Merit points - a way to keep middle class schools pure?

In the last post I tried to explain the proposal to charge foreigns form outside the European Union with tuition fees. I also argued that it was unlucky, since it is unfair, and would would make Swedish universities less internationalized, in a time when they should become more.


Tuition fees for non-EU students is the wrong thing to do, but in isolation the arguments are somehow intelligible. Swedish universities do lose out one a lot of money from students who are rich enough to pay, but not smart enough to get scholarships, compared to universities in the Netherlands, the UK or elsewhere. And it is quite a problem for the vision of Europe that education costs so much in some places and is free elsewhere. Even more problmatic is that the relation between costs and high quality education is seldom straight forward.


Tuition fees, however, is just a part of a vision of education that is shared not only by the

Tuition fees - a way to keep Sweden Swedish?

I live in Sweden together with my Bulgarian girlfriend who is studying on the psychology programme in Lund, one of our dear country's most renowned sites of education. The education itself is no doubt high class, but God knows that not everyone was prepared to accept a foreign student when we came here. She, and to some extent both of us, have encountered endless obstacles and more red tape than we could ever imagine. and we have both seen a lot.

The university of Lund is well accustomed to exchange students studying master programmes, but the prospect of an individual from Bulgaria who wants to enroll in a Swedish university just like one of us was, and for many is still is, beyond comprehension. I liked to think that that the two of us are the forerunners of a true European, or even global, generation, and that university staff will eventually get used to a world where people don't necessary live in one country their entire life. Also, my own positive memories form Swedish universities made me benevolent, and a few years in more chaotic countries has induced in me a profound respect for the Swedish kind of law-abiding bureacracy.

Maybe I was naïve, but five months ago I didn't interpret these obstacles as any institutionalised racism. But the recently announces decision to ask non-EU student for tuition fees made me suspicious, and the recent schism between our minister of higher education Tobias Krantz and Högskoleverket - the Swedish university authority , made my innocence look embarrasing.


The issue at hand is that mr. Krantz has proposed a system where foreign students are accepted

Future plans

Maladets! is alive again, as anyone reading this probably already knows. As if anything witht that name could die...

During the autumn and winter this blog was neglected, and my energy was in stead spent on the Th!nk About it! Climate change competition. It was a great experience, and guess what? I did it well enough to be selected as a blogger also in the next round, where the topic will be "The developing world".

As you have seen, I have started writing about developing issues also on maladets!, mostly as a way to get to know the subject. I plan to continue posting on maladets!, also after the competition starts. Everything worth reading will be found here, and the best pieces also on the competition site.

In addition, I have a little project trying to get my fingers dirty with HTML from scratch.... everything I ever write is supposed to end up on the Maladets! homepage, but this will also be the place where I test my programming skills. At the moment they are... basic.

As you migh also have noticed, Maladets! has been redesigned. I was experimenting with different customized templates, but in the end I settled for a Blogger template. One reason is that I like it, and that it meets my main requirement - simplicity. I could probably find a nice custom template, but what I couldn't make work was the like/unlike buttons under the posts. I really like them, as a way for readers to give input without commenting. Feel free to use them!

The side bar has been dedicated to sharing and following gadgets... somehow this is the essence of the internet I think, and since I love to tweet what I read myself, I want to make it easy to share the maldets! posts.

Last but not least... in the side bar you will find a banner for the Reporters without Borders (RSF)  yearly World Day Against Cyber Censorship , which is today, March 12th. It is late to put up the banner, but I am a strong supporter of their cause.

There are many threats to free speech on the internet today, The obvious one's, that must not be beglected are despotic regimes, like the ex-government of Moldova, the Chinese and the Iranian government. There are countries where blogging is dangerous, but people still write. All of us benefit from these bloggers' writings, but they alone carry the risks. The least we can do is to show solidarity.

But Reporters without Borders' vision of "a single Internet that is unrestricted and accessible to all". Is threated also from commercial interests. The fact that not all youtube videos can be seen in all countries, is one frustrating example. Governments and NGO's all over the world work hard to give their citizens acces to the internet. If information is not free on the internet, than these efforts are all in vain.

Read more about the World Day Against Cyber Censorship on Global Voices Online, a fantastic example of what the internet can be.

8th of March, climate change and everything else

Today is eight of March. Amnesty International in Lund, where I am an active member, has highlighted domestic violence. Mainstream Swedish media try benchmarking the state of gender equality in Sweden today. I don't hesitate to call myself a feminist, but it is a tragic fact that in ten last years, feminism in Sweden has developed much faster than gender equality.

Meanwhile, women all over eastern Europe receive flowers, chocolates, restaurant visits etc. by their lovers. My humble guess is that most women feel quite comfortable with the tradition, but that does not prevent east European feminists to use this day to highlight gender politics. For example the Romanian blog Monkey monkey underpants, or the Bulgarian left wing students' organisation Priziv, asking whether 8th of March is "a day for struggle or a day for flowers".

Photo: Nationaal Archief

Maybe the struggle we actually want to win is fought with flowers. But what is the rationale behind working for gender equality? Yesterday maybe 500 people were killed in ethnic violence in Nigera. Last week an earthquake shook Chile, only months after the catastrophe in Haiti that killed 200 000 people and left a country in ruins. On top of this there is the threat of a hotter climate that will render some of the poorest countries in the world uninhabitable, and farmland into deserts. Are these not bigger issues that deserve bloggers' and activists' attention more than gender equality?

The question is rethorical, and the answer is no. For three reasons: Women are human beings and women are victims. And last but not least - female empowerment is part and parcel of saving the world.

Women are humans and as such they do have human rights. It is a shame that we still need to write such truisms in 2010, but it is a fact beyond discussion that women in many countries are denied their human rights, simply for being women. Every human has a right to education, but in Zambia, many girls go to school fearing sexual harrasment from their teachers. The fact that we know speaks good about Zambia - a government that has the courage to bring this problem up deserves respect. The Indian government vows to combat gender inequality, which is visible in "low health, education and nutritional indicators of women that have made achieving our MDGs a far cry" Times of India writes. All humans have a right to eat and to live healthy. Also Indian women. But again, acknowledging the problem is part of the solution.

Also in Europe gender inequality is manifest in lower salaries for women and domestic violence. Not to mention the criminal networks trafficing women throughout the continent. A lucurative business that requires customers in wealthy countries as well as desperate women in poor countries. No human being should live in slavery. Not even if they are destitute women.

As long as humans are being denied their rights because they are women, we need to discuss gender issues. But it does not halt there. In all the other problems, the big ones that get precious TV time, like wars and natural catastrophes, where women suffer from studpidity, greed and politics not for being women per se, but for being breadwinners in the world's poorest families. In military conflicts, more men than women take part, but no one suffers so much as female civilians - starving, fleeing and in addition being raped and abused by soldiers, or civilians in the chaos that conflicts bring.

Climate change is already affecting women harder than men, which might be the reason why less than educated men are allowed to doubt about the existance of climate change even in respectable media. Women suffer from droughts becase of their "marginalized status and dependence on local natural resources, their domestic burdens are increased, including additional work to fetch water, or to collect fuel and fodder" an IUCN report from 8th of March 2007 states.

There is no major problem in the world today where women are not hit harder than men. Fortunately, there is also no major problem where the empowerment of women is not also part of the solution. there is no magic about this. Only the simply fact that problems are best solved by the individuals that encounter them daily. The UN Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro in her
opening speech of the fifty-fourth session of the Commission on the Status of Wome on 1 March highlighted the role of women's organisations in development work, and underscored: "Where women are fully represented, societies are more peaceful and stable. Standing up for women’s rights and development is standing up for the global good."

It is a great dissapoiontment, therefore, that the gap is still so wide between the UN's policy statements, and political praxis. In the new UN Climate Change financing group, a group that will hold immense power over what happens next in the global cooperation to restrain climatechange, only 1 out of 19 names is a woman's Grist writes. That is embarrasing, and potentially dangerous. We need women to come to grip with climate change, and everything else.

The Polluter pays?

After the COP15 was judged a failure by the European left, right and green movement alike, one culd easily fall into despair over the possibilities to reach international policy agreements. The Copenhagen accord failed to reach an agreement on anything more substantional than a vague promise to lower co2 emissions. Especially bitter was the question about who is responsible for the current high co2 levels. Is it the rich countries, who built their wealth on fossile fuels, without knowing, or is it the developing countries who argue for their right to grow richer, while knowingthat co2 levels must down.

It could be surprising, then , that the support for the principle "The polluter pays", which clearly defines a culprit, is almost unanimous. The left loves it, because it promises to tax multinationals. The right revers it, because it is ideologically pure liberalism - if a market system is supposed to work, big companies can not be allowed to pollute, and destroy the resources of smaller, equally important entrepeneurs. Those greens who avoid leaning left or right believe in it because a system that it targets the morally bad companies, rather than private entrepeneurship as such, is both more moral, an likely a more efficient way to achieve political change.

It is a pity that it doesn't work. Or at least has worked very poorly, so far. The Guardian earlier this week published findings from a study written by Trucost for the UN, due to be published in the summer. The study that the world's top firms cause staggering $2.2tn of environmental damage. "The figure equates to 6-7% of the companies' combined turnover, or an average of one-third of their profits, though some businesses would be much harder hit than others."

According to the Guardian, the report is likely to end up in proposals to end state subsidies to industries like agriculture, energy and transport. Personally, I think the consensus about "the Polluter pays" will end the minute specific companies are targeted with claims.

There are lot of reasons to be pessimistic about the possibility to ask companies for this kind of responsibility. The political world, especially the part of it dealing with social- and environmental issues, is not void of beautiful words, or good ideas. But when it comes down to action, changing the world is a hard thing to do. These $2.2tn of environmental damage that noone takes repsonsibility is an ample illustration of this fact.

Picture from the wikipedia commons

One could also get pessimistic by the fact, that taking one-third of profits from some of the worlds biggest companies would be harmful, to say the least for the word economy. As if it was not already in havoc. Just imagine the headlines in FT and the Economist, and the political response from the targeted companies.

But one could also see a hope in these numbers. Their merit is not that they work as legal claims, but that they can help educating society about the gravity of the matter. Something must change. Rather sooner than later.

I think we need a kind of truth commission, assesing how businesses have used and misused our common environment, so that we can find better ways to feed, transport and amuse ourselves. The better ways to grow food and transport people already exists, but how can we make "ecological" the only legal alternative? This must be an open and throughout discussion. But there should not be any reason to hide information about how business have been actually been done - therefore the guilt question must not be central. Criminal behavior can be forgiven, but not forgotten. What is really important is not what has been done up to now, but with what mindset the kids who are now in school will go into business fifteen years from now.

But forgivance comes with a demand - that the foul behavior is not repeated. No one should be allowed to destroy what belongs to everyone - therefore the principle about "The Polluter pays" has to be enacted with legal force in the very near future. Companies, states or individuals should face justice for environmental crimes. Some rules are simply more important than others. Environmental protection is one of those you just can not bend.