20 February 2022  Issue No: 680

Dutch universities are calling on the government to cap the number of international students, to maintain the quality of degree programmes in the face of rapidly rising numbers of students from abroad and stagnant funding. So says Drs Pieter Duisenberg, president of the Association of Universities of the Netherlands.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted social inequalities as well as differences in institutional responses between private and public universities in Brazil. Hopefully initiatives undertaken by universities in response to the pandemic will create a new dynamic that leads to a more open and inclusive higher education system.

With another Hong Kong university head announcing his departure – the third in recent months – human rights organisations say a ‘purge’ at Hong Kong’s universities is continuing apace. A pro-democracy academic has come under fire in the pro-Beijing media and has left, and a further student union has been derecognised.

Recent changes in quality assurance legislation in Chile and Mexico show the importance of including all stakeholders in discussions. But more needs to be done to put institutions at the heart of quality assurance and to incentivise them to make improvements.

Is China’s approach to higher education unique or can previous understandings of wider East Asian development help us to interpret – but not fully explain – the situation of China and its higher education sector?

While COVID-19 put the brakes on the expansion of cross-border student mobility around the world, digital delivery of higher education gathered momentum. A future challenge will be how to offer students digitised learning together with personal interaction and intercultural experiences to boost internationalisation and exchange.

Concerned that campuses need to switch from being homogenous echo chambers to arenas of debate, Ronald J Daniels in What Universities Owe Democracy calls for an end to legacy admissions and self-segregation, a strong defence of facts, and a requirement to study democracy.

A project using a supercomputer to rapidly identify viruses dangerous to humans was sketched out on the back of a napkin in March 2020. Eleven days after it started, that project had identified 132,000 potentially pathogenic novel RNA viruses – at relatively low cost.

The European University Association has set out a radical vision to support its 850 member institutions in 48 European countries to move to an open science system that aspires to open access not only to scholarly outputs, but the whole research process.