Laurie Taylor Column
Pulped books spark fury - THES, June . Welcome to the Library Rationalisation Committee. We have two new faces. As you know our former head librarian, Dr A. J. R. Duncombe, has taken early retirement...
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Alan Ryan
The real lessons from the Ivy League are about fees and donations, not graduate numbers and management style. The silly season started early this year. And in the austere pages of this paper, too. It...
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Leader: Businesslike but far more than just businesses
Large and important though Manchester's merged university will be, the dispute over its governance (pages 2 and 14) would be of mainly local concern were it not for the government's interest....
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Leader: Blair may need to sugar the pill in vital subjects
Engineers are worried about the shortage of science students (page 7), linguists are already trimming degrees to three years, abandoning the traditional year abroad, because they are struggling to...
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Literati dine out on the cultural cold war
The CIA funded British intelligentsia to help stop communism. The results were mixed, but they paved the way for Tony Blair, says Hugh Wilford. It was a revelation that scandalised British...
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Seeds of the 'new Holocaust'?
In an incendiary polemic, Baruch Kimmerling attacks the violent policies of Ariel Sharon and argues that failure to see that Israeli and Palestinian fates are intertwined could reduce the Jewish...
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A 6ft nipple, a severed handI the fun we had
Stealing college mascots, swallowing live goldfish, transforming domes into giant breasts - the student prank is alive and kicking, but, says Adrian Mourby, not everyone is laughing. The 150ft-high...
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Skaters fend off a bureaucratic bodycheck in UK powerplay
Ice hockey started in Britain, but students face red tape, a dearth of facilities and financial obstacles in efforts to set up a league. Matthew Baker reports It may be a bit of a sporting sideline...
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Alchemy at work in the garden
Far from being a pervert or a fanatic, as some have supposed, Hieronymus Bosch was a man of his time who reflected the thoughts and fears of a society obsessed with the apocalypse, argues Laurinda...
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Up for the challenge of a sticky wicket
Oxford's next v-c is an energetic all-rounder who has won kudos in the worlds of cricket, industry and academe. Claire Sanders and Richard Thomson report. John Hood is a cricketing man. He becomes...
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The peril of students' appraisal 1
Poor response rates are not the only problem with the planned annual student satisfaction survey ("Just 10 students may blight careers", THES, June ). The wording and scoring cast severe doubt on the...
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The peril of students' appraisal 2
Where is the evidence that students at "high-ranking universities... judge their institutions more critically than students at less-prestigious universities because the latter have lower expectations...
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The peril of students' appraisal 3
Reliable information is unlikely to be gleaned from student responses to the sample survey questions you print. A question about libraries asks for strength of agreement with a positive statement;...
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The peril of students' appraisal 4
The student satisfaction survey will be invalid not only because responders differ in opinion from non-responders, but also because the agree/disagree boxes are flawed. The array of five boxes...
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The peril of students' appraisal 5
The annual student survey is wrongly positioned and technologically underpowered. It would be better to ask universities how they gather students' opinions, how they examine the efficacy of their...