In October 1986, a historic summit meeting was held at Reykjavik, Iceland, between the United States, under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan, and the Soviet Union, under the leadership of President Mikhail Gorbachev. What began as a summit with an agenda of limited reduction of nuclear weapons and human rights quickly transformed into a discussion by the two leaders advocating for elimination of all nuclear weapons. The prospect of a world without nuclear weapons had never before been held at such a high level and has never been held since. These negotiations were truly historic and in many ways groundbreaking in helping to end the Cold War.

Reykjavik, a one-act play, written by Richard Rhodes, is a dialogue taken from the actual transcripts of the negotiations between the two presidents. Rhodes is the author or editor of twenty-four works of history, memoir, and fiction, including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. A past visiting scholar at MIT and Harvard University, he is presently an associate of the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation. 

The play runs for seventy-five minutes and will be followed by a question-and-answer session on May 8 with Richard Rhodes and on May 9 with a panel of nuclear security experts led by Charles Ferguson, president of the Federation of American Scientists.

This program is co-sponsored by the Federation of American Scientists, the Fund for Peace Initiatives, the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Bowen H. McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, and Stanford Continuing Studies.

For additional information on the series, please visit the Stanford Ethics and War series website. 

For additional information on the series, please visit the Stanford Ethics and War series website. 

This day long conference is based on a major study of higher education expansion and quality in the world's four largest developing economies-Brazil, Russia, India, and China-known as the BRIC countries. These four economies are already important players globally, but by mid-century, they are likely to be economic powerhouses. Whether they reach that level of development will depend partly on how successfully they create quality higher education that puts their labor forces at the cutting edge of the information society. It is difficult to imagine large economies reaching advanced stages of development in the 21st century without high levels of innovative, well-trained, socially oriented professionals.

The study places particular emphasis on how the BRICs are expanding engineering higher education and the quality and equity of that expansion. Evaluating the potential success of the BRIC countries in developing highly skilled professionals is not the only reason to study their higher education systems. We want to learn how these governments go about organizing higher education because this can tell us a lot about their implicit economic, social, and political goals, and their capacity to reach them. Although the BRICs are acutely aware of their new role in the global economy, their governments must negotiate complex political demands at home, including ensuring domestic economic growth, social mobility, and political participation. Because more and better higher education is positively associated with all these elements, BRIC governments' focus on their university systems has become an important part of their domestic economic and social policy.

The conference involves all the authors of the study from China, India, Russia, and the United States, as well as expert discussants from Brazil and the United States. The various panels of the day-long discussion will focus on various aspects of change in the higher education systems in the BRICs.

TRIUMPH OF THE BRICS?

Higher Education Expansion in the Global Economy

Bechtel Conference Center--FSI

April 28, 2012

Co-Sponsored by

Freeman Spogli Institute, U.S. Department of Education, Office of Post-Secondary Education, Stanford School of Education Lemann Center for Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Brazil, Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford, State Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, China Institute for Educational Finance Research at Peking University, and National University of Educational Policy and Administration, Delhi

8:00 am Bagels and coffee

8:30 am Welcome

8:45 am Introduction to the Study
Presenter: Martin Carnoy, School of Education, Stanford
Discussants: Francisco Ramirez, School of Education, Stanford Gustavo Fischman*, Arizona State University

9:30 am Panel I: The Expansion of and Payoffs to Higher Education in the BRICs
Presenters: Isak Froumin and Maria Dobryakova, State Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Prashant Loyalka, China Institute for Educational Finance Research, Peking University  Discussants: Eric Bettinger, School of Education, Stanford Rafiq Dossani, Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford

10:45 am Coffee Break

11:00 am Panel II: Financing of Higher Education in the BRICs
Presenters: Jandhyala B.G. Tilak, National University of Educational Planning Administration (NUEPA)
Wang Rong, China Institute for Educational Finance Research, Peking University
Discussants: Nick Hope, Stanford Center for International Development
Robert Verhine*, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil

12:15 pm Lunch Break

1:00 pm: Panel III: Institutional Change In BRIC Universities
Presenters: Rafiq Dossani, Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford
Katherine Kuhns, School of Education, Stanford
Discussants: Simon Schwartzman*, Instituto de Estudos do Trabalho e Sociedade, Rio de Janeiro
Wang Rong, China Institute for Educational Finance Research, Peking University

2:15 pm Panel IV: How Does the Quality of Engineering Education Compare?
Presenters: Prashant Loyalka, CIEFR, Peking University
Jandhyala B.G. Tilak, NUEPA, Delhi
Discussants: Sheri Sheppard, School of Engineering, Stanford
Anthony Antonio, School of Education, Stanford

3:30 pm Coffee break

3:45: pm Panel V: Implications for the Future
Presenters:  Martin Carnoy, School of Education, Stanford
Isak Froumin, Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Discussant: Philip Altbach*, Center for International Higher Education, Boston College

5:00 pm Closing Remarks

*Will give their remarks via Webinar connection

The book The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History by Milton Leitenberg and Raymond A. Zilinskas is scheduled to be published on May 14, 2012 by Harvard University Press. This book describes and analyzes in detail the Soviet biological warfare (BW) program, from its inception in 1928 to likely termination in 1992. The two most vexing questions that the authors attempt to answer are; in the final analysis, what were the Soviet BW program’s accomplishments? Second, might Soviet accomplishments related to enhancing biological weaponry be made available to future national or terrorist BW programs? This presentation will explain why these questions are difficult to answer but nevertheless will propose answers to them. The authors have a basis for doing so because they have been able to collect and analyze information from primary resources in archives and special collections, as well as in the course of hundreds of hours spent on interviewing scientists who operated the Soviet BW program. During his presentation, Zilinskas will discuss tentative findings that encompass subjects such as whether the application of genetic engineering, which resulted in among other accomplishments the development of multiantibiotic resistant Bacillus anthracis, Francisella tularensis, and Yersinia pestis, actually resulted in improved weaponry and whether genetically engineered strains remain in Russian cell culture collections and from there might escape or be made available to those who seek to acquire biological weapons.

About the speaker: Raymond A. Zilinskas, formerly a clinical microbiologist, is the director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He is the editor of Biological Warfare: Modern Offense and Defense (Lynne Rienner, 1999) and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Bioterrorism Defense (Wiley, 2005). He received a PhD from the University of Southern California and a BA in Biology from the University of Stockholm.