Let us firm up the foundations first
Last Sunday I told the Labour party's national education conference that I had changed my mind about the further expansion of the number of students entering higher education. I did so with the...
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Social whirl puts students in spin
"Can this be," mused an editorial in the Chicago Tribune, "the end of western civilisation as we know it?" The Tribune, the powerhouse newspaper of the Midwest, could not resist poking fun at the...
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Coffee and corpses kill the appetite
Like students all over the world, the medical students at one of Israel's leading teaching hospitals in Jerusalem look forward to their coffee breaks. Time to read a paper maybe or grab something to...
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Greek universities shut for week
Greek universities are to close for a week as a warning and longer if necessary if the government fails to solve their long-standing financial and operational problems. Their collective debt is...
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Romanians take to street
Romanian students have begun the biggest wave of nationwide protests since the 1990 student movement was broken up by miners in Bucharest. All student unions including the largest, the League, called...
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Portugal suspends tuition fee law
The incoming Socialist government in Portugal is suspending the controversial tuition fee law as promised by leader Antonio Guterres in the party election manifesto. In its place students at state...
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Expats ponder career prospects in ex-colony
With 600 days to go before Hong Kong reverts to Chinese rule, expatriate academics, who are reluctant to work under a Chinese dictator, are starting to reconsider their career options. Stanley Vittoz...
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Black woman scores v-c first
Former black consciousness activist Mamphela Ramphela is to be the first black leader of an historically white university and South Africa's second woman vice chancellor. She was chosen last week as...
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Myanmar students rally for rights
Hundreds of students in Rangoon have defied the military government of Myanmar (Burma), to honour the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. They gathered in front of her home to celebrate a traditional...
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Aid for TV fans with poor sight
Visually impaired people will soon have much less difficulty in following television programmes thanks to an audio commentary that fills in the gaps between dialogue. Known as Audiotel, the technique...
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Sleep arousals checked
It may be of little comfort to sufferers of insomnia to learn that some kinds of sleeplessness are worse than others. Some restless periods in bed, which scientists call "arousals", tend to cause...
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The trek that filled a planet
Thousands of years ago human beings trekked the 2,000 kilometres across the "ice-free corridor" from Siberia through to the Americas. This last great continental colonisation has now become the...
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Coventry in race for cleaner car engine
Coventry University has teamed up with Northampton-based formula one racing giant Cosworth in a race to build the first fundamentally different car engine for a century. Cosworth, whose high...
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Chip thieves target colleges
Colleges and universities are being targeted by gangs of thieves on the lookout for scarce memory chips worth up to Pounds 800 each, writes Alison Utley. John Heap, head of computing services at...
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Campus plan staggers under damning reports
A flagship plan for a campus in West Belfast has been severely holed below the waterline by two Government-commissioned reports. The University of Ulster is now fighting a rearguard action to keep...