Breaking News
MIDDLE EAST
Wagdy Sawahel and Brendan O’Malley
Iranian drone strikes on Amazon Web Services data centres in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have directly disrupted the higher education sector by disabling critical digital infrastructure, raising questions about the resilience of cloud systems and disaster recovery in periods of high risk.
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ZIMBABWE Clemence Manyukwe
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NORWAY Jan Petter Myklebust
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Top Stories
GLOBAL |
Tertiary students rose from 103 million to 269 million
Nathan M Greenfield
Higher education student numbers worldwide have risen 161% since 2000, but completion rates need improving. Overall, equitable expansion depends less on any single policy than on coherent combinations of demand- and supply-side measures, underpinned by quality assurance, flexible pathways and evaluation of who benefits, says UNESCO.
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 AUSTRALIA Shadi Khan Saif
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 INDIA Shuriah Niazi
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 MIDDLE EAST Annalisa Pavan
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News
IRAN-ISRAEL
Wagdy Sawahel
Amid escalating conflict in the Middle East, the Israel Defense Forces have confirmed targeting two Iranian universities, namely, Malek Ashtar University and Imam Hossein University, alleging their military use by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as a space research centre.
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INDIA-MIDDLE EAST Shuriah Niazi
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AFRICA Wagdy Sawahel While some countries in Southern and West Africa maintain prominent levels of academic freedom, the African region is experiencing stagnation, with academic freedom operating at a level that indicates stress for researchers and institutions, according to the Academic Freedom Index 2026 report just released.
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FINLAND Jan Petter Myklebust Student organisations in Finland have criticised a proposal by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment sent out for public comment in January that will make it possible for the authorities to revoke the residence permit of a foreign student who receives social assistance from the state.
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GERMANY Michael Gardner A new analysis performed by the Moses Mendelssohn Institute suggests that housing costs for students in Germany are continuing to rise. The German Student Welfare Association has called on the government to urgently take action to address the issue.
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DENMARK Jan Petter Myklebust
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Edtech, AI and Higher Education
GLOBAL
James Yoonil Auh
Educational technology has reached a structural turning point, shifting from frontier innovation to embedded infrastructure. In its place, AI is reconfiguring learning as real-time, co-constructed cognition. This is a disciplinary rupture with profound implications for higher education, institutional design and the future of knowledge.
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GLOBAL Anila DeHart 
As AI transforms entry-level work, the human-centric capabilities it cannot replicate matter more for graduates, employers and for universities’ relevance in workforce development. Higher education’s ability to make those capabilities accessible to all students will shape equity outcomes and economic competitiveness in the AI era.
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GLOBAL Hanelie Adendorff, Francois Cilliers, Cheng-Wen Huang, Soraya Lester, Sonja Strydom and Sukaina Walji 
Across the world, universities are working out how to respond to the challenge of generative artificial intelligence. Nowhere has this disruption been felt more acutely than in assessment, where questions of integrity, authorship and evidence of learning sit at the core of institutional credibility.
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World Blog
UNITED KINGDOM
Rob Phillips
Residential courses offer huge benefits to students, from Open University weekends, doctoral summer schools and MBA away-days to field trips for many other subjects, and they could also provide international students with additional skills and the chance to experience life away from the university.
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SDGs
INDIA
Nidhi Piplani Kapur and Harshita Tripathi
India aims to become a global hub by strengthening domestic research, innovation and student employability. In order to do this, it is not enough to merely attract more international students. Universities must build global citizens through a national education policy of ‘internationalisation at home’.
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Top Stories from Last Week
UNITED STATES-GLOBAL
Nathan M Greenfield
Academic freedom has declined more quickly in the United States than any other country, according to the latest index. Once a global role model for institutional autonomy and academic freedom, the country now risks being an exporter of bad models, experts say.
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 GLOBAL Bruce Macfarlane and Jason Yeung-Tarre
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 SOUTH AFRICA Desmond Thompson
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 GLOBAL James Yoonil Auh
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AFRICA Desmond Thompson 
The innovative approach of the African Higher Education in Emergencies Network, a consortium of African universities, training providers and refugee-led organisations, focuses on expanding access for displaced persons to accredited employment-oriented tertiary qualifications. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for more than 30% of the world’s refugee population.
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NORWAY-NORDIC COUNTRIES Jan Petter Myklebust 
A renewed campaign to have academic freedom enshrined in the Norwegian constitution has been launched by the Norwegian Association of Researchers and the National Union of Students in Norway – with strong support from some of the country’s top scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners.
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UNITED STATES Nathan M Greenfield 
A group of scholarly organisations in the United States is challenging last year’s termination of US$100 million in National Endowment for the Humanities grants identified as having a ‘disfavoured’ and ‘dangerous viewpoint’ by a two-person Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, team with the help of ChatGPT.
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FINLAND Jan Petter Myklebust 
A new report saying that Finnish researchers face ‘growing institutional pressure, instrumentalist views on research, and personal harassment for their research’, raises the question of how resilient Finland and other Nordic countries are when it comes to protecting the concept of academic freedom.
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