Archers Academics
Beyond @LegoAcademics Inspired by the novelty of Lego Academics and by the chance meeting (by my wife) of an Archers namesake at a conference I wondered how many Archers characters also had academic counterparts. (For th…
Posts, page 27
Can we have our Honorary Degree back please?
Honorary Degree revocation is pretty unusual Previous posts have commented on the awards of Honorary Degrees to celebrities. The risk for universities in making such awards though is that famous people sometimes turn out…
New Sino-Foreign Fun
US and Russian universities in new Sino-Foreign ventures Exciting news from Asia as not one but two universities announce new Sino-Foreign higher education institutions. First up is the University of Pittsburgh which has…
Urgent: save those emails
Do we need to preserve Vice-Chancellors’ emails? A diverting essay in Inside Higher Ed has a call for the preservation of presidential email: …boards of trustees should act – with a sense of urgency. They might begin by …
2014 Academic Ranking of World Universities: Top 20 and UK placings
2014 ARWU University World Rankings: Top 20 and UK placings It feels like a strange time to publish a world ranking but ideal holiday reading for many. Anyway, as in previous years there is not a huge amount to get excit…
More on Beyoncé and Ghostbusting courses
The Telegraph seems to have a bit of a thing about courses featuring popular music and musicians. Especialy Beyoncé Recently they published this story about Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus studies being offered at US colleges: I…
The new University of Life
Some people are just too smart for university Must admit to being immensely irritated at the so-called ‘UnCollege’ proposition> And, having seen Dale speak recently at Going Global my annoyance has not decreased. This se…
Jobs in .ac.uk
Some handy data on higher education employment trends HEFCE has published ‘interactive’ data on the trends in employment of staff in the higher education sector for the ten years, 2003-04 to 2012-13. The data is divided …
Spy kids
GCHQ accredits UK master’s degrees for ‘cyber spies’ Was very much taken by this thrilling news. Of course we have had Professional Body accreditation for many years and more recently courses supported by Asda and other …
A long list of management principles
Important maxims to live and work by? Or just a long and forgettable list? The Chronicle of Higher Education has a diverting piece on a set of rules the new president of the University of Akron has issued to his senior s…
From 007 to Registrar
A distinctive new approach to the campus novel Unlikely as it may seem this brief book offers the most exciting representation of a Registrar since Lucky Jim. Set in a real university (York) but with fictional (we hope) …
Mobile students
Student mobility in and out of the UK The British Council has produced this nice graphic on student mobility in and out of the UK: This new interactive animation shows how the UK as a provider and host of internationally…
Video game scholarships
League of Legends becomes a varsity sport Inside Higher Ed has a story about an Illinois university which has decided to make ‘League of Legends’ a varsity sport and award a number of scholarships to boot: In the latest …
Graduation 2014: Latest
Updates from the Ceremonial Front Line I recently provided a summary of a series of posts related to graduation (reproduced below): A recent post on graduation challenges including Decanal difficulties with names and a f…
Singalonga Higher Ed
Lyrical challenges at the University of Utah Inside Higher Ed has a diverting piece on the changes being made to the University of Utah’s ‘fight song’ to address some of the lyrical challenges of the original: The line “…
Honorary Degree: serious or celeb 2014
Who are this year’s lucky winners? A post some time ago on Honorary Degree recipients noted that almost all of them fall clearly into one of two categories: they are either serious or celeb. Back in 2013 I provided a han…
Signs of the Times
Is university signage important for academic achievement? No. And I fear that this story rather overstates the significance of signage on university campuses. This piece was pointed out to me by Simon @GlobalHE (to whom …
Betting the farm
A very big gamble The Chronicle of Higher Education has an extraordinary piece about how one investment manager gambled away $13.1 Million of her university’s money: Over a series of three contracts, Ms. Prizevoits signe…
It’s graduation time again
It’s gown and mortar board season Having realised that I’ve written quite a few posts on graduation in the past, and being short of something new to say as our graduation season kicks off this week, I thought I would bri…
The luxury gap
Dormitories v apartments I wrote some time ago here about the advent of extremely luxurious student accommodation in the US. This was linked to anxieties about students having it all just too easy. Certainly the trend in…