Universities have blamed President Donald Trump for a dip in foreign student enrolment in the United States, citing his anti-immigration stance as a contributing factor, writes Harriet Sinclair for Newsweek. More...

An assessment of Brazil’s contribution to high-impact science from 1980 onwards, analysed from the number of papers published in Nature and Science from three of the country’s leading universities, has shown that there was a dramatic increase in their publications in these prestigious journals over the period, write Gabriel José de Carli and Tiago Campos Pereira for Nature. More...

By Mary Beth Marklein. A gathering of United States scholars last week took up the question of how their work can remain relevant in a ‘post-truth’ era, when alternative facts can influence public policy and fake news can be leveraged to try to swing election results. More...

By Brendan O’Malley – Managing Editor. In Commentary, Gwilym Croucher says US universities and their advocates are increasingly concerned about the hostility shown by the United States federal administration to science, and will need to step up their efforts to restate their science mission to avert this threat to fundamental research. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson argues that the current focus on teaching facts and skills crowds out the cultivation of judgment, which is what students need to deal with the ‘unknown unknowns’ of the future. And Damtew Teferra says the Continental Education Strategy for Africa – unlike the Sustainable Development Goals – places higher education firmly at the centre of the continent’s development, where it belongs.
   In World Blog this week, Grace Karram Stephenson and Emmanuelle Fick question the extensive power of Canadian research ethics boards as gatekeepers and whether there is a need to harmonise ethics reviews across the country.
   In our section on Academic Freedom, Sofia Karlsson and Denis Aslan draw attention to the fears of the family of Iranian scholar Ahmadreza Djalali, a specialist in disaster medicine who trained and lived in Europe and who, upon returning to Iran to share his knowledge, was imprisoned and sentenced to death.
   In a Special Report on the Going Global 2018 conference held last week in Malaysia, Yojana Sharma unpacks a British Council study released at the conference that looks at the patchy nature of student and academic mobility in the Southeast Asian region, while Glenda Crosling and Angela Lee Siew Hoong explain why Malaysia has set a target in its higher education blueprint for 70% of university programmes to use blended learning by 2025.
   In Features, Ararat L Osipian reports on the struggles Ukraine’s acting minister of health is having with rectors of some medical universities over cases of alleged corruption. More...