Eau de HE: the Smell of Success

A new range of fundraising fragrances from Notre Dame. The Chronicle of Higher Education has this entertaining piece about the very serious business of making money from smells: The University of Notre Dame has long been known for its enthusiastic sports fans. Now, the South Bend Tribune reports, all of those rabid supporters will be …

Measuring Collegiality

Can you test for academics' collegiality? And would you want to? The Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece on the launch of a new test to help determine academics' collegiality or,as they put it, whether a faculty member is "a bully or a jerk or an all-around pain in the neck." Two higher-education consultants …

Rate your administrator

Rate this, rate that, rate everything Following the outstanding success of Rate Your Lecturer, which has been overwhelmingly endorsed by right-thinking academics everywhere, it's time to broaden the assessment. Due to extraordinary demand therefore we are now launching Rate Your Administrator. RYA is the site that finally gives users of a range of administrative services …

Another international prize

A good night at the THELMAs Terrific result for the University of Nottingham's Asia Business Centre at last night's THE Leadership and Management Awards (the THELMAs). Although we were less fortunate in two other categories this was a great achievement for the ABC team. In the citation it was noted that Nottingham's entry was outstanding …

School of Rock

New foundation degree in heavy metal makes some noise. The Nottingham Post reports on a new degree in heavy metal launched at New College Nottingham: Performance, recording and promotion will also feature heavily, with students having career options with recording companies, teaching and performance. “You can study music at Oxford, Cambridge and in cities all …

£5m for Students’ Green Fund

Big funding for student-led green initiatives. HEFCE recently announced the launch of the 'Students’ Green Fund' which is intended to help students work with their institutions on sustainable development: NUS will run a single-round bidding competition in summer 2013, to allocate the funding. The funded projects will then receive the funding over two full academic …

Using data to enhance campus services

Really useful data. Some great examples of using data to improve institutional management in this The Chronicle of Higher Education story: William D. Law Jr. was talking about "big data" before it was a buzzword. Mr. Law, president of St. Petersburg College, has long argued that colleges can improve student performance with a little number …

20 over 500

Youth isn't everything Last year it was Times Higher Education but this year it is the turn of QS to produce a ranking of newer universities, presumably on the basis that somehow they suffer in the rankings for not having done enough stuff over their limited histories. Unfortunately, this rather discriminates against older institutions which …

Do we need more ways to measure HE?

Clearly we do... There seems to be a new review of performance indicators for higher education underway. This is, it appears, a "fundamental review" of how higher education is measured in the UK. The review has been commissioned by HEFCE's Performance Indicators Steering Group (the acronym for which I get a childish pleasure from saying out …

On the size of branch campuses

Biggest isn't always best but it does tell you something Looking at the latest University of Nottingham student statistics and the most recently published HESA data it struck me that Nottingham is now the UK's largest campus university (ie if we exclude the Open University). However, it is important to understand that two of our …

Guardian League Table 2014: One or two changes

New Guardian League Table for 2014 Top 20 of the full list (available here) is as follows (last year's position in brackets): 1 (1) Cambridge 2 (2) Oxford 3 (3) LSE 4 (4) St Andrews 5 (6) UCL 6 (7) Durham 7 (9) Bath 8 (12) Surrey 9 (13) Imperial 10 (5) Warwick 11 (7) …

Progress Claimed for Duke Kunshan University

Duke still sounds upbeat about its China campus. The Chronicle's Duke section has a report on what sounds like some modest progress with the development of the new Duke Kunshan University in China: Considerable progress is being made on the campus of Duke Kunshan University, Provost Peter Lange said at Wednesday evening’s Duke Student Government …