Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
An Almost-Autopsy of Small Colleges
There’s a lovely diversity in the size and mission of institutions of higher education in the United States. It’s a shame that the little schools, like the Virginia women’s college Sweet Briar, are faced with ugly financial threats.
University Rankings Driven by Corporate Interests
Social Science Space’s newest core blogger takes a look at how industry has an outsize stake in the business of ranking universities. Has academe gotten in deeper than it bargained for?
Preserving Academic Freedom When Tenure Is Tenuous
Cathy Sandeen, chancellor of University of Wisconsin Colleges and the University of Wisconsin-Extension, argues that universities need to be more honest on how academic freedom applies to different teaching roles in an environment where tenure is no longer a given.
Reversing Africa’s Academic Brain Drain
It won’t come easy, but an Nigerian academic working in Arkansas urges administrators of African universities to limit the obstacles keeping Africans from choosing to work in the home continent.
Loony Lefties, Trolls and Public Debates About Higher Education in the UK
All the arguments for a critique of the new authoritarian, hierarchical, business-minded corporate universities are in place, says Daniel Nehring. The ways to insert these arguments into public life still need to be found.
Is ‘Credentialism’ a Genuine Danger?
The values of a university education are many and generally agreed upon. But is holding a degree the same thing?
What’s Wrong With Academic Freedom in the UK?
Given the ferocity of the current assault on academic freedom, argues Daniel Nehring, it seems to me that we may be close to a point of no return, past which ‘tone of voice policies’ and similar control mechanisms may become a norm into which coming generations of academics will be socialized as a matter of course.
Giving Reviewers Some Credit: The R-index
Peer review is flawed, and a new index proposes a simple way to create transparency and quality control mechanisms. Shane Gero and Maurício Cantor believe that giving citable recognition to reviewers can improve the system by encouraging more participation but also higher quality, constructive input, without the need for a loss of anonymity.
