28 May 2020  Issue No: 271

Nigeria needs a ‘National Institute of Higher Education Research and Policy Development’ to help advise on higher education policy, help prioritise higher education challenges in relation to developmental challenges, and advance evidence-based policy that will promote the country’s development.

The dismissal of a university law lecturer and human rights defender who set an examination question considered by the Cameroon government to be ‘seditious’ has been widely criticised by a number of the country’s academics.

South Africa’s Minister of Health Zweli Mkhize this week denied there had been any interference with academic freedom in the case of Professor Glenda Gray, head of the South African Medical Research Council, whose critical public comments about the government’s lockdown regulations drew calls from a government bureaucrat for an investigation.

If universities want to keep their international students when they move online they will need to confront prejudice about online learning among foreign students and some governments, notably China and India, and prove its quality and develop more attractive international pricing strategies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the landscape of international higher education into disarray. Now is the time to rethink, starting from the why of internationalisation, and encourage even the most seemingly outlandish methods of connecting people and their ideas across borders, inspired by hope.

The COVID-19 crisis and pre-existing China-United States tensions exacerbated during the pandemic will mean a rebalancing of cross-border academic relations, student and academic mobility, and in the pattern of research collaborations with China, with Europe expected to be the main – but wary – beneficiary.