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Zimbabwean police arrested the Higher Education, Science and Technology Minister and his deputy on Wednesday for allegedly misappropriating around US$450,000 from a manpower development fund that finances students, among other activities. The politicians were questioned and released. Days before his arrest the minister – a former politics professor at the University of Zimbabwe and researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, which accused him of embezzling research funds – issued a statement denying any wrongdoing.

A professor in political economy at the world’s oldest university has more or less invited his students to copy. It is his way of speaking out against the impunity of certain of his colleagues accused of plagiarism. He announced “I will not be checking to see if you have copied your work as I cannot, in good conscience, ask you to respect rules that the University of Bologna allows it’s professors to violate.”

Students have “no understanding” of what plagiarism is and why they must avoid it, according to new research. An education research fellow at the University of Otago, finds that universities might need to consider their plagiarism policies and how they might “influence or confuse students in counterproductive ways”. The qualitative study, published in the journal Higher Education, found that although “aware of plagiarism as a concept” and believing that those who “intentionally cheat are cheating everybody”, students were ignorant of the potential implications of unintentional plagiarism.

The Higher Education Ministry and Universiti Malaya (UM) will investigate allegations of research fraud involving a group of UM faculty of medicine researchers. The allegations of fraud exploded over social media in the past week, and was subsequently picked up by the mainstream scientific press.The Higher Education Minister has said that he would personally look into the matter. The university has formed an ad hoc committee to investigate the allegation.

The issue of education continues to be at the centre of public discourse in Liberia, with frequent outcries about the system. While dozens of scholarly papers have been published by veteran scholars about how to reform education in the country, ambiguity remains as to who is at the origin of the poor level of quality within a sector plagued with issues such as sex for grades, bribery, deception, outdated curricula and a lack of competent instructors.

The Office of the Higher Education Commission (Ohec) has warned universities they are responsible for placing more emphasis on the quality of teaching, especially at the graduate level, after two cases of alleged thesis plagiarism at Silpakorn University were unveiled last month. Ohec oversees higher education institutes at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Its secretary-general says the office is concerned over the allegations.

The president of the Far Eastern Federal University has been arrested in what could be one of the largest corruption scandals in Russian higher education in the past quarter century. The university, located in Russia’s port city of Vladivostok employs over 3,000 faculty, enrols 33,000 students and has nine branch campuses in the region. The university is the flagship of higher education in the Far East and was intended to become a world-class research university.

German university heads have welcomed proposals by the Stifterverband – a network of foundations, businesses and individuals supporting the country’s higher education and research – for improved transparency in collaborations between universities and industry. The recommendations, issued in mid-April, stress the “responsibility of universities, as autonomous institutions, to regularly and appropriately inform the public about their collaborative projects with industry”.

The independence of Swiss universities from the corporate world has again been called into question as details of pharmaceutical sponsorship deals were broadcast by Swiss public television, SRF. The programme found evidence that one firm may have manipulated academic research data. SRF research shows financial links between pharma giants and several leading universities. The most damning revelation is that one group demanded to see research every three months and reserved the right to make “acceptable alterations” to results.