Protesters into seventh day of hunger strike in support of Palestinians and in effort to demand university divestment

A group of students at Yale University were on Friday into the seventh day of a hunger strike in support of Palestinians in Gaza and in a protest to pressure the university to divest from any weapons manufacturing companies potentially supplying the Israeli military.

The group titles itself Yale Hunger Strikers for Palestine and one protester, the graduate student Miguel Monteiro, described losing weight and feeling dizzy, while attempting to put the group’s efforts into a wider perspective.

The pandemic showed that remote learning is effective. It’s absurd that universities are going back to processes that exclude us

• Rosie Anfilogoff is the winner of the 2024 Hugo Young Award (19-25 age category) recognising young talent in political opinion writing

My route to university was never going to be simple. While my friends were flicking through university brochures and choosing Ucas options, I was signing chemotherapy consent forms in the teenage cancer unit at Addenbrooke’s hospital and throwing up in its weirdly tropical island-themed bathrooms. Even before then, my severe chronic illness made attending traditional university unthinkable – until the pandemic happened.

In 2020, for the first time, it became possible to attend a brick-and-mortar university online. Universities became accessible – or at least, more accessible than they had ever been – practically overnight. Accommodations that disabled students had been requesting for years, such as lecture recordings and software that would allow them to take exams from home, were slotted into place so that students could learn remotely. Suddenly, friends at university were having the kind of experience that would have enabled me to join them. But since the “end” of the pandemic, online learning has withered away. and thousands of students have been left without sufficient access. By returning to the pre-pandemic state of affairs, universities are failing current and prospective disabled students like me.

Rosie Anfilogoff is a writer and journalist

With rising house prices, a decade of wage stagnation and ballooning student debt, young people in Australia are living through what author Jill Filipovic describes as ‘a series of broken promises’. In episode one of this new series from Guardian Australia, Full Story co-host Jane Lee and reporter Matilda Boseley sort through these broken promises, investigating why young people are living in a time of such economic strain.

In this episode, we hear from a handful of experts featured in Who screwed millennials? – including author Jill Filipovic , youth researcher Intifar Chowdhury , author Malcolm Harris , Guardian Australia editor Lenore Taylor and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis about how millennials became the first generation to be worse off than their parents

You can subscribe for free to Guardian Australia’s daily news podcast Full Story on Apple Podcasts and Spotify .

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Meeting at London’s Royal Society will scrutinise basic model first formulated in 1922 that universe is a vast, even expanse with no notable features

If you zoomed out on the universe, well beyond the level of planets, stars or galaxies, you would eventually see a vast, evenly speckled expanse with no notable features. At least, that has been the conventional view.

The principle that everything looks the same everywhere is a fundamental pillar of the standard model of cosmology, which aims to explain the big bang and how the universe has evolved in the 13.7bn years since.

Arts education is essential – yet on both sides of the Atlantic, the humanities and critical thinking are under attack. With massive redundancies announced at this London institution, is it the canary in the coalmine?

It is a couple of days before Easter, and the students who have been holding a sit-in in the Professor Stuart Hall building in Goldsmiths, University of London are packing up. The large basement smells of duvets and camping mats and solidarity and liveliness, and deodorant sprayed on in a hurry under a T-shirt, and it smells like a place where people have slept, which 20 of them have done since 20 February, with crowds swelling to 100 for spontaneous lectures.

This isn’t a story about idiot idealists making futile gestures: Mark Peacock, a 28-year-old postgraduate student in the politics department, rattles through a number of concessions the senior management team at the university has made as a result of the action. Yet Danna MacRae, 24, studying for an MA in ecology, culture and society, says the occupation has been greater than the sum of its demands: “It’s about opening up the literal physical space but also the social space to expand political possibilities. So much becomes possible when you’re living together 24/7.” I read their banner as they’re furling it up: among other things, it calls for the university to protect students’ right to protest, expand scholarships for Palestinian students and divest from any company providing equipment to Israel.

Booker-winning author says course ‘shouldn’t be seen as dispensable’ as university seeks to cut 130 academic jobs

The Booker prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo has criticised the “amputation” of Black British literature and queer history courses at Goldsmiths University in London, as part of a cost-cutting programme in which 130 academic jobs are to go.

Evaristo, along with former students and writers, issued a plea to Goldsmiths to reconsider the removal of “pioneering” postgraduate courses after plans were announced to cut the jobs in 11 departments.

Nancy Fraser, professor of philosophy at the New School, condemned killings in Gaza carried out by the Israeli military

A leading US philosopher has been disinvited from taking up a prestigious professorship at the University of Cologne after signing a letter expressing solidarity with Palestinians and condemning the killings in Gaza carried out by Israeli forces.

Nancy Fraser, professor of philosophy and politics at the New School for Social Research in New York, said she had been cancelled by the university, which has withdrawn its invitation to the Albertus Magnus Professorship 2024, a visiting position, which she had been awarded in 2022. The letter was written in November 2023 following the 7 October attacks on Israel by Hamas, prompting Israel’s attack on Gaza.

Gillian Keegan will also squeeze funding for programmes to widen access to higher education

Ministers will cut funding for performing and creative arts courses at English universities next year, which sector leaders say will further damage the country’s cultural industries.

The cuts, outlined by the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, in guidance to the universities regulator , will also reduce funding for Uni-Connect, which runs programmes aimed at widening access to higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to £20m, a third of its 2020-21 budget.

Prof Des Freedman , Michael Bassey , John Sommer and Sally Bates respond to an article about the dire state of Britain’s higher education institutions

Gaby Hinsliff ( Britain’s universities are in freefall – and saving them will take more than funding, 29 March ) says “the story [of decline] starts with the freezing of tuition fees in 2017”.

However, this was the outcome, not the cause, of a crisis that began with the decision by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government in 2010 to treble tuition fees and to build a “market” in UK higher education. Since then, policymakers and university managers have pursued a disastrous ideological project to turn higher education into a commodity rather than to treat it as a public good.