A campus facilities arms race?

It's all about the aquatics apparently I've posted before about the growth of luxury student accommodation in the US. Now the Education Advisory Board has a report on what it says amounts to a recreation facilities arms race on US campuses: Auburn University has a 45-person paw-print shaped hot tub, Pensacola Christian College has a …

Times and Sunday Times 2015 University League Table Top Placings

The Times and Sunday Times League Table 2015 A quick look at the top 25 in the all new Times/Sunday Times Good University Guide ranking for 2015. Full details can be found on the Sunday Times website (£). (Last year's position in brackets.) 1= (1) Cambridge 1= (2) Oxford 3 (4) St Andrews 4 (5) Imperial …

Spy kids

GCHQ accredits UK master's degrees for 'cyber spies'     Was very much taken by this thrilling news. Of course we have had Professional Body accreditation for many years and more recently courses supported by Asda and other supermarkets. But this is a little bit different. Not least in the sense that GCHQ is not …

A long list of management principles

Important maxims to live and work by? Or just a long and forgettable list? The Chronicle of Higher Education has a diverting piece on a set of rules the new president of the University of Akron has issued to his senior staff: If Scott L. Scarborough gets his way, the University of Akron will have …

Celebrating Student Success

We really do have an outstanding Students' Union A nice new website publicising the University of Nottingham Students' Union's successes over the past year and its centenary celebrations: For the last week of the semester, your officers decided it was time to celebrate the things we’d achieved. So, we launched our very first Celebration Week. …

2015 Complete University Guide League Table

It's spring and it's time for the first league table of the season. Once again it's the Complete University Guide which is first to publish this year. The top 25 is as follows: 1 (1) Cambridge 2 (2) Oxford 3 (3) London School of Economics 4 (6) St Andrews 5 (5) Durham 6 (4) Imperial …

A stimulating new degree course

A Degree in Coffee? Inside Higher Ed has an entertaining piece on the advent of a new degree in the critical area of coffee:   Many students and faculty members consider coffee to be essential to their daily existence. The University of California at Davis could be moving toward offering a major in coffee, The …

Trademarking the obvious in Higher Education

You might be sued for using some pretty common HE phrases Slate has an amusing piece on universities and colleges which have trademarked seemingly everyday Higher Education phrases such as "student life" and "fast-track MBA". According to the piece various institutions have been granted federal trademark registrations on the phrases, presumably to stop other people …

True Crime on Campus §34: voodoo

New year true crime on campus Some odd things can happen on campus. Fortunately, our unflappable Security staff are more than capable of responding to any situation: 010 Report of a group of youths on Jubilee Campus. The youths were spoken to by Security and told to leave Campus. The youths ran into Exchange Building …

24 hour study people

Food: all day and all of the night It's perhaps not that novel but Inside Higher Ed has a story about a small US college, Lynn University, which has introduced all-night dining to help, among other things, with more flexible class scheduling: Lynn made the adjustment in dining hours for a pretty simple and obvious …

The 2014 Grant letter: another epistolary triumph

And the wait was finally over The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills has written to HEFCE with the Department's annual message on funding and helpful bag of instructions. As excitement in the sector reached near fever pitch, the contents were being live-tweeted by @TimesHigherEd while everyone else waited to get hold of …

The future of counselling?

Is online counselling the future? The Chronicle of Higher Education has a fascinating story on the introduction of an online counselling programme in Florida. Initially developed as a response to resource constraints  it nevertheless seems to have real merit: Three years ago, facing a particularly acute demand for services, the Counseling and Wellness Center at the …

The damage caused by the athletics arms race

Uncontrolled expansion of athletics can cause real problems Interesting piece in Inside Higher Ed on a paper which looks at the academic damage of an expanding independent athletics program with a particular focus on Berkeley: When describing the approach that administrators at the University of California at Berkeley took to the university's sports program, John Cummins …

The Imperfect University: 2013 collection

Because universities are still difficult, but still worth it With the latest post, on Robbins, we are now up to a total of 18 pieces to date in the Imperfect University series. Covering a wide range of occasionally relevant issues I do hope there is something for everyone in here. And there is a question …

Shared Services in the USA

It's probably not quite what they were hoping for. Inside Higher Ed reports on a bold plan at the University of Michigan to address shared services within the institution. The idea must have seemed such a good one at the time - centralise large parts of departmental administration into a single place in order to …