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In advance of her upcoming May 27th trial, SAR calls for letters on behalf of Professor Büşra Ersanlı, a professor of political science at Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey.

The Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association has written a letter to the president of Egypt’s Suez Canal University protesting its investigation and informal suspension without pay of an English professor variously accused of “contempt of religion” and “insulting Islam.” As the letter details, Mona Prince is accused by a student of making “untoward” statements about Islam in a lecture on sectarian tensions in Egypt.

The Burmese opposition leader told an event held at the University of London today that there were “no residential universities in Burma”. Campus life had been “destroyed” by the military regime – which ruled Burma between 1962 and 2011 – as it feared gatherings of young people were “dangerous” and would “demand the fall of the government”, she added.

In early October 2011, Ayşe Berktay, an author and translator of historical works and a woman’s activist in Turkey, was arrested as part of a crackdown related to the pro-Kurdish legal Party for Peace and Democracy (BDP). PEN International, the Initiative for Free Expression in Turkey, PEN American Center and the International Freedom of Expression Exchange have launched a petition for her release.

A number of Egyptian faculty members announced on Tuesday their solidarity with an Egyptian professor who was questioned over allegations of insulting religion and prevented from teaching.

he Scholars at Risk network has welcomed the acquittal of Habib Kazdaghli, a dean at the University of Manouba, in Tunisia, who was accused of slapping one of two veiled students who entered his office without permission. The incident was part of a broader dispute involving conservative Muslims about the university’s prohibition on students veiling their faces in the classroom.

In a trial that has gripped Tunisia for months, a court acquitted a Tunisian university dean of assaulting a veiled female student.

According to a recent article in the publication Nature, Omid Kokabee, the Iranian graduate student in physics at the University of Texas/Austin who is in jail in Teheran, released two open letters in which he states that Iranian authorities pressured him to participate in military projects possibly of involving nuclear weapons, and that his imprisonment and sentence are punishments for his refusal to cooperate.

All students wishing to study nuclear science in the Netherlands will have to ask for official clearance, regardless of their nationality, under new education ministry rules, news agency ANP reports.

YANGON, Myanmar — Moe Sat, a 23-year-old physics major at Myingyan Degree College near Mandalay, said that there were so many students in class that no one could hear the teachers.

Four people at Al-Hussein Bin Talal University died of gunshot wounds and 25 were injured when an armed fight broke out between students last Monday at the Maan-based university, also resulting in the suspension of classes, reports The Jordan Times.

Scholars at Risk welcomes the news that Dr. Habib Kazdaghli, Dean of the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Humanities at the University of Manouba, Tunisia, was acquitted of all charges on May 2, 2013.

Scholars at Risk welcomes the news that Dr. Habib Kazdaghli, Dean of the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Humanities at the University of Manouba, Tunisia, was acquitted of all charges on May 2, 2013.

Die Revolution hat Ägyptens Studierende gestärkt, doch dies hat auch eine Kehrseite: Islamistische Studenten haben soeben die Suspendierung einer Professorin bewirkt Wien/Kairo - Der Anruf des Rektors hinterließ die ägyptische Professorin Mona Prince perplex. Sie solle sich vorerst von der Suez-Universität fernhalten, denn es sei eine Beschwerde gegen sie eingelegt worden. Der Vorwurf: Diffamierung der Religionen.

A Tunisian university dean accused of slapping a veiled female student was acquitted on Thursday, in a case that has come to symbolize bristling tensions between Islamists and secularists.

Sayed Mojtaba Atarodi, a professor of electrical engineering at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran who had been held in prison in the United States since 7 December 2011, was released and returned to Iran on 27 April, according to the Iranian government-funded PressTV.

BISHKEK -- A well-known Central Asia expert from Russia's Oriental Studies Institute, Aleksandr Knyazev, has been banned from reentering Kyrgyzstan.

The University of Otago took a "very serious" look at the implications of hosting the Dalai Lama before opting to let him speak on campus during his visit to Dunedin next month.

The denial of tenure for Cherian George, an associate professor of journalism at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, has attracted criticisms from scholars around the world, as well as from his current and former students, who have praised George's strong record as a scholar and teacher and suggested that it could only be objections to the sensitive subject of his research – press freedoms and state power in Singapore – that have blocked his tenure bid. Now, following the rejection of George’s...

ARTICLE 19 is concerned for the safety of the Moroccan academic and human rights activist Ahmed Assid following calls for his murder for "defaming the prophet Mohamed". ARTICLE 19 condemns a hate campaign that is being waged against the philosopher for comments he made about religious texts in the national education curriculum.

The persecution of university faculty members is unacceptable, said two human rights groups on Tuesday.

Omid Kokabee, a former graduate student in physics who has been imprisoned in Iran since January 2011, has written in an open letter that he was being persecuted for refusing to cooperate with Iranian military projects. In another, private letter, he says these projects are related to nuclear applications.

Israel must release a Palestinian activist held without charge for two years, Amnesty International urged today after his administrative detention was extended for the sixth time without justification.

Relatives of blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, who is currently a visiting legal scholar in New York, say the authorities have stepped up harassment of the family ahead of Friday's anniversary of his daring escape from house arrest.

The University of Sydney, one of Australia’s top institutions of higher learning, has reversed a decision taken earlier this month to cancel a talk by Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, and will now allow the exiled religious figure to speak.

The general membership of the Association for Asian American Studies has unanimously approved a resolution endorsing the boycott of Israeli universities, making it the first scholarly organization in the U.S. to do so, according to the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

Liu Xia, the wife of jailed Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo, was seen in public on Tuesday for the first time in two-and-a-half years as she attended her brother’s trial in Beijing on fraud charges related to a property dispute.

The country of Belarus, between Russia and Poland, has been described as Europe's last dictatorship. But there is a university where students can study in a democratic climate - across the border in Lithuania. It sees itself as educating a generation that will be ready to step in when, one day, change comes to Belarus.

Lawyer Anna Dolidze has turned fear, and exile from her home country of Georgia, into a succession of “firsts” and a new career at Western University, but not without a little help along the way.

HONG KONG — The Goddess of Democracy, a sculpture resembling the Statue of Liberty that has become a protest symbol, is holding court at the City University of Hong Kong, which is host to an exhibit about the 1989 crackdown near Tiananmen Square, an event that cannot be discussed openly in mainland China.

Since early January 2013 Prof. Felix Kaputu is the first "Scholar at Risk" guest at Ghent University. Prof. Kaputu was born in 1959 in Lubumbashi. He is a professor of comparative literature and is an expert in the field of art education, writing, literary and political criticism and ancient religious studies.

Are politicians stealing our academic freedom? Is their fetish with open access publishing leading to a 'pay to say' system for the rich? And will the trendy goal of making publicly financed research freely available skew the world of scholarship even further towards the natural sciences? I don't think so. But it took me a while to get there.

"Belarus aspires to the integration with the universal educational system preserving its achievements and traditions", – said the Deputy Minister of Education Alexander Zhuk on 3 April 2013. However, what he meant under "traditions" sometimes clearly contradicts the principles of education accepted elsewhere in Europe.

DOHA, QATAR — When Matt J. Duffy first got a job teaching journalism at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi in 2010, he was thrilled. Besides teaching courses in storytelling, journalistic ethics, and media regulation at Zayed, Dr. Duffy, an enthusiastic blogger, became a frequent contributor to Gulf News, a Dubai newspaper. He also was chairman of a conference on the role of the media in the Arab Spring, started a student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and organized campus celebrations...

has found that the institution compromised academic freedom when it banned a controversial classroom exercise that asked students to step on a piece of paper with the word “Jesus” written on it, according to The Palm Beach Post.

WORCESTER — Tararith Kho was born in the midst of one of the worst genocides in human history, a survivor of war and poverty who has become a successful writer in his native Khmer language.

Fighting erupted last week among rival students at Ain Shams University, Egypt's second biggest public institution, prompting the administration to suspend classes indefinitely. Dozens of students were injured and campus facilities were damaged.

CANBERRA (Reuters) – One of Australia’s most exclusive universities has called off a talk to students by the Dalai Lama, prompting accusations it is bowing to China which has branded the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader a dangerous separatist.

Lorsque Habib 
Kazdaghli est sorti du tribunal de la 
Manouba, hier, en fin de matinée, tous ceux qui étaient venus le soutenir de la faculté des lettres, des arts et des humanités de ce même gouvernorat situé dans la banlieue de Tunis, ont spontanément chanté l’hymne tunisien, certains faisant le « V » de la victoire. Le doyen a d’ailleurs reçu le soutien d’universitaires du monde entier, et encore récemment de ceux de l’université de Toulouse. Le tribunal a mis en délibéré...

The fallout from the BBC's undercover Panorama film on North Korea spilled into a sixth day on Thursday, as the London School of Economics defended itself from criticism levelled by its own students.

A court in northwest China’s Qinghai province has sentenced eight Tibetan students to prison terms of up to four years for their role in protests defending their right to use the Tibetan language, according to sources in the region and in exile.

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information about charges brought against a community educator in Burma for teaching political science. Min Min, a human rights defender based in the country’s lowland, is being prosecuted because he refused to heed warnings that he not teaches a course on political science at his community-based education centre. He is currently on bail with the trial underway.

The company will offer full tuition scholarships to those supported by IIE’s Scholar Rescue Fund (SRF), to help them quickly achieve the English necessary for tertiary study in the USA. This will enable them to continue their academic work “safely and effectively”, it said. “This language scholarship is a real lifeline to these individuals”

In the wake of President Obama’s historic visit to Myanmar in November, American universities have begun to engage with the country’s higher education institutions. A report released Friday by the Institute of International Education, which led a delegation including representatives from 10 U.S. universities to Myanmar in February, describes the extensive needs of the country's higher education system and offers recommendations for universities interested in forming partnerships.

The video went viral on conservative websites late last week. The Fox headline: "USC Political Science Professor Darry Sragow Tells Students Republicans Are ‘Stupid and Racist.' " Various conservative websites reposted the video as evidence of "liberal bias" in the classroom, referring to the University of Southern California instructor as a "professor of political science." The site Angry White Dude used the headline: "Indoctrination 101: Meet USC Professor Darry Sragow." The story at Campus Reform...

Let’s sketch out the main characteristics of a post-Soviet university, based on the latest experience in Ukraine. I’ll take the liberty of supposing that those characteristics are universal, although the situation in Ukraine probably reflects the worst of all the post-Soviet systems.

In January, Florida journalists noticed that a professor at Florida Atlantic University had been blogging about his doubts that a massacre really took place at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school in December. The professor, James Tracy, teaches communication and writes, among other things, about his view that mainstream media is inaccurate or deceptive in many ways. He has taught about conspiracies. Of Newtown, he wrote on his blog: "While it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire...

Ahead of the Russian Federation’s second Universal Periodic Review on 29 April 2013 at the United Nations in Geneva, ARTICLE 19 calls on the Russian authorities to repeal legislation suppressing the rights to freedom of expression, assembly and association. This includes legislation on demonstrations, non-commercial organisations, and treason, all adopted in 2012 in reaction to, and in parallel with, a rise in civil society actions and protests criticising the Russian authorities.

Accreditation by U.S. agencies is a prize that many universities in the Arab world have sought in recent years, a prize that allows them to sell students from the region on getting an education at U.S. standards closer to home and at a lower cost.

Zaria — The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) yesterday vowed to resist what it called continuous intimidation and harassment of Professor Haruna Kaita over his statement on polio vaccine, which he classified as harmful.