Troubled East Timor reopens
THE University of East Timor, the only higher educational institution in Indonesia's youngest province, reopened last week after an enforced five-week "vacation". It was closed in November following...
THE University of East Timor, the only higher educational institution in Indonesia's youngest province, reopened last week after an enforced five-week "vacation". It was closed in November following...
Next week the Teaching and Higher Education Bill begins its committee stage in the House of Lords. Here the elected leader of the British universities, Martin Harris, sets out the universities' terms...
Academics are meant to spend their time doing two things: uncovering new knowledge and transmitting existing wisdom to others - in other words, research and teaching. Despite the danger that...
RAEs overlook higher education research and it is time for change, says Mantz Yorke The funding councils recently launched their consultation over the future of the research assessment exercise. The...
While welcoming the aims of the government's lifelong learning initiative, Peter Jarvis, Colin Griffin, John Holford, Linda Merricks and Paul Tosey argue that learning has to be distinguished from...
The drawbacks of a peer-review system (THES, Leader, January 9) whereby one's rivals can pass judgement on the fate of one's work are obvious. Similarly, few would be surprised at the tendency of...
The main concern of the National Postgraduate Committee is that postgraduates should study in a high-quality research environment with other active researchers. Obviously, a well-managed peer-review...
Richard Brook's discussion of the peer-review system (THES, Opinion, January 9) leaves out one essential element: the altruistic attitude required to fund something really new and outside the...
The peer-review system does seem to be an old-boys' club, predominantly managed by old professors from old universities, giving money predominantly to old universities. The same people sit on...
You launch your debate on peer review with the award of research grants. But the "fixers" are also at work at the heart of the increasingly bitter Cambridge promotions crisis. We have partly reformed...
I was relieved to encounter halfway through Tim Cornwell's article on Steven Pinker's new book, How the Mind Works, some trenchant criticism from Stephen J. Gould (THES, January 9). But apart from...
Jennifer Wallace's approving profile of Peter Holland, the new director of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, (THES, "The luvvie director", December 26 1997) unfairly...
This week's First Impressions, the competition in which you have to identify a book from its opening sentence, comes from a novel that one might hesitate to show one's servants: "Ours is essentially...
The Genius of Shakespeare
The Book Trade and its Customers 1450-1900