Fees ‘amnesty’ tops UUK’s pre-election wish list
Parties exhorted to prioritise research investment and internationalisation

Parties exhorted to prioritise research investment and internationalisation

New book explores challenges female academics at Cambridge face on route to top

First-ever American poll to be carried out on the effect of higher education on happiness and success

Solutions to demographic, quality and employability issues needed for a sector slow to adapt to globalisation
I’m not sure what was more shocking about Kevin Fong’s article “Gear-shift mechanism” (13 February): that University College London apparently does not foster transferable skills in its...
Laurie Taylor’s Which?-style review of Professor Lapping (20 February) reprises his 1980s response to a call by Lord Joseph for an academic equivalent to Which?. At that time in Taylor’s column, the...
Rebecca Braun’s article about maternity leave for academics (“She knows, she tried”, Features, 23 January) gave a rather negative view of the experience and detracted from some of the progress that...
The seriousness of the threatened takeover of the Institute of Education, University of London by University College London (“Love, honour, obey: will the IoE repent its UCL union at leisure”,...
In the article “Open access may have little impact on time-poor firms” (News, February), representatives of the publisher Elsevier suggest that achieving the UK government’s goal of full open access...
The feature “Fit to supervise?” (20 February) suggests that poor supervision is to blame for “substandard doctoral theses”. But poor theses are produced by poor students. No degree of expert...
After carefully reviewing the issue of sharing personal data, Dame Fiona Caldicott concluded: “The duty to share information can be as important as the duty to protect patient confidentiality.” The...
Claims about the cost burden imposed by “onerous” methodology for the research excellence framework (“The REF: how was it for you?”, February) ignore the behavioural response of academics and...

Applied research group bolsters its roster of expertise with with five new posts. Plus the latest higher education jobs and appointments

Students should not be expected to ‘perform’ their emotional commitment to trendy political orthodoxies, says Bruce Macfarlane

In the midst of a desert, Shahidha Bari finds a wellspring of scholarly inspiration