Joshua Cohen's Program on Global Justice (PGJ), which explores issues at the intersection of political norms and global political-economic realities, has joined CDDRL Center Director Larry Diamond has announced.  Cohen, a professor of political science, philosophy, and law, came to Stanford from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in 2006 to launch a new program on global justice at FSI.

The aim of his program, Cohen said, "is to build dialogue and research that integrates political values - toleration, fairness, and the common good - into discussions about human rights, global governance, and access to such basic goods as food and clean water."  "These issues of global politics are all ethically consequential," Cohen points out, "and addressing them well requires a mix of philosophical thought with the best current social-scientific research."

CDDRL Director Diamond and Associate Director for research Kathryn Stoner joined in saying "We are delighted to welcome Josh Cohen to our team.  His path-breaking work bridges the normative, empirical, and policy dimensions of our Center's ongoing concerns for democracy, equitable economic development, and the rule of law."

Under Cohen, the Global Justice Program's largest effort has focused on the Just Supply Chains project. As globalization of production creates a need for new models of fair treatment for workers in global supply chains, fresh thinking is also needed on the role of unions, the rights of workers to associate, and the role of trade agreement in promoting just working conditions.

Cohen, Diamond, and Terry Winograd, Stanford professor of computer science, have also initiated a the new Program on Liberation Technology which brings together Stanford colleagues from computer science and applied technology with social scientists to explore ways that new information technologies can improve economic, political, and social conditions in low income countries, and materially improve human lives. As Cohen and Diamond note, Liberation Technology "seeks to understand how information technology can be used to defend human rights, improve governance, empower the poor, promote economic development, and pursue of variety of other social goods."  

A prolific author, Cohen has written extensively on issues of democratic theory, especially the theory of deliberative democracy, and implications of that idea for personal liberty. He is the author with Joel Rogers of On Democracy (1983), Rules of the Game (1986), and Associations and Democracy (1995). A volume of his selected papers, Philosophy, Politics, Democracy is forthcoming from Harvard University Press, and his Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals, is forthcoming from Oxford University press.  

Cohen is also the editor of Boston Review, a bi-monthly magazine of political, cultural, and literary ideas, and has edited 18 books that grew out of forums that appeared in the Review. He moderated the Global Poverty and Development Course offered by Google.org in 2007 for google.com employees. The ten week-course addressed issues ranging from growth and globalization to education and urbanization, and can still be watched on YouTube.

Diamond, Stoner-Weiss, and Cohen are part of the distinguished Stanford faculty group who lead the Just Supply Chains each summer.  This highly competitive program each year selects from 600-800 applicants some 30 rising leaders from major transitioning countries such as Russia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Kenya, and Zimbabwe and brings them to Stanford to examine and foster linkages among democracy, sustainable economic development, and good governance. As Diamond and Cohen point out, in today's challenging environment, putting new information technologies to socially, politically, and economic constructive uses is a powerful tool and of growing interest to many of these rising leaders from transitioning countries.   

Has the Internet democratized American politics? Did the Internet phenomenon Democracy 2.0 elect Barack Obama? Program on Global Justice Director Joshua Cohen, professor of law, philosophy, and political science, offers his perspective that despite conventional wisdom, the Internet was not, in fact, responsible for putting a Democrat in the White House this election cycle.

At the Information Technology and the Public Good conference hosted by Google and Microsoft from February 28 to March 1, and put on by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Joshua Cohen insisted that, despite conventional  wisdom, the Internet was not, in fact, responsible for putting a Democrat in the White House this election cycle.

Cohen's commentary is highlighted in the Ars Technica article "Report: Democracy 2.0 not quite the upgrade we first thought."

Management Science and Engineering Professor Siegfried S. Hecker, an expert on nuclear weapons, recently returned from a visit to North Korea, where he frequently checks on the country's denuclearization process. Hecker has researched extensively in fields of plutonium science-he served as director of Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1986 through 1997, and remains an emeritus director to the Laboratory. Through a series of Track Two, non-governmental, non-official visits to North Korea, Hecker has worked closely with the previous and current administration's North Korean negotiations team. The Daily spoke with Hecker about his experiences in the country, and his insight into nuclear issues in North Korea and elsewhere.

The Stanford Daily (SD): This is your sixth visit to North Korea. You made one each year from 2004 to 2009. How is this trip different from the previous ones? Any change in North Korean society, diplomacy?

Siegfried Hecker (SH): We visited North Korea from Tuesday, Feb. 24 to Saturday, Feb. 28, and first of all it was quite a relief from Beijing in that the air was quite clear and that the weather was beautiful. In Beijing, it went day to day from being smoggy to being almost impossibly smoggy. So the first thing that we found when we got off at Pyongyang, was the relief of having reasonably clean air.

Even though it was in February and still quite cold, the greatest impression left is that Pyongyang and the people just looked more prosperous this time than I have seen them look in the past. There were more cars on the road; there were more tractors, especially when we got off into the countryside. The people were better dressed.

Particularly, one of the things I look for is color. Years ago, North Korea, like the Soviet Union, was all drab, gray and black. Now you see lots of colors; lots of down jackets, for example, on little children and women with bright colors from yellow to green to red. There was more construction in Pyongyang. We've seen many cranes working on the ground.

All the way around, while some people believed that North Korea and its economy is sinking, we've actually seen it rising and looking better than we've seen in the past. I would say this is the starkest observation of how it struck differently as the previous times.

[Diplomatically,] we've seen a change of attitude since October 2006, when they conducted a nuclear test. Even though, by technical standards, that nuclear test was of limited success, politically for them it was very successful. So the principal attitude change is one of greater confidence on their part. They now tell us, you must deal with us as a nuclear weapon state. We have demonstrated that we have nuclear weapons. We've tested a nuclear weapon, and so we expect to be treated as a state that has nuclear weapons. That confidence will most likely harden their negotiating position. Then, of course, they're also still trying to get a sense of what the new administration will do. They are entering the negotiations with a new administration from what they considered to be a position of strength.

SD: How is North Korea's disablement process of its nuclear facilities going?

SH: In July 2007, they stopped operations and began disabling the nuclear facilities. When I was there almost exactly one year ago, they showed me the nuclear facilities, allowed me to take photographs of the nuclear facilities to demonstrate that they are disabling those facilities that produce the bomb fuel-the plutonium. Disabling the facilities means making it more difficult to restart. They have finished most of the disablement actions, but still need to complete the unloading of the fuel from the nuclear reactor.

They made the decision last year to slow down the unloading because the other parties did not meet their obligations of providing heavy fuel oil or equivalent energy aid. At this point, Japan and South Korea have not finished their obligations, so the slow-down continues.

If the other parties complete their obligations, then I believe North Korea is prepared to complete the disablement. However, the next important step is to dismantle the facilities-that is, take them apart. The terms of that dismantlement have not yet been negotiated. Subsequently, they will need to give up their nuclear weapons. That seems a long way off now based on their comments.

SD: In one of your reports, you discussed the idea of a scientific fingerprint that could deter North Korea from exporting its plutonium. This is very interesting. Can the method have wider use?

SH: One of the concerns with North Korea would be the possibility of them selling or exporting plutonium or nuclear technologies. We know enough about the North Korean plutonium that we have what you call a scientific fingerprint. The makeup of plutonium is determined by the type of reactor and by how long it was in the reactor. We know that about the North Korean plutonium so we can identify North Korea's plutonium. This should be a deterrent for North Korea ever exporting its plutonium because we would know it came from North Korea.

We, of course, don't know whether or not North Korea would ever want to sell its plutonium, but just in case, the fingerprint represents a deterrent. This fingerprinting of plutonium is not as useful for plutonium from the rest of the world, because there are so many different types of reactors and we know less about their fuels and operating schedules.

SD: Do you think the example of North Korea contributes much to a solution of nuclear problems in other regions-for example, Iran?

SH: Right now, the second nuclear hot spot is Iran, and the difference between North Korea and Iran is that North Korea has declared its nuclear program now to be a weapon's program and has demonstrated that at least it can detonate a nuclear device, even though it wasn't fully successful. Iran, I believe, is developing an option for nuclear weapons but under the umbrella of doing it strictly for civilian purposes. They say, "We're not a nuclear weapon state and we have no intention of developing nuclear weapons," but they are continuing to put most of the capabilities in place should they decide to build weapons.

The dividing line between military and civilian is a very fine line, so North Korea and Iran are two very different problems. However, those countries certainly watch each other and look at the diplomatic responses during each other's negotiations.

SD: Are you advising anyone in the new administration?

SH: We work very closely with the U.S. government on this, although our visits are strictly track two visits, which means non-governmental, non-official visits. I don't go as an official, but rather as a Stanford University employee. In the past, we worked very closely with the previous North Korean negotiations team led by Ambassador Christopher Hill. We have now begun to work with the new team that is just being put in place.

SD: During your visits, you met with North Korean officials in education, public health, and explored possibilities of cooperation in these areas. How do you envision these future exchanges?

SH: We met with officials from the ministry of education and one of the economic universities to discuss potential cooperation in educational and technology exchange. In the past, we have also met with officials from the health ministry. So, in addition to working the nuclear issues, we're very interested in trying to engage the North Korean community in a broader set of activities than simply nuclear, and technology is one of those. They're very interested in material science, biotechnology, information technology, and so we explored the possibility of exchange visits and particularly having some Stanford professors go to North Korea and lecture on those topics.

SD: What classes do you currently teach at Stanford? How do you like being a professor at Stanford?

SH: I have a terrific time-that's one of the reasons why I'm at Stanford. The two classes that I teach are both Management Science and Engineering classes. They both focus on the intersection of technology and policy. One is a very large class, MSE 193/293, that Professor William Perry, former Secretary of Defense, and I teach together. We cover everything from history of technology and warfare to modern times and what the current challenges are in the security arena. Both Prof. Perry and I try to teach that in the spirit of our own experiences in these areas. It's a very, very large class-over 200 students.

Then I teach a course by myself in spring that's exactly the opposite. It's a sophomore seminar, MSE93Q, and I have approximately 16 students. The title is "Nuclear Weapons, Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Terrorism," and in essence, it's everything nuclear. So I cover in that 10 weeks the whole nuclear problem. I try to get students to understand the basics of nuclear technology and how that interfaces with the policy issue of nuclear weapons, energy, proliferation and terrorism. We cover topics such as: If you develop nuclear energy, why do you have to be concerned about nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation? What is the connection between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons? That's what we cover in 10 weeks' time, and I've enjoyed the interaction with students immensely.

SD: What do you aim to teach students in the classroom and outside?

SH: Particularly, I want students to understand the intersections of technology and policy. The nuclear field is a very good one to do that because you must understand the basics of nuclear technology to make good policy. And we also now have 60 years of very rich history of the interplay of those two in so many different countries and so many different ways. For example, in both of my classes the students have to write policy papers that show they have at least a basic understanding of the technology, even though they may be social science, political science, international relations majors, but I want them to understand the difference between plutonium and uranium, between fission and fusion, between weapons and energy. That's what I like to be able to contribute to the University.

What I like about the students is how truly interested and dedicated they are and how experienced so many of them are in the international arena. In addition, what's also fascinating is that we have students from all over the world. Whether it is a physics major from Palestine, or somebody who grew up in Iran, Pakistan, India or in China, Vietnam, Africa, they bring a totally different outlook on the world to the table, which then of course helps the rest of the students to understand that this world is much more than just about the United States of America, and Stanford is a great place to do it.

“You should remove ‘agricultural worker’ from the list of options of parents’ occupations in Question 11,” said the senior government bureaucrat. He explained, “It is impossible for the child of a farm laborer to enter an engineering college.” That statement was made on May 8 in Delhi this year, while he – the chief advisor on higher education to the national government – reviewed a questionnaire for final year engineering students. The questionnaire is to be filled by the graduating cohort of engineering students at various Indian universities this coming year. Its purpose is to discover job mobility across generations and relate that to the cost of education, location, public versus private provision, and various other factors. It is part of a broader study supported by FSI that colleagues at Stanford University and I, along with research groups in India, China and Russia, have initiated to compare the quality of the engineering workforce in three countries – China, India and Russia – with each other and with the United States.

A few days later, on May 14, I was with the head of a medium-sized private college in Bangalore, which had administered the pilot version of the questionnaire to graduating students. As he handed me 450 completed forms, I glanced at the first few. There, right on top, I read the first student’s response to Question 11. A female, she had chosen “agricultural worker” as the father’s occupation. Combined with information on her family’s income (which was in the lowest tier), this was clearly someone who contradicted the bureaucrat’s assumption.

As heartwarming as it was to see that response on the questionnaire, it reminded me, not for the first time, about how little government officials can sometimes know about their constituents. In 2004, I had studied, jointly with a division of the Ministry of Information Technology, how rural users might best use information technology. Our expectation (prior to the study) was that e-mail for personal and business purposes and Internet searches and transactions for farm work would be the main uses.

Instead, what people wanted was government services – health care and other welfare services, postal services, accessing titles and other official records, and government jobs. When I presented our findings to the country’s Minister for Information Technology, he insisted that we were wrong and that our initial hypotheses were correct. It was only when his own division head, who had conducted the study jointly with me, stated (firmly) that he stood by the results that the Minister started to change his views.

Perhaps one should not be too harsh on a bureaucrat when a political master, the minister, could be so ignorant! But, there is another reason for leniency: the higher education revolution in India has still not been understood, even within India, perhaps because of the speed of its happening. A revolution it undoubtedly is. For example, in engineering studies, the number of students enrolled in full-time 4-year undergraduate degree programs has risen from 250,000 in 1997 to 1.5 million in 2007, and is currently growing at 25% annually. Most surprisingly, the higher education sector has moved from a primarily state-provided service to private provision within a decade. 95 per cent of the above increase comes from enrollment in privately-run colleges, which now account for 80% of total enrolment. The storied state-owned Indian Institutes of Technology, which made up 10% of national engineering enrolment in 1990, now account for less than 2%, and graduate 5,000 students a year.

How this happened is too long a story to go into here. Briefly, the national government has increasingly yielded control over higher education to the individual states over the past ten years. The states have, in turn, allowed the private sector in, something that the national government resisted when it was in charge.

One of the desirable outcomes is, as demonstrated by the response to Question 11 above, increased access. Ten years ago, the child of an agricultural worker was, if educated through secondary school, likely to have studied only in the vernacular – and would thus have been excluded from the higher education engineering degree, which is taught only in English. Even if there was money in the family till to pay for tuition, the nearest college was probably too far to allow the student to stay at home; even if she had the money for staying away from home, competition for the limited number of available seats would likely exclude her from even the least meritorious college.

Today, even though the private colleges charge, on average, fifty thousand rupees ($1250) a year for tuition, which is three times the tuition fees at the comparable state college, affordability has increased. This is for two reasons. First is the proliferation of colleges. Thanks to the blanket coverage being provided by the private sector, there is a college, most likely two or three, in most small towns. Bangalore, with 290 engineering colleges – almost all private – tells the story of the rest of the country.

So, even small-town students no longer need to live away from home, thus saving on living costs. This can be a significant savings: in Bangalore, rent for a single room more than makes up the difference in private and state tuition fees. Second, the private colleges have built linkages with banks, so bank loans will usually cover half the tuition costs.

The democratization of higher education in India has removed the impending shortage of talent for the IT exporting sector. It has also brought into question the importance of the IITs to the eco-system, which – according to the recruiters I have interviewed over the years – was always overstated. Let’s examine both of these in the current context.

For the top IT exporting firms in India, such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro, the private providers are a boon. Together, the top three firms will, even in today’s difficult global economic environment, add 70,000 persons to their payrolls (net of attrition) in 2008. 70 per cent of these recruits will be fresh graduates. Private college graduates will account for the overwhelming majority of their recruits, followed by state colleges (not IITs).

Of course, these firms would like to recruit the top IIT graduates. However, the best IIT graduates either go abroad to study or work (a third do so, though that ratio is declining), another third join an MBA program in India, and the rest are recruited by the Indian operations of western firms like Google or Yahoo!, or join Indian startups like Tejas Networks or Telsima. Such firms pay starting salaries that are double the $7,500 starting wage offered by the Indian IT majors.

Is this a big loss for the Indian IT industry? No, say the recruiters, pointing out that the IIT graduating cohort was always a small proportion of their recruits because of overseas migration. What is important, they point out, is that other providers are rapidly catching up with the IITs in quality. Given their reliance on fresh graduates and their scale of recruitment (for example, between June and August of this year, TCS will make one thousand job offers a week and recruit 85% of its offerees), the Indian IT firms make precise calibrations of schools and rank them. The top quartile of the graduates of the top local private colleges in Bangalore are now considered equal in quality to those at the 50th percentile in the IITs. The top quartile at national colleges, such as the National Institutes of Technology, are deemed equal to the 75th percentile of the IITs.

The rank is based on various factors: alumni recruited by them in earlier years, internal factors such as laboratory and library infrastructure, and course content, their interaction with faculty in research projects, and student performance in internships. A thousand colleges (of the four thousand that offer engineering degrees in India) are deemed to meet the standards of the top three IT firms and their graduates are thus eligible for recruitment. According to one of the IT firms I spoke to, a decade ago, there were only fifty colleges that met their standards.

In consequence, in states where they are concentrated, eg., Infosys and Wipro in the state of Karnataka (whose capital is Bangalore) and TCS in Tamil Nadu (whose capital is Chennai), the ranking by the top 3 IT firms is critical for the colleges. A corporate recruiter from a smaller firm seeking IT talent from a Chennai college will demand to know its “TCS ranking."

This, in turn, is invaluable information to incoming students, which, in its turn, influences how colleges invest in faculty and infrastructure. As a result, in a way that was unforeseen by government planners and even the World Bank (which, in 2000, argued that market failure was likely in case private provision in India became important), a thriving market for engineering education has been created and quality has improved.

As recently as 2001, a report on IT education (which included a study of the IITs) by the Ministry of Human Resource Development noted that “The barest minimum laboratory facilities are available in many of the institutions and very little research activity is undertaken…Engineering institutions have not succeeded in developing strong linkages with industry…The curriculum offered is outdated and does not meet the needs of the labor market.” Around that time, when I had interviewed the director of one of the IITs, he had supported this finding, noting that almost all the engineering students at that IIT did their final year thesis projects in laboratories within the IIT (rather than, as intended, in companies).

Today, an engineering graduate from any of the thousand colleges that the IT services industry deems eligible for recruitment will always have completed several internships with industry prior to graduation, including the final semester thesis project – in other words, this is a sea change from just a few years ago.

Of course, there are caveats to the story of higher education. One of the concerns stated by regulators is that, as control has shifted from New Delhi to the states, the weak states have not been able to keep up with the strong states, thus increasing the intellectual gap between them. This appears to be true, on first impression. My conversations with recruiters of IT firms in Bangalore in May indicated increasing regional selectivity. Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Maharashtra and West Bengal were the regions of choice, while weak states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were falling behind.

A second genuine concern of policymakers is that the private colleges have no research agenda. Of course, what policymakers do not state is that the IITs have historically had no research agenda either. The good part of the present situation is that, with the burden of providing mass education off its backs, the national government is using its limited resources to support centers of excellence for research.

A final caution is on replicability in other countries. The higher education system that has resulted in India was not foreseen and caught the nation’s education planners by surprise. No one expected that the private sector would respond as it did. Planners designed the system to allow only non-profit private providers. Planners expected that those private providers that would enter the system would be philanthropic. They would exist at the margins of the then larger state-system. Accordingly, planners encouraged them, through incentives, to set up their institutions in smaller towns.

Instead, the private providers stormed into the big cities first, preferring to ignore the incentives, and have only recently spread to smaller towns. They have made profits through the back-door (by charging an upfront fee, the capitation fee).

A key factor was rising federalism: strong states like Karnataka and Tamil Nadu were able to provide the regulatory support that made private sector entry possible. The second key factor was the IT industry’s willingness to be the market maker, as described above. In this, the role of the large Indian IT firms, as noted, was critical. It is unlikely that an industry characterized by a large numbers of small firms would have been able to play the role of market maker.

So, there are some unique factors in India. China offers an alternative, perhaps more replicable, model: an entirely state-run system in which tuition fees, which average $800 per annum, pay for 50 per cent of costs. It, too, has grown rapidly: for example, 5 million students are currently enrolled in undergraduate engineering programs. The share of the burden per student appears to be higher in India. In India, the state and “aided” private colleges (these are privately owned and managed, but accept state-aid to pay for costs such as infrastructure and faculty salaries – in return, they must charge the same tuition fees as state-run institutions) account for 40% of total enrollment and charge fees that cover 30 per cent of costs. The unaided schools, as noted earlier, recover full costs through tuitions (endowments insignificant). Hence, the share of total national costs of education borne by students in the system is over 70%. This may be important for achieving long-term sustainability, although, in the short-term, it may adversely affect enrollment.

For the moment, though, the Indian IT industry, earlier starved of talent, has been saved by one of its own – the for-profit private education sector.