The week in higher education – 8 June 2023

The explosion of Elon Musk’s Starship mega-rocket in April suggests commercial travel to the moon remains a distant prospect, but a Japanese university behind a new “space agriculture centre” is more optimistic. Announcing a new research facility that aims to grow crops in space, Chiba University said it expects as many as 1,000 people will be living on the moon by the 2030s, the Mainichi newspaper reported. If such lunar outposts don’t materialise, Chiba’s focus on high-efficiency plant production won’t be wasted, with scientists hoping their research will bring forward net zero farming here on planet Earth. Speaking at the launch of the centre, research centre director Hideyuki Takahashi said: “We hope that our research results will also lead to efficient and stable food production on earth that is not affected by typhoons, insect pests or other factors.” A moonshot if ever there was one.

A US professor has been ordered to remove two gigantic Transformer models he installed outside his home after losing a two-year battle with disgruntled neighbours. The hulking figures of Optimus Prime and Bumblebee that guard the entrance to Georgetown University scientist Newton Howard’s home in a historic part of Washington DC have become popular with students and tourists, MailOnline reported, and the colourful metal figures brought a “tangible vibrancy and happiness to those who come across them”, claimed one supportive student. However, residents who describe them as a “nuisance” and an “eyesore” did not feel the same warmth, and local authorities apparently agreed, ordering Professor Howard to topple the robot heroes – doing more than the Decepticons managed in seven outings of Michael Bay’s horribly noisy movie series.

A Japanese woman who had a 10-year affair with her university professor has been ordered to pay his wife almost $20,000 (£16,000). At the age of 23, Meiko Sano began a decade-long relationship with art history professor Michio Hayashi, then aged 48, travelling with him to trips to France, Spain and Italy, the New York Post reported. But she later claimed she had been groomed by the Sophia University academic, whom she accused of sexual harassment, and sought damages from the university. In a strange twist, however, Ms Sano was sued by Professor Hayashi’s wife for causing her mental anguish under Japan’s civil code, which considers infidelity a breach of the marriage contract. The minimal damages won by Ms Sano from Sophia will just about cover her losses, although neither side seems like a winner, with Professor Hayashi having been sacked last year for having the “inappropriate relationship.”

“If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere,” is perhaps what Glasgow Caledonian University thought when it opened a New York campus in 2013. A decade and £26.5 million in loans and grants from the university later, GCU has accepted its stateside satellite site had “not reached its potential”. It is now hoping one of the “prestigious educational organisations” it is in talks with will buy the slice of Manhattan real estate described as a “vanity project” and a “white elephant” by Labour MSP Jackie Baillie, the BBC reported. “This is a welcome end to an expensive and doomed project that should go down in history as a guide in how not to run a project of this nature,” said Ms Baillie, clearly not one for mincing her words. A three-year delay in issuing degree certificates means GCU may learn more than it taught during its Big Apple adventure.

For image-conscious and ambitious students, a place at an Oxbridge college offers a heady mix of world-class study and photogenic architecture. But the rise and fall of sometime social media influencer Caroline Calloway illustrates the headaches such attractions can bring for admissions staff. Her alma mater, St Edmund’s College Cambridge, has been left with egg on its face after the former student bragged in an interview with Vanity Fair that she had forged her school transcripts to get in after receiving rejections from Harvard, Yale and Oxford. Ms Calloway, who bagged a $500,000 (£400,000) book deal off the back of her Instagram account depicting “Harry Potter-like castles” and “Jane Austen-like balls”, was forced to rebrand after she failed to deliver the aspirational tome to her publisher, blaming her party lifestyle and an addiction to the drug Adderall. Not one to be disheartened, she claimed to the magazine she was almost ready to release her first memoir, Scammer. Excerpts are unlikely to make it into the alumni magazine, perhaps.