It’s been a busy couple of weeks in higher education. There are the downstream consequences of the attack on Iran, interesting developments on the left and the right in Latin America, a couple of important global reports and some AI-related developments in China as it approaches adoption of the 15th five-year plan. Let’s go!
1. The American/Israeli attack on Iran (and, secondarily, Lebanon) is having cascading effects across higher education. The first-order consequence is that universities in both Iran and Lebanon have been bombed, causing fatalities. The second-order consequence stem from Iranian counter-attacks on neighboring Gulf states, leading many institutions in those countries as well as at branch campuses located there to shift to virtual instruction. In Bahrain, part of a drone hit a university there, though it’s unclear if the university was itself a target. The third-order consequence is that Iran’s blockade of the Straits of Hormuz have sent oil prices rocketing, leading countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan to tell universities to move instruction online in order to save fuel. In the Philippines, the government has put the country on a 4-day week, but students are protesting the possibility of teaching going even partially online during the crisis. The fourth-order consequence? The price of gas makes frying food more expensive, which has led university canteens in India to take samosas off the menu.
2. There’s a very good long article in the Times Higher Ed on the subject of caste discrimination in Indian higher education and the backlash against attempts to end the practice. Worth your time.
3. The Minister of Higher Education in Chad, Tom Erdimy, has resigned from the government over President Mahamat Déby’s decision to overturn Erdimy’s plan to decentralize the administration of higher education in the country.
4. Colombia’s left-wing government – which at the moment seems likely to retain the Presidency in elections due a the end of May – has introduced a new funding system that permits greater annual increases in funding (whether Congress actually authorizes such funding is a different question. It has also introduced a new decree which taxes private non-profit universities based on their assets. It is estimated that about 80% of private universities exceed the minimum threshold, and the collective cost to institutions would be about US $36 million/year, which might put thousands of study places at risk.
5. Türkiye is considering lowering the age at which students attend university to 16 or even 15. The move comes as the government continues to reduce university enrolment quotas at public and private universities in response to demographic decline and softening demand.
6. Last week, UNESCO published its new “roadmap” for higher education, Transforming Higher Education: Global Collaboration on Visioning and Action. As with all UNESCO documents, it’s heavy on the language of rights, equity, collaboration, academic freedom and standards, and while it speaks a lot to what needs to change in higher education, it occasionally feels a bit short on how systemic changes actually occur in the sector. But I for one appreciated that a UNESCO document took seriously issues of “dynamic engagement with labour markets and entrepreneurial opportunity”. Not sure UNESCO could have used those words 20 years ago: it’s a good sign.
7. The Institute of Political Science at Friederich-Alexander-Universität in Germany released its 2026 Academic Freedom Index last week. The main story this year of course was the precipitous decline in the USA’s rank position, which now stands slightly below that of Mozambique (which, IMHO is nonsense, but whatever). Overall, Czechia came top while Nicaragua came last, but levels of academic freedom are overall in decline worldwide. In related news, the Bavarian constitutional court ruled that universities and researchers could not be required to work with the German armed forces (and, equivalently, that they could not be prevented from doing so either. Jan-Martin Wiarda has the details.
8. Ukraine, despite having a lot of very good competing priorities for spending, has nearly doubled its monthly student stipend to about $90 US, and also extended such aid to state-funded students at private universities. Hungary has also declared an increase in student scholarships of a similar magnitude, but the government will not contribute a cent to the effort, preferring to force universities to shoulder the burden on their own. While universities may not refuse the order, they will be permitted to each draft its own disbursement criteria because university autonomy (seriously, this is actually what the government said).
9. Here’s an interesting little piece on how academic corruption plays out in Chinese universities, which is salient given the emphasis on research in the upcoming 15th five-year plan.
10. Staying in the middle kingdom for a moment, there has been a lot of chatter about the changing mix of academic programming and in particular how to alter programs in the face of artificial intelligence. At last week’s meeting of the National People’s Congress, the Party Secretary of the Communications University of China boasted of having eliminated a number of programs (both STEM and non-STEM) because AI was likely to make these areas obsolete (The excellent Chinese news outlet Sixth Tone has more details here). The President of Fudan university in Shanghai gave an interview saying institutions needed to do more “Lego Thinking” in the development of academic programs (by which he meant putting existing modules from different existing departments to create new offerings. In a completely unrelated matter, China’s first Barbecue College was opened in Hunan province, hard on the heels of the recent creation of “Crayfish Academy” in the central Hubei province, and the “Burning Noodles Academy” in southwest Sichuan province.
11. A number of good articles out of the United States in this last couple of weeks. Dominique Baker published the third of her three-part series charting a history of academic freedom in the United States (here are links to parts one and two). Robert Kelchen has an article out on university spending patterns by budgeting system, which uses a new and innovative data set. And a trio of scholars from Amherst College have published an article which links records of campus applications with records of campus visits and finds that students who do a campus tour when it is hot or raining are 10% and 8%, respectively, less likely to apply than those who visit on a more pleasant day.
12. In the United Kingdom, a meningitis outbreak at the University of Kent that spread at a Chemistry Club event has left two dead and another 20 seriously ill. A special course of vaccinations for students at the university was authorized on Wednesday.
13. Also in the UK, Sheffield Hallam has hit upon a radical cost-containment measure. Teaching-only professors will no longer be employed by the university, but rather by a separate company owned by the university which will not pay equivalent pension benefits. Chalmers University in Sweden has decided to split its teaching- and research-oriented professors, though here the goal was to concentrate research funding better rather than to reduce compensation.
14. Chile’s new right-wing government has started off with a bang. It’s “National Reconstruction Pact”, introduced into Parliament within days of President Kast being inaugurated, contains dozens of measures to undo the work of the previous left-wing government. Two key pieces with respect to education: first a limit on the country’s policies of gratuidad or targeted free tuition to make it only for students under 30 (this would reduce the number of beneficiaries by about 1.5%), and a more aggressive approach to collections on student loans. El Pais has a good summary here.
15. And finally in Spain, peace has broken out between the President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Ayuso, and the community’s long-underfunded universities. Last month Ayuso sacked her previous minister for not reaching an accord. Her new Minister, Mercedes Zarzalejo, managed to get a deal after what was apparently an intense all-night WhatsApp session. The deal provides a substantial increase in funding to universities (14.8 billion euros over five years), but will still leave Madrid with the weakest per-student funding among all 17 of Spain’s autonomous communities. And yes, the parallels with Ontario are pretty astonishing.
That’s it for now. Two weeks from now is Good Friday, and I’m not planning on filling your inboxes that day, so the next edition of The Fifteen will be on April 10. See you then!
