Breaking News
GLOBAL
Yojana Sharma
Proposed cuts to the NASA budget, which threaten US university-based space research programmes as well as joint space missions, have left international scientific collaborators of the United States in limbo and wondering whether China will emerge to fill the knowledge – and funding – gap.
Top Stories
GLOBAL
Impact of geopolitics on HE worldwide is accelerating
Futao Huang, Niancai Liu and Simon Marginson
A closed-door seminar which analysed the forces that will shape world-class universities in the 2050s ended with a shared conviction that, although universities face unprecedented turbulence that will reorder global academic life, they hold unique potential to shape a more cooperative global future.
UNITED STATES-CHINA
Jan Petter Myklebust
UNITED STATES-GLOBAL
Nathan M Greenfield
AUSTRALIA-NEW ZEALAND
John Gerritsen
News
DENMARK
Jan Petter Myklebust
Universities, academics and trade unions have welcomed the recent announcement by the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science of a new fund for basic research that will lay the foundation for scientific breakthroughs and innovation over the next four years.
GLOBAL-SWEDEN
Jan Petter Myklebust
CAMEROON
Elias Ngalame
Cameroon’s re-elected 93-year-old president, Paul Biya, who has ruled the country for 43 years, has pledged to chart a new path in the country’s higher education system, beginning with the resumption of PhD programmes at state universities this academic year. His plans have triggered mixed reactions.
EGYPT
Wagdy Sawahel
Egypt needs at least 65 new universities by 2030 to meet the demand for higher education amid a rapidly growing university-age population, a market research report has revealed. Student enrolment is expected to surge to more than five million over the next five years.
IRELAND
John Walshe
A cross-border partnership involving Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland and the Dundalk Institute of Technology in Ireland has been agreed following weeks of confidential talks. Irish Finance Minister and Tanaiste Simon Harris said the collaboration represents an important milestone in developing an all-island education system.
Edtech, AI and Higher Education
SOUTH KOREA
James Yoonil Auh
NVIDIA’s pledge of 260,000 graphic processing units, or GPUs, to South Korea is more than a hardware deal – it’s a test of whether nations can educate, govern and evolve faster than their machines. Universities could be the intellectual infrastructure of the AI era, key to converting computational abundance into cognitive abundance.
World Blog
GLOBAL
Nita Temmerman
For some academics the whole activity of quality assurance may be seen as an imposition that adds to their workload – one they perceive as predominantly focusing on compliance rather than authentic quality improvement. Consequently, it is not recognised as adding value to what they do.
Special Report: Education for Sustainable Development XI – Climate Science
GLOBAL
Climate science is vital to tackling global sustainability challenges, and future leaders will require strong climate and sustainability skills. The COP30 climate conference reflected the growing importance of climate Education for Sustainable Development, as does this 11th University World News special report in support of the Sustainable Development Goals.
GLOBAL
Lauren Rickards
GLOBAL
Karen MacGregor
AFRICA
Eve Ruwoko
SOUTH AFRICA
Desmond Thompson
The tension between accelerating climate change innovation and the limited readiness of science and governance systems was the focus of the first South African Ocean and Land CDR Science-Policy Workshop, held at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in the run-up to COP30.
SINGAPORE
Kalinga Seneviratne
The small but densely populated island nation of Singapore is spending millions of dollars in climate-related research focused on the tropics, a hitherto neglected area of scientific knowledge, in response to the region’s growing need for robust climate adaptation strategies.
SDGs
GLOBAL
UWN Reporter
Lund University in Sweden has seized top spot in the 2026 Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings: Sustainability. The results reflect ongoing progress from Asia, a strong showing from the United Kingdom – the most successful higher education system in the ranking – and some declines from the United States.
GLOBAL
Nathan M Greenfield
SUDAN
Gihad Ibrahim
GLOBAL
Milan Kovacevic
Top Stories from Last Week
NETHERLANDS
Jo Ritzen and Job Zomerplaag
The outcome of the recent elections in the Netherlands offers universities breathing space from threatened cuts but reveals a challenge facing many universities across Europe: the need to demonstrate that international excellence and local relevance are mutually reinforcing rather than competing priorities.
GLOBAL
Vu Tran-Thanh
INDIA
Shuriah Niazi
GLOBAL
Qiang Zha and Ya Xuan Wang
GLOBAL
Louise Nicol
The announcement of Ministerial Direction 115 in Australia is another sign that governments of major Anglophone study destination countries are conflating international education with migration risk. While it may be politically convenient, economically it is self-defeating, and students are the big losers.
KAZAKHSTAN
Elena Denisova-Schmidt, Tatyana Kim and Aliya Kuzhabekova
Interviews with senior university staff in Kazakhstan suggest that cheating has become embedded within broader educational and cultural structures, sustained by inherited norms, weak institutional regulation and patterns of social dependency – all of which require a rethinking of approaches to ensure academic integrity.
UNITED STATES
Brendan O’Malley
The Trump administration’s push against universities and science is posing an ‘existential threat’ to higher education and democracy and is transforming universities into breeding grounds of compliance, university leaders and academic freedom experts warned the Anniversary of the Magna Charta Universitatum MCU2020.
GLOBAL
Sjur Bergan
The signing of the Magna Charta Universitatum by 37 new universities on 13 November is anything but trivial. In doing so, they have joined a growing global family of over 1,000 institutions concerned with and committed to academic freedom and institutional autonomy.