Category: Higher Education

2022 in review: Living and Working in Higher Education

From the war in Ukraine to the politics of citation, this annual review brings together twelve posts that explore issues in higher education and how they are shaped by the world within and without the ivory tower. The responsibility of intellectuals in…

The Lovelace Effect – AI generated texts should lead us to re-value creativity in academic writing

The continuing development of AI generated writing has led to a debate around its use in higher education. In this post, Simone Natale and Leah Henrickson, draw on their research into computational creativity and introduce the concept of the ‘Lovelace …

Book Review: Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School – But Didn’t by Marc F. Bellemare

In Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School – But Didn’t, Marc F. Bellemare offers a new guide to research economists to help equip them with the practical tools for ‘doing economics’. This book will be an excellent starting point f…

Contrary to media narratives, higher education has little impact on students’ political views

It is often taken as a given that higher education shapes the politics of students. However, drawing on evidence from the British Election Study, Tom Fryer finds students’ political attitudes do not change radically during their studies. Instead, stude…

Book Review: Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization: Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research, and Scholarship edited by Abby Day, Lois Lee, Dave S.P. Thomas and James Spickard

In Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization: Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research, and Scholarship, Abby Day, Lois Lee, Dave S.P. Thomas and James Spickard bring together academics from across the globe to explore tangible actions those wit…

A tool for navigating your research career

In this cross-post, Christina Boswell introduces a newly developed tool to help researchers map the activities they are engaged with the aim of exposing where activity is clustered. The tool has been designed to help researchers be more strategic and s…

Book Review: Creative Universities: Reimagining Education for Global Challenges and Alternative Futures by Anke Schwittay

In Creative Universities: Reimagining Education for Global Challenges and Alternative Futures, Anke Schwittay proposes imaginative strategies to secure radical change to higher education and resist the instrumentalisation and commodification of knowled…

What does it mean to be a student in European higher education?

Students, even those from different countries and cultures are all too often thought of as a homogenous bloc. Drawing on research undertaken for their new book, Constructing the Higher Education Student, Rachel Brooks discusses the different ways in wh…

Rankings affect the financial sustainability of English universities, just not for the elite

University rankings are often presumed to be value neutral, creating equal opportunities for the institutions they order to compete around fixed indicators of quality. However, highlighting new collaborative research, Roxana Baltaru shows how universit…