Top 200 firms see quality slip
More than half of Britain's major employers think degree standards are falling, while just a tenth think they are improving, a national study has found. In some sectors, such as civil engineering, up...
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A vital role in the peace process
As Northern Ireland secretary Mo Mowlam struggles to set up Ulster's assembly, Noel McAdam and Olga Wojtas examine higher education's contribution to the fragile peace. Northern Ireland's two...
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'Poverty' wage set
The introduction of the national minimum wage next month will boost the pay of nearly two million employees by an average of 30 per cent, according to a study out this week. The study by David...
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Students sit in to stop fees sanction
About 100 students have been occupying a building at Goldsmiths College, London, since last Friday in protest against the university's threat to expel eight students for refusing to pay tuition fees...
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NUS debates reform
Scottish and Welsh students may have more power devolved to them under plans to reform the National Union of Students. Reform will be one of the main motions being discussed at the union's annual...
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We support a BHEC
The story declaring that opposition from the Standing Conference of Principals has scuppered the formation of an over-arching British Higher Education Council is not based on any position held by...
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Variations on the same meme
Whether memetics ("The forget meme not theory", THES, February 26) is a serious academic discipline or only an intellectual contagion can be debated. What is certain is that it was only the word "...
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Variations on the same meme
As a non-expert, the idea of memes seems essentially sterile - it does not tell us anything that is not obvious to start with. In fact, the BIDS Institute for Scientific Information science citation...
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Variations on the same meme
The notion that ideas concatenate into neat parcels that are "transmitted" in the "frighteningly simple" way Susan Blackmore describes is absurd. It is bizarre to think that "tunes, ideas, catch-...
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Variations on the same meme
I would support Robert Aunger's call for evidence for the meme hypothesis - except that even this seems a category mistake. Meme theory seems at best an analogy, which, of course, cannot be proved or...
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Variations on the same meme
If, as Susan Blackmore says, ideas survive by natural selection as "memes", is the theory of memes itself also a meme? If it is, it cannot be a scientific one because it would in that case be...
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League games
You were obviously annoyed by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service denying you easy access to information that UCAS stakeholders (as represented on the board) have declared as...
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New life in e-books
Academics cannot get their books published. Is electronic publishing the answer? asks Robert Darnton Are scholarly monographs -learned treatises on specific subjects - in danger of extinction,...
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Water war against hormones
Ulster University researchers are using a harmless, cheap white pigment found in toothpaste in a revolutionary technique for removing the female sex hormone oestrogen from the water supply. Oestrogen...
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Drop in homicide rate probed
Historians at York University are trawling 200 years of court records to understand the decline in homicide rates in the 17th century. According to Jim Sharpe, professor of history at York, homicide...