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 […]
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?
Why Study Social Science
We study social science because social phenomena affect people’s lives in profound ways. If you want to start with Cantor’s focus—physical illness and death—then social phenomena are tremendously important.
Are Vocational Education, Liberal Arts on a Collision Course?
As even liberal arts colleges continue to turn their back on the liberal arts, where will the technocrats produced by higher education hone their thinking skills to address the current crisis in governing?
Liberal Arts: Still Valuable
Emory’s recent decision to shut down or suspend various academic departments and programs has rightly generated campus-wide and national attention.
