Thank God I’m an atheist!
LEUVEN (la croix) -- Scholars at the Catholic Verbiest Institute in Belgium have in a gathering declared religious freedom to be a ‘priority human right’. The meeting is being seen as a big step forwards, since scholars from Beijing and the Vatican were in attendance ... read more 11.09.2017
Belgian students crawl the kerb
BRUSSELS (le soir) -- The Belgian jury of publishing ethics (JEP) has received a complaint regarding a sign, encouraging students to “go out with a sugar daddy” to improve their lifestyle. The sign is part of a campaign by the website RichMeetBeautiful, which has already attracted “an enormous popularity” for the site. The JEP could either condemn the campaign, forcing it to stop, or rule that it doesn’t pose any issues ... read more 25.09.2017
Student protests in Barcelona protest for independence
BARCELONA (diario) -- Almost a hundred students from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) caused a traffic jam stretching for ten kilometres in the city on Thursday morning. The protest was held in order to protect the referendum of October 1st on Catalonian independence, which has been suspended by the Constitutional Court ... read more | and here 28.9.17
Taylor & Francis buys out OA publisher
LONDON (bookseller) -- Industry concentration proceeds, regardless of open access. The academic publisher Taylor & Francis has acquired the independent Open Access publisher Dove Medical Press (with over 86 OA journals) for an undisclosed amount. The newly bought publisher focusses on the health sciences ... read more 27.09.2017
Polish initiatives of excellence
WARSAW (wpolityce) -- At the National Congress of Science in Krakow, science minister Jarosław Gowin announced two flagship programmes for Polish universities. Similar to the German “Excellence Initiative”, it promises to grant a group of universities with a competitive advantage additional funding. A new mobility agency will also start operating as of 1 October, it has been modelled on the German Academic Exchange Service, DAAD, but with a much smaller budget and a weaker legal position ... read more 19.09.2017
Faster digitisation at Norwegian universities
OSLO (uniforum) -- Norwegian science Minister, Torbjørn Røe Isaksen has promised a focus on digitisation for universities and colleges in order to make study more accessible, and for technology to create better, more efficient research. “This is not just about new technology, but also about how the students learn and are assessed and how the institutions organise and carry out research” he said in a press release ... read more 11.09.2017
Turkey’s academic exodus is destroying its future
ANKARA (balkan insight) -- Many of Turkey’s academics are fleeing the country. With every one of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s emergency decrees, lists of people dismissed on the charge of collaborating with a terrorist organisation are published. Thousands are left with no practical choice other than going abroad ... read more 18.09.2017
Hungary: A tunnel at the end of the light
BUDAPEST (div) -- A solution with the Central European University is possible, claims science minister László Palkovics, referring to McDaniel College from Maryland that operates in Budapest since 1994 and complies with the new law. While negotiations with CEU’s home state of New York are possible now, many doubt that an operating “home campus” can be opened there by January 2018, when the so-called Lex CEU comes into action ... read more 20.09.2017
Ukrainian state-funded study places axed
KIEV (uwn) -- State-funded places in domestic Ukrainian universities have been cut by 17 percent this academic year. The measure is part of a larger reform in the Ukrainian national system of higher education, which aims to drop the ‘Soviet’ approach by including the specialist degree and taking on EU standards ... read more 21.09.2017
Niqab or not niqab?
BODØ (universitetsavisa) -- Earlier this year, the Norwegian government issued bill for a ban on full faced head garments in institutes of education. The board directors of Nord University have now decided after ten minutes of debate to uphold this proposal, setting themselves apart from all other universities ... read more 25.09.2017
Reward for fostering young talent
GRONINGEN (scienceguide) -- The grant for the promotion and development of young talent has been awarded to a consortium of educational institutions. “It is an enormous challenge to facilitate talent while taking into account the diversity of the student population” explains Marca Wolfensberger of Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen, which is leading the consortium ... read more 15.9.17
‘Petit Calais’ on Reims university campus
REIMS (le monde) -- The University of Reims has closed its campus Croix-Rouge on the grounds of security concerns, as migrants set up camp there. This closure has, however, ignited debate between students and staff alike. Commendably, many members of university staff are going against the decision, putting values of solidarity first ... read more 20.09.2017
Swiss ERASMUS+ back from the dead
BERN (swissinfo) -- The Swiss Council of States has voted 28 to 11 to reassociate the country with the EU exchange program, which offers students a stay at a foreign university, by 2021. 114.5 million francs (98.6 million euros) has already been approved for an interim solution from 2018. Students are however not entirely satisfied, with almost 10,000 having signed a petition calling for Switzerland’s immediate participation in the programme ... read more 21.09.17
Chemical Society attacks Sci-Hub
(quartz) -- The American Chemical Society or ACS, a publisher of multiple chemistry journals, is not a fan of Sci-Hub and wants it stopped. On Sept. 1 when the ACS asked a US federal court for an injunction that would force search engines and internet service providers to block Sci-Hub, a rogue pirating service for academic research. The publisher also requested a default judgement that would require Sci-Hub to pay $4.8 million. TorrentFreak reports that while Sci-Hub knew the case was going on it did not appear in court, hence the default $4.8m figure, which was announced in its absence. A similar judgement was found on the hub earlier and it was told to pay $15m in piracy damages to academic publisher Elsevier ... read more 07.09.2017
Italy: transgender students’ names to be recognised
PAVIA (gelocal) -- Transgender students at the University of Pavia, near Milan, now have the option to go by an ‘alias’ in all situations of university life. The provision is a workaround solution to allowing students to change their name to one of the gender they identify with ... read more 19.09.2017
Portuguese remain among their own kinsfolk
LISBON (público) -- About 70 percent of Portuguese university professors have a doctorate from the same institution where they teach, the Directorate General for Statistics on Education and Science (DGEEC) has found. The concept of ‘academic endogamy’, their study specifies, “refers to situations of professional immobility ... read more 21.09.2017