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Immediately after the President was elected, borrower advocates and lawmakers expressed concern about what would happen to the current regulations aimed at holding for-profit colleges accountable. On Tuesday, their concerns were validated. The Education Department announced that it would delay and renegotiate two of the previous administration’s signature regulations: the first aims to penalize programs whose graduates’ loan payments exceed a set percentage of their earnings, while the second simplifies the process for borrowers who say they have been defrauded by their colleges.

Months after an academic librarian deleted lists of “predatory” journals and publishers from his blog, a website with derogatory comments about his academic qualifications and mental health remains online. A communications librarian at the University of Colorado at Denver, for years maintained lists of scholarly journals and publishers he deemed “predatory. The lists, while controversial, were a resource for many scholars wondering if the invitation to publish a paper or present at a conference sitting in their inbox was legitimate.

Universities in the United States should close down their Confucius Institutes – teaching and research centres funded directly by the Chinese government – says a report by the National Association of Scholars or NAS. The wide-ranging report includes additional insights on the institutes’ often-secretive operations gleaned from the contracts signed with a dozen US universities, obtained through freedom of information law requests. The report, Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and soft power in American higher education, says unless contracts between US universities and the Hanban can be renegotiated to include more transparency, financial and hiring autonomy for US host universities, academic freedom guarantees and other safeguards, the institutes should be shut down.

One of the most prolific scientists in an emerging area of cancer research involving what is sometimes called the “dark matter” of the human genome has parlayed his decades-long pursuit of cancer remedies into a research empire: He has received more than $86 million in federal grants as a principal investigator and, by his own count, more than 60 awards. However, over the last several years a tide of allegations have been made concerning data falsification and other scientific misconduct. Concerns about falsified data in the scientific literature run far deeper as cases of fraud can reverberate through whole fields of research.

The civil organization called for the six aspiring governors of Mexico State to commit to actions such as debugging the education payroll and providing resources to schools in marginalized areas. "Mexicans have a right to know which candidates for state governor are in favor of educational reform and which are in favor of the comfortable status quo, as well as which candidates for governor are committed to the rule of law and which will continue to allow a series of abuses and omissions of the law," said the organization.

In Latin America, one high-level scandal after another has tainted current or recent presidents or vice-presidents across the region. The price is awful public services, from transport and education to law enforcement and health care, as state coffers are ransacked while appointments and contracts are awarded as favors rather than on merit. Yet, counter-intuitively, the steady stream of grim headlines about kickbacks, influence-peddling and nepotism may actually be good news. Many experts regard the public revelations as a sign that corruption in the region is actually being tolerated less and less.

Scientists from the University of Ottawa, The Ottawa Hospital and other top-tier institutions across Canada keep publishing their results in fake science journals, tainting the work despite years of warnings. One veteran science publisher warns all the work that produced these studies “is just thrown away.” Until recently, the scope of the problem of “predatory” journals has been hard to measure. Now, one giant in the fake publishing field, OMICS International of India, has improved the search engine for 700 journals. Hundreds of Canadian scientists were found to have published recently with the Indian firm — the same company that accepted this newspaper’s analysis of how pigs fly.