Professor

Online teaching has allowed less-confident students, so often female, to create for themselves a space in which to speak, says Madeleine Davies

More ‘coherent’ mechanism is needed to develop regional ties, expert says

Freshly inaugurated US president Joe Biden owes his election victory to swing states in America’s Rust Belt. But is his plan to revitalise them by creating ‘millions of new manufacturing and innovation’ jobs realistic? And how best can universities play their part? John Morgan reports

My student is right to wonder out loud why learning in college must be a forced march rather than a playful adventure, says Gregory Skutches

Establishing clear performance goals can be crucial for the success of young researchers and research groups alike. Jack Grove speaks to laboratory leaders about taking a more enlightened approach to this task in difficult times

Legislation is urgently needed to ensure good governance and fair pay and conditions, says Nahid Neazy

The president-elect may have academic connections, but the path from campus to cabinet is rarely travelled successfully, say three political scientists

The country’s universities have shot up global rankings on the back of huge investment and a ruthless focus on publication. But as the country gears up for its next five-year plan, Joyce Lau asks whether stratospheric ambitions for a ‘Chinese Harvard’ can be met

Academics should not be seduced by the moral certainty on either side of the ‘with us or against us’ divide, says Brad Evans

China and India embrace creation of online courses to support universities that lack the capacity to create their own digital programmes

Tributes paid to a prolific and ‘fun-loving’ historian with a sharp eye for ‘the inanities of academic life’

Hamish Coates calls for creation of transnational accreditation system to pull the region together post-Covid

In their unearthly calm and Dewey Decimal order, university libraries offer the promise of remaking ourselves, says Joe Moran

The past 12 months will live long in the memory, for all the wrong reasons. But as 2020 nears its end amid fairy lights and optimism about vaccines, six academics tell us the bright spots they managed to find amid the gloom – from human connections to elasticated waistbands

Practitioners have a lot to teach students, but the value of research training should not be dismissed lightly, says Sam Christie

Robert Peckham’s faith in the value of his medical humanities training was gravely tested as his father lay in intensive care

Essay mills’ opportunism, preying on student anxiety about online assessment methods, strengthens the case for legislation, says Douglas Blackstock

Pandemic or no pandemic, academics should try to find time for regular rethinking of their curricula and methods, says Jessica Johnson 

The US’ announcement that it now regards Israeli settlements as consistent with international law does not make them so, say eight senior academics

Sociologist who has shone light on some of India’s most oppressed people explains why she keeps up the good fight

The impact of the Black Lives Matter movement has raised urgent issues for universities about who should be taught what – and how. After 40 years of pushing to widen the range of voices taught on literature courses, Lyn Innes still sees much to be done that is crucial for students of all races

Academics have long grappled with the strains that job scarcity and the mobility imperative impose on their families. But might the experience of mass remote working finally offer a viable solution, asks Jack Grove

While eLife is planning to publish only preprints, even it concedes that journal brand still counts for a lot, notes Michael Marinetto

Gavin Williamson’s directive will embolden other groups to demand the enforcement of their interests by ministerial fiat, says Geoffrey Alderman

Universities’ ethics oblige them to pay their own interns, so why do they permit their students to work many months for free, asks Sam Scott

Evidence suggests that different personality types are drawn to – and excel at – teaching and research, says John Dreijmanis

Inevitable examples of jargon or poor research are no reason to reject an entire discipline, say Debby Cotton, Elizabeth Cleaver and Dilly Fung

Budget, seen as ‘remarkable commitment’ to education, could be leveraged to improve IT and teaching quality

Academics remain wedded to prestige indicators, but peer reviewers may conclude that the journal is profiteering, says Dorothy Bishop

The government points to a decade of funding guarantees, but critics have taken aim at draconian punishments for campus protests and the rushed scrapping of a PhD vetting body

An Australian university’s attitude towards Rwanda illustrates the West’s failure to treat African academics as equal partners, says Timothy Carey

Lucas Lixinski shares his experiences as a gay man in academia and reflects on how they have helped his career

French scholars, accused of fostering terrorism, fear escalating rhetoric could curtail freedom of research

Universities are now committed to ‘celebrating success’ and to treating every failure as just a stepping stone on the way to further success. Yet this, argues Joe Moran, is a betrayal of what really matters in the academy

Most lecturers dread educationalists’ holier-than-thou, discipline-blind invocations of the latest teaching fads, says an anonymous academic

Prestigious journal group seeks to spread cost of publishing across a greater number of authors than those accepted for publication

Pledged support for equality must be put into practice on multiple fronts, from syllabi and curricula to advising and recommending, say Chisomo Selemani and Anna Young

Young researchers have been locked out of labs and clinics for 10 months because of Covid

It is crucial to adapt teaching methodology to students’ specific cultures and traditions of learning, says Bashir Makhoul

Academics justifiably express disbelief and outrage when librarians inform them that they can’t afford a particular title, says Caroline Ball

As debate intensifies on how to measure research excellence beyond publications, Jack Grove asks senior scientists how they assess intangible personal qualities when hiring researchers

Half of regional governors’ dissertations contained copied text, and these plagiarists went on to perform worse in government, research suggests

If we can’t find the narrative forms to make the world real to one another, we risk losing our politics to the fantasists and cynics, says Lyndsey Stonebridge

Astrophysicists in Hong Kong and France say that public perceptions of gender should change and that more should be done to support women in science

Academics urge governments to set up frameworks for ethical use of technology and reaffirm the need for greater multidisciplinarity 

If these unique institutions can become more inclusive, issue-oriented and multidisciplinary, their graduates will be equipped to tackle the 21st century’s multiple crises, say Steven Volk and Beth Benedix

As the pandemic reshapes both conferencing and publishing, melding talks and papers makes a lot of sense, says Richard Oliver

Yogesh Tyagi suspended by government after he and executive council try to appoint rival candidates for registrar

We need to teach all students to listen better, to ask the right questions and to be willing to be wrong, says Anne Houtman

Until we stop glorifying self-achievement, collaboration will remain transactional, say Maru Mormina, Romina Istratii and Alex Lewis

The pandemic has underlined the need for student assessment strategies to adapt to extraordinary circumstances, say Alexander Amigud and David J. Pell 

The holy grail of a business model for open access monographs that works at scale for publishers, libraries and scholars is close, says Martin Paul Eve

The removal of Donald Trump from the White House could lead to major reform in college education, but many other issues require urgent action, argue Sandro Galea and Nason Maani

Ministers’ eagerness to launch yet another review when so many others remain unpublished is testing the patience of universities, says Andrew McRae

Universities urged to take opportunity to modernise, as government’s next strategic plan set to boost research and technology

What does it say about our labour culture that a tenured professor stuck in an elevator did not even consider cancelling his class, asks Irina Dumitrescu

Those who make the loudest noises about equality can be among the most myopic about the evils of academic inbreeding, says Bruce Macfarlane

Greater Bay Area outposts offer more space, government funding and industry collaboration opportunities

UK minister Kemi Badenoch’s disavowal of the theory plays into a misleading right-wing narrative, says Hannah Robbins

The pandemic underlines the need for executives to be instilled with a more radical approach to sustainability, say Lars Moratis and Frans Melissen