4 June 2023  Issue No: 742

In the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings 2023, which are geared to assessing institutions’ contribution to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Australian and Canadian universities dominate the top 10 of the overall category, but Australia takes first place in seven of the individual 17 SDGs.

Universities and research organisations across Africa and Europe have called for a new science, technology and innovation framework for cooperation between the two continents to drive sustainable development. They say it should be grounded in academic excellence, sustainability, capacity building and scalability.

A relentless attempt to curtail access to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programming is not a marker of bold leadership nourishing a robust democracy. On the contrary, it is indicative of a deep fear of the transformative potential of inclusive and equitable education.

Organisational change networks – including those that weave in and between colleges and universities of all types – exemplify the idea that so-called ‘weak’ connections between individuals who share a commitment to the transformative potential of undergraduate education can be major drivers of organisational change.

ABET, the global accreditor of more than 4,000 college and university programmes worldwide, has agreed a three-year partnership with University World News to support its coverage of higher education’s contribution to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, with a focus on education for sustainable development.

A partnership between a Canadian university and an Indian college which grants Indian students a Canadian work permit upon graduation offers an effective example of third-culture building and supports the idea of glocalisation as a sustainable alternative to exploitative international higher education models.

Publicly funded research outputs should be immediately and openly available to all without barriers such as subscription fees or paywalls, say European scientific community leaders who welcomed a recent 20-point plan agreed by the Council of the European Union to encourage open science.