Pardee Research and Paper Presented to NAS Meeting

Boston University Provost Dr. David Campbell and Pardee Center Director Prof. Adil Najam presented the findings and state of research on the “Mapping Complexity in Higher Education in Developing Countries” project to a meeting of the National Academies of Sciences Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI) meeting in Chicago on Friday, May 21, 2010. Pardee Center Faculty Fellow Prof. Hamid Zaman is the third investigator on the project.

The project, which was funded by NAKFI, had resulted in an experts workshop hosted by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future in October 2009. The Pardee Center workshop had brought together scholars from multiple disciplines and practitioners from around the world to discuss how we can define success and sustainability of a higher education system in the context of a developing world. This workshop focused on understanding the dimensions of the higher education ’systems’ in developing countries with the hope of turning that understanding into a larger program of interdisciplinary research and activity.

The workshop has resulted in a Pardee Center Issues in Brief paper titled ‘Mapping Complexity of Higher Education in the Developing World’ by Professors Hamid Zaman, Adil Najam and David Campbell. (Paper can be downloaded here).

The NAKFI meeting in Chicago brought together the researchers from across USA who had been funded by NAKFI grants to present and discuss their research. Prof. Campbell and Prof. Najam presented a summary of the workshop held and paper produced as part of this research and responded to questions and comments from other researchers at the meeting.