Times Higher Education’s most-read articles of 2022

Beyond being a guide to the staple interests of academics and higher education professionals, Times Higher Education’s annual most-read lists often tell you something more meaningful about the 12 months just past.

The lists for 2020 and 2021 were dominated by stories about Covid-19 and how the pandemic was impacting international student mobility – always a topic of significant interest online. The 2022 list, however, marks something of a return to normality, with a wide range of stories making the top 15, and our coverage of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework taking a number of the highest-ranked spots.

15. After 30 years of STEM, it is time to move on

Higher education has more than its fair share of acronyms and few receive more attention than STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – with these subjects increasingly dominating research funding and policy debates. This January opinion piece by Andy Miah, chair in science communication and future media at the University of Salford, took aim at the acronym wars, whether the rival option is STEAM – adding arts to the mix – or even one for today’s digital economy, MESH: media literacy, ethics, sociology and history. “We should not look towards new forms of subject alliance, which will have the same effects as STEM of excluding or deprioritising other forms of knowledge,” he wrote. “Instead, we need to create integrated knowledge pathways and programmes of work that celebrate networked intelligence across subjects.”

14. Manchester investigates PhD student’s masturbation paper

The concerning story of a University of Manchester PhD who published a journal paper describing how he masturbated to sexualised images of young boys was the subject of a number of THE articles, all of which attracted strong attention from readers – and one of which makes an appearance higher up our most-read list. This initial story described how Karl Andersson’s paper, “Using masturbation as an ethnographic method in research on shota subculture in Japan”, raised questions around vetting at the Sage journal Qualitative Research, which later retracted the paper. Summing up scholars’ shock was Alice Sullivan, professor of sociology at UCL, who said: “Wanking is not a research method; it is just wanking.”

13. UK university and Indian IIT to offer joint degree for first time

India’s Institutes of Technology are perhaps the one part of the country’s higher education system with the potential to be major global players, but traditionally they have struggled to attract international students or be major players in global research collaboration. This scoop from THE’s Pola Lem revealed a sign of significant progress: a deal between the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the University of Birmingham to offer two-year master’s programmes in the fields of energy systems, data science and biomedical engineering.

12. ‘Eye-watering’ Australian university salaries revealed

Amid all the furore about vice-chancellors’ pay in the UK, their earnings are small fry compared with what the top brass can make Down Under. This story from Asia-Pacific editor John Ross, based on freedom of information requests, revealed that big pay packets aren’t confined to the presidential suite only. The documents seen by John “illustrate the rich pickings enjoyed by Australian university A-listers, with dozens of staff out-earning the prime minister and hundreds attracting salaries way over those prescribed in industrial agreements”.

11. Australian work rules for overseas students ‘courting disaster’

Throughout 2022, Australia sought to tempt back international students who looked elsewhere during long-running Covid-driven border shutdowns by loosening the rules around how many hours they could work during their studies. While the move proved popular with employers battling post-pandemic labour shortages, higher education experts warned that the move risked resurrecting the types of perverse behaviour – such as an explosion in demand for cooking and hairdressing courses – that triggered a harmful regulatory crackdown a decade ago. A series of articles from John Ross raised the alarm, including this one, which proved particularly popular with readers.

10. ‘Cognitive dissonance’ blamed for academics’ mental health woes

THE runs many stories on the mental health issues that researchers and academics battle with, but what is causing them? This article focused on "cognitive dissonance" – the idea that scholars come into higher education seeking to embrace reason, objectivity, and public responsibility, and then find they are employed in institutions that fail to live up to these values in their own activities. “Facts matter; data matters; evidence matters,” said Peter Tregear, lead author of the study that our article was based on. “That’s clearly going to come crashing into a brand-focused management style concerned instead with spin and image – where you’re expected to fall into line rather than speak truth to power.”

9. Poor German pushing international students towards dropping out

Lots of major higher education sectors want to increase their international recruitment. But once students are enrolled, can institutions keep them? Not always, and shaky language skills are often a key factor in overseas learners’ decision to drop out. This article focused on a survey of more than 4,500 international students at 125 universities by Germany’s academic exchange service, Daad, which found that many lack the German-language skills needed, with some students only realising mid-course that their skills were insufficient to write a thesis.

8. Researchers are wounded in academia’s gender wars

The toxic dispute over the rights of transgender people and how freely these matters should be discussed remains academia’s most divisive issue. In this long read, Laura Favaro, a researcher at City, University of London’s Gender & Sexualities Research Centre, outlined what she found after interviewing 50 gender studies academics across many disciplines to learn about their views and experiences of the dispute. “Having approached the topic with an open mind, my discussions left me in no doubt that a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold across universities in England, and many countries beyond,” wrote Favaro. Perhaps inevitably, the feature attracted significant attention from readers – and significant commentary from those on both sides of the debate.

7. If the UK bans overseas students, guards will have lonely Christmases

Our most-read list always throws up a few surprises, and this is perhaps one of them. Suggestions that international students could be banned from all but the UK’s most “elite” universities created significant concern in the sector in the final few months of the year, and were the subject of several news pieces. The article that attracted more attention than any other, however, was this perspective from campus security guard George Bass, noting how the security desk is often the first and last port of call for jet-lagged and far-from-home students. “In the end, all this talk of banning international students is probably just political point-scoring,” Bass said. “But you don’t have to be a Manchester City supporter to know that it’s hard to score points without a Spanish midfielder, a Brazilian goalie, a Norwegian centre-forward and a Portuguese right-back playing alongside the bloke from Barnsley.”

6. Pressure to pass mediocre students forced me out of academia

When it comes to standards of university assessment, grade inflation is usually the elephant in the room: can such significant increases in grading really be explained by improvements in teaching only? Anything that suggests otherwise strikes a chord with academics, and their managers, too – including this opinion piece by an anonymous former physics professor at a small private college in the US. In it, the author outlined how they had been driven to quit by pressure from demanding students to pass substandard assignments. The pressure came from managers too, for reasons which the author identified as being purely financial. “Many students at my former institution assumed that their academic success and graduation was guaranteed,” the professor wrote. “They also assumed – rightly – that their failure was ruled out upon payment of their tuition.”

5. PhD graduates ‘look overqualified’ for university administration

It is well known that there are nowhere near enough academic jobs for all PhD students, and also that it can be hard to branch out beyond a university career, with a doctoral graduate sometimes looking overqualified for relatively junior roles. It turns out that this applies in academia, too, with a study finding that many PhD graduates who moved into university administrative roles, while positive about their decision and valuing the job security it offered, still faced barriers, with employers assuming they wouldn’t be satisfied in their role and so wouldn’t stay long. PhD careers stories are always popular on THE, and this was no different.

4. REF 2021: Golden triangle looks set to lose funding share

The publication – a year late – of the results of the UK’s 2021 Research Excellence Framework was the big event of 2022 in UK higher education. This story, the first of three REF-related entries on the most-read list, identified what was perhaps the key shift in the latest exercise: improved performance, and hence increased funding, for a number of universities outside the golden triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge. Large research-intensive institutions in major regional centres such as the universities of Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool – as well as several smaller research institutions and regional post-92s – all looked set to receive a bigger share of quality-related funding in the wake of the exercise.

3. REF 2021: Quality ratings hit new high in expanded assessment

When it comes to REF methodology, the big change in the 2021 exercise was the requirement for universities to submit all research-active staff for assessment. Previously institutions were able to choose who they put in, leading to significant “game-playing” – and much rancour – over who was “REF-able” and who wasn’t. A significant increase in the number of academics being submitted to the REF went hand in hand with a large rise in overall quality ratings, suggesting that much excellent research had historically been overlooked by evaluators.

2. REF 2021: Social sciences on the up as arts and humanities shrink

It is widely held that most academics’ interests are fairly well confined to their own area of scholarly expertise and the associated discipline. This notion is supported by the fact that this article – looking at performance across different research areas, and including detailed, field-by-field league tables, outperformed other, bigger-picture, stories.

1. Masturbation journal paper exposes deeper problems in research

That journal paper provided THE with its most-read article of the year. In this opinion piece, William Matthews, an LSE fellow in the anthropology of China at the London School of Economics, argued that Karl Andersson’s “appallingly bad” paper exposed the insanity of ethnography’s turn towards introspection and other postmodern research methods that place little value on objectivity.