Social Science Space

University rankings might claim to provide an index through which students, faculty, and the general public might ascertain a number of things: the quality of education provided by an institution, the potential for networking at an institution, the breadth and depth of research being performed at an institution, and more. The institutional quest towards topping the university rankings can, however, derail efforts towards the improvement of society and higher education at large.

Surely preparing Britain’s social science community to take the lead in a future of global and interdisciplinary team research isn’t a quest for a mythical beast? Matt Flinders, who heads an ESRC project trying to nurture that leadership, doesn’t think so – but he understands why someone might think it is.

Even as government spending per-student for higher education institutions has been faltering in the United States, private money has been flowing in. But not all public institutions are getting the same amount of seed money from outsiders.

Joni Lakin takes a look at David Lohman’s seminal 2005 work in Gifted Child Quarterly. His paper addresses the issue of underrepresentation while tackling a well-intentioned myth that nonverbal tests are the most equitable way to assess students who come from racial, ethnic, or linguistic minorities in the U.S.

Most countries in Africa are lagging behind development goal suggested by the United Nations. Science academies have a crucial role to play in developing ways for scientists to help these nations achieve development goals more effectively.

Robert J. Marks, the director of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, argues that academic reformers are battling numerical laws that govern how incentives work. His counsel? Know your enemy!

Burned out by the hamster-wheel of academe and the regime of metrics, John Postill decided the tonic would be to write a spoof spy thriller about a Spanish nerd with a silly name who moves to London in 1994 and accidentally foils a terrorist plot by an evil anthropologist.

Concerns that free speech is being on university campuses, at least in the United Kingdom, are overblown, with the biggest threat originating not on campuses but from the government and its Prevent program. That’s a key takeaway in a new paper from Britain’s Higher Education Policy Institute, Free Speech and Censorship on Campus.

In recent years, sociology has begun a twin global and decolonial turn, marked by a series of high-profile publications that have sought to engage with sociology’s roots outside the Global Northwest. So how effective have these efforts been?

Turnitin and similar programs don’t deal with the causes of plagiarism. Rather, argue Amanda Mphahlele and Sioux McKenna, they allow institutions to claim they’re doing something without really tackling the issues that lead students to plagiarize.

Daniel Nehring describes China’s social networking platform WeChat as ‘Facebook on steroids,’ and notes it has long surpassed e-mail as the main tool of mediating communication at Chinese universities while obliterating boundaries between work and home. Is this a cautionary tale for academe outside of China?

In the wake of Brexit, Robert Dingwall asks a series of probing questions about the eclipse of Conservative Social Thought at universities, such as when did the social sciences last have a serious engagement with the institutions of the bourgeoisie, even though by income and status many of us would belong to that class?