Category: Policy

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

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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

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That Was the Quarter That Was, Spring 2025

What’s been going on around the world since the end of March, you ask?  Well, unsurprisingly, the biggest stories have come from the United States.  There are in effect four fronts to the Trump administration’s attacks on the world of higher education.  First of all, the government’s new budget is going to reduce student eligibility for student loans and grants, meaning there will be less opportunity available to American students.  Second, the budget also proposes to radically slash the budgets of the

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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

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Code Red on University Autonomy

There is no aspect of university autonomy that is more fundamental – in the British Commonwealth at least — than the right of each institution to select which students it chooses to admit. Along with financial autonomy, staffing autonomy, and financial autonomy (that last one being under increasing pressure these days), the right of institutions to choose which students to teach is fundamental to the Canadian higher education system. At no time in Canadian history has a government ever tried

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