OSUN's Global Commons is a new online literary and news publication seeking student-generated work on issues related to OSUN themes in a range of genres, including research-based, journalistic, academic, and creative. Submit by January 30, 2022.READ MORE
Open Society University Network:
A New Model for Higher Education
Integrating learning and the advancement of knowledge across geographic and demographic boundaries.Read More
OSUN Spring Courses 2022
Nine member institutions are offering 45 OSUN courses during Spring 2022. Classes include "Data and Democracy," "Reproductive Health and Human Rights," "Economics for Non-Economists," and "Beyond Bollywood: Mapping South Asian Cinema." Register for Spring 2022 courses here.
Visual Storytelling for Civic Engagement 2021 Festival Winner: A Story That Eye Witnessed
A Story That Eye Witnessed, by BRAC University students, won six awards at the Visual Storytelling for Civic Engagement Film Festival, the culminating event of OSUN's “Visual Storytelling for Student Engagement” fall 2021 workshop.READ MORE
OSUN 2020/21 Annual Report
OSUN's 41 partner institutions developed a multitude of diverse projects while accelerating collaboration in teaching by bringing 3,000+ students into more than 180 online courses.READ MORE
Faculty Mobility Fellowships
OSUN invites applications for Junior, Visiting, Short-Term Visiting, and Replacement Faculty Fellowships and for OSUN Sabbaticals. The Portal for Applications opens January 3, 2022 and applications received by January 31 will receive priority consideration. READ MORE
Womenity Club: Educating and Empowering for Gender Equity in Palestine
OSUN Student Global Engagement Fellow Sundus Al Fararja, a junior studying Human Rights and International Law at Al Quds Bard College, in 2021 started Womenity Club, a civic engagement project which seeks to educate Palestinian women and girls on their social, economic, and political rights.
The Open Society University Network (OSUN) is a global partnership of educational institutions that integrates learning and the advancement of knowledge--in the social sciences, the humanities, the sciences and the arts, on undergraduate and graduate levels--across geographic and demographic boundaries, promotes civic engagement on behalf of open societies, and expands access to higher education for underserved communities.
OSUN builds on the accomplishments of several major initiatives in higher education supported by the Open Society Foundations (OSF). In the 1990s, OSF’s Higher Education Support Program (HESP) effectively served as a Marshall Plan for higher education in Central and Eastern Europe. CEU, founded in 1991, became a unique model in graduate education, combining cutting-edge research and research-based teaching with a focused social mission.
Philanthropic Partner
For almost 30 years, OSF has supported innovative cooperation between CEU and Bard College, and between their respective national and international networks. During this period, OSF has contributed to the development of groundbreaking higher education institutions, first in Central and Eastern Europe, and then globally. OSF also supported a program of fellowships in higher education that has intellectually empowered tens of thousands of students and educators throughout the world.
The Open Society Foundations (OSF) is an international grant-making network that supports civil society groups around the world, with the aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media. Since its inception, in 1993, it has contributed:
$15.2 billion in total expenditures
50,000+ grants to organizations, scholars, and activists in 120+ countries
Although originally focused in the 1990s on Central and Eastern Europe, Eurasia, South Africa, and Myanmar, OSF has since expanded its network to Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, and had a budget of $1.1 billion in 2019.
OSF’s Higher Education Support Program initiated a massive undertaking to reform research and teaching in the social sciences and humanities at universities across Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia in the 1990s. It has since expanded this program to over 50 colleges and universities around the world, with the aim of promoting academic freedom, university autonomy, equal and open access to knowledge and education, student-centered learning, service to the community, and transparent, inclusive governance. This program has yielded significant advances, including:
The creation of beachheads of intellectual freedom and critical enquiry at some of its core grantee institutions, such as the American University of Central Asia and American University in Bulgaria.
Improvements in the quality of the liberal arts curriculum and pedagogy at the American University of Central Asia, European Humanities University, Al-Quds Bard College, and St. Petersburg University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts, in partnership with Bard.
The introduction of innovative models of access to higher education in the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in Kenya.
The establishment of independent external testing system for admissions at Ukrainian universities, which have combat the paying of bribes for student places.
As part of its efforts to expand access to higher education and empowered educators around the world, OSF has provided close to 20,000 scholarships and research grants since the 1980s - with awards in 42 countries, ranging from Haiti to Angola, Eritrea, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Cambodia.
OSF has also demonstrated its deep commitment to academic freedom through its early and long-standing support for scholars who are threatened or imprisoned because of their work. It was a founding contributor to the Scholar Rescue Fund and is a leading supporter of the Scholars at Risk network.
