A well-known obesity researcher will plead guilty to making material false statements in a 1999 grant application worth $542,000 from the US National Institutes of Health. The researcher, who held various research positions at the University of Vermont (UVM) College of Medicine in Burlington could go to jail for up to 5 years.

A federal grand jury in Kansas indicted a former college-basketball coach last month on charges that he arranged for his players to receive phony academic credit and stole $120,000 in Pell Grants. The former coach faces a total of 51 years in prison and over $1.5-million in fines if found guilty of all counts.

Plans by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) to export its examinations system to China have been put on hold following charges of fraud by students looking to gain entry to Britain on study visas. Staff at a Sino-British college, Sea Rich, raised concerns that many students were not studying, but had been promised by the university a two-year-year HND for payments of US$2,200. The students had also been promised assistance by the university to get UK entry clearance.

In spring 2004 interviews were conducted with 43 rectors, vice rectors, and administrators at five private universities. A consensus emerged that successful licensing or accreditation applications, with few exceptions, required some form of bribery. Licensing might require a bribe of US$ 200 about two months' salary for a typical academic - while accreditation might call for a 10 or 20 times greater "gratuity."

Compton community college lost its accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges in June. The regional accrediting body cited poor governance, lack of education plans, lack of student support services, and an inadequate administrative staff as reasons for revoking the schools accreditation. The school is now being taken over by the state, despite California's highly decentralized system.

The legal advisor to the Eduardo Mondlane University has denied that there was anything improper in giving scholarships to people who do not work at the university. In 2003 alone, over 147,000 US dollars, money that should have been used to send teachers to take further degrees abroad, in order to build up the institutional capacity of the university, were allegedly spent instead on the Vice-Chancellor's daughter, two children of the head of the universities public relations and 16 others.

According to investigations conducted in Nicaragua, among the 3 500 teachers from autonomous colleges who actually collect a salary on a monthly basis, in reality only 1 945 of them are actually teaching. At least 555 individual salaries are therefore paid to fictitious teachers or to individuals falsely (fraudulently) using the names of teachers.

The news of examination leakages has rocked the West African Examination Council. The leaked papers have forced the council to cancel and reschedule the papers. Both staff and auxiliary workers are now under probe. The leakage occurred despite various measures to eliminate cheating. The council has designed a website and introduced the embossment of passport photographs on certificates to avoid impersonation of candidates.

The Exam Ethics Project (EEP), an NGO fighting against examination malpractices, has in the last few years released figures either as profit made from examination malpractice business or those (students, invigilators etc) sacked for engaging in examination malpractice.

Academics and students around the world at this very second are being subjected to infringements of their professional and human rights, and most of these violations are going unnoticed. Violations of this kind are not limited to countries with poor human rights records. On the contrary, in the post 9/11 world even the most transparent democracies are showing signs that are a cause for concern. Many institutions and academics in the West are subject to an increasingly sophisticated infrastructure of surveillance, intervention and control.