Tag: Global

  • Gender governance and the global grammar of illiberal inclusion

    Gender governance and the global grammar of illiberal inclusion

    by Ourania Filippakou

    Across global higher education, the terms of justice, equality and inclusion are being rewritten. In recent years, the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the United States (Spitalniak, 2025) has unfolded alongside a global resurgence of anti-gender, ultra-nationalist, racialised and colonial politics (Brechenmacher, 2025). At the same time, the rise of authoritarian and far-right ideologies, together with deepening socioeconomic inequalities fuelled by an ascendant billionaire class (Klein and Taylor, 2025) and the growing portrayal of feminist and queer scholarship as ideological extremism (Pitts-Taylor and Wood, 2025), signal a profound shift in the rationalities shaping the politics of higher education. These developments do not reject inclusion; they refashion it. Equality becomes excess, dissent is recast as disorder, and inclusion is reconstituted as a technology of governance.

    This conjuncture, what Stuart Hall (Hall in Hall and Massey, 2010, p57) would call the alignment of economic, political and cultural forces, requires a vocabulary capable of capturing continuity and rupture. It also reflects the deepening crisis of neoliberalism, whose governing logics become more coercive as their legitimacy wanes (Beckert, 2025; Menand, 2023). As Hall reminds us, ‘a conjuncture is a period when different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions… or as Althusser said ‘fuse in a ruptural unity’’ (Hall in Hall and Massey, 2012, p57). A conjuncture, in this sense, does not resolve crisis but produces new configurations of ideological coherence and institutional control. In my recent article, ‘Managed Inclusion and the Politics of Erasure: Gender Governance in Higher Education under Neoliberal Authoritarianism’ (Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, 2025), I theorise these developments as a global grammar of illiberal inclusion: a political rationality that appropriates the language of equity while disabling its redistributive, democratic and epistemic force. The article develops a typology of symbolic, technocratic and transformative inclusion to examine how feminist, anti-caste and critical vocabularies are increasingly absorbed into systems of civility, visibility and procedural control. Transformative inclusion, the configuration most aligned with redistribution, dissent and epistemic plurality, is the one most forcefully neutralised.

    Across geopolitical contexts, from postcolonial states to liberal democracies, gender inclusion is increasingly appropriated not as a demand for justice but as a mechanism of control. The techniques of co-option vary, yet they consolidate into a shared political rationality in which equity is stripped of redistributive force and redeployed to affirm institutional legitimacy, nationalist virtue and market competitiveness. This is not a rupture with neoliberal governance but its intensification through more disciplinary and exclusionary forms. For example, in India, the National Education Policy 2020 invokes empowerment while enacting epistemic erasure, systematically marginalising the knowledges of women from subordinated caste, class and religious communities (Peerzada et al, 2024; Patil, 2023; Singh, 2023). At the same time, state-led campaigns such as Beti Bachao elevate women’s visibility only within ideals of modesty and nationalist virtue (Chhachhi, 2020). In Hungary, the 2018 ban on gender studies aligned higher education with labour-market imperatives and nationalist agendas (Barát, 2022; Zsubori, 2018). In Turkey, reforms under Erdoğan consolidate patriarchal norms while constraining feminist organising (Zihnioğlu and Kourou, 2025). Here, gender inclusion is tolerated only when it reinforces state agendas and restricts dissent.

    Elsewhere, inclusion is recast as ideological deviance. In the United States, the Trump-era rollback of DEI initiatives and reproductive rights has weaponised inclusion as a spectre of radicalism, disproportionately targeting racialised and LGBTQ+ communities (Amnesty International, 2024; Chao-Fong, 2025). In Argentina, Milei abolished the Ministry of Women, describing feminism as fiscally irresponsible (James, 2024). In Italy, Meloni’s government invokes ‘traditional values’ to erode anti-discrimination frameworks (De Giorgi et al, 2023, p.v11i1.6042). In these cases, inclusion is not merely neutralised but actively vilified, its political charge reframed as cultural threat.

    Even when inclusion is celebrated, it is tethered to respectability and moral legibility. In France, femonationalist discourses instrumentalise gender equality to legitimise anti-Muslim policy (Farris, 2012; Möser, 2022). In Greece, conservative statecraft reframes inclusion through familialist narratives while dismantling equality infrastructures (Bempeza, 2025). These patterns reflect a longer political repertoire in which authoritarian and ultra-nationalist projects mobilise idealised domestic femininity to naturalise social hierarchies. As historian Diana Garvin (Garvin quoted in Matei, 2025) notes, ‘what fascisms old and new have in common is they tend to look to women to fill in the gaps that the state misses’, with contemporary ‘womanosphere’ influencers in the US reviving fantasies of domestic bliss that obscure intensified gendered precarity (Matei, 2025).

    Such gendered constructions coexist with escalating violence. More than 50.000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members in 2024, which means one woman or girl was killed every ten minutes, or 137 every day, according to the latest UNODC and UN Women femicide report (UNODC/UN Women, 2025). This sits within a wider continuum of harm: 83.000 women and girls were intentionally killed last year, and the report finds no sign of real progress. It also highlights a steep rise in digital violence, including harassment, stalking, gendered disinformation and deepfakes, which increasingly spills into offline contexts and contributes to more lethal forms of harm. These global patterns intersect with regional crises. For example, more than 7.000 women were killed in India in gender-related violence in 2022 (NCRB, 2023); eleven women are murdered daily in femicides across Latin America (NU CEPAL, 2024). At the same time, masculinist influencers such as Andrew Tate cultivate transnational publics organised around misogyny (Adams, 2025; Wescott et al, 2024). As UN Secretary-General António Guterres (2025) warns: ‘Instead of mainstreaming equal rights, we are seeing the mainstreaming of misogyny’.

    These global pressures reverberate across institutions that have historically positioned themselves as democratic spaces, including universities, which increasingly recast gender equity as a reputational risk or cultural flashpoint rather than a democratic obligation (D’Angelo et al, 2024; McEwen and Narayanaswamy, 2023). Equity becomes an emblem of modernity to be audited, displayed and curated, rather than a demand for justice. Ahmed’s (2012) theorisation of non-performativity is essential here: institutions declare commitments to equality precisely to contain the transformations such commitments would require. In this context, symbolic and technocratic inclusion flourish, while the structural conditions for transformative inclusion continue to narrow.

    These shifts reflect broader political and economic formations. Brown (2015) shows how neoliberal reason converts justice claims into performance demands, hollowing out democratic vocabularies. Fraser’s (2017) account of ‘progressive neoliberalism’ illuminates the terrain in which market liberalism coupled with selective diversity politics absorbs emancipatory discourse while preserving inequality. Patnaik (2021) argues that the rise of neofascism is a political necessity for neoliberalism in crisis, as rights are redefined as privileges and inclusion is repurposed to stabilise inequality. In this conjuncture, these tendencies intensify into what Giroux (2018, 2021, 2022a) names ‘neoliberal fascism’, a formation structured by three interlocking fundamentalisms: a market fundamentalism that commodifies all aspects of life, a religious fundamentalism that moralises inequality; and a regime of manufactured ignorance and militarised illiteracy that discredits critical thought and erases historical memory (Giroux 2022b, p48-54).

    The United States now offers a further manifestation of this global pattern, illustrating how attacks on DEI can function as a broader assault on higher education. As recent analyses of US politics show, the first and particularly the second Trump administration is actively modelling itself on Viktor Orbán’s illiberal statecraft, centralising executive power, purging public institutions and mobilising ‘family values’ and anti-‘woke’ politics to reshape education and media governance (Giroux, 2017; Smith, 2025; Kauffmann, 2025). The dismantling of DEI under the Trump administration, framed as a defence of merit, free speech and fiscal responsibility (The White House, 2025), marks the beginning of a wider attempt to consolidate political influence over higher education. Executive orders targeting DEI have been followed by lawsuits, funding withdrawals and intensified federal scrutiny, prompting universities such as Michigan, Columbia and Chicago to scale back equality infrastructures, cut programmes and reduce humanities provision (cf Bleiler, 2025; Pickering, Cosgrove and Massel, 2025; Quinn, 2025). These developments do not simply eliminate DEI; they position anti-gender politics as a mechanism of disciplining universities, narrowing intellectual autonomy and extending political control over academic life. They exemplify wider global tendencies in which inclusion becomes a field through which illiberal projects consolidate authority. The assault on DEI is thus not a uniquely American phenomenon but part of a broader authoritarian turn in which inclusion is recoded to stabilise, rather than challenge, existing power.

    Understanding gender governance in higher education through this conjunctural lens reveals not merely the erosion of equity but the emergence of a political formation that reconfigures inclusion into an apparatus of civility, visibility and administrative control. These tendencies are not aberrations but expressions of a larger global grammar that binds emancipatory rhetoric to authoritarian-neoliberal governance. The result is not the dilution of equality but its rearrangement as a practice of containment.

    The implications for the sector are profound. If inclusion is increasingly reorganised through metrics, decorum and procedural compliance, then reclaiming its democratic potential requires an epistemic and institutional shift. Inclusion needs to be understood not as a reputational asset but as a commitment to justice, redistribution and collective struggle. This means recovering equality as political and pedagogical labour: the work of confronting injustice, protecting dissent and renewing the public imagination. Academic freedom and equality are inseparable: without equality, freedom becomes privilege; without freedom, equality becomes performance.

    As Angela Davis (Davis quoted in Gerges, 2023) reminds us: ‘Diversity without structural transformation simply brings those who were previously excluded into a system as racist and misogynist as it was before… There can be no diversity and inclusion without transformation and justice.’ And as Henry Giroux (2025) argues, democracy depends on how societies fight over language, memory and possibility. That struggle now runs through the university itself, shaping its governance, its epistemic life and the courage to imagine more just and democratic possibilities.

    Ourania Filippakou is a Professor of Education at Brunel University of London. Her research interrogates the politics of higher education, examining universities as contested spaces where power, inequality, and resistance intersect. Rooted in critical traditions, she explores how higher education can foster social justice, equity, and transformative change.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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  • The Mis-education of Global Elites

    The Mis-education of Global Elites

    Across the United States, the U.K., Europe, and increasingly the Gulf States and East Asia, elite education has become a finishing school for rulers rather than a training ground for genuine public servants. These institutions—rich in endowment, selective in admission, steeped in prestige—construct worldviews that normalize inequity as efficiency, privatization as innovation, and austerity as necessity. Instead of interrogating the historical and structural forces that produce suffering, elite curricula often neutralize them, reducing political economy to management science and social justice to branding.

    This mis-education manifests in global leadership failures. The same graduates who enter parliaments, presidential cabinets, central banks, multinational boards, and international NGOs routinely oversee policies that accelerate inequality and erode the public sphere. Many come from universities with unparalleled research capacity and moral rhetoric, yet preside over housing crises, medical debt catastrophes, and planetary degradation. They authorize wars but rarely experience them. They tout meritocracy while gatekeeping opportunity. They celebrate entrepreneurship while dismantling public goods. Their philanthropic initiatives—often built from profits derived through tax avoidance, monopolization, and labor exploitation—give the appearance of benevolence without altering the underlying systems of harm.

    Carter G. Woodson’s warning in The Mis-education of the Negro echoes eerily here: “When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.” Global elites, educated into a narrow ideology that glorifies markets and hierarchy, do not need to be coerced into maintaining destructive systems—they do so voluntarily, believing themselves enlightened.

    Nowhere is this clearer than in the corporate education complex itself. Elite universities produce the analysts who rationalize austerity, the managers who coordinate privatization, the consultants who reengineer public institutions to mimic corporations, and the financiers who define the metrics of success. They also cultivate the ideological insulation that shields elites from accountability. When their policies trigger chaos, the explanation is never structural, only technical: markets corrected, externalities emerged, populists disrupted stability. The mis-education of elites ensures they cannot see failure as their own.

    Global institutions—from the IMF and World Bank to the UN and WTO—have mirrored this mindset. Their leaders, mostly trained in the same corridors of prestige, have promoted development models that prioritize capital mobility over community well-being, and foreign investment over local sovereignty. Even when faced with overwhelming evidence that structural adjustment, privatized healthcare, or financialization intensify human suffering, the elite worldview persists. The inability—or unwillingness—to imagine alternative systems is not an intellectual deficiency but the logical outcome of an education designed to reproduce power, not challenge it.

    Meanwhile, those most affected by global crises—workers, migrants, debtors, students, the poor—are told to adapt, innovate, or sacrifice. They are bombarded with entrepreneurial rhetoric and resilience talk while their material conditions worsen. Political leaders lament social fragmentation but continue to funnel wealth upward. University administrators speak of inclusion while expanding administrative hierarchies and outsourcing labor. Energy executives promise transitions while drilling new pipelines. Tech CEOs warn about misinformation while building the infrastructure that spreads it.

    The result is a world where the legitimacy of elites is evaporating. From Santiago to Paris, Lagos to Minneapolis, Delhi to London, mass movements are demanding accountability from institutions that have proven incapable of self-reform. The global backlash against inequality, authoritarianism, and corporate hegemony is not a misunderstanding—it is a recognition that the systems run by elites have failed.

    If there is to be a better world, the mis-education of elites must be confronted directly. That means transforming the mission of universities from prestige accumulation to public purpose; replacing managerialism with democratic governance; centering histories of resistance rather than merely histories of empire; teaching economic justice instead of market worship; and training leaders who measure success not by shareholder value or rankings but by human flourishing.

    Elites have long claimed exclusive expertise in solving the world’s problems. They have had centuries—and trillions—to prove it. They have failed miserably. A new generation of thinkers, activists, workers, and communities is already building the alternatives. Whether global elites choose to learn from them—or continue along their well-worn path of extraction and denial—will determine the next century.

    For now, the record is clear: the institutions that shaped the world’s most powerful people were never designed to create justice. And they haven’t.

    Academic Sources

    Baldwin, Davarian L. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. Bold Type Books, 2021.

    Bourdieu, Pierre. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power. Stanford University Press, 1996.

    Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014.

    Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.

    Khan, Shamus Rahman. Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School. Princeton University Press, 2011.

    Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, 1956.

    Mkandawire, Thandika. “Institutional Monocropping and Monotasking in Africa.” UNRISD, 2007.

    Piketty, Thomas. Capital and Ideology. Harvard University Press, 2020.

    Saul, John Ralston. Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Free Press, 1992.

    Sklair, Leslie. The Transnational Capitalist Class. Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.

    Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited. W.W. Norton, 2017.

    Woodson, Carter G. The Mis-education of the Negro. Associated Publishers, 1933.

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  • Neoliberalism and the Global College Meltdown

    Neoliberalism and the Global College Meltdown

    Over the past four decades, neoliberalism has reshaped higher education into a market-driven enterprise, producing what can only be described as a global College Meltdown. Once envisioned as a public good—a tool for civic empowerment, social mobility, and national progress—higher education in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China has been transformed into a competitive market system defined by privatization, debt, and disillusionment.

    The United States: From Public Good to Profit Engine

    Nowhere has neoliberal ideology had a more devastating effect on higher education than in the United States. Beginning in the 1980s, with the Reagan administration’s cuts to federal grants and the expansion of student loans, higher education funding shifted from public investment to individual burden. Universities adopted corporate governance models, hired armies of administrators, and marketed education as a private commodity promising personal enrichment rather than collective advancement.

    The results are visible everywhere: tuition inflation, student debt exceeding $1.7 trillion, and the proliferation of predatory for-profit colleges. Elite universities transformed into financial behemoths, hoarding endowments while relying on contingent faculty. Meanwhile, working-class and minority students were lured into debt traps by institutions that promised upward mobility but delivered unemployment and despair.

    The U.S. College Meltdown—a term that describes the system’s moral and financial collapse—is a direct consequence of neoliberal policies: deregulation, privatization, and austerity disguised as efficiency. The profit motive replaced the public mission, and the casualties include students, adjuncts, and the ideal of education as a democratic right.

    The United Kingdom: Marketization and Managerialism

    The United Kingdom followed a similar trajectory under Margaret Thatcher and her successors. The introduction of tuition fees in 1998 and their tripling in 2012 marked the formal triumph of neoliberal logic over public investment. British universities became quasi-corporate entities, obsessed with league tables, branding, and global rankings.

    The result has been mounting student debt, declining staff morale, and a hollowing out of intellectual life. Faculty strikes over pensions and pay disparities underscore a deeper crisis of purpose. Universities now function as rent-seeking landlords—building luxury dorms for international students while cutting humanities departments. The logic of “student-as-customer” has reduced education to a transaction, and accountability has been redefined to mean profit margin rather than social contribution.

    The UK’s College Meltdown mirrors that of the U.S.—a story of financialization, precarious labor, and the erosion of public trust.

    China: Neoliberalism with Authoritarian Characteristics

    At first glance, China seems to defy the Western College Meltdown. Its universities have expanded rapidly, producing millions of graduates and investing heavily in research. But beneath this apparent success lies a deeply neoliberal structure embedded in an authoritarian framework.

    Since the 1990s, China’s higher education system has embraced competition, rankings, and market incentives. Universities compete for prestige and funding; families invest heavily in private tutoring and overseas degrees; and graduates face a saturated labor market. The result is mounting anxiety and unemployment among young people—known online as the “lying flat” generation, disillusioned with promises of meritocratic success.

    The Chinese model fuses state control with neoliberal marketization. Education serves as both an instrument of national power and a mechanism of social stratification. In this sense, China’s version of the College Meltdown reflects a global truth: the commodification of education leads to alienation, regardless of political system.

    A Global System in Crisis

    Whether in Washington, London, or Beijing, the pattern is strikingly similar. Neoliberalism treats education as an investment in human capital, reducing learning to a financial calculation. Universities compete like corporations; students borrow like consumers; and knowledge becomes a tool of capital accumulation rather than liberation.

    This convergence of economic and ideological forces has created an unsustainable higher education bubble—overpriced, overcredentialized, and underdelivering. Across continents, graduates face debt, underemployment, and despair, while universities chase rankings and revenue streams instead of justice and truth.

    Toward a Post-Neoliberal Education

    Reversing the College Meltdown requires more than reform; it demands a new philosophy. Public universities must reclaim their civic mission. Education must once again be understood as a human right, not a private investment. Debt forgiveness, reinvestment in teaching, and democratic governance are essential first steps.

    Neoliberalism’s greatest illusion was that markets could produce wisdom. The College Meltdown proves the opposite: when education serves profit instead of people, it consumes itself from within.

    Sources:

    • Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos (2015)

    • David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)

    • Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed (2017)

    • The Higher Education Inquirer archives on the U.S. College Meltdown

    • BBC, “University staff strikes and student debt crisis,” 2024

    • Caixin, “China’s youth unemployment and education anxiety,” 2023

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  • Games for Change Opens 2026 Student Challenge to Game Creators and Innovators Ages 10–25

    Games for Change Opens 2026 Student Challenge to Game Creators and Innovators Ages 10–25

    The annual global game design awards $20,000 in grand prizes for creative and impactful games that advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals

    NEW YORK, NY — [NOV 10, 2025] — Games for Change (G4C), the leading nonprofit that empowers game creators and innovators to drive real-world change, today announced the kick off of the 2025- 2026 Games for Change Student Challenge, a global game design program inviting learners ages 10–25 years old to tackle pressing world issues that address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, through creativity, play, and purposeful design.

    Now in its eleventh year, the Student Challenge has reached more than 70,000 students and almost 2,000 educators and faculty across 600cities in 91 countries, inspiring the creation of over 6,600 original student-designed games that connect learning to action. From November to April 2026, participants will design and submit games for consideration in regional and global competitions, with Game Jams taking place worldwide throughout the season.

    “The G4C Student Challenge continues to show that when young people design games about real-world issues, they see themselves not just as players, but as problem solvers and changemakers,” said Arana Shapiro, Chief Operations and Programs Officer at Games for Change. “Through game design, students learn to think critically, collaborate, and build solutions with purpose. In a world shaped by AI and constant change, durable skills like problem solving, critical thinking, and game design will allow all learners to thrive in their communities and worldwide.”

    This year, students will explore three new themes developed with world-class partners to inspire civic imagination and problem-solving:

    Two grand-prize winners will receive a total of $20,000 in scholarships, generously provided by Take-Two Interactive and Endless. Winners and finalists will be celebrated at the Student Challenge Awards on May 28, 2026, in recognition of exceptional creativity, social impact, and innovation in student game design.

    “With 3.4 billion players worldwide, the video games industry has an unprecedented ability to reach and inspire audiences across cultures and our next generation of leaders,” said Lisa Pak, Head of Operations at Playing for the Planet. “We’re excited about our collaboration with Games for Change, empowering students to use their creativity to spotlight the threats to reefs, rainforests, and our climate. Together, we’re transforming play into a powerful tool for awareness, education, and action.”

    “More than 319 million people face severe hunger around the world today,” said Jessamyn Sarmiento, Chief Marketing Officer at World Food Program USA. “Through the ‘Outgrow Hunger’ theme, we’re giving the next generation a way to explore the root causes of food insecurity and imagine solutions through research, game design, and play. This collaboration helps students connect their creativity to one of the most urgent challenges of our time—ending hunger for good.”

    Additionally, G4C is expanding its educator support with the launch of the G4C Learn website, the world’s largest online resource library featuring lesson plans, tutorials, and toolkits to guide students, teachers, and faculty on topics like game design, game-based learning, esports, career pathways, and more. In partnership with Global Game Jam, educators worldwide can receive funding, training, and support to host Student Challenge Game Jams in their classrooms and communities.

    “Games turn learning into challenges students actually want to take on,” said Luna Ramirez, CTE teacher at Thomas A. Edison CTE High School based in New York City. “When students design games to tackle pressing global problems affecting their communities, they become curious about the world around them, experimenting, and bringing ideas to life. The best learning happens when students take risks, fail forward, and collaborate, and that’s exactly what the Games for Change Student Challenge empowers.”

    Educators, parents, and learners ages 10–25 can now registerfor the 2026 Games for Change Student Challenge and access free tools and resources at learn.gamesforchange.org.

    This year’s Student Challenge is made possible through the generous support of key partners, including Endless, General Motors, Verizon, Motorola Solutions Foundation, Take-Two Interactive, World Food Program USA, Playing for the Planet, Unity, and Global Game Jam.

    About Games for Change

    Since 2004, Games for Change (G4C) has empowered game creators and innovators to drive real-world change through games and immersive media, helping people learn, improve their communities, and make the world a better place. G4C partners with technology and gaming companies, nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies to run world-class events, public arcades, design challenges, and youth programs. G4C supports a global community of developers using games to tackle real-world challenges, from humanitarian conflicts to climate change and education. For more information, visit: https://www.gamesforchange.org/.

    Media contact(s):

    Alyssa Miller

    Games for Change

    [email protected]

    973-615-1292

    Susanna Pollack
    [email protected]

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  • US students are voting with their feet – and global universities are ready

    US students are voting with their feet – and global universities are ready

    A record number of American students are applying to UK universities, with applications up nearly 14% over last year. The shift reflects something deeper than academic preference. It’s a response to uncertainty – political, cultural, and institutional – within the US higher education system.

    Students are assessing the climate as carefully as the curriculum, and for many, overseas options are starting to look more stable, more supportive, and more aligned with their values.

    For years, US institutions have concentrated on drawing international students into their classrooms and research labs. These efforts have been crucial to advancing STEM research, sustaining graduate-level enrolment, and feeding innovation pipelines. That trend continues, but the story is evolving.

    An outbound shift is now underway, with a growing number of American students pursuing degrees abroad. They’re no longer just participating in short-term exchanges or postgraduate fellowships, they’re committing to full undergraduate and master’s programs in other countries.

    This change matters – and it signals both a loss of tuition revenue and a weakening of domestic confidence in US higher education itself.

    Global competitors are moving decisively

    Universities in the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands have responded to this moment with strategy and urgency. They’ve expanded international recruitment offices, developed targeted campaigns for US students, and aligned their degree programs with global employment pathways.

    Tuition transparency, faster visa timelines, and the option to work post-graduation are all part of a larger value proposition. These countries have positioned themselves as predictable, inclusive, and serious about talent retention.

    When American students earn degrees abroad, they begin forming professional relationships, research collaborations, and employment ties in other countries

    The messaging stands in sharp contrast to the environment many students perceive at home in the US, where they’re regrettably familiar with ongoing threats to federal research funding, campus free speech tensions, and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Legislative actions in some states, such as restrictions on DEI programs or faculty tenure, further complicate the picture for students who see higher education as a place of openness and critical inquiry.

    Even where the academic offering remains strong, the broader social climate is giving students pause. Many now fear that attending university in the US could come with limitations on expression, uncertainty around institutional support, or even diminished international credibility. These concerns are pushing more prospective students, both international and domestic, to weigh their options with increasing care.

    The landscape is becoming borderless

    Higher education is no longer a domestically bounded experience. Today’s students are growing up in a digital-first world where comparison is constant and information is immediate. They can browse course catalogs from universities in five countries before lunch.

    They’re watching lectures on TikTok from professors in London, Melbourne, and Berlin. They’re discussing housing, scholarships, and career prospects with peers on Reddit, Discord, and WhatsApp. The idea of applying to college abroad no longer feels radical or risky – it feels strategic.

    At the same time, the financial argument for international study has grown stronger. In the UK and parts of Europe, undergraduate degrees often take three years instead of four. Tuition is fixed, predictable, and, in some cases, lower than the out-of-state rates at US public universities.

    Students can begin building global networks immediately, with exposure to cross-cultural collaboration built into the experience. That combination of efficiency, affordability, and international orientation is hard to ignore.

    Consequences will extend beyond enrollment trends

    If this shift continues, the implications go well beyond enrolment figures. When American students earn degrees abroad, they begin forming professional relationships, research collaborations, and employment ties in other countries. That international experience can strengthen global literacy, which is good in theory, but it may also weaken long-term institutional connections to the US – particularly if graduates choose to live, work, and innovate elsewhere.

    This becomes especially relevant in sectors where talent mobility drives economic growth. If a critical mass of globally minded US students pursue AI, climate tech, public health, or diplomacy degrees abroad and then launch their careers overseas, the domestic pipeline for advanced skills and leadership becomes harder to sustain. These are early signs of a broader trend, and we should treat them with urgency.

    The same applies to the soft power of US education. For decades, American universities have served as platforms for international exchange, not only bringing foreign students in, but equipping domestic students to become global ambassadors. If that dynamic begins to fade, so does the country’s influence in shaping global norms around research, ethics, and innovation.

    Prioritising stability and trust 

    Reversing this trend will require more than competitive admissions packages. US institutions – and the policymakers who shape their environment – must work to restore trust. That means safeguarding academic freedom, ensuring transparent financial support structures, and publicly affirming the value of international engagement.

    Students are listening closely. They are attuned to leadership choices and the broader societal signals surrounding higher education. If they sense instability or retreat, they will continue to look abroad.

    Universities also need to communicate more effectively with prospective students about their long-term value. That includes articulating what makes a US education distinctive, and doing so without leaning solely on prestige or nostalgia. There must be a renewed emphasis on civic purpose, global relevance, and practical opportunity. The next generation is looking for clarity, meaning, and alignment between their educational investment and the world they hope to shape.

    The US can lead again, if it chooses to

    The United States still possesses unmatched institutional capacity in research, innovation, and cultural reach. But influence is not a static asset. It depends on the willingness to adapt and lead with principle. The current wave of outbound student mobility should not be dismissed as an anomaly. It’s a signal. How US higher education responds – at both the institutional and national levels – will determine whether it remains a magnet for talent or becomes just one option among many.

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  • Professor Dame Sally Mapstone on the role of the arts and humanities in global higher education

    Professor Dame Sally Mapstone on the role of the arts and humanities in global higher education

    The post Professor Dame Sally Mapstone on the role of the arts and humanities in global higher education appeared first on The PIE News.

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  • The global free speech recession

    The global free speech recession

    This essay was originally published in The Dispatch on Oct. 28, 2025.

    Since Charlie Kirk’s murder, the Trump administration has launched a blitzkrieg against Americans’ free speech rights. The scale and speed are dizzying — and they jeopardize the United States’ credibility as the world’s leading defender of free expression as other democracies continue to falter.

    The administration’s most alarming actions blur the distinction between protected and unprotected speech as well as words and violence. Right after the Kirk tragedy, Attorney General Pam Bondi said: “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Bondi later walked this statement back, saying that “Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.” But since then, the administration has only continued to conflate protected speech with violence.

    Why everything Pam Bondi said about ‘hate speech’ is wrong

    The nation’s top law enforcement officer doesn’t understand there is no hate-speech exception to the First Amendment — and that’s scary.


    Read More

    On Sept. 25, the White House released a national security memo on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” Inside it lies this passage:

    Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

    There’s little subtlety here. The White House has flagged Americans it considers anti-American, anti-capitalist, or anti-Christian — none of which the memo defines — as potential national security threats. The president’s memo asserts a vast left-wing conspiracy to incite political violence and then directs the National Joint Terrorism Task Force and its local offices to “investigate all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies.”

    This guilt-by-association tactic is absolutely chilling in a free society. Being critical of America, capitalism, and Christianity shouldn’t put you on the feds’ radar because all those viewpoints are protected speech. A federal investigation should only occur when there’s reasonable evidence that some person or group — regardless of their constitutionally protected beliefs and opinions — has crossed the line into criminality. By the memo’s logic, the president’s own Make America Great Again movement could have been investigated after the political violence that erupted on Jan. 6. The message conveyed here is simple: Watch what you say. Or else.

    And if you’re a noncitizen legally in the country, that message goes doubly for you. Two weeks ago, the State Department revoked six foreigners’ visas for their social media posts about Kirk’s murder. According to the State Department on X, it will “continue to identify visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk.” This continues the administration’s crusade against noncitizens who engage in expression that the government doesn’t like. But the First Amendment protects the free speech rights of anyone on American soil, as the Supreme Court made clear in 1945’s Bridges v. Wixon. (Full disclosure: the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, my employer, is currently suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to challenge two federal provisions that give the secretary the power to deport noncitizens for their protected speech.)

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    FIRE is suing Secretary of State Rubio to defend the First Amendment rights of legal immigrants threatened with deportation simply for speaking their minds.


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    The administration has intensified its prolific jawboning, too, turning the screws on the private sector, particularly the media, to achieve what it does not have the constitutional power to do itself. The most infamous example of this occurred when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr pressured Disney and ABC to cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live. Soon after, ABC indefinitely suspended Kimmel, though he was back on air after a week. Then in mid-October, Bondi leaned on Facebook to remove a group page that allowed users to track where ICE agents were in Chicago, much like Waze alerts you to speed traps. Like it or not, this is constitutionally protected speech. Telling folks the location of law enforcement isn’t a crime, and the creators and users of the page are registering their dissent to the government’s immigration policies.

    During the Biden administration, President Trump and conservative Americans understood the perniciousness of jawboning. They rightly pointed to the behind-the-scenes pressure the Biden administration exerted on social media companies to suppress stories they deemed as mis- or disinformation. This included Hunter Biden’s laptop, the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, or the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origins. Yet now that Trump is back in power, the feeling is that “the left” is getting their just deserts. Politics is triumphing over principle — remember Trump’s promise to “bring back” free speech and his executive order restoring free speech and ending federal censorship once and for all — as America’s culture of free expression deteriorates more and more.

    But the Trump administration’s deliberate and focused attacks on free expression don’t just impact America, they reverberate globally. Across the democratic world, a free speech recession continues to worsen. Rather than defend this foundational human right at home and abroad, the U.S. government is abdicating that responsibility and undermining the legitimacy of free speech in an increasingly illiberal and authoritarian world.

    Two years ago, The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank at Vanderbilt University, released a report, “The Free Speech Recession Hits Home.” The report analyzed free speech developments in 22 democracies between 2015 and 2022. It found something alarming: “Over 75 percent of the developments discussed are speech restrictive.”

    Recent examples from the United States’ closest allies are illustrative of these societies’ splintering belief in free speech as a critical right in a democracy.

    This fall, Canada’s Quebec province will consider a bill to ban prayer in public. Secularism Minister Jean-François Roberge said the bill would be introduced as part of his mandate “to strengthen secularism.” Religious expression, of course, is a form of free expression, but Roberge believes it shouldn’t be public. “Seeing people praying in the streets, in public parks, is not something we want in Quebec,” he said. He added: “When we want to pray, we go to a church, we go to a mosque, but not in public places. And, yes, we will look at the means where we can act legally or otherwise.”

    In Germany last year, a 64-year-old man had his flat searched and tablet seized because of alleged “antisemitic” posts as well as one calling a German politician a “professional idiot.” Under German law, it’s not only a crime to insult a politician, the penalties are more severe than criticizing a German pleb, in perfect Animal Farm style. Also in 2024, American expat C.J. Hopkins was charged with disseminating propaganda for criticizing Germany’s COVID-19 response on X by superimposing a barely visible white swastika on top of a white medical mask.

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    This is a feature, not a bug, of Germany’s repressive speech climate. During a 60 Minutes story from last February, when correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi asked three prosecutors if it was a crime in Germany to insult someone, they confirmed it was. The punishment could even be worse when posted online “because in internet, it stays there,” said one prosecutor. Germany’s federal police, the BKA, also organize “action days” — including investigations, raids, interrogations, and seizures — to crack down on hate speech and insulting politicians online. In June, the BKA launched its 12th day of action, which included a total of 180 “police measures.” Herbert Reul, an interior minister for the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, summed it up best, telling a German news agency, “Digital arsonists must not be allowed to hide behind their phones or computers.”

    In France, President Emmanuel Macron took thin-skinned to extraordinary heights when he sued a billboard owner in 2021 for using some of his inventory to depict the French president dressed up like Adolf Hitler to protest France’s pandemic policies. The business owner, Michel-Ange Flori, told Reuters: “I caricature. People may or may not like it but it is all the same, caricature will remain caricature.” A French court disagreed, slapping Flori with a fine of 10,000 euros. In response, Flori’s lawyer said “the right to caricature has been violated” in France, adding, “The president, so quick to defend freedom of expression … considers that it stops at his own august person.”

    But the most depressing accomplice in the West’s retreat from free speech is, without a doubt, our neighbor across the pond. In April, the Times of London reported a shocking statistic. Analyzing custody data, the newspaper reported that police in the United Kingdom arrested more than 24,000 people from 2022 through 2023 for sending “grossly offensive” messages or sharing posts considered “indecent,” “obscene,” or of a “menacing character” on social media.

    The most recent and infamous case of this is Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan. In early September, five armed police officers arrested the writer after he disembarked a flight from the United States to Heathrow. Linehan’s offense: mean tweets about transgender people, which the Metropolitan Police said incited violence. Linehan posted the tweets in April — four and a half months before his arrest — demonstrating the absurdity of the inciting-violence rationale. Last week, both Linehan and Londoners received good news: The Metropolitan Police announced they dropped the investigation into Linehan and said it would no longer investigate “non-crime hate incidents.” That’s the right approach, of course, but that’s only one police force across the entire kingdom. It also doesn’t undo the ordeal Linehan went through, which is why he intends to sue the Metropolitan police for wrongful arrest.

    The U.K.’s crackdown on speech, however, isn’t contained to online discourse. Since July, more than 2,000 people have been arrested for expressing support for Palestine Action, a pro-Palestinian direct action network. In July, Parliament deemed the group a terrorist organization and banned it after two members broke into a military base and damaged two planes.

    In early September, London’s Metropolitan Police arrested nearly 900 protesters for peacefully protesting the ban. A month later, police arrested nearly 500 more people for demonstrating in support of Palestine Action in Trafalgar Square. The reason for their arrest is eye-widening: They held up a sign that read, “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” Police even took in a man who held up a magazine cover about these arrests.

    Diane Afhim, a 69-year-old protester, said it best during the September arrests: “I feel that justice is not working if people are being arrested for holding a sign. This is not my Britain.”

    Late last month, another disconcerting story came out of the U.K., when a judge handed down a suspended sentence to Moussa Kadri, sparing him jail. Back in February, Kadri attacked a protester, Hamit Coskun, with a knife for burning the Quran outside of the Turkish consulate in London.

    “The court is effectively saying that if you attack a blasphemer with a knife, … you won’t have to spend a day behind bars,” said Lord Young of Acton, general secretary of the Free Speech Union, in reaction to Kadri’s suspended sentence.

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    But things get worse. Back in June, a court found Coskun, the victim of Kadri’s knife attack, guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offense and ordered him to pay a fine. “Your actions in burning the Quran where you did were highly provocative,” the judge said, “and your actions were accompanied by bad language in some cases directed toward the religion and were motivated at least in part by hatred of followers of the religion.” Most alarming was the judge’s finding that the violent attack on Coskun was evidence of Coskun’s guilt. You read that right.

    Fortunately, Coskun won his appeal this month. On Oct. 10, Coskun’s conviction was overturned by a judge who reminded Britons that they have no blasphemy law on the books.

    “Burning a Koran may be an act that many Muslims find desperately upsetting and offensive,” Justice Joel Bennathan said. “The criminal law, however, is not a mechanism that seeks to avoid people being upset, even grievously upset. The right to freedom of expression, if it is a right worth having, must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.”

    While the courts finally got it right, Coskun never should have had to go through this nightmare in the first place.

    The despots of the world must relish the propaganda value of this Western backsliding on free expression.

    If they attack the press, they can point to what Trump is doing in the United States as justification. Throw a critic in jail? They can bring up Macron’s lawsuit for caricaturing him in France. Punish a religious dissenter? Well, there’s the curious case of Hamit Coskun in London. Repress the supporters of a disfavored group? They can point to the UK arrests of Palestine Action protesters. These illiberal actions are gifts to the world’s dictators — the Putins, the Erdogans, the Xis of the world — demonstrating that when push comes to shove, the world’s democracies will crack down on speech they don’t like, too.

    Just look at the unjust trial of media mogul Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong, where a judge in the case cited censorship in the U.S. and UK to justify the proceedings against Lai. “People who were freely expressing their views on Palestine, they were arrested in England … [and] in the U.S.,” Judge Esther Toh said in August. “It’s easy to say ‘la-di-da, it’s not illegal,’ but it’s not an absolute. Each country’s government has a different limit on freedom of expression.”

    But it doesn’t need to be this way.

    It’s a cruel irony that America’s dedication to free speech is slipping as we prepare to celebrate this nation’s 250th birthday. But it’s an opportunity, too. An opportunity to recommit to what makes the American experiment so special: our ability to settle our differences through dialogue and the ballot box, rather than dehumanization and the bullet. America is still the last best hope of earth, that shining city upon the hill, if we’ll fight for it.

    Even as America’s culture of free speech withers, the First Amendment fortunately still gives this country the world’s strongest constitutional protection for speech. But culture matters. Woe to us if we indulge our worst impulses and welcome in the ravenous, all-consuming spirits of censorship and violence and turn our back on what truly makes America exceptional.

    As Judge Learned Hand wrote back in 1944: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

    There would be no greater tragedy than if free speech dies here by our own hands, to the delight of despots everywhere.

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  • “New Collaborations Needed” as U.S. Cuts Global Health Funds

    “New Collaborations Needed” as U.S. Cuts Global Health Funds

    Universities focused on global health will have to collaborate more with each other and with industry and philanthropic organizations in the face of the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar aid cuts, according to academic leaders from around the world.

    Funding covering projects tackling conditions such as AIDS, tuberculosis and Ebola has been upended since Donald Trump returned to power in January, and speakers at Times Higher Education’s World Academic Summit said that it would be impossible to replace the lost dollars overnight.

    Mosa Moshabela, vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, said that his institution had been one of the largest recipients of National Institutes of Health funding outside the U.S., supporting projects in areas such as HIV and tuberculosis prevention, and that his institution had been “impacted a lot” by the White House’s decisions.

    “We realize the danger of having placed all our eggs in one basket, pretty much,” said Moshabela, himself a leading public health researcher.

    “We know that, in terms of scale of funding, we’re not necessarily going to have one source that can replace the amount [we received] from the NIH, but by spreading our partnerships we can still achieve similar results—and we are strengthening our partnerships in the Middle East, in Asia, across the globe, and also looking at new donors that are coming through.”

    Moshabela said that Cape Town was also putting pressure on the South African government to increase research spending, highlighting that it currently spent only 0.6 percent of gross domestic product in this area, despite a long-standing target for the outlay to reach a minimum of 1.5 percent.

    “Even between universities, we are adopting the principle of cooperation over competition,” Moshabela continued.

    “For a long time, we were competing for the same sources of funding, but now what we’re trying to do as a strategy is to cooperate more rather than compete over sources of funding.”

    Vivek Goel, vice chancellor of Canada’s University of Waterloo, agreed that it would take time to fill the funding gap left by U.S. cuts.

    “I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that overnight we are going to fill those gaps,” he said. “I think we became very reliant on a certain model … I think in collaboration between governments, philanthropy, industry and our institutions we can come up with new ways of working that can replace that work [on global health, but] not necessarily all of that funding.”

    Goel, another public health researcher, highlighted that it was not just U.S. funding that was being lost, pointing to research that was funded by Canadian sources or philanthropic organizations but that depended on clinics or infrastructure operated by the United States Agency for International Development. Researchers may also lose access to Centers for Disease Control data, he warned.

    Drawing down funding for global health research in the future will require a change of mindset, Moshabela argued, such as focusing on solutions with wider commercial benefit to attract the support of pharmaceutical companies and working to develop broader ecosystems and not just clinical interventions to win funding from philanthropists.

    Deborah McNamara, president of RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, said that Western universities should approach the funding challenges “with humility.”

    “Our partners in the Global South have been doing more with less for a very, very long time,” she noted.

    “I think we’ve all observed over time waste in development funding, and in the surgical arena certainly we often discover [that] at hospitals that we work with they have large amounts of donated equipment that perhaps can’t be maintained, can’t be run, [and] isn’t operational.

    “By listening more we can reduce the waste that happens and direct [funding] more effectively.”

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  • Global demand for US master’s degrees plunges by 60%

    Global demand for US master’s degrees plunges by 60%

    The data, collected from January 6 to September 28, aligns closely with the start of Donald Trump’s second presidential term and the ensuing uncertainty around student visas and post-graduation work opportunities. It is based on the search behaviour of over 50 million prospective students on Studyportals.  

    “Prospective international students and their families weigh not only academic reputation but also regulatory stability and post-graduation prospects,” said Studyportals CEO Edwin van Rest: “Right now, those factors are working against institutions.”  

    Studyportals said the steep decline – dropping more than 60% in less than nine months – corresponds to proposed and enacted policy changes impacting student visa duration, Optional Practical Training (OPT) and H-1B work authorisation in the US. 

    Last week, the Trump administration shocked businesses and prospective employees by hiking the H-1B visa fee to $100,000 – over 20 times what employers previously paid. Days later, the government announced proposals to overhaul the visa system in favour of higher-paid workers.  

    Sector leaders have warned that OPT could be the administration’s next target, after a senior US senator called on the homeland security secretary Kristi Noem to stop issuing work authorisations such as OPT to international students.  

    Such a move would have a detrimental impact on student interest in the US, with a recent NAFSA survey suggesting that losing OPT reduces enrolment likelihood from 67% to 48%.  

    Meanwhile, roughly half of current students planning to stay in the US after graduation would abandon those plans if H-1B visas prioritised higher wage earners, the survey indicated.  

    “Prospective students are making go/no-go enrolment decisions, while current students are making stay/leave retention decisions,” said van Rest. 

    “Policy changes ripple through both ends of the pipeline, reducing new inflow and pushing out existing talent already contributing to US research, innovation and competitiveness,” he added.  

    Data: Studyportals

    The search data revealed a spike in interest at the beginning of July, primarily from Vietnam and Bangladesh, and to a lesser extent India and Pakistan. Experts have suggested the new Jardine-Fulbright Scholarship aimed at empowering future Vietnam leaders could have contributed to the rise.  

    Meanwhile, Iran, Nepal and India have seen the steepest drops in master’s demand, declining more than 60% this year to date compared to last.  

    While federal SEVIS data recorded a 0.8% rise in international student levels this semester, plummeting visa arrivals and anecdotal reports of fewer students on campus suggest the rise was in part due to OPT extensions – individuals who are counted in student totals but who are not enrolled on US campuses or paying tuition fees.  

    Beyond the immediate financial concerns of declining international enrolments for some schools, van Rest warned: “The policies we adopt today will echo for years in global talent flows.”

    The UK and Ireland have gained the most relative market share of international interest on Studyportals – both up 16% compared to the same period in 2024. Australia, Austria, Sweden and Spain all experienced a 12% increase on the previous year.  

    In the US, international students make up over half of all students enrolled in STEM fields and 70% of all full-time graduate enrolments in AI-related disciplines, according to Institute of International Education (IIE) data.  

    The policies we adopt today will echo for years in global talent flows

    Edwin van Rest, Studyportals

    What’s more, universities with higher rates of international enrolment have been found to produce more domestic STEM graduates, likely due to greater investment in these disciplines, National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) research has shown.  

    Last year, graduate students made up 45% of the overall international student cohort (including OPT), compared to undergraduate which comprised roughly 30%, according to IIE Open Doors data.  

    Universities with higher proportions of overseas students have been found to produce more domestic STEM graduates, likely due to greater investment in these disciplines, National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) research has shown. 

    The news of plummeting international demand comes as domestic enrolments are declining, with less high school graduates entering college education and an overall demographic shrinking of university-age students.  

    In a recent survey by the American Council on Education (ACE), nearly three quarters of college leaders said they were concerned about enrolment levels this semester, with 65% moderately or extremely worried about immigration restrictions and visa revocations.  

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  • Facing global isolation, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu addresses U.N. General Assembly (PBS NewsHour)

    Facing global isolation, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu addresses U.N. General Assembly (PBS NewsHour)







    Higher Education Inquirer : Facing global isolation, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu addresses U.N. General Assembly (PBS NewsHour)




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