Philip G. Altbach is J. Donald Monan, S.J. professor of higher education and director of the Center for International Higher Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. He has been a senior associate of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and served as editor of the Review of Higher Education, Comparative Education Review, and as an editor of Educational Policy. He is author of Comparative Higher Education, Student Politics in America, and others.  He edited International Higher Education: An Encyclopedia. Dr. Altbach holds the B.A., M.A. and Ph.D degrees from the University of Chicago. He has taught the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he directed the Comparative Education Center, and chaired the Department of Educational Organization, Administration and Policy, and was a post-doctoral fellow and lecturer on education at Harvard University. He is a Guest Professor at the Institute of Higher Education at Peking University in the Peoples Republic of China, and as been a visiting professor at Stanford University and at the University of Bombay in India. Dr. Altbach has been a Fulbright scholar in India, and in Malaysia and Singapore. He has had awards from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and has been Onwell Fellow at the University of Hong Kong. He is the 2004-2006 Distinguished Scholar Leader of the New Century Scholars initiative of the Fulbright program.Dr. Altbach has published widely on higher education, comparative education, and on publishing and knowledge distribution. Among his books are The International Academic Profession: Portraits from 14 Countries, International Higher Education: An Encyclopedia, Comparative Higher Education, The Knowledge Context: Comparative Perspectives on the Distribution of Knowledge, American Higher Education in the 21st Century, Scientific Development and Higher Education in Newly Industrializing Countries, Comparative Education, Student Politics in America, and others.  His books have been translated into German, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Turkish, and Spanish.  Dr. Altbach is also editor of Greenwood Studies in Higher Education, a book series, and of the RoutledgeFalmer Dissertation Series on Higher Education.

 

Alfred Ebenbauer was born in St. Michael, Styria, in 1945. After graduating from grammar school with distinction he studied German Language and Literature as well as History at the University of Vienna, from which he graduated with a PhD in 1970. In the same year he became an assistant at the Department of German Language and Literature of the University of Vienna. Since 1981 he has been a full professor at the University of Vienna. From 1987 to 1990 Prof. Ebenbauer was the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and afterwards he became rector of the University of Vienna (1990-1998). From 1991 to 1993 he was the president of the Austrian Rectors’ Conference.In his function as rector Alfred Ebenbauer promoted international partnerships of the University of Vienna. The start of Austrian participation in the ERASMUS programme in 1992/93 also coincided with the time of his rectorship. In 1997 Alfred Ebenbauer became president of the Austrian Exchange Service (ÖAD) and has since been re-elected twice for another three-year term in 2000 and in 2003. Prof. Ebenbauer is also considered a precursor of the university reform; he played an essential role in the transition to the University Organisation Act 1993. For his merits towards the Austrian education and university system he was awarded by the Republic of Austria on April 11th of this year.

Dr Guy HAUG is a European expert on higher education policy in an international setting. He is currently advising the European Commission (Directorate for Education) on higher education matters such as the recent Communication on “Mobilising the brainpower of Europe”.Before that he was centrally involved in shaping the Bologna process as Principal Advisor to the European Association of Universities. Until 1998 he was Director General for Europe of the Council on International Educational Exchange, New York/Paris. He worked for the EU for the inception of the ERASMUS, TEMPUS and ASIA-LINK programmes. He cooperated with the Council of Europe, the Nordic Council of Ministers, OECD, UNESCO and many NGOs. He holds a Master’s degree in Law (Strasbourg), an MBA (Ottawa), a Ph.D. in Political Science (Tübingen) and a Doctorate honoris causa from HETAC (Ireland).

Since October 2002, Holger Heller has worked at the Federation of Austrian Industry, where he is a project manager and senior expert in the field of education policy and reform on national and EU level, and works in particular with the development of a national Lifelong Learning strategy and action plan, and the reform of further education systems in Austria. Heller is also a member of several committees and working groups, like the EU Advisory Committee on Vocational training, UNICE education committee, EU Social dialogue, European Commission expert group on the new LLL program, and the national expert group on LLL.Before joining the Federation of Austrian Industry, Heller worked for three years as national expert at the European Commission, and two years as attaché for education and research in the Permanent Representation of Austria to the European Union. Since 2000 Heller has also been a lecturer on EU education policies, European programs, and EU immigration policy at the Fachhochschule Eisenstadt in Austria. Heller is a graduate in legal studies and has also a degree in marketing.

Rolf Hoffmann is Executive Director of the German-American Fulbright Commission in Berlin since February 2004. Born in Cologne, Germany, he studied biological sciences at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA, and the University of Tübingen in Germany where he was awarded a doctoral degree in 1983. After two years as an assistant professor in zoology at the University of Karlsruhe he joined the policy division of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn and later became Deputy Director of their selection division and the Feodor-Lynen Program. In 1990, he joined the newly created German Space Agency (DARA) as head of the international science and business relations policy office. Since 1991 he worked mainly for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Bonn, first as Programme Director (for North American and European programs), then as Director of the DAAD North America office in New York, with an interim (1999-2000) as Director of the German-American Academic Council in Bonn and Washington, D.C.In 2001, Rolf Hoffmann was appointed Director of DAAD’s new International Marketing Initiative, which combines GATE-Germany (the German Higher Education Institution’s marketing consortium) and the official Secretariat of the German Government’s Joint Initiative for the International Promotion of Study and Research in Germany.

Sohail Inayatullah, a political scientist, is Professor at Tamkang University, Taipei (Graduate Institute of Futures Studies), Visiting Academic/Research Associate at Queensland University of Technology (Centre for Social Change Research); Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast (Faculty of Social Sciences and the Arts); and, Associate, Transcend Peace University. Inayatullah is a Fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation and the World Academy of Art and Science. He is on the International Advisory Council of the World Future Society, and on the Professional Board of the Futures Foundation, Sydney. Inayatullah is a co-editor of the Journal of Futures Studies and associate editor of New Renaissance. He is also on the editorial boards of Futures, Development and Foresight. Inayatullah has written more than 300 journal articles, book chapters, encyclopaedia entries and magazine pieces, which have appeared in over 40 different journals.

Wolfgang Lutz is Director of the Vienna Institute of Demography of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Leader of the World Population Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He is also Affiliated Professor at the College of Population Studies at Chulalongkorn University (Thailand)). He has published 18 books and more than 150 refereed articles in leading journals (including Science and Nature).His research interests are in population forecasting, fertility and the analysis of human capital formation. He was Secretary General of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) 1997-2001 and served as demographic coordinator of the European Observatory on the Social Situation, Demography and the Family 1999-2004.

George Psacharopoulos holds the O’Leary Chair at the University of Illinois and is a member of the European Experts Network on the Economics of Education. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and has taught at the London School of Economics and the University of Athens. He served at the World Bank managing education research and policy.  His research focuses on the role of education in economic and social development. He has published extensively on the economics of education, labor markets and poverty alleviation. Two of his recent publications of relevance to this conference are:  “Private vs. public university systems,” CESifo DICE Report – Journal for Institutional Comparisons, 4 (4) 2004: 3-8, and “The real university cost in a ‘free’ higher education country,” Economics of Education Review, 24 (1) 2005:103-108.

Peter Scott is the Vice-Chancellor of Kingston University and the President of the Academic Cooperation Association. Prior to this he was Pro Vice-Chancellor for External Affairs at the University of Leeds, as well as a Professor of Education and the Director of the Centre for Policy Studies in Education. Before going to Leeds in 1992, he was for sixteen years Editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement.Peter Scott was educated at the University of Oxford and at the University of California at Berkeley. He has honorary doctorates from the University of Bath, UMIST, the (former) Council for National Academic Awards, Anglia Polytechnic University and Grand Valley State University. He is also a Member of the Academia Europea and of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences. His research interests are the governance and management of universities and colleges, non-standard access to higher education and the links between further and higher education. Among his publications are The Meanings of Mass Higher Education (1995), Governing Universities (1996), The Globalization of Higher Education (1998) and Higher Education Re-formed (2000), University Leadership: The Role of the Chief Executive (2000), Ten Years On: Higher Education in Central and Eastern Europe (2000) and Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge Production in an Age of Uncertainties (2001).

Dr. Maurits van Rooijen started his academic career (in green town planning) at his alma mater, Utrecht University, before moving in the mid-80s to the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is one of the first generation to get involved in the strategic ‘internationalisation’ of universities. In 1993 he moved to the University of Westminster, London, originally as Director of International Education, and now as Vice-President for International and Institutional Development. At the same time, from 1999 to 2005, he held a similar position at the Leiden University on a part-time secondment. In 1998, during a sabbatical from Westminster, he was also acting vice-president (international) at Victoria University Melbourne.Dr. Van Rooijen is involved in a substantial number of international organisations: he is vice-president of the Compostela Group of Universities, vice-president of the European Access Network (for widening participating to higher education), governor of WACE (for work-integrated learning), etc.

Bernd Wächter is the chief executive officer (Director) of the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA), a European association of 20 nationally based internationalisation agencies. In this capacity, which he has held since 1998, he bears overall responsibility for the implementation of all ACA policy.
Earlier on (1995 – 1997), he was the Head of the Erasmus Department in the then Socrates and Youth TAO, which implemented the centralised parts of the Erasmus Programme on behalf of the European Commission. Between 1992 and 1995, he headed the German national agency for the Erasmus Programme inside the DAAD, which also had important national information functions for the COMETT, LINGUA and TEMPUS schemes. His experience with internationalisation also relates to the institutional level, through his functions as head of the international office of the Fachhochschule Darmstadt, and as a departmental coordinator of international relations at the Gesamthochschule Kassel. He has also worked for the British Council.Bernd Wächter has published and lectured widely on issues of Europeanisation and internationalisation of higher education. He is the editor of the ACA Papers on International Cooperation in Education.

Georg Winckler is President of the European University Association (2005-2009). He is also Rector of the University of Vienna since 1999 and was President of the Austrian Rectors’ Conference (2000-2005).Georg Winckler studied economics at the University of Princeton, USA, and at the University of Vienna, Austria. He has been a professor of economics at the University of Vienna since 1978, specialising in monetary and applied Economics. He has also served as a visiting professor at Georgetown University, USA, University of Fribourg, Switzerland, Comenius University of Bratislava, Slovakia, and worked as a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund, Washington D.C., USA. Since June 2004 Georg Winckler has been a member of EURAB (European Research Advisory Board).