As the UK Home Office unveils plans to attract the “brightest and best” individuals to the UK, Johnny Rich outlines how using university league tables as a proxy measure to achieve this goal is unlikely to be successful. The UK Government has announced…
Category: Higher Education
Book Review: Complaint! by Sara Ahmed
In Complaint!, Sara Ahmed follows the institutional life of complaints within the university, exploring how they begin, how they are processed and how they are ultimately stopped, thereby reproducing systems of whiteness, violence and silencing. Propos…
New AI tools that can write student essays require educators to rethink teaching and assessment
AI tools are available today that can write compelling university level essays. Taking an example of sample essay produced by the GPT-3 transformer, Mike Sharples discusses the implications of this technology for higher education and argues that they s…
Stratification, Centralisation and the REF – The changing face of the UK university workforce
Drawing on an analysis of HESA and case study data, Andrew Jenkins and Alison Wolf, explore the changing composition of the workforce in the UK higher education sector. Trends towards increased professionalisation and centralisation of roles, as well a…
Global conflict and the rise of ‘post naïve’ science diplomacy.
Reflecting on developments in science diplomacy following the war in Ukraine and developing ideas from their previous post questioning the current conceptualisation of science diplomacy, Doubravka Olšáková and Sam Robinson, argue that we are at the …
War in Ukraine highlights the enduring myths of science diplomacy.
Amongst other things, the war in Ukraine has demonstrated the failure of western diplomacy to contain the outbreak of war in Europe. Over the past decades, one aspect of this diplomacy has involved the role of scientific and research relationships betw…
Book Review: Subversive Pedagogies: Radical Possibility in the Academy edited by Kate Schick and Claire Timperley
In Subversive Pedagogies: Radical Possibility in the Academy, Kate Schick and Claire Timperley bring together contributors to explore teaching as a subversive space of radical possibility, drawing attention to pedagogies that are situated, embodied, ca…
Times Higher Education is expanding, but what is it becoming?
Since its origins as a newspaper supplement, the Times Higher Education (THE) has become so much more than a higher education news company. As its business model and commercial raison d’être changed, so has its rankings-related journalism. In thi…
What can universities do to support the well-being and mental health of postgraduate researchers?
As highlighted in a recent LSE Impact blogpost, there is evidence to show that postgraduate researchers face particular risks in relation to poor mental health and well-being. Reporting on a recent review of interventions carried out by universities an…
A Narrative CV for Universities?
In an attempt to move away from overly quantitative assessments of researchers, many research funding bodies are turning to the use of narrative CVs. In this blogpost, Elizabeth Gadd argues that, in the same way, offering universities a narrative forma…