The week in higher education – 16 February 2023

After the Varsity Blues bribery scandal, could genetic selection be the unlikely next twist in the race to secure a place at a top US university? A paper published in Science examined the attitudes of 6,800 Americans towards using pre-implantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P), which, in conjunction with IVF, allows parents to choose which embryos to take based on the strength of their genes. Thirty-eight per cent said they were more likely than not to use the technology to increase the odds of a child’s getting into a top 100-ranked college, assuming that they were already using IVF. Twenty-eight per cent would use gene editing to boost their odds. Those who had at least a bachelor’s degree themselves were more likely to use both forms of technology, but researchers warned that over time gains from PGT-P could “exacerbate existing inequalities” in education.

Pressing tardy students to do push-ups and buy breakfast for their classmates is pretty old school, but criminal? Not in Italy, at least, where an academic at the University of Salerno, dubbed the “king of tendons” for his expertise in treating the injuries of high-profile athletes, has been exonerated for his unusual approach to student motivation. Il Mattino reported that Nicola Maffulli has been reinstated as a school director at Salerno after internal and police investigations found that his punishments did not break the law. The prosecution against the highly cited orthopaedic specialist, who has treated footballers including Thierry Henry, was opened in April last year after videos emerged of postgraduates at the school doing push-ups as punishment for having arrived late to 6.30am classes. Let us hope that the tendon king can now shed his less illustrious media moniker: “Professor Flexion”.

What instructor wouldn’t be proud to see their students find imaginative applications for knowledge gained, particularly when self-directed projects snowball into something profitable? One notable exception might be those who nurtured Wybo Wiersma, a former PhD student at the Oxford Internet Institute, who has been jailed for four and a half years for stealing more than £2 million in cryptocurrency. The 40-year-old Dutch scammer was caught after using the same “Norbert van den Berg” alias in his coursework and to register a website that generated the sham random numbers at the heart of his crypto-swindle, The Times reported. Wiersma “never expected” his trick on 99 users of the Iota cryptocurrency to take off, Andrew Wheeler KC told Oxford Crown Court. Alas, the road to jail is paved with extracurricular projects.

In the US, political tensions and ready access to weapons can leave public life feeling like a tinderbox, so can you blame anyone for wanting to lose themselves in the knockabout world of video games? But enthusiasm for such coping strategies can, on occasion, backfire, as at California State University, Fullerton, where a student’s insistence that a professor cancel class “for the good of humanity” because of a “once-in-a-lifetime event” – a promotional broadcast by gaming giant Nintendo – was interpreted by police as constituting a “vague threat to campus”. The Los Angeles Times quoted acting police chief Scot Willey as saying that “after hours of investigation by our detectives”, the force “learned of a Nintendo Direct event that would occur at the exact date and time the individual suggested the class be cancelled”. Whether students got the reference and tuned into Nintendo’s livestream, or simply assumed the worst, the paper reported that many decided to stay home.

Ignoring all wisdom, His Majesty’s ministers are manoeuvring to cut UK student visas. But wait, the resulting squeeze on affordable-but-presentable foreign labour is ruffling the feathers of the good Lady Carnarvon, chatelaine of Highclere Castle. When the Countess of Carnarvon’s country pile isn’t earning an honest quid as the filming location for ITV’s blockbuster period drama, Downton Abbey, it hosts high-end weddings for the likes of Katie Price and Peter Andre, an aristocratic business model that Lady Carnarvon says will fall apart without summering European students. Writing in The Independent, her ladyship criticises the 30-page form that students must complete to work in Britain. “Needless to say, they can’t be bothered when there are so many other jobs available for them on mainland Europe,” she writes. “Who can blame them?” If the collective condemnation of vice-chancellors isn’t enough to move the needle on graduate visa caps, perhaps such well-titled supporters can help to change ministerial minds.