The 2019/2020 academic year has come to an end, and our students have experienced a semester unlike any other. What takeaways can we draw from this unprecedented period? How did this hurried switchover go over for students and teachers? The verdict that we are able to draw today shows a successful adjustment for the vast majority and provides useful lessons for the upcoming semester.

Students both with and without previous military experience are able to enrol in Vice-Admiral Anne Cullerre’s course, “Ruling the seas”, provided that they have an interest in the “untamable realm” that is the ocean, with all of its geopolitical rivalries, territorial disputes, environmental challenges...and pirates. While “a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor”, a skilled sailor certainly makes a great teacher!

After a trip to Silicon Valley in 2017 and to the MIT in 2019, the Centre for Entrepreneurship’s third Learning Expedition took participants to Israel, a country equivalent in size to a French département that has the highest number of startups per capita in the world (1 in 6,000). What are the reasons for this “entrepreneurial miracle”, and how does it work? Loanne Guérin and Laura Salesse (first and second year students respectively in the Master’s in Finance and Strategy), two of the twelve students chosen to take part in the adventure, tell us about their experience.

International academic mobility has been a cornerstone of universities dating back as far as the 12th and 13th centuries when they began to flower throughout the European continent.  With a clear understanding of the multiple benefits of academic mobility and the rich and diverse learning environment it created, the University of Bologna, the oldest university in Europe, adopted the Constitutio Habita, an academic charter that ensured and protected the rights and free movement of a traveling scholar in the pursuit of education.  The widely referred to concept of “academic freedom” today stems from the idea of this charter.

The public debate on the current economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic has focused on rich countries. But how is this crisis truly “global”? What are the current inequalities with developing countries? Here is an overview with Jérôme Sgard, Professor of Political Economy at the Centre for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po and specialist in the construction and regulation of markets.