Words by Lydia Dye-Stonebridge, joint runner up in the CDBU Essay Prize Competition 2022. I once worked for a large corporate, and they saw it fit to test my personality. The assessment plotted me against the Randian axes of dominance and compliance, influence and steadiness. My line of best fit demonstrated that while in work,...Read More
Review by Professor Julian Preece Ronald J. Daniels, the lead author of this original and much-needed book, has been President of Johns Hopkins since 2007. He was previously head of the Law School at Toronto, then Provost at Pennsylvania. Universities have not only been the centre of his professional life, however. As the child of...Read More
Words by Ronald Barnett, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education, University College London. Can we really think about higher education? To what extent are there spaces in universities for collective thinking about higher education? And to the extent that there are such spaces, do they not contain prompts and guard-rails that subtly steer thought...Read More
Words by Professor David Midgley. The writing was on the wall in January. It was then that the government published its response to Dame Shirley Pearce’s review of the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework, commonly known as the TEF. Dame Shirley’s carefully argued and judiciously worded report had pointed out that the best way...Read More
A website has accrued over 15,000 anonymous testimonies of sexual harassment, assault, and other accounts of deeply entrenched misogyny at universities across the UK. Naturally, this has caused students and staff to question whether enough is being done to tackle rape culture on campuses. Meanwhile, the government has announced that students may return to campuses...Read More
Words by Liz Morrish, independent scholar. In August 2020, the UK think tank The Policy Exchange produced a report on Academic Freedom in the UK, alleging a chilling effect for staff and students expressing conservative opinions, particularly pro-Brexit or ‘gender critical’ ideas. This is an issue that was examined by a 2018 parliamentary committee on...Read More
Words by Right2Learn The Right2Learn campaign was founded in December 2020 with a simple mission: to campaign for a legal right to learn throughout life. This mission drew on the work of the Lifelong Learning Commission set up by the Labour Party in 2018 which examined in great detail the inequity of access to education...Read More
Words by Professor John Drury, member of Independent Sage and Social Psychologist at the University of Sussex. How should teaching be carried out in universities during a pandemic? Back in September this year, SAGE, the scientific advisory group which advises the UK government on Covid, recommended that university teaching be moved online. Earlier that month,...Read More
This week, LSE launched their ‘SHAPE’ campaign which strives to promote the humanities and social sciences, students and staff joined forces to condemn the closure of the Philosophy programme at the University of the West of England and devastating cuts to the Literature department at the University of Portsmouth, and the government announced that EU...Read More
As Covid-19 continues to inflict damage across the higher education sector and with the plea for a financial bailout falling on deaf ears, students and staff have come out in full force to highlight “inhumane” management practices and responses to the pandemic. NEW on the CDBU blog! ‘Don’t frighten the students’: the crisis of academic...Read More
