Words by Dr Jon Hall, senior lecturer at the Open University and CDBU’s Company Secretary. “Accessing our creativity is a fantastic way to top up our resilience.”Chief Operating Officer, North Tees & Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust Resilience means being able to bounce back after a blow, after a tragedy, after a crisis. With reserves sufficient...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 J Clarke, Co-Director of Climate Campaigns at People & Planet, the UK’s largest student network campaigning on social and climate justice issues. The fossil fuel divestment movement has been incredibly successful on an international scale, making a robust link in the popular consciousness between investing practices and the unfolding climate crisis. The global...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
As Covid cases across the UK rise exponentially, universities have quickly become virus hotspots. Students forced into quarantine have reported feeling “abandoned” by their universities, raising concerns about the mental health crisis that might be triggered by the “draconian” rules being enforced on campuses. Call for contributors!CDBU would like to expand their pool of blog...Read More
Professor Judith Marquand has just published Democrats, Authoritarians and the Bologna Process: Universities in Germany, Russia, England and Wales. Here she explains what the Bologna Process has meant in different countries When I told the principal of an Oxford college that I was writing a book about the Bologna Process, she asked, “What is that?”...Read More
Professor GR Evans finds much that is self-justifying and sometimes misleading in a new book by former universities and science minister David Willetts David Willetts defends himself more than once about the purpose of this book. He dismisses the possibility that it is ‘just a heavily disguised ministerial memoir’ and claims on another page that...Read More
Attempts to promote ‘alternative facts’ should be resisted, argues Professor James Ladyman It should surprise nobody that when Chris Heaton-Harris MP wrote to universities asking for details of academic staff discussing European affairs, he was immediately supported by tabloid reports about anti-Brexit bias. This is a familiar tactic imported from the US and we should expect...Read More
Opinion piece by G. R. Evans It is very welcome news that the Government has decided to include a definition of the Haldane Principle on the face of the Bill. Jo Johnson made a special point of this in his speech to Universities UK on 24 February. An accompanying document was published jointly by both...Read More
Report on CDBU Annual Lecture 2017 by Dorothy Bishop Last night, Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, delivered a splendid lecture with the title “Uses and Abuses of Economics in the Debate on Universities”. It is not possible to do this justice in a brief report, but I aim here to give...Read More
