From where I sit - A sad loss of literacy Down Under
University lecturers in Australia are seeing increasing numbers of students who lack what were once considered basic literacy skills.Last semester, I taught a first-year communications unit at...
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Battling Granny takes the honours
Our university made the local and national papers last week with the news that it had awarded a joint BA Honours degree in Psychology and Medieval Studies to 137-year-old Winifred Armitage.Winifred,...
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Noddy management
Treat your staff to lashings of 1940s-style good sense and you jolly well won't go far wrong, advises Blyton devotee Sally Feldman
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Coming down to earth
Alan Ryan says growing disparity in graduate premiums doesn't bode well for HEIs
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Off Piste: Grand masters of vinyl
Prog rock devotee Greg Walker takes an affectionate look at an intelligent and gloriously ambitious genre, and asks us to celebrate the era when rock's dinosaurs roamed the Earth
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Guest leader: The real sting of the QAA whip
Attacks on the grading system will not improve standards but will harm the UK's reputation, claims Malcolm Grant
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Michael Baxandall, 1933-2008
Michael Baxandall, widely considered one of the finest postwar art historians, died on 12 August at the age of 74. He was born in Cardiff on 18 August 1933 into a family steeped in the world of...
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University of Oxford - MBA student targets US market
Students from poorer families in America could find it easier to access higher education thanks to a new funding initiative devised by MBA student Scott Patterson, based at the University of Oxford's...
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Where excellence shines through 1
As ever, my old friend Kevin Sharpe in his opinion article harks back to a non-existent golden age of academia ("A lighter weight of paper", 28 August).A recent perusal of several PhDs published in...
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Where excellence shines through 2
Kevin Sharpe asserts that the requirement for PhDs to make an original contribution to knowledge "has gone even from elite universities" and is being replaced "in many institutions" with a need to...
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Bridging the language gap
I read with amusement, interest and a degree of recognition William Burns' opinion article ("Ditch the island mentality", 4 September).However, I have two objections to make. The first has to do with...
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Staff costs remain steady
Your article "Finances top list of threats to the health of UK sector" (4 September) includes the assertion from Grant Thornton that for universities, "pay is somewhere between 60 and 70 per cent of...
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Thoughts and feelings 1
In his work on Jungian individual difference, the psychologist David Keirsey posited two kinds of "ideas" people: intuitive thinking types, who value logic-based ideas, and intuitive feeling types,...
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Thoughts and feelings 2
Contributions to the recent debate on university standards have characterised the Government's current view as being that the function of higher education is principally to prepare students for the...
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Right-thinking Marxists
I was interested in Anthony Glees' revelation about the apparent "left-of-centre to Marxist consensus" in education ("Culture in the state-funded sector condones failure, claims professor", 4...