Universities today are under more pressure than ever to collaborate with industry. In the words of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull: Increasing collaboration between businesses, universities and the research sector is absolutely critical for our businesses to remain competitive. Australia has a poor report card when it comes to university-business collaboration. It ranks last among the […] … learn more→

I want to talk more about this huge Senate report on for-profit schools, particularly this key line: However, over the past 10 years the United States has lost the place it once held as the world’s preeminent provider of higher education. Once first in the world in percentage of people with a college degree, the […] … learn more→

Now that Roald Dahl’s 1982 novel The BFG has finally been transformed into a big screen feature film courtesy of Disney and director Steven Spielberg, one aspect of the book that has delighted children and adults alike will be made more obvious: the Big Friendly Giant’s tendency to gobblefunk, the BFG’s own term for the […] … learn more→

As a board member of Google and Cisco, you’d expect John Hennessy to know a thing or two about future digital trends. But the Stanford University president’s prediction to The New Yorker four years ago that a “tsunami was coming” in relation to technology’s impact on higher education appears to have been wide of the […] … learn more→

As news of the attempted military coup in Turkey unfolded, I was in Pennsylvania. Travelling in the US, I had coincidentally found myself in the home state of Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen, who Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has singled out as the mastermind of the uprising. Gülen, once a close Erdoğan associate until he […] … learn more→

The annual statistics relating to scientific procedures performed on living animals are published today. The data will be pored over by policymakers, industry associations, animal protection groups and members of the public to identify the increases or decreases, across procedures, and over species. Press releases will follow. There will be variations in interpretation. For different […] … learn more→

It’s no secret to the public that many accredited for-profit colleges are shady (at very best), plundering the student loan money while providing no education. It’s no secret to the general public, but does our government know? Of course they do. The Federal government shut down Corinthian, despite it satisfying all accreditation requirements (and the […] … learn more→

If Donald and Melania Trump were students in one of my writing classes at Columbia University, they’d be facing charges of violating academic integrity. More specifically, they’d both be accused of—and no doubt found responsible for—plagiarism. (Donald would also be brought up for fabrication and impersonation.) As a result, they’d receive Fs in my class […] … learn more→

“I bumped into my supervisor on the stairs when I was with X [my fellow postdoc]. I might as well have been invisible, he didn’t address a word to me. It really hurt.” So wrote a young female postdoc during an extremely miserable couple of years working in the USA. I came across these words […] … learn more→

Half of primary schools in England will receive £41m over four years to teach mathematics using a method called the “mastery approach” that is used in Chinese schools. Yet during the last ten years many primary schools in England have started embracing another method, called the “mindset approach”, which is supported by 30 years of […] … learn more→