26 January 2020  Issue No: 582

As Australia burns and the global climate emergency proceeds, now is the time for universities to become leaders for global action against climate change by pledging to teach students to prepare humanity to mitigate the effects of the wave of extinction events to come.

George Soros, the global financier and philanthropist, has announced that he is donating US$1 billion to create a new global university network to foster critical thinking and open inquiry and better prepare students for current and future challenges “amid the current resurgence of authoritarianism”.

The needs of contemporary society are changing and so must higher education. It must adapt to the bio-tech revolution, for instance, and find ways to make innovation work for all people, as well as teaching creative thinking, which now is as important as knowledge acquisition.

As exploitation of new media makes it harder to distinguish between truth and lies, and fact and fiction, higher education needs to teach students digital literacy and convey the importance of interrogating the different ways that authority and power hide, get hidden and subvert knowledge creation and truth.

Canada’s University of Ottawa is helping to build capacity in African universities through a dozen African partnerships and by founding an innovation network, but it also sees an opportunity to strengthen its bilingual mission in a continent where French-speaking populations are growing fast.

Natural disaster-prone Japan, which focuses heavily on earthquake-prediction research, technologies and countermeasures, is allocating new funds for building resilience against climate change-related typhoons and flooding, and will also boost flood and earthquake resistance measures as host to the Olympic Games this year.