Opinion

Arts and humanities advocate Philip Esler offers to fill a yawning gap in No 10's strategy for realising Britain's potential

Felipe Fernández-Armesto says we must choose our commemorations wisely

The dilution of PhD standards damages the status of every aspect of UK academe, claims Kevin Sharpe

Pictures of smiling girls clutching A grades belie the fact that they are still unrepresented in elite institutions, claims Miriam David

Wikipedia is created mostly by teenage male computer nerds, so Martin Cohen worries about its growing clout among 'scholars'

Textbooks have been neglected in favour of other media, but Tara Brabazon argues the case for their importance

Beware those who want information - and informers. An anonymous academic considers the police-state side to 'managerial techniques'

It's time to start exchanging gifts and sharing cultures with the digital natives who are our students, says Fintan Culwin

Developed along idiosyncratic lines since the age of Napoleon, France's universities must embrace globalisation, Zoe McKenzie says

The spark of connection between lecturers and students cannot be duplicated, although digitisation has its place in preserving special, life-changing lectures

Economic woes and political uncertainty mean the sector must take charge in proposing new policies, says Deian Hopkin

Sally Feldman on the deals, desperation and bottom-line realities of clearing

Jonathan Taylor posits that our emphasis on the advancement of knowledge can crush creativity

Graham Manville and Gill Schiel outline the challenges institutions face harnessing the potential of this new whirlpool of talent

The precedents, the tear-stained notes, the wisdom of Solomon (The External): Frank Burnet wonders whatever happened to exam boards

Stop decrying the signal-to-noise ratio in online scholarly resources, says Tara Brabazon, and give open-source web journals your full support

Conventional wisdom says universities do rather well in a recession. Don't count on it this time, warns John Craven

Kevin Fong's clash with the beautiful game leaves him sick as a parrot

Ninety years after the suffragettes' first victory, June Purvis reflects on wars still being fought on behalf of women's rights

Nostalgia was once taboo in academe but a new generation is unafraid to explore longing and loss, says Alastair Bonnett

Don't let students' howlers drive you mad, says Ken Smith. Accept their most common mistakes as variant spellings ... and relax

Country music is ethnography with a banjo, and Tara Brabazon discovers that it is as relevant to university life and Friday-night Eastbourne as it is to Appalachia

The creation of an Innovation Index is a long-overdue opportunity to right funding wrongs, argues Les Ebdon

Alan Ryan wishes Oxford's big donors would share their financial expertise

It is time for the West to listen and learn from Muslim moderates and radicals alike, insists Cynthia Keppley Mahmood

Frank Furedi says the reason the degree classification system is broken is too little autonomy, not too much

Widening-participation pieties that ignore class are as much a fantasy as J. K. Rowling's magical-mirror Oxbridge, says Mary Evans

Wellington was once a town where espresso was dangerously pretentious, but an innovative alliance of galleries, libraries, archives and museums has helped rebrand the New Zealand city

The economic slowdown calls for strong leadership and new ways of working across boundaries, says Ewart Wooldridge

The tyranny of 'the hypothesis' has made science too timid, says Tim Birkhead

Press-ganged into attending the annual graduation ceremony, a sweaty and begowned Gloria Monday wishes some of the cash on show was heading her way

Students’ pleasure in writing is often knocked out of them by formal schooling. Blogging may become their only outlet of expression and, with a little encouragement, it is possible to reignite their love for the written word, suggests Tara Brabazon

Universities' admissions of their failings have been met with calls for stringent supervision, surely the wrong approach entirely

Marking schemes are an admission of failure, says Felipe Fernández-Armesto

The fuss over external examining and standards misses the point - degrees really are no longer what they were, says Kevin Sharpe

At a seminar in Romania, Jon Baldwin finds that this new member of the EU has valuable lessons for UK universities

The work of advising select committees is demanding and rigorous, and it deserves reward in the REF, argues Steven Barnett

David Baker argues that forward-thinking higher education providers see opportunities, not unremitting gloom, ahead

Roger Brown and Geoffrey Alderman ask if the QAA and the external examining system must change to continue to ensure quality

Managers should open new paths to the title 'professor' as research funds shrink and academics' duties expand, argues Huw Morris

The titles of the Open Media Series help lift Tara Brabazon above the daily grind and remind her of the need to question conventional wisdom and fight injustice

The SNP wants applied research to drive the Scottish economy. Can universities deliver without more money or a loss of quality?

The wasteful technician-academic divide needs to end, says Sally Feldman

Gloria Monday is surprised to find marks being awarded for expletives, and wonders whether she should incorporate this practice into her work as an external examiner

Nancy Rothwell, Raymond Dwek, Alan Malcolm and Richard Dyer on the future of UK biology's learned societies

Stress and harassment cost the sector millions of pounds in lost work days and feed a culture of human misery, says Sally Hunt

Middle management occupies an uneasy but vital position between collegial scholars and master-planning senior officials

Kevin Fong discovers fear in a campus mini-mart shelf full of Pot Noodles

Undergraduates who see creative writing as an 'easy' degree dismay a tutor accustomed to the dedication of adult education students

Carping about universities often overlooks the positive and the constant efforts we make to improve, says Rick Trainor

Putting staff on insecure fixed-term contracts is a false economy that harms research, says Sean Wallis. Let's recycle their expertise instead

Diplomas offer the skills and knowledge a competitive economy needs, so the CBI's predilection for A levels is puzzling, says Michael Arthur

E-learning consultants invent crises and create divisions between students and teachers so they can sell their wares. Tara Brabazon analyses the rise of the digital Raj

Despite some progress, this year's Green League reveals that universities are still failing to deliver a lead on sustainability

A degree is no mark of genius, and we shouldn't expect it to be, says Alan Ryan

Yet another meeting, yet another report that fails to break new ground. Gloria Monday fights boredom by totting up the number of legs in the room

Tara Brabazon on the soundtrack to life on a continent’s edge

Increasingly bitter and complex campus disputes need sane, tactful ombudsmen to solve them, says G.R. Evans