Skip to main content

Florida Career College to Close

Florida Career College to Close Doug Lederman Fri, 01/26/2024 - 03:00 AM Byline(s) Doug Lederman from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/avZRfLi
Post a Comment

Higher education fears impact of coup in Myanmar

Tensions continue to rise on Myanmar campuses, where the military has used violence to push back against students and academics protesting against a coup earlier this month.

“The past two weeks have been distressing, especially given recent signs of positive growth within the country's higher education community,” Daniel Munier, senior advocacy officer at Scholars at Risk, told Times Higher Education. SAR, based at New York University, is a global network that tracks academic freedom.

There are growing concerns that a decade of higher education growth and development in the developing Southeast Asian country will be lost if stability and openness are not restored soon.

Munier cited “immediately alarming” threats to Myanmar’s higher education community, such as “the arrests of students and scholars, the entry of troops onto campuses, and the frequent use of force against peaceful demonstrators, including one student who died after being shot in the head with a live round.”

Meanwhile, internet shutdowns and a recent cybersecurity bill “risk long-term damage to efforts to build up the country’s university system and connect scholars and students with peers in and outside the country,” he said.

The military police has been cracking down on academics they deem sympathetic to the ousted government.

Sean Turnell, a Macquarie University professor and adviser to jailed leader Aung San Suu Kyi, became the first known foreign academic to be detained on Feb. 6. The authorities stormed the Australian economist’s hotel room in Yangon while he was conducting an interview with the BBC.

On Feb. 11, soldiers in seven military vehicles held staff at Meikhtila University at gunpoint while demanding access to the quarters of Aung Kyaw Min, a mathematics professor. “They took him away so fast that his wife and son didn’t even realize it,” a witness told Radio Free Asia.

The next day, the police opened fire at Mawlamyine University, according to Human Rights Watch.

They also raided the home of Khin Maung Lwin, rector of the Mandalay University of Medicine. A video posted on Facebook by his daughters showed officers retreating from their attempted arrest after being confronted by angry residents, according to The Irrawaddy, a Myanmar news source.

One student has been killed so far: 20-year-old Ma Mya Thwet Khine was shot by police while seeking shelter at a bus station on Feb. 6 and died in the hospital several days later.

More than 100 Myanmar studies experts have signed an open letter to the government, foreign affairs ministry and Myanmar embassies around the world, condemning Turnell’s arrest and calling for the release of political prisoners taken this month.

Student union leaders from 18 Myanmar universities also sent an open letter to the Chinese president, urging him not to recognize the military takeover.

SAR called on Myanmar to release detainees and “respect universities' institutional autonomy and everyone’s right to peaceful protest.”

“Without this, scholars, students and university leaders may continue to see a palpable risk in long-term engagements in Myanmar's higher education sector, starving it of the minds and resources that can propel it forward,” Munier said.

Global
Editorial Tags: 
Times Higher Ed
Is this diversity newsletter?: 
Newsletter Order: 
0
Disable left side advertisement?: 
Is this Career Advice newsletter?: 
Magazine treatment: 
Trending: 
Display Promo Box: 
Live Updates: 
liveupdates0


from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/3uyzvFg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Is Middle School So Hard for So Many People?

Middle school. The very memory of it prompts disgust. Here’s a thing no one’s thinking: Geez, I wish I still looked the way I did when I was 12. Middle school is the worst. Tweenhood, which starts around age 9 , is horrifying for a few reasons. For one, the body morphs in weird and scary ways. Certain parts expand faster than others, sometimes so fast that they cause literal growing pains; hair grows in awkward locations, often accompanied by awkward smells. And many kids face new schools and a new set of rules for how to act, both socially and academically. But middle school doesn’t have to be like this. It could be okay. It could be good , even. After all, middle schoolers are “kind of the best people on Earth,” says Mayra Cruz, the principal of Oyster-Adams Bilingual School, a public middle school in Washington, D.C. The notion that middle school deserves its own educational ecosystem at all dates back to the 1960s , with a campaign to better accommodate the specific learning ne...
20 comments
Read more

Debacle over review reveals racism in academy (opinion)

When medievalist Mary Rambaran-Olm wrote about having her book review “torpedoed” for not being “more generous” to the book’s authors, no one could have expected that this would send shock waves across the academic community in what became an online maelstrom revealing the extent of white academic gatekeeping, ally performativity and blatant racism. For those of us who work on decentering whiteness in premodern fields such as classics, medieval/early modern studies, archaeology and in or on the Global South, this latest attack targeting a scholar of color exposed what many of us have been trying to draw attention to for years—that racism is deep and pernicious in the so-called liberal and woke academy. Rambaran-Olm was commissioned to review The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe ( HarperCollins ) for the Los Angeles Review of Books because of her expertise in early English medieval literature and history, and because she is one of the leading scholars challenging the...
Post a Comment
Read more