Please join Marvin Kalb to discuss the impact of the Vietnam War on presidential/strategic decisions about national security issues. 

Marvin Kalb is also a contributing news analyst for National Public Radio and Fox News Channel. In addition, he is frequently called upon to comment on major issues of the day by many of the nation's other leading news organizations.

Kalb had a distinguished 30-year broadcast career, working for both CBS News and NBC News, where he served as Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, Moscow Bureau Chief, and moderator of Meet the Press. Among his many honors are two Peabody Awards, the DuPont Prize from Columbia University, the 2006 Fourth Estate Award from the National Press Club and more than a half-dozen Overseas Press Club awards. He has lectured at many universities, here and abroad. Kalb was the founding director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

A graduate of the City College of New York, Kalb has an M.A. from Harvard and was zeroing in on his Ph.D. in Russian history when he left Cambridge in 1956 for a Moscow assignment with the State Department. The following year, he joined CBS News, the last correspondent hired by Edward R. Murrow. Kalb has authored or co-authored 10 nonfiction books and two best-selling novels. His latest book, The Media and the War on Terrorism (co-edited with Stephen Hess), was the recipient of the 2004 Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism. He is currently engaged in research for a book on U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and its impact on American politics and foreign policy.

The Indian economy has expanded at a fairly steady and rapid rate in the past fifteen years, and part of that expansion has been a greatly increased demand for university graduates, particularly for those in technical fields. As of 2008, India was the largest producer and exporter of IT enabled services in the developing world. At the same time, Indian higher education has also expanded rapidly, both in the number of students enrolled and number of institutions—now four times the number in the US and Europe and more than twice that of China. The growth of private colleges in technical and business fields is an important feature of India’s higher education expansion, but it needs to be interpreted carefully. The rapid expansion of unaided colleges affiliated with universities is gradually transforming the role of public universities into regulating, degree-granting institutions and away from teaching or research (Kapur, 2009). Further, the form that higher education expansion took in India in the 2000s resulted in a steady reduction in public spending per student in higher education in the early 2000s. 

State authorities appear increasingly willing to grant support for private unaided colleges to become autonomous universities, thereby loosening the regulatory power over the institutions’ decision making.  At the same time, many signals (including the government’s 2012 higher education enrollment target of 15 percent of age cohort—approximately 21 million students) point toward considerable expansion of public universities and colleges over the next 4-5 years. The total number of students in all these institutions together, however, will be small compared to the total output of India’s technical colleges.

Given this background and some preliminary data we have from student and institutional surveys and interviews in Indian technical colleges and universities, we try to address several important issues in Indian higher education:

1. What is the essence of the higher education financing system established by government policies and what can we infer from that financing system about government goals for higher education in the next ten years?
2. How are colleges, their faculty, and their students reacting to these policies?
3. What can be said about the current quality of Indian technical/engineering education and its prospects for the future?
4. What can we conclude from the Indian case about the driving forces shaping higher education and where they are likely to take it?

Carolina for Kibera (CFK) inspires and nurtures youth leaders in the slum of Kibera, Kenya through a unique model of participatory development.  CFK recognizes the youth of Kibera as resilient, wise, innovative, and eager to lift their community above the poverty and violence that plagues it.  CFK's long-term initiatives provide youth opportunities to learn and serve while addressing a wide range of community needs including healthcare, education, waste recycling and reduction, HIV/AIDS testing and counseling, and girls' empowerment.  CFK's model of participatory to fight abject poverty, and prevent ethnic, gender and religious violence has been internationally recognized, earning awards as a Time Magazine and Gates Foundation "Hero of Global Health" and the 2008 Oklahoma City National Memorial Foundation's Reflections of Hope Award.  CFK is a major affiliated entity of UNC based at the Center for Global Initiatives.

Salim Mohamed Salim Mohamed co-founded and served as the Executive Director of Carolina for Kibera for eight years. At the age of 16, he was involved in the development of MYSA - the largest youth sports program in Africa based in the Mathare slum of Nairobi.  Salim has helped launch community based sports and development programs in Ghana, Gambia, and Nigeria and presented at the International AIDS Conference. He serves as a director for Shoe 4 Africa, an advisor to Global Education Fund and a YES! facilitator.  A TED Africa Fellow, he is currently pursuing a master's degree at the University of Manchester.

Rye Barcott  While an undergraduate on an NROTC scholarship at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2001, Barcott founded CFK with the late nurse Tabitha Atieno Festo and community organizer Salim Mohamed. Barcott served five years in the Marine Corps before earning a combined MBA and MPA at Harvard as a Reynolds Social Entrepreneurship Fellow and a member of the Harvard Endowment's Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility.  In 2006, he was named an ABC World News Person of the Year.  A TED Fellow and member of the UNC Chancellor's Innovation Circle, Barcott is writing a book that juxtaposes community organizing and counter-insurgency (under contract, Bloomsbury Publishing).

Professor Fujitani’s presentation will be drawn from his forthcoming book, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans in WWII. The book is a comparative and transnational study of ethnic and colonial soldiers during the Asia-Pacific War (or the Second World War in the Asia-Pacific) that focuses specifically on Japanese Americans mobilized to serve in the United States army and Koreans who were recruited or drafted into the Japanese military. His research utilizes the two sites of soldiering as optics through which to examine the larger operations and structures of the changing U.S. and Japanese national empires as they struggled to manage racialized populations within the larger demands of conducting total war. He seeks to show how discussions about, policies, and representations of these two sets of soldiers tell us a great deal about the changing characteristics of wartime racism, nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, gender politics, the family, and some other related issues on both sides of the Pacific that go well beyond the soldiers themselves, and whose repercussions remain with us today. The seminar will focus on the Korean Japanese side of his research.

Takashi Fujitani is Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. His primary areas of research are modern and contemporary Japanese history, East Asian history, and transnational history (primarily U.S./Japan and Asia-Pacific). His publications include: Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (UC Press, 1996; Japanese version, 1994; Korean translation, 2003);  Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (co-editor, Duke, 2001); and  Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans in WWII (forthcoming, UC Press; Japanese version, Iwanami Shoten); as well as numerous book chapters and articles published in Korean, Japanese and English. His recent research has been funded by the John. S. Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Social Science Research Council.

This seminar is supported by a generous grant from Koret Foundation.