Northwestern president becomes lightning rod in Republican-led committee hearing also featuring chiefs of Rutgers and UCLA

Members of a Republican-led congressional committee confronted another set of university heads on Thursday over their approach to pro-Palestinian protests in the latest hearings on Capitol Hill on a reported increase of campus antisemitism.

Republicans on the House of Representatives’ education and workforce committee repeatedly clashed fiercely with Michael Schill, president of Northwestern University in Illinois, over his decision to negotiate an end to a tented protest community rather than call in police, as has happened on other campuses.

In what a professor calls an ‘intellectual embarrassment’, the school is requiring students to complete a bizarre training

Like many other campuses around the world, New York University has seen its students protest the university’s ties to weapon manufacturers and other institutions that are profiting off the slaughter in Gaza or enabling it. Like many other campuses, NYU has been doing its best to curtail these protests and punish the students involved.

Unlike many other campuses, however, punishments include being told to watch The Simpsons and write what the NYU law professor Liam Murphy recently described in an open letter to leadership as “coerced confessions of wrongdoing”.

Every year, hundreds of Kenyans head off to study at elite universities in the US and UK. On graduating, many find themselves in a strange position: unable to fit in abroad, but no longer feeling like they belong back home

It was 30 December and the girls were all in Kilifi. Bottles on the table, music piping through a speaker, the beach and the Indian Ocean less than 200 metres away from the villa. Some of the girls had partied together in New York and Miami and Ibiza, and now they were on the Kenyan coast.

Like thousands of other young people across Africa who belong to a very specific social class, they had attended top universities in the UK and the US. After graduation, some had gone back to their countries and walked into fancy jobs in finance or consulting. Others had stayed abroad and lived in London, New York, Paris and the world’s other financial centres. Every December, they would go back home to visit.

Pro-Palestinian students were attempting to take over a university hall to protest school’s refusal to negotiate in ‘good faith’

More than a dozen pro-Palestinian activists, including six students at the University of Pennsylvania, were arrested after attempting to occupy a hall on the university campus late Friday.

The protesters were arrested around 9pm after trying to take over Fisher-Bennett Hall but had been met with a response from university and Philadelphia police, according to reports. The Daily Pennsylvanian reported that protesters caused the evacuation of an alumni event at the Penn Museum.

Vermont State University confers doctorate in ‘litter-ature’ upon tabby for being keen hunter of mice and beloved figure on campus

Men named Max have won the Nobel prize (Planck), the Oscar for best actor (Schell), and multiple Formula One world championships (Verstappen).

A cat in the US named Max now joins those lofty ranks, having earned a doctorate in “litter-ature” when Vermont State University bestowed an honorary degree on the campus-dwelling tabby in recognition of his friendliness, a gesture which quickly achieved virality in corners of the internet dedicated to spotlighting light-hearted news.