Links tagged with “universities”
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Stefan Collini · Who are the spongers now? · LRB 21 January 2016
It’s probably only because I’m not involved in higher education, and don’t have children heading towards it, that I find reading things like this, about the government’s current and future plans, enjoyable, like dystopian fiction.
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How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus - The Atlantic
Fascinating. Things like this, and the behaviours and attitudes amplified by social media, make me wonder what the world will be like when today’s 20-year-olds are in charge. (via @preoccupations)
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Deep Springs College - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
26 students, no fees, isolated location, students and staff all work on the ranch/farm. (via The New York Review of Books)
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Sold Out by Stefan Collini (London Review of Books)
On how the UK’s universities have changed over recent decades, becoming bigger, more beholden to private interests, more expensive for students… the LRB’s best current affairs articles are all so depressing.
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Times Higher Education - This could be huge…
Good article on online courses, a bit more practical than Clay Shirky’s (also good but different). Challenges of teaching one, how can they make money, what are the implications of universities recognising the qualifications, etc. (via @annegalloway)
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Napster, Udacity, and the Academy
Clay on free online courses being to universities as file sharing was/is to the music industry. Even aside from that, worth it for making clear the variety and scale (ie, how tiny Ivy League is) of US higer education.
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Our Universities: How Bad? How Good? by Peter Brooks | The New York Review of Books
I’m not sure why I keep finding these articles about universities so interesting. Maybe because it’s so hard to pin down what they’re *for*, never mind how to achieve that.
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The Grim Threat to British Universities by Simon Head | The New York Review of Books
A description of the business-derived practices now standard in UK universities, alluded to in the previously-linked LRB article, including the Balanced Scorecard, Key Performance Indicators and Research Assessment Exercise.
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Stefan Collini · From Robbins to McKinsey: The Dismantling of the Universities · LRB 25 August 2011
On the higher education White Paper: The gradual movement of responsibility for higher education within government towards business departments; the tortuous attempts to balance a free market and a command economy; the odd language (“the mission-statement present”, “the dogmatic future tense”); that studying something often isn’t wholly enjoyable; that choosing a university “cannot primarily be price-sensitive, adaptive, feedback-governed consumer behaviour”; the 1963 Robbins Report’s emphasis on intellectual inquiry rather than “meeting the needs of employers.”
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The End of the Open University As We Know It « The Thought Stash
Ugh, the OU is increasing its course fees by around 3.5 times. I only studied with them for a term but would have considered it again. Much. much less sure about that now. (via Preoccupations)
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AC Grayling’s private university is odious | Terry Eagleton | Comment is free | The Guardian
My thoughts: Expensive private universities were inevitable once all universities were able to charge a lot. But inevitability doesn’t make it better, and there’s no way to pretend this is anything but bad for inequality.
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LRB · Howard Hotson · Short Cuts
The new BPP University in the UK is owned by the Apollo Group, whose biggest US institution, the University of Phoenix, sounds very dodgy.
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LRB · Howard Hotson · Don’t Look to the Ivy League
A good account of why the US’s market-based university system (admired by Tories) harms the public system and isn’t as good as a first glance at league tables suggests.
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LRB · Stefan Collini · Browne’s Gamble
A good account of the inconsistencies of the Browne Report into the future of funding Britain’s higher education. Sounds like it’s written by people for whom education is simply a way of earning MOAR MONEY.