21 August 2022  Issue No: 704

New research that identifies four key reasons behind anti-science attitudes suggests that improving scientific literacy, the default solution for combating scepticism towards science, will only go so far towards solving the problem and a far more informed range of strategies may be needed.

All of Hong Kong’s eight publicly funded universities have now brought in new national security law courses this academic year as a requirement for graduation, as required under Beijing-imposed laws. Beijing argued that the law would bring stability after many months of unrest in 2019-20.

Salma al-Shehab, a PhD student at Leeds University in the United Kingdom and lecturer at a university in Saudi Arabia, has been sentenced to 34 years in prison in Saudi Arabia for tweets in support of greater freedoms and human rights and those who advocate them. Human rights organisations described the sentence as a “dangerous precedent”.

Edtech has enormous potential to benefit students, staff and higher education, but it matters how it is rolled out and governed, which requires us to think more carefully about how to make proprietary edtech platform owners accountable to stakeholders and the broader public.

Over the past 40 years, there has been a student amnesty law enacted before every election. In addition to showing the political importance of the student demographic, the law is an implicit admission of the inequalities that characterise the current higher education system.

Higher education is not only about acquiring the skills to get a good job. It is about developing values, the maturity to accept other points of view and the will to solve problems – all of which are needed to build a more sustainable world.

A new study shows that many regional comprehensive universities in the United States are successfully educating most of the nation’s poorest students and launching them into their careers, despite the fact that these institutions often do not have all the resources needed to provide academic support.

Higher education institutions must transform themselves into places of lifelong and lifewide learning communities. As centres of knowledge consumption and production, they must lead the way in helping to create the sustainable society of the future and must serve as catalysts for change in the emerging environmental revolution.