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 […]
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.’
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.’
