Q2 isn’t quite over, but since tomorrow is the last blog of the academic year, today is the day to review what’s been happening globally over the last couple of months in a self-imposed 1200-word limit. Buckle up.
The story of the quarter – for all of the last six quarters, really – is the ongoing mutilation of the American Science system. Where to start? The firing of the National Science Board? The attempt to limit foreign collaboration in science? The administration’s deliberate slow-walking of the release of already-approved research grants (decent visualization of what’s going on is also available here)? The OMB’s proposal that it be permitted to cancel any research grant at any time based on the President’s (or more likely some NSF-based commissar)’s whim? It all amounts to a national surrender of global scientific leadership on science. Quite simply, Americans have decided they want the future to be invented in China rather than in their own country.
Although Trump has dialed back on the attacking of individual universities in 2026, the example he set last year seems to have sowed imitators abroad. The government of Belarus chased the European University of the Humanities into neighboring Lithuania, but that has not stopped them from continuing to attack the university through intimidation tactics like calling in students’ families for police interrogation. The government of Kosovo is doing its best to hound the Serbian University of Pristina (based in North Mitrovica) out of existence. And, of course, the Turkish government tried to close Bigli University, a major institution in Istanbul, because it was owned by an individual that President Erdogan both disliked and had thrown in prison. The move was retracted quickly in the face of protests, but it shows how authoritarian government are throwing their weight around. (Side note: Viktor Orban did something similar to Central European University a decade ago when he chased it from Budapest to Vienna, and despite his removal from power this spring, CEU has said it’s not going back).
A major theme of the last few months has been higher education in war and conflict. Part of this has been from the familiar source of Russia and Ukraine – Ukraine bombing an educational facility in occupied Lukhansk, Russia upping the pace of drafting students into the military and using one of its top universities for espionage training, but more has come from elsewhere. In Afghanistan, an attack by Pakistan on Sayed Jamaluddin Afghani University killed seven people and wounded dozens. The United States and Israel combined to bomb 30 universities in Iran, killing 60 people. Iran responded with a threat to treat American campuses as legitimate targets; it did not in the end make good on this threat, or indeed attack any educational facilities in the region, but nonetheless most if not all education in the region went remote for several weeks. If it turns out that the UAE’s reputation as a safe destination turns out not to survive this war, then the effect on the local Transnational Education (TNE) ecosystem will be severe, and a whole bunch of countries in the region may start bidding to become TNE hubs in their own right (my eye is on Kazakhstan).
There is never a lack of drama in Latin American higher education, but for the last few years the centre of attention has tended to be the southern end of the continent, in particular Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. The last of those is still a live story as President Milei still refuses to enact the law on university funding that Congress passed last year. But recently it has been places further north that have been producing the biggest stories these past two months. Peru has seen student strikes over tuition fees and governance, and Honduras has also had major student protests over funding. The Autonomous University of Chiriqui in Panama has been at the centre of a significant corruption scandal; in Ecuador the First Lady, to everyone’s surprise, managed to earn an undergraduate degree in just eight months. The re-election of the rector of Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, the country’s only public university, was mired in controversy; this matters because the university’s rector sits on the commission that appoints senior judges and the Attorney General and the current incumbent is linked to some very anti-democratic politicians. And finally, there was Costa Rica, where the government does not have a funding formula, but rather dumps an amount of money on the sector and tells the five public universities negotiate the distribution between themselves. Turns out they couldn’t achieve consensus this year, which led the government to threaten to freeze the overall university budget, which in turn led to students occupying the University of Costa Rica’s rector’s office and a set of nationwide protests. Is there a thread here? Yes, in the sense that these are all middle-income countries whose higher education funding and governance systems seem to no longer work very well. Time for new solutions.
Africa has been mostly quiet for the last couple of months, but the South African government’s decision to put the National Student Financial Aid Scheme into administration for the third (and likely final) time was certainly a big development. Poor management and dysfunctional governance played a role, clearly, but the bigger issue surely is that the government, in placing the burden for financing universities too squarely on student loans, simply asked more of it the agency than it could reasonably deliver. The big question now is whether something similar happens in Kenya, where the much better-run Higher Education Loans Board has been asked to deliver similar miracles.
Europe for the most part has been a story of systems quietly cracking under strain. Perhaps there has been nothing as dramatic in this quarter as occurred in Madrid late last year, but it is pretty widespread nonetheless. In Germany, the “cracking” is physically true as one of the most important tech universities, the main building at the Technical University of Berlin was closed due to disrepair. Finnish universities have seen a reduction in their budget; the Austrian government, which had been seemingly quite keen on funding higher education, recently told its universities to expect a 3% cut rather than the 12% increase they had been looking for. Add to that the ongoing weakness in French higher education finances (evidenced by a recent report from the Cour des Comptes, and the chaotic institution-by-institution failures in the UK (the big story last month was King’s College London acquiring a distressed Cranfield University), and you’ve got continent-wide malaise.
You can thus perhaps understand why in some less-developed countries, there is reluctance to follow the European way of relying on publicly-funded universities to act as system flagships. The Economist wrote a good article on why India’s new and well-resources private universities are feeling pretty cocky these days and Times Higher had a similar piece about Hanoi’s innovative and well-funded VinUniversity, which is backed by one of the country’s biggest private conglomerates. New models for new times.
And that, folks, is where the world of higher education sits in mid-2026 in exactly 1200 words. See you back here in September.
