10 April 2022  Issue No: 687

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hindered and in some cases reversed years of progress towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs, universities are being encouraged to focus on forging broad partnerships as a means to effect meaningful change.

The European Union has announced tougher action on halting science cooperation with Russia, moving from suspending ties and payments to terminating grant agreements and subsequent payments to Russian bodies or related organisations. It ends participation of Russian bodies in Horizon Europe, Horizon 2020 and Euratom.

A postgraduate student at Ludong University in China’s Shandong province who protested against the university’s harsh COVID-19 lockdown and mass testing was this week expelled by the university. Currently, several major Chinese cities have imposed severe restrictions, with many students banned from leaving their dormitories.

Student mobility exchanges between Germany and the United Kingdom will be cut by half and work placements for German students could dry up completely when the UK’s Turing scheme fully replaces the European Union’s Erasmus programme next year, an online briefing on UK-EU educational cooperation was warned.

While the swift higher education reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is understandable, it ignores the most vulnerable and could jeopardise the foundation of international collaboration and ultimately harm individuals and institutions with little to no control over state policy-making.

The COVID pandemic and war in Ukraine have challenged existing conceptualisations of internationalisation of higher education to the extent that new understandings need to pay more attention to the capacity of higher education internationalisation to contribute to political and economic aspects of international cooperation.

The Aga Khan University in Kenya has joined the fight against global warming with an initiative expected to make it the first institution of higher learning in East Africa to go carbon neutral by 2030. Its plans affect all its operations, from procurement policies to budgeting.

A new model for transnational partnerships that acknowledges and strengthens the contribution made by public higher education institutions in the Global South is needed to produce the kind of knowledge the world needs, according to higher education leader Adam Habib.

Professor Mahmood Mamdani was the executive director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University, Uganda, from 2010 to the end of Feburary 2022. He shares his views about how to build a strong research culture, his work as an academic and threats to higher education.