By Brendan O’Malley – Managing Editor. In our series on Transformative Leadership, published in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation, Graeme Atherton says higher education should take the lead in pressing governments to commit to strategies for achieving equity for students from marginalised groups, a key message of the first ‘World Access to Higher Education Day’. And Simon Marginson discusses how universities – both the research-intensive universities in the global cities and universities outside the global capitals – can address the problem of economic inequality driven by rising global cities and declining regional hinterlands.In Commentary, Alejandro Caballero discusses how educators can prepare workers for the transition to a ‘gig economy’, where traditional jobs are likely to be replaced by workers performing a series of individual freelance gigs. Bob Birrell and Katharine Betts warn that selling higher education has become precarious for Australia’s universities due to the Group of Eight’s overdependence on Chinese students and other universities’ overreliance on Indian students. And Tony McMahon, Anne Scott and Colin Scott argue that the Irish government’s controversial plan to fund 45 women-only professorships is needed to correct historic inequalities.
In our World Blog this week, Valerie Clifford and Martin Haigh take stock of internationalisation of the curriculum and its ultimate goal of creating global citizens who promote the welfare of the future world and are prepared to tackle its most serious problems.
On the topic of Academic Freedom, Brendan O’Malley and Wagdy Sawahel write that the sentencing of UK doctoral student Matthew Hedges to life imprisonment in the UAE is setting off alarm bells for academics conducting research in the Middle East, who are already shaken by the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Turkey last month.
In Features, Wagdy Sawahel reports on the Tunisian government’s plans to tackle terrorism at higher education institutions in the wake of a suicide bomb attack carried out by a jobless female university graduate last month. More...
