The week in higher education – 21 November 2024

With Paddington in Peru taking almost £10 million at the British box office in its opening weekend, it seems the duffel-coated bear is more beloved than ever. Yet while the latest Paddington movie is little more than a high-spirited jungle adventure, a University of Sunderland academic has called on audiences to remember the powerful allegorical message of Michael Bond’s books – and the first two films – in which Paddington’s status as an illegal immigrant is central. In a paper titled “Paddington Bear: A case study of immigration and otherness”, Angela Smith describes how the original Paddington story, published in 1958, sees the Brown family “rescue” him from the famous London train station, despite knowing that Paddington has “arrived in Britain sans name or identity [and] admits to having stowed away on a boat”, The Northern Echo reported. Fingers crossed that Paddington’s possession of a British passport in the latest film, noted by Radio Times, will save him from deportation any time soon.

In the Netflix series One Day, Dexter and Emma overcame the class divide at University of Edinburgh to get it on, but those at the real-life Scottish institution are not faring so well. According to BBC News, the university has “warned students from privileged backgrounds not to be ‘snobs’ towards their peers from Scottish and working-class backgrounds”. Indeed, class prejudice is so bad on campus for Scots that the student-led “Scottish Social Mobility Society complained lecturers and students regularly mocked and mimicked individuals from north of the border”. “My accent has changed so much since starting at uni because I was getting comments if I said a word like ‘cannae’,” explained one student. One small consolation for those put-upon Scots is their English neighbours are paying £9,250 a year in tuition fees while Scots pay nothing.

The much-anticipated sequel to Squid Game is coming to Netflix in December, but a similarly gruelling test of physical and mental fortitude has already taken place in South Korea this month: the eight-hour university placement exam known as the suneung. The stakes are so high, BBC News explained, that students have been warned to avoid earworm pop hits in case they distract them during cramming season. “I’m worried that the song will play in my head even during the exam,” said one student, with Go Go by BTS and Ring Ding Dong by SHINee repeatedly cited online as tracks that should be forbidden. It’s not a matter of life-or-death, Squid Game-style, but with 10,000 police on the streets to ensure that students reach exams and planes grounded so as not to disturb exams, the Koreans certainly take this test seriously.

Labour big beast Lord Mandelson is among the final five candidates to become chancellor of the University of Oxford, but he has not ruled out “double jobbing” if he is appointed Britain’s next ambassador to Washington. “If by some chance these two things were to happen, they are not incompatible with each other,” he told The Times How To Win An Election podcast. With his bid to be Oxford’s chancellor already stressing his mission to fundraise, Lord Mandelson was clear that a transatlantic move could work well for his alma mater if it allowed him to mix with well-heeled potential donors, the Daily Mail reported. “If I was in the US, I would be promoting Oxford as a great, iconic premier university that is revered in the US,” he said.

Should scholars be worried by the increasingly “sloppy” spelling found in academic literature? Yes, according to researchers from Queensland University of Technology who claim the sharp rise in spelling errors in medical literature between 1970 and 2023 indicates how researchers are prioritising quantity over quality. Clangers such as “casual inference”, “risk ration” and “pubic health” that now litter academic papers should not be regarded as simple mistakes but evidence that vital checks, such as running sensitivity analyses to verify results or waiting for a colleague’s feedback on a draft paper, have not taken place, state the authors. These errors are also bad for science too, as “spelling and grammar errors will slow readers down, forcing them to work out, or even guess, what the authors actually meant”, said lead author Adrian Barrett.