A strange use for a weapon
On the slightly odd tradition of the university mace During our summer graduations, as I sat on stage and mused on the various facets of these wonderful if rather bizarre ceremonies (as I’ve done before so won’t repeat h…
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Reducing regulation in Australia
But will regulatory review deliver? A story in Inside Higher Ed notes that the Australian government is considering cutting higher education regulation. A previous post noted the woeful track record of UK governments in …
A Huge Outsourcing Deal
Texas goes large A while ago via The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on massive outsourcing activity in Texas. Whilst outsourcing in itself is not that unusual, the scale of the deal done by Texas A&M University i…
Badges, badges, badges
Earn your first badge now! I’ve posted before about this nonsense but then I heard the exciting news about how you can bypass all that messy unpleasant formal education stuff and get straight on and get some real recogni…
Faking it: China’s Diploma Mills
Report Reveals 100 Fake Universities (and wild chickens) A blog post last year noted the case of a non-existent university in the USA. Now there is an interesting report on China’s Diploma Mills which has shown up a larg…
More Data – Open Data
Data for all Data.ac.uk has launched. It’s a great idea for a site which is intended to provide access to lots of open data but also tools and somewhere to share ideas and approaches: This is a landmark site for academia…
Regulation without legislation
Not a campaign slogan but the next steps in HE regulatory change from HEFCE Something of a surprise announcement from HEFCE on new changes to HE regulation. The changes follow a written Ministerial statement from David W…
A higher education report to remember?
Or not much of an impact? It’s a month or so now since the publication of the IPPR report on securing the future of higher education in England. It was a big report based on a considerable amount of work by a group heade…
An engaging app for students?
Possibly. But it’s a tough sell. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story on a new app which claims to offer faster outreach to students. But will it catch on? The app, Student Engauge, is part of a larger trend tow…
More honoraries: serious or celeb 2013
Who are the lucky stars this year? A previous post on Honorary Degree recipients noted that almost all of them fall clearly into one of two categories: they are either serious or celeb. The former really don’t get much p…
Another amusing attack on administrators
Flipping administration. Clever. An entertaining piece on another splendid idea by Benjamin Ginsberg. A previous post noted his recent book The Fall of the Faculty had a distinctive analysis of the process of strategic p…
Delivering better higher education data?
Another attempt to clean up HE data A previous post on the HE regulatory landscape noted the challenge of sorting out the massive range of data reporting required of universities – 550 different reporting requirements – …
More interest in branch campuses
Immigration constraints prompt overseas interests Out-law.com has an interesting piece on institutional ambitions overseas: In research carried out by Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, 67% of surveyed univ…
Eau de HE: the Smell of Success
A new range of fundraising fragrances from Notre Dame The Chronicle of Higher Education has this entertaining piece about the very serious business of making money from smells: The University of Notre Dame has long been …
Measuring Collegiality
Can you test for academics’ collegiality? And would you want to? The Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece on the launch of a new test to help determine academics’ collegiality or,as they put it, whether a faculty me…
Rate your administrator
Rate this, rate that, rate everything Following the outstanding success of Rate Your Lecturer, which has been overwhelmingly endorsed by right-thinking academics everywhere, it’s time to broaden the assessment. Due to ex…
Another international prize
A good night at the THELMAs Terrific result for the University of Nottingham’s Asia Business Centre at last night’s THE Leadership and Management Awards (the THELMAs). Although we were less fortunate in two other categor…
School of Rock
New foundation degree in heavy metal makes some noise The Nottingham Post reports on a new degree in heavy metal launched at New College Nottingham: Performance, recording and promotion will also feature heavily, with st…
£5m for Students’ Green Fund
Big funding for student-led green initiatives HEFCE recently announced the launch of the ‘Students’ Green Fund’ which is intended to help students work with their institutions on sustainable development: NUS will run a s…
Using data to enhance campus services
Really useful data Some great examples of using data to improve institutional management in this The Chronicle of Higher Education story: William D. Law Jr. was talking about “big data” before it was a buzzword. Mr. Law,…