The week in higher education – 16 January 2020

Just when you thought we might be able to say goodbye to annoying hybrid words like Brexit as we move into the 2020s, “Megxit” came crashing into the global consciousness. And it seems even higher education can’t escape the gravitational news pull of this all-encompassing royal psychodrama. The Chicago Tribune wryly spotted an opportunity for a local angle to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s attempt to step down as senior royals and divide their time between North America and the UK, with the Twitter headline “Northwestern graduate moving closer to home after spending time abroad”, a reference to Meghan’s time as an undergraduate at the Illinois institution. It shows that if you look hard enough, you’re bound to find a higher education angle in any news story; just add “did they go to university and where?” to the basic journalistic questions of Who, What, Where, When, Why and How.

A UK university campus was placed on lockdown after a jogger wearing a fitness vest was mistaken for a potential suicide bomber. Staff and students at Bournemouth University were told to stay inside as police investigated reports that a man had been seen wearing “something that resembled a suicide vest”, according to The Sun. In fact, it turned out the person was a jogger wearing a weighted vest that runners can use to improve upper-body strength. The lockdown at the university lasted around 45 minutes before police gave the all clear, reported the newspaper, which said there have previously been problems with people wearing such vests, which feature several pockets filled with sand to make them weigh several kilogrammes.

The education minister in Brazil’s right-wing authoritarian government is known for his provocative YouTube videos championing military rule and flat Earth theory – and, following a recent attack on universities, for his spelling mistakes. Abraham Weintraub’s “latest gaffe came…when he sent a Twitter message to the politician son of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, containing the bogus claim that there had been no academic study of public security issues in Brazil”, The Guardian reported. “That false assertion was imprecionante (“imprecive”), Weintraub declared, sparking widespread derision, even from supporters.” The minister was previously “ridiculed for using the misspelled word suspenção (‘suspention’) in an official document”, it added. To cover his embarrassment, Mr Weintraub could perhaps try arguing that dictionaries are conspiracies created by Marxist academic elites to ridicule the real, idiosyncratic spelling of honest, ordinary folk. 

As tensions flared between the US and Iran in the aftermath of President Trump’s order to kill a top Iranian general, a professor at Babson College, a business school in Massachusetts, thought he would try a joke on social media. Responding to Mr Trump’s statement on the US’ having identified 52 sites in Iran it could strike against, including sites of cultural significance, Asheen Phansey said: “In retaliation, Ayatollah Khomenei [sic] should tweet a list of 52 sites of beloved American cultural heritage that he would bomb. Um…Mall of America? Kardashian residence.” Shortly afterwards, reported the Boston Herald on 9 January, Professor Phansey was “terminated” from the school. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education objected that his comment “cannot reasonably be read as a threat, incitement, or even a sincere endorsement of violence”.

The barnacles being blasted from the good ship global Britain as it prepares for its buccaneering Brexit journey may include the European Union’s Erasmus programme, which offers support for UK students to study at foreign universities across the bloc. “Officials in the Treasury and the Department for Education have suggested that Britain’s participation in the Erasmus+ exchange scheme could end this year,” The Times reported. “The question being asked is whether you want to spend a billion pounds on this or put it into the schools budget,” said a “Whitehall source” who materialised every fear about putting the budget for higher education into the Department for Education alongside that for schools. “Clearly it will depend on the negotiations with the EU but the feeling is that it is expensive and not a priority for the government.” Whitehall officials must be feeling confident about the current numbers of UK students studying abroad or learning foreign languages – perhaps they could share the reasons for their confidence more widely.