Category: Podcast

Higher Ed at the Ballot Box: Australia’s Election and the Accord with Andrew Norton

It’s been about eighteen months since this podcast last visited Australia. The story at the time was about something called “the Universities Accord”, an oddly-named expert panel report which was supposed to give the Labor government a roadmap for re-structuring a higher education system widely believed to be under enormous stress.  Since then, lots has happened. There’s been an international student visa controversy, a whole ton of cutbacks at institutions (including a quite wild polycrisis at Australian National Universities) and

Read More »

From Funding Formulas to AI: Pedro Teixeira on Higher Education’s Next Challenges

Welcome back to our fourth season. Time Flies. We’ve gone back to an audio only format ’cause apparently y’all are audio and bibliophiles and not videophiles, so we decided to chuck the extra editing burden. Other than that, though, it’s the same show. Bring you stories on higher education from all around the world. So, let’s get to it. Today’s guest is Pedro Teixeira. He’s a higher education scholar from the University of Porto in Portugal, focusing to a large

Read More »

The Year the Money Ran Out: Global Higher Ed Review

Hello everyone, and welcome to the World of Higher Education podcast. I’m Tiffany MacLennan, and if you’re a faithful listener, you know what it means when I’m the one opening the episode—this week, our guest is AU. We’re doing a year in review, looking at some of the global higher education stories that stood out in 2024—from massification to private higher education, from Trump’s international impact to the most interesting stories overall. But I’ll pass it over to Alex. The World of

Read More »

Cut, Coerce, Control: What Trump Is Doing to U.S. Universities

The single biggest story in higher education for the first six months of this year, without a doubt, has been the Trump administration’s remarkable assault on science and universities. Arguably it’s the largest state-led assault on higher education institutions anywhere in the world since Mao and the cultural revolution. Billions of dollars already legally allocated to institutions have been stripped from them mainly, but not exclusively through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Billions more are

Read More »

Opening January 2026: Inside One of the Biggest University Mergers in Australia

There’s a huge story going on right now in Australian higher education, one that hasn’t made many ripples outside the country yet, but really should have. In January of 2026, two of the country’s major universities will be merging. The old research intensive University of Adelaide, one of the country’s so-called sandstone — meaning prestigious — universities, will be joining with the newer post Dawkins i.e., created in the early 1990s, University of South Australia, which began its life as

Read More »