Leader: Same ideals unite the high and low
No one will be surprised to learn that there are big differences between Oxford and Wolverhampton universities. Not only are they at opposite ends of the league tables, but one has the highest...
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Leader: Distinguishing details
Detailed transcripts of student achievements have long been a favoured alternative to simple degree classifications among the leaders of higher education. The obstacle to their more general...
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Grade A nerve 2
I am sure that, in his case against his university for failing to give proper guidance on acceptable research techniques in the use of web-based sources, student Michael Gunn would be able to rely on...
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Benefactors are us
So, universities should look to alumni to address underfunding ("Task force sees merit in drive to tap alumni", May 14). Most of my colleagues support their institutions by working 15 hours a week...
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System failure
The current weaknesses in examining practice are systemic and not primarily the result of individual failings (Letters, May 21). Externals should scrutinise a sample of scripts drawn from each...
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Lofty meanness
Mass higher education needs its popularisers as never before. So Jean Aitchison's review of Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure of English (Books, May 14) was particularly mean-spirited. Acknowledging that...
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Hail Tottenham
Frank Furedi's comments on the proposed Middlesex University development at Tottenham Hale are unacceptable (Soapbox, May 28). The site has excellent transport links to central London and is adjacent...
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Poor classification 1
David Rose (Letters, May 21) defends the new "nominal" government social-class schema as being the product of a seven-year programme of research involving fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences...
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Poor classification 2
David Rose accuses me of "cavalier criticisms" of the government social-class schema. It is Rose who is being cavalier. I was not criticising the schema, but rather the use that had been made of it,...
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A civil word
The pre-publication review of my book Violence and Democracy (Books, May 21) by a professional ceramicist came as a surprise. Pity then that every one of Ivo Mosley's polemical claims are so poorly...
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Question of rank
Paul Cobley (Letters, May 14) proposes the bold hypothesis that peer review can be compromised by snobbery, that this is more pronounced between those whose institutions are of almost equal status...
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Why must cloning be criminal?
The reasons that Ian Wilmut gives for justifying the criminalisation of human cloning are unconvincing and slightly disturbing (Books, May 21). Present techniques are, he says, inefficient, and...
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Grade A nerve 1
I am a former professor at the University of Kent at Canterbury (though not in the English department), so I may be regarded as biased against the student plagiarist who is threatening to sue it (...
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Twist in the tale of two genders
Modern Darwinists have sidestepped data on homosexuality in animals and are thus complicit in the persecution of gays, says Joan Roughgarden In 1871, Darwin wrote: "Males of almost all animals have...
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Warning: don't ignore the scientific, society needs it
Hostility to the science in social sciences will harm the disciplines and diminish their role in public life, writes Max Steuer When I sat down to write The Scientific Study of Society some ten years...