Cultural Capital: education

The press coverage of the launch of the New College of the Humanities is symptomatic of the decline of our civilisation that its founders are seeking to exploit. The college was repeatedly described as a "university", though it will not have the power to confer degrees. It has been said that the line-up of star professors will teach, when in fact they will collectively give ... read more

The repercussions of the cuts in higher education are being felt in Bristol, where lecturers at the University of the West of England (UWE) have been forced to take strike action over threats to staffing. Michael reports on the strike and finds out what students who supported it think about the situation.

Michael Chanan is professor of film at Roehampton University ... read more

This is a cross-post from Enemies of Reason

We'll read a lot about these student protests today. Much of the rage will focus on the fact that an elderly chutney maker had his car kicked in by some people on his way to see Michael McIntyre and Cheryl Cole perform in his honour. Some will deplore the breaking and burning of things by those whom Kay ... read more

"Keep Calm and Carry On." The appeal of this particular piece of credit crunch kitsch may now be on the wane, as protestors take to the streets, but since the first announcement of the coalition's austerity programme, we have been repeatedly subject to a similar kind of official rhetoric.

The exhortation that we "share the pain" of the cuts, recognising that "we are all in this together" has promoted a strange ... read more

The defining image of the student occupation at University College London is probably a MacBook. Walk past security, through the corridor plastered with hand-made signs, and into the brightly-lit Jeremy Bentham Room, which is overflowing with students, and you'll be struck by the proliferation of laptops. Clusters of large tables are dominated by them, supporting the core of the UCL occupation: the working groups.

The Media Team are updating Twitter, an ... read more

The ongoing dispute over the future of Middlesex University's highly regarded philosophy department was ratcheted up a notch on Friday, when students and three members of the academic staff -- Professors Peter Osborne, Peter Hallward and Christian Kerslake -- were suspended from the university, pending an investigation into their role in a second occupation at the university's Trent Park campus.

Protesters entered campus buildings on Thursday ... read more

It was only a matter of time before the protests of 1968 were alluded to in the Nash Room at the ICA yesterday evening. After an academic year that has brought mounting opposition to cuts in higher education, an impassioned crowd of students and academics from across the country had convened at the arts centre for a debate -- "Who's afraid of philosophy?" -- to ... read more

The American political philosopher Michael Sandel, whom I profiled for the NS in June this year, has been teaching Justice, an undergraduate course in moral and political philosophy, at Harvard for nearly 30 years now. It's wildly popular, having attracted more than 14,000 students over the years. Watching the video footage of his classes recently made available online by Harvard, as part of a collaboration with ... read more

As an addendum to my previous post on the Research Excellence Framework, let me point you to a piece written three years ago for the Times Higher Education Supplement by the philosopher Simon Blackburn. Blackburn was writing in the era of the REF's predecessor, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), but the problems he describes are familiar:

[W]e . . . find with gratitude that "the sub-panel is aware ... read more

Last month, I blogged about the establishment of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which lays down the criteria for disbursement of research funding in British universities. One of those criteria concerns the likely "impact" of academic research. And, as I pointed out, the problem with this is that it's hard to quantify the short-term impact of research in the humanities -- or, for that matter, the purer regions ... read more