YEAR IN REVIEW 1996: POPULATION-TRENDS: RACE AND ...

RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS: John Peters Humphrey In 1968 French jurist Ren Cassin was honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize as the author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by the UN General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948. This document, which served as "a common standard of achievement for all peoples of all nations," was vitally important in focusing global attention on human rights, a term that previously had not been defined in any act of international law. Although some nations routinely violated the principles of the declaration, most countries not only accepted its precepts but adhered to them. In 1988, however, John Hobbins of the law library at McGill University, Montreal, examined the original document and found that it had been written not in the hand of Cassin but in that of John Peters Humphrey. Humphrey, a Canadian lawyer, diplomat, and scholar, died in Montreal, on March 14, 1995, having been belatedly recognized as the architect of the "Magna Carta of mankind." He was born April 30, 1905, in Hampton, N.B. His childhood was unfortunate. At the age of six he lost his left arm in a fire, and from the age of 11 he was raised in orphanages. Humphrey entered Mount Allison University, Sackville, N.B., at 15 and was called to the Quebec bar in 1929. He practiced law until 1936, when he joined the faculty of McGill, specializing in international law. In 1946 he was appointed the first director of the Division of Human Rights for the UN Secretariat, a post he held for two decades. It was there that he penned the Declaration. In 1966 he returned to McGill, and he remained active as a human rights crusader, helping to establish both the Canadian Human Rights Foundation and the Canadian branch of Amnesty International. Humphrey was the author of numerous books, notably Human Rights and the United Nations: A Great Adventure (1984) and No Distant Millennium: The World Law of Human Rights (1989). (KAREN J. SPARKS) REFUGEES Although the worldwide refugee population had decreased to 14.5 million by early 1995, the total number of persons of concern to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had risen to 27.4 million. That number, however, did not include the 2.8 million Palestinian refugees who fell under the mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East or the estimated 26 million other displaced persons. UNHCR continued to implement a core mandate by providing international refugee protection and by seeking permanent solutions to their dislocation, preferably through voluntary repatriation. As a reflection of the increasingly complex displaced-population crisis, UNHCR also expanded its activities to assist 4 million returning refugees, 5.4 million internally displaced persons (those who had a refugee-like status but had not crossed an international border), and 3.5 million others of humanitarian concern. The humanitarian crisis, provoked in 1994 by the flight of over two million Rwandans and Burundians in the African Great Lakes region, continued to fester. While disease was kept under control and nutrition remained sufficient, security concerns, environmental degradation, and ethnic imbalances strained the generosity of those African countries that had traditionally welcomed refugees. Zaire, host to the largest number of Rwandan refugees, began forcibly repatriating them. Tanzania, an asylum country for African refugees even before its independence, sealed the border against further arrivals. Meanwhile, an estimated 750,000 refugees, mostly Tutsi who had left in the early 1960s, returned to Rwanda. Many of the former exiles took over houses abandoned by more recent refugees, a move that complicated the return of the new caseload. A meeting of these countries plus Uganda produced in November an agreement to return the refugees to Rwanda. In southern Africa the voluntary repatriation of 1.6 million Mozambicans was successfully completed in June. UNHCR turned its focus to helping their long-term integration into a devastated country. A duplication of the Mozambican repatriation was hoped for in Angola, where a fragile peace prevailed after 20 years of civil war that had spawned 311,000 refugees and 2 million internally displaced persons. In the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia was host nation to some 350,000 Somali, Sudanese, Djiboutian, and Kenyan refugees. Somalia witnessed the return of some 127,000 of its nationals over a 54-month period. UNHCR assisted their reintegration by means of small-scale projects intended to bridge the gap between emergency relief and long-term development. Repatriation to Eritrea faltered in the face of limited donor support. In West Africa the formation of a new government in Monrovia ushered in prospects for an end to five years of fighting and the return of 794,000 Liberian refugees. Violence in neighbouring Sierra Leone resulted in an additional 275,000 Sierra Leonean refugees. In former Yugoslavia aggressors and victims changed roles as lightning gains and attritional battles bloated the displaced-person population. By the fall of 1995, fighting had displaced an estimated 500,000 people, adding to the 3.5 million refugees, displaced persons, and others of concern. The peace treaty signed in December raised the possibility that in the short term more people could be displaced to accommodate territorial adjustments. As a token of this, some 750 rebels against the Bosnian government, fearful of their reception, returned from Croatia. In Russia the year opened with a heavy-handed war in the self-declared independent republic of Chechnya. UNHCR assisted the 210,000 persons who had escaped to the neighbouring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan, while the International Committee of the Red Cross worked to succour those within Chechnya. The cease-fire agreed to by Armenia and Azerbaijan in May 1994 continued to hold, and some 450,000 of the most needy of those displaced by the dispute in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh were assisted by UNHCR. UNHCR and concerned governments of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) developed a regional approach to the problems affecting refugees, returnees, displaced persons, and migrants in the CIS and relevant neighbouring states. In 1994 Western Europe experienced a 40% decline in asylum applications compared with the previous year. Of the 338,000 persons who applied, 47,000 were granted refugee status and another 58,000 were allowed to stay for humanitarian reasons. By early 1995 some 700,000 persons from former Yugoslavia had been granted temporary protection. The Afghan refugees who streamed out of their country after the 1979 invasion by Soviet forces were the largest refugee caseload of concern to UNHCR. About 2.7 million persons fled to Iran and Pakistan. As Afghanistan remained divided into regions of relative peace and ongoing combat, UNHCR attempted to encourage repatriation and mitigate further outflows by intensifying its activities in safer areas within the country. A major impediment to return and rehabilitation--as was the case also in Angola, Cambodia, and Mozambique--was the presence of indiscriminately sown land mines. Although most of the 500,000 internally displaced Tajiks and 60,000 Tajik refugees had returned to their places of origin within Tajikistan or in Afghanistan, some 34,000 Tajiks remained displaced. In a departure, UNHCR supported the Tajikistan authorities in protecting returnees and attempted to resolve conflicts. The 15,000 Turkish Kurd refugees in Iraq endured further displacement and uncertainty when their camps were targeted during a Turkish operation against suspected Kurd militants. More than 600,000 Iraqi refugees, mostly Kurds and Arab Shi'ites, combined with 1.6 million Afghan refugees to make Iran the top country of asylum. In Yemen, Somali refugees, many of whom had previously found themselves on the front line between warring sides of Yemeni, fell prey to a campaign of forced repatriation. Two years after the signing of a declaration of principles between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, Palestinian refugees were forcibly pushed out of Libya and put under increasing pressure to leave Lebanon as well. In Asia more than 200,000 Burmese Muslim refugees had repatriated from Bangladesh since September 1992, and 50,000 remained in camps in Bangladesh. The repatriation of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees from southern India ebbed and flowed in tandem with developments in Sri Lanka. More than 10,000 Sri Lankans returned in the first half of 1995, but 54,000 remained in camps in India. Some 85,000 Bhutanese refugees remained in camps in Nepal as efforts to resolve their plight proved fruitless. Plans to settle Indo-Chinese asylum seekers met a temporary roadblock when 41,000 Vietnamese nonrefugees refused to repatriate in the hope that proposed legislation would allow them to resettle in the United States. Nearly a million Vietnamese had fled after the fall of the Saigon government in 1975, and the vast majority had resettled in other countries. Under the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indo-Chinese Refugees (CPA), those who had left for reasons other than a well-founded fear of persecution were designated for repatriation. Of the more than 73,000 persons who had returned to Vietnam since the implementation of the CPA in 1989, UNHCR found no significant cases of persecution. The plight of Cubans and Haitians who had taken to the high seas and then been apprehended and sequestered at the United States naval base at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, was resolved. Following a political breakthrough in Haiti and the reinstatement of Pres. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haitians were repatriated, involuntarily in many cases. Most of the 21,000 Cubans at Guantnamo were allowed to enter the U.S., but any Cubans picked up at sea would be returned to Cuba after Pres. Bill Clinton revoked a long-standing U.S. policy of granting asylum to all Cubans. The repatriation of the more than 40,000 Guatemalan refugees in Mexico proceeded cautiously; the deliberate killing of returnees by paramilitary groups, notably in the fall, amplified the wariness of potential returnees. The United States issued guidelines to help immigration officers grant asylum to women who were threatened with sexual violence, which was used as political persecution in their homeland. The new guidelines did not change the criteria needed for refugee status but rather educated asylum officers about gender-based discrimination and provided them with procedures and methods for evaluating refugee standards for individual claims. (UNHCR) This updates the article population. SOCIAL PROTECTION Efforts were made throughout most parts of the world in 1995 to ease the strain brought about by widespread unemployment and to restructure and reform benefit programs. Social security benefits and programs in Western Europe were used to promote the introduction of new and flexible forms of employment. Countries in Central and Eastern Europe followed the lead of their Western neighbours, but they were primarily concerned with ensuring that large segments of the population did not fall below a minimum standard of living. In industrialized Asia and the Pacific, efforts were made to combat discrimination in the distribution of social security benefits. Major reforms were proposed but not implemented in emerging and less developed countries. In North America the U.S. and Canada initiated a massive restructuring of social policy, as did Mexico, where a 52-year-old social security system was on the brink of collapse. Special Report Child Welfare Crisis BY DAVID TOBIS The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the General Assembly in 1989, affirmed the rights of the world's children to be protected against all forms of abuse, neglect, and exploitation. By 1995 it had been ratified by 180 nations, which made it the most widely adopted convention in human rights history. The agreement recognized the family as the primary caregiver, responsible for the growth and well-being of children. It asserted that families should receive the necessary assistance to fulfill this responsibility so that children could remain with their parents except when doing so would not be in their best interest. It also stated that children should be entitled to special protection by the state if their families could not care for them. UNICEF uses the designation "children in especially difficult circumstances" to describe those youngsters who require the special protection outlined in the convention. Although systematic data do not exist, hundreds of millions of the world's two billion children are living in especially difficult circumstances. Ironically, it appeared in 1995 that more children were living in such conditions than when the Convention on the Rights of the Child came into force. This increase was one of the main factors contributing to the child welfare crisis. Traditionally the family, the clan, and the community were the primary sources of assistance for children in need. Increasingly, however, government had assumed the responsibility of caring for these children, providing child welfare services--either direct help to families or substitute (i.e., foster) care--when traditional sources of help were unavailable. In recent years fewer government resources relative to need were made available for these children, a situation that exacerbated the crisis. The conditions that placed children at risk and the assistance provided varied widely from one country to another. For purposes of comparison, four areas could be identified: the industrialized nations, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the less developed nations, and those countries experiencing civil war or internal disintegration. Education Primary and Secondary Education. Downsizing of the U.S. government adversely affected federal education programs, while the number of difficult tasks facing educators continued to multiply in 1995. Voicing his concern, U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley noted that the Information Age requires an "Education Age." The new Republican-controlled Congress sought to cut spending in many programs as part of its "Contract with America" (see Special Report) and to return control over most education to the states. The Department of Education was initially in danger of elimination, but Pres. Bill Clinton proposed less-drastic changes in Cabinet-level departments. The president sought to retain adequate federal support for safe and drug-free schools, adult job programs, and AmeriCorps--the national-service program. Enrollments in the U.S. for the 1995-96 school year increased at all levels of education. Preschool and kindergarten numbers rose by some 250,000 students to more than 7.7 million. Elementary and secondary enrollments reached 51 million students, surpassing even the peak levels of 1971. The number of minority students was expected to reach 32.8%, a 4.6% increase over the previous year. High-school graduates for the academic year were expected to number 2.6 million. There were some three million teachers in U.S. elementary and secondary schools, with a smaller number of educators serving in collegiate faculty positions. About 4.2 million individuals held administrative, various other professional, and support positions in educational institutions. A judicial ruling on drug testing that could have wider ramifications was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld random drug testing of high-school athletes. The justices ruled that athletes must submit to testing at the beginning of a sports season and to random tests thereafter. Results would be available only to school officials. It was possible that the drug ruling could be applied to random testing of all students, as part of a school's general responsibility to protect young people's well-being. Under the decision, school officials were not required to have a specific suspicion of drug use, unlike a Fourth Amendment requirement for adult testing. The high court left some issues unsettled with regard to prayer in school. It overturned a 1994 ruling by the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit stating that student-initiated prayers during graduation ceremonies were unacceptable and left intact an earlier ruling by the Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that upheld the constitutionality of student-led graduation prayers. The Supreme Court found that a federal judge had exceeded constitutional limits in a long-standing Missouri desegregation case. The judge had ruled that school officials had to pay additional salaries to minority employees as part of an effort to undo the effects of past segregation. The supervised district had undertaken the most expensive desegregation plan in the U.S. The court ruled that under the Constitution, officials were not bound to pay higher salaries to minorities to meet the requirements of desegregation. The Supreme Court also found that school gun-free zones, authorized in a 1990 federal act, were an unacceptable extension of the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, a provision that had been used for decades to extend federal jurisdiction in many areas. Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) scores reached their highest levels in many years, especially math scores, which were the highest in 20 years. White and Asian students topped the rankings, while minority students continued to make gains. Male students again outscored females, who continued to improve their performance. Voucher plans to permit public funding of private schools continued to be widely advocated around the nation. The Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned a legislative act that permitted Milwaukee schools to provide up to $3,600 for private, even sectarian, school tuition for families whose annual income was less than $26,000. Pres. Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) found recent achievement levels reported by the National Center for Education Statistics both "surprising and encouraging." Shanker noted that student course selections and graduation requirements had become more rigorous than they had been a decade previously, when the publication of A Nation at Risk (1983) sounded an education-crisis alarm. The government publication had focused on low educational achievement and called for massive changes, many of which subsequently were implemented, said the veteran AFT leader. Poverty and alcoholism were tied to many school-age children's problems. Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in conjunction with Emory University, Atlanta, Ga., reported that women in poverty were more likely to have retarded children who would probably have more difficulty in getting an education. CDC researchers also found that the percentage of babies born with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) had increased sixfold between 1979 and 1993. FAS babies experience mental retardation and central nervous system problems, which make their education more difficult. Violence in the media remained a nationwide concern. The Television Violence Monitoring Report, based at the University of California, Los Angeles, claimed that in 1995 motion pictures and children's television programs had more violence than could be found on prime-time television. Harvard University's Robert D. Putnam proposed the idea that the introduction of television notably weakened the nation's social and educational fabric. He theorized that the advent of television led to declines in social trust and group participation, which he claimed were crucial to maintaining social and educational standards in a democracy. He held that this decline brought on by TV possibly contributed more to an overall social change in the United States than did such factors as divorce, the rise in the number of working women, and the spread of the welfare state. The increase in the numbers of children who did not speak English as their primary language was attributed to the increased number of immigrants to the country. The National Association for Bilingual Education's executive director said that one child in six entered school speaking a language other than English. In 1995 a comparison of educational levels in 21 member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed that in most OECD countries over half of the adult population had completed secondary school. In Germany, Switzerland, Norway, and the United States, the level rose to more than 80%. In Europe, where 19 of the OECD nations are located, there were marked disparities in educational achievement between northern and southern countries. More than 60% of adults had earned a high-school diploma in Austria, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, while fewer than one-third had completed high school in Greece (32%), Italy (25%), Spain (25%), Portugal (15%), and Turkey (15%). In only two of the OECD countries had more than one-fifth of the population between ages 25 and 64 completed college--The Netherlands (21%) and the United States (24%). A World Bank report urged governments to furnish all citizens with at least six years of schooling as a means of stimulating economic growth and reducing poverty in less developed nations. The report noted that the proportion of children attending school in less developed countries had risen from below 50% in 1960 to 76% in 1995, and it concluded that a still higher proportion of citizens with basic education would be needed to keep pace with predicted shifts in labour markets caused by technological innovations and economic reform. A variety of sub-Saharan African governments adopted plans to cooperate with other countries to improve educational systems. In one effort research teams from nine nations launched a joint assessment of education sponsored by the Southern African Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality. Participating countries included Kenya, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Swaziland, mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The primary aim of the research was to identify the major influences on students' reading achievement. In a separate effort, education ministries in Lesotho and Swaziland sought to become independent of Great Britain's influence over the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate by localizing the assessment of test papers. In Kenya a plan adopted in 1985 to vocationalize education at all levels had proved too complicated and too costly to implement; a similar plan was rejected in Botswana. A Nicaraguan study of 6,600 school-age children from 2,500 homes indicated that males took a year longer than females to complete primary school and two years longer to finish secondary school. More than 20% of pupils repeated grades because of poor academic performance or ill health, and the main cause of school delinquency was economic, with the dropout rate for males far higher than that for females. Pupils in Nicaragua were more likely to succeed in school if they came from homes of married couples, their families had few children, they had attended preschool, and they had started school at age five. Cuba's economic crisis contributed to a deterioration of the nation's highly centralized school system and discouraged an increasing number of qualified people from entering the teaching profession. The extent to which technological advances were adopted in schools was investigated in Great Britain, where a survey of the popularity of educational broadcasts among 1,500 teachers in 700 British schools revealed that most primary teachers took advantage of television programs but only half used educational radio. In secondary schools television broadcasts were employed most often for studying geography and history and least often for mathematics. Secondary teachers rarely used radio programs, with the exception of modern-language classes, where radio was used fairly often. The privatization of schools increased in various parts of the world. In Canada increased enrollments in private schools continued into 1995, with many of the students coming from middle-class families that traditionally had patronized public schools. Part of the appeal of the private institutions was their low teacher-student ratios. Economic reforms in Vietnam that created greater wealth for the private sector led to cutbacks in public moneys for education, and thus the traditional school system became drastically underfunded. As a consequence, secondary schools that charged tuition grew increasingly popular with the country's expanding middle class. Such schools attracted well-qualified teachers and provided higher-quality education than did the impoverished public schools attended by the rural poor. In Pakistan the network of private schools continued to expand as a result of the underfunding of state schools and corruption in the public education system. Several nations announced plans to expand educational opportunities. Thailand's government intended to invest $1.5 billion toward several educational initiatives, including an extension of compulsory schooling from six to nine years, a refinancing of private schools outside the capital city of Bangkok, and an increase in the availability of loans for economically disadvantaged students. The purpose was to improve younger workers' skills in order to sustain the country's economic boom. A new education law in China, drafted over 10 years, went into effect September 1. The law provided a framework for future legislation and outlined a revised educational system focusing on moral and intellectual development. Subsequently, the nation's State Education Commission issued regulations governing the establishment of schools jointly operated by Chinese and foreign sponsors. Although no religious affiliates would be allowed to conduct school, nonreligious groups would be permitted to do so as long as they provided high-quality education as defined in the commission's guidelines. As the government increased its investment in economic development, however, its financial support of education continued to decline. As a consequence, schools at all levels of the educational system were obliged to launch cottage industries or other moneymaking ventures to sustain their operations. Mexico's Pres. Ernesto Zedillo pledged that before the close of his administration, all children would have the opportunity to advance through secondary school. This commitment was considered highly optimistic for a country in which 75% of rural pupils traditionally did not complete the six years of primary education. Economic needs were cited as the main cause of high dropout rates, particularly in subsistence-farming regions, where children were needed for their labour. Critics also charged that the primary- and secondary-school curriculum had long been ill-suited to regional needs. Because of this, many pupils found schooling irrelevant and either dropped out or were not motivated to study. This problem also extended to the 10% of pupils in Mexico (nine million) who spoke only an Indian dialect. Malaysia's Prime Minister Datuk Seri Mahathir bin Mohamad had begun to stress the importance of the English language in the country's national curriculum, thereby initiating a shift from the policy of the past three decades, which emphasized the Malaysian national language. He said that knowledge of English was vital to international trade, and he hoped that prestigious overseas universities would consider establishing branches in Malaysia. Datuk Francis Yeoh Sock Ping, a prominent business leader, confirmed that he would like to build a local campus for the University of London, a proposal that until recently would not have been considered. A number of countries took steps to resolve racial conflicts and to offer equal educational opportunities for ethnic groups. The South African government sought to reverse years of inequality by committing itself to furnishing every child, regardless of racial background, with 10 years of education at government expense. Educational segregation was officially abolished, and new school-construction plans and improved training for black teachers were announced. Many Australian schools expanded their Asian studies curricula in an attempt to integrate and promote a greater appreciation of Australia's Asian population. Classes in magnet schools included Asian languages, geography, literature, and religious history. Educational authorities in France were criticized by Islamic leaders for not permitting women students to wear head scarves in the public schools. Officials claimed that displaying the traditional Islamic head coverings violated France's law banning religion in schools, even though Catholic students were still allowed to wear crosses. Higher Education. A UNESCO report on higher education disclosed that annual attendance in postsecondary institutions throughout the world grew from 28 million students in 1970 to 65 million in 1991 and would continue to increase, reaching 79 million by 1999 and 97 million by 2015. In less developed countries enrollments over the 1970-91 period rose from 7 million to 30 million. The proportion of students at private universities increased, particularly in less developed regions, with the numbers of nondegree and part-time students also rising. According to the report, the financial burden of rapid growth tempted officials to limit spending on higher education. UNESCO's director general, Federico Mayor, warned that yielding to that temptation would simply widen the gap between industrialized and nonindustrialized societies. Sub-Saharan Africa had the fewest educational resources and opportunities of any region. Students in Africa were four times less likely to pursue postsecondary education than those in other less developed areas and 17 times less likely than those in the industrialized countries. Public and private postsecondary enrollments in the U.S. were projected to increase slightly, to 15.4 million students. More than half of the students--nine million--were expected to attend four-year institutions. Two-year colleges were set to enroll an estimated six million. Proprietary schools and postsecondary programs were expecting one million enrollees, and degrees earned were projected to reach record levels. Federal officials expected seven million students to receive some type of financial aid by 1996. Spending in the U.S. for public elementary, secondary, and collegiate education was projected to reach $433 billion in 1995. The cost of a private education was predicted to reach $104 billion, and the head of the U.S. College Board said that most college students faced a heavily mortgaged future. His assessment was made in response to rising tuition and a decline in available federal grants and loans. Tuition increased at a 6% rate for the third year in a row, an increase greater than the pace of inflation. The annual cost of tuition, room and board, books, and personal expenses averaged $19,762 per student at four-year private colleges and $9,285 at state colleges. To make matters worse, Congress had been hammering out an agreement to trim billions of dollars from student loan programs as part of its move toward balancing the federal budget by 2002. By 1995 the European Union's (EU's) plan for transferring academic credits across country borders had resulted in 5,546 students' receiving credit for foreign study pursued in 145 institutions in 18 countries. The initial program was limited to the subject areas of business administration, chemistry, history, mechanical engineering, and medicine. Plans were laid to double the number of cooperating institutions and increase the diversity of disciplines in 1996. Ireland's system of 46 nonuniversity postsecondary institutions adopted a system that permitted students to earn a national degree by combining studies completed at different institutions. A national computerized database, containing 6,000 registered courses, kept track of all students' completed courses, certificates, and degrees. The number of Canada's aboriginal peoples--Indians and Inuits--enrolled in higher education increased fourfold over the decade between 1985 and 1995, owing largely to financial aid from the federal government and a growing number of academic programs designed precisely for the nation's indigenous ethnic groups. Focused on providing indigenous youths with opportunities to study their own cultures, Canada's first aboriginal higher-education institution, the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, enrolled 1,300 students in 1995, most of them women. Former communist nations faced problems of transition. Russian institutions suffered from insufficient funds; only 3.65% of the national budget was allocated for education in 1995, over 80% of the country's schools lacked proper experimental facilities, the number of students in specialized programs declined, and skilled personnel continued to emigrate. Student admission policies were changing in such institutions as Moscow State University and Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics, where well-trained, academically apt students from preparatory schools were being admitted without an entrance examination or tuition fee. Critics charged that such admission practices were unfair to students who could not afford to attend quality preparatory schools. In 1995 Romanian academicians were concerned that the quality of higher education was threatened by the hasty establishment of more than 60 private universities set up to meet a rapidly rising demand. At the same time, efforts to reform the curricula in state universities were hampered by a shortage of funds. In the neighbouring state of Moldova, government leaders endeavoured to assert their nation's independence, but students and faculty members of most of Moldova's 15 higher-education institutions went on strike when the government changed the title of a common university course from "The History of the Romanian People" to "The History of Moldova." New legislation in Estonia inaugurated the most dramatic changes in the nation's six universities since the former Russian system was discarded in 1990. By 1995 Estonia's universities had revamped their budgetary system and completed their changeover to an American-style structure in which course work was measured by credits earned and bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees were awarded by institutions. Four years after the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia achieved independence, representatives of the nation's ethnic Albanians announced the establishment of an Albanian-language university in the town of Tetovo. The plan was denounced by government authorities, who felt that Albanians were entitled only to primary and secondary education in their native language. Founders of the university vowed to conduct classes anyway, even if the government refused the institution official recognition. In Israel political conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis continued to disrupt university life. Early in the year, Israeli military forces arrested 21 Islamic students at a college near Jerusalem on charges of anti-Israeli propaganda and stockpiling weapons. The Israeli civil administration also stopped granting entry permits to Palestinian students, a measure intended to discourage Palestinian nationalistic activism. Because tuition charges doubled at some Palestinian universities in the West Bank, many students were forced to drop out. Recent emergency legislation enabled Peru's military forces to take control of three universities where members of the Marxist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) organization had disrupted the educational process. One institution, Hermilio Valdizn National University of Hunuco, had been adrift since 1994, when its rector, Abner Chvez Leandro, had confessed to abetting Sendero Luminoso terrorists. Ways to raise revenue in support of higher education were a concern throughout the world. In China financial problems prompted the government to urge universities to generate their own funds. A shortage of money also led institutions in several countries to admit wealthy, less-qualified students in preference over poor but talented applicants. The French government's handling of the financial plight of universities drew sharp criticism from university presidents and faculty organizations. The Conference of French University Presidents, representing 83 institutions, charged that the 1995 increase of 5% in research funds and 2.8% in operating expenses was far short of what was needed in view of rapidly growing enrollments. The presidents sought greater latitude in raising money from private sources and recommended a gradual increase in student registration fees, which traditionally had been extremely low. The nation's largest faculty union claimed that inadequate support for basic research, libraries, and undergraduate teaching had reached a crisis level. The union also criticized the government's tightened immigration policy, which resulted in a growing number of foreign students--particularly Algerians--being forced to leave France. Requiring students to pay tuition continued to be a controversial issue in Eastern Europe, where the cost of attending a university had long been borne entirely by the government. The Czech Republic's new higher-education law set fees ranging from $95 to $380 per year, depending on which academic specialty a student pursued. In mid-March thousands of Hungarian students demonstrated in Budapest following the government's announcement that tuition would be charged in the fall term. Swiss students protested a tuition increase from $60 to $450 per semester and proposed instead that the needed funds be raised through the savings achieved by the hiring of associate professors rather than full professors. Academics in Switzerland had been among the highest paid in the world, with salaries of associate professors ranging from $97,000 to $133,000 and of full professors from $121,000 to $166,000. The issue of tuition also set off street demonstrations in Australia, where protesters demanded that the government abolish fees for graduate students and revoke the deferred-payment system that required students to pay about 20% of their educational costs. At the same time, in a bold move the Australian government allotted a record high of U.S. $12 billion for state higher education programs over the 1997-99 period. The funds would equip institutions to serve an additional 11,000 students in regions with growing populations, to provide more research facilities, to increase vocational education offerings, and to strengthen the Australian Research Council. The government's new performance-based funding system led to a transfer of funds from existing institutions to newly established universities. The plan provided nearly $248 million annually to new institutions, on the basis of their success in obtaining research grants from industries, on their levels of publication, and on the number of graduate students completing their studies. Concern over bureaucratic meddling in the hiring and promotion of professors was voiced in Japan and Italy. At a conference of Japanese academics, the nation's Ministry of Education was accused of contributing to a decline in the quality of teaching in universities by preventing higher education institutions from individually evaluating faculty members. Critics charged that the ministry's strict bureaucratic control over appointments served to keep ineffective professors in their posts and thereby led to a lower quality of instruction. In Italy the practice of basing professorial appointments on political patronage rather than on candidates' accomplishments was attacked by delegates at a conference on recruitment and academic promotion in European universities held at the University of Bologna. Speakers claimed that the patronage system, in which assignments were made nationally rather than by individual institutions, damaged the image of Italian academics in international circles and caused Italy to perform poorly in the competition for European Union research grants. In contrast to the Italian model, promotion schemes operating in France, The Netherlands, Austria, and the United Kingdom were said to include continuous assessment of merit in both teaching and research, student evaluations of professors' teaching effectiveness, and faculty-selection committees including representatives from various departments of the university. (JOEL L. BURDIN; ROBERT MURRAY THOMAS) See also Libraries and Museums. This updates the articles education, history