There can be little doubt that the research environment in universities is changing: it is now less a collegiate community of scholars than a competitive game of winners and losers. This transformation…
In the run up to a general election, it would be unusual to spot radical shifts in the government’s higher education policy. The latest annual grant letter that the Department of Business, Innovation and…
The funding of higher education is a mess, and it is getting messier. New proposals on the table to allow universities to take on the debt burden of their own students could have profoundly worrying consequences…
Spring in UK universities sees the funding letter drop on the mat of the vice chancellor’s lodge and like an English April, no two years are the same. Coalition ministers are keen to tell us that the present…
There are class tensions existing very close to the surface of the government’s policy to increase the number of students from disadvantaged areas going to university. New data shows that the number of…
I recall the time some years ago when the possible introduction of student fees was being debated and a government decision was imminent. I was attending a seminar on the subject organised by a think tank…
The election of the Rudd Government in 2007 killed the momentum that had been building in the last few years of the Howard government for research valuation to move beyond metrics-based methods (such as…
Visiting British expert David Sweeney could have star appeal for academics frustrated by the bureaucratic inflexibility of Australia’s research auditing system and metrics-based assessments blind to the…