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UNIVERSITY

Swiss uni is fourth most innovative in Europe

Lausanne's EPFL has been ranked the fourth most innovative in Europe in the first ever Reuters Top 100: Europe's Most Innovative Universities ranking launched on Tuesday.

Published: 14 June 2016 13:30 CEST
Swiss uni is fourth most innovative in Europe
The EPFL in Lausanne scored particularly high for commercial impact. Photo: Alain Herzog

Established in its current form in 1968, the EPFL is a sister school to the prestigious ETH technology school in Zurich.

With around 10,000 students – half of them from Switzerland and the other half from around the world – the EPFL came in fourth in the Reuters rankings behind top-place getters Belgium’s KU Leuven, Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge.

The Reuters rankings comprised ten different metrics including patent filing, patents granted and commercial impact, or the extent to which research at an institution has affected commercial research and development activities.

With its innovation park housing both startups and massive companies like Nestle and Siemens, the EPFL scored particularly well in terms of commercial impact, scoring 84.8 points against an average of 48.7.

The EPFL is one of four Swiss universities to make the new Reuters list with the University of Zurich at number 10, Zurich’s ETH at number 13 and the University of Basel at number 33.

Germany, meanwhile, has the most institutions on the list – 24 in total – while the UK can boast 17.

The Reuters ranking is just the latest in a series of good results for the EPFL.

In April, it was voted the best ‘young’ university in the world in the Times Higher Education (THE) rankings of universities under 50 years old for the second year in a row.

In March, the university was named Europe’s 11th best in the THE’s Europe ranking while it is currently ranking 48th globally by the same organization.

ISLAM

Police probe opened after poster campaign against ‘Islamophobic’ lecturers at French university

The French government condemned on Monday a student protest campaign targeting two university professors accused of Islamophobia, saying it could put the lecturers in danger.

Published: 8 March 2021 13:35 CET
Police probe opened after poster campaign against 'Islamophobic' lecturers at French university
Illustration photo: Justin Tallis/AFP

Student groups plastered posters last week on the walls of a leading political science faculty in Grenoble that likened the professors to “fascists” and named them both in a campaign backed by the UNEF student union.

Junior interior minister Marlene Schiappa said the posters and social media comments recalled the online harassment of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty last October, who was beheaded in public after being denounced online for offending Muslims.

“These are really odious acts after what happened with the decapitation of Samuel Paty who was smeared in the same way on social networks,” she said on the BFM news channel. “We can’t put up with this type of thing.”

“When something is viewed as racist or discriminatory, there’s a hierarchy where you can report these types of issues, which will speak to the professor and take action if anything is proven,” Schiappa said.

Sciences Po university, which runs the Institute of Political Studies (IEP) in Grenoble in eastern France, also condemned the campaign on Monday and has filed a criminal complaint.

An investigation has been opened into slander and property damage after the posters saying “Fascists in our lecture halls. Islamophobia kills” were found on the walls of the faculty.

One of the professors is in charge of a course called “Islam and Muslims in contemporary France” while the other is a lecturer in German who has taught at the faculty for 25 years.

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