This is not normal: universities in the news
A reaction to recent news coverage of UK universities, among other things.
I particularly liked “the degraded language of TEF, REF and KEF, which confuses bureaucracy with vision”. Well said.
It is not normal for universities to occupy the front pages of national newspapers. Granted, at any time there is a vital, occasionally tense, dialogue between universities and the nations in which they are situated. The line between ideals of academic freedom on the one hand, and the 
realities of finances and state oversight on the other hand, is notoriously fuzzy. The extent to which universities reflect or represent their nations is always a potential point of controversy.
But these are not normal times. Over the past few months, debate has swirled frenetically around questions including university funding, whether we have too many universities, what our top managers are paid, free speech on campus, how we select our students, and what we teach. We appear now to be at the point where even what academics think might be a point for national outrage.
It seems to me that much of…
View original post 767 more words
In the Dark 
October 30, 2017 at 9:20 pm
The Daily Mail should remember some of the stories it has reported in the past, which seem to explain this headline quite adequately:
There’s this one which reports “Conservative politics work almost as a ‘gateway’ into prejudice against others”