The World

T he Chronicle began publication aiming to write about American colleges and universities, but it quickly turned its eye overseas. In addition to a network of correspondents we recruited around the world, we sent our reporters to international campuses to report first hand on developments, often in regions of conflict. We sent a reporter to the American University of Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon war, and to El Salvador in 1983 after the Salvadoran army ransacked the National University of El Salvador. We also had a reporter at Tiananmen Square in Beijing during the 1989 student uprising.

A signature event in The Chronicle’s international reporting was a special report it published in 1986 on higher education under apartheid. Two editors, Malcolm G. Scully and Paul Desruisseaux, in collaboration with the paper’s Cape Town correspondent, Helen Zille, traveled throughout South Africa, visiting 10 university campuses and interviewing more than 150 people. Their report ran over 20 pages in the June 11, 1986, issue.

In recent years, The Chronicle has focused its reporting on the large influx of foreign students to U.S. campuses and the international spread of American higher education.

October 14, 1968

British Style of Student Activism More Ideological Than U.S. Brand

London
The Oxford Union, breeding-ground of prime ministers, has produced one of the world’s best known youthful radicals — Tariq Ali — England’s Mark Rudd. Mr. Ali, a 24-year-old Pakistani, is, like many British student radicals, a socialist.

He draws large audiences for his frequent speeches at universities. But he is more interested in reforming society than in changing universities now.

British radicals are much more ideology-oriented than their American counterparts. They know what kind of world they want to build on the ashes of the existing social and economic order. Mr. Rudd, and most other American leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, readily admit they are uncertain in their vision of an ideal world.

October 28, 1968

Student Radicals in Berlin Find Professors’ Power Impregnable

Berlin
In the United States, England, and Canada, many students believe that the education they are receiving is valuable and that they are being taught in a viable and coherent manner. Such students are not easy to find in Germany — at least in West Berlin. Several dozen German students, of a wide range of political persuasions, who were interviewed here felt the German university required substantial change — beginning with breaking the power of professors.

50 Years of The Chronicle of Higher Education

This special issue of The Chronicle offers some of the best and most representative journalism of our first 50 years — from the turbulence of the 1960s to the present moment of financial constraint and accountability. And it’s all yours, free for downloading. Download The Chronicle’s 50th-Anniversary Anthology.

• The End Is the Beginning
• An Era of Protests
• Download The Chronicle’s 50th-Anniversary Anthology
• The Faculty
• Race on Campus
• Technology
• The Chronicle: How We Got Here
• Timeline: 50 Years of Higher Education

“We have a Middle Ages monarchy here in the universities,” a 26-year-old student said. “Professors are like absolute monarchs. They are not and cannot be forced to cooperate with any sort of academic pattern. They just work as they want.”

September 15, 1982

American University of Beirut Caught Up in War in Lebanon

Beirut, Lebanon
“I don’t feel unsafe, … but the danger is always present.” — Malcolm H. Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, 16 months before his assassination in January 1984.

June 11, 1986

South Africa: The Crisis, the Campuses, and Some Messages for Americans

Johannesburg
These two black students at the white university here find little to be happy about. Dali Mpofu and Thandi Gqubule are studying at one of their country’s most prestigious institutions. But the daily, dominant fact of their lives is apartheid. The South African government’s policy of white supremacy is evident to them everywhere — even here at the University of the Witwatersrand.

The university is working valiantly to find new ways of serving blacks. It is raising money for scholarships — “bursaries,” it calls them — that would enable more blacks to enroll. In defiance of South African law, it is housing black students in dormitories on its campus so they will not have to commute long distances from black townships every day. And it is trying to recruit more black professors.

But Dali Mpofu and Thandi Gqubule often feel isolated at the university — sometimes, indeed, “invisible.” No matter how well-intentioned, this is still a white dominated institution in a white-dominated society in which 80 percent of the people are black.

June 14, 1989

Beijing University, Before and After

The bloody crackdown by the government stuns students and faculty members

Beijing
Shortly before dawn on the morning of June 4, students at Beijing University began to gather outside their dormitories. They stood in a tight little circle, not far from the campus store, in a meeting area known as sanjiao di.

The first, fragmentary reports of the carnage that would leave hundreds — perhaps thousands — of students and other people dead were beginning to reach the campus from Tiananmen Square, about 10 miles away.

Someone produced a stack of black armbands, and one by one the students reached out for them and put them on. A soldier’s uniform, neatly folded, was placed on the pavement and set on fire. About a dozen students encircled it and stood motionless, their heads bowed, as the flames slowly consumed the cloth.

A student told an American visitor: “Please, tell your country: The Chinese government is very cruel.”

March 2, 2007

Cornell Courts a Subcontinent

Mumbai, India
A whirlwind tour of India highlights U.S. institutions’ haste to find global partners

India is increasingly showing up on the travel schedules of college presidents nationwide. Like American corporations that began coming to India more than a decade ago to tap the brain power of its millions of inexpensive, well-educated engineers, software writers, and medical technicians, American higher-education institutions are flocking here to recruit Indian students, set up academic and research ventures, and raise money, largely through their rapidly expanding alumni bases. The most ambitious among them are considering joint-degree programs or full-fledged campuses.

July 6, 2015

The Chinese Mother’s American Dream

Beijing
This fall more than 275,000 Chinese students will start classes on American campuses, nearly triple the number from any other country. But even as American colleges have come to rely ever more on these students’ tuition dollars, they may know very little about the people writing the checks. Back in China, some half-million parents are holding their breath.

The decision they made to send a child across the globe in search of a better education and a better life is one fused with hope and fear, spurred by motivations that are complicated and sometimes contradictory. It may be about the draw of the United States or dissatisfaction with China, aspirations for the future or pragmatism about the present, a child’s desire or a parent’s resolve. It may be about all of that.

In many ways, mothers and fathers in Beijing and Shanghai face the same concerns as their counterparts in Minneapolis and Dallas, fretting about whether their kid is choosing the right college or an impractical major. But for Chinese parents, the choice of an American education for their child — and almost always their only child — is not just a financial investment. It’s a political maneuver, a personal sacrifice, a bet on greater opportunity abroad.