The week in higher education – 9 December 2021

Working remotely during Covid may seem on the surface to be eco-friendly given the reduced travel and less use of large university campuses. But estates managers speaking at a Times Higher Education conference have illustrated how it doesn’t necessarily mean savings, especially if staff and students are insisting buildings are kept heated for when they do venture in. The THE Campus Live event heard that some academics were insisting on having their offices “toasty warm” from 7am, Monday to Friday, despite “only coming in two to three hours a week”, while sometimes university libraries needed to be kept heated and lit late into the night despite only being used by a few students. Andy Nolan, director of development and sustainability at the University of Nottingham, told the conference that his institution was expecting a significant hike in its £13 million-a-year utilities bill because of higher energy prices and Covid mitigation. “That is an extra £1 million that could be spent on laboratories or student sport resources,” he said.

One guaranteed way to stoke the culture war on your university campus would probably be to invite Rod Liddle to speak in front of students. No surprise then that when the Spectator columnist addressed a formal dinner at Durham University’s South College, some students walked out, leading the head of the college to call those leaving “pathetic”, The Times reported, quoting student newspaper Palatinate. Mr Liddle is said to have started by making a joke about sex workers, given recent headlines about Durham introducing safety training for students working in the sex industry, and moved on to other classic culture war territory such as gender and race. The university distanced itself from comments made in the speech but Tim Luckhurst, the principal of South College, said in reply to a student complaint that “freedom of speech means nothing unless it encompasses the right to say things with which others disagree profoundly”.

Overseeing students as a personal tutor or PhD supervisor may sometimes be seen by some academics as a time-consuming task that just draws attention away from their own research. However, at least students’ compliance with Covid rules is not normally something that needs checking up on. That is apparently what is happening in China though, where universities have made compliance with coronavirus lockdowns a matter of academic discipline and put supervisors in charge of checking on infringers. At Henan University, supervisors were told that they were liable for whether their students broke rules or not and that this would be one of the criteria in their performance review. Meanwhile, students also face academic or funding sanctions for breaching lockdowns, such as six graduate students at Zhengzhou University being told they would lose their eligibility for an annual scholarship for leaving the campus without permission.

A “preprints debacle” in Australia has been resolved after about 30 researchers won appeals against their funding applications being thrown out over breaching a little-understood rule about referencing preprints. The Australian Research Council (ARC) appeals committee found in favour of all 32 physics researchers whose funding applications had been ruled invalid because they included references to preprints, falling foul of a ban introduced early last year that had largely gone unnoticed. The group included six researchers whose projects had been ranked highly enough to attract funding: the ARC said it had enough money in reserve to bankroll the combined A$2.9 million (£1.5 million) cost of proceeding with the projects. The remaining appellants, whose projects were not ranked highly enough for funding, will now be allowed to reapply.

A student in England has managed to accumulate almost £190,000 in debt, the largest amount owed by a single person, according to a Freedom of Information request. The Student Loans Company said the “exceptional case” was the result of loans taken out for several courses, The Guardian reported, but it has led to others saying that figures around the £100,000 mark are not uncommon. The huge debt came to light following an FoI request by former student Craig Rossiter, who wondered whether his own debt of £61,000 could be the largest in the UK after he had to drop out of five different courses due to personal circumstances, the newspaper reported. It comes as a study from the Higher Education Policy Institute that interviewed almost 100 graduates who started university between 2006 and 2013 warned that graduates feel their debt is causing them “anxiety, pressure, worry and dread”.