Opinion

Senior academics who flatter juniors and promulgate a high-minded vision of higher education are all in recruitment mode, says Harvey Graff

The UK government’s White Paper is a good start but needs to do more to link local learning with local needs, says Marius Ostrowski 

Time is running out to strike a deal that will cement the continent’s scientific strength, says Jan Palmowski

Publishers need to examine their biases and universities their support mechanisms, say Avi Staiman, Marnie Jo Petray and Gaillynn Clements

Inhaling one another’s insights could help scholars assuage public confusion about this crucial but confusing concept, says Jacques Berlinerblau

Marketing students in business schools increasingly demand to be taught to use audio-visual software, says Emmanuel Mogaji

If Jordan Peterson and his ilk think business schools have been taken over by a Marxist mob, they clearly haven’t been in one recently, says Carl Rhodes

Higher inflation is set to challenge higher education everywhere, and all but the well-endowed elite will feel the bite and face difficult choices

As the value of public funding diminishes, success will depend on ability to boost other sources of income, says Anton Muscatelli

Accurate reporting of results is important, but meaning is rarely distorted by orthographic or grammatical slips, says Adrian Furnham

Universities in non-anglophone nations should limit teaching in English and offer English support to students and academics, says Rosemary Salomone

Requiring 60 per cent of graduates to go into managerial or professional roles ignores the reality of creative careers, says Bashir Makhoul

The Novak Djokovic affair underlines the need to teach that openness to error is the baseline of knowledge, say Raj Persaud and Adrian Furnham

Two years of low-quality online provision has left one stranded international student homeless, unemployed and heartbroken

Random selection from a gender-equal shortlist of qualified candidates would remove the effects of implicit bias, says Nathan Burke

Even institutions that are engaging with the SDGs as a whole are ignoring their responsibilities to promote sustainable agriculture, argue Wayne Nelles and Supawan Visetnoi

Removing Amy Wax from compulsory courses or revoking her named chair would not contravene her academic rights, says Daniel Carpenter

If universities will not give up NDAs, how can we expect private corporations to do any better, asks Julie Macfarlane

The technological objectification of thought plagued education long before classes were conducted over Zoom, says Kishore Saval

A ban on abortion clinics’ use of university-affiliated doctors is a barefaced interference in universities’ hiring decisions, says Edward Halperin

The publication of three Nature papers demonstrates that money is no substitute for good ideas, open science and collaboration, says Andrea Morello

Classroom skills that previously came naturally to lecturers and students can become very rusty in the online environment, says Christopher Hallenbrook 

Kick-starting a conversation on national funding levels is useful, but collaboration on frontier-led research needs attention, says Jan Palmowski

Universities are autonomous in principle but their financial reliance on the state means conflict is inevitable – and suppression is a very real threat

The Oxford college’s vast expenditure of charitable funds to try to dislodge its own dean could have serious repercussions, says Alan Rusbridger

Reskilling may help workers feed their families – but a plateful of modules may not add up to a square educational meal, warns Johnny Rich

Higher education must acknowledge the extra workload that comes with higher education in the digital era, says Christopher Schaberg

Marketing claims are often empty, unaccompanied by comprehensive policies, plans, timetables or evaluation criteria, says Harvey Graff

Adapting and adopting US approaches to commercialisation offer an opportunity for the UK, says Chris Loryman

Without it, we could lose sight of the subtleties of the sliding scale of disadvantage and its impact on participation, says Jayne Taylor

Perhaps it is only by recasting an agreement as an adventure that professors can respond to the urgency of our times, says Robert Zaretsky

Higher education must double down on the liberal education values of interdisciplinarity, experiential learning and critical thinking, says Eric Skipper

The UK minister’s demand that universities stick to face-to-face lectures is a step backwards for education, says Wendy Garnham

If the English regulator agrees to tear up universities’ current access plans it risks undermining any perception of autonomy, says Geoffrey Alderman

Robbert Dijkgraaf's appointment to the Netherlands’ new government has got academics very excited, says Michèle Wera

With concerted efforts, the UK could attract far more than 600,000 international students to its shores, says James Pitman

Hong Kong University’s legally dubious dismantling of the monument to Tiananmen Square should provoke global outrage, says Phil C.W. Chan

Pushing the ARC to focus on commercialisation neglects the complex interdependency between basic and applied research, says Duncan Ivison

The pandemic may just push US colleges and universities to do what they should have done a long time ago: reorganise, says Michael Hadjiargyrou

Higher education looks to be beset by any number of challenges in 2022, not least more Covid disruption. Resilience may again be the year’s watchword

The pandemic has demonstrated that there are broad deficiencies in quantitative reasoning skills even within the academy, says David Sanders

Privileging one set of subjects with a catchy acronym may once have served a purpose, but that has long since been outlived, says Andy Miah 

Enlisting miscreants to help improve understanding of contract cheating, as part of their punishment, could be a way forward, says Kholah Yaruq Malik

UK higher education is in robust shape, but it must be willing to build multiple bridges in 2022, says David Bell

Despite the pandemic, trade disputes and geopolitical tensions, several factors will continue to push and pull Chinese students abroad, says Nicolas Chu

Higher education in continental Europe needs to overcome its prejudices about DBAs if it is to meet demand from today’s senior managers, says Michel Kalika

Networks such as Universitas 21 facilitate mutual support to meet net zero targets, say Tan Eng Chye and Anton Muscatelli

After a second year of social distancing, how strong are the ties that bind us together and what is it that makes us a community, in society and HE?

The escalating pressures of university life are resulting in all manner of exotic new psychological disorders. Adrian Furnham opens his casebook

Unclear guidelines, screen-tanned conspiracy theorists and government party animals: none of them is helping campus security, says George Bass

Funding for green campuses, levelling up and international links would be a gift from Santa Rishi Sunak to himself, too, says Nick Isles

UK higher education says it wants diversity, but its treatment of early career researchers suggests otherwise, says Edda Nicolson

The Taliban’s professed support for higher education has not been matched by their actions so far, says Rahmatullah Katawazai

Persuasion is everywhere, but universities could do a public service by communicating the messy, uncertain truth more widely, says Michael Blastland

They helped create the problems we face. Now business schools should be fundamentally reimagined as democratic institutions, says Carl Rhodes

Australian universities’ ongoing embrace of digital approaches is cheapening learning – but not in a good way, says Binoy Kampmark

The Florida governor’s control over the make-up of public universities’ boards makes recent controversies unsurprising, says Mei Lan Frame

The financial effects of Covid may cause disadvantaged college applicants to panic, unclear how to apply for aid or too ashamed to do so, says Amy Glynn

Emily Shuckburgh and Alyssa Gilbert, co-chairs of the COP26 Universities Network, draw the lessons from two years of collective effort

Deep cuts may be reversed, but the Brazilian president’s anti-science rhetoric will do lasting damage, says John Aubrey Douglass