Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
Campaigning for Social Science: Public Sociology and ‘Public Sociologists’
The arrival of a report calling for the British government to better support social science has raised questions about the role, responses and responsibilities of a ‘public sociology.’
A Marketplace of Ideas? Yes. A Market? No
Research and teaching have never been free from external constraints and public universities have long been expected to justify the resources society devotes to them. But universities feel threatened and increasingly incapable of fulfilling their primary functions.
Freeing Biz School from the Blah-Blah-Blahs
The eternal conflict between the abstract and the applicable haunts the halls of many business schools. One way to help close the gap between research and practice is to re-examine how ‘impact’ is measured in the field.
Book Review: Rank Hypocrisies: the Insult of the REF
Publication of the results of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework evaluation of the quality of work undertaken in all UK universities last December attracted much attention. Ron Johnston reviews a book that savagely criticizes the peer reviews undertaken at the heart of the REF but also the mock exercises as universities prepared their submissions.
Young Scholars Fear for the University of Their Future
Universities are at a crossroads. Pushed by governments who want institutions to dominate in the competitive, globalized world of higher education, they are also struggling with questions about academic freedom in the face of the pressures of marketization. Here a group of young PhD students argue for more debate about the kind of places universities are becoming.
You Tell Us: Are Adjunct Professors the New Fast-Food Workers?
Besides fast-food workers, there is another face of low-wage workers across the country–adjunct professors. Please weigh in on this issue by responding to a story from the site Capital & Main and a survey from our friends at Pacific Standard.
Is Higher Education Losing Its Progressive Potential?
In the the concluding piece of his three-article look at academic labor in the UK in the wake of Marina Warner’s departure from Essex, Daniel Nehring asks if the conservative turn in education is driven by students or policy makers.
If Only MOOCs Could Add an eHarmony Component
We go to school for an education, not a mate. But if you don’t find a mate at school, you are not getting as much return out of the experience as you can. Which brings us, in a new Danish study, to one issue with online classes …
