24 April 2022  Issue No: 689

A report by an expert group on ‘universities and the 2030 Agenda’ highlights the need for universities to open up to diverse ways of knowing, pursue interdisciplinary approaches, and form partnerships with society in order to fulfil their role as catalysts for sustainability.

India’s University Grants Commission has recently announced two sets of new rules, the first of which allows students to simultaneously pursue two degrees in Indian universities, and the second involving a simplified partnership procedure for joint degrees with foreign universities.

The existence of memoranda of understanding entered into before the pandemic to govern the terms of international exchanges, visits and collaborations between higher education institutions begs the question: do they need to be updated in a post-COVID world or thrown out altogether?

Staying ‘woke’ should become a continuous task for everyone in the university, but the challenge is how we can treat one another respectfully without the debate losing its bite. A legal scholar and former university president shares some thoughts on how this might work.

Universities can lead the way in the facilitation of a sustainability mindset that is better suited to the realities of the 21st century by modelling how to improve planetary resources and by partnering with other organisations to help achieve the sustainability goals.

If they are not to be condemned to irrelevance, universities in Africa must strengthen their research and teaching and adopt a proactive stance in responding to the institutional and development demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, according to Paul Zeleza, academic, higher education commentator and former vice-chancellor.

An analysis of Russian speculative fiction reveals the role of popular literature in the production of a ‘social imaginary’ which contains traces of the trauma associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and informs the current invasion and attempted subjugation of Ukraine.