President Barack Obama is reading What Is the What and has recommended that all his staff read it as well.

Valentino Achak Deng's life has been described by The New York Times as a testament "to human resilience over tragedy and disaster." Born in the village of Marial Bai, in Southern Sudan, he was forced to flee in the 1980s, at the age of seven, when civil war erupted. As one of the so-called Lost Boys, he trekked hundreds of miles, pursued by animals and government militias, and lived for years in refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. He eventually resettled in America, to a new set of challenges. Deng's life is the basis of Dave Eggers' epic book What Is the What, which Francine Prose calls "an extraordinary work of witness, and of art." In 2009, as part of his Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, he opened the Marial Bai Secondary School, the region's first proper high school. Read Nicolas Kristof's glowing New York Times Op-ed about the Marial Bai School in Sudan.

Valentino Deng spent his formative years in refugee camps, where he worked as a social advocate and reproductive health educator for the UN High Commission for Refugees. He has toured the United States and Europe, telling his story and becoming an advocate for social justice and the universal right to education. In 2006, Deng collaborated with Dave Eggers on What Is the What, an international bestseller that is now required reading on college campuses across America. With Eggers, Deng is co-founder of the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which helps rebuild Sudanese communities by providing educational opportunities and facilities.

Professor Anne Bartlett received her Ph.D. from the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago. She is a director of the Darfur Centre for Human Rights and Development based in London. Since 2002, Bartlett has worked with tribes and rebel groups from Darfur as part of a research project on insurgent politics. At the invitation of the Darfur delegation, Bartlett was the chair of the United Nations hearing on the Darfur crisis, UN commission on Human Rights, 60th Session, Geneva, Switzerland, April 2004. She was also a guest speaker at "The Human Rights and Humanitarian Crisis in Darfur (Western Sudan): Challenges to the International Community," UN Commission on Human Rights, 61st session, April 2005, Geneva, Switzerland. Bartlett has published extensively on the crisis and has given numerous talks on the Darfur crisis worldwide. She is currently working on a project that examines the effect of humanitarian intervention in the region.

Co-Sponsored by

The Billie Achilles Fund and the Bechtel International Center, Programs in International Relations, SAGE, Six Degrees & Human Rights Forum, STAND, Stanford Amnesty International, UNICEF, Program on Human Rights: CDDRL, Center for African Studies, & The Black Community Services Center

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).