Breaking News
UNITED STATES
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Nathan M Greenfield
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.
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CANADA
Nathan M Greenfield
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MIDDLE EAST-NORTH AFRICA
Wagdy Sawahel
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UNITED KINGDOM-CHINA
Nic Mitchell
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Top Stories
CHINA
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Government aim to control data and analysis is ‘chilling’
Yojana Sharma
China’s tightened control of access to data and data exports has made it more difficult to independently seek out or verify statistics on the ground. New data security laws have also created a research environment in which even minimal connection or collaboration with China must be handled with extreme care.
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CHINA
Mimi Leung
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UNITED KINGDOM-EUROPE
Anne Corbett
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GLOBAL
Jason E Lane
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Academic Freedom and Resilience
GLOBAL
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Nathan M Greenfield
Bureaucratic and legal threats by governments, weaponising the law to control the curriculum and curtail critical analysis, anti-intellectual, populist and authoritarian rhetorical attacks and crackdowns on professors and their expertise, as well as increasing pressure to self-censor, have put academic freedom in decline worldwide.
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News
SOUTH KOREA
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Yumi Jeung
South Korea’s government has unveiled a substantial 16.6% reduction in research and development spending in its budget proposal for 2024, taking the science community by surprise. If passed by the National Assembly, it will be the first reduction in science spending in 33 years.
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INDIA
Shuriah Niazi
India-United States higher education collaboration is set to strengthen with a number of multi-institutional joint education alliances between the two nations cemented against the backdrop of US President Joe Biden’s visit to India for the G20 Summit this month.
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LIBYA
Wagdy Sawahel
Academics in Libya are calling for those in power to pay more heed to scientific advice as it emerged that research published last year contained warnings about the possibility of flooding caused by a lack of dam maintenance in the area devastated by Storm Daniel.
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NORDIC COUNTRIES
Jan Petter Myklebust
News of the closure later this year of the Copenhagen-based Nordic Institute of Asian Studies owing to a lack of funding comes at a time of marked geopolitical tensions between the West and China, which academics believe should be met with continued academic cooperation.
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DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO
Augustin Sadiki
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Edtech, AI and Higher Education
HONG KONG
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Yojana Sharma
A small liberal arts university in Asia appears an unlikely place for an engineering professor and data scientist. But Joe Qin, who took over as president of Lingnan University in Hong Kong on 1 September, may have arrived at an opportune time to steer the institution into an era of generative AI and ChatGPT.
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Special Report: Education for Sustainable Development
GLOBAL
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Half-way to the target date for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, University World News – in partnership with global quality assurance provider ABET – launches a series of special reports on how higher education can best equip students with the skills, knowledge and values needed to shape a sustainable future.
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GLOBAL
Patrick Blessinger
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.
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GLOBAL
Karen MacGregor
A core role of universities is to produce quality graduates for the economy and society, with the knowledge and skills they need to secure a job and to succeed. In today’s world of climate chaos and global challenges, the imperative that graduates also make a positive contribution to the world has driven a global movement towards ‘education for sustainable development’.
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GLOBAL
Nic Mitchell
Universities and other educational institutions will need to adopt experimental and applied learning approaches to ‘education for sustainable development’ to prepare learners to address the grand socio-ecological challenges of the 21st century, according to the International Association of Universities.
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IRELAND
John Walshe
University College Cork in Ireland started on the sustainability journey before it became fashionable. Since then it has become a world-leading sustainability university – and a great example of a bottom-up approach to sustainability that was met with a top-down commitment from university management.
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PERU
Keith Nuthall
Peru’s Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola has won a United Nations-supported international award for a groundbreaking initiative that imparts sustainability skills to students, which they then practise in the local community. Nearly 150,000 volunteer hours have been undertaken for more than 40 organisations.
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World Blog
UNITED KINGDOM
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Louise Nicol and Alan Preece
Universities in Britain need to get ahead of the politicians when it comes to visa clampdowns by providing the kind of data policy-makers take note of, proving that universities are good and responsible stewards who accept only international students with the requisite skills and intentions.
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Commentary
SOUTH KOREA
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Kyuseok Kim
Taejae University, South Korea’s new global online university, has its first class starting this autumn. Enrolment has been low so far despite its ambitions to disrupt the higher education market. The university needs to prove what sets it apart from other institutions.
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UNITED KINGDOM
Christina Matthews
Universities in the United Kingdom cannot be complacent about recent student recruitment success as competition grows. That makes it crucial for institutions to ensure that the international student journey from application to arrival is as seamless as possible.
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SOUTH AFRICA
Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh and Thierry M Luescher
The student protests which called for the decolonisation of higher education in South Africa between 2015 and 2017 were the focus of a recent two-day colloquium that explored the legacy of the ‘Fallism’ movement and its significance for the nature, orientation and composition of the African university.
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AFRICA-GLOBAL
Orla Quinlan and Darla Deardorff
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Features
UNITED KINGDOM
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Nic Mitchell
European university presidents and rectors often earn a fraction of the generous salaries enjoyed by vice-chancellors in the United Kingdom and other Anglo-Saxon countries. A new report aims to clear the air around the recurring controversy over high university leaders’ salaries, but sparked some contrary reactions.
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SDGs
VIETNAM
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Tran Le Huu Nghia and Ly Thi Tran
When it comes to higher education reforms, student experience is rarely taken into account. A recent study shows why it should be and how that relates to the Sustainable Development Goals. The greatest differences in students’ experiences are based on gender, discipline and public versus private universities.
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Top Stories from Last Week
UNITED STATES
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Nathan M Greenfield
After Republican presidential hopefuls lined up to cheer the United States Supreme Court decision to scrap the current administration’s student debt relief plan, President Joe Biden has come back with another version that benefits previously marginalised minority groups. But can it withstand further political attack?
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CHINA
Philip G Altbach and Hans de Wit
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FINLAND
Jan Petter Myklebust
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AFGHANISTAN
Shadi Khan Saif
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POLAND-GLOBAL
Nic Mitchell
Poland has been chosen to host the upcoming Magna Charta Observatory anniversary conference to allow delegates to learn first-hand how Polish universities and society were responsive to the crisis sparked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, exemplifying the principles of the Magna Charta Universitatum.
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EUROPE-UNITED KINGDOM
Brendan O’Malley
The European Commission and the United Kingdom government have reached an agreement in principle on the association of the UK to Horizon Europe, the EU’s flagship £85 billion (US$91 billion) research collaboration programme, and the Copernicus programme, which the UK had left under the terms of Brexit.
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DENMARK
Jan Petter Myklebust
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Sponsored Article
Ferris State University staff
Around the globe, university students with big ideas for making their communities and the world better and helping solve some of today’s biggest problems – pollution, hunger, waste, and more – are applying for Wege Prize, an international design competition with a prize pool of US$65,000.
Promoted by Ferris State University.
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Sponsored Article
Stellenbosch University staff
Stellenbosch University’s vision to be a systemically sustainable institution addressing continental and global sustainable development challenges is beginning to bear fruit. Not only is it educating future leaders, policy-makers and professionals in this space, but it is also finding solutions through research, training and development.
Promoted by Stellenbosch University.
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Sponsored Article
ABET staff
ABET, the global accreditor of science, computing, engineering and technology programmes, is supporting Pride Month and prioritising equality, diversity and inclusion. It believes collaboration between a diverse pool of talent is a vital contributor to finding the best solutions to the world’s problems.
Promoted by ABET.
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Sponsored Article
UAE University staff
As water scarcity reaches critical levels globally, a research team at the United Arab Emirates University seeks to revolutionise seawater desalination practices, offering a path to mitigate water scarcity while championing environmental preservation.
Promoted by the United Arab Emirates University.
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World Round-up
UNITED STATES-SOUTH KOREA
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