What we know about Australian universities cutting ties with Confucius Institutes
By Yiying Li
Several Australian universities have closed Confucius Institutes on their campuses, amid ongoing scrutiny about links to the Chinese government. Here is what we know.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-02/what-we-know-about-confucius-institutes-explainer/105121890
6 Australian universities have quietly closed Chinese government-linked Confucius Institutes on their campuses.
The Australian government has ramped up scrutiny on the education centres over concerns that Beijing is using them to spread propaganda and spy on Chinese international students.
I think Ateneo de Manila hosts a Confucius Institute.
#Asian #Propaganda #Spying #Australia #Universities #UNSW #Melbourne
The Trump Administration’s research funding and DEI cuts present an existential threat to regional public universities like Southern Illinois University, the economic backbone of the conservative rural region it serves.
https://www.propublica.org/article/regional-public-universities-trump-funding-dei #SIU #Trump #DOGE #Universities #Rural
#Lawsuits targeting #diversity efforts in #science are multiplying
The lawsuits join a recent uptick in legal action against #universities, departments, and professional societies with programs intended to increase diversity across academia, including in sciences.
Short of a court victory, the mere threat of lawsuits is likely to push many organizations to cancel or scale back their diversity programming, “Even that's a win for them."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/anti-diversity-lawsuits-likely-to-hurt-the-scientific-community-say-scholars/ #DEI
Update. Thank you to former #Harvard President #DerekBok for recommending that Harvard abolish legacy admissions.
https://www.ft.com/content/32c1cef2-bb07-48ce-b1a2-0d9e06281f0d
"The current Republican embrace of xenophobic anti-intellectualism is bad for America. It will make the country stupider and more provincial."
~ Jeet Heer
#Musk #Trump #DOGE #ICE #immigrants #students #universities #education
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/trump-academic-purge/
Another preventable tragedy, on rights, disrupted lives, & on economic & societal terms:
">1.1M foreign students come to the US each year to study
--> they contributed >$43B to the US economy in foreign currency balances
--> students who came to the U.S. to study founded 55% of America’s 582 start-up companies worth at least $1B."
-J Allen
#Universities #Colleges #Trump #RIghts #Immigration #Racism #Economy #Trumpcession #USPol
https://newrepublic.com/article/193206/trump-war-higher-education-demands-aggressive-response
Confucius Institutes quietly disappear from six Australian universities
By Stephen Dziedzic and Conor Duffy
Australia's leading universities cut ties with Confucius Institutes, but don’t cite concerns of foreign interference.
Hey #universities, this is how you do it: https://www.commondreams.org/news/rutgers-protests
KDE adds The Open Source Promotion Program to its list of mentorship programs.
Want to learn how to contribute to an Open Source project? Check out our blog post and start writing your project submission now!
https://mentorship.kde.org/blog/2025-03-29-ospp/
All over the West, free speech is falling victim to pro-Israel supporters in government and institutions, and anything related to the Gaza genocide is being severely punished and suppressed with the blanket accusation of 'antisemitism'.
c: @5149jamesli on IG
"Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.
I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,2 and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.
Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided."
https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/p/the-average-college-student-today
"A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer, Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.
Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to his employer, he has served as principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million over his 21 years there.
He has also co-authored scores of academic papers on a diverse range of research fields, including cryptography, systems security, and data privacy, including the protection of human genomic data. I have personally spoken to him on three occasions for articles here, here, and here."
What would you expect?
"The massive changes in US research brought about by the new administration of President Donald Trump are causing many scientists in the country to rethink their lives and careers. More than 1,200 scientists who responded to a Nature poll — three-quarters of the total respondents — are considering leaving the United States following the disruptions prompted by Trump. Europe and Canada were among the top choices for relocation.
The trend was particularly pronounced among early-career researchers. Of the 690 postgraduate researchers who responded, 548 were considering leaving; 255 of 340 PhD students said the same.
Trump’s administration has slashed research funding and halted broad swathes of federally funded science, under a government-wide cost-cutting initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk. Tens of thousands of federal employees, including many scientists, have been fired and rehired following a court order, with threats of more mass firings to come. Immigration crackdowns and battles over academic freedom have left researchers reeling as uncertainty and disruption permeate all aspects of the US research enterprise"
"The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) appears to be manually revoking students’ immigration status – an authority typically left to university staff."
#Trump #ICE #immigrants #students #universities #deportation
/4
"They’ve also reported inconsistent notification patterns: some students have been informed about the revocations by the government, some have not; some only found out after officials manually checked internal visa status databases – while universities and officials themselves have mostly seemed to not be informed by the government."
#Trump #ICE #immigrants #students #universities #deportation
/3
"According to documentation seen by Zeteo and interviews with university officials, the administration is deploying the rarely-used risk-to-foreign-policy immigration provision they used to detain Mahmoud Khalil to now target students across the country.
University officials say that targeted students hail from the Middle East and Muslim-majority countries."
#Trump #ICE #immigrants #students #universities #deportation
/2
"In a developing story, it appears the Trump administration is quietly targeting even more students for deportation and doing so in a way that is taking universities and the students themselves completely by surprise."
~ Prem Thakker
#Trump #ICE #immigrants #students #universities #deportation
/1
https://zeteo.com/p/ice-manually-revoking-university-students-residency-status-middle-east
Researchers from the University of the Philippines have developed an herbal anti-diabetes pill that works by regulating blood sugar levels and by reducing the chances of dangerous spikes that could lead to complications.
#Philippined #Asian #Universities #Health #Medicine #Diabetes #Herbal
