The week in higher education – 28 April 2022

Nothing sells tickets quicker than some moral outrage, so the organisers of a college-run drag queen show may have been quietly pleased when Texas A&M University announced it would not subsidise this year’s spectacle. That decision led students to raise more than $10,000 (£7,850) to ensure Draggieland could go ahead, generating front-page headlines across America, with 750 people eventually packing out a campus auditorium to see the LGBT celebration – which, in previous years, has attracted protests and petitions labelling it “sinful” and “immoral”, the Daily Beast reported. In South Carolina, a similar tale also played out at Clemson College, where another wildly popular drag show was condemned on social media by the college’s Republican group as “chock-full of sexual degeneracy that spits in the face of the Christian population”. The post did not go down well – with an online petition set up to ban the Republican group, rather than drag artists, from campus, Inside Higher Ed reported.

Twitter is not always the quickest to act on abusive or threatening language, but an academic’s use of Shakespeare’s famous line “Let’s kill all the lawyers” was a step too far. Peter Kirwan, assistant professor of early modern drama at the University of Nottingham, was sanctioned for “abuse and harassment” after quoting the line from Henry VI Part 2 when sending support to the Nottingham Shakespeare Rebels acting group, who are due to perform the play at the Royal Shakespeare Company later this year, The Times reported. “Break a leg everyone, and do kill all the lawyers,” wrote Kirwan, referencing the 1591 play. The murderous suggestion, spoken by Dick the Butcher to rebel leader Jack Cade, is, in fact, acknowledged as a compliment to lawyers, suggesting they may be a bulwark against insurrectionary forces keen to abandon the rule of law – something unsurprisingly lost on Twitter’s moderating algorithms.

Academics often wonder why they are still using a laptop running Windows XP when their institution spends millions on new IT equipment every year. Some answers have been provided at Stanford University, where a former employee was jailed for selling off hundreds of Apple MacBooks she had ordered for use by faculty and staff in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Patricia Castaneda first began stealing computers in 2009 or 2010 and sold them for cash to someone she met on Craigslist, Inside Higher Ed reported. In 2016, she recruited her brother Eric Castaneda into the scam, and he reportedly passed 800 computers to an intermediary who then sold them out-of-state. The fraud cost Stanford more than $4 million. Patricia Castaneda has been sentenced to 33 months in prison and ordered to pay $4 million in restitution. This is unlikely to be much consolation to those still waiting for Outlook to load.

With UK higher education still in a rancorous mood, UK Research and Innovation clearly decided an all-out unreserved apology was the best way to put its Researchfish travails behind it. In an uncharacteristically contrite blog, the UK’s main research funder said it was “truly sorry” for the concern caused to academics who had been referred to it after making critical comments of the impact tracking service Researchfish – most of whom were mocking its name. Ultimately, UKRI contacted only three Researchfish critics directly or their employers over the course of four years, and no disciplinary action was taken or funding withheld, but the funder understood it had still erred. “We were wrong,” summarised the UKRI blog, adding: “We recognise the right of people to criticise an organisation or system without fear of reprisal.”

They say much can be gleaned about someone’s university days from the degree they eventually receive; get a third or 2:2 and you’ll never quite shake off the perception that you perhaps had a bit too much fun. “Nothing wrong with a Desmond,” the saying goes, after the late Archbishop Tutu, whose name has been unfairly but inextricably linked to the lower echelons of the classification system. But new research in the UK has shown those who attend top universities and come away with a 2:2 suffer a “large earnings penalty” compared to their higher-achieving peers. The Institute for Fiscal Studies found women earned 7 per cent less at age 30 compared to 2:1 graduates, and men suffer an 11 per cent 2:2 penalty. They may even have fared better attending a less prestigious institution and getting a 2:1, the study found.