U.S. College Officials Ordered Out of Russia
Five University at Buffalo academics were ordered deported from Russia after they violated the terms of their visas by speaking at a local university. The faculty and staff members were temporarily detained after giving a professional talk, in violation of their status as tourists. They were allowed to leave the country after paying a small fine. Buffalo officials blamed the situation on a “misunderstanding” with the Russian university, saying that the Americans had seen the talk as an “open discussion” but that it had been promoted locally as a formal lecture.
Campus Protest in India Turns Violent
Protests erupted on an Indian university campus over a controversial citizenship law that critics say discriminates against the country’s Muslim minority. Two hundred people, many of them students, were injured after police tried to use batons and sticks to break up a demonstration at Jamia Millia Islamia University, in Delhi. The new law fast-tracks citizenship for religious minorities, including Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians, from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan who came to India before 2015. But the measure excludes Muslims because President Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, says they are not minorities in their home countries.
Professor Fired in Chinese #MeToo Moment
A Chinese university professor has been fired for allegedly locking one of his students in his car and sexually assaulting her. Qian Fengsheng, an associate professor of accounting at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, was fired after a post by the alleged victim went viral; in it, she wrote that the professor assaulted her after offering her a ride home while answering her questions about a class. But the backlash against a Chinese student studying in Minnesota who accused a powerful entrepreneur of rape reveals the limits of the country’s #MeToo movement.
How Colleges Measure Their Global Footprint
It’s a classic “if a tree falls in the forest …” moment — if a college can’t accurately measure its global activities, is it truly making progress in internationalization? In this week’s edition of my global newsletter, latitude(s), I talked with a couple of experts about the challenges of creating a universitywide system for tracking internationalization (colleges are big places, with a lot going on) and the benefits (it enables colleges to best leverage their strengths globally).