13 January 2019  Issue No: 234

Why have South African universities, whose leaders have a lot to say about transformation and curriculum change to address the demands of society, been so slow in recognising their role in building a capable South African state which requires appropriate financial management skills?

Zimbabwe's treasury has reversed its five-year-long freeze on the recruitment of university teaching staff, allowing universities to recruit about 350 lecturers to bolster capacity and improve service delivery in the country’s burgeoning higher education sector.

An effective two-year prison sentence recently slapped by a high court judge on a Nigerian professor accused of sexual harassment of a student has met with mixed reaction on Nigerian campuses.

Internationalisation of higher education aims to raise the quality of higher education for all, but first results from the 5th Global Survey of the International Association of Universities suggest a worrying gap emerging between those higher education institutions that are increasing internationalisation and those that are not.

United States Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has detailed some of her ambitious plans for higher education in 2019, including reducing federal oversight of higher education accreditation, which critics say will invite low-quality higher education providers and predatory actors to take advantage of students.

A European project has produced a toolkit for recognising the qualifications held by refugees, which could overcome a significant barrier to them being able to continue or access higher education or secure a job. Could it provide a model for addressing this issue globally?

Undergraduate student Emmanuel Gweamee, 24, has suffered from war, discrimination and disability growing up in Liberia. But after being trained in transformative leadership at a university in the United States, he is finding practical ways to empower excluded disabled young people back in his homeland.