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Academia’s Stockholm Syndrome: The Ambivalent Status of Rankings in Higher Education (Research)

Posted on May 9, 2021October 9, 2024by Jelena Brankovic

Academia has an ambivalent relationship with rankings. On the one hand, academics constantly complain about them; on the other, they always look for ways to “fix” them.

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  • Commentary

English (higher) education: a system that divides students and disconnects them from social reality

Posted on May 5, 2021May 5, 2021by Carlos Azevedo

One of the most surprising aspects of the English educational system—speaking as a non-English who does research on higher education (HE)—is how imbalanced it is for almost every student involved. Let me explain what I mean by this.

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Why I have a problem with the “top” discourse

Posted on March 29, 2021April 15, 2021by Melina Aarnikoivu

It’s usually once a day that I browse through Twitter or other social media sites and see the word “top” connected to academia somehow. Most of the time, this word drives me completely mad. I stopped to think for a moment why that is.

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Why is higher education SO bad?

Posted on November 23, 2020November 23, 2020by Richard Budd
park bench

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.

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Why should we care about academic freedom? Meet Central European University, a higher education institution that relocated to another country

Posted on October 27, 2020December 8, 2020by Maryna Lakhno

Earlier this month, the European Court of Justice decided that the Hungarian government breached the WTO and EU law on academia and the freedom to […]

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The great university covid regression?

Posted on May 1, 2020November 22, 2020by Richard Budd
fork in the road

“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. […]

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  • Commentary

UK University Strike: Pensions, Pay and Precarity

Posted on December 8, 2019February 23, 2020by Richard Budd

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 […]

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  • Commentary

Satire, Resignation and Anger around Higher Education Rankings and Wankings

Posted on January 7, 2019June 9, 2020by Jelena Brankovic
track

For a while now, university rankings have been intensely debated all over the world. Despite the prevailing sentiment among academics that rankings are harming the academic profession, the actual resistance […]

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Protected by their shields? Why are UK universities increasingly adopting coats of arms as their logos?

Posted on December 17, 2018July 8, 2019by Richard Budd
UK university

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 […]

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