As the new academic year begins in the northern hemisphere, universities are scratching their heads over exactly how to conduct this nerve-racking experiment in campus reopening. How many staff might already have been infected by SARS-CoV-2? What safety measures should be introduced? And, crucially, what support mechanisms will they most benefit from? At King’s College […] … learn more→

The international rankings of universities are today a reality of globalization which sheds a different light than the historical reputation of institutions or the evaluation reports produced on them. They are based on purely quantitative comparative performance elements that must be interpreted within their scope: what data are used? What are the indicators? What are the calculation algorithms? […] … learn more→

  Last week Times Higher Education reported that the UK’s education secretary, Gavin Williamson, is preparing possible legislation that would require students’ unions to guarantee free speech. One measure apparently under consideration is the extension of the Education (No. 2) Act 1986 to specifically oblige students’ unions – in addition to universities themselves – to […] … learn more→

It would appear that Covid-19 isn’t the only type of virus that universities should be concerned about. Last week, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) issued an alert to the sector regarding a spate of recent ransomware attacks on academic institutions. A recent freedom of information request suggests that at least a third of […] … learn more→

Australian university research funding is made up of discretionary income that comes from various sources, including international student fees. This is additional to the funding, including government grants, specifically received for research activities. Universities spent A$12.2 billion on research in 2018. Discretionary income used to fund Australian university research that year amounted to $6 billion, of which […] … learn more→

It’s a conversation that every business school professor has had, and that many have learned to avoid: the one in which you ask business executives what they think of management research. The answers you will get depend, of course, on how knowledgeable (and how polite) the executives are. Some will describe research as a waste […] … learn more→

Schools across the U.S. responded to the COVID-19 pandemic last spring with an unprecedented shift to remote learning – a trend that has continued into the new school year for many districts. Millions of children now use laptops and tablets at home as part of their daily education. This arrangement is neither ideal nor easy. But immigrant students who […] … learn more→

The catastrophic wildfires raging on the west coast of the US in the midst of a global pandemic have served to underscore the critical contribution that university research makes in responding to the grand challenges facing humanity. Australia’s own bushfire crisis last summer saw many regional universities cement their value as “anchor institutions” in and […] … learn more→

The philosopher and cultural theorist Gary Hall describes the current disruption of higher education as the “Uberification of the university”. The Covid-19 pandemic and the opening up of the relatively protected spaces of university campuses to the digital platform economy have put that process on steroids. Almost overnight, the very definition of a university classroom […] … learn more→

Writing about literatures doesn’t mean writing a summary of what you have read. You dont want a paragraph by paragraph laundry list of the texts you’ve been reading organised into a rough kind of order. Of course you write summaries as a means of making sense of your readings, but it’s not where you stop. […] … learn more→