A space to explore, share and shape the issues facing social and behavioral scientists
In an open letter, 63 Australian Research Council laureate fellows complain vigorously to the minister and to the chief executive of the ARC about a recent instance of political interference in the funding of basic research.
What are the three biggest challenges Australia faces in the next five to ten years? What role will the social sciences play in resolving these challenges? The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia asked these questions in a discussion paper earlier this year. The backdrop to this review is cuts to social science disciplines around the country, with teaching taking priority over research.
I’ve spent my adult life in and around social science. Academically through studying psychology and linguistics (alongside philosophy), professionally through […]
Academics in the United Kingdom and in Australia interviewed about the impact agenda show fears that the balance between applied and basic knowledge may be tilting too far in one way.
The UK’s proposed Teaching Excellence Framework focuses strongly on ‘value for money,’ which, argues our Daniel Nehring, further elides the intellectual dimensions of scholarship and replaced it with the reduction of academics’ labor to the production of a skilled labor force.
Academics do not simply teach and do research: they are teacher-researchers, notes Steve Fuller. In reviewing the UK spending review, he says, it is the value added to society by nurturing this complex role that should be at the forefront of the state’s thinking about the criteria used to fund universities.
A new project from the British Academy sets down the calculator in the latest attempt to tot up the value of the social sciences and humanities.
King’s College London’s Alexandre Afonso looks at the so-called marketization of higher education with disdain–not because of its advent but because it hasn’t gone far enough.
In the past 15 years and across successive governments in the United Kingdom, the concept of value for money has been internalized throughout higher education. Here, the author of “Consuming Higher Education: Why Learning Can’t Be Bought” outlines why it is a problem to use student choice and value for money as a means of holding universities to account.
In an essay published in the London Review of Books, Howard Hotson analyses the THE-QS World University Rankings and concludes […]
