Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
Why Do Academics Matter So Little in Britain’s Corporate Universities?
Corporate universities, argues our Daniel Nehring, have come to operate as self-enclosed power structures that are shielded from intellectually driven debate by their authoritarian structures and their anti-intellectual ethos.
The Deskilled Academic: Bureaucracy Defeats Scholarship
Intellectual labor comes to be largely external to the objectives of the bureaucratic regimes that dominate universities, argues our Daniel Nehring, and academics whose careers were built on intellectual labor turn out to be deskilled workers in organizational settings indifferent to their concerns.
One Size Does Not Fit All
Current efforts to solve wicked problems with a quick dusting of data are unlikely to result in socially useful answers. Luckily, there are innovative people and initiatives using a variety of methods to home in on real solutions.
University Amenities and University Food Banks
Is it possible, asks our Michelle Stack, to have an excellent university that is inequitable?
New Teaching Excellence Framework Shows the Power of Marketing
The UK’s proposed Teaching Excellence Framework focuses strongly on ‘value for money,’ which, argues our Daniel Nehring, further elides the intellectual dimensions of scholarship and replaced it with the reduction of academics’ labor to the production of a skilled labor force.
All Eggs in a Few Baskets Doesn’t Work for Universities, Either
The Russell Group argues that research funding should be concentrated in the most elite institutions, Two sociologists who have studied how Asian universities have fared in global rankings argue just the opposite.
ResearchGate Score: Good Example of a Bad Metric
Remember that call for a ‘Bad Metric’ prize in the recent ‘The Metric Tide’ report? Peter Kraker, Katy Jordan and Elisabeth Lex take a closer look at one particularly opaque metric, the ResearchGate Score, and suggest they’ve found a real contender.
From Agora to Shopping Mall: Tone-of-Voice Policies, Marketing and the Re-making of British Universities
Tone-of-voice policies raise serious questions about the future of academic freedom in Britain and the extent to which academic labour may come to be subject to the financial and political objectives of the corporate managers that form universities’ leadership.
