How the humanities became the new enemy within. The strain of conservatism that has now taken up residence in Downing Street is tireless in its identification of enemies.
The BBC and Channel 4 were put on notice during the latter stages of the election campaign, and the government is now openly pursuing the termination of the BBC licence fee. Dominic Cummings’ long-harboured resentment towards civil service mandarins is driving Whitehall reform, imperilling its independence. The vanguard of rightwing thinktanks and newspapers is redoubling its attacks on universities, with a pitifully thin Policy Exchange report on the topic this week earning a Times headline decrying these “sneering” institutions. Meanwhile, a bogey-ideology known as “wokeness”, constructed by conservative commentators and “free speech” advocates, now serves as an all-purpose bin into which any form of activism, complaint or critical theory can be thrown.
Market economics has driven universities into crisis – and we’re all paying t... The trebling of tuition fees would unleash a new golden age for English universities, or so we were told.
They would become financially sustainable, competitive, liberated from stifling bureaucracy and responsive to the needs of students. And yet, nearly a decade later, higher education is in crisis. Tuition fees have formed part of a full-frontal assault on the living standards of a generation battered by a housing crisis, stagnating wages and slashed services. And with 83% of student loans forecast to never be paid back in full, the promises of financial sustainability are a nonsense.
When Disaster Capitalism Comes for the University of Puerto Rico. EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been edited to clarify Apollo Education Group's link to Puerto Rico's bond debt.
They are partly owned by Apollo Global Management, a direct bondholder. As the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) begins a new semester, its future is anything but certain. Hurricane María dealt a blow to its infrastructure last year; now, both the federal and local governments seem intent on further damaging the island’s public-university system rather than repairing and strengthening this crucial asset for Puerto Rico’s socioeconomic development. In a territory with soaring poverty and unemployment rates, students face a 100 percent increase in tuition alongside the elimination of the waivers traditionally offered to athletes, choir members, and other students providing services to the university—all at an institution that for over a century has been the island’s main channel for upward mobility.
Times Higher Education - Education news and university jobs. Why UK universities should adopt US-style degrees. I am finishing my 20th year of teaching in the UK.
I came to Lancaster University from my native US in 1994, and in 2006 I left Lancaster for the University of Aberdeen. I was born, raised, and educated in the US. But by now I think I fathom the very different UK conventions. Walter Isaacson Lecture. My fellow humanists, I am deeply humbled to be here today.
Real World. “Utopiæ insulæ tabula.”
Woodcut map, From Utopia, by Thomas More, 1518 by Jenny C. Mann. In Michael Gove's world Jane Austen, Orwell and Dickens will die out. Michael Gove is Mr M'Choakumchild and Thomas Gradgrind personified: "What I want is, Facts.
Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. " Welcome, Freshmen. You Do Not Deserve to Be Here. A few weeks ago, I attended a conference at Stanford University.
We finished in the late afternoon, and as I walked out into the sunlight I noticed groups of people, young and old, all streaming in the same direction. I decided to follow them. We came to a large courtyard where several thousand people were gathered in front of a stage. It was the university's 123rd freshman convocation.
Richard Shaw, dean of admission and financial aid, was at the podium, dressed in academic regalia, telling a story about an American Indian student who had gone from the reservation to Stanford and become a NASA scientist. The Greater Humanities. School of Athens, Raphael, 1510-1511 Posted by kind permission of James Clifford, this is the text of a talk he delivered at “The University We Are For,” a conference organized by David Theo Goldberg and Wendy Brown at UC Berkeley (11/5/10).
The Berkeley forum is webcast here and the UC Irvine version can be viewed here. “The University We Are For.” Life Expectancy for Less Educated Whites in U.S. Is Shrinking. Iranian university bans on women causes consternation. 21 September 2012Last updated at 20:57 ET By Fariba Sahraei BBC Persian Female university students in Iran have outnumbered men for the past decade With the start of the new Iranian academic year, a raft of restrictions on courses open to female students has been introduced, raising questions about the rights of women to education in Iran - and the long-term impact such exclusions might have.
More than 30 universities have introduced new rules banning female students from almost 80 different degree courses. These include a bewildering variety of subjects from engineering, nuclear physics and computer science, to English literature, archaeology and business. The threat to our universities.