Continuing a recent trend, more states are passing laws that deal with free speech rights on college campuses. Action has also come at the federal level with President Donald Trump’s March 21 executive order on campus free speech. There have also been calls to add campus speech protections to the Higher Education Act. This legislation is the main federal law dealing […] … learn more→

Admin: “Please be aware we had another phishing attempt on our servers, do not respond to e-mails in the following format…” –I get phishing/hacking e-mails on my institution’s account about every week or so. Like most folks, I get many “phishing” attempts on my e-mail. Some are quite good, but many have a weakness which […] … learn more→

A couple of weeks ago I shared some of the research I have been doing with my colleagues Associate Professor Hanna Suominen and Dr Will Grant about recruiter’s attitudes to PhD graduates. I recommend you read the previous post on anti-PhD attitudes before this one, but briefly: our research concerns recruiters, who are important gate keepers in the non-academic employment process. […] … learn more→

Of course a PhD is “hard” – as in it “has a high difficulty setting” and also “is a lot of work”. It is three or more years of creating new knowledge, after all. But how “hard” should it be, and what kind of “hard”? In my work teaching research and writing skills at La […] … learn more→

Before the days of the student loan scam, universities were renowned for their endurance. The oldest university in the world is over a thousand years old, and even “abandoned” universities like in Timbuktu still endure, because they were collections of scholars…not institutions devoted to siphoning off student loan money. Despite the money pouring into higher […] … learn more→

A recent college admissions scandal in the United States, which revealed that wealthy parents had bribed officials at elite universities, exposed the price some people are willing to pay to say, “I went to an Ivy League school.” In a country where the myth of academic meritocracy persists despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, many people were shocked to learn […] … learn more→

As the school year begins to wind down, high school seniors – and those who care about them – typically have their eyes on two prizes: getting into college and graduating from high school. While both milestones are worthy of celebration, there’s much more that students and parents should do after those two milestones are […] … learn more→

These are the days where we’re supposed to be very paranoid over other countries’ influence on our institutions…even as our media refuses to mention how our country influences entire governments of other countries. That said, the Chinese government does have outposts on our campuses. I see little reason for outrage, as these things are hardly […] … learn more→

The upper echelons of British society are filled with graduates from elite universities. These universities are, in turn, disproportionately full of students from wealthier backgrounds, many of whom went to private school. For these graduates, their top education and superior knowledge of the “rules of the game” regarding how institutions work gains them entry-level graduate jobs in […] … learn more→

I commenced my PhD programme in Molecular and Cell Biology of Infectious Diseases at the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP), the University of Ghana in August last year. WACCBIP is a world class research centre where young African researchers are groomed to be research leaders who would change the landscape […] … learn more→