Brendan O’Malley, one of the journalist founders of University World News and chair of our board, was the lead researcher for Education Under Attack 2014, produced by the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack. He reports on the study’s findings as they relate to higher education.

In this special series on the topic of student mobility, University World News correspondents describe the flow of students away from and into different countries. They also highlight the marked contrast, in Western countries especially, between the number of foreigners they enrol and the far smaller proportion of their own students willing to go beyond their borders.

A major study of science granting councils in Sub-Saharan Africa has been undertaken by the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology – CREST – at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, funded by Canada’s IDRC – International Development Research Centre. A consultative conference was held late last year, and University World News was there.

University World News looks at higher education issues and trends around the world that are likely to impact on the sector during 2014.

The Observatory on Borderless Higher Education held a conference in London this month titled “The International Higher Education Revolution: Impacts on mobility, qualifications, networks”. University World News was there.

The second Bi-Regional Conference of Alfa PUENTES – a project aimed at improving integration across Latin American higher education institutions and building partnerships with European counterparts – was held from 2-4 December in Cartagena, Colombia. The project, coordinated by the European University Association, involves more than 20 university associations from Latin America and Europe. University World News was at the conference.

In his new book on Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa, John Higgins argues that when it comes to contested relations between the university and the state, South Africa has come a full circle since apartheid. In the foreword JM Coetzee, recipient of the 2003 Nobel prize in literature, writes that South African universities are not alone in facing the ideological force driving the assault on the independence of universities.

Doctoral training in Africa has become a focus of universities, researchers, policy-makers, governments and donors across Africa and around the world. In this, the first of two Special Reports, we look at the topic as discussed at a gathering hosted by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and South Africa’s National Research Foundation, and at a Volkswagen Foundation grantees' meeting in Hanover, Germany.

The Robbins Report, produced by a government-commissioned Committee on Higher Education, was published in the United Kingdom in October 1963. Its recommendations were accepted and had a literally massive impact on the sector. We revisit Robbins and how higher education has evolved in the subsequent half a century.

The 7th Annual Teaching and Learning Higher Education Conference was held at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban from 25-27 September, titled “Re-envisioning African Higher Education: Alternative paradigms, emerging trends and new directions”. Some 250 delegates attended, along with speakers from across Africa and the world. University World News was there.