New head will extend learning body's reach
One of Sir John Daniel's first acts when he took over the presidency of the Vancouver-based Commonwealth of Learning this month was to ditch the reference on his business cards to the open and...
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Arab outpost in Israel will be a move to peace
A planned outpost of a Jordanian university in Israel will be the first Arab institution to be opened in the country, other than the Jordanian and Egyptian embassies and airline offices. The chosen...
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Whites-only grant challenged
The South African government has launched a legal challenge against a 1920 trust that grants scholarships only to white male Christian students of the University of Cape Town. It will argue that the...
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Peer review key to trust in science
Scientific knowledge is special for two reasons. It has been arrived at by an experimental method that means that there are solid reasons for believing it. And it is published only when the...
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The future's female
Sooner or later, the female majority on UK undergraduate courses was bound to have an impact on the recruitment of academics, but today's figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency suggest...
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Covert operations in our fight to improve lives
Colleges deserve praise for giving people a second chance by bringing them into higher education, says John Moverley. The numbers of people entering higher education through further education...
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Nancy Rothwell
Committees too often waste man-hours and paper and allow some staff to escape more productive uses of time. Peter Medawar was a Nobel prizewinning scientist and a great writer. He was also a personal...
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My revolting past
From working-class kid to getaway driver for hooligans - sociologist John Williams shares memories of a colourful life. John Williams, director of Leicester University's Centre for the Sociology of...
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No busy body
Minutes of the monthly meetings of the Department for Education and Skills' research forum, chaired by Sir Graeme Davies, have appeared on the web. But they give little clue about what this...
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Pants protester trousers seat
An academic who stripped to his underpants and donned a hood outside Norwich Labour Club in a protest against the treatment of prisoners in Iraq has been elected to the city council in the...
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Party pooper
The Arts and Humanities Research Board will have a proper seat at the funding table when it becomes a research council next spring. In recognition of its importance, Charles Clarke showed up at the...
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Thought for food
And finally, there was a small but poignant victory for science communication at last week's science festival in Cheltenham. During one public session, academics discussed synaesthesia - a condition...
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Why I ...believe the British should celebrate Bloomsbury
My clippings files are stuffed with Bloomsbury satires: a floor of the New York Public Library collapses under the weight of books by and about the Bloomsbury Group; to rival Dallas , a new soap...
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Set free to do the job
Government constraints stymie useful work, so Alan Smithers is delighted to go independent The Centre for Education and Employment Research is moving to Buckingham University. It is not just that it...
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Conflict overrules consensus
The days when we trusted the judgement of a public inquiry are over, argues Kieron O'Hara Twenty years ago next month, the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology,...