They are selling replica Leicester City shirts on market stalls in Beijing. They weren’t selling them a year ago. That’s what topping the Premier League does. It’s almost certain that Leicester’s two universities will now see a spike in international, and probably UK, applications: everyone loves a winner. The Guardian published its 2017 University Guide…
There’s an episode in series one of The West Wing (it’s episode 18, ‘Six Meetings Before Lunch’, a day I can understand), in which Sam Seaborn, the junior speechwriter, is talking about education policy and defence policy. He says “Schools should be palaces. They should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge…
Drive down Main Street in Salt Lake City and, at number 143, two blocks south of the Salt Lake Temple you’ll find Neumont University, which educates 366 students. Bryn Athyn College – “spiritual by choice, small by design” – in Philadelphia is smaller at just 215 students, but unlike other tiny American universities, Neumont chooses to use the…
Since I arrived in January, I have been setting out my ideas on the future of Hallam, and have written here about refreshing the University’s strategy. From today, you can find out more about how we will approach this work and keep up to date with developments here. Alongside that, I have been looking hard…
I’d be lying (and that’s something Vice-Chancellors should never be caught doing) if I said that I played any part at all in the 1975 referendum on Britain’s membership of the Common Market. I was sixteen, I had plenty of other things on my mind. There was the first Cricket World Cup to occupy me,…
The Institute for Fiscal Studies report which I blogged about a couple of weeks ago caused something of a stir. It looked at the connection between university degrees and subsequent earnings, using HMRC data to track individuals over time. At the core of the report is a simple challenge which characterises higher education systems across…
The University approved a new strategy, for 2015-2020, in late 2014. I was obviously not here, but I’m told that the strategy was the result of extensive consultation across the University over an extended period of time. Since the 2015-2020 strategy was published, any number of things have changed: there has been a general election,…
The English author and critic Simon Gray had a pretty caustic view of his university experiences. “I wrote all my papers”, he claimed, “with a fraudulent fluency that could only have taken in those who were bound by their own educations to honour a fluent fraud”. Others, of course, have a nobler view of what…
It’s a new term, and a new season: the headline is itself a quotation from Browning’s poem, Home Thoughts, from Abroad, which begins ‘oh, to be in England, now that April’s there’. The clocks have gone forward, bringing lighter evenings and a sense of Spring arriving. It’s the beginning of – either – my second term…
In 1975, the United Kingdom voted on whether to remain a member of the European Economic Community. There was an article, I recall, in The Sunday Times by the then very influential left-wing historian E. P. Thompson arguing passionately against membership. Thompson excoriated the values of the common market. He argued that markets were all about…