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 […]
September 10, 2015
Fairer Funding in Social Sciences Masks Gender Imbalance
Read Now
Weeding the Books Out of Academic Libraries
The printed book, though still part of the academic library ensemble, is being relegated to the role of supporting player rather than the lead actor, argues a University of California librarian.
Who Should Decide Cuts for UK’s Research Councils?
Objective outsiders focused on the purse or knowledgeable insiders focused on the scholarship — who should decide the best way to derive the productivity and innovations sought from Britain’s Research Councils?
I Never Thought I’d Quote the Pope: Self-Interested Pragmatism and University Rankings
In his recent encyclical that made waves for addressing climate change, notes our blogger Michelle Stack, Pope Francis also spoke about the current emphasis on education as a consumer product that focuses on “self-interested pragmatism.”
Report: Metrics Not Mature Enough to Replace Peer Review
A new report looking at the role of metrics in analyzing British academe finds, ‘A lot of the things we value most in academic culture resist simple quantification, and individual indicators can struggle to do justice to the richness and diversity of our research.’
So How Does Tenure Work in Europe?
With university tenure under scrutiny in Wisconsin and tenure itself under assault elsewhere, Jürgen Enders examines how academics are protected in three European countries.
An Almost-Autopsy of Small Colleges
There’s a lovely diversity in the size and mission of institutions of higher education in the United States. It’s a shame that the little schools, like the Virginia women’s college Sweet Briar, are faced with ugly financial threats.
University Rankings Driven by Corporate Interests
Social Science Space’s newest core blogger takes a look at how industry has an outsize stake in the business of ranking universities. Has academe gotten in deeper than it bargained for?
Preserving Academic Freedom When Tenure Is Tenuous
Cathy Sandeen, chancellor of University of Wisconsin Colleges and the University of Wisconsin-Extension, argues that universities need to be more honest on how academic freedom applies to different teaching roles in an environment where tenure is no longer a given.
