I often wonder how commonly held the myth of a certain kind of higher education is—of tweed-jacketed dons in lifelong jobs, with iron-plated pensions, spending lots of time with happy, engaged students, teaching with passion, with space for slow, thoughtful scholarship.
Author: Richard Budd
“People are busier, there are more journals, there’s pressure to publish. It’s an escalation of everything”: Interview with Rosemary Deem
In this edition of our “Meet the Editors” interview series, Richard Budd talks to Rosemary Deem, a co-editor of Higher Education. Rosemary is Professor of Higher Education Management in the School […]
The great university covid regression?
“Pre-covid” life in the UK almost feels like an aeon ago, but we’re only six weeks into it. At the end of February I was in London, co-hosting an event with colleagues, and was still recruiting and interviewing participants for my research project in mid-March. How things have changed. […]
UK University Strike: Pensions, Pay and Precarity
Colleagues outside UK may have noticed, on social media or elsewhere, that a significant number of UK staff, both academic and administrative, have been on strike for the past couple of weeks. Those not so familiar with recent […]
Academic careers in the UK: how it works
The expectation in the UK is that you will probably spend the bulk of your academic life doing both teaching and research. While this is probably true, how you get there, and what it looks like if/when you do, will vary. Some aspects of academic careers here look good […]
Lost in Space – the unsettlement of interdisciplinarity
I’ve been feeling increasingly rootless over the past few months, but in a weirdly good way. Well, mostly good. I’m bringing in loads of new ideas to my work, which is intellectually stimulating but also quite tricky as the scope of those ideas is […]
Protected by their shields? Why are UK universities increasingly adopting coats of arms as their logos?
In what is now a classic paper, Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell (1983) explained that companies/firms in any given field (loosely speaking, an industry) often resemble each other after a time. They described how the process […]