In the year that memorial tables to the four colleagues murdered by Concordia University professor Valery Fabrikant were unveiled, there were several reminders that universities are not immune from the escalating levels of violence in wider society.

* August: Three San Diego State University professors were shot and killed, allegedly by a student there who was due to defend his master's thesis in Engineering * October: Henry Edwards, dean at the University of Ottawa since 1983, resigned after being charged with attempting to poison his 87-year-old mother. * The director of a leading nuclear weapons research centre in the Urals committed suicide, apparently in part because of his despair over the budgetary woes of his institute.

* November Four colleagues were shot dead by Karen Zhamogortian, director of a Russian Academy of Science Institute of Computer Science in Kazan, Tatarstan, who then killed his 63-year-old wife and turned the gun on himself.

Campuses become deadly places

Nick Holdsworth, Moscow

Although the deaths of six Russian academics this autumn shocked the scientific community, colleagues have been reluctant to ascribe the incidents to the financial crisis within academia.

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But, along with a well-publicised hunger strike, the suicides and murders have undoubtedly focused minds on the pressures science is under in Russia. The re-election earlier this year of president Boris Yeltsin, who ensured that public sector workers, including academics and scientists, were paid long-overdue wages just before the June polls and July run-off, seemed to steady the political crisis.

Yet the financial crisis began to worsen. Science, with most institutes able barely to cover the poverty-level wages of their remaining staff, reflects that of all public sector enterprises.

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The Russian Academy of Sciences received around 80 per cent of its allocated budget in the first 11 months of this year, including Pounds 12,300 in write-offs against unpaid utility bills for its Moscow headquarters, but many individual institutes struggle on less.

For Russia's brightest young brains, the meagre salaries and poor working conditions of scientific research jobs are hardly attractive in an economy where bankers and businessmen can command grotesquely huge fees.

Yet the response of most scientists and research workers, surviving on an average monthly salary of 500,000 roubles (Pounds 60), around a quarter of what is considered a decent living salary, is not despair or anger, but simply to turn to second or third jobs. Others see the situation as a reversal of the unprecedented support science enjoyed under communism.

Money from cads and lotharios

Tim Cornwell, Los Angeles

The generosity and eccentricities of private donors who give large sums to universities have never been more striking.

Last month Washington and Lee University announced a gift of $11 million from the estate of James Dye, scion of an Oklahoma oil family, despite having expelled him in 1931. For the rest of his life, the New York Times reported recently, Mr Dye remembered the rebuke handed him by a professor: "You are not a scholar, as demonstrated by your work in this particular class. And by your demeanour in and out of class, you have demonstrated that you are not a gentleman, and that is the more severe of the two."

It was 60 years before Mr Dye talked to anyone at his alma mater. He told a university fundraiser that the chemistry professor had taught him the meaning of being a gentleman, and subsequently left half his fortune to the institution.

Other recent donors include the secretive Bass brothers of Texas, the Turkish government, which endowed chairs in Turkish studies (propagandising, according to the critics), and the late packing and shipping tycoon Larry Hillblom. His bequest of more than half a billion dollars to the University of California is being contested by a string of illegitimate children, allegedly conceived as he romped with teenage girls in the Pacific islands.

The "new economic environment" - better known as the cash crunch, after years of steady expansion - remains one of the biggest issues, according to Stanley Ikenberry, the new head of the American Council on Education, the higher education lobby group.

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Symptoms of retrenchment have been everywhere this year: from professors' groups nervously defending tenure, to wage strikes by graduate teaching assistants, to university presses claiming they can no longer afford to publish dense academic monographs.

In the competition for students, colleges have cut fees, spruced up their menus and sleeping quarters, offered "fifth year free" masters programmes or job "guarantees" for their degrees - promising to cover loan payments for successful graduates who cannot find work. Affordability has been the rallying cry.

But the gloom may be lifting. The academic establishment has weathered, and weathered well, the first two years of the Newt Gingrich era, the speaker of the house of representatives who accused it of being "out of control, increasingly out of touch with the rest of America".

Universities proved their political clout when they successfully resisted, and in some cases even reversed, Republican attempts to tighten the funds available for all-important student loans. Though cuts in defence, research, and arts spending have certainly taken their toll, "we came out of the session in remarkably good shape," said Mr Ikenberry.

The Higher Education Act, which authorises student aid and grants, is up for reauthorisation in Congress next year, potentially a slow and gruelling process. But the ACE and other lobbying groups can now rely on a sympathetic White House. Bill Clinton made education a centrepiece of his reelection campaign, and has proposed tax credits and scholarships in his promise to make the first two years of college as automatic as the last years of school.

The potboilers of American academe continue to bubble away: sexual harassment, "political correctness" and accreditation. This year, affirmative action programmes have taken double blows, as Texas court rulings and California's vote on Proposition 209 has barred admissions policies that openly favour students of one race. Colleges will be looking for subtler ways to help minority and disadvantaged students.

Heartbreaker with skin of rhinoceros

Geoff Maslen, Melbourne

A woman has caused more heartache this year among Australia's academics - male and female - than any other person in recent history, including the former Labor education minister, John Dawkins, who transformed the higher education system eight years ago.

Amanda Vanstone was the surprise choice to take on Dawkins's mantle when new conservative prime minister John Howard, announced his Cabinet after a sweeping victory in March.

As opposition spokesperson on consumer affairs and justice, Vanstone had no government experience and little knowledge of higher education. Her most recent contact with any campus appeared to date from years before when she was a part-time arts and law student at the University of Adelaide.

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But she has proved implacable in achieving her goals, with a rhinoceros-like capacity to shrug off the slings and arrows of Labor politicians, students and the higher education unions.

The Howard government was elected on a series of promises to correct mistakes Labor was alleged to have made, with guarantees to maintain spending in key areas. Once in power, however, all the major promises went out the window. Claiming that Australia faced an almost insoluble level of foreign debt, the government brought down a budget in August that imposed reductions across the board.

To lessen the negative political impact, Senator Vanstone announced details of spending on higher education 11 days before the full budget went to Parliament. She set out an astonishing series of changes that involved savings of nearly Aus$2 billion over the next three years, along with a radical reshaping of tuition payments.

For the first time in 15 years, universities were confronted by a major cut in federal spending, a government refusal to provide additional money for a substantial staff pay rise, and the prospect that thousands of academic jobs would be lost. This was despite the fact that universities would be allowed, again for the first time, to charge full fees to Australian students who do not win a government-funded place.

The policy changes begin taking effect from the start of 1997 and will mean a huge rise in student charges, a complex and untried differential system of applying course costs, and faster repayments by graduates of the debt they incur from studying.

Having set out the changes, Senator Vanstone also announced a comprehensive independent review of the sector, along the lines of the Dearing inquiry. The review will focus on the next ten to 20 years but, nearly five months later, the terms of reference and membership have still to be announced.

At first, the government faced an on-going industrial dispute with academics and general staff who are demanding a 15 per cent pay rise, plus a confrontation in the senate where the opposition Labor and Democrat parties vowed to reject key elements of the budget. Early in December, however, with the help of two independent senators, the education minister had her package of reforms passed almost untouched.

Senator Vanstone, and the government, have achieved all the major goals they had set themselves, including a massive reform of Australia's industrial relations system. To that extent she ends the year victorious.

But academics feel bewildered and betrayed: they see their courses disappearing, departments closing down around them, and their colleagues taking early retirement or being forced to quit.

In the new harsher world they inhabit, the "privatisation" of higher education seems certain to gather pace as universities strive to find more non-government sources of revenue. Already, a new system of pay scales is emerging where staff in some institutions will earn more than their counterparts elsewhere.

But beyond that, the future looks more bleak and uncertain than it has ever been.

Thumbs twiddle while Socrates ponders

Olga Wojtas

European universities spent the first half of 1996 frenetically drawing up their bids for the new Socrates programme of educational cooperation, and the second half of the year twiddling their thumbs awaiting the outcome.

It will be spring before the contracts are awarded for the coming academic session, due to the complexity of processing the 1,600 institutional applications, and also of the European Commission's decision-making processes. Funding is also an unknown quantity. The overall budget, which covers all types and levels of education from kindergarten to postgraduate courses, is due to be reviewed in 1997.

Socrates dramatically broadens the Erasmus student exchange scheme, offering grants, for example, for curriculum development at under and postgraduate level; implementing the European Credit Transfer System, and integrating language courses into other disciplines, such as engineering or chemistry.

But it is clear that student exchanges will still dominate. These form part of 1,516 of the bids, potentially covering a record 180,000 students. Institutions are also hoping for a substantial increase in staff mobility, with 1,352 bids covering 31,000 academics, compared to the 13,000 staff in the last Erasmus round.

But this figure applies only to teaching assignments of up to two months. There has been little interest in the two to six-month teaching assignments, presumably because hard-pressed institutions feel they cannot spare staff.

While Erasmus depended on grass-roots links between academics, Socrates demands a single institutional bid backed by a European policy statement of strategic objectives. Some parts of an bid may be deemed worthy of a contract while others fail, although virtually no institution is likely to have its entire bid rejected. The level of European Commission dirigisme remains an open question, but some believe it may want to stimulate mobility in under-represented disciplines and under-represented member states.

Staff reaction has been mixed: some Erasmus pioneers feel marginalised, while others welcome the admin burden shifting to institutions' international offices. International offices are nervous since the funding will not be earmarked, and staff will come under pressure when disbursing the funds.

The scheme is leading to a proliferation of international offices. It is already looking towards a wider Europe, underpinning the "pre-accession strategy" for those countries wanting to join the European Union.

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The Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Romania, Cyprus and Malta are already negotiating to put in bids by July for the 1998/99 session, with Poland and Bulgaria also hoping to meet the deadline.