23 July 2023  Issue No: 749

A prestigious German university has decided to suspend collaboration with students funded by the China Scholarship Council “to reduce the risk of industrial espionage”. It is the first university in Germany to openly break with the Chinese government scholarship scheme.

With the Conservative government in the United Kingdom reeling from one crisis to the next and facing three by-elections and runaway inflation, it has picked a fight with the higher education sector, threatening a crackdown on so-called ‘rip-off’ university degrees.

University World News reports on the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative or HESI Global Forum – which highlights the critical role higher education plays in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs – last week and the UN High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, which is reviewing progress towards the SDGs half-way to 2030.

A national survey in the United Kingdom aimed at identifying reasons why university staff members are choosing to leave their jobs points, among other issues, to a work-based culture which permits and fails to address or sanction a prevalence of bullying, harassment, intimidation and discrimination.

It is hard to find any winners in the United States Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action at universities, which, in addition to changing the face of higher education, is likely to herald significant repercussions for industry and society as a whole.

The planned merger of the universities of Adelaide and South Australia into a mega university promises to pump millions of dollars and many jobs into the South Australian state economy and create something that is ‘transformative for the future generation’. However, not everyone is convinced of that.

The death of Dr Anshu Padayachee, the CEO of the Technological Higher Education Network South Africa, has deprived the tertiary education landscape of an outspoken teacher, researcher and administrator, someone who would not hesitate to phone any government minister in South Africa to put things right.

To move forward, international higher education must reject neocolonialism and embrace a pluralist system based on a consensus about the global common good, equality of respect and epistemic diversity, that can unite us across the colonial divide between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’.