SRHE News Issue 11 – February 2013

Editorial

Annual Conference: What is Higher Education for? Rob Cuthbert The 2012 Annual Research Conference was possibly the best ever, with 220 research papers, 9 symposia, and - that rarity in any conference - five well- received plenary presentations. The opening address from Howard Hotson (Oxford), Chair of the newly-formed Council for the Defence of British Universities, established a suitably global perspective, implicating multinational business in his reinterpretation of the ‘global university crisis’. Georg Krucken (Kassel) offered a different, classically European, interpretation of ‘contemporary transformations’, and Suellen Shay (Cape Town) provided a third intellectually challenging and concept-packed analysis of change, focusing on the curriculum. SRHE’s outgoing President David Watson supplied a typically well-organised and elegant analysis of HE’s claims to transformation, and Vice-President Roger Brown was in his usual challenging and compelling form on politics and policymaking in HE. These splendid plenaries punctuated the ever-richer mix of research papers from some 350 participants from more than 35 countries. Whether your interests were in academic practice, the student experience, HE policy, learning and teaching or leadership, management and quality, there were in every session difficult choices between competing papers promising new ideas and new evidence.

The Conference is now a well-established landmark in the higher education year, with good media coverage, especially in the Times Higher Education, which this year featured SRHE International Network convener Linda Evans’ (Leeds) research on the role of the professor, as reported in THE on 20 December 2012. The conference content also reflected the fast-changing media landscape, with a growing number of papers addressing the uses and implications of mobile technologies, websites, blogs and social media for HE and its future purposes. The Symposium on ‘Social media as HE practice’ led by Pat Thomson (Nottingham) and her colleagues suggested that new media were creating ‘feral spaces’ with new kinds of risk, but more importantly new kinds of opportunity for researchers, teachers and students. While the Twitter feed on the Conference itself remained underwhelming, the technology-enabled new media theme was prominent to the end, with one of the closing Research Directions seminars addressing the much-hyped phenomenon of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The seminars seemed to have solved, as much as anyone can, the problem of how to retain interest and engagement right through to the end of an intense programme. The iron law of conference organisation is that, whatever the scheduled closing time, 20% of participants will have good reasons for leaving 3 hours earlier. This inevitable truth did not weaken the momentum of the discussions in the final sessions, with the successful idea of Research Directions seminars set to be a lasting feature of the programme.

Best of all was the involvement of so many first-time participants in the Conference. If you were one of those new to the Conference and new to the Society we’d like to hear about your impressions and your experiences of joining the SRHE research community. Use SRHE News to expand your connections with academic colleagues worldwide. And come to next year’s Conference.

SRHE News Editor: Professor Rob Cuthbert [email protected] (00 44) 1275 392919 Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England, Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics [email protected], Editor, Higher Education Review www.highereducationreview.com, and Chair, Improving Dispute Resolution Advisory Service www.idras.ac.uk.

Editorial policy

SRHE News aims to comment on recent events, publications, and activities in a journalistic but scholarly way, allowing more human interest and unsupported speculation than any self-respecting journal, but never forgetting its academic audience and their concern for the professional niceties. If you would like to suggest topics for inclusion in future issues, to contribute an item, or to volunteer a regular contribution, please contact [email protected]. We aim to be legal, decent, honest, truthful, opinionated and informed by scholarship. We identify named individuals with their employing institutions. News content is written by the editor except where authors are identified or sources are acknowledged. Comments and suggested additions to editorial policy are welcome.

Future editions of SRHE NEWS

Copy deadline for SRHE News Issue 12: 30 April 2013

Contributions and comments from SRHE members keep News in touch with what is going on in higher education research around the world: please let the editor know of any personal news or contributions you would like to submit for future issues. Just email [email protected]

2 Contents Editorial ...... 1

Annual Conference: What is Higher Education for? ...... 1

Government and Higher Education Policy ...... 5

Policy and Funding in England ...... 5

Policy and Funding in Scotland ...... 7

Policy and Funding in the USA...... 9

Private and For-Profit Higher Education ...... 10

Leadership, Governance and Management ...... 13

Managers can make a difference to managerialism...... 13

Teaching, Learning and Assessment ...... 15

Teaching and learning ...... 15

University Teaching: An Introductory Guide ...... 16

Assessment ...... 17

Students ...... 18

Research ...... 19

Research into higher education ...... 20

Quality, Standards, Performance, Evaluation ...... 21

Quality assurance ...... 21

Performance evaluation ...... 21

League tables ...... 22

Staff ...... 22

Ethics and Academic Freedom ...... 24

Plagiarism ...... 25

Academic freedom ...... 26

Access and Widening Participation ...... 27

Access in the USA ...... 27

3 Widening participation in the UK ...... 28

Libraries, Publishing and Information Technology ...... 28

Libraries ...... 28

Publishing ...... 28

Journals ...... 29

Social media and information technology ...... 29

Global Perspectives ...... 29

Australasia ...... 31

Europe ...... 32

People ...... 36

Society News ...... 36

Audio files and podcasts: SRHE conference keynote addresses ...... 36

Forthcoming SRHE Network Events...... 37

Small ads...... 38

Conferences and seminars ...... 38

Mind your language ...... 39

More name games ...... 39

And Finally … ...... 40

4 Government and Higher Education Policy

Policy and Funding in England

Bahram is undaunted HEPI Report No 58 issued on 25 October 2012 gave a further analysis of The cost of the Government's reforms of the financing of higher education. John Thompson and Bahram Bekhradnia had been rubbished but not refuted by Government about their series of reports picking large holes in Ministerial statements about the implications of the Browne Review and subsequent Government policy decisions. Their updated conclusion remained the same: “… that the Government's assessment of the cost … of the loans that it makes … which still depends on highly uncertain and optimistic assumptions, remains too low, and that the inflationary effects of the proposals (student loans form part of the basket that is used to calculate inflation) will lead to a rise in those benefits whose value is adjusted according to inflation, and so to increased government spending. If we are right, the effect of these two factors will reduce any savings that will follow from the new policies, and could even mean that there are no savings to be had. The consequences will be serious. Either future taxpayers will need to increase their contribution, or other parts of the higher education budget will need to be cut, or student numbers will need to be held down even further than is planned at present, or former students will have to repay more.” We look forward to another Government statement simply saying that HEPI is using the wrong figures, or using them in the wrong way, without explaining what exactly is wrong.

HEFCE says things are OK … perhaps After the HEPI analysis it was hardly reassuring to read the HEFCE news release on 5 November 2012 headed ‘Secure finances against a background of change’, Having also provided a useful map identifying all HEIs it funds and FE colleges that it funds directly, HEFCE said: “The projected performance for the higher education sector in England for the period to 2014-15 is sound overall, although this is heavily dependent on the sector achieving its student recruitment targets.” But it also said that 2012-2013 demand is “lower than forecast by the sector”, which “increases the risk that financial performance for these institutions will be poorer than anticipated.” Furthermore, the fallout from the London Metropolitan saga might have negative sector-wide implications for international student recruitment, jeopardising another major income stream. So the HEFCE analysis, ‘Financial health of the higher education sector: 2011-12 to 2014-15 forecasts’ didn’t add up to a ringing vote of confidence.

Campaign for the Public University In this economically-troubled context a group of concerned academics launched a Campaign for the Public University, whose aims were summarised by one of its founders John Homewood (Nottingham) on the Impact of Social Sciences blog on 18 November 2012, where he warned that ‘Higher education reforms have put teaching and research infrastructure at serious risk’.

The campaign was not helped by the Russell Group, which, in a typical attempt to grab an even bigger share of public funding, argued in October 2012 that even more research funding should be reserved for the self-styled ‘Jewels in the Crown’ of UK HE. This understandably provoked a peeved response from Million+, whose 24 October press release had chair Patrick McGhee (East London) saying the argument was outdated and the more important question was “why Russell Group universities received almost 70% of government research funding last year but were assessed as delivering only 62% of internationally excellent or world-leading research in the last Research Assessment Exercise. There are diamonds of world class research to be found in all universities in the UK. … There is not one shred of evidence to support the argument that there should be any further

5 concentration. On the contrary, further diversification is needed. The proposals being put forward would also result in increased geographic concentration of research funding in London and the South-East …”

Don’t blame HEFCE HEFCE’s Circular Letter to vice-chancellors 30/2012 (November 2012) was a case study of carefully correct implementation of a policy which HEFCE clearly wishes wasn’t in place. You can almost see the fingers held to the nose as the letter was drafted. The letter, about the ‘Revised list of qualifications exempted from the student number control for 2013-14’, begins: “As you will be aware, the Government asked HEFCE to free up a proportion of student numbers from the student number control for 2012-13, specifically those achieving AAB+ at A-level or equivalent, in order to facilitate dynamism in the higher education system. For 2013-14, the Government has decided that this should apply to students achieving ABB+ or equivalent.”

It goes on to explain the tortuous measures needed to try to make this work, including a switch of language for courses involved, from ‘equivalences’ to ‘exemptions’ to ‘clarify their purpose’. The letter concludes: “Government’s aims in pursuing its high grades policy are to respect institutional autonomy in admissions, improve student choice, and achieve dynamism which enables popular institutions to expand, while always ensuring the effective stewardship of student support budgets. The exemptions list has been developed solely for the practical and limited purpose of implementing the Government’s student number control policy, and is, in essence, a technical response to implementing Government policy in a manageable way. It is not a comprehensive or exhaustive assessment of students’ prior attainment. It makes no comment or judgement on the educational value or equivalence of grade/qualification combinations. HEFCE is not seeking to influence the determination of individual applicants’ suitability for admission to university. The autonomy of universities in admissions is always paramount. HEFCE will continue to work with institutions and other stakeholders to ensure that this policy is understood.” HEFCE then issued its provisional allocation of student numbers to each institution on 18 January 2013.

So we can be clear about whose fault it all is, then, as university applications continue their downward trend – down 9.9% year-on-year, according to the Press Association report on 29 November 2012 on the AoL site. The UCAS End of Cycle Report on 2012 said there were nearly 54000 fewer people starting courses in Autumn 2012, with England starters showing the biggest drop (6.6% year on year). Numbers from Wales were up 5%, from Northern Ireland down 3.7%, and in Scotland just 0.3% up. Application figures for 2013 were 8% down compared with the same point in the previous year.

At least BIS managed to send the Ministerial grant letter to HEFCE a little earlier this year, perhaps because there were few if any surprises - HEFCE is required to continue to prioritise the White Paper strategy, whatever it was.

The consequential problems for postgraduate education are just beginning to get the attention they deserve. The self-styled Higher Education Commission, ‘an independent group of leaders from across the education sector, business community and all three major political parties’, issued a report Postgraduate Education, arguing the economic case for the UK to do more to’ up-skill its workforce’, and pointing out skills shortages in important growth markets. It said the UK had become the education outsourcing capital of the world’, with postgraduate provision over balanced in favour of international students and doing too little to produce highly-qualified British workers. Recent European Commission data showed that in England and Wales fewer than 10% of home-domiciled undergraduates enter postgraduate study within two years: the only other countries in the European education area with such a low proportion are Andorra and Kazakhstan. The report recommends a

6 state-backed loan system for postgraduates. Miriam Frankel in Research Fortnight on 31 October 2012 put this together with the HEPI report about underestimating the cost of the undergraduate fees policy and suggested there was a ‘strategic stalemate’ in HE policy.

Making sense of government policy David Willetts revealed in Westminster’s The House magazine on 18 October 2012 that he and Vince Cable often share a car home after a long day in the office: “It’s good to have that kind of more relaxed kind of political gossip in the car. Often it’s the first time during the day when it all makes sense. Suddenly you do sort of work out what you’ve been doing and why.” If only he’d tell us.

To remember what they said to get your vote, you could read the article by Manuel Souto-Otero (Bath) ‘Making Higher Education Work: A Comparison of Discourses in the United Kingdom’s Conservative and Labour Parties’ General Election Manifestos between 1979 and 2010.’ in Comparative Education Review 55(3):293-314.

Policy and Funding in Scotland

Notes from North of the Tweed: Embodied and abstracted higher education research and the case of national qualifications frameworks Vicky Gunn “In the course of our deliberations the panel has gathered a considerable amount of evidence from individuals and organisations [in Scotland’s Higher Education sector]. However, we were struck by the apparent lack of formal research in this area. Where faculty of education research programmes are concerned they appear to focus on school and early years rather than further and higher education, with the exception of teacher training.”(1)

This quote is drawn from the recent review of higher education governance in Scotland. Whatever one’s views on the intellectual rigour and evidence base of the report (and there are very many views here in Scotland), section 7.2 illuminated a thorny issue: the apparent absence of research into and about further and higher education in the devolved nations of the United Kingdom. I say ‘apparent’ because the report failed to take into account any of the practice-based research, often produced at an institutional level, fostered by the Scottish University sector’s educational developers. This group, drawn from both professional educational developers (2) and disciplinary- based academics, has generated a wealth of knowledge about student learning, methods of instruction and their enhancement, and assessment within Scotland’s universities. One need only attend the annual Quality Enhancement Themes Conferences, Higher Education Academy sponsored events, or one of the institutional Learning and Teaching Symposia to get a flavour of the vitality in this area. Additionally, the Schools / Faculties of Education in Scottish Universities have been energetically engaged with research in adult and lifelong learning that has, under its wings, FE & HE at a European and Global level, including large scale projects such as the impact of national qualifications frameworks (NQF).

So why this inaccuracy in the governance report? Some quick answers are: 1. Absence of symbolic capital in local embodied research more associated with the scholarship of learning and teaching than peer reviewed international publications. (This isn’t just a Scottish issue but is more broadly related to the difference between applied/action/ embodied HE research focused at an institutional and local level and HE research ‘proper’ that forms the basis

7 of disciplinary codified knowledge.) Resultant lack in modes of publication respected enough by policy wonks that they used them. 2. Reiteration of this thanks to on-line search engines such as Google scholar. 3. A lack of inter-professional opportunities between Education School/Faculty researchers and educational developers in Learning and Teaching Centres/academics in the disciplines due to varying degrees of suspicion about the research each does which leads to Schools of Education not always understanding what university ‘academic developers’ do and vice versa. Which means that if a policy wonk phones a friend, they tend only to get one side of the story.

In passing earlier I mentioned NQFs. This is because I believe they are illustrative of the trend of separation between embodied and more abstracted knowledge around higher education practice and policy that exists in Scotland. What I mean is, national qualifications frameworks are a location for meetings between embodied knowledges (micro; socio-cultural at a local level; responsive to perceived questions around how to resolve perceived student under-achievement/ under- engagement; articulated in relationships within given classrooms) and abstracted or disembodied knowledges (macro; political readings of institutional, national and international emergent and established situations; responsive to perceived questions about how power functions between govt/ institutions as organisational bodies/ about control and accountability).

Drawing on this latter body, Scotland is perceived to have one of the most successful NQFs: the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework. (3) This success has been identified as a result of the specific circumstances of the Scottish sector.(4) How the success is described tends to relate to broader educational indicators which have emerged out of abstract knowledge forms in educational research.

However, should you ask an educational developer about its actual impact at a local level you might find more variable perspectives aired. From my own experience, there are negatives and positives to the SCQF: • Academics have learned to write intended learning outcomes that suit the paperwork but are not necessarily representative of what actually happens in the classroom; • Tuning intended learning outcomes from the SCQF between institutions in Scotland and abroad is fraught and the location for all sorts of cultural stereotyping about one’s own institution’s superiority (and by implication, others, to whom we are tuning, inferiority) and vice versa; • Discipline benchmarks have been produced in a manner that makes the disciplines look inflexible and conservative in approach, but again what goes on in the classroom is more dynamic; • Students rarely engage with it and if they do are not really sure what it means in terms of their learning; • Scottish students are not yet going abroad enough to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of tuning to other NQFs; • Employers don’t seem to engage with SCQF descriptors beyond the FE level, depending on degree classification instead (I have yet to see a student articulate the SCQF level of their degree on a CV)

There are also positives though, relating particularly to forms of individual academic agency which, through tacit consensus, become more collective in approach. These are potentially where research linking embodied and more abstracted educational knowledge could be focused: • The use of qualifications frameworks and their sub-frameworks as leverage points to ensure continued or growing resources in disciplines under threat of cuts within given institutions; • Academics are more than capable of subverting what they perceive to be infringements on decisions around what and how to teach. Thus, though academic freedom seems to be under

8 threat, the reality of this at grassroots level in the pre-1992 institutions is questionable. It is more problematic in post-92 institutions because of the nature of their academic contracts. In this case, it is not the SCQF that’s a fundamental constraint but the employment conditions of the academics. What does individual and collective academic subversion mean for the debates concerning neo-liberalism, decline in academic freedom, and agency in the devolved contexts? Might it shift the balance away from the perceived ‘bad boys’ of quality audit to what it means to be an academic as employee? (Which, let’s face it, is where the embodied experience of the new lecturer, full of hopes and fears, and the disembodied analysis of cynicism meet); • The potential to articulate threshold standards which, with the right resourcing, should allow for better articulation between the FE & HE sector and thus ultimately make it easier for individual students to move successfully into the four year degree system from two year FE qualifications (an aim the current Scottish government is keen to fulfil). • The potential to enable the disciplines to determine creative boundaries at the same time as helping students understand the different qualitative levels of expertise they might achieve whilst in a university context and thereby assist progression and engagement.

As Scotland looks to assist in the development of quality and governance structures elsewhere in the globe, it is in a perfect position to bring the embodied and disembodied researchers together, to ensure the export of systems based on integrity. The SCQF is a perfect place to start. Now all we need to do is find a way to get Scottish Higher Educational Developers and Schools of Education to work together to inform Scottish government. Easy. (That’s irony, by the way.)

1. 7.2 Evidence Base, Report of the Review of Higher Education Governance in Scotland. Chaired by Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/0038/00386780.pdf 2. Affiliated to the Scottish Heads of Educational Development group, with a reporting line to the Universities Scotland Learning and Teaching Committee 3. http://www.scqf.org.uk/ 4. Allais, S. (2011) The impact and implementation of national qualifications frameworks: a comparison of 16 countries. Journal of Education and Work, 24(3-4): 233-259, p. 256

SRHE member Dr Vicky Gunn is Director of the Learning and Teaching Centre at the University of Glasgow. Follow her on Twitter: Vicky Gunn @StacyGray45.

Policy and Funding in Wales

The BBC reported on 6 November 2012 that Welsh Education Minister Leighton Andrews had stepped back from his earlier insistence that Cardiff Metropolitan University should merge with Glamorgan and Newport. Andrews said that Glamorgan and Newport wanted to merge sooner than anticipated and Cardiff Metropolitan would not be forced to join them ‘for the time being’, so he was cancelling the consultation announced earlier on a three-way merger.

Policy and Funding in the USA

Californians vote against more cuts in higher education spending At last some good news for HE in California, where in early November 2012 voters approved Proposition 30 by 54% to 40%, forestalling another $1billion budget cut after the $750million reduction in the current financial year. The Proposition increased sales tax, and raised taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year. Alison Moodie told the story in University World News on 2 December 2012.

9 Pell Grants not going over the cliff Libby A. Nelson reported on prospects for Pell Grants in Inside Higher Education on 16 November 2012. Pell Grants are the biggest source of financial support for US students, but the $37billion annual cost is increasingly difficult to sustain, despite cuts in recent years. The grants are not part of the temporarily-avoided ‘fiscal cliff’ cuts, but in September 2013 some of the mandated support expires and a $5.7billion deficit for the 2013-2014 year is projected, despite a doubling of interest rates from 3.4 to 6.8% scheduled for 1 July 2013. Community colleges in particular are lobbying hard for grants to be protected, but further cuts seem inevitable despite President Obama’s public support for the maximum grant.

Private and For-Profit Higher Education

UK for-profits want public support The UK’s private HE providers want the government not only to give them full university status, but also to give their students equal access to government-subsidised student loans. John Morgan in Times Higher Education reported on 22 November 2012 his discoveries through Freedom of Information requests to the government Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Private HE providers responded to policy consultations in public 2011 by calling for full access for their students to student loans up to £9000 pa. The UK government is favourably disposed to private providers, but it will need to think carefully about giving for-profits access to government-supported loans, after the US experience. The US government has introduced tougher regulation of private providers after they profited by allegedly recruiting too many students unlikely to be able to repay tuition loans.

Private providers also called for changes to the HEFCE Board to give it a majority of independent non-HE members. On 6 December 2012 HE Minister David Willetts announced a new appointment to the HEFCE Board: Suzy Walton (full biography on the HEFCE website) was a civil servant in the Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and the Ministry of Defence and now sits on numerous boards, including the RSA and the University of Westminster. Is she independent enough?

College of Law gets full university status, becomes University of Law Education Editor Graham Paton exulted in the Daily Telegraph on 22 November 2012 that the for- profit College of Law, the UK’s largest provider of legal education and training, had been granted full university status. The College will charge £9000 a year for undergraduate degrees, but its courses will take only two years, not three. His report said: “The disclosure is bound to spark outrage among academics who have accused the Government of attempting to privatise higher education and drive down standards.“

Meanwhile the £18,000-a-year New College of the Humanities got off to a stuttering start, with its initial intake said to be below target, and a gaggle of egg-throwing protesters picketing the entrance on the first day that new students arrived, as Kevin Rawlinson reported in The Independent on 25 September 2012.

At the other end of the for-profit market, the Government stripped Guildhall College of its designation for HND courses in Business and Computing and Systems Development, as David Wiilletts confirmed in a statement on 25 October 2012. Many students enrolled after the College opened in April 2012 had complained to the Student Loans Company that they were unable to start their courses. The Government was trying to claw back any monies paid to the College, and agreed that students would be deemed never to have started their course, and would remain eligible for a loan in future.

Union calls for better regulation of private equity firms in education The University and College Union issued a report on 25 October 2012 saying that: “The UK risks becoming embroiled in serious financial scandals if private equity firms ‘circling education’ are not properly regulated.” Public Service or Portfolio Investment: how private equity funds are taking over post-secondary education surveys the impact of private equity takeovers in other UK public services such as care homes, as well as the private equity-fuelled expansion of for-profit higher education, and the resulting scandals, in America. A recent report by Senator Tom Harkin into for-profit HE in America identified the US government’s de-regulatory policies at the start of the century as a key factor in current problems. The UCU report argues for urgent action to prevent private equity firms buying out university departments or even whole institutions. Five private equity funds now own many large providers of adult vocational training and receive about 10% of the government budget for adult skills - more than £300m in 2011-12, compared with £70m in 2007-8. The report says the most likely routes for private equity to enter higher education in the short term are through joint ventures with established universities, buyouts of a failing institution, or through a further education college using new powers under the Education Act 2011 to become a company limited by guarantee.

On 6 December UCU followed up with a call for an inquiry into the rapid growth in public money flowing into private colleges, pointing out that in 2011-2012 over £100 milion of public money supported unregulated courses at private colleges, more than three times the amount in the previous year. Of that total 23% goes to one provider, the Greenwich School of Management (GSM) (unconnected to the University of Greenwich) which is owned by a private equity fund, Sovereign Capital, whose founder John Nash, a Tory Party donor, advises the Government on public sector reform. GSM was not allowed to recruit foreign students turned away from London Metropolitan University after the UK Border Agency debacle, after a poor inspection report from the QAA.

Google, Wiki and McKinsey colleges? A Skills Commission report published on 3 December 2012 argued the need for radical reshaping of further education to make it more responsive to the needs of local employers and individual students. It called for investment from multinationals in an FE sector which prioritises specialist, employer-led vocational and technical education to create a ‘network of specialist hubs’. The Skills Commission is a group of leading figures from across the skills sector and Parliament, co-chaired by Barry Sheerman MP and Dame Ruth Silver, which suggests that the Report might be worth a look, even if its proposals don’t sound as new as they claim.

Another way to pay tax voluntarily We told you in SRHE News 8 (May 2012) about the problems in Providence, where a small city with a lot of HE was near to bankruptcy, allegedly because of private non-profit universities’ tax-exempt status. Now Roman Catholic institution Providence College is adding to its voluntary annual donation of about $250,000 by proposing to buy parts of three city streets bordering the college campus, for about $3.8million. Providence College, a highly-rated liberal arts college with 3900 undergraduates, is the only US HEI administered by the Dominican Friars. If the deal is approved the College will pay the city $1million down and then $315,000 a year for the next ten years. Lee Gardner in the Chronicle on 18 December 2012 reported Mayor Angel Taveras’s claim that this would increase the negotiated voluntary payments from the city’s four major non-profits (including Brown University), and from three similarly exempt healthcare institutions), to $48million over the next 11 years. The Providence brouhahah is mirrored in the recent UK controversy over tax avoidance by multinationals like Amazon, Google and Starbucks, where customer pressure recently forced the company to volunteer a £20million tax contribution over the next two years, after paying almost no tax on a multi-£billion turnover in the last ten years.

11 Phoenix seeks to rise from its own ashes Phoenix University owners Apollo Group announced on 16 October 2012 that it would reduce staff numbers by 800 and close 115 campuses and other locations, to reduce annual operating costs by $300million. Eric Kelderman reported in the Chronicle on 17 October that perhaps this signalled an attempt to reshape the business to make it viable in the new financial environment created by regulatory and other changes. The Phoenix intake in the fourth quarter of the financial year ending 31 August 2012 was 14% down on the previous year, with a similar drop in overall enrolment. This followed a 19% fall in the previous year. Nevertheless Apollo agreed in November 2012 to buy McGraw-Hill’s education unit for $2.5billion, as Jeffrey Trachtenberg reported on 26 November 2012 in The Wall Street Journal.

The share price of Apollo Group Inc, which fell by two-thirds in 2012, slumped another 7.8% in just one day when the Group announced that the accreditors of Phoenix University had put the University on notice for ‘areas of concern’ that remained unspecified. The Wall Street Journal reported Apollo’s difficulties on 9 January 2013, revealed by the Apollo chief executive in a conference call discussion about quarterly results. Phoenix is accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which has been conducting a scheduled review in preparation for the University of Phoenix’s reaccreditation. Apollo expects that the ensuing draft report will recommend that Phoenix be put ‘on notice’. Being put on notice is less serious than being put ‘on probation’, but as the Chronicle reported on 9 January 2013 it was enough for Morgan Stanley to downgrade Apollo, commenting that recent issues for Phoenix included student loan default rates, student-staff ratios and faculty changes.

Career Education Corp also cuts back Career Education Corp. (CEC) announced in November that 23 of its 90 campuses would be closed and staff numbers would be cut by 900, reflecting a 22% drop in student numbers and an operating loss of $110million in the year to October. President and CEO Steven H Lesnik issued a statement explaining the move. CEC was also challenged by one of its accreditors, the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges, to "show cause" why accreditation should not be withdrawn from 10 of its institutions after the company admitted it could not substantiate some job placement data. That triggered a similar inquiry by another accreditor, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, which cleared the company, as Inside Higher Education reported.

Ozarks Technical Community College goes on the attack against for-profits Missouri college OTCC has launched an unusually aggressive marketing campaign pointing out how much more expensive some of its local for-profit colleges are than OTCC, where tuition is around $3272 pa, compared with $13000-18000 at the for-profits.

For-profits promised code of conduct flops A code of conduct mooted as part of the ‘gainful employment’ spat between the Obama administration and for-profit colleges has not enrolled any additional members nor shown any action since its ‘launch’, according to a report by Goldie Blumenstyk in the Chronicle on 10 October 2012.

12 Leadership, Governance and Management

Correction SRHE Chair Jill Jameson is at the University of Greenwich and not the place we wrongly assigned her to in the October issue, News 10. Apologies for our mistake.

Managing Higher Education in the post-2012 Era A special issue of the London Review of Education (10(3) 2012) celebrated the 20th anniversary of the MBA Higher Education Management at the London institute of Education with an introduction by SRHE Fellow Mike Shattock, articles from MBA alumni - Paul Clark (Universities UK): ‘Are national higher education policies adequate for the next decade?’; William Locke (HEFCE): ‘The dislocation of teaching and research and the reconfiguring of academic work’; Ann Priest (Nottingham Trent): ‘The challenge of managing a large university in conditions of uncertainty’; Mark P Taylor (Warwick): ‘The entrepreneurial university in the twenty-first century’; Virginia Davis (Queen Mary, London): ‘Humanities: the unexpected success story of the twenty-first century’ - and an Afterword from Paul Temple (IoE) on ‘Managing higher education and the MBA programme’.

The Institute of Education made a joint announcement on 2 October 2012 with its near neighbour University College London that the two institutions would enter a ‘formal strategic partnership to assess the potential for a step-change in the institutions’ contributions to education and social science, in London, nationally and globally’. The ‘initial focus’ will be on research, teaching, establishing a formal framework for school improvement, and developing shared professional and administrative services, which doesn’t leave much out of focus

Managers can make a difference to managerialism Research on school managers by Mirko Noordegraaf and Bas de Wit (Utrecht) published in Public Administration (online on 16 October 2012), suggests that education managers have a crucial mediating role in coping with managerialist pressures. Their article ‘Responses to managerialism: how management pressures affect managerial relations and loyalties in education’ reflected on the friction within managerial work felt by managers loyal both to performance pressures and to teachers and pupils.

Why did Armenian HE reforms fail? HE leaders blame teachers, government, students and society That’s the conclusion of interviews with six Armenian HE leaders in research by Susanna Yuri Karakhanyan (National Centre for Professional Education Quality Assurance, Armenia), Klas van Veen and Theo M Bergen, published as ‘What Do Leaders Think? Reflections on the Implementation of Higher Education Reforms in Armenia’ in Educational Management Administration and Leadership November 2012 (40(6): 752-771). So management wasn’t the problem, then.

University of Central Lancashire UCLan told its staff in November 2012 that it planned to alter its corporate status in 2013. The University has applied to Secretary of State Vince Cable to dissolve the higher education corporation (HEC) which until now has been the university’s legal identity. It wants to become a company limited by guarantee and form a group corporate structure to support planned expansion into overseas markets, especially Cyprus, Sri Lanka and Thailand, where UClan already has a campus presence.

A number of universities, including LSE and the former inner London polytechnics, have always been companies limited by guarantee. HEC was a new corporate form created by the 1988 Education Reform Act when polytechnics were removed from local authority control and given legal independence. Under the Act HECs may only be dissolved with the agreement of the Secretary of

13 State. Whether universities, in whatever corporate form, are public or private institutions is hotly debated, but this change is undoubtedly a step towards a more private status.

UCLan VC Malcolm McVicar intends to step down but to become chief executive of the group. UCLan advertised for a new VC and in December headhunters Odgers Berndtsen were phoning round with what appeared to be increasing desperation to see if anyone would be willing to take on the new subsidiary job while their predecessor remained firmly in control of the company which owned the university. Andrew McGettigan told the story on his Critical Education blog on 21 November 2012.

The London School of Business & Finance (LSBF) announced on 8 November 2012 the appointment of Maurits Van Rooijen as its new CEO and Rector. He was previously Rector Magnificus of Nyenrode Business University in the Netherlands, and from 1993 to 2009 Vice-President at the University of Westminster.

New leaders at Berkeley and Yale Top jobs at Berkeley and Yale were both filled in the same week in November 2012, when the University of California at Berkeley named anthropologist Nicholas B. Dirks, Columbia University's executive vice president and dean of the faculty of arts and sciences as its new chancellor from 1 June 2013, and Peter Salovey, Yale's provost and a professor of psychology, was announced as the next Yale President, to take up the post on 30 June 2013. Dartmouth and Princeton are also currently looking for new presidents. The Yale announcement came only ten weeks after long- serving President Richard Levin announced he would step down, even quicker than the three months taken by MIT earlier in 2012 before appointing its provost L Rafael Reif to replace Susan Hockfield as President. President searches usually take six months to a year.

Association of American Universities invites Boston to join In perhaps another sign of the global jitters affecting elite research-intensive universities, the Association of American Universities (AAU) has once again changed its membership, inviting Boston University to join only a year after Nebraska at Lincoln was expelled and Syracuse jumped before it was pushed. The full story was told by Eric Kelderman in the Chronicle on 5 November 2012, which also supplied a helpful timeline of AAU membership changes.

Stevie Blunder is all Yester-me Yester-You Yesterday In a much-publicised spat at the University of Hawaii over a Stevie Wonder concert that never was, the University was persuaded to hand over $200,000 to a bogus agency for a benefit concert, but Stevie Wonder had not been signed, sealed or delivered. Two people, not university employees, have been charged with fraud. The alleged scam led to almost terminal conflict between the President and the Board, but a joint statement issued by President MRC Greenwood said that all concerned were now just living for the (univer)sity.

14 Teaching, Learning and Assessment

Teaching and learning Carnegie to review the credit hour The credit hour was invented by the Carnegie Foundation a century ago to help academic pensions, but it then became a ubiquitous measure of student learning. Now the Foundation has announced that it will use a $460,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to rethink the measure. A critique of the credit hour in a recent report from another agency said the measure was implicated in several key HE problems, including inefficiencies in credit transfer between institutions. Paul Fain went into detail for Inside Higher Education on 5 December 2012.

The MOOCs phenomenon Higher education has seen many false dawns with technological innovations hyped as revolutionary. Now we have MOOCs, massive open online courses, introduced by some prestigious US institutions and recently mirrored by a consortium led by the Open University, as reported in Times Higher Education and by Marc Parry in the Chronicle on 13 December 2012. The OU has created a new company, FutureLearn, which wil bring together the universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, East Anglia, Exeter, Lancaster, Leeds, Southampton, St. Andrews, Warwick and King’s College London, to deliver courses from late 2013. In the UK Edinburgh was probably the first to engage with MOOCs, using Coursera as its platform. In the US, Doug Guthrie in the Chronicle on 17 December 2012 was urging colleagues to ‘Jump Off the Coursera Bandwagon’, saying that Coursera had not done nearly enough to deal with critical pedagogical issues. ‘Coursera and its devotees simply have it wrong. The Coursera model doesn't create a learning community; it creates a crowd. In most cases, the crowd lacks the loyalty, initiative, and interest to advance a learning relationship beyond an informal, intermittent connection.’ At SRHE’s 2013 Research Conference the concluding ‘Research Directions’ themed sessions included Lesley Gourlay (London Institute of Education) and Kelly Coate (Galway) leading a session on MOOCs.

Stand by for more Mickey Mouse courses When George Lucas completes the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney he plans to use the $4billion proceeds to create a foundation focusing on educational issues, as Alex Ben Block revealed in in The Hollywood Reporter on 10 October 2012.

L. Hunt and D. Chalmers (eds) (2012) University Teaching in Focus: A learning-centred approach ACER Press: Camberwell, Victoria ISBN 9781742860312 (Pbk). Pp 330

This new edited collection aims to synthesise recent higher education research to derive evidence-based principles and practical guidance for early career teachers in universities. Organised into four sections focusing on teaching, curriculum, students and quality and leadership, the collection draws on an international expert authorship to provide summaries of relevant and up-to-date research. This collection, developed specifically from an Australian perspective, demonstrates the evolution of both initial academic practice programmes specifically and higher education teaching more broadly in attempting to move away from the teaching genre approach of other new lecturer textbooks. The collection by Hunt and Chalmers adopts an approach that seeks to extend the focus to initiatives underpinning current higher education reform, including an appropriate emphasis on different perspectives towards the curriculum, the relationship between research and teaching, and awareness of inclusivity and internationalisation in relation to the student body.

15 In the first section Stewart provides a well-balanced critical survey of theories of learning with explicit explanations of the implications for practice, providing an excellent introduction for new lecturers. Comprehensive chapters on discipline-based teaching by Land and research-led /based undergraduate teaching by Jenkins and Healey provide succinct surveys by leading researchers in the field. Pedagogic features including frequent “Your thoughts” question prompts and case examples drawn from Australasian, US and UK contexts also provide standard tools for supporting application of the ideas to individual practice throughout the textbook.

While the book is international in scope, the Australian perspective is most evident in Christie and Asmar’s chapter on indigenous knowers and learning in former colonial countries. Though focusing specifically on Aboriginal knowledge in Australia the chapter also references comparable issues in North America, southern Africa and New Zealand. With the emphasis on the idea of place and community in indigenous knowledge, this chapter is a fascinating contribution both for those working outside and those within these contexts. By raising critical questions about how, in a globalised world, we can engage with local, contextual and collective ways of knowing, the chapter is a persuasive argument for reflecting on alternative pedagogies to those at the heart of many western curricula.

As with other edited collections, the most significant challenge for editors is how to manage the individual chapters and perspectives in meaningful ways. Explicit links between chapters are made throughout but there are also tensions – for example Land’s chapter on disciplinary knowledge as the basis for pedagogy is juxtaposed with Chalmers and Partridge’s chapter on graduate attributes and Angelo’s chapter on curriculum design which work from generic principles to applied examples in disciplinary practice. In attempting to synthesise extensive bodies of research some chapters also use extensive bulleted lists that are accessible but can lack sufficient practical application. For example, giving effective feedback is recognised as a key challenge for many lecturers but recommendations to provide feedback to students that can be used to actively improve learning are not explicit enough to demonstrate what that might look like in practice.

As with comparable textbooks, the focus is primarily undergraduate education but the editors’ decision to subtitle their collection “a learning-centred approach” is intended to draw on student- centred practices whilst also signalling a “third way” for this text. However it is not until page 97 that Angelo articulates what a learning-centred approach might constitute in relation to the curriculum. The potential this different approach affords for exploring the university as a mutually shared learning experience for teachers as well as their students is not fully exploited across the chapters but overall this new collection is a valuable addition to the field for those seeking up-to-date introductory readings for new lecturer programmes.

Reviewed by Saranne Weller

SRHE Member Dr Saranne Weller is Senior Lecturer in Higher Education and Assistant Director (Accredited Programmes) in King’s Learning Institute, King’s College London. She has been the Co-convenor of the SRHE Newer Researchers Network since 2009.

University Teaching: An Introductory Guide University Teaching: An Introductory Guide by Tony Harland (Otago), published in 2012 by Routledge, 136 pages, is “a vital tool for the new lecturer that aims to encourage and support an inquiry into university teaching and academic life. This book understands that teaching is not discrete but one of many activities integrated in academic work. It recognizes that teaching is directly affected by administrative concerns such as timetabling and workload demands,

16 departmental culture, disciplinary research expectations and how we think about the purposes and values of higher education. The new lecturer must learn to adapt to and shape the circumstances of their academic work.”

If you’d like to review a book you think SRHE members should know about, let us know: email [email protected] and we can probably get you a review copy.

Assessment

Assessment Literacy: The Foundation for Improving Student Learning Margaret Price, Chris Rust, Berry O’Donovan and Karen Handley, with Rebecca Bryant (2012) Assessment Literacy: the foundation for improving student learning Oxford: Oxford Brookes University 170pp A5 £19.95 ISBN: 978-1-873576-83-0

In this book Margaret Price and her colleagues make the case for assessment literacy, arguing that although it is essential for effective assessment, assessment literacy has been largely unrecognised and the means to support its development are still in their infancy. The authors form the Directorate of one of the HEFCE-funded Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning: Assessment Standards Knowledge exchange (ASKe) based at Oxford Brookes University and draw heavily on their own evidence-based practices and projects. The book is relevant for graduate students and educators in all HE contexts as it provides specific practical examples that can be emulated, tested and further developed.

As the authors state at the outset of the book, it aims to balance the conceptual, the ‘how to,’ the ‘how could’ and the ‘what if.’ Chapter 1 introduces the concept of assessment literacy and how it can be developed. It aims to persuade staff of the importance and benefits of assessment literacy, not only for them, but more especially for students, thereby highlighting the importance of interaction between staff and students in order to build an effective relational community where students’ engagement and participation in developing assessment literacy is of paramount importance. The chapter makes the case for developing students’ assessment literacy in tertiary education and illustrates that the benefits of assessment literacy result in better student learning and performance and maximising their autonomy. Chapter 2 outlines the history of theoretical approaches to the sharing of assessment standards, introduces authors’ own social constructivist model of assessment (the matrix and the ‘cultivated community of practice model’) which argues that through mutual engagement and a shared invested efforts in the joint endeavour of assessment, staff and students jointly become increasingly assessment literate. Chapter 7 further explores the importance of the community of practice, drawing from the authors’ own experience of the initiatives they have introduced in the Business School at Oxford Brookes University. In particular, it explores practical ways in which a sense of community and a community of practice can be cultivated. This chapter is especially relevant for practitioners looking to enhance their professional development as the authors provide a step-by-step guidance pertaining to relational community development and also renounce the dividing line between the assessors and the assessed. However, since HE institutions in the UK have been experiencing an influx of foreign students in the past decade or so, it could have been very helpful if the chapter mentioned what initiatives had been taken by staff or students to tackle the issue of involving international students in the community of practice.

Chapters 3 to 6 present practical and evidence-based examples for the development of assessment literacy at a separate stage of the assessment process. In particular, Chapter 3 highlights the planning of assessment and addresses the importance of adopting a programme-wide approach to the design of assessment, as opposed to a module-focused approach. Chapter 4 focuses on students

17 and looks at pre-assessment activity. To buttress their argument, the authors provide a detailed description of pedagogic techniques and exercises that staff could use to prepare students for assessment, to enhance their assessment literacy, and to improve their learning. Additionally, this chapter refers the reader to a number of similar studies in British, Australian, American and New Zealand contexts, which also investigated the issue of students’ enhancement of assessment literacy. It is not however clear whether the proposed pedagogic techniques would work in Asian or other contexts where the cultural and social norms and mores require different communicative approaches to student-staff interactions. Chapter 5 explores the staff role in assessment activity, highlighting the importance of assessment tasks that staff set for students, and marking. The authors masterfully examine and identify deep inadequacies in both criterion-referenced and norm- referenced approaches, and introduce their own community-of-practice-based approach to marking as a more objective and reliable alternative. Chapter 6 concentrates on post-assessment activity, mainly the production and use of end-of-assessment feedback. This chapter provides some practical examples of how feedback can be effectively used to ensure students’ active engagement with feedback. Again, the authors provide their own analytical model, which emphasizes the various stages of engagement within the feedback process and illuminates reasons for students’ dissatisfaction and a loss of interest in engaging with feedback. In conclusion Chapter 8 argues that the key to successful development of assessment literacy for both staff and students is community. The strength of the book is that it not only provides an extensive reference to the academic scholarship in assessment, but also presents some practical examples that educators in any HE contexts could emulate, adapt, adopt and further develop to prepare their students for a global arena of assessment and feedback in tertiary education.

Reviewed by Alexandra Shaitan

SRHE member Alexandra Shaitan is a PhD student at Birkbeck College, University of London researching hybrid identity of mixed-race people in the context of Japan.

Students

BIS Secretary Vince Cable announced on 27 September 2012 the launch, after many teething troubles, of the completely revised Unistats web-site, which ‘provides extensive information for over 31,000 courses in the UK, including student satisfaction ratings, graduate salaries and employment, tuition fees and financial support, and the cost of accommodation’.

In the 2012 National Student Survey more students than ever (85%) said they were satisfied with their experience at UK universities or colleges. The 85% overall satisfaction rate is the highest recorded in the eight years of the Survey.

More complete data show more completions A report from the US National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC) shows that completion rates for students are better than usually reported. By tracking almost all students in colleges participating in federal aid programmes the NSCRC is able to overcome the limitations of college-focused analyses. 22 per cent of students get a degree from a college other than the one where they first enrolled. 54 per cent of first time students complete within 6 years, and the 6-year completion rate for full-time students is 75 per cent. Paul Fain had the story in Inside Higher Education on 15 November 2012.

The black student experience in the USA Black Males in Postsecondary Education: Examining their Experiences in Diverse Institutional Contexts, edited by Adriel A Hilton (Upper Iowa), J Luke Wood (San Diego State) and Chance W Lewis (North Carolina at Charlotte) is part of a series on Contemporary Perspectives on Access, Equity, and Achievement edited by Lewis.

Why do students misbehave and how should staff respond? If you think students are customers you might want to look at ‘Dealing with customer misbehaviour: Employees’ tactics, practical judgement and implicit knowledge’ in Marketing Theory December 2012 12(4):427-449. Per Echeverri (Karlstad), Nicklas Salomonson (Borås) and Annika Åberg (Karlstad) use examples from four industries, not including HE, to illustrate their argument that: “When incidents of misbehaviour occur they are met by tactics ranging from routinized action to more analytical and strategic approaches. These tactics are guided by underlying mechanisms in the form of practical judgements based on rules, balanced adjustment or reflection, with the judgements in turn being informed by implicit knowledge based on norms, schemes, or multi- perspective thinking. “

Research

The Impact of Social Sciences multi-author blog on 22 October 2012 introduced a series of free Advice Notes on how to prepare Impact Case Studies for the Research Excellence Framework (REF), focusing on the social sciences and humanities. Patrick Dunleavy (LSE) kicked off the series by exploring how to decode HEFCE’s official language to identify which achievements might make feasible cases. Then in the second Advice Note Dunleavy explained how to develop a case, saying that the key thing is to ‘stay auditable’ and to ‘process trace’ in as much detail as possible how your research achieved external impact. The LSE Future of Impacts conference in London prompted Nick Scott (Digital Manager at the Overseas Development Institute) to blog on 17 December 2012 about altmetrics, arguing that the key issue is not whether altmetrics are better than traditional ways of assessing impact, but that altmetrics should be the central way to measure scholarly communication in the digital age.

The impact of top-ranked scientific journals has been slowly but steadily declining for the last 20 years, according to research by Vincent Larivière (Montreal), working with two colleagues at the University of Quebec at Montreal. The research, published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology in November 2012, analysed 820million citations of 25million articles published from 1992 to 2009. Paul Basken reported the story in the Chronicle on 8 November 2012.

Adam Golberg (Nottingham) blogged about the huge differences in success rates between different social science disciplines under ESRC’s open call research grants scheme: ‘The overall success rate was 14 per cent (779 applications, 108 funded) for the last tranche of responsive mode Small Grants and response mode Standard Grants (now Research Grants). However, Business and Management researchers submitted 68 applications, of which 1 was funded. … Education fared little better with 2 successes out of 62. … At the top end were Socio-Legal Studies (a stonking 39 per cent, 7 of 18), and Social Anthropology (28 per cent, 5 from 18), with Linguistics; Economics; and Economic and Social History also having hit rates over 20 per cent. … Psychology (185 applications, 30 funded, 16% success rate) … scored the highest number of projects – almost as many as Sociology and Economics (the second and third most funded) combined. … So what’s going on? Unconscious bias? Snobbery? Institutional bias? Politics? Hidden agendas? All of the above? … something needs to be done …’

Research into higher education

What are we to do with Higher Education? Craig Prichard (Massey) introduced a series on ‘What are we to do with Higher Education?’ in Organization November 2012 19(6) 879-880. To begin the series, ‘Belinda Luke and Kate Kearin’s empirically engaging, yet dispassionate, analysis of university management’s complicity in the global theft of academic work. … [a] serious, but hilarious, mockumentary-like exploration of ‘academic excellence’ from Sverre Spoelstra and Nick Butler. … [a] meticulous and challenging investigation of publisher profits and tax avoidance from Geoff Lightfoot and colleagues and … Jonathan Murphy’s stark demonstration of the neo-colonialism at the core of the Anglo-American domination of academic publishing.’ You get the flavour, which faithfully reflects the critical stance of the journal, and builds on the earlier articles in a useful list cited by Prichard, including Ann Game (1994) in the very first issue of the journal: ‘“Matter Out of Place”: The Management of Academic Work’, Organization 1(1): 47–50.

Imagining the university You might have thought that by now Ron Barnett (London Institute of Education) would have run out of verbs describing things to do to universities, but he tells us otherwise. His latest book Imagining the University “argues for imaginative ideas that are critical, sensitive to the deep structures underlying universities and are yet optimistic, in short feasible utopias of the university. The case is pressed for one such idea, that of the ecological university. The book concludes by offering a vision of the imagining university, a university that has the capacity continually to re- imagine itself.” Ron Barnett is an SRHE Fellow and former Chair of the Society.

Out of cite, but not out of mind In the 20th anniversary issue of Organization (January 2013) Craig Prichard provided a typically useful and quirky analysis: ‘All the lonely papers, where do they all belong?’ Organization has published 569 papers in its 20 years, of which 44% have been cited less than four times, and 9% (48 papers), have never been cited, not even by their own authors: “What might we make of these lonely and seemingly neglected papers? Are they the Eleanor Rigbys and the Father McKenzies of the academic world?” The paper examines Organization’s uncited 48, incidentally showing the limitations of citation analysis. You say hello, I say goodbye. Help!

BERA launch new journal BERA claim their new journal will be the ‘only journal outlet for major research pieces (10,000- 20,000 words)’. It will be launched in 2013 with articles from Michael Apple (Madison- Wisconsin) and a team headed by David Hogan all from the National Institute of Education, Singapore. Articles in the first issue will be free online until 2014.

QAA relaunches the Higher Education Empirical Research (HEER) database HEER is an online information resource (http://heer.qaa.ac.uk) with summaries of evidence-based research on a range of topics related to higher education. Registered users have free access to: summaries of the latest higher education research; research from a wide variety of sources – from policy institutes and think tanks to academic journals; research summaries catalogued by theme to enable users to access what you need quickly and effectively; clear signposting to full original sources; tailored email subscriptions notifying users of the latest additions. HEER, now owned and managed by QAA, was previously sponsored by BIS and HEFCE, and was maintained by the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information until it was sadly closed by the Open University.

20 An easier way to find research articles That’s Routledge’s claim for their relaunched Educational Research Abstracts Online (ERA), a comprehensive database which offers online access to over 300,000 records, over 1,000 abstracts updated monthly, a complete archive from 1995 onwards and ‘sophisticated search facilities’.

Quality, Standards, Performance, Evaluation

Quality assurance

QAA and the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding that ‘recognises their complementary and distinctive roles, and commits both sides to sharing information relevant to developing the risk-based approach to regulation in higher education’.

QAA has published new guidance about HE partnerships in the snappily titled Chapter B10: Managing higher education provision with others of the UK Quality Code for Higher Education. In 2012 the Agency published 140 educational oversight review reports on private colleges wishing to recruit international students on to higher education programmes. 131 providers ‘achieved positive outcomes in all aspects of the management of academic standards, the quality of learning opportunities, and the accuracy and completeness of the public information they provide’. So 9 didn’t.

The University of Gloucestershire has abandoned a partnership with London-based private provider Williams College. QAA had decided to carry out a full investigation of the College and the partnership under its Concerns scheme and published a report on its findings on 14 December 2012. Under the QAA procedure the University and College each have six weeks to draw up an action plan to confirm how they intend to address the recommendations in the report.

Performance evaluation

How assessors reach judgements about public services Public Administration 90(4): 869-895 December 2012, had an article by Sandra Nutley (Edinburgh), Ruth Levitt, William Solesbury(both King’s College London) and Steve Martin (Cardiff): ‘Scrutinizing performance: how assessors reach judgements about public services’. They analysed informal scrutiny processes in three national audit bodies, three service inspectorates, and two inquiry committees in the UK.

Susan Ainsworth and Cynthia Hardy (both Melbourne) looked at how statistics and stories might both become legitimated as modes of knowledge production and validation, but only if they can become ‘embedded in the appropriate discursive conventions’. ‘Subjects of Inquiry: Statistics, Stories, and the Production of Knowledge’ was in Organization Studies December 2012 33(2):1693- 1714 . Alternatively, read Andrew Dilnot’s Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) Annual Lecture, ‘Numbers and Public Policy: The Power of Official Statistics and Statistical Communication in Public Policymaking’, delivered on 5 November 2012 and already published in Fiscal Studies Volume 33, Issue 4, pages 429–448, December 2012

21 League tables

THE World University Rankings This year’s story, much like last year’s, seems to be the alleged imminent decline of UK and perhaps US universities, a spin which will no doubt suit the Russell Group’s pleadings for an even bigger slice of the diminishing UK public spend on HE. But Edinburgh ‘climbed from 36th to 32nd’ despite being ranked 125th out of 125 in the Sunday Times ranking for teaching. The only story there was presumably Edinburgh students organising their responses collectively to try to give the university some kind of message.

More rankings … In University World News 25 November 2012 William Patrick Leonard (SolBridge International School of Business, Daejeon, South Korea) pointed to 2 new rankings of US colleges which rely on more subjective alumni assessments, and speculated that this kind of thing might ultimately prove to be more valuable than the established rankings.

In the US an organisation called Law School Transparency aims to help students make informed applications by collecting something like the UK’s Key Information Set of data about institutions and making them available on the LST website.

Staff

Health warning for student-staff ratios (SSRs) Stephen Court, senior research officer of the University and College Union (UCU), not only gave a paper at the December 2012 SRHE Conference, the UCU issued a news release about it on 5 December 2012. Stephen, a regular SRHE Conference attender, warned in his detailed analysis that SSRs, although still a significant measure, are inaccurate because they include all the time of teaching-and-research academics as if it were spent on teaching, and not also on research, administration or other activities. At Russell Group universities only 23.7% of staff time is spent on teaching, whereas staff at medium-sized ‘teaching-focused’ institutions spend 58.4% of their time on teaching. In other words: “… universities that come out best in the calculation of the SSR have academics spending a low proportion of their time directly on teaching …universities that do worst in the SSR calculation tend to have academics spending a large proportion of their time directly on teaching”. The paper, ‘An analysis of student:staff ratios, the academics’ use of time, and potential links with student satisfaction’, considers data relating to SSRs, measures how academics actually spend their time and asks if there is a correlation between the amount of teaching time and student satisfaction.

Keep calm and carry on writing James Hartley (Keele, emeritus) reported on recent research about how retired academics continue to make a considerable contribution, for the Impact of Social Sciences blog on 23 October 2012.

Green green grass of home The grass isn’t always greener even where the grants are bigger. The Chronicle reported on 15 November 2012 that Patrik Rorsman had abandoned a $10million grant he was awarded under a scheme to attract researchers to Canada, returning to England after just 7 months at the University of Alberta. The programme had been controversial from its launch because the first 19 people recruited were all men.

22 Being a professor isn’t stressful When Forbes journalist Susan Adams followed up a ‘study’ by jobs portal Careercast for a piece on stress at work, she probably didn’t expect quite the backlash her article provoked. She picked out being a college professor as the least stressful job for 2013, prompting a deluge of objections, as Scott Jaschik reported for Inside Higher Education on 7 January 2013.

Maybe it’s different in the UK. On 4 October 2012 the University and College Union (UCU) reported a survey of 14000 of its members which found their stress level from intense workload was higher than that of the general British working population. They said many universities suffer from a long- hours culture, with over half of all full-time respondents at the University of East London, Oxford Brookes University and Canterbury Christ Church University saying they work, on average, more than 50 hours a week. 72 more institutions had more than 30% of all full-time respondents reporting they worked over 50 hours a week. Using a standard Health and Safety Executive questionnaire, the survey found that every university represented in this survey had an average level of stress considerably higher than that of the general British working population.

To cope with the stress of managerialist control you have to laugh, according to Robert Westwood (University of Technology, Australia) and Allanah Johnston (Queensland) in their article ‘Reclaiming authentic selves: Control, resistive humour and identity work in the office’ in Organization November 2012 19(6):787-808. They reinterpreted excerpts from Ricky Gervais’s TV comedy The Office as a parody of performativity. Worth a look, but the sort of thing that gives the average journalist an easy shot at media studies: “… identity work takes place within power, but operates through a series of plateaux: actions may act resistively in relation to a managerial/hierarchical plateau whilst at the same time acting to reproduce forms of heteronormative masculinity in a different, gender power plateau.”

Teaching-only academic jobs are still a new idea in the US Or so it would seem from this ‘news’ piece by Robin Wilson in the Chronicle on 14 October 2012.

Professionalism in further education The UK Government has agreed the central recommendation of Professionalism in Further Education, the Lingfield Report on FE staff issued in October 2012, to create a new professional body to be called the FE Guild. The Guild would replace the Institute for Learning (IfL), which was boycotted by the Universities and College Union (UCU) and most FE staff, who were unwilling to pay a significant annual subscription for benefits which were unclear. A UCU press release on 23 October 2012 welcomed the Lingfield rcommendations, which included a call for the pay gap between college staff and other teachers to be addressed, as long as teachers were able to play a major part in the work of the proposed FE Guild. Membership of the Guild would be voluntary, and there would be no subscription. The Lingfield Report proposes an ‘FE Covenant’ under which the purpose of FE would be more clearly defined, colleges would agree to support professionalism through training and fair performance management, and staff would engage in training and agree to lesson observation and performance management.

The New Academic: A Strategic Handbook (2012) Open University Press / McGraw-Hill, is a new book by HERDSA President Shelda Debowski (Western Australia) aimed at early career academics and their mentors.

Not quite that significant, then When Professor Guy Halsall (York) had poor attendance for one of his second year undergraduate lectures he went on the offensive in a post on the university’s VLE, which included: "you get the chance to hear (probably) the most significant historian of early medieval Europe under the age of

23 60 anywhere in the world give 16 lectures on his current research." He later apologised unreservedly, and his department head issued a supportive statement saying Prof Halsall was unused to facing a "noticeable degree of non-attendance." The apology came too late to prevent Times Higher Education’s Paul Jump from telling the world in Inside Higher Education on 3 January 2013.

Ethics and Academic Freedom

Ethics and Integrity

Yoshitaka Fuji, previously at Tsukuba and Toho universities in Japan, was found to have submitted almost 200 fraudulent papers to a range of medical journals about pain relief in anaesthesia, but only after an academic career lasting 20 years. How could it have gone on for so long? asked David McNeill in the Chronicle on 8 October 2012.

Three Elsevier journals have retracted eleven papers after discovering they were accepted on the basis of fraudulent but well-written reviews, as Paul Jump reported in Times Higher Education on 20 December 2012. Reviews were submitted in the names of respected academics who had no knowledge of the deception, for Optics & Laser Technology, the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications and Experimental Parasitology.

After a report in student magazine The GW Hatchet, George Washington University admitted misrepresenting figures on entry qualifications of students for more than ten years, to boost its league table position. George Washington became the third private university in rapid succession to admit that it has been reporting incorrect information, as Scot Jaschik reported for Inside Higher Education on 9 November 2012. The University reported that 78% of its latest intake were in the top 10% of their high school classes, when the true figure was 58%. U.S. News & World Report removed George Washington from its ‘Best Colleges’ rankings and the long-serving Dean of Admissions at University, Kathryn M. Napper, retired in December 2012.

Also stepping down was Jordan Miller, the newly-appointed first social media director at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. The Michigan Daily reported that Miller had falsely claimed to hold a degree from Columbia College in Chicago, after a “Concerned Taxpayer,” posted images of Miller’s CV as evidence in a thread on the University’s Reddit community web pages, saying that they had been obtained through public records requests.

The Chinese government implemented new regulations on 1 January 2013, aiming to reduce various kinds of academic fraud, including the activities of ghostwriting services used by many Chinese students, as Yojana Sharma reported for University World News on 6 January 2013. So it was probably a good idea for QAA to send a team to China in November 2012 to look at the student experience in some China-UK partnerships.

The UK Higher Education International Unit has published A Legal Guide to UK Anti-Bribery and Corruption commissioned from the international law firm Eversheds. The guide includes information about the jurisdiction of the Bribery Act 2010 and international operations, what procedures should be in place to prevent bribery, checklists, examples and guidance on what to do if bribery occurs. This came too late for three HE leaders in Chile who were jailed on 1 December 2012, charged with bribery and money laundering. Former rectors Héctor Zúñiga (Universidad del Mar) and Angel Maulén (Universidad Pedro de Valdivia) are accused of bribing Luis Eugenio Díaz, the former

24 President of Chile’s National Accreditation Commission (NCA). The public prosecutor thinks four other universities may have done the same, and the General Comptroller’s Office has issued a highly critical report on multiple irregularities at the NCA, as Maria Elena Hurtado reported for University World News on 6 December 2012.

In Uganda a grassroots initiative against petty academic corruption was launched in May 2012 and is attracting growing interest, according to a report by Andrew Green in World University News on 30 September 2012. Law student Raymond Qatahar used the Not In My Country website to invite students to report corrupt practices such as lecturers asking for money or sex for favourable grades.

Plagiarism

Another German Minister Accused of Plagiarism Inside Higher Education reported on 16 October 2012 that the 30-year-old PhD thesis of Germany's education minister, Annette Schavan, was being investigated by the University of Dusseldorf for alleged plagiarism. Schavan’s thesis was submitted more than 30 years ago and an investigation by the University’s PhD committee was leaked days before the committee was scheduled to meet. Dusseldorf’s Jewish Studies scholar Stefan Rohrbacher reviewed the thesis after allegations about plagiarism were made in May 2012, and found 60 questionable passages, including some of her conclusions, mostly paraphrasing other texts but not always citing them directly, although citing the source elsewhere. He said that Schavan had paraphrased secondary sources extensively in an attempt to show that she had read the primary sources: ‘Not only because of a pattern recurring throughout the work, but also because of specific features found in a significant plurality of sections (in the work), it can be stated that there was a clear intention to deceive.’ Schavan has strongly denied any wrongdoing and others have accused the university of procedural errors. Michele Gardner covered the story in detail in University World News on 18 October 2012. The thesis topic? ‘Individuals and their conscience’.

Silence is deadly That’s the argument of Belinda Luke (Queensland University of Technology) and Kate Kearns (Auckland University of Technology) in their Organization (November 2012 19(6): 881-889) article ‘Attribution of words versus attribution of responsibilities: Academic plagiarism and university practice’. The article looks at a particular case and the issues it raised in several institutions. The authors conclude that silence and complicity by university leaders ‘speak volumes in terms of the values academic institutions profess, and those they actually uphold’, and argue that academics should consider a more proactive stance to promote ethical leadership.

North American institutions sometimes seem to manage these things better. The University of Windsor announced in early December 2012 in UWindsor News that Dr. Clinton Beckford had been placed on administrative leave and unpaid suspension from his position as Dean of the Faculty of Education, until June 30, 2014, in recognition of an academic integrity breach involving plagiarism.

Berkeley professor Terrence Deacon has come under fire very publicly for allegedly using some other academics’ work without proper citation in his book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. The argument is playing out in prestige publications: Colin McGinn (Miami) reviewed Deacon’s book for The New York Review of Books, saying that Deacon’s ideas draw heavily on work by Alicia Juarrero (emerita, Prince George’s Community College with a PhD from Miami), and Evan Thompson (Toronto), though neither scholar is cited. Thompson made the same point in his own review in Nature. The case has been vigorously pursued and publicised through a dedicated website by Juarrero and colleagues including serial objector Michael Lissack, leading to a furore fully

25 reported by Alexandra Tilsley for Inside Higher Education on 22 October 2012. Other academics including Stephen Pinker have come to Deacon’s defence, but the controversy has prompted Berkeley to mount an investigation ‘to clear the air’, without any implication that the claims have any validity. Deacon has welcomed debate and appears unconcerned about the investigation, but objects to the tactics, including the website development and Lissack’s mass emails.

More common, perhaps, is the phenomenon of disputes between graduate students and their supervisors, witness John M Braxton’s (Peabody) 2010 book Professors behaving badly: faculty misconduct in graduate education. A Chronicle story by Stacey Patton on 11 November 2012 reported two recent cases. Padmapriya Ashokkumar, a former Ph.D. student at the U. of Nebraska at Lincoln, accused her adviser Scott Henninger of plagiarising her research, an accusation upheld after a university investigation, and is now suing him and other faculty members in computer science. Henninger resigned from Lincoln in 2008. Mazdak Taghioskioui got a PhD in chemistry at George Washington University but claims that his supervisor Akbar Montaser began a campaign of abuse and accusations of stealing Montaser’s work. Taghioskoui complained that Montaser had filed patent applications for devices which Taghioskoui invented and had presented a conference paper as his own even though it was based on Taghioskoui’s work. Montaser retired and relocated, but Taghioskoui is suing the university. In each case the former student claims the university failed to provide sufficient support in response to their complaints.

Plagiarism software now used regularly by US grant-awarding bodies Karen M. Markin (Rhode Island) reported in the Chronicle on 10 December 2012 that some federal agencies were using technology in their attempts to clamp down on plagiarism and fraud. A recent National Science Foundation report had said that allegations of fraud had tripled in the last ten years.

Academic freedom

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, based in Calgary, issued its 2012 Campus Freedom Index in October 2012, saying that the state of free speech in Canadian universities was ‘abysmal’. The Index rates universities and students’ unions against their actions in supporting or banning controversial speakers, pro-life groups and so on. Across 35 universities the Index gave 3 As but 28 Fs to 12 universities and 16 students’ unions, as Sarah Boesveld reported in the Canadian National Post on 31 October 2012.

Striking a similar note, Greg Lukianoff in the New York Times on 24 October 2012 said that US universities were ‘Feigning Free Speech on Campus’: “Colleges and universities are supposed to be bastions of unbridled inquiry and expression, but they probably do as much to repress free speech as any other institution in young people’s lives.” He said that speech codes on campus might be well- meant but often backfire, suppressing instead of supporting free expression. Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia banned a student protest against an appearance by Paul Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee. A student at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, was blocked from putting a notice on her door arguing that neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney was fit for office. (She successfully appealed.) And a federal judge struck down the University of Cincinnati’s “free speech zone,” which had limited demonstrations to 0.1 percent of the campus. Lukianoff works for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which looked at speech codes in 392 colleges and found that 65 percent had policies that in the Foundation’s view violated the Constitution’s guarantee of the right to free speech. Elite colleges were particularly bad offenders, sometimes ‘Orwellian’. Harvard pressured freshmen to sign an oath promising to act with “civility” and

26 “inclusiveness” and affirming that “kindness holds a place on par with intellectual attainment.” Former Dean of Harvard College Harry R Lewis criticised the oath as ‘thought control’.

Yale is also under fire for allegedly jeopardising academic freedom in its new Yale-National University of Singapore (NUS) liberal arts college venture in Singapore. Some Yale academics had protested that the Singapore political culture would infringe on freedoms cherished in the US, and called for more information about the joint venture between the Singapore Government and Yale. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) weighed in with an open letter calling on Yale to establish a suitable forum where the new venture could be discussed, and to guarantee “provisions to ensure academic freedom and tenure and collegial governance”, including “anti- harassment and anti-discrimination provisions and rights to procedural fairness”. The letter expressed concern about whether independent internet access will be available, whether teaching and research materials will be subject to censorship, and that students and staff may be at risk through campus speeches, internet postings, email messages and broadcast lectures that criticise the Singapore government. Working conditions have also become an issue after the Singapore government deported Chinese bus workers for striking over discriminatory pay.

Yale-NUS President Pericles Lewis hit back strongly in the Yale Daily News on 5 December 2012, saying that the new college had shown strong commitment to academic freedom, which was a ‘bedrock principle’ guaranteed by documents already circulated by the University. Yale would not benefit financially from the new venture.

Singapore’s opposition leaders Democratic Party Secretary-General Chee Soon Juan questioned Yale’s motives in the venture. Chee was previously a neuropsychology lecturer at the National University of Singapore (NUS) but was dismissed when he joined the opposition party in 1993. He pointed out that students at the new college would not be allowed to form organisations affiliated to political parties: “We had hoped that given Yale’s proud history, it would not allow Singapore’s government, or any other government, to dictate the kind of experience it provides for its students,” Chee said. Adele Yung and Yojana Sharma reported the affair in detail for University World News on 7 December 2012.

Helena Flusfeder in University World News on 7 October 2012 said that Israel was “treading a fine line on academic freedom”. The Israeli Council for Higher Education (CHE) had recommended that the department of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University should not be allowed to register students for the 2013-14 academic year, which would in effect close the department. Some academics in the department have been accused of being left-wing, and the recommendation went against the conclusions of an international ad hoc group, according to a letter from the international panel.

Access and Widening Participation

Access in the USA

How not to buy university entry A cautionary tale about two Hong Kong parents and one unscrupulous ‘admissions consultant’ from the Boston Globe on 9 October 2012.

27 Widening participation in the UK

Widening participation toolkits launched The Higher Education Academy (HEA) has published four toolkits offering practical guidance to those working in higher education (HE) outreach and widening participation.. And a report from HEFCE published on 3 October 2012 looks at how the chances of young people entering higher education vary according to where they live.

Libraries, Publishing and Information Technology

Libraries

Canadian Universities pull out of licensing agreement with the American Chemical Society The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), a partnership of Canadian universities, dedicated to expanding digital content for the academic research enterprise in Canada, announced on 26 November 2012 that it would terminate a licensing agreement with the American Chemical Society (ACS) that had been running since 2001. The ACS has been trying to negotiate a new agreement which would charge participating universities according to journal usage, which the CRKN said would expose its members to unacceptable levels of financial risk.

Publishing

New Kinds of Scholarly Press Amherst College plans to launch a digital-only scholarly press which will make its output available free of charge, a ‘wildly idealistic’ initiative reported by Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Education on 6 December 2012. Amherst Librarian Bryn Geffert has led the new venture and hopes that if enough institutions follow suit there might be a tipping point beyond which there would be a critical mass of freely available scholarly literature, and HE libraries would enter a new and more viable economic era.

Christopher Land (Essex) argued on the Impact of Social Sciences blog on 6 December 2012 that universities should form a new kind of hybrid partnership with learned societies to bring publishing back under academic control and promote open access. He suggested “four possible strategies for modernising the academic publishing industry: increasing open access through institutional repositories or a publisher-pays commercial model; a ‘fair trade’ model that would reimburse universities for at least some of the work they currently provide to publishers for free; a revival of the university presses; a move toward self-organized, academic publishing collectives”.

Peering into open access space New approaches to academic publishing are starting to appear. Peter Binfield, who once published PLoSOne, one of the best-known and most respected open-access science journals, launched PeerJ in May 2012, which works by attracting members wiling to pay a lifetime membership fee of between $100 and $300. Members are allowed to submit as many papers as they like, but also obliged to review papers submitted by other members. Anyone can read the papers which PeerJ publishes.

Rubriq, also launched in 2012, aims to do something different, by offering a more efficient and quicker way of getting articles reviewed. It’s speed-dating for articles looking for a home: “As an

28 independent, for-benefit organization, Rubriq can provide rigorous reviews by the same qualified peers who review for journals, but with a standardized scorecard that can be used in any publishing model. Our system will enable faster, more consistent reviews, and will help match papers with the right journals. Find out more about our plan here.”

Meanwhile the emerging preference for gold open access approaches (see SRHE News 10) following the Finch Report continues to arouse hostility. Mike Taylor (Bristol) put his analysis on the Impact of Social Sciences blog, suggesting that publishers are taking $1973 for every journal article they publish. Finch estimated ‘article processing charges’ at between £1500 and £2000, but Taylor says that was far too high, for several reasons. Finch relied on earlier work: Houghton J et al; Heading for the Open Road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications, RIN, PRC, Wellcome Trust, JISC, RLUK, 2011; and Solomon, D, and Björk, B-Christer A study of Open Access Journals using article processing charges. Taylor argues that the Finch analysis ignores free-to-the-author journals and ignored the low average price found by the Solomon and Björk analysis. It focused on authors spending ‘other people’s money’ (ie research grants etc), ignored the world’s leading open access journal Plos One, ignored the waivers offered by many gold open access journals, and didn’t recognize how the shape of publishing was changing with new initiatives such as eLife and PeerJ. Taylor suggests the true APC is nearer to $453 or £283, only a fifth of the Finch estimate.

Journals

Transformative Dialogues: Teaching and Learning e-journal is a free open access peer-reviewed online journal which can be found at: http://kwantlen.ca/TD/Current_Issue Articles are available as .pdf files. The main page is at: http://kwantlen.ca/TD, and previous issues are at: http://kwantlen.ca/TD/past_issues. Transformative Dialogues is a forum for conversations intended to foster the improvement of adult teaching and learning. TD facilitates the multi- disciplinary exchange of ideas, actions, and results of innovative and professional practice in the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Social media and information technology Check out SRHE member Pat Thomson’s (Nottingham) blog, ‘Patter’, on how to do doctoral research.

Global Perspectives

Africa

Uganda seeks to dominate HE in East Africa Maina Waruru wrote in World University News on 30 September 2012 that Ugandan universities, especially Makerere, Kampala, Kampala International and Busoga, were aggressively recruiting students from neighbouring countries and forming partnerships with institutions in Kenya, Tanzania and Sudan.

All Nigerian part-time university courses suspended The National Universities Commission of Nigeria announced on 14 October 2012 that all part-time courses in universities would be suspended with immediate effect pending a quality assurance

29 review, with problems suspected on a large scale. The closure was reported by Tunde Fatunde in University World News on 14 October 2012.

South Africa legislation threatens to reduce university autonomy As the Higher Education and Training Laws Amendment Bill neared final legislative approval in South Africa in December, universities raised fundamental objections to the implications of the new powers conferred on Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande. HE bodies were not consulted on the amendments, which were described as ‘devastating’ by Durban University of Technology Vice-Chancellor Ahmed Bawa, Chair of the vice-chancellors’ group Higher Education South Africa (HESA). The Bill makes it easier for the government to intervene to put universities into administration, and to create new HE institutions which might encroach on the autonomy of existing universities. HESA and the statutory advisory body the Council on Higher Education both made submissions to parliamentary bodies protesting they had not been consulted and objecting to the implications of the new law, as Nicola Jenvey reported for University World News on 9 December 2012.

Wizard scholarship scheme for Malawi Food scientist Harry Potter, who died in April 2012, was awarded an OBE for services to Food Security in Africa after a lifetime’s work in the developing world. His former colleague Rev Susan Flynn hopes to establish a scholarship in Agriculture, Environmental Studies or Natural Sciences as a memorial to Harry Potter so that young bright Malawians with leadership potential who are financially challenged may benefit as he did from a government grant to study at Caius College Cambridge. For more information contact [email protected] or go to www.test4africa.com.

Asia

China should stop favoured academics cashing in on research grants Under the general system for awarding research grants in China there are no rules about how much money should go to the researchers themselves, leading to some abuses. An article by Jin Zhu in China Daily on 4 January 2013 reported a call by Chu Zhaohui, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Education Sciences, for more detailed regulation and for academics to have more say in how grants are awarded.

Pakistan Higher Education Commission appointment overturned by Supreme Court Pakistan Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf tried to appoint Ministry of Education civil servant Qamar Zaman Chaudhry as the new executive director of the Higher Education Commission, which distributes about $500million a year in HE funds, much of it from foreign aid. The HEC’s 18-member governing body had tried in August 2012 to extend the current HEC Executive Director Sohail Naqvi’s term in office for a third time. Senior academics took the case to court as an alleged violation of the statutory autonomy of the HEC, and the legal ruling was that neither candidate should be considered. The judge said the HEC should adopt a better process, and they promptly appointed a new interim executive director, with plans for a permanent appointee to be announced by 19 January 2013. There is speculation that the government was trying to tighten control over the HEC, which has exposed more than 50 parliamentarians as having suspect or bogus degrees. Ameen Amjad Khan had the full story in University World News on 6 January 2013.

The Conference of Vice-Chancellors of Central and State Universities in India has published University and society: issues and challenges Some Ideas from Leading Practitioners of Higher Education, edited by Ved Prakash of the University Grants Commission.

30 Taiwan university mergers Falling enrolments in Taiwan have prompted the government to merge six universities into three and contemplate a budget freeze, as The China Post reported on 20 November 2012. The mergers, to be completed in 2013, will combine three pairs of top-rated universities: National Taiwan University and National Taipei University of Education; National Tsing Hua University and National Hsinchu University of Education; and National Pingtung University of Education and National Pingtung Institute of Commerce. Government policy prioritises the 53 local universities with fewer than 10000 students.

Rectors say universities in Europe and Asia must collaborate When university leaders from 37 countries in Europe and Asia met in Groningen on 25-26 September 2012 they unsurprisingly agreed it was necessary to collaborate, and recommended promoting a credit transfer system within the Asia Europe Meeting (ASEM) of university rectors, which is supported by the Singapore-based Europe Asia Foundation. Yojana Sharma reported the event in University World News on 28 September 2012. ASEM education ministers will meet in Kuala Lumpur in 2013.

Australasia

Canberra and Holmesglen create a national ‘polytechnic university’ The University of Canberra announced on 17 October 2012 its plans to form a partnership with Holmesglen Institute of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in Melbourne and rename itself the University of Canberra Melbourne. The University also has an agreement with the Metropolitan South Institute of TAFE in Brisbane to offer programmes in Queensland. UC VC Stephen Parker said this was about the ‘reinvention’ of the University of Canberra on a model which Holmesglen’s chief executive Bruce Mackenzie called a ‘polytechnic university’.

Australian research is getting better - official An Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) report by the Australian Research Council, released by Science and Research Minister Senator Chris Evans, said that the number of disciplines in higher education institutions performing at and above world standard had doubled over the past two years, with 10 universities rated above the world standard for research, including four performing at well above world standard. Whatever that means. Geoff Maslen had the story in University World News on 6 December 2012.

Voting for Higher Education Marcia Devlin 2013 in Australia has started with searing, record-breaking temperatures across the country. It has also started with almost daily analysis of the chances of the rivals for the top job of Prime Minister in what will be an election year. The current Labour Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, faces off against the current leader of the Liberal opposition, Tony Abbott.

Having survived a tough year in 2012, filled with controversy and close shaves, Gillard’s popularity has risen slightly, particularly following the ‘misogyny speech’ in parliament, the recording of which went viral internationally late last year. But Gillard has numerous challenges to overcome to retain power. On the other hand, Abbott has an image problem, particularly with women, who perceive him to be sexist and macho. The papers and social media have been filled with debate and discussion about his clumsy attempts to use his female staff and wife and daughters in staged media events to prove how much he loves women.

Commentators have begun predicting the key factors on which the election result will be decided. These include gender alongside economic management, carbon pricing, health and education, among others. While a traditionally Labour concern, a focus on education, however, does not necessarily highlight higher education.

Higher education is not a vote catcher in Australia. Part of the issue is that, like Abbott, Australian higher education suffers from an image problem. However, instead of finding it offensive, as many women find Abbott’s approach to politics, the Australian public are largely indifferent to university education.

A number of factors contribute to the low profile of Australian higher education. These include: the general discomfort in the community, outside the elite, around celebrating academic achievement; the egalitarian culture that urges giving everyone a ‘fair go’ and, therefore, not wanting to promote something to which everyone does not have equal access; the lack of connection between higher education and the national obsession – sport; and the absence of good PR for higher education generally, despite the myriad and enormous contributions it makes to advancing society and the lives of citizens.

What may be necessary in an election year, where economic management will be front and centre in voters’ minds, is to convince the public and through them, the government, that higher education is not a cost, but an investment. I wonder who might take up this challenge, however, in a competitive and demand-driven system where universities are focused on competing with each other for students and funding.

The elite universities in Australia keep pointing to the fact that the sector is only partly deregulated and calling for price deregulation to create a more market-oriented sector. We’ve started to see how well that has worked in the UK and the consequences for institutions and individuals. But it does seem to work well for the government who are relieved, to some extent, from the responsibility of funding higher education. This could be appealing to either side of politics in Australia.

The election is likely to be toward the end of the year. In the meantime, the daily discussions about Gillard and Abbott, or Julia and Tony as we prefer to call them here, continue. May the best (wo)man for higher education win.

SRHE member Marcia Devlin is an adjunct professor at two Australian universities and a higher education commentator. Twitter: @MarciaDevlin

Europe

France

French government decides HE investment is counter-cyclical Keynesianism lives under Francois Hollande, it seems. The higher education budget has actually increased by 2.2% in 2013, although most government departments have seen cuts in the austerity budget which the new French President has been forced to introduce, as Jane Marshall reported in University World News on 4 October 2012.

Management troubles continue at Sciences Po Jane Marshall reported in University World News on 14 October 2012 that state auditor Cours des Comptes had identified many serious deficiencies in the management of Sciences Po, the elite Institute of Political Studies in Paris, during the tenure of previous Director Richard Descoigns, who died suddenly in April 2012 on a business trip to New York. Turmoil over its leadership has continued. The French Ministry of Higher Education and Research wanted to defer replacing the Director until the audit office had completed its investigations and published a report, but the Institute’s faculty pressed ahead and nominated Hervé Crès, one of Descoings’ deputies, as his successor. A damning audit report, ‘Sciences Po: une forte ambition, une gestion défaillante’, emerged on 22 November 2012, pointing to weak financial controls and various other shortcomings. Then Minister Geneviève Fioraso blocked the appointment of Cres, instead making Jean Gaeremynck, a financial civil servant, interim director. French academics are civil servants with tightly-regulated salaries and working conditions, and this is said to have complicated Descoings’ earlier attempts to reform the Institute, prompting some of the irregular payments. The Institute has promised to put things right, issuing a substantial response to the audit report. DD Guttenplan reported the saga in detail in The New York Times on 1 December 2012.

Ireland

Irish Government will legislate to restrict university freedoms over pay After reports of payments to some staff in some universities which went against Irish government policy, Education Minister Ruairi Quinn said on 2 October 2012 that legislation would be amended to ensure future compliance, according to a report in RTE.

Netherlands

Cuts provoke student outrage This may sound familiar in the UK … a new coalition government has made HE changes which have outraged students, as part of a £16billion package of public expenditure cuts in the Netherlands. From September 2014 Dutch undergraduates will have loans rather than scholarships and the popular free student public transport pass will be scrapped. The loans move had been expected, but there was general surprise at the lack of significant countervailing investment in HE, which received only an extra £150million for basic research. Jan van‘t Westende, chair of the National Chamber of Associations (of students), protested that students were bearing a disproportionate share of the cuts: “There are 600,000 students in The Netherlands and they face £1 billion of budget cuts”. The Higher Education Board, which represents universities of applied sciences, calculated that there would be 15,000 fewer students because of the cuts, as Robert Visscher reported for University World News on 4 November 2012.

Spain

Spain’s much-publicised economic difficulties have brought drastic cuts for higher education budgets, with the Spanish Government proposing reductions in 2013 of 18% in teaching funding, and 7.2% in research support, as Rebecca Warden reported in University World News on 16 December 2012. Rectors of all but one of the country’s 50 universities united in making a joint statement of protest, read out simultaneously by the rector of each university on 10 December 2012. But the protests have not yet led to a similarly unified view of the way forward, as Michele Girotto writes in this analysis specially commissioned for SRHE News.

A stronger, bolder, higher education system? Spanish universities under scrutiny Michele Girotto The higher education system in Spain has undergone substantial change in the last thirty years. Significant growth in the number of universities and degree programmes available led to the consolidation of a system mainly comprised of public institutions. The aftermath of the economic crisis is now forcing reflection on what strategic directions the higher education system should follow, starting from first principles in considering future possibilities for the institutions. Should there be fewer universities, better managed? How can the system achieve more financial feasibility? Could university mergers provide a better future for the Spanish higher education system? How can higher education enhance graduate employability in the context of the highest rate of youth unemployment? These are only some of several hot topics under public scrutiny.

With the recent approval of the draft of the Organic Law for Education Quality Improvement (LOMCE), the government foresees setting up a new access system, gradual growth in tuition fees, limitation of scholarships policies and significant reductions in university budgets. The current situation suggests that Spanish universities have not been a model of transparency and accountability: institutional debt is the order of the day, embedded in a context in which the universities claim to be owed millions by regional governments. With the current policy of budget cuts the deficit is particularly affecting large universities, damaging revenues and balance sheets because although universities have other sources of income - research grants, business alliances, etc - the contribution of regional government represents up to 80% of the income of public universities.

Spanish universities are not well-represented in the Shanghai, QS, and THE international rankings, their economic problems are accentuated by HE policy emphasising entrepreneurship and competitionve policy strategies, and the Spanish labour market is unable to absorb the number of graduates that universities annually generate. Therefore, policy debates focus on what should be the role and model of Spanish universities in this new context.

The current national government has a modernisation agenda but it remains to be seen what degree of autonomy the new legislation will allow the universities. The reform raises questions about whether there are too many public universities - currently there are 50 public and 28 private institutions – and questions the general model in which universities offer similar degrees. The new model suggests a reduced system with more specialised institutions. However, there have not yet been any mergers of Spanish universities, beyond the sporadic integration of some smaller schools. Will we see in the coming years mergers of Spanish universities either at regional or national level? The prevailing landscape suggests that the Spanish university vice-chancellors do not have a unanimous proposal on this subject, neither do policy makers. There are divergent perspectives for and against merger policies, where discourses markedly focus attention on promoting different types of collaboration between universities, discarding full integration. Nevertheless the current forced rationalization of the system could possibly end in mergers. Ideas about the future of the Spanish higher education system are being contested and it seems that the battle will continue to rage for some time.

SRHE member Michele Girotto is a Lecturer in Business Management in the Department of Management of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain, and a research collaborator at the UNESCO Chair of Higher Education Management, specialising in strategy and management tools in higher education. She is currently working on an edited book on Strategic Management of Universities: Concepts and Experiences for Telescopi Network in the Ibero-America region. She is also

34 involved in the implementation of Strategic University Management Unfolding Practices (SUMUP), a European project consortium which is actively involved in university management research throughout the CLUSTER network of universities, as well as in the building up of ISMU, the Institute for Strategic Management of Universities, under the Tempus framework programme.

Sweden

On 11 October 2012 Swedish Education Minister Jan Borklund announced plans to raise Sweden’s research and HE spending to 3.46% of GDP by 2016, putting Sweden fourth worldwide in HE spending (after Israel, Finland and South Korea). There will be an increase in the base funding for Sweden’s 37 HE institutions, and the proportion of the budget distributed through quality-related criteria will rise from 10% to 20%, as Jan Petter Myklebust reported for University World News on 18 October 2012.

Ukraine

Some Ukraine university academics allege that the government has told them to save money on student grants by ‘artificially failing students’, according to a report by Daria Zadorozhnaya and Yuriy Onyshkiv in the Kyiv Post on 6 December 2012. About half of the 400,000 Ukraine students receive ‘stipends’ ranging from Hr 550 to Hr 730 ($90) for good or excellent academic performance. In summer 2012 the government cut stipends by almost Hr 200 by not adjusting it for inflation, triggering student protest after which the government increased the payments.

North America

Canada

Quebec Government keeps manifesto pledge on tuition fees

On her first day in office the new Quebec premier, Pauline Marois, said her government would as promised cancel a controversial tuition fee increase for Quebec’s universities and revoke parts of a law that restricted protests, as CBC News reported on 20 September 2013. The Marois-led government was elected by a narrow margin after months of student protests had disrupted Quebec during the election campaign. Tuition fees returned to their previous level of CAD$2168.

USA

Shorter did get smaller We reported in SRHE News the controversial proposals at Baptist Shorter University, in Rome, Georgia, to change staff contracts by requiring them to sign a statement of faith and a list of “lifestyle” expectations. A year later the University had lost more than a third of the 94 full-time faculty on its undergraduate campus, as Libby A Nelson reported for Inside Higher Education on 14 November 2012.

On your bike Tufts University has rescinded the honorary degree it granted to disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, after a unanimous vote of the Board of Regents. Interesting that the honorary degree was in the gift of the Board and not the academic senate.

Getting the politics wrong Alabama State put its new president Joseph Silver on leave only three months after he took up his post, after he tried to dismiss two senior officials for insubordination. One of those threatened, local politician John Knight, has now been named interim president, as Alabama.com reported on 26 November 2012.

People

The SRHE Research Conference is always a good time to catch up on recent moves, and 2012 was no exception. Ian Kinchin moved a while ago from King’s College London to Surrey, where he heads a new department of higher education, a welcome statement of intent by the university in the face of cutbacks elsewhere reducing capacity for research into HE. SRHE Fellow Penny Jane Burke has also completed her move from Roehampton to a chair at Sussex, strengthening the already impressive group which includes SRHE Fellow Louise Morley, Valerie Hey and others represented as usual in a stimulating CHEER Symposium at the Conference. Paul Temple is retiring from the London Institute of Education, where his many contributions, including joint leadership of the flagship MBA HE Management programme, will be hard to replace. And SRHE Council member Kelly Coate is returning to London from the National University of Ireland, Galway, where she has been since leaving the London Institute of Education. Her new job is in the King’s Learning Institute headed by Paul Blackmore. Gordon Lee has held a range of senior posts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and since August has been Acting Provost, after most recently serving for some years as Vice- President for Finance and Resources.

We like news about SRHE people. Send your stuff about job moves, awards, triumphs, new articles or books, whatever you think we’ll like, to [email protected].

Society News

SRHE Team Helen Perkins Director [email protected] Rob Gresham Manager Operations and Finance [email protected] Franco Carta Finance Officer [email protected] Nicola Manches Administration Assistant [email protected] François Smit Conference and Events Organiser [email protected]

Audio files and podcasts: SRHE conference keynote addresses For those members who were unable to attend the SRHE conference in December (and for those who did attend and would hear part of all of these addresses again) the following recordings are now available from the following link www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2012 or via the direct links below

Professor Howard Hotson Professor Sir David Watson

Professor Suellen Shay Professor Roger Brown

Professor Georg Krücken Professor Roni Bamber

36 Downloadable podcasts of all of the above are also available via the SRHE Podcast page – the full link for this is https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/srhe-society-for-research/id594177334?mt=2&ign- mpt=uo%3D4

Note for your diaries: The 2013 SRHE Conference will take place on 11-13 December 2013, with the Newer Researchers Conference on 10th December. The Call for Papers will follow shortly.

Forthcoming SRHE Network Events Newer Researchers Network Wednesday 13 February 2013 Academic Writing Skills Speaker: Professor Rowena Murray, Strathclyde University Venue - SRHE, 73 Collier Street, London N1 9BE Fully booked- Waiting list only

International Research and Researchers Tuesday 26 February 2013 Archerian analyses-Applying Margaret Archer’s theoretical perspectives to research in HE Speakers: Professor Margaret Archer, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, Ahmad Lodhi, University of the Punjab, Pakistan, and University of Leeds, Dr Carol O’Byrne, Waterford Institute of Technology, Republic of Ireland Venue - SRHE, 73 Collier Street, London N1 9BE

Post-Compulsory and Higher Education Tuesday 19 March 2013 The role of further education sector in higher education provision in England Speakers: Dr Marion Bowl, University of Birmingham, Dr Anne Thompson, Researcher and Consultant, Venue - University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, B5 2TT

Edinburgh Colloquium Thursday 25 and Friday 26 April 2013 Higher Education as if the World Mattered Speakers; Professor Melanie Walker, Free State University, South Africa, Professor Monica McLean, University of Nottingham, Professor Jon Nixon, Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIE), and Honorary Professor, University of Sheffield and Professor Ray Land, Durham University, UK Venue: University of Edinburgh This event cost members - £130 and non -members £150, University of Edinburgh - complimentary

For further details and to book your place, see www.srhe.ac.uk . SRHE events are free to members, there is a charge of £45 for non-members

Further seminars and events are detailed on the ‘Worldwise News’ section of the SRHE homepage at www.srhe.ac.uk

37 Small ads

Distance learning PhD in HE Research, Evaluation and Enhancement The Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University is launching a unique distance learning PhD programme in Higher Education Research, Evaluation and Enhancement, for 2013 entry. Students will complete the part-time programme entirely online, over four to five years. Designed for professionals working within higher education institutions around the world, participants can study from home whilst in full- or part-time employment and do not need to visit the Lancaster campus, making the programme ideal for international students. Lancaster boasts one of the best Education Departments within the UK, with internationally renowned researchers/practitioners, and was ranked 10th in the UK and 1st in the North West of England in the Guardian University Guide 2012. For more information, please visit: www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/edres/study/higher_education_research/index.htm

External examiners, referees, reviewers wanted News will be happy to carry advertisements for external examiners in the broad field of research into higher education, for publishers’ referees, for book reviewers, and so on.

Conferences and seminars 13 February 2013 Education, employment and social mobility: what is really going on and what can be done? University of Greenwich Business School Work and Employment Research Unit Seminar Series Ken Roberts (Liverpool) 'The real trend in social mobility: from upwards to downwards' Lefteris Kretsos (Greenwich) ‘The persistent pandemic of Work Precariousness and Insecurity’ Martin Allen (NUT) and Patrick Ainley (Greenwich) on ‘Too Great Expectations of Education’ Plenary/ summing up: Ian Greer (Greenwich); Liam Burns, (President NUS) Chair: Maria Papapolydorou (Greenwich) Information: [email protected] Venue: Hamilton House, 15 Park Vista, London SE10 9LZ

14 February 2013 Researcher awareness and engagement with research integrity For further information about the project and the event contact: Dr Fiona Denney (Kings College London): [email protected] Dr Andrew C. Rawnsley (Teesside University & UKCGE Exec Committee):[email protected] Venue: THE CIRCLE (Rockingham Lane), SHEFFIELD (in collaboration with the University of Sheffield)

20-22 March 2013 Who and what are universities for? Local communities, global competitiveness and the part-time student The Universities Association for Lifelong Learning Annual Conference 2013. Details and the Call for Papers at: www.uall.ac.uk Venue: Durham University

29 April Matters of Learning: Sociomaterial Approaches to Researching Education Professor Tara Fenwick (University of Stirling) Please email Sylvia Willis ([email protected]) if you would like to book a place Venue: University of Brighton, Room M101, Mayfield House, Falmer from 5.00pm to 6.30pm

4 July 2013 Ethics and Student Engagement: Exploring Practices in Higher Education University of Brighton/Sheffield Hallam University Keynote speakers: Professor Ron Barnett, Centre of Higher Education Studies, Institute of Education and Colin Bryson, Director of Combined Honours Centre, University of Newcastle Offers of papers should be made by sending a title and an abstract of no more than 300 words to Carol Robison at [email protected] to be received by Friday 12th April 2013. Venue: University of Brighton (School of Education)

1-4 July 2013 HERDSA Conference 2013 Proposals for the HERDSA 2013 conference should be submitted by 22 February 2013. For information about the conference, guidelines for submissions, and a link to the online submission portal go to the conference website: http://conference.herdsa.org.au/2013 Venue: AUT University in Auckland

21-23 July 2014 Higher Education Close Up The 7th biennial Higher Education Close Up conference will take place at Lancaster University, UK, on 21-23 July 2014. A forum for researchers across the world who are doing fine-grained research into higher education, the conference theme this time is ‘Making a Difference’. Further information: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/events/hecu7/ Venue: Lancaster House Hotel adjacent to the University.

Mind your language

More name games The merger of Georgia Health Sciences University and Augusta State University caused outrage in Augusta, not over the merger, but over the name the Regents proposed: Georgia Regents University (see SRHE News 10). That name was chosen despite a study commissioned by a joint merger group which found that ‘University of Augusta’ was rated highest in local, state and national polls. Augusta State supporters complained that their university’s history was being ignored, and then Regent University (in Virginia) said it had trademarked the ‘Regent’ name and proposed legal action to defend its position. So the Regents tried again with ‘Georgia Regents University Augusta’. That isn’t an official change from the original name, it’s a different ‘branding’, but one which will appear on all university materials and merchandise. And now everybody seems happy about the compromise.

In Utah Dixie State College is considering a name change and in particular thinking about dropping the "Dixie" part because it is redolent of the slave trade, as Associated Press reported on 30 November 2012. The name came from 19th-century cotton-growing Mormon settlers who didn’t do things by halves: the college has a statue of Confederate soldiers and until recently had ‘Rebel’ as the college mascot. Traditionalists are defending the name as part of the college history and saying it doesn’t contradict a modern mission of equality and diversity.

An Afghanistan university name change prompted violent protests in Kabul. President Hamid Karzai decided to change its name from the Kabul Education University to the Martyr of Peace Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani University, as reported by The New York Times in October 2012. Mr. Rabbani, a leader of a Tajik political party, was killed last year by a suicide bomber. The change has become a

39 fault line between ethnic groups in the country, with Tajiks, mostly from outside the university, supporting it and Pashtun and Hazara students opposing it.

What a sweet name Founded by a sweetshop magnate, the ‘Lovely Professional University’ is possibly the biggest campus in India, as Shailaja Neelakantan reported for the Chronicle on 18 November 2012.

Times Higher Education jargon competition Chris Parr reported on the UK’s losing battle against managerial gobbledegook on 16 November 2012 in Inside Higher Education, citing comments by Dawn Freshwater, Leeds Pro Vice-Chancellor for staff and organizational effectiveness, in the university's in-house magazine: "We can reframe the way we define [organisational effectiveness], so that it's not viewed as simply foregrounding cost savings, but instead a much more complex interplay of influences and drivers that facilitate opportunities for enhancing the ways in which we manage movement." An unnamed London university was "… confident that we can respond to these challenges in a way that will allow us to be an agile institution able to flex as we move forward like a gazelle across the veldt which is the changing landscape of higher education." Even Oxford succumbs: its University Library Services Strategic Plan 2009-10 to 2014-15 describes itself as a "roadmap for collective action and an aid to chart our progress into the future," which "takes into account the known world and projects forward the path into terrain where we shall be explorers of new peaks."

And Finally …

Mind your logoage

A new logo proposed for the University of California at Berkeley immediately attracted widespread opposition, to such an extent that eventually the University climbed down and withdrew the new design. The University has always used its original 1868 seal featuring an open book and the words ‘let there be light’. The new seal supposedly showed a C inside a U. For Berkeley commentators it was too reminiscent of the loading icon on Youtube, as reported in student newspaper The Daily Californian, but UK observers are more likely to be reminded of the long-lived and much-loved Open University logo.

Scott Jaschik for Inside Higher Education on 10 December 2012 recalled other HE logo failures, including Drake University's D+ campaign., Middlebury College's logo redesign (largely abandoned) and Nicholls State University's mascot redesign. More than 50,000 people signed a petition against the new logo, objecting to a loss of prestige and elegance, and Facebook protest pages multiplied: "The New UC Logo is Awful,"; "Stop the UC Logo Change"; "UC Alumni Against the New Logo,".

The University put up a vigorous defence but admitted defeat, as Xarissa Holdaway reported for the Chronicle (U. of California Suspends Unpopular New Logo) on 14 December 2012. Daniel M. Dooley,, senior VP for external relations said in a press release, “While I believe the design element in question would win wide acceptance over time, it also is important that we listen to and respect what has been a significant negative response by students, alumni and other members of our

40 community. Therefore, I have instructed the communications team to suspend further use of the monogram.”

The changing academic novel In response to the item in SRHE News 10 about academic novels, Ian McNay points out that: “Ms Mentor and her respondents seem never to have heard of CP Snow, 'ye onlie begetter'. And if you extend to crime novels, there is a whole catalogue. Elaine Showalter's book was disappointing for its lack of coverage of some key examples of the campus-based genre. In North America, Robertson Davies should also get a mention - best description of a challenged viva panel in any novel in 'Lyre of Orpheus', part of his trilogy.”

There was a time when the academic novel was mostly about Oxbridge academics. But more recently the genre has shown signs of catching up with realities, addressing instead a range of institutional contexts and focusing on those working in support services, as administrators and in part-time temporary academic roles. A delightful essay by Jeffrey J Williams (Carnegie Mellon) in the Chronicle on 12 November 2012 described ‘the rise of the adjunct novel’, exemplified by three well- regarded 2010 novels, Sam Lipsyte's The Ask, James Hynes's Next, and John McNally's After the Workshop. Williams even attributes the rise of the new subgenre to Hynes and his 1997 collection Publish and Perish. “The hero of the new academic novel is a professor manqué, and the academic world is no longer a path to middle-class security.”

An English university with a website/chatroom where students can ask questions recently had one student who asked: "Is this the University in the novel 'Crump'?". The answer, alas, was no more than humourless corporatespeak about the magnificence of the student experience, rather suggesting that the real answer was: ‘It could be’.

Academic plays After our general failure to attract contributions on academic novels, this new venture is probably doomed from the start. But we can’t resist telling you about the National Theatre of Scotland and their production The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, which has even been touring in the US, as admirably reported by Heidi Landexker for the Chronicle on 7 January 2013. The eponymous Prudencia is a new academic, an authority on hell in Scots border ballads, who discovers through a conference that hell is not other people, but an inescapable library (based in a B&B) full of other people’s work on your speciality, but not your own.

Students at Boston University found it all too easy to identify with Les Miserables, producing a polished parody which the Boston Globe reported on 26 December 2012.

We want your suggestions for entry in the pantheon of academic plays. We will give points for all submissions, and (with acknowledgement to BBC Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue) points mean, of course, that you welcome any distraction from finishing that article, reviewing that book, or marking those scripts. Email [email protected] and you will get a mention in a future issue, which (if you’re getting desperate for the impending REF) you could even count as ‘impact’.

Ian McNay writes …

Scotland gets an honorable mention in the report of the Royal Commission of 1851, contrasting the indolence and decadence of Oxbridge with Scots who return to follow the plough during vacations. Note the surge of English students into the older Scots universities as part of the drift to 3 year degrees.

One of the placards at a recent student protest march referred to a new publication - Cameron and Osborne, 'The Origin of Specious'.

There was a new article in International Journal of Social Research Methodology, now in Taylor & Francis Online: ‘A methodological approach to the materiality of clothing: Wardrobe studies’ by Ingun Grimstad Klepp & Mari Bjerck (DOI: 10.1080/13645579.2012.737148). Well, we've done lions and witches. This is an obvious next step.

Homophone corner, as the Guardian would say: in recent BIS publications 'has lead to', 'comprised of' and so on; Research Fortnight had Alan Milburn saying there was a need to diffuse the postgraduate numbers time bomb.

SRHE Fellow Ian McNay is emeritus professor at the University of Greenwich.