24 September 2023  Issue No: 755

With the world halfway to the 2030 target date for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations this week urged governments globally to create solid national SDG policy and greater spending commitments. But the key roles of universities in advancing sustainability continue to be underplayed.

An online discussion on the ‘authoritarian assault on gender studies’ linked the remaking of Florida’s postsecondary legal landscape and the destruction of the liberal arts tradition of New College of Florida to the targeting of LGBT people and other authoritarian events around the world.

France has suspended student mobility with Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso and told new students from those countries who were about to start studies in France that they may not come after all. Current scholarship students without valid visas will also not be able to travel to France.

Having risked blowing the United Kingdom’s research relationship with Europe through a three-year post-Brexit delay in rejoining the multi-billion-euro Horizon programme, British universities now face being caught up in another international government fallout, this time with China – its fastest growing research partner.

There is much that can be done to tackle academic corruption, from seeking out innovative approaches and looking at what is happening in schools, to keeping abreast of technological advances, not stigmatising international students and close collaboration among researchers and practitioners worldwide.

With students looking for ways to fund their way through university and with employers keen for graduates with entrepreneurial skills, universities around the world would be wise to increase their support for entrepreneurship education and help to normalise it as a career path.

The extraordinary work that universities have done over decades to advance sustainable development is not sufficiently recognised by society at large, governments or the United Nations system. A new partnership between University World News and the International Association of Universities will address that problem.

By harnessing the power of crowdsourcing, citizen science can make science more inclusive and can help to accelerate the implementation of the United Nations 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Through ‘education for sustainable development’, university classrooms have the potential to become living laboratories where students apply disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge and skills to real-world problems. This vision requires long-term commitment from institutional leaders with a sustainability vision for the future.