Many (not most) campuses are hotbeds of racial hatred, hatred of white people and white culture in particular. It used to be weird demonstrations of hatred of white people (eg, “Whites Are An Abomination”) were a “once a year” thing…then every six months. Today, hardly a week goes by without some idiocy slouching out from […] … learn more→

In the worldwide campaign to shift academic publishing to open access, the Germans are fighting a major battle. To many, they look like heroes. “Projekt DEAL” is the name of a German national consortium that includes university libraries and scientific organisations. The consortium has been working towards an agreement with Elsevier that, if the Germans […] … learn more→

Offline publishing will never be the same as it was before.  It changed a lot these past few decades. This quick shift, from bulky books to online media, comes as well with a marketing evolution, from the conventional medium such as broadcast and print to the World Wide Web. And with the help of Shmul […] … learn more→

Quite often in my blog, I reference things I’ve seen with my own eyes. I completely understand that many of the things I’ve claimed are so ridiculous as to be impossible to believe. Faculty forced to nod their heads in agreement as an ideologue tells us there were no European battles in pre-colonial North America […] … learn more→

Schools in England are legally required to promote the moral development of pupils. Unfortunately though, there is little agreement on what this involves. Most people recognise that morality is important and needs to be taught – but when it comes to saying what it is and how to teach it, the consensus soon breaks down. The […] … learn more→

In Australian schools, assessment drives learning. If there’s one thing that preoccupies students during the examination period, it’s the fear of failure and having to resit the dreaded supplementary examination. What is a supplementary exam? A supplementary exam is a form of further assessment offered to students who have not satisfied the passing criteria set […] … learn more→

The small Scottish town of St Andrews is home to one of the UK’s oldest and most highly regarded universities. The University of St Andrews has grown very rapidly in recent years, witnessing a threefold expansion in student numbers between 2002 and 2017. Today, there are 9,000 full-time students matriculated in a town with a […] … learn more→

Thursday the Department of Education made an announcement about the nearly 100,000 borrowers who have been waiting at least a year for the Department to consider their borrower defense to repayment claims: A whopping 21,000 or so of them will finally get an answer. In total, the Department officially approved 12,900 claims for former Corinthian Colleges students, […] … learn more→

The “unstoppable machine”. That is how Yiannis Gabriel, one of the UK’s leading social thinkers, labelled the academic-publishing complex in a recent piece for Times Higher Education (“We must rescue social science research from obscurity”, Opinion, August 10). His ire was directed, in particular, at social science research, which he sees as falling into aimless, […] … learn more→

There has been a lot of noise on cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin of late. While some suggest cryptocurrencies are a fraud, others believe them to be the next biggest economic revolution the world has seen since the internet. Bitcoin has brought to light blockchain technology, which offers great potential for food safety and verification in the agrifood sector. Yet it […] … learn more→