The student drinking culture

Over the past ten years I have frequently, particularly on a Friday night or at weekends, overheard students talking about their plans for a drinking spree. I remember on one occasion hearing one female student say to another at a bus stop that she was planning to get ‘totally smashed’ and that it would not [...]

Organising international student recruitment

In Ireland the new government has now been in place for a couple of weeks or so, and it is interesting to note what has been its first higher education initiative: international student recruitment. Last week Ruairi Quinn, Minister for Education and Skills (together with Richard Bruton, whose ministerial title is Minister for Jobs, Enterprise [...]

The working student

The Vice-Chancvellor of the University of Melbourne in Australia, Professor Glyn Davis, recently wrote about some of the financial pressures on students. In Australia, he said, 44 per cent of students are also in employment of some sort or another while undertaking their studies. In fact, some work done in Ireland has suggested that a remarkably [...]

Is the ‘public university’ doomed?

In a post on this blog a couple of months ago I looked at the emergence of campaigns to protect the concept of ‘public’ universities. I noted at the time that the term ‘public univertsity’ might not have as clear a meaning as some might think, and that as a society we are not really [...]

Trivialising brutality

Maybe I’m too innocent or lead en excessively sheltered life, but I have to admit that this news story shocked me. In the United States a computer games company is planning to release a game called School Shooter: North American Tour 2010. The ‘game’ is loosely based on the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School [...]

The wiki generation

If you are like me, you may be getting a bit tired of the prefix ‘wiki’ appearing everywhere. I have to confess that it has taken me until today to find out what ‘wiki’ actually means. Actually, I still don’t really know, because there are various suggestions out there on the internet. The two most [...]

Not just a philosophical question

Over the past year campaigns have been fought over the survival of small philosophy departments in at least two British universities: Middlesex and Keele. In both cases the university concerned had decided to discontinue the subject, where philosophy was not part of what many might have considered the more visible public identity of the institution; [...]

Determining the national research agenda

A common feature of government-commissioned higher education reviews in a number of countries in recent years has been the suggestion that publicly funded research (and indeed teaching programmes) should take account of national strategic priorities. Put another way, what this means is that if university researchers are spending public money on research projects, these should [...]

The right and wrong Michel(l)e

In June 2010 Paul McCartney was awarded the US Library of Congress Gershwin Prize, and to celebrate the award was invited to sing in the White House. As part of the concert he sang the Beatles’ song ‘Michelle’, in the presence of Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle. McCartney quipped that he might return regularly [...]

Taking down the Tower of Babel: languages in retreat?

When I was a student, not that many years ago (or so I would argue), it was taken for granted that languages were major tools for success, and language programmes in universities were highly popular. In Ireland, the still rather new membership of what was then the European Economic Community had created a much greater [...]