ALI GUNES

  Ensuring Quality in Higher Education: The Importance of External Accreditation Ali Gunes The University of New York Tirana aligunes@unyt.edu.al   In higher education's dynamic landscape, external accreditation is a hallmark of quality assurance, academic integrity, and success, and it cannot be exaggerated, especially in the context of the rapidly increasing number of universities offering various programs worldwide based on the requirements of the time. External accreditation processes are not easy, and they cover crucial quantitative and qualitative information, including stakeholder feedback, meticulous documentation, and sincere academic and administrative staff dedication. However, u niversities worldwide constantly undergo rigorous evaluation processes to attain accreditation from external bodies, signifying their commitment to excellence in education, research and community service. Thus, universities worldwide open quality assurance and excellence centres t...

  The Ignored Value of Social Sciences: A Case for Recognition ali gunes The University of New York Tirana aligunes@unyt.edu.al In contemporary capitalist consumerist societies, money and what brings money have become particularly important. Consumerism, unquestionably entwined with capitalism, visibly affects daily life in postmodern society, constantly shaping and reshaping social structures and institutions, along with habits, beliefs and identities, by imposing its hegemonic and controlling grip on individuals and group lives and behaviours. Suradech Chotiudompant (2013) argues that “consumerism is a crucial issue nowadays because we need to consume not only to meet our basic needs but also to satisfy our wants, which are increasingly complex and hard to distinguish from the former. We must consume…to create our identity, state our political standpoint, or quench our insatiable desires.” Consumerism, in the first place, is merely linked to the satisfaction of basic ma...

  The Crucial Role of Literature in Shaping Human Experience ali gunes The University of New York Tirana aligunes@unyt.edu.al   When one attacks literature and considers it useless, I recall Sir Philip Sidney with his often-quoted work An Apology for Poetry  (or  The Defence of Poesy ), published in 1595, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous essay “The Defence of Poetry” published posthumously in 1840 in  Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments . Both authors defended literature in general and poetry in particular against the criticism that literature was unnecessary during scientific developments because literature was considered useless and a waste of time. Sidney rejects those tendencies throughout the writing in An Apology for Poetry : “. . . Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bri...