The week in higher education – 24 October 2019

The Booker Prize judges found themselves in hot water when they split the prestigious literary prize between two authors. Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other, was announced as the joint winner alongside Margaret Atwood, nominated for her latest novel The Testaments. Critics lamented the fact that Professor Evaristo, professor of creative writing at Brunel University London, had become the first black woman to win the prize but now had to share the spotlight with an already well-known author. However, Professor Evaristo said she hoped her win “signals a new direction” for the award. “It’s a bittersweet experience. In one sense it’s great to be the first [black female winner], but I shouldn’t be the first,” she said. 

The “global war against the rat” sounds like the subject matter for a dystopian sci-fi novel in which the last remnants of humanity battle hordes of bloodthirsty rodents – but it is actually the subject of a University of St Andrews job advert seeking a research fellow in the history of rat-catching. The advert states that the St Andrews department of social anthropology “with funding provided by the Wellcome Trust is sponsoring a project entitled The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis” (zoonosis being a disease that can be spread from animals to humans). The post, which runs for 52 months, will “examine rat-catching practices and campaigns as these unfolded in colonial and metropolitan contexts…so as to understand how they led to the emergence of new forms of human-rat interaction, and how they contributed to the development of scientific understandings of zoonosis”. When the apocalypse comes and the epic war between humans and rats reaches its final act, make sure you are standing next to a St Andrews social anthropologist.

Staff at one Indian college have deployed technology in the fight against exam cheating – specifically the ultra low-tech concept of forcing students to wear cardboard boxes on their heads to stop them from copying their classmates’ work. Images taken during a chemistry exam at Bhagat Pre-University College in Haveri, Karnataka state went viral, the BBC reported. Junior college administrator MB Satish told BBC Hindi he was sorry for trying to use the unusual anti-cheating technique. He “insisted it had been done with the students’ consent – in fact they had brought in their own boxes”. Thinking outside the box to find unusual solutions to problems is usually a good thing – but not if you are making others do their thinking inside a box.

If you imagined that being an associate professor in papyrology and Greek literature would be drier than an ancient manuscript, Dirk Obbink has news for you. Dr Obbink, who holds that post at the University of Oxford, made headlines around the world after he was “accused of selling ancient Bible fragments to a controversial US company that has been involved in several high-profile scandals related to its aggressive purchases of biblical artefacts”, The Guardian reported on 16 October. He is “accused of selling without permission a number of ancient fragments to the US arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby. Its owners, the Green family, are prominent Christian evangelicals and, under the guidance of the Hobby Lobby president Steve Green, were behind the founding of Washington’s $400 million Museum of the Bible in 2017, the newspaper added. The Guardian said it had contacted Dr Obbink for comment – he has previously denied some of the allegations.

Reducing the restrictions on prisoners’ access to student loans in the UK would benefit society as well as thousands of incarcerated individuals, the Higher Education Policy Institute has claimed. According to a policy note published by the thinktank on 24 October, removing the rule that means prisoners can only access student support if their release date is within six years would create an additional 9,770 eligible students. The authors estimate this would equate to an additional 200 prisoners studying per year at the Open University – where the majority would study – and an additional £2.3 million in the upfront cost of student loans. But a key aspect in increasing the number of prisoners able to study is the fact that it has been consistently proven to reduce reoffending rates, saving between £3 million and £6 million. So, good for society, good for the public purse.