Welcome to The Fifteen, a global round-up of the stories animating higher education institutions and systems around the globe. Let’s get to it.
1. From the US, an update on the Compact: of the nine original invitees, there are now seven “no”s, one “we’re not not saying no” (Vanderbilt) and one radio silence (UT Austin). In the face of near-universal rejection, Trump issued an open invitation to all institutions to sign the deal but none have yet done so, not even deep red-state public universities (yet, anyway). This isn’t really surprising since it is such an incredibly bad deal (even the Cato institute thinks Trump’s gone too far with this one). Meanwhile, the University of Virginia, which declined to sign the compact, did inch closer to an agreement with the White House that at first glance, at least, seemed much more favourable to the university than similar deals signed with Columbia and Brown earlier in the year.
2. The Associated Press has put together data from across a number of big US private universities on Black student admissions since the 2023 Supreme Court verdict. Surprise! The situation has worsened considerably (for a slightly more nuanced take see here).
3. The UK government has released its post-16 Skills White Paper. I would say it was a “long-anticipated” white paper, but let’s face it, the UK issues one of these things every year or two and few of them actually change anything, so no one outside the UK HE bubble ever really pays much attention. If you don’t have time to read the whole thing, read the WonkHE summary and especially WonkHE’s take on why the report was silent on perhaps the most important point of all (institutional financial failures). The excellent Andrew McGettigan pointed out that most of the solutions seem rooted in an earlier Tory era. Also, in a wonderful post, Paul Greatrix eviscerated the White Paper’s view that HE greatness requires yet more regulation.
4. There was a huge brawl on the University of Jordan campus in Amman, one blamed on inter-tribal rivalries. Forty students were arrested, and 21 expelled.
5. Georgia (the country, not the state) announced a major shake-up to its university system this month. Many of the measures were opposed because the reform was believed to be a political attack by a pro-Putin government on the university sector (which is widely seen to be anti-Putin). But among the more intriguing (and not necessarily ideological) suggestions is a principle of One City, One Faculty; that is to say, multiple institutions in a single city are acceptable, but there should not be any duplication at the faculty level within a single city. We’ll see how that plays out.
6. Lots of news on artificial intelligence in higher education this last couple of weeks. A survey from Wiley AI said that scientists are increasingly skeptical about the efficacy of AI. New AI-specific universities were announced in both India and Kazakhstan. The New York Times published a reasonably balanced piece on the big AI initiative at California State University. And in Kenya, Prime Minister Ruto enrolled in an AI class at the country’s Open University and asked profs to be kind to him (although given that university lecturers are in the sixth week of a strike for unpaid back wages, this seems a bit optimistic).
7. A couple of interesting new free-to-read publications came out in the past few weeks. My friend Frank Ziegele and his colleague Ulrich Müller last year wrote a book called “The Authentic University”, which has now been translated and made freely available. The other is the first-ever annual report of the Global Observatory on Change in Higher Education (look for a podcast on this latter early in November).
8. The Argentina funding soap opera to date: i) Congress passed a law to increase university funding, ii) President Milei vetoed the bill, iii) Congress overrode the veto. Now: Milei signed a decree halting implementation of the bill on the grounds that Congress never specified how to pay for the huge increase in spending. Cue a lawsuit to overturn the decree and a quick two-day faculty strike.
9. Staying in Argentina for a second, former football international Juan Sebastian Veron is fronting a new Sports University. He’s not the first ex-ManU star to start a university: a few years several of his erstwhile teammates created University Academy 92, a private degree-granting institute in Old Trafford which currently has about 1,000 students. Meanwhile, over in Senegal, the country’s main institution of higher education, l’Université Cheikh-Anta-Diop has signed a deal with the Confederation of African Football to create a centre of excellence for African football administration focusing on governance, law, and management of sporting heritage.
10. This one was news to me: a half-dozen Brazilian federal universities have quotas for trans/non-binary students. They aren’t all filling them, though. (For more on the general subject of quotas in Brazilian higher education, see my podcast interview with Luiz Augusto Campos from earlier this month).
11. The government of Italy has decided that its contribution to reconstruction in Gaza will be to build a university there. Meanwhile, at the Gaza Tribunal in Istanbul, a number of witnesses testified with respect to the destruction of higher education in Gaza over the past two years.
12. The Government of the Community of Madrid, currently run by right-wing (Partido Popular) President Isabel Diaz Ayuso, is not known for supporting its universities. Complutense University of Madrid, one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious universities, is close to insolvency and other universities are too. Ayuso’s solution is not to increase the size of institutional grants, but rather to loan institutions money to cover short-term costs, leading the left to characterize the regional government as a predatory lender.
13. Here’s an interesting example of higher ed diplomacy. China provided the President of Ghana with a US $30M grant to build any infrastructure project he wanted. He chose to use it to build a hospital and a university in his own home district of Damongo.
14. Remember the President of Nigeria slapping a seven-year moratorium on the creation of new universities a few weeks ago? The House of Assembly showed what they thought of that idea this month by passing legislation creating another four universities. Expect a showdown when the bills hit the President’s desk. Meanwhile, a reminder from Bangladesh that although Parliament can authorize new universities, absent money and organization these universities won’t actually open.
15. Due to the usual settler backlash, the University of Auckland has retreated from plans to require all students to take a course on the treaty of Waitangi. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the Higher Education Commission has made two courses on the Quran mandatory for students in all programs.
And finally, not really a story, but definitely my favourite headline of the month: “Latvian Universities Ranked About the Same as Usual”. If I were a dictator, I would make this the default headline for pretty much every story about rankings, ever, anywhere.
Cheers, and see you back here in two weeks.
