Blogging

This blog is now nearly three and a half years old, and has attracted over a million hits. During that time I have published 1,802 posts, and readers have made 12,580 comments on these posts. Something new has been published here pretty much every day since June 2008. It may be time for a change [...]

Promoting the extra-curricular experience

The typical university student of previous generations no longer exists. Today students are not all recent school-leavers embarking on three or four years of full-time study before setting out on a career of permanent employment. There are still some of those, but others are part-time students, or mature students coming out of employment, or distance [...]

An unexpected Newcastle United FC story: a good one

From time to time, as readers of this blog know, I comment on the affairs of Newcastle United football club. Mostly these are comments of despair and disbelief, as the club has for years now had a habit of taking mad decisions, firing good managers and appointing not-so-obviously-good ones, selling players the club needs to [...]

Does anyone other than Harvard still need a Chemistry professor?

The answer to the question is yes, by the way. But it is a question that is now being asked (and for chemistry you can substitute various other disciplines). But where does this question come from? Well, at a recent conference on the future of higher education in Madrid, a New York university president, David [...]

Recession photograph

The photo below was taken on a recent visit to America, but it probably could have been taken in a number of countries, in any city near you.

Academic discourse: robust argument, or personal unkindness?

Last week a friend, who works in another university, wrote me an email telling me about the stress she is experiencing as a result of the behaviour of an academic colleague, who has been haranguing her (and others) at committee meetings. It is not an entirely rare experience in universities, alas. In a previous job, [...]

Revolution day

This day – October 23 – has been declared by the new Libyan government to be ‘liberation day’, the day on which the uprising against the now deceased dictator was completed. Although this is probably not much on the minds of Libya’s National Transitional Council, October 23 is a date with all sorts of revolutionary [...]

Education, or skills, or what?

An interesting public argument has been taking place in the United States, one that should have resonances elsewhere also. It was prompted by a statement from the Governor of Florida, Rick Scott. The Governor has been cutting the state’s budget, and in doing so has mused on what he would and would not like to [...]

University managerialism: another narrative

One of the most common critiques these days of university life as presented by academics is that of ‘managerialism’. As far back as 2001 an article in Times Higher Education described it as follows: ‘”New managerialism” usually refers to practices commonplace in the private sector, particularly the imposition of a powerful management body that overrides professional skills [...]

Do university computer workstations still work?

Nearly ten years ago, when I was the fairly new President of Dublin City University, we opened the new O’Reilly Library in the university – a state of the art building designed to offer the right environment and facilities for today’s students. One key feature of the library was the availability of large numbers of [...]