Roger Tatoud OnLine

This essay is based on a presentation I gave when interviewed for a position at The Campaign for Science and Engineering.

The academic year started with a “Time Bomb” uncovered by the Higher Education Policy Institute[1] (HEPI): student in England are having it the easy way with an average of 26 hours a week spent studying compared to 30 in Ireland, 35 in France and 41 in Portugal. Variations are wide depending on the subject but with less than 15 hours of tuition a week, fears and concerns are raised that Higher Education is going down the drain and will have serious academic consequences for the future of Science in the UK.

Some object that quantity does not equate quality; however, content is not the only challenge the UK science base is facing. Science faces a continuum of challenges from school to university, from university to the public world. It is a challenge to teach and train people in science but also to publicise and exploit, commercially or not, the results of scientific research. In this article, I will introduce 5 major challenges that should inform education and science policies.

Published by openDemocracy, August 21, 2006.

To tackle Aids, empowering women will not work without "disempowering" men, says Roger Tatoud, as the sixteenth international Aids conference stresses women's role in combating the disease.

Two strong messages have emerged from the 16th International Aids Conference in Toronto, Canada. The first is that with drug treatment now being rolled out in developing countries, prevention should return to centre stage in future policies and strategies. The second is that women's lives and status need to be improved and that women need to be given power to prevent HIV infection.