The week in higher education – 17 March 2022

Could you tell one fancy-dress cheerleader from another on a darkened street late at night? Former Bucks New University lecturer Maria Konstantaki was convinced that two of a supposedly drunken squad spotted parading down her road were her own students. She set about administering her own form of retribution for the disturbance by failing them on a paper they had taken. But it backfired when she was dismissed for gross misconduct, and she has now lost her case for unfair dismissal, The Times reported. A hearing was told that Dr Konstantaki accused the students of banging on the window of her sister’s house – in the same street – but had “little evidence” other than one of them being called by a “not uncommon” first name. No one could be identified as they were seen 100m away, in poor lighting, and all dressed the same. Despite this, Dr Konstantaki rebuked the pair via email and refused to give feedback on an assignment.

The diversity of all life on Earth was born of errors in copying and pasting – ie, genetic mutations – that introduce the variety that allows organisms to adapt and evolution to proceed. Terry Magnuson, vice-chancellor for research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently found himself facing the sharp end of a similar process after copying online text into a federal grant application. Predation and other pressures prevent negative mutations being passed on to the next generation, and in this case, federal investigators said his application included four instances of “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly plagiarising text” from published material. The trunk of life’s tree grows on, even after great boughs fall, and writing to the UNC community two days after the investigation was publicly revealed, Professor Magnuson claimed that the copying had been inadvertent, but he acknowledged that his resignation was “in the best interest of the university”.

The University of Melbourne been blacklisted by one of Australia’s top sources of medical fellowship funding after awarding honorary doctorates to six white men. The university could not satisfactorily explain to Snow Medical why it had failed to award an honorary doctorate to a woman or a non-white person for the past three years, the family-owned foundation said. Melbourne is now out of the programme, which had allocated A$16 million (£8.9 million) to two of its researchers last year, until it “has demonstrated better outcomes”. “We would have preferred not to have taken this step, but now is the time for action – not just talk,” Snow Medical said. The funder, which is run by an all-white advisory committee, said the university’s existing Snow Fellowships would be honoured. The university, for its part, said it intended to bestow honorary doctorates on three women and an indigenous man in February, but that they had been unable to attend the ceremony and so would be honoured later.

Staying at the top is hard, as Moshe Porat, the former dean of Temple University’s Fox School of Business, is finding out as he begins a 14-month prison sentence. He presided over the false rankings scandal that has dogged the institution since the dodgy data first came to light in 2018. Porat, who has continued to deny any wrongdoing, knowingly embellished student figures sent to US News & World Report that helped to propel Fox’s online MBA programme to the number one spot in the magazine’s rankings for four straight years. The scam helped Fox to more than double its enrolment between 2014 and 2017 and saw Porat hailed as a “visionary administrator”, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Since the wrongdoing was exposed, the programme has sunk to 100th place in the table, and the university has been sued by former students who say their degrees have been devalued.

Much grumbling is generated by the insistence that education “must be more like a game”, but it was pandemic precaution that persuaded South Korea’s Yeungnam University to hold its entrance ceremony inside the game Minecraft. Freshers frolicked in block-based recreations of the university’s campus, ascending a stage to jump awkwardly around a lectern. Despite the game’s reputation for unpredictable thrills, the ceremony included the usual messages about grand dreams and social contribution. Cyberspatial celebration is perhaps par for the course at Yeungnam, which is already on to the fifth instalment of its institutional robot football tournament.