FEBRUARY AT CDBU: This month, we were pleased to launch a new ‘Book Review’ section of our blog. We will be posting regular reviews of higher education and topical books. If you would like to suggest a book for us to review, would like to author a review yourself, or have even recently published a...Read More

THE LATEST CDBU NEWS: – New on the CDBU blog: ‘Getting off the back foot – and taking the offensive’ Words by Peter Scott, CDBU Trustee, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Studies at the UCL Institute of Education and former Vice-Chancellor of Kingston University. – Contribute to our blog series on academic freedom! Email cdbupress@gmail.com. You...Read More

Top universities including Durham, York and Manchester have employed specialist investigators to deal with a rapid rise in reported sexual assault cases, with some paying investigators up to £10,000 per case. This follows the publication of a new anonymous testimonial site, Everyone’s Invited, which has amassed nearly 50,000 testimonies of sexual assault, harassment and misogyny...Read More

Academic staff have voted to accept an offer to reopen negotiations with employers, and the position of the OU’s vice-chancellor finally becomes untenable   Student nurses face financial hardship over loan error, says nursing body The Guardian, 16/04/2018, Patrick Greenfield Hundreds of student nurses whose loans and grants have been cut off or reduced because...Read More

UCU has asked external examiners to resign in support of the strike over pensions. But what exactly does an external examiner do? Professor GR Evans reflects on the value of an undersung role On 15 March the University and College Union (UCU) asked external examiners to “resign” in support of the strike over proposed USS pension...Read More

It seemed that the pensions dispute had been resolved – and then union members voted to reject it. So who decides when an agreement has been reached, asks Professor GR Evans The press was quick off the mark to announce a resolution to the pensions dispute when talks with ACAS involving Universities UK and the...Read More

The universities minister says that students should be compensated for missed teaching time as a result of the pensions strike, and a report says that there should have been greater scrutiny in the appointment of Toby Young to the board of the Office for Students   EU ‘should forge wider research community after Brexit’ Times Higher...Read More

Academic pensions may seem like a niche interest. But, argues Dr Rowan Cerys Tomlinson, proposals to change the current pension scheme represent an assault on the entire sector I became an academic for many reasons: because of my intellectual curiosity, because I wanted to contribute to society by teaching, because academia offered the heady mixture...Read More