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 […]
Loony Lefties, Trolls and Public Debates About Higher Education in the UK
All the arguments for a critique of the new authoritarian, hierarchical, business-minded corporate universities are in place, says Daniel Nehring. The ways to insert these arguments into public life still need to be found.
Is ‘Credentialism’ a Genuine Danger?
The values of a university education are many and generally agreed upon. But is holding a degree the same thing?
What’s Wrong With Academic Freedom in the UK?
Given the ferocity of the current assault on academic freedom, argues Daniel Nehring, it seems to me that we may be close to a point of no return, past which ‘tone of voice policies’ and similar control mechanisms may become a norm into which coming generations of academics will be socialized as a matter of course.
Giving Reviewers Some Credit: The R-index
Peer review is flawed, and a new index proposes a simple way to create transparency and quality control mechanisms. Shane Gero and Maurício Cantor believe that giving citable recognition to reviewers can improve the system by encouraging more participation but also higher quality, constructive input, without the need for a loss of anonymity.
The Never-Ending Audit®
In a society in which the remit of critical public debate is narrowing, in which protest and dissent are increasingly being criminalised, in which public space is being supplanted by private and commercial space, and in which the meaning of democracy is now altogether questionable, critically and politically engaged scholars may come to be figures of suspicion.
Divining the Future of College
Kevin Carey deftly explains how a series of historical contingencies combined to create the peculiar mash-up that is the contemporary research university, according to a new book by Kevin Carey.
Stop Fighting Wikipedia and Co-Opt it
Although it’s been ruled off-limits by many academics, of sociology prof actually makes his students engage with Wikipedia — making the web safer for (looking up) social science in the process.
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.’
