Do free trade deals pose a threat to public higher education in Europe?

By Brendan O’Malley – Managing Editor. In Features, Tino Brömme and Barnaby Britten warn that free trade agreements such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership could intensify the pressures on public education of privatisation and commercialisation. Yojana Sharma says academics are concerned that US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric, including talk of building a wall between Mexico and the United States, could jeopardise higher education collaboration between the countries. Jason A Scorza says remembering to think about the future does not come naturally but academic leaders must take seriously their moral obligations to posterity for the sake of generations to come.
In Commentary, Natalia Shmatko encourages Russian PhD holders to further develop international academic cooperation and in particular consider simultaneous mobility, where a researcher works for several organisations located in different countries at the same time and is based either in one of them or in the home country. And Anand Kulkarni writes that global university rankings and comparisons with China indicate that India needs to do more to spread excellence and become more internationally oriented in its higher education system.
In World Blog, Richard Holmes provides some tongue-in-cheek advice on how North Korea could facilitate a rapid rise of its universities in the global rankings.
In a series on Transformative Leadership in which University World News is partnering with The MasterCard Foundation, Sharon Dell reports from a meeting of the International Association of University Presidents on the importance of forging equal higher education partnerships to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in the context of global inequalities.
Lastly, in our Student View section, Casey O’Brien pleads with professors everywhere to make students work for their trips abroad to arm them with knowledge about the complexities of their host country. Read more...