Data from US universities appear to show that higher tuition fees translate into better teaching provision, say Peter Andras and Bruce Charlton. The news is full of discussion concerning the cost and...
A dozen of The THES's contributors nominate their favourite books of last year. Helen Davies reports. Philip Anderson , Nobel laureate, professor of theoretical physics, Princeton University, US If I...
The Mona Baker affair has produced two victims and one casualty - but none carries the name "Baker". The victims are the two academics Baker dismissed from her editorial board because they are...
Oren Yiftachel's problem in submitting his research paper to the journal Political Geography ("Student unions reject academic boycott of Israel", THES , December 20/) illustrates the indiscriminate...
Why are the National Union of Students and the Socialist Worker Student Society so selective about whom they boycott? There are poorly treated nationals in many countries but we hear of no similar...
John Waller writes that by 1930 Alexander Fleming's early optimism in the clinical potential of penicillin had gone (Letters, THES , December 20/). This is not true. Many former St Mary's medical...
It is a bit rich to describe me as a "vociferous anti-moderniser" ("Cambridge rebels hold up rejig", THES , December 13). The outgoing administration ran up an eight-figure deficit. It tried to...
There is a major weakness in Roger Waterhouse's contention that education is "just another service industry" (Soapbox, THES , December 20/). No normal service industry depends for its success on the...
I was one of those customers referred to by Roger Waterhouse. As a paying student, the basics and image were as important to me as the support. What I encountered were two-hour lectures with little...
John Saunders (Letters, THES , December 13) has not read my Exchange article carefully. Evidence of the lack of relationship between the quality of a lecturer's teaching and his or her research comes...
John Sutherland (Letters, THES , December 20/) claims that computer science students can spend less than half a working week on study. I teach my course unit - one of four students take - on the...
John Sutherland's fact-shovelling one-year degree would only certify having "done time" (Why I..., THES , December 6). He is confusing learning with education. Learning is based on accumulating...
I do not share Michael Rutter's confidence that the blank-slate view of human nature has been widely rejected (Books, THES , December 13) and think it is unfair to claim that Steven Pinker's The...
Martin Ince likened the author list of some scientific papers to the credits of a Hollywood film (Opinion, THES , December 6). Like them, they should specify contributions. This would give credit to...
Jonathan Dollimore's defence of theory ("Sex rescues sad character from clutches of caricature", THES , December 20/) was tellingly placed before Kathleen Taylor's essay on imagination and knowledge...