The week in higher education – 15 August 2024

With 18 gold medals, Australia enjoyed its best-ever Olympics at Paris 2024, but the country’s most-discussed athlete was arguably its least successful: a 36-year-old Macquarie University academic called Rachael Gunn who failed to score a single point in any of her three breaking battles. Dr Gunn’s decision to eschew the explosive acrobatic style of her competitors and deliver a slower routine that included hopping around like a kangaroo was mocked mercilessly online as “hilariously bad”. But, with videos circulating showing how the scholar better known as “Raygun” can actually pull off some credible spins, online sleuths dug up a 2023 academic paper co-authored by Dr Gunn that notes the huge resistance among Australian breakers to hip-hop dancing becoming an Olympic sport. Its inclusion at the games would “place breaking more firmly within this sporting nation’s hegemonic settler-colonial structures that rely upon racialised and gendered hierarchies”, argued Dr Gunn. So, was it a subversive attempt to save breaking for the streets? Or artistic catastrophe, stage fright, lack of talent or injury? The conspiracy theories over Raygun will continue to swirl for some time, it seems.

UK universities were getting out the red carpets in a last-chance bid to attract students ahead of this year’s A-level results day. The University of Central Lancashire was offering “VIP clearing”, telling applicants they can gain access to “exclusive benefits [and] helpful content”, and even a “chance to win some amazing prizes” if they enrol, The Times reported. Whether it will be deal-or-no-deal for students, however, is yet to be seen, as cash-strapped universities fight over a smaller pool of applicants. Meanwhile, the University of Gloucestershire has gone one step further by offering students the chance to win free accommodation in halls of residence if they register to become a “clearing VIP” ahead of results day, as well as a “personalised” postcard. Terms and conditions apply, no doubt.

Two academic pranksters have highlighted major flaws in a system used to rank researchers by earning hundreds of citations for a fake scholar who was actually a cat.  According to Google Scholar, Larry Richardson was a mathematician with a creditable h-index whose papers were garnering significant attention from fellow scholars. In fact, Larry was a feline who belonged to the father of Reese Richardson, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University, who, with University of Cambridge researcher Nick Wise, created a string of nonsensical sham papers by Larry, as well as several others citing the moggy’s musings. “The scientific enterprise has become so competitive and unequal that services have emerged to offer reputation laundering, preying on academics desperate for jobs and promotions,” Mr Richardson told The Times, who added that “with the reality of the situation being this ridiculous, we wanted to bring attention to the problem with something even more absurd.”

You are what you teach, if the experience of a former criminology lecturer convicted of theft is anything to go by. Salisbury Crown Court heard that Pauline Al Said, who had worked at Bath Spa University since 2016, took a hands-on approach to her subject when she attempted to steal more than £1,000 worth of Le Creuset cookware, 33 “high value” steaks and alcohol from a garden centre and a Marks & Spencer branch, The Times reported. After security guards caught her leaving the garden centre with the unpaid goods, she was found to have a security tag remover in her bags. But Al Said, who represented herself during her trial, denied the charges, telling the jurors: “Keep your eyes, and your mind, and your ears open.”

Having a well-regarded PhD supervisor is more important than ever for success in academia, according to a paper published in Royal Society journal Interface on 14 August. The study, which tracked how often PhD graduates were cited over a five-year period, finds strong evidence to support the long-held belief that PhD graduates of well-known researchers are cited far more often than those without a starry supervisor, arguing that this kind of “impact inequality” indicates how “academia has become less open and more stratified over time”. Alluding to the curve denoting the persistence of income inequality between generations, the “academic Great Gatsby Curve” is greatest in philosophy, linguistics and perhaps surprisingly, mathematics, says the paper by researchers from Italy, China and the UK.