corporation would attract and retain "the most talented research scientists and engineers".
Council deputy chairman Shansul Amri Baharuddin said it was hoped initiatives to attract talent were "not just focusing on the researchers, scientists and engineers but also should include the social sciences and the humanities".
The Talent Corporation was formed to coordinate the policies of different ministries and departments including Higher Education, Science, Economics and Immigration.
The initiative focuses on Malaysians currently living abroad but will also include other foreign academics looking to further their careers.
Among the key initiatives to bring "world class talents" to Malaysia will be the introduction of a residency pass in April 2011, which will not require the holder to be tied to a specific employer to remain in the country. The 10-year limit for foreigners to work in Malaysia is also being relaxed.
"Some countries are offering a lot of incentives to attract talent," said Professor Zaini Ujang, Vice-chancellor of Universiti Technologi Malaysia. "Malaysia is offering not just jobs but also residence, research facilities and research partnerships."
But some are sceptical that the policies can reverse the brain drain of recent years, let alone set the country on the path to becoming a high income country by 2020, which is the prime minister's stated goal.
"Malaysia at the moment is trying to transform itself into a centre for education excellence and is internationalising higher education," said Noorsaadah Addul-Rahman, a professor of chemistry at the University of Malaya.
"But it is not clear what the objectives and functions of the Talent Corporation are. They are looking to bring in talent from outside. We are also doing that at our university but we have to train our own talent as well, we can't forever be bringing in brains from outside," Abdul-Rahman told University World News.
The country's previous Brain Gain Malaysia, managed by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation from 2006 on, and before that the Returning Expert programme launched in 2001, attracted fewer than 3,000 applicants, despite offering incentives such as tax exemptions and access to permanent residency for foreign spouses.
Only around 1,050 "networking scientists and knowledge workers" were brought into the country under Brain Gain Malaysia in the last four years and some of them may have since returned abroad.
"Brain Gain Malaysia was almost like the Talent Corporation but it was not successful. We have to provide the infrastructure and the environment for returning academics and researchers, apart from the money," said Abdul-Rahman.
She said Malaysia could be in competition with Singapore and China, which have similar policies to lure back talent. But she said Singapore had good research infrastructure to attract people from abroad, including excellent laboratories, while China was concentrating its efforts on a small number of universities upgrading the facilities to world-class standards to attract back top professors.
According to officials some 700,000 Malaysians are living abroad, around half of them in Singapore, with sizeable diasporas also in Australia, Britain and the US. Many companies complain of a lack of skilled workers and the government sees it as hindering its efforts to attract high-technology industries.
Monday, December 20, 2010
GLOBAL: Australia and South Africa pay top salaries
Geoff Maslen
19 December 2010, University World News
Issue: 152
It might come as a surprise to academics in South Africa but the purchasing power of their salaries, on average, is now higher than that of their counterparts in Canada, the UK and New Zealand, according to a survey of 46 Commonwealth universities. However South African academics earn 6% less than those in Australia - the top-ranked country when cost of living is taken into account.
At the same time, South Africa has the highest salary scales relative to national gross domestic product per capita and the overall average academic salary is seven times the GDP per capita. This is perhaps not surprising for a developing country where joblessness is high and average per capita income is low, and where there are deep inequalities between rich and poor.
The survey, taken over the past 12 months found that differences in average salaries between countries had reduced since the last survey three years ago. This suggests increased international competition for academic staff as well as efforts within individual countries to improve academic salary levels.
A report of the survey says the rate of growth in salaries in Canada, the UK and New Zealand has been higher than in Australia since the last survey. South Africa experienced the highest growth rate with a 51% increase over the past three years, but the report says this could be related to increased investment in higher education and efforts to restructure the sector, as well as high levels of inflation.
The survey was the seventh undertaken by the Association of Commonwealth Universities. The results take account of academic salary scales and associated benefits in 46 institutions across seven Commonwealth countries: Australia, Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa and the UK.
Provision of discretionary bonuses or market adjustments has increased significantly from the previous survey and is now offered at 63% of institutions compared with 41% in 2006-07, the report says. Several institutions also highlight specific recruitment and retention strategies, further pointing to the increased importance of attracting and retaining academic staff.
Australian universities continue to have some of the best pension and leave conditions, while Malaysia is notable for its extensive use of additional benefits on top of base salaries. These include set entertainment and housing benefits, as well as generous medical entitlements for employees and their dependents.
The report says 41 institutions in seven Commonwealth countries responded to the survey. Salary scales for academic staff were compared from point of entry up to professorial level and public sources provided information and data for an additional five universities in New Zealand.
Salary scales were analysed using a purchasing power parity conversion rate - the Big Mac Index - expressing all salaries in US dollars. For comparison of salary levels across the participating countries and over time, average salary levels were calculated.
The report says the PPP conversion factor incorporates the cost of living so salaries purchase the same goods and services in compared countries. Using a PPP conversion factor provides a more balanced basis for the international comparison of salary values than market exchange rates which are relatively volatile and do not reflect the cost of living in the countries concerned.
Participating countries were ranked according to their overall midpoint average, the arithmetic mean of the top and bottom of each scale averaged across all responses.
Australian academic salaries, at all levels except lecturer, continue to be above those of the other responding countries when cost of living was factored into the equation, the report says. The overall midpoint average of the Australian academic salary scales is US$83,670 or 6.4% higher than South Africa, the new second-placed country in the ranking.
The report says that had Singapore been included, it would have ranked highest of all participating countries, with overall midpoint average salaries 30% above Australia. But Singapore has not participated in the survey since the beginning of the 2000s and, because its sample this year was not representative, it was excluded.
South Africa ranks second overall with an average of PPP US$78,653 while Canada and the UK are in third and fourth place respectively. This is in contrast to the survey in 2006-07 when South Africa was at the bottom of the ranking.
Canada has an overall average salary of US$76,594, closely followed by the UK with US$76,377. New Zealand (US$68,863) ranks fifth when purchasing power is considered but the gap with its geographical neighbor, Australia, has narrowed considerably rising from 40% in 2006-07 to 21.5% in this survey.
South Africa has the highest salary scales relative to national GDP per capita (the overall average academic salary is seven times the GDP per capita) and also saw the highest level of growth in academic salary scales since the last survey (51%).
The report highlights the differences between the countries in setting academic salaries by examining individual countries' higher education funding and salary determination mechanisms. It also discusses salary negotiations and attraction and retention issues, as well as the internationalisation of higher education.
In Canada, provinces are responsible for funding while the eight main universities in New Zealand are state-owned. The report says this may contribute to the high diversity in salary levels in Canada and the relatively uniform levels of pay in New Zealand.
In South Africa, the large diversity in salary levels is due to the relatively high level of institutional autonomy while academics in public universities in Malaysia are part of the civil service, resulting in a relatively low impact on salary levels.
The report says these issues are particularly relevant as growing pressures on universities in terms of funding and accountability - intensified by the global economic crisis - have generated varied responses from the countries in the survey. This, in turn, may affect the level of pay for academics.
19 December 2010, University World News
Issue: 152
It might come as a surprise to academics in South Africa but the purchasing power of their salaries, on average, is now higher than that of their counterparts in Canada, the UK and New Zealand, according to a survey of 46 Commonwealth universities. However South African academics earn 6% less than those in Australia - the top-ranked country when cost of living is taken into account.
At the same time, South Africa has the highest salary scales relative to national gross domestic product per capita and the overall average academic salary is seven times the GDP per capita. This is perhaps not surprising for a developing country where joblessness is high and average per capita income is low, and where there are deep inequalities between rich and poor.
The survey, taken over the past 12 months found that differences in average salaries between countries had reduced since the last survey three years ago. This suggests increased international competition for academic staff as well as efforts within individual countries to improve academic salary levels.
A report of the survey says the rate of growth in salaries in Canada, the UK and New Zealand has been higher than in Australia since the last survey. South Africa experienced the highest growth rate with a 51% increase over the past three years, but the report says this could be related to increased investment in higher education and efforts to restructure the sector, as well as high levels of inflation.
The survey was the seventh undertaken by the Association of Commonwealth Universities. The results take account of academic salary scales and associated benefits in 46 institutions across seven Commonwealth countries: Australia, Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa and the UK.
Provision of discretionary bonuses or market adjustments has increased significantly from the previous survey and is now offered at 63% of institutions compared with 41% in 2006-07, the report says. Several institutions also highlight specific recruitment and retention strategies, further pointing to the increased importance of attracting and retaining academic staff.
Australian universities continue to have some of the best pension and leave conditions, while Malaysia is notable for its extensive use of additional benefits on top of base salaries. These include set entertainment and housing benefits, as well as generous medical entitlements for employees and their dependents.
The report says 41 institutions in seven Commonwealth countries responded to the survey. Salary scales for academic staff were compared from point of entry up to professorial level and public sources provided information and data for an additional five universities in New Zealand.
Salary scales were analysed using a purchasing power parity conversion rate - the Big Mac Index - expressing all salaries in US dollars. For comparison of salary levels across the participating countries and over time, average salary levels were calculated.
The report says the PPP conversion factor incorporates the cost of living so salaries purchase the same goods and services in compared countries. Using a PPP conversion factor provides a more balanced basis for the international comparison of salary values than market exchange rates which are relatively volatile and do not reflect the cost of living in the countries concerned.
Participating countries were ranked according to their overall midpoint average, the arithmetic mean of the top and bottom of each scale averaged across all responses.
Australian academic salaries, at all levels except lecturer, continue to be above those of the other responding countries when cost of living was factored into the equation, the report says. The overall midpoint average of the Australian academic salary scales is US$83,670 or 6.4% higher than South Africa, the new second-placed country in the ranking.
The report says that had Singapore been included, it would have ranked highest of all participating countries, with overall midpoint average salaries 30% above Australia. But Singapore has not participated in the survey since the beginning of the 2000s and, because its sample this year was not representative, it was excluded.
South Africa ranks second overall with an average of PPP US$78,653 while Canada and the UK are in third and fourth place respectively. This is in contrast to the survey in 2006-07 when South Africa was at the bottom of the ranking.
Canada has an overall average salary of US$76,594, closely followed by the UK with US$76,377. New Zealand (US$68,863) ranks fifth when purchasing power is considered but the gap with its geographical neighbor, Australia, has narrowed considerably rising from 40% in 2006-07 to 21.5% in this survey.
South Africa has the highest salary scales relative to national GDP per capita (the overall average academic salary is seven times the GDP per capita) and also saw the highest level of growth in academic salary scales since the last survey (51%).
The report highlights the differences between the countries in setting academic salaries by examining individual countries' higher education funding and salary determination mechanisms. It also discusses salary negotiations and attraction and retention issues, as well as the internationalisation of higher education.
In Canada, provinces are responsible for funding while the eight main universities in New Zealand are state-owned. The report says this may contribute to the high diversity in salary levels in Canada and the relatively uniform levels of pay in New Zealand.
In South Africa, the large diversity in salary levels is due to the relatively high level of institutional autonomy while academics in public universities in Malaysia are part of the civil service, resulting in a relatively low impact on salary levels.
The report says these issues are particularly relevant as growing pressures on universities in terms of funding and accountability - intensified by the global economic crisis - have generated varied responses from the countries in the survey. This, in turn, may affect the level of pay for academics.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
What Are Books Good For?
September 26, 2010, Chronicle Review
Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle Review
By William Germano
I've been wondering lately when books became the enemy. Scholars have always been people of the book, so it seems wrong that the faithful companion has been put on the defensive. Part of the problem is knowing what we mean exactly when we say "book." It's a slippery term for a format, a technology, a historical construct, and something else as well.
Maybe we need to redefine, or undefine, our terms. I'm struck by the fact that the designation "scholarly book," to name one relevant category, is in itself a back formation, like "acoustic guitar." Books began as works of great seriousness, mapping out the religious and legal dimensions of culture. In a sense, books were always scholarly. Who could produce them but serious people? Who had the linguistic training to decode them?
In the sense of having been around a long time, the book has a long story to tell, one that might be organized around four epochal events, at least in the West. In the beginning was the invention of writing and its appearance on various materials. The second was the development during the first years of the Christian era of the codex—the thing with pages and a cover—first as a supplement and eventually as a replacement for the older technology of the scroll. The third was what we think of as the Gutenberg moment, the European deployment of movable type, in the 15th century. And the fourth is, of course, the digital revolution in the middle of which we find ourselves today.
When we say "book," we hear the name of a physical object, even if we're thinking outside the codex. The codex bound text in a particular way, organizing words into pages, and as a result literally reframed ideas. The static text image on my desktop is the electronic cousin of late antiquity's reading invention. When my screen is still, or when I arrange text into two or four pages, like so much visual real estate, I am replicating a medieval codex, unbinding its beautifully illuminated pages. Yet reading digitally is also a scroll-like engagement—the fact that we "scroll down" connects us to a reading practice that dates back several millennia. One of the things that book historians study is the change in, and persistence of, reading technologies over time, and what those historians have demonstrated is that good technologies don't eradicate earlier good technologies. They overlap with them—or morph, so that the old and the new may persist alongside yet another development. Think Post-its, printed books, PC's, and iPads, all in the same office cubicle.
The book has a long history, but the concept of the "history of the book" is comparatively new. In the 1950s, two Frenchmen—Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin—brought out L'apparition du livre, or, in English, The Coming of the Book, a work of scholarship that became one of the signs marking the arrival of a new scholarly discipline. Book history's objective was analysis of the function of the book in European culture, and since the 1970s, it has continually expanded its scope, emerging as a trading zone among various disciplines, a rare scholarly arena where the work of librarians, archivists, and scholarly publishers can intersect with the work of traditional scholars and theorists, all members of what the economist Fritz Machlup termed the "knowledge industry."
In the long night of culture, we knowledge workers are restless sleepers. We need dreamers—in technology and science as well as the arts. Right now we are walking through two great dreams that are shaping the future of scholarship, even the very idea of scholarship and the role "the book" should play within it.
Great Dream No. 1 is universal access to knowledge. The cry to open the doors to information is heard everywhere. This dream means many things to many people, but for knowledge workers it means that scholarly books and journals can, and therefore should, be made available to all users. New technologies make that possible for the first time in human history, and as the argument goes, the existence of such possibilities obligates us to use them.
Great Dream No. 2 is the ideal of knowledge building as a self-correcting, collective exercise. Twenty years ago, nobody had Wikipedia, but when it arrived it took over the hearts and laptops of undergraduate students, and then of everyone else in the education business. Professional academic life would be poorer, or at least much slower, without it. The central premise of Wikipedia isn't speed but infinite self-correction, perpetually fine-tuning what we know. In our second dream, we expand our aggregated knowledge, quantitatively and qualitatively.
These two great dreams—the universal and the collective—should sound very familiar, since they are fundamentally the latest entries in Western culture's utopian tradition: Thomas More's Utopia, the Enlightenment's rational distribution of freedoms, Karl Marx's reorganization of labor. But their dark side—the troubling lump in the mattress—is the problem of books themselves, a problem always framed around the physical book and its limitations. The physical book takes up space, it may cost too much to buy and to make, it is heavy, only one person can read it at a time. Books deplete the greenery of our graying planet. Besides, the world and its technologies have replaced book reading with a quick dip into an electronic resource.
Against all that, there are classic arguments in favor of the book. Consider four.
The epistemological argument: Books are the material evidence of what we know. They are knowledge, and through them we discover what we know and who we are.
The cautionary or monitory argument: In their function as record-keepers, books transform history into the present and the present into history. Books cause us to remember and to prevent future generations from forgetting or misunderstanding us and the long collective story of particulars.
The technological argument: No predigital means of transmission has been as effective as the codex. Books don't need batteries. They're cheap in the scheme of things, and remarkably permanent. They travel well. The so-called invention of distance education, in the mid-20th century, was preceded at least 1,500 years earlier by books sent long distances from one early Christian community to another.
The autobiographical argument: Little else can demonstrate as clearly as a shelf of books (or possibly a refrigerator) who we are or imagine ourselves to be. This last argument has been given less respect than it might. Great and fancy libraries astound us, but it's the personal library where a scholar's serious work begins. Lose the personal library, and we become less than we are.
Those are four good arguments. But they don't make my case for books.
In 2009, Robert Darnton, formerly a professor of history at Princeton University and now director of the Harvard University Library, published a volume of more than three decades of essays, titled The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (PublicAffairs). Perhaps more than any others, those essays have helped shape the current conversation about books and scholarship, their history and their future. In essence, The Case for Books has naturalized an argument that the Enlightenment's Republic of Letters—with its democratic vista lined with books available to all comers—may be reinvented in the 21st century. Darnton helps us see the connection between "a republic of learning" and a republic of electronic letters. His thoughtful case falls short—how could it not?—of proposing a solution to the competing interests of the market and the user. But we need visions, which by definition lack the fine print that makes the wonderful possible.
The Enlightenment's concerns with spreading light and learning are amply demonstrated in the Darntonian vision of a digital democracy. Both celebrate the luminosity of knowledge, shining forth through the written word. I'm struck, though, by the word "case" in the title of The Case for Books. In arguing his case for books, the author makes reference to cases of historical archives and to the various legal cases surrounding copyright protection.
But there are other relevant uses of the word "case." One would have been familiar to publishers for the 100 years before computers reinvented first printing and then publishing. When the term "case" entered the book trade, at the end of the 19th century, it described what we today might call a binder. The purchaser could use the case to store issues of a journal or other periodical publications. (Twentieth-century English publishers developed the habit of referring to their hardcover books as published in cased editions, as if the text were free-standing and the pages likely to wander off on their own.) Books had been bound in leather for centuries, but for 19th-century English printers engaged in mass production for a general audience, they were encased between what rare-book dealers and some publishers refer to as the top and bottom boards of a book. To the working publisher circa 1950, the case for books was not the Darntonian vision of the ultimate digital repository but a simple covering, a protective armature.
There are earlier uses of the word "case" as well. The Oxford English Dictionary cites an earlier case from an Elizabethan devotional tract that warned, "Every mans case is the skinne of a sinner." The pious writer meant that we are not only sinners, we also are containers stuffed with sin—sort of sin sausages. In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's Egyptian queen bids her servants leave Marc Antony's corpse at the Monument: "Come, away," she tells them. "This case of that huge spirit now is cold." Cleopatra's words confirm the distinction between the box that contains our life and the life within it.
Is the book the physical, printed text in its protective case, or is it the knowledge that the hidden text is always prepared to reveal? The answer, of course, is that the book is both. And because the book is and is not the form in which it is presented, it can do its work between boards of calf, or morocco, or Kivar, or from the booklike window of an iPad or a Nook.
So what are books good for? My best answer is that books produce knowledge by encasing it. Books take ideas and set them down, transforming them through the limitations of space into thinking usable by others. In 1959, C.P. Snow threw down the challenge of "two cultures," the scientific and the humanistic, pursuing their separate, unconnected lives within developed societies. In the new-media ecology of the 21st century, we may not have closed that gap, but the two cultures of the contemporary world are the culture of data and the culture of narrative. Narrative is rarely collective. It isn't infinitely expandable. Narrative has a shape and a temporality, and it ends, just as our lives do. Books tell stories. Scholarly books tell scholarly stories.
Storytelling is central to the work of the narrative-driven disciplines—the humanities and the nonquantitative social sciences—and it is central to the communicative pleasures of reading. Even argument is a form of narrative. Different kinds of books are, of course, good for different things. Some should be created only for download and occasional access, as in the case of most reference projects, which these days are born digital or at least given dual passports. But scholarly writing requires narrative fortitude, on the part of writer and reader. There is nothing wiki about the last set of Cambridge University Press monographs I purchased, and in each I encounter an individual speaking subject.
Each single-author book is immensely particular, a story told as only one storyteller could recount it. Scholarship is a collagist, building the next iteration of what we know book by book. Stories end, and that, I think, is a very good thing. A single authorial voice is a kind of performance, with an audience of one at a time, and no performance should outstay its welcome. Because a book must end, it must have a shape, the arc of thought that demonstrates not only the writer's command of her or his subject but also that writer's respect for the reader. A book is its own set of bookends.
Even if a book is published or disseminated in digital form, freed from its materiality, that shaping case of the codex is the ghost in the knowledge-machine. We are the case for books. Our bodies hold the capacity to generate thousands of ideas, perhaps even a couple of full-length monographs, and maybe a trade book or two. If we can get them right, books are luminous versions of our ideas, bound by narrative structure so that others can encounter those better, smarter versions of us on the page or screen. Books make the case for us, for the identity of the individual as an embodiment of thinking in the world. The heart of what even scholars do is the endless task of making that world visible again and again by telling stories, complicated, nuanced, subtle stories that reshape us daily so that new forms of knowledge can shine out.
William Germano is dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. A longer version of this essay was presented as a talk at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses this summer.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
SINGAPORE: A shift from science to humanities
Stanislaus Jude Chan
The proposed tie-up between the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Yale University in the United States to set up a joint liberal-arts college in Singapore is more than just a university partnership. It represents a departure for resource-scarce Singapore's emphasis on technology and the sciences.
Science and technology have been promoted for decades and have been key drivers of the economy for the tiny but affluent island-state."
A liberal arts education is a new thing for most Singaporeans," said Kirpal Singh, an English literature and creative thinking lecturer at the Singapore Management University (SMU).
"Ours has been quite a sustained 'pragmatic' society which, basically, has adhered to a somewhat utilitarian philosophy of education, instrumentalist in its goals," Singh told University World News, referring to the need for education to be linked closely to economic goals.
But he believes liberal arts education will be vital to ensure Singapore's continued economic growth.
"Our current socio-political system is fast becoming outmoded," Singh said. "If we are not careful, we are going to be left way behind the rest of the world in terms of the way citizens think - and consequently feel - about crucial issues confronting a globalised world.
"The liberal arts in the US are seen as developing critical and analytical thinking through literature and the arts, and opening young minds to other cultural traditions, valuable for even scientists in a globalised world.
A liberal arts degree would bring about "much-needed changes, even transformation, in the way Singaporeans think about things", Singh said.
"The new economy is rapidly moving away from a narrow, traditional focus on science and technology," he said, adding that "thinking imaginatively" about science and technology will take over from merely using the available tools.
"Once liberal arts are accepted as a norm, we can look forward to a much greater - and much more robust - engagement with science and technology," Singh said.
Yale president Richard Levin has described the proposed tie-up as a "new educational model for the 21st century, contextualised especially for Asia. There has never been greater need for undergraduate education that cultivates critical inquiry".
"In a world that is increasingly interconnected, the qualities of mind developed through liberal education are perhaps more indispensable than ever in preparing students to understand and appreciate differences across cultures and national boundaries, and to address problems for which there are no easy solutions," he said.
Singapore's Education Minister Ng Eng Hen told reporters at the end of a recent four-day working trip to the US that such an education trains "the cut of mind" and "lends itself to the 21st century because many of our problems and challenges are multidisciplinary in nature".
Ng said a liberal arts college in Singapore would introduce "a more well-developed approach to the training of future leaders".
Singapore has also stepped up the funding of fine arts courses, with financing for the first time being made available for up to 400 new degree places in art, design and media.
However after years of promoting the sciences, and with the importance of science education for future careers firmly entrenched in the minds of parents, it is not at all clear that a liberal arts education will attract the best and the brightest or be seen as a preferred option.
The Yale tie-up is seen as a shrewd move by the government to persuade a sceptical public.
"To persuade people to accept a liberal arts education, the potential tying-up with a distinguished leader in liberal arts education - Yale - is a very good move," said Singh.
Sentiment on the ground for such a curriculum appears surprisingly encouraging. Darren Tan, whose son is a second-year undergraduate reading engineering at the Nanyang Technological University, believes it is the right time for Singapore to promote the liberal arts.
"There is a perception that having an arts education won't pay well in one's career. What are you even going to work as here? But maybe it's time Singaporeans appreciate the fact that while money is important, it is not all there is in life," said Tan.
Some parents, as the government intended, appeared more interested in the Yale tag than the course content.
"It's up to my children what they want to study and we'll fully support them in whatever way we can," said Rosalind Lee, a mother of two girls aged 16 and 18. While her elder daughter will likely miss out on the benefits as the new tie-up is only expected to come into fruition - if it goes through - in 2013, Lee said she was excited about the opportunities for her younger daughter.
"How often do you hear of a Singaporean saying she graduated from Yale?" she asked. Lee remained upbeat even when informed that degrees will not be granted by Yale, but NUS. "It will be a very strong brand name, nonetheless," she said.
Singapore and NUS will bear all expenses to set up and operate the proposed Yale-NUS College, with seats on the governing board to be shared evenly between Yale and NUS appointees.
Huang Zongwei, 28, an NUS graduate who obtained a masters degree from the University of Oxford and is now a doctoral student majoring in psychology at Yale University, told Singapore's Chinese language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao that the purpose of a liberal arts education was not only to expose students to a wide range of knowledge but also to nurture analytical and problem-solving skills.
"Possessing different modes of thinking is critically important to handling social issues. Future leaders should have this type of vision," Huang said.
"It is timely to consider introducing liberal arts education in Singapore," the country's education minister said in September, when first announcing the non-binding agreement between Yale and NUS to examine the proposal to set up a new liberal arts college.
"The government is supportive of NUS's and Yale's efforts to develop a liberal arts model that will attract top students, and that is contextualised to Singapore and Asia."
14 November 2010, University World News, Issue:147
The proposed tie-up between the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Yale University in the United States to set up a joint liberal-arts college in Singapore is more than just a university partnership. It represents a departure for resource-scarce Singapore's emphasis on technology and the sciences.
Science and technology have been promoted for decades and have been key drivers of the economy for the tiny but affluent island-state."
A liberal arts education is a new thing for most Singaporeans," said Kirpal Singh, an English literature and creative thinking lecturer at the Singapore Management University (SMU).
"Ours has been quite a sustained 'pragmatic' society which, basically, has adhered to a somewhat utilitarian philosophy of education, instrumentalist in its goals," Singh told University World News, referring to the need for education to be linked closely to economic goals.
But he believes liberal arts education will be vital to ensure Singapore's continued economic growth.
"Our current socio-political system is fast becoming outmoded," Singh said. "If we are not careful, we are going to be left way behind the rest of the world in terms of the way citizens think - and consequently feel - about crucial issues confronting a globalised world.
"The liberal arts in the US are seen as developing critical and analytical thinking through literature and the arts, and opening young minds to other cultural traditions, valuable for even scientists in a globalised world.
A liberal arts degree would bring about "much-needed changes, even transformation, in the way Singaporeans think about things", Singh said.
"The new economy is rapidly moving away from a narrow, traditional focus on science and technology," he said, adding that "thinking imaginatively" about science and technology will take over from merely using the available tools.
"Once liberal arts are accepted as a norm, we can look forward to a much greater - and much more robust - engagement with science and technology," Singh said.
Yale president Richard Levin has described the proposed tie-up as a "new educational model for the 21st century, contextualised especially for Asia. There has never been greater need for undergraduate education that cultivates critical inquiry".
"In a world that is increasingly interconnected, the qualities of mind developed through liberal education are perhaps more indispensable than ever in preparing students to understand and appreciate differences across cultures and national boundaries, and to address problems for which there are no easy solutions," he said.
Singapore's Education Minister Ng Eng Hen told reporters at the end of a recent four-day working trip to the US that such an education trains "the cut of mind" and "lends itself to the 21st century because many of our problems and challenges are multidisciplinary in nature".
Ng said a liberal arts college in Singapore would introduce "a more well-developed approach to the training of future leaders".
Singapore has also stepped up the funding of fine arts courses, with financing for the first time being made available for up to 400 new degree places in art, design and media.
However after years of promoting the sciences, and with the importance of science education for future careers firmly entrenched in the minds of parents, it is not at all clear that a liberal arts education will attract the best and the brightest or be seen as a preferred option.
The Yale tie-up is seen as a shrewd move by the government to persuade a sceptical public.
"To persuade people to accept a liberal arts education, the potential tying-up with a distinguished leader in liberal arts education - Yale - is a very good move," said Singh.
Sentiment on the ground for such a curriculum appears surprisingly encouraging. Darren Tan, whose son is a second-year undergraduate reading engineering at the Nanyang Technological University, believes it is the right time for Singapore to promote the liberal arts.
"There is a perception that having an arts education won't pay well in one's career. What are you even going to work as here? But maybe it's time Singaporeans appreciate the fact that while money is important, it is not all there is in life," said Tan.
Some parents, as the government intended, appeared more interested in the Yale tag than the course content.
"It's up to my children what they want to study and we'll fully support them in whatever way we can," said Rosalind Lee, a mother of two girls aged 16 and 18. While her elder daughter will likely miss out on the benefits as the new tie-up is only expected to come into fruition - if it goes through - in 2013, Lee said she was excited about the opportunities for her younger daughter.
"How often do you hear of a Singaporean saying she graduated from Yale?" she asked. Lee remained upbeat even when informed that degrees will not be granted by Yale, but NUS. "It will be a very strong brand name, nonetheless," she said.
Singapore and NUS will bear all expenses to set up and operate the proposed Yale-NUS College, with seats on the governing board to be shared evenly between Yale and NUS appointees.
Huang Zongwei, 28, an NUS graduate who obtained a masters degree from the University of Oxford and is now a doctoral student majoring in psychology at Yale University, told Singapore's Chinese language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao that the purpose of a liberal arts education was not only to expose students to a wide range of knowledge but also to nurture analytical and problem-solving skills.
"Possessing different modes of thinking is critically important to handling social issues. Future leaders should have this type of vision," Huang said.
"It is timely to consider introducing liberal arts education in Singapore," the country's education minister said in September, when first announcing the non-binding agreement between Yale and NUS to examine the proposal to set up a new liberal arts college.
"The government is supportive of NUS's and Yale's efforts to develop a liberal arts model that will attract top students, and that is contextualised to Singapore and Asia."
14 November 2010, University World News, Issue:147
The Shadow Scholar
The man who writes your students' papers tells his story
Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle Review
By Ed Dante
Editor's note: Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.
The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): "You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?"
I've gotten pretty good at interpreting this kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with details about the paper. She needed the first section in a week. Seventy-five pages.
I told her no problem.
It truly was no problem. In the past year, I've written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won't find my name on a single paper.
Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle Review
I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.
You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists.
I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.
In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company's staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.
You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students' writing. I have seen the word "desperate" misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn't write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren't getting it.
For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?
I live well on the desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created. Granted, as a writer, I could earn more; certainly there are ways to earn less. But I never struggle to find work. And as my peers trudge through thankless office jobs that seem more intolerable with every passing month of our sustained recession, I am on pace for my best year yet. I will make roughly $66,000 this year. Not a king's ransom, but higher than what many actual educators are paid.
Of course, I know you are aware that cheating occurs. But you have no idea how deeply this kind of cheating penetrates the academic system, much less how to stop it. Last summer The New York Times reported that 61 percent of undergraduates have admitted to some form of cheating on assignments and exams. Yet there is little discussion about custom papers and how they differ from more-detectable forms of plagiarism, or about why students cheat in the first place.
It is my hope that this essay will initiate such a conversation. As for me, I'm planning to retire. I'm tired of helping you make your students look competent.
It is late in the semester when the business student contacts me, a time when I typically juggle deadlines and push out 20 to 40 pages a day. I had written a short research proposal for her a few weeks before, suggesting a project that connected a surge of unethical business practices to the patterns of trade liberalization. The proposal was approved, and now I had six days to complete the assignment. This was not quite a rush order, which we get top dollar to write. This assignment would be priced at a standard $2,000, half of which goes in my pocket.
A few hours after I had agreed to write the paper, I received the following e-mail: "sending sorces for ur to use thanx."
I did not reply immediately. One hour later, I received another message:
"did u get the sorce I send
please where you are now?
Desprit to pass spring projict"
Not only was this student going to be a constant thorn in my side, but she also communicated in haiku, each less decipherable than the one before it. I let her know that I was giving her work the utmost attention, that I had received her sources, and that I would be in touch if I had any questions. Then I put it aside.
From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.
For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let's be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.
As for the first two types of students—the ESL and the hopelessly deficient—colleges are utterly failing them. Students who come to American universities from other countries find that their efforts to learn a new language are confounded not only by cultural difficulties but also by the pressures of grading. The focus on evaluation rather than education means that those who haven't mastered English must do so quickly or suffer the consequences. My service provides a particularly quick way to "master" English. And those who are hopelessly deficient—a euphemism, I admit—struggle with communication in general.
Two days had passed since I last heard from the business student. Overnight I had received 14 e-mails from her. She had additional instructions for the assignment, such as "but more again please make sure they are a good link betwee the leticture review and all the chapter and the benfet of my paper. finally do you think the level of this work? how match i can get it?"
I'll admit, I didn't fully understand that one.
It was followed by some clarification: "where u are can you get my messages? Please I pay a lot and dont have ao to faile I strated to get very worry."
Her messages had arrived between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. Again I assured her I had the matter under control.
It was true. At this point, there are few academic challenges that I find intimidating. You name it, I've been paid to write about it.
Customers' orders are endlessly different yet strangely all the same. No matter what the subject, clients want to be assured that their assignment is in capable hands. It would be terrible to think that your Ivy League graduate thesis was riding on the work ethic and perspicacity of a public-university slacker. So part of my job is to be whatever my clients want me to be. I say yes when I am asked if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked if I have professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say yes when asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine and documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal.
The subject matter, the grade level, the college, the course—these things are irrelevant to me. Prices are determined per page and are based on how long I have to complete the assignment. As long as it doesn't require me to do any math or video-documented animal husbandry, I will write anything.
I have completed countless online courses. Students provide me with passwords and user names so I can access key documents and online exams. In some instances, I have even contributed to weekly online discussions with other students in the class.
I have become a master of the admissions essay. I have written these for undergraduate, master's, and doctoral programs, some at elite universities. I can explain exactly why you're Brown material, why the Wharton M.B.A. program would benefit from your presence, how certain life experiences have prepared you for the rigors of your chosen course of study. I do not mean to be insensitive, but I can't tell you how many times I've been paid to write about somebody helping a loved one battle cancer. I've written essays that could be adapted into Meryl Streep movies.
I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow. I have been commissioned to write many a passionate condemnation of America's moral decay as exemplified by abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution. All in all, we may presume that clerical authorities see these as a greater threat than the plagiarism committed by the future frocked.
With respect to America's nurses, fear not. Our lives are in capable hands—just hands that can't write a lick. Nursing students account for one of my company's biggest customer bases. I've written case-management plans, reports on nursing ethics, and essays on why nurse practitioners are lighting the way to the future of medicine. I've even written pharmaceutical-treatment courses, for patients who I hope were hypothetical.
I, who have no name, no opinions, and no style, have written so many papers at this point, including legal briefs, military-strategy assessments, poems, lab reports, and, yes, even papers on academic integrity, that it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I'd say education is the worst. I've written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I've written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I've synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I've written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I've completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents. (Future educators of America, I know who you are.)
As the deadline for the business-ethics paper approaches, I think about what's ahead of me. Whenever I take on an assignment this large, I get a certain physical sensation. My body says: Are you sure you want to do this again? You know how much it hurt the last time. You know this student will be with you for a long time. You know you will become her emergency contact, her guidance counselor and life raft. You know that for the 48 hours that you dedicate to writing this paper, you will cease all human functions but typing, you will Google until the term has lost all meaning, and you will drink enough coffee to fuel a revolution in a small Central American country.
But then there's the money, the sense that I must capitalize on opportunity, and even a bit of a thrill in seeing whether I can do it.
And I can. It's not implausible to write a 75-page paper in two days. It's just miserable. I don't need much sleep, and when I get cranking, I can churn out four or five pages an hour. First I lay out the sections of an assignment—introduction, problem statement, methodology, literature review, findings, conclusion—whatever the instructions call for. Then I start Googling.
I haven't been to a library once since I started doing this job. Amazon is quite generous about free samples. If I can find a single page from a particular text, I can cobble that into a report, deducing what I don't know from customer reviews and publisher blurbs. Google Scholar is a great source for material, providing the abstract of nearly any journal article. And of course, there's Wikipedia, which is often my first stop when dealing with unfamiliar subjects. Naturally one must verify such material elsewhere, but I've taken hundreds of crash courses this way.
After I've gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph.
I've also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: "A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come." Fill in the blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignment's instructions.
How good is the product created by this process? That depends—on the day, my mood, how many other assignments I am working on. It also depends on the customer, his or her expectations, and the degree to which the completed work exceeds his or her abilities. I don't ever edit my assignments. That way I get fewer customer requests to "dumb it down." So some of my work is great. Some of it is not so great. Most of my clients do not have the wherewithal to tell the difference, which probably means that in most cases the work is better than what the student would have produced on his or her own. I've actually had customers thank me for being clever enough to insert typos. "Nice touch," they'll say.
I've read enough academic material to know that I'm not the only bullshit artist out there. I think about how Dickens got paid per word and how, as a result, Bleak House is ... well, let's be diplomatic and say exhaustive. Dickens is a role model for me.
So how does someone become a custom-paper writer? The story of how I got into this job may be instructive. It is mostly about the tremendous disappointment that awaited me in college.
My distaste for the early hours and regimented nature of high school was tempered by the promise of the educational community ahead, with its free exchange of ideas and access to great minds. How dispiriting to find out that college was just another place where grades were grubbed, competition overshadowed personal growth, and the threat of failure was used to encourage learning.
Although my university experience did not live up to its vaunted reputation, it did lead me to where I am today. I was raised in an upper-middle-class family, but I went to college in a poor neighborhood. I fit in really well: After paying my tuition, I didn't have a cent to my name. I had nothing but a meal plan and my roommate's computer. But I was determined to write for a living, and, moreover, to spend these extremely expensive years learning how to do so. When I completed my first novel, in the summer between sophomore and junior years, I contacted the English department about creating an independent study around editing and publishing it. I was received like a mental patient. I was told, "There's nothing like that here." I was told that I could go back to my classes, sit in my lectures, and fill out Scantron tests until I graduated.
I didn't much care for my classes, though. I slept late and spent the afternoons working on my own material. Then a funny thing happened. Here I was, begging anybody in authority to take my work seriously. But my classmates did. They saw my abilities and my abundance of free time. They saw a value that the university did not.
It turned out that my lazy, Xanax-snorting, Miller-swilling classmates were thrilled to pay me to write their papers. And I was thrilled to take their money. Imagine you are crumbling under the weight of university-issued parking tickets and self-doubt when a frat boy offers you cash to write about Plato. Doing that job was a no-brainer. Word of my services spread quickly, especially through the fraternities. Soon I was receiving calls from strangers who wanted to commission my work. I was a writer!
Nearly a decade later, students, not publishers, still come from everywhere to find me.
I work hard for a living. I'm nice to people. But I understand that in simple terms, I'm the bad guy. I see where I'm vulnerable to ethical scrutiny.
But pointing the finger at me is too easy. Why does my business thrive? Why do so many students prefer to cheat rather than do their own work?
Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat.
You know what's never happened? I've never had a client complain that he'd been expelled from school, that the originality of his work had been questioned, that some disciplinary action had been taken. As far as I know, not one of my customers has ever been caught.
With just two days to go, I was finally ready to throw myself into the business assignment. I turned off my phone, caged myself in my office, and went through the purgatory of cramming the summation of a student's alleged education into a weekend. Try it sometime. After the 20th hour on a single subject, you have an almost-out-of-body experience.
My client was thrilled with my work. She told me that she would present the chapter to her mentor and get back to me with our next steps. Two weeks passed, by which time the assignment was but a distant memory, obscured by the several hundred pages I had written since. On a Wednesday evening, I received the following e-mail:
"Thanx u so much for the chapter is going very good the porfesser likes it but wants the folloing suggestions please what do you thing?:
"'The hypothesis is interesting but I'd like to see it a bit more focused. Choose a specific connection and try to prove it.'
"What shoudwe say?"
This happens a lot. I get paid per assignment. But with longer papers, the student starts to think of me as a personal educational counselor. She paid me to write a one-page response to her professor, and then she paid me to revise her paper. I completed each of these assignments, sustaining the voice that the student had established and maintaining the front of competence from some invisible location far beneath the ivory tower.
The 75-page paper on business ethics ultimately expanded into a 160-page graduate thesis, every word of which was written by me. I can't remember the name of my client, but it's her name on my work. We collaborated for months. As with so many other topics I tackle, the connection between unethical business practices and trade liberalization became a subtext to my everyday life.
So, of course, you can imagine my excitement when I received the good news:
"thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now".
The Chronicle Review, November 12, 2010
Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle Review
By Ed Dante
Editor's note: Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.
The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): "You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?"
I've gotten pretty good at interpreting this kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with details about the paper. She needed the first section in a week. Seventy-five pages.
I told her no problem.
It truly was no problem. In the past year, I've written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won't find my name on a single paper.
Jonathan Barkat for The Chronicle Review
I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.
You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists.
I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.
In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company's staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.
You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students' writing. I have seen the word "desperate" misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn't write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren't getting it.
For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?
I live well on the desperation, misery, and incompetence that your educational system has created. Granted, as a writer, I could earn more; certainly there are ways to earn less. But I never struggle to find work. And as my peers trudge through thankless office jobs that seem more intolerable with every passing month of our sustained recession, I am on pace for my best year yet. I will make roughly $66,000 this year. Not a king's ransom, but higher than what many actual educators are paid.
Of course, I know you are aware that cheating occurs. But you have no idea how deeply this kind of cheating penetrates the academic system, much less how to stop it. Last summer The New York Times reported that 61 percent of undergraduates have admitted to some form of cheating on assignments and exams. Yet there is little discussion about custom papers and how they differ from more-detectable forms of plagiarism, or about why students cheat in the first place.
It is my hope that this essay will initiate such a conversation. As for me, I'm planning to retire. I'm tired of helping you make your students look competent.
It is late in the semester when the business student contacts me, a time when I typically juggle deadlines and push out 20 to 40 pages a day. I had written a short research proposal for her a few weeks before, suggesting a project that connected a surge of unethical business practices to the patterns of trade liberalization. The proposal was approved, and now I had six days to complete the assignment. This was not quite a rush order, which we get top dollar to write. This assignment would be priced at a standard $2,000, half of which goes in my pocket.
A few hours after I had agreed to write the paper, I received the following e-mail: "sending sorces for ur to use thanx."
I did not reply immediately. One hour later, I received another message:
"did u get the sorce I send
please where you are now?
Desprit to pass spring projict"
Not only was this student going to be a constant thorn in my side, but she also communicated in haiku, each less decipherable than the one before it. I let her know that I was giving her work the utmost attention, that I had received her sources, and that I would be in touch if I had any questions. Then I put it aside.
From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.
For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let's be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.
As for the first two types of students—the ESL and the hopelessly deficient—colleges are utterly failing them. Students who come to American universities from other countries find that their efforts to learn a new language are confounded not only by cultural difficulties but also by the pressures of grading. The focus on evaluation rather than education means that those who haven't mastered English must do so quickly or suffer the consequences. My service provides a particularly quick way to "master" English. And those who are hopelessly deficient—a euphemism, I admit—struggle with communication in general.
Two days had passed since I last heard from the business student. Overnight I had received 14 e-mails from her. She had additional instructions for the assignment, such as "but more again please make sure they are a good link betwee the leticture review and all the chapter and the benfet of my paper. finally do you think the level of this work? how match i can get it?"
I'll admit, I didn't fully understand that one.
It was followed by some clarification: "where u are can you get my messages? Please I pay a lot and dont have ao to faile I strated to get very worry."
Her messages had arrived between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. Again I assured her I had the matter under control.
It was true. At this point, there are few academic challenges that I find intimidating. You name it, I've been paid to write about it.
Customers' orders are endlessly different yet strangely all the same. No matter what the subject, clients want to be assured that their assignment is in capable hands. It would be terrible to think that your Ivy League graduate thesis was riding on the work ethic and perspicacity of a public-university slacker. So part of my job is to be whatever my clients want me to be. I say yes when I am asked if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked if I have professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say yes when asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine and documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal.
The subject matter, the grade level, the college, the course—these things are irrelevant to me. Prices are determined per page and are based on how long I have to complete the assignment. As long as it doesn't require me to do any math or video-documented animal husbandry, I will write anything.
I have completed countless online courses. Students provide me with passwords and user names so I can access key documents and online exams. In some instances, I have even contributed to weekly online discussions with other students in the class.
I have become a master of the admissions essay. I have written these for undergraduate, master's, and doctoral programs, some at elite universities. I can explain exactly why you're Brown material, why the Wharton M.B.A. program would benefit from your presence, how certain life experiences have prepared you for the rigors of your chosen course of study. I do not mean to be insensitive, but I can't tell you how many times I've been paid to write about somebody helping a loved one battle cancer. I've written essays that could be adapted into Meryl Streep movies.
I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow. I have been commissioned to write many a passionate condemnation of America's moral decay as exemplified by abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution. All in all, we may presume that clerical authorities see these as a greater threat than the plagiarism committed by the future frocked.
With respect to America's nurses, fear not. Our lives are in capable hands—just hands that can't write a lick. Nursing students account for one of my company's biggest customer bases. I've written case-management plans, reports on nursing ethics, and essays on why nurse practitioners are lighting the way to the future of medicine. I've even written pharmaceutical-treatment courses, for patients who I hope were hypothetical.
I, who have no name, no opinions, and no style, have written so many papers at this point, including legal briefs, military-strategy assessments, poems, lab reports, and, yes, even papers on academic integrity, that it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I'd say education is the worst. I've written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I've written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I've synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I've written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I've completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents. (Future educators of America, I know who you are.)
As the deadline for the business-ethics paper approaches, I think about what's ahead of me. Whenever I take on an assignment this large, I get a certain physical sensation. My body says: Are you sure you want to do this again? You know how much it hurt the last time. You know this student will be with you for a long time. You know you will become her emergency contact, her guidance counselor and life raft. You know that for the 48 hours that you dedicate to writing this paper, you will cease all human functions but typing, you will Google until the term has lost all meaning, and you will drink enough coffee to fuel a revolution in a small Central American country.
But then there's the money, the sense that I must capitalize on opportunity, and even a bit of a thrill in seeing whether I can do it.
And I can. It's not implausible to write a 75-page paper in two days. It's just miserable. I don't need much sleep, and when I get cranking, I can churn out four or five pages an hour. First I lay out the sections of an assignment—introduction, problem statement, methodology, literature review, findings, conclusion—whatever the instructions call for. Then I start Googling.
I haven't been to a library once since I started doing this job. Amazon is quite generous about free samples. If I can find a single page from a particular text, I can cobble that into a report, deducing what I don't know from customer reviews and publisher blurbs. Google Scholar is a great source for material, providing the abstract of nearly any journal article. And of course, there's Wikipedia, which is often my first stop when dealing with unfamiliar subjects. Naturally one must verify such material elsewhere, but I've taken hundreds of crash courses this way.
After I've gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph.
I've also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: "A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come." Fill in the blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignment's instructions.
How good is the product created by this process? That depends—on the day, my mood, how many other assignments I am working on. It also depends on the customer, his or her expectations, and the degree to which the completed work exceeds his or her abilities. I don't ever edit my assignments. That way I get fewer customer requests to "dumb it down." So some of my work is great. Some of it is not so great. Most of my clients do not have the wherewithal to tell the difference, which probably means that in most cases the work is better than what the student would have produced on his or her own. I've actually had customers thank me for being clever enough to insert typos. "Nice touch," they'll say.
I've read enough academic material to know that I'm not the only bullshit artist out there. I think about how Dickens got paid per word and how, as a result, Bleak House is ... well, let's be diplomatic and say exhaustive. Dickens is a role model for me.
So how does someone become a custom-paper writer? The story of how I got into this job may be instructive. It is mostly about the tremendous disappointment that awaited me in college.
My distaste for the early hours and regimented nature of high school was tempered by the promise of the educational community ahead, with its free exchange of ideas and access to great minds. How dispiriting to find out that college was just another place where grades were grubbed, competition overshadowed personal growth, and the threat of failure was used to encourage learning.
Although my university experience did not live up to its vaunted reputation, it did lead me to where I am today. I was raised in an upper-middle-class family, but I went to college in a poor neighborhood. I fit in really well: After paying my tuition, I didn't have a cent to my name. I had nothing but a meal plan and my roommate's computer. But I was determined to write for a living, and, moreover, to spend these extremely expensive years learning how to do so. When I completed my first novel, in the summer between sophomore and junior years, I contacted the English department about creating an independent study around editing and publishing it. I was received like a mental patient. I was told, "There's nothing like that here." I was told that I could go back to my classes, sit in my lectures, and fill out Scantron tests until I graduated.
I didn't much care for my classes, though. I slept late and spent the afternoons working on my own material. Then a funny thing happened. Here I was, begging anybody in authority to take my work seriously. But my classmates did. They saw my abilities and my abundance of free time. They saw a value that the university did not.
It turned out that my lazy, Xanax-snorting, Miller-swilling classmates were thrilled to pay me to write their papers. And I was thrilled to take their money. Imagine you are crumbling under the weight of university-issued parking tickets and self-doubt when a frat boy offers you cash to write about Plato. Doing that job was a no-brainer. Word of my services spread quickly, especially through the fraternities. Soon I was receiving calls from strangers who wanted to commission my work. I was a writer!
Nearly a decade later, students, not publishers, still come from everywhere to find me.
I work hard for a living. I'm nice to people. But I understand that in simple terms, I'm the bad guy. I see where I'm vulnerable to ethical scrutiny.
But pointing the finger at me is too easy. Why does my business thrive? Why do so many students prefer to cheat rather than do their own work?
Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat.
You know what's never happened? I've never had a client complain that he'd been expelled from school, that the originality of his work had been questioned, that some disciplinary action had been taken. As far as I know, not one of my customers has ever been caught.
With just two days to go, I was finally ready to throw myself into the business assignment. I turned off my phone, caged myself in my office, and went through the purgatory of cramming the summation of a student's alleged education into a weekend. Try it sometime. After the 20th hour on a single subject, you have an almost-out-of-body experience.
My client was thrilled with my work. She told me that she would present the chapter to her mentor and get back to me with our next steps. Two weeks passed, by which time the assignment was but a distant memory, obscured by the several hundred pages I had written since. On a Wednesday evening, I received the following e-mail:
"Thanx u so much for the chapter is going very good the porfesser likes it but wants the folloing suggestions please what do you thing?:
"'The hypothesis is interesting but I'd like to see it a bit more focused. Choose a specific connection and try to prove it.'
"What shoudwe say?"
This happens a lot. I get paid per assignment. But with longer papers, the student starts to think of me as a personal educational counselor. She paid me to write a one-page response to her professor, and then she paid me to revise her paper. I completed each of these assignments, sustaining the voice that the student had established and maintaining the front of competence from some invisible location far beneath the ivory tower.
The 75-page paper on business ethics ultimately expanded into a 160-page graduate thesis, every word of which was written by me. I can't remember the name of my client, but it's her name on my work. We collaborated for months. As with so many other topics I tackle, the connection between unethical business practices and trade liberalization became a subtext to my everyday life.
So, of course, you can imagine my excitement when I received the good news:
"thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now".
The Chronicle Review, November 12, 2010
The Power of Peace and Unity
US President Barack Obama’s Nov. 10 Speech at the University of Indonesia November 10, 2010
Let me begin with a simple statement: Indonesia is a part of me. I first came to this country when my mother married an Indonesian man named Lolo Soetoro. As a young boy, I was coming to a different world. But the people of Indonesia quickly made me feel at home.
Jakarta looked very different in those days. The city was filled with buildings that were no more than a few stories tall. The Hotel Indonesia was one of the few high-rises, and there was just one brand new shopping center called Sarinah. Becaks outnumbered automobiles in those days, and the highway quickly gave way to unpaved roads and kampungs.
We moved to Menteng Dalam, where we lived in a small house with a mango tree out front. I learned to love Indonesia while flying kites, running along paddy fields, catching dragonflies, and buying satay and bakso from the street vendors. Most of all, I remember the people — the old men and women who welcomed us with smiles, the children who made a foreigner feel like a neighbor, and the teachers who helped me learn about the wider world.
Because Indonesia is made up of thousands of islands, hundreds of languages and people from scores of regions and ethnic groups, my times here helped me appreciate the common humanity of all people. And while my stepfather, like most Indonesians, was raised a Muslim, he firmly believed that all religions were worthy of respect. In this way, he reflected the spirit of religious tolerance that is enshrined in Indonesia’s Constitution, and that remains one of this country’s defining and inspiring characteristics.
I stayed here for four years — a time that helped shape my childhood, a time that saw the birth of my wonderful sister, Maya, and a time that made such an impression on my mother that she kept returning to Indonesia over the next 20 years to live, work and travel — pursuing her passion of promoting opportunity in Indonesia’s villages, particularly for women and girls. For her entire life, my mother held this place and its people close to her heart.
So much has changed in the four decades since I boarded a plane to move back to Hawaii. If you asked me — or any of my schoolmates who knew me back then — I don’t think any of us could have anticipated that I would one day come back to Jakarta as president of the United States. And few could have anticipated the remarkable story of Indonesia over these last four decades.
The Jakarta that I once knew has grown to a teeming city of nearly 10 million, with skyscrapers that dwarf the Hotel Indonesia, and thriving centers of culture and commerce. While my Indonesian friends and I used to run in fields with water buffalo and goats, a new generation of Indonesians is among the most wired in the world — connected through cellphones and social networks. And while Indonesia as a young nation focused inward, a growing Indonesia now plays a key role in the Asia Pacific and the global economy.
This change extends to politics. When my step-father was a boy, he watched his own father and older brother leave home to fight and die in the struggle for Indonesian independence. I’m happy to be here on Heroes Day to honor the memory of so many Indonesians who have sacrificed on behalf of this great country.
When I moved to Jakarta, it was 1967, a time that followed great suffering and conflict in parts of this country. Even though my step-father had served in the Army, the violence and killing during that time of political upheaval was largely unknown to me because it was unspoken by my Indonesian family and friends. In my household, like so many others across Indonesia, it was an invisible presence. Indonesians had their independence, but fear was not far away.
In the years since then, Indonesia has charted its own course through an extraordinary democratic transformation — from the rule of an iron fist to the rule of the people. In recent years, the world has watched with hope and admiration, as Indonesians embraced the peaceful transfer of power and the direct election of leaders. And just as your democracy is symbolized by your elected president and legislature, your democracy is sustained and fortified by its checks and balances: a dynamic civil society, political parties and unions, a vibrant media and engaged citizens who have ensured that in Indonesia there will be no turning back.
But even as this land of my youth has changed in so many ways, those things that I learned to love about Indonesia — that spirit of tolerance that is written into your Constitution, symbolized in your mosques and churches and temples and embodied in your people — still lives on. Bhinneka Tunggal Ika — unity in diversity. This is the foundation of Indonesia’s example to the world, and this is why Indonesia will play such an important role in the 21st century.
So today, I return to Indonesia as a friend, but also as a president who seeks a deep and enduring partnership between our two countries. Because as vast and diverse countries, as neighbors on either side of the Pacific and above all as democracies, the United States and Indonesia are bound together by shared interests and shared values.
Yesterday, President Yudhoyono and I announced a new Comprehensive Partnership between the United States and Indonesia. We are increasing ties between our governments in many different areas, and — just as importantly — we are increasing ties among our people. This is a partnership of equals, grounded in mutual interests and mutual respect.
With the rest of my time today, I’d like to talk about why the story I just told — the story of Indonesia since the days when I lived here — is so important to the United States, and to the world. I will focus on three areas that are closely related, and fundamental to human progress — development, democracy and religion.
Development
First, the friendship between the United States and Indonesia can advance our mutual interest in development.
When I moved to Indonesia, it would have been hard to imagine a future in which the prosperity of families in Chicago and Jakarta would be connected. But our economies are now global, and Indonesians have experienced both the promise and perils of globalization — from the shock of the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s to the millions lifted out of poverty. What that means — and what we learned in the recent economic crisis — is that we have a stake in each other’s success.
America has a stake in an Indonesia that is growing, with prosperity that is broadly shared among the Indonesian people — because a rising middle class here means new markets for our goods, as America is a market for yours. And so we are investing more in Indonesia, our exports have grown by nearly 50 percent, and we are opening doors for Americans and Indonesians to do business with one another.
America has a stake in an Indonesia that plays its rightful role in shaping the global economy. Gone are the days when seven or eight countries could come together to determine the direction of global markets. That is why the G-20 is now the center of international economic cooperation, so that emerging economies like Indonesia have a greater voice and bear greater responsibility. And through its leadership of the G-20’s anticorruption group, Indonesia should lead on the world stage and by example in embracing transparency and accountability.
America has a stake in an Indonesia that pursues sustainable development, because the way we grow will determine the quality of our lives and the health of our planet. That is why we are developing clean energy technologies that can power industry and preserve Indonesia’s precious natural resources — and America welcomes your country’s strong leadership in the global effort to combat climate change.
Above all, America has a stake in the success of the Indonesian people. Underneath the headlines of the day, we must build bridges between our peoples, because our future security and prosperity is shared. That is exactly what we are doing — by increased collaboration among our scientists and researchers, and by working together to foster entrepreneurship. And I am especially pleased that we have committed to double the number of American and Indonesian students studying in our respective countries — we want more Indonesian students in our schools, and more American students to come study in this country, so that we can forge new ties that last well into this young century.
These are the issues that really matter in our daily lives. Development, after all, is not simply about growth rates and numbers on a balance sheet. It’s about whether a child can learn the skills they need to make it in a changing world. It’s about whether a good idea is allowed to grow into a business, and not be suffocated by corruption. It’s about whether those forces that have transformed the Jakarta that I once knew —technology and trade and the flow of people and goods — translate into a better life for human beings, a life marked by dignity and opportunity. This kind of development is inseparable from the role of democracy.
Democracy
Today we sometimes hear that democracy stands in the way of economic progress. This is not a new argument. Particularly in times of change and economic uncertainty, some will say that it is easier to take a shortcut to development by trading away the rights of human beings for the power of the state. But that is not what I saw on my trip to India, and that is not what I see in Indonesia. Your achievements demonstrate that democracy and development reinforce one another.
Like any democracy, you have known setbacks along the way. America is no different. Our own constitution spoke of the effort to forge a “more perfect union,” and that is a journey we have traveled ever since, enduring civil war and struggles to extend rights to all our citizens. But it is precisely this effort that has allowed us to become stronger and more prosperous, while also becoming a more just and free society.
Like other countries that emerged from colonial rule in the last century, Indonesia struggled and sacrificed for the right to determine your destiny. That is what Heroes Day is all about — an Indonesia that belongs to Indonesians. But you also ultimately decided that freedom cannot mean replacing the strong hand of a colonizer with a strongman of your own.
Of course, democracy is messy. Not everyone likes the results of every election. You go through ups and downs. But the journey is worthwhile, and it goes beyond casting a ballot. It takes strong institutions to check the concentration of power. It takes open markets that allow individuals to thrive. It takes a free press and an independent justice system to root out abuse and excess, and to insist upon accountability. It takes open society and active citizens to reject inequality and injustice.
These are the forces that will propel Indonesia forward. And it will require a refusal to tolerate the corruption that stands in the way of opportunity, a commitment to transparency that gives every Indonesian a stake in their government, and a belief that the freedom that Indonesians have fought for is what holds this great nation together.
That is the message of the Indonesians who have advanced this democratic story — from those who fought in the Battle of Surabaya 55 years ago today to the students who marched peacefully for democracy in the 1990s, to leaders who have embraced the peaceful transition of power in this young century. Because ultimately, it will be the rights of citizens that will stitch together this remarkable nusantara that stretches from Sabang to Merauke — an insistence that every child born in this country should be treated equally, whether they come from Java or Aceh, Bali or Papua.
That effort extends to the example that Indonesia sets abroad. Indonesia took the initiative to establish the Bali Democracy Forum, an open forum for countries to share their experiences and best practices in fostering democracy. Indonesia has also been at the forefront of pushing for more attention to human rights within Asean The nations of Southeast Asia must have the right to determine their own destiny, and the United States will strongly support that right. But the people of Southeast Asia must have the right to determine their own destiny as well. That is why we condemned elections in Burma that were neither free nor fair. That is why we are supporting your vibrant civil society in working with counterparts across this region. Because there is no reason why respect for human rights should stop at the border of any country.
Hand in hand, that is what development and democracy are about — the notion that certain values are universal. Prosperity without freedom is just another form of poverty. Because there are aspirations that human beings share — the liberty of knowing that your leader is accountable to you, and that you won’t be locked up for disagreeing with them; the opportunity to get an education and to work with dignity; the freedom to practice your faith without fear or restriction.
Religion
Religion is the final topic I want to address today, and — like democracy and development — it is fundamental to the Indonesian story. Like the other Asian nations I am visiting on this trip, Indonesia is steeped in spirituality, a place where people worship God in many different ways. Along with this rich diversity, it is also home to the world’s largest Muslim population, a truth that I came to know as a boy when I heard the call to prayer across Jakarta.
Just as individuals are not defined solely by their faith, Indonesia is defined by more than its Muslim population. But we also know that relations between the United States and Muslim communities have frayed over many years. As president, I have made it a priority to begin to repair these relations. As a part of that effort, I went to Cairo last June, and called for a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one that creates a path for us to move beyond our differences.
I said then, and I will repeat now, that no single speech can eradicate years of mistrust. But I believed then, and I believe today, that we do have a choice. We can choose to be defined by our differences, and give in to a future of suspicion and mistrust. Or we can choose to do the hard work of forging common ground, and commit ourselves to the steady pursuit of progress. And I can promise you: No matter what setbacks may come, the United States is committed to human progress. That is who we are. That is what we have done. That is what we will do.
We know well the issues that have caused tensions for many years, issues that I addressed in Cairo. In the 17 months that have passed we have made some progress, but much more work remains to be done.
Innocent civilians in America, Indonesia and across the world are still targeted by violent extremists. I have made it clear that America is not, and never will be, at war with Islam. Instead, all of us must defeat Al Qaeda and its affiliates, who have no claim to be leaders of any religion — certainly not a great, world religion like Islam. But those who want to build must not cede ground to terrorists who seek to destroy. This is not a task for America alone. Indeed, here in Indonesia, you have made progress in rooting out terrorists and combating violent extremism.
In Afghanistan, we continue to work with a coalition of nations to build the capacity of the Afghan government to secure its future. Our shared interest is in building peace in a war-torn land — a peace that provides no safe-haven for violent extremists, and that provides hope for the Afghan people. Meanwhile, we have made progress on one of our core commitments, our effort to end the war in Iraq. One hundred thousand American troops have left Iraq. Iraqis have taken full responsibility for their security. And we will continue to support Iraq as it forms an inclusive government and we bring all of our troops home.
In the Middle East, we have faced false starts and setbacks, but we have been persistent in our pursuit of peace. Israelis and Palestinians restarted direct talks, but enormous obstacles remain. There should be no illusions that peace and security will come easy. But let there be no doubt. We will spare no effort in working for the outcome that is just, and that is in the interest of all the parties involved: two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.
The stakes are high in resolving these issues, and the others I have spoken about today. For our world has grown smaller and while those forces that connect us have unleashed opportunity, they also empower those who seek to derail progress. One bomb in a marketplace can obliterate the bustle of daily commerce. One whispered rumor can obscure the truth, and set off violence between communities that once lived in peace. In an age of rapid change and colliding cultures, what we share as human beings can be lost.
But I believe that the history of both America and Indonesia gives us hope. It’s a story written into our national mottos. E Pluribus Unum — out of many, one. Bhinneka Tunggal Ika — unity in diversity. We are two nations, which have travelled different paths. Yet our nations show that hundreds of millions who hold different beliefs can be united in freedom under one flag. And we are now building on that shared humanity — through the young people who will study in each other’s schools, through the entrepreneurs forging ties that can lead to prosperity, and through our embrace of fundamental democratic values and human aspirations.
Earlier today, I visited the Istiqlal mosque — a place of worship that was still under construction when I lived in Jakarta. I admired its soaring minaret, imposing dome and welcoming space. But its name and history also speak to what makes Indonesia great. Istiqlal means independence, and its construction was in part a testament to the nation’s struggle for freedom. Moreover, this house of worship for many thousands of Muslims was designed by a Christian architect.
Such is Indonesia’s spirit. Such is the message of Indonesia’s inclusive philosophy, Pancasila. Across an archipelago that contains some of God’s most beautiful creations, islands rising above an ocean named for peace, people choose to worship God as they please. Islam flourishes, but so do other faiths. Development is strengthened by an emerging democracy. Ancient traditions endure even as a rising power is on the move.
That is not to say that Indonesia is without imperfections. No country is. But here can be found the ability to bridge divides of race and region and religion — that ability to see yourself in all individuals. As a child of a different race coming from a distant country, I found this spirit in the greeting that I received upon moving here: Selamat Datang. As a Christian visiting a mosque on this visit, I found it in the words of a leader who was asked about my visit and said, “Muslims are also allowed in churches. We are all God’s followers.”
That spark of the divine lies within each of us. We cannot give in to doubt or cynicism or despair. The stories of Indonesia and America tell us that history is on the side of human progress, that unity is more powerful than division, and that the people of this world can live together in peace. May our two nations work together, with faith and determination, to share these truths with all mankind.
Let me begin with a simple statement: Indonesia is a part of me. I first came to this country when my mother married an Indonesian man named Lolo Soetoro. As a young boy, I was coming to a different world. But the people of Indonesia quickly made me feel at home.
Jakarta looked very different in those days. The city was filled with buildings that were no more than a few stories tall. The Hotel Indonesia was one of the few high-rises, and there was just one brand new shopping center called Sarinah. Becaks outnumbered automobiles in those days, and the highway quickly gave way to unpaved roads and kampungs.
We moved to Menteng Dalam, where we lived in a small house with a mango tree out front. I learned to love Indonesia while flying kites, running along paddy fields, catching dragonflies, and buying satay and bakso from the street vendors. Most of all, I remember the people — the old men and women who welcomed us with smiles, the children who made a foreigner feel like a neighbor, and the teachers who helped me learn about the wider world.
Because Indonesia is made up of thousands of islands, hundreds of languages and people from scores of regions and ethnic groups, my times here helped me appreciate the common humanity of all people. And while my stepfather, like most Indonesians, was raised a Muslim, he firmly believed that all religions were worthy of respect. In this way, he reflected the spirit of religious tolerance that is enshrined in Indonesia’s Constitution, and that remains one of this country’s defining and inspiring characteristics.
I stayed here for four years — a time that helped shape my childhood, a time that saw the birth of my wonderful sister, Maya, and a time that made such an impression on my mother that she kept returning to Indonesia over the next 20 years to live, work and travel — pursuing her passion of promoting opportunity in Indonesia’s villages, particularly for women and girls. For her entire life, my mother held this place and its people close to her heart.
So much has changed in the four decades since I boarded a plane to move back to Hawaii. If you asked me — or any of my schoolmates who knew me back then — I don’t think any of us could have anticipated that I would one day come back to Jakarta as president of the United States. And few could have anticipated the remarkable story of Indonesia over these last four decades.
The Jakarta that I once knew has grown to a teeming city of nearly 10 million, with skyscrapers that dwarf the Hotel Indonesia, and thriving centers of culture and commerce. While my Indonesian friends and I used to run in fields with water buffalo and goats, a new generation of Indonesians is among the most wired in the world — connected through cellphones and social networks. And while Indonesia as a young nation focused inward, a growing Indonesia now plays a key role in the Asia Pacific and the global economy.
This change extends to politics. When my step-father was a boy, he watched his own father and older brother leave home to fight and die in the struggle for Indonesian independence. I’m happy to be here on Heroes Day to honor the memory of so many Indonesians who have sacrificed on behalf of this great country.
When I moved to Jakarta, it was 1967, a time that followed great suffering and conflict in parts of this country. Even though my step-father had served in the Army, the violence and killing during that time of political upheaval was largely unknown to me because it was unspoken by my Indonesian family and friends. In my household, like so many others across Indonesia, it was an invisible presence. Indonesians had their independence, but fear was not far away.
In the years since then, Indonesia has charted its own course through an extraordinary democratic transformation — from the rule of an iron fist to the rule of the people. In recent years, the world has watched with hope and admiration, as Indonesians embraced the peaceful transfer of power and the direct election of leaders. And just as your democracy is symbolized by your elected president and legislature, your democracy is sustained and fortified by its checks and balances: a dynamic civil society, political parties and unions, a vibrant media and engaged citizens who have ensured that in Indonesia there will be no turning back.
But even as this land of my youth has changed in so many ways, those things that I learned to love about Indonesia — that spirit of tolerance that is written into your Constitution, symbolized in your mosques and churches and temples and embodied in your people — still lives on. Bhinneka Tunggal Ika — unity in diversity. This is the foundation of Indonesia’s example to the world, and this is why Indonesia will play such an important role in the 21st century.
So today, I return to Indonesia as a friend, but also as a president who seeks a deep and enduring partnership between our two countries. Because as vast and diverse countries, as neighbors on either side of the Pacific and above all as democracies, the United States and Indonesia are bound together by shared interests and shared values.
Yesterday, President Yudhoyono and I announced a new Comprehensive Partnership between the United States and Indonesia. We are increasing ties between our governments in many different areas, and — just as importantly — we are increasing ties among our people. This is a partnership of equals, grounded in mutual interests and mutual respect.
With the rest of my time today, I’d like to talk about why the story I just told — the story of Indonesia since the days when I lived here — is so important to the United States, and to the world. I will focus on three areas that are closely related, and fundamental to human progress — development, democracy and religion.
Development
First, the friendship between the United States and Indonesia can advance our mutual interest in development.
When I moved to Indonesia, it would have been hard to imagine a future in which the prosperity of families in Chicago and Jakarta would be connected. But our economies are now global, and Indonesians have experienced both the promise and perils of globalization — from the shock of the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s to the millions lifted out of poverty. What that means — and what we learned in the recent economic crisis — is that we have a stake in each other’s success.
America has a stake in an Indonesia that is growing, with prosperity that is broadly shared among the Indonesian people — because a rising middle class here means new markets for our goods, as America is a market for yours. And so we are investing more in Indonesia, our exports have grown by nearly 50 percent, and we are opening doors for Americans and Indonesians to do business with one another.
America has a stake in an Indonesia that plays its rightful role in shaping the global economy. Gone are the days when seven or eight countries could come together to determine the direction of global markets. That is why the G-20 is now the center of international economic cooperation, so that emerging economies like Indonesia have a greater voice and bear greater responsibility. And through its leadership of the G-20’s anticorruption group, Indonesia should lead on the world stage and by example in embracing transparency and accountability.
America has a stake in an Indonesia that pursues sustainable development, because the way we grow will determine the quality of our lives and the health of our planet. That is why we are developing clean energy technologies that can power industry and preserve Indonesia’s precious natural resources — and America welcomes your country’s strong leadership in the global effort to combat climate change.
Above all, America has a stake in the success of the Indonesian people. Underneath the headlines of the day, we must build bridges between our peoples, because our future security and prosperity is shared. That is exactly what we are doing — by increased collaboration among our scientists and researchers, and by working together to foster entrepreneurship. And I am especially pleased that we have committed to double the number of American and Indonesian students studying in our respective countries — we want more Indonesian students in our schools, and more American students to come study in this country, so that we can forge new ties that last well into this young century.
These are the issues that really matter in our daily lives. Development, after all, is not simply about growth rates and numbers on a balance sheet. It’s about whether a child can learn the skills they need to make it in a changing world. It’s about whether a good idea is allowed to grow into a business, and not be suffocated by corruption. It’s about whether those forces that have transformed the Jakarta that I once knew —technology and trade and the flow of people and goods — translate into a better life for human beings, a life marked by dignity and opportunity. This kind of development is inseparable from the role of democracy.
Democracy
Today we sometimes hear that democracy stands in the way of economic progress. This is not a new argument. Particularly in times of change and economic uncertainty, some will say that it is easier to take a shortcut to development by trading away the rights of human beings for the power of the state. But that is not what I saw on my trip to India, and that is not what I see in Indonesia. Your achievements demonstrate that democracy and development reinforce one another.
Like any democracy, you have known setbacks along the way. America is no different. Our own constitution spoke of the effort to forge a “more perfect union,” and that is a journey we have traveled ever since, enduring civil war and struggles to extend rights to all our citizens. But it is precisely this effort that has allowed us to become stronger and more prosperous, while also becoming a more just and free society.
Like other countries that emerged from colonial rule in the last century, Indonesia struggled and sacrificed for the right to determine your destiny. That is what Heroes Day is all about — an Indonesia that belongs to Indonesians. But you also ultimately decided that freedom cannot mean replacing the strong hand of a colonizer with a strongman of your own.
Of course, democracy is messy. Not everyone likes the results of every election. You go through ups and downs. But the journey is worthwhile, and it goes beyond casting a ballot. It takes strong institutions to check the concentration of power. It takes open markets that allow individuals to thrive. It takes a free press and an independent justice system to root out abuse and excess, and to insist upon accountability. It takes open society and active citizens to reject inequality and injustice.
These are the forces that will propel Indonesia forward. And it will require a refusal to tolerate the corruption that stands in the way of opportunity, a commitment to transparency that gives every Indonesian a stake in their government, and a belief that the freedom that Indonesians have fought for is what holds this great nation together.
That is the message of the Indonesians who have advanced this democratic story — from those who fought in the Battle of Surabaya 55 years ago today to the students who marched peacefully for democracy in the 1990s, to leaders who have embraced the peaceful transition of power in this young century. Because ultimately, it will be the rights of citizens that will stitch together this remarkable nusantara that stretches from Sabang to Merauke — an insistence that every child born in this country should be treated equally, whether they come from Java or Aceh, Bali or Papua.
That effort extends to the example that Indonesia sets abroad. Indonesia took the initiative to establish the Bali Democracy Forum, an open forum for countries to share their experiences and best practices in fostering democracy. Indonesia has also been at the forefront of pushing for more attention to human rights within Asean The nations of Southeast Asia must have the right to determine their own destiny, and the United States will strongly support that right. But the people of Southeast Asia must have the right to determine their own destiny as well. That is why we condemned elections in Burma that were neither free nor fair. That is why we are supporting your vibrant civil society in working with counterparts across this region. Because there is no reason why respect for human rights should stop at the border of any country.
Hand in hand, that is what development and democracy are about — the notion that certain values are universal. Prosperity without freedom is just another form of poverty. Because there are aspirations that human beings share — the liberty of knowing that your leader is accountable to you, and that you won’t be locked up for disagreeing with them; the opportunity to get an education and to work with dignity; the freedom to practice your faith without fear or restriction.
Religion
Religion is the final topic I want to address today, and — like democracy and development — it is fundamental to the Indonesian story. Like the other Asian nations I am visiting on this trip, Indonesia is steeped in spirituality, a place where people worship God in many different ways. Along with this rich diversity, it is also home to the world’s largest Muslim population, a truth that I came to know as a boy when I heard the call to prayer across Jakarta.
Just as individuals are not defined solely by their faith, Indonesia is defined by more than its Muslim population. But we also know that relations between the United States and Muslim communities have frayed over many years. As president, I have made it a priority to begin to repair these relations. As a part of that effort, I went to Cairo last June, and called for a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one that creates a path for us to move beyond our differences.
I said then, and I will repeat now, that no single speech can eradicate years of mistrust. But I believed then, and I believe today, that we do have a choice. We can choose to be defined by our differences, and give in to a future of suspicion and mistrust. Or we can choose to do the hard work of forging common ground, and commit ourselves to the steady pursuit of progress. And I can promise you: No matter what setbacks may come, the United States is committed to human progress. That is who we are. That is what we have done. That is what we will do.
We know well the issues that have caused tensions for many years, issues that I addressed in Cairo. In the 17 months that have passed we have made some progress, but much more work remains to be done.
Innocent civilians in America, Indonesia and across the world are still targeted by violent extremists. I have made it clear that America is not, and never will be, at war with Islam. Instead, all of us must defeat Al Qaeda and its affiliates, who have no claim to be leaders of any religion — certainly not a great, world religion like Islam. But those who want to build must not cede ground to terrorists who seek to destroy. This is not a task for America alone. Indeed, here in Indonesia, you have made progress in rooting out terrorists and combating violent extremism.
In Afghanistan, we continue to work with a coalition of nations to build the capacity of the Afghan government to secure its future. Our shared interest is in building peace in a war-torn land — a peace that provides no safe-haven for violent extremists, and that provides hope for the Afghan people. Meanwhile, we have made progress on one of our core commitments, our effort to end the war in Iraq. One hundred thousand American troops have left Iraq. Iraqis have taken full responsibility for their security. And we will continue to support Iraq as it forms an inclusive government and we bring all of our troops home.
In the Middle East, we have faced false starts and setbacks, but we have been persistent in our pursuit of peace. Israelis and Palestinians restarted direct talks, but enormous obstacles remain. There should be no illusions that peace and security will come easy. But let there be no doubt. We will spare no effort in working for the outcome that is just, and that is in the interest of all the parties involved: two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.
The stakes are high in resolving these issues, and the others I have spoken about today. For our world has grown smaller and while those forces that connect us have unleashed opportunity, they also empower those who seek to derail progress. One bomb in a marketplace can obliterate the bustle of daily commerce. One whispered rumor can obscure the truth, and set off violence between communities that once lived in peace. In an age of rapid change and colliding cultures, what we share as human beings can be lost.
But I believe that the history of both America and Indonesia gives us hope. It’s a story written into our national mottos. E Pluribus Unum — out of many, one. Bhinneka Tunggal Ika — unity in diversity. We are two nations, which have travelled different paths. Yet our nations show that hundreds of millions who hold different beliefs can be united in freedom under one flag. And we are now building on that shared humanity — through the young people who will study in each other’s schools, through the entrepreneurs forging ties that can lead to prosperity, and through our embrace of fundamental democratic values and human aspirations.
Earlier today, I visited the Istiqlal mosque — a place of worship that was still under construction when I lived in Jakarta. I admired its soaring minaret, imposing dome and welcoming space. But its name and history also speak to what makes Indonesia great. Istiqlal means independence, and its construction was in part a testament to the nation’s struggle for freedom. Moreover, this house of worship for many thousands of Muslims was designed by a Christian architect.
Such is Indonesia’s spirit. Such is the message of Indonesia’s inclusive philosophy, Pancasila. Across an archipelago that contains some of God’s most beautiful creations, islands rising above an ocean named for peace, people choose to worship God as they please. Islam flourishes, but so do other faiths. Development is strengthened by an emerging democracy. Ancient traditions endure even as a rising power is on the move.
That is not to say that Indonesia is without imperfections. No country is. But here can be found the ability to bridge divides of race and region and religion — that ability to see yourself in all individuals. As a child of a different race coming from a distant country, I found this spirit in the greeting that I received upon moving here: Selamat Datang. As a Christian visiting a mosque on this visit, I found it in the words of a leader who was asked about my visit and said, “Muslims are also allowed in churches. We are all God’s followers.”
That spark of the divine lies within each of us. We cannot give in to doubt or cynicism or despair. The stories of Indonesia and America tell us that history is on the side of human progress, that unity is more powerful than division, and that the people of this world can live together in peace. May our two nations work together, with faith and determination, to share these truths with all mankind.
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