����Vlog

Hosts’ hiccups

I imagine that all scholars have stories of talks from hell to match Tim Birkhead’s (“Lost for words”, Features, 29 May).An Italian university “could not” pay for flights up front, so I paid. On my...

Natural advantages

Graham Gibbs argues for the validity of students’ instructional evaluations of their professors as measures of teaching quality “You don’t have to guess at who’s doing well”, Teaching intelligence, 5...

Digesting derecognition

Sir David Bell, vice-chancellor at the University of Reading, asserts that the decision to derecognise Unite and Unison and establish a staff forum was taken to address “a serious democratic deficit...

Open access analysis

G. R. Evans raises some important questions in her letter about open access books (Letters, 29 May). Happily, the survey that she mentions is just one small element of OAPEN-UK, a five-year research...

Musical chairs

In her response to Craig Brandist’s analysis of the organisation of many higher education institutions, Liz Morrish has come up with a splendid idea – three-yearly rotations of departmental heads in...

Wedded to the past

Education secretary Michael Gove read English at the University of Oxford from 1985 to 1988, exactly the moment when the student pressure group Oxford English Limited (OEL) was campaigning to open...

UCU tactics

We, the undersigned members of the 2013-14 University and College Union ����Vlog Committee, write in response to the article “UCU militants press for maximum strike force” (News, 5 June)....

Staff at the mercy of satisfaction scores

As a University of Surrey graduate – and later a professor, member of council and senate, and chair of the academic assembly there – could I say how deeply moved I am to know that it is leading the...

Piled Higher and Deeper, by Jorge Cham - 12 June 2014

The week in higher education - 12 June 2014

A student philosophy society named after Friedrich Nietzsche has been barred from meeting at University College London after it was branded “fascist”, news website The Daily Beast reported. The...

One good thing after another

“Good things are here to stay!”That was how our Deputy Head of Student Experience, Nancy Harbinger, responded to the recent declaration by David Willetts, the universities and science minister, that...

Perry Else, 1959-2014

A leading scholar in the field of children’s play has died

Q&A with Lord Stafford

We speak to the next chancellor of Staffordshire University

THE Scholarly Web - 12 June 2014

Weekly transmissions from the blogosphere

A plague of tapeworm sentences

Brian Bloch ponders the convoluted tangle that permeates scholarly German writing