The week in higher education – 5 August 2021

When UK students were offered the chance to study “well beyond Europe’s frontiers” under the new post-Brexit Turing scheme, some might have imagined a semester at Harvard or a year in Sydney. Potential US or Australian locations for the Erasmus replacement scheme starting in September have yet to be disclosed, but some other less obvious destinations will soon be available as study options, according to The Sunday Times. Those not sold on a trip to Paris, Rome or Berlin can instead plump for a stint of study or work in Iraq (where British citizens are advised not to travel due to the risk of kidnapping and terrorism) or in the Falkland Islands, the South Atlantic archipelago with a population of 3,300 people and no post-16 college. With the initiative named after the British computer pioneer Alan Turing, who was persecuted for being gay, it is maybe more surprising to see Zimbabwe, where male homosexuality remains illegal, and Azerbaijan, recently named Europe’s most anti-LGBT country, on the list of the scheme’s partners.

Stormzy was back in the singles charts last month but is arguably making a bigger impact in higher education these days after HSBC agreed to bankroll a further 30 scholarships in his name. The UK rap star hit the headlines back in 2018 when he offered to fund two black British students to go to the University of Cambridge and will fund another two this year, with HSBC now expanding the scheme with another 10 scholarships in each of the next three years, The Independent reported. The bursaries have coincided with the number of black students at Cambridge more than doubling since 2017, with 137 undergraduates admitted last year. The rapper described the bank’s move as an “incredible milestone”, saying the scheme should “serve as a small reminder to young black students that the opportunity to study at one of the best universities in the world is theirs for the taking”.

A US professor is suing one of her students after he suggested she was likely to regrade his exam script unfairly, the Connecticut Post has reported. According to court papers, the unusual action has been brought by Sharlene McEvoy, a business law professor at Fairfield University, after Joseph Moran complained he had been awarded an unfair mark. The New Jersey-based student had been required to carry out his exams remotely and mail his papers owing to the pandemic, but his tutor received his exam bundle four days after the cut-off date and she gave him a failing mark, the lawsuit explains. Emailing McEvoy’s head of department to object, Moran claimed he would “not feel comfortable with [her] re-grading his paper from a non-bias [sic] way” – a statement that the claim described as defamatory. The lawsuit demands the failing grade – changed to a pass on appeal – be reinstated and unspecified financial damages.

Cancel culture is, according to some critics, largely in the imagination of right-wing commentators. But the most sceptical of scholars might wonder what to make of recent calls by students at the London School of Economics to ban a university club named after the free-market economist Friedrich Hayek, who taught there in the interwar years. According to a group named LSE Class War, the Hayek Society should have “no place on campus” because it “promotes free market fundamentalist views which outwardly call for the oppression of working-class people”. The demand was part of a radical manifesto for change which also suggested the LSE “gradually”  becomes a “private school-free institution”, noting that one in three students currently come from independent schools, Mail Online reported. “The statements of LSE Class War read like the work of a satirist,” said Toby Young, general secretary of the Free Speech Union.

More than 100 Nobel laureates have signed a statement accusing China of interfering with the Nobel Summit, a virtual event that was co-hosted by the US National Academy of Sciences in April. In the month leading up to the event, the Chinese Embassy in the US demanded by both email and telephone that two speakers be removed: the Dalai Lama, a Nobel peace laureate, and Yuan Lee, a Taiwan-born chemist and emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, according to the statement. When the Nobel Foundation went ahead with the two speakers anyway, video transmission of some sessions was interrupted by “cyber-attacks”. “We are outraged by the Chinese government’s attempt to censor and bully the scientific community by attempting to prevent two of our fellow laureates (or indeed anyone) from speaking at a meeting outside of China,” they write.