Forget the Office for Students, Stonewall or the Quality Assurance Agency, it seems the toughest accreditation to gain in UK academia is…the Hedgehog Friendly Campus Award. According to the University of Bristol, it is now the only UK university to hold bronze, silver and gold accreditation after scooping the top honour in this year’s awards, run by the British Hedgehog Preservation Society. That accolade follows years of determined efforts by students and staff to make Bristol a hedgehog haven, including work to create wildflower meadows and “hog highways” between parts of the campus. They have also built shelters for the prickly visitors and made escape routes out of ponds. Simone Jacobs, Bristol’s horticultural supervisor, said efforts to help hedgehogs over the past three years had “given us a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate best practice in ecological landscape management, as well as raise awareness of hedgehogs and their conservation status to our students and staff”.
Durham University’s largest donor has pulled his financial support over what he calls “ridiculous and ineffective” Covid restrictions. In an interview with the university’s student newspaper, Palatinate, Mark Hillery said he would not “visit Durham again while there is a single Covid-related rule imposed on the students”. The hedge fund boss, who has donated £7 million to his alma mater since 2015, said the Russell Group institution’s “insistence to persist with restrictions and impositions on healthy 20-year-olds that are way beyond those placed on the rest of society” since September had caused him to cease any future donations, describing it as “a very depressing state of affairs”. “The same pedantic and ineffective policies that place the priorities of the paying students at the bottom of the pile are simply continued and refined – it’s tiring to watch,” he said. Thanking Mr Hillery for his support, Durham said nonetheless that its “approach to managing the Covid-19 pandemic has always prioritised the health, safety and well-being of our staff, students and wider community”.
Two students who murdered their professor were inspired by a scene in Breaking Bad to dismember his corpse and dissolve it in acid, a court has heard. The gruesome body disposal method – used by school teacher turned drugs kingpin Walter White in the acclaimed television series – was described at the trial of Dmitry Bykovsky and Alexander Kharlamov, who are accused of killing Vyacheslav Kuznetsov, a chemistry professor at Russia’s Voronezh State University, The Daily Mirror reported. The graduate students are alleged to have emptied the 58-year-old’s bank account after the murder, which took place in March 2020. The pair, who deny wrongdoing, could serve at least 19 years each if convicted.
Dolly Parton’s reputation as one of America’s most enlightened education philanthropists has been further burnished after her theme park said it will pay tuition fees for employees who want to go to university, The Times reported. All seasonal, part-time and full-time staff at the famously kitsch Dollywood park in Tennessee, which was founded by the country music superstar in 1986, will have access to the offer. The singer’s backing for affordable university education is yet another example of visionary philanthropy for which the 76-year-old has become increasingly known: she donated much of the $10 million (£7.4 million) royalties from Whitney Houston’s hit version of her song I Will Always Love You to book-reading programmes and a historically black neighbourhood in Nashville, and also gifted $1 million to a university research centre involved in creating the Moderna Covid vaccine.
The tale of a student who borrowed two copies of a book at a time so they could learn alongside their mother moved many in academia when it was tweeted by a British university library. They were less impressed when Royal Holloway, University of London admitted that the thread was an “imagined scenario” rather than a genuine snippet of lifelong learning at its finest. “Our story of two characters was intended to tell the story of many, and the important role friends and family play in supporting students,” the library said. The admission – and apology – didn’t come as a surprise to some Twitter users, who remarked that it was hard enough to bag a single copy of required reading in many academic libraries, let alone two. But others wondered if this episode was also an instructive moment for university staff now under pressure to produce relatable social media content. “To try and win social media, chasing engagement, is a losing game…only Twitter wins,” said one.