'Higher Education' tag archive

informal basis, and asked how their procedures could be improved so as to prevent departmental chairs and university appointments panels acting as a force for conservatism in the belief that this would reap RAE rewards. In pursuing these goals it was agreed that SWIP would be working jointly with all those who felt that their […]

News Compulsory downshiftingThe landmark case of the Open University v. its part-time staff is grinding its way through the courts towards likely victory for the associate staff on pro-rata fulltime employment benefits. Whilst this highlights a particularly bad case of handme-down employment conditions in the HE sector (one recent estimate puts pay at £8.00 per […]

News Strategies for language? Being a modern linguist is a pretty rotten business. Applications to study modern languages in UK universities have fallen by over a third in the last decade. Whilst Spanish and to a lesser extent Italian have fared reasonably well, other languages are in rapid decline. University applications have directly reflected falling […]

‘Take your time but be quick about it, because you don’t know what awaits you’, said French philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1998 at Stanford. [1] Indeed. He would not have expected to be cited like this by Valérie Pécresse, French Minster for Higher Education and Research, in January 2009: We are taking all the measures […]

The immediate causes of the current protests by students, lecturers and academic researchers in Europe are contingent; they are directed at individual educational institutions or administrators, and the demands they make are capable of being met over the short term.* But on a second level, one that cannot be separated from the immediate events, protestors […]

Reports from the protests by those campaigning against the cuts to educations, including Nina Power on the centrality of women.