14 March 2021  Issue No: 634

By ignoring the impact of academic freedom on research, ranking companies risk complicity in censorship and worse. They must include academic freedom in their rankings or make their failure to do so explicit. The Academic Freedom Index or AFi gives them the data they need to do this.

United States President Joe Biden on Thursday signed into law a US$1.9 trillion COVID relief package – the American Rescue Plan. It includes nearly US$40 billion in new relief for students and colleges, of which half will be spent on emergency grants to students, but the American Council on Education says it is not nearly enough.

Female enrolment in higher education has tripled globally between 1995 and 2018. However, recent research has provided evidence that the gender gap in higher education has declined very little in recent decades and closely matches the continued gender inequality in the labour market.

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North America and Western Europe continue to dominate the QS subject rankings, but Asian universities are continuing to rise, buoyed by investment. The lesson for policy-makers in other regions is that to improve performance, you have to raise the level of funding.

The arts and humanities are central to understanding the local and human contexts in which the COVID-19 pandemic is situated and in imagining more socially just possibilities for the future. Via deep observation, listening and empathy, they can cultivate the compassion that drives social change.

The shifting of learning and collaborations online during the COVID-19 pandemic has led to new threats to academic freedom, including increased opportunities for surveillance of research, teaching and discourse, as well as restrictions, self-censorship and isolation, new data from the Academic Freedom Index 2020 shows.