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 […]
What Will Happen to the Cosmopolitans?
Despite what he calls the poisonously xenophobic tone of politics and public debates in Britain, our Daniel Nehring still finds it a colorfully multicultural and sometimes, in some places, cosmopolitan society. One place he’d especially like to protect that virtue is in British universities.
Japan’s Ministry of Education Downsizing the Liberal Arts?
Have japan’s national universities been ordered — or coerced — into dismantling their humanities and social science programs or not? Jeff Kingston of Temple University Japan walks us through an answer tangled up in patriotism, politics and the nation’s ailing academy.
The Value of Peer Review: A View from Publons
Andrew Preston of Publons argues that while the academic community does “a pretty good job of peer reviewing,” the process remains hampered by the 19th century technology used to manage the process.
Sense About Science On the Value of Peer Review
Peer Review Week begins today, a week to explore the role of peer review in addressing academic quality and rigor. Here, Sense About Science details why it feels it’s important to explain peer review to the wider world.
Book Excerpt: Fareed Zakaria Defends Liberal Education
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of SAGE at the New York Public Library last week, journalist and author Fareed Zakaria addressed the importance of the humanities and social science to society. Zakaria’s latest book, ‘In Defense of a Liberal Education,’ tackles those same themes in depth.
Fairer Funding in Social Sciences Masks Gender Imbalance
Even when the news is good — women win grants from the ESRC at the same rate as men, and those grants are actually a bit larger on average — it’s tinged with bad — because there are so few senior women in academic social sciences men still get majority of the money.
The Politics of Knowledge Mobilization
When universities make note of how they ‘mobilize knowledge,’ they tend to focus on a select group of activities for an equally select audience. That’s a disservice.
Ranking African Universities Fraught and Futile
The director of directs the International Network for Higher Education in Africa argues that a nascent effort to rank the continent’s institutions of higher education ‘seems to me to be doomed from the start.’
