Recently, Politecnico di Milano in Italy has attempted to force all teaching at Master level in English. This has been stopped by some academics who went to different levels of administrative courts, and recently there was a prononciation of the Supreme Court. The matter is not settled yet, but you can find an account of this with various links here.
An interesting blog discussion on the disappearance of fundamentals from teaching in Universities was brought to my attention. It serves as an interesting reminder that we who are educators in the University system must be ever vigilent in planning mechanics curricula and changes to curriculum. Should we be offering courses in the area of this month's jClub, "Nanomechanics"? Should we drop classical courses that have stopped being interesting to the majority of students (and thus attract low numbers)? Should we educate students explicitly in biomechanics without providing them a classical mechanics background? These are the questions we are likely to face in the next few years as change continues to sweep across the university system, especialy in the US but elsewhere as well. I believe that we as a community have a responsibility here to ensure that the high standards of the discipline are maintained through teaching of fundamentals and the passing along of these values to future generations!
