Background: Over the last two decades it has become increasingly urgent to rethink current hurdles and opportunities for higher education, not just in the Global North, but in the effects of Northern policies globally. Aim: For the last 6 years a team of European scholars worked on a book entitled, Academia in Crisis (Donskis et al. 2019 ), AiC as it will be referred to in the article, inspired by the works of our late colleagues Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis. Setting: Tamara Shefer from the University of the West Cape (UWC) was invited to provide a foreword to AiC , providing a perspective from the Global South. Method: This served to question underlying dimensions of mutual influence: neo-coloniality in times where the demand for decolonization from South African colleagues is strong and justified. Results: It seems urgent, in the light of recent cooperation and mutual support between these two parts of the world, to reflect on recent developments in and around higher education. What currently ‘neo-colonises’ higher education? More or less parallel to AiC , Rob Pattman and Ronelle Carolissen produced Transforming Transformation in 2018 with the promising subtitle ‘South African offerings’. Conclusion: Combining insights from those two works leads to renewed inspiration, at least in terms of new debates and questions about the present and future of higher education, especially following the current pandemic with all the effects it has had on collegial cooperation, locking down of universities, and perhaps some thinking time over managerialisms and other power processes in academic work.

Background:  In the Netherlands, most of the academic curricula for teacher training in religious education (RE) focus on shortfalls of students, like a lack of knowledge about the plurality of worldviews and the diversity in interpretations of the Christian tradition. In our research project, the focus is not on the students, but on the university professors and lecturers who teach the subject of RE: professors and lecturers who train and educate students to teach RE. Aim:  The main aim of the project was to gain a better insight into the inherent complexity of the professionalism of academics, that is, their own positionality in the plurality of the Roman Catholic traditions they adhere to in relation to their capabilities and commitment to the current curriculum – the ‘old’ one – and the new curriculum to be developed, in the context of the Dutch plural society. Setting:  Respondents in this research were university professors and lecturers of the Teacher Training Institute of Tilburg University, located at Utrecht, the Netherlands. Methods:  For this investigation, we used a research instrument based on the dialogical self theory and its self confrontation method for organisations to gain insight into professionals’ own and their colleagues’ positionality regarding teaching RE. Results:  Preliminary results show that the self confrontation method for organisations has shown itself to be a challenging instrument to invite academics involved in the process of data construction and data analysis. Conclusion:  Based on these results, we recommend to include the research population in a validation process to increase the sustainability of the results and to maximise engagement in the implementation phase of the new curriculum.

African PhD fellows who are interested in completing (part of) their research in Europe cannot always afford to leave their place of residency for prolonged periods of time. Yet, young researchers from African countries might be searching for particular guidance from experts in their field that might not be accessible in their home countries. Consequently, both PhD fellows and universities and postgraduate research institutes require more flexible educational formats that cater for these circumstances. With the growing availability and potential of online tools and methodologies, it is possible to choose from a range of options for PhD education. Communities of Learning (CoL) have emerged as an approach to support the exchange of knowledge and experience among participants on the Internet. Participants can collaborate in developing research skills, while at the same time creating a feeling of belonging, which helps individuals to establish personal ties and relations. The paper introduces the research and educational project: Community for Learning for Africa (CoLA). It was designed to help participating actors from Africa and Europe to get and to stay connected online, to collaborate in joint training activities and projects, as well as to openly exchange ideas and thoughts, all in relation to underlying PhD research trajectories via the Internet. The paper offers results from a needs assessment undertaken in spring 2015, among PhD fellows and supervisors in Africa on what they would need CoLA to include, as well as template of what CoLA could include.