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 […]
UK backs Social Science, the World benefits
Studying ourselves is something the British do exceptionally well: specialists flock here from all over the world seeking answers to fundamental questions from our unique series of cohort birth studies, and no one else has anything quite like them.
Can Brands be Intellectuals?
As an academic, you are a brand not only as a matter of choice, but, increasingly, due to powerful institutional imperatives that are becoming harder and harder to ignore.
The Myth of Academic Stardom
The recent and on-going reforms of higher education are enforcing an individualisation of academic labour. That academics would gamely play along with such a system is astonishing.
Stand Out and Be Counted: Quantitative Skills
The British Academy recently published a guide for students encouraging those studying the humanities and social sciences to become statistically savvy.
Accountability, Compliance and Bureaucratisation in Higher Education
Around the educational mission we are now spinning a web of ‘accountability’ that has little to do with explaining or justifying our activities, and much to do with obscuring our responsibility through the creation of elaborate processes.
Modernizing Universities?
Universities are starting to look like the behemoths of the US auto industry of the 1980s, with highly-paid CEOs buried in their offices looking only at numbers.
So Much Noise: Are Academics being Over-Branded?
The Ivory Tower has been toppled and academia has an impact in the ‘real world’. The problem is that this may have come at the expense of truly innovative and critical scholarship.
Open Access and the Privatisation of Knowledge
Is OA the flip side to privatisation of Higher Education? Is there a way in which OA is a means of justifying the economic inaccessibility of HE by providing a public good?
