The week in higher education – 2 January 2020

More noises are emanating from Whitehall about the new Tory administration’s wishes to see its plans to boost science centred outside the golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge. The Financial Times reported that Boris Johnson wants to see a big shift of civil servants out of London with new government bodies such as the much-touted advanced science agency – seen as the brainchild of senior Johnson adviser Dominic Cummings – being earmarked as one way to do this. Of course, higher education experts may be unmoved by this news, given that most of the UK’s existing research councils are headquartered in Swindon, which is not usually renowned as a bastion of the metropolitan elite. But why worry about that when you can bandy around a few slogans for more headlines in the London-centred media.

It seems to be getting a little ahead of ourselves to look at the shape of higher education in the 2030s when we’re just getting used to the 2020s, but one projection has claimed that some UK universities will be dishing out first-class degrees to every student in a little over 10 years. The Times took the average increase in firsts over the past few years and projected it into the future to show how degree awards could look by the end of the decade on current trends. The report suggests that if the increase in the share of firsts – which has risen several percentage points in the past few years – carries on, then every student in the UK will get the classification in 38 years’ time. The 2:2 – which the newspaper says was “once seen as almost respectable” – will also become extinct by about 2033. It is possible that this analysis takes future projection of a trend a little far, but grade inflation watchers will keenly await the latest data on UK degree awards, due out in just a couple of weeks, to see if such projections are still on course to become reality.

Calling someone a “nerd” or a “geek” should be seen as a hate crime in the same way as racist or homophobic language, according to a psychotherapist who has studied the effect of bullying on children with high IQs. Sonja Falck, senior lecturer in counselling and psychotherapy at the University of East London, told The Daily Telegraph it “would be progress for British society to come to feel the same way about hate-filled, prejudicial slurs against our high-IQ community” as it has with other types of discriminatory language. She said that high-IQ children who suffered such name-calling can end up with lasting psychological damage. Of course, a major irony of such an article is that one of its primary motivations must have been to get social media into its own name-calling frenzy, with “snowflake” likely to be very high on the list of insults.

At the start of the next decade, boozy university club initiations will probably be as anachronistic as lads’ mags and alcopops are as we enter the 2020s. Until then, however, it seems these bizarre rituals are thriving on campus amid claims that Loughborough University’s women’s hockey team asked new members to eat dead maggots and dog food in an I’m a Celebrity-inspired initiation. According to The Times, would-be hockey players were also presented with a live centipede and told to eat it – before organisers decided that that would be going too far. The ceremony also involved women passing spicy soup along a line using only their mouths, causing one participant to vomit, while others bit into onions and downed dirty pints of leftover slops. The university told the student website The Tab, which first reported the alleged incident, that the allegations “suggest behaviour that falls below the high standards expected of Loughborough sport athletes”.

A Chinese researcher has been sentenced to three years in prison and fined Rmb 3 million (£327,000) for illegal human embryo gene-editing using CRISPR-Cas9 technology. He Jiankui, previously an associate professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology, was sentenced alongside Zhang Renli and Qin Jinzhou, researchers from two other medical institutes in Guangdong province, who were also given jail terms and fines. Controversy erupted in November 2018 when Dr He revealed that he had altered the embryos of twin girls, allegedly to prevent them from contracting HIV.