Page 50 - EW FEB 2022

International News

pensive costs of living in Australia. Covid amplified hard-
ship by forcing many out of the hospitality and retail jobs
they needed to support themselves, as restaurants, cafes
and shops shuttered. With no family homes to retreat to,
and barred from receiving the JobKeeper wage subsidies
and JobSeeker unemployment benefits that sustain their
domestic counterparts, some international students are in
dire straits.
But the tradition of student hunger stretches long before
Coronavirus. Studies in 2014 in Queensland and Victoria
found that food insecurity afflicted one-quarter to almost
one-half of students. But with the scant research into the
issue mainly limited to occasional surveys, Prof. Jeffrey and
Melbourne colleagues devised a qualitative study that was
conceived before Covid’s emergence but undertaken under President Macron: continental identity quest
pandemic conditions. Interviews with 90 students at six
Victorian universities found that daily hunger pangs were awareness across Europe this is a problem that needs to be
a common experience that left participants sluggish and addressed and that one needs to ask oneself what are big
detached, affecting their mental and physical health. issues in today’s Europe.”
But pandemic privations have also created common Prof. Dehousse argues that the new academy will be
cause, as locals become increasingly aware of their foreign sufficiently different from Academia Europaea, a learned
peers’ adversities. “One of the things we really noticed was academy founded by 55 scholars in Cambridge in 1988,
domestic students getting worried about international stu- which now boasts almost 5,000 members from across the
dents,” he says. “The care of students one for another is continent. “Academia is really a learned society for academ-
very apparent.” ics, whereas Macron makes a different point, he wants intel-
lectuals — thinkers, who may not be academics,” he says.
FRANCE But other heads of pan-European academies have res-
European Academy proposal ervations. Sierd Cloetingh, professor of earth sciences at
Utrecht University and president of Academia Europaea,
A FRENCH PROPOSAL TO CREATE A ‘European says that restricting membership to around 100 would al-
Academy’ could help to rejuvenate efforts to build low for “a little bit more than three per member country.”
a common continental identity. Under France’s He is also concerned about restricting membership to aca-
presidency of the Council of the European Union, which demics from within the European Union, excluding schol-
runs to June 2022, President Emmanuel Macron has pro- ars from countries such as the UK.
posed “a European Academy bringing together a hundred The move comes as the European Universities Initiative,
or so intellectuals from the 27 countries and from all disci- a Macron-led plan to create cross-border institutions, offers
plines to shed light on the European debate”. a third round of funding.
Thierry Chopin, professor of political science at the
Catholic University of Lille, says the idea is “to create a BANGLADESH
European structure to work on the narrative of ‘belonging’ Familiar ragging menace
and on a common European identity, mainly through the
academic world, but also by involving the cultural world AS THE CHAPTER CLOSES ON THE 2019 kill-
more widely”. “The idea is that there will be no European ing of Bangladeshi student Abrar Fahad, advocates
sovereignty without a sense of belonging and active iden- say universities should be doing more to prevent
tification to an EU-wide political community. In concrete violent behaviour still rampant on the country’s public
terms, I don’t know if it could be a permanent structure or campuses. Last December, a Dhaka court issued death
an annual meeting,” he says. sentences to 20 students at the Bangladesh University of
Renaud Dehousse, president of the European University Engineering and Technology (BUET) for Fahad’s murder.
Institute, a Florence-based research university created by But the culture of so-called “ragging” or “hazing” — brutal
an international treaty in 1972, says “what is being sought rituals often involving physical violence — continues to be
is really a debate”. “There is a big Macron agenda which widespread at many institutions.
says, ‘Let’s try to reinvent the meaning for Europe.’ Europe Aniruddha Ganguly, a student in his final year at BUET,
has been confronted for decades now, at least two decades, told Times Higher Education that since this incident, the
with a certain disenchantment, of which Brexit has been culture at his university has radically changed. “Right now
one manifestation, but only one. There’s a widespread it’s totally different — we’re probably the only university

50 EDUCATIONWORLD FEBRUARY 2022