Last week North Carolina became the first state to pass a law requiring transgender individuals (including students) to use only bathrooms that match their biological (rather than identified) gender. They did so in response to an ordinance passed in Charlotte that supported transgender bathroom choice. Transgender students’ access to bathrooms is an increasingly active front […] … learn more→

My background in architecture offices has given me a range of time and project management skills that are helpful in my second career as an academic. I think I’m pretty good at working multiple projects with complex dependencies, but moving into a management role at ANU has pushed me to my limit. For years I’ve […] … learn more→

Students who believe they’ve been defrauded by for-profit colleges might get their day in court, as the Obama administration weighs whether to ban mandatory arbitration in such cases. But while the administration’s proposal is long overdue, it may not go far enough. Over the last decade, the for-profit higher education industry has succeeded—with the help […] … learn more→

Despite what some people might think, academics are not all humourless boffins out of touch with the real world. They can also be funny, and some are turning to humour to help get their messages across. Last November, the Times Higher Education reported that zooarchaeologists from the University of Nottingham had hired a stand-up comedian […] … learn more→

Lord Willetts understands higher education and academics very well. He was never more accurate than when he said in 2011 that you don’t become an academic to improve social mobility. While the government might set more targets for access to higher education and put social mobility in the title of its policy papers for the […] … learn more→

With the Panama Papers exposé perhaps we can now say the fortress walls of offshore secrecy are finally cracking. Such havens allow corruption and tax avoidance to take place on a massive international scale by some of the richest and most powerful people on Earth. Meanwhile, the poor get poorer. Western politicians have huffed and […] … learn more→

In the University College London Urban Laboratory, we promote knowledge and new ideas about urbanism; but we also maintain that universities can do this by example through their own estates strategies and spatial development plans. Cities globally face grand societal challenges that often seem intractable, but universities have access to networks of knowledge, power and […] … learn more→

Saturday, for April Fools Day, I posted Gig University, an only slightly satiric look at where some people would like higher education to head. It presents a reductivist vision of humanity and human possibilities. We—or, at least, the masses of us—become nothing more than material to be processed or cogs to fit into extant machinery. […] … learn more→

“College degree holders make a million more dollars over a lifetime…” –the above is thoroughly debunked, but still advanced as truth by college administrators. Every month or two, I get an angry e-mail, saying something like the following: “How DARE you tell people not to go to college! Don’t you want people to improve themselves?” […] … learn more→