Brains and Bloomsbury seem to go together. The bustling central London suburb is home to the British Museum, the University of London, and several leading medical institutions. Back in the smog-filled day Charles Dickens roamed its streets and later the likes of Virginia Woolf, John...
That higher education is in the grip of profound forces reshaping its role and meaning is a truism. The university as a cloistered centre “is a physical reminder of times past” writes Tom P Ables, but its function is no longer the same: “Not only is...
What is a university for? It’s a hoary old question, one that pops up with persistent regularity - if not explicitly then by implication. There have been two fine examples of this in the space of a couple of weeks or so, the implied answers poles...
The ‘Aristotle of our time’ Robert McKee, a guiding guru for writers of all kinds everywhere, says that storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world. Have universities grasped this simple but paradoxically complex truth and used it to good effect...
From Limerick to Maastricht, Dallas to Madrid, the Arctic to Geelong, Dundee to Tsukuba, there has been the higher education equivalent of dancing in the streets (soy lattes all round for the management team?) as youngish universities discover they have done very well indeed in...
Many thousands of highly successful people are the proud owners of liberal arts degrees, majoring in subjects ranging from modern history to literature. The roll call includes CEOs of major companies, politicians, academics, journalists, actors, policymakers, TV and movie producers, executives across a wide range...
Recently Professor Glyn Davis, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, reflected on his institution’s outstanding success in raising more than $500m thanks to the generosity of 20,000 donors the majority of whom were alumni. The money will be well spent: 24 new professorships, $150m in...
A recent article in the Guardian posed the question: Are universities doing enough to help students start businesses? It seems reasonable to ask given that, according to recent research, more than a quarter of students have started, or plan to start, a small venture while...
After years of fragmented and low-level approaches it is now action stations in higher education as the sector comes to grips with the challenges and opportunities inherent in Work Integrated Learning. Most, if not all, universities have WIL programs, ranging from case studies to fully-paid...
In a celebrated TED talk (which is now nudging north towards 38 million views) Sir Ken Robinson persuasively argued that schools were killing creativity. Sir Ken never saw teachers as the problem, but rather the system in which they worked which, because of a combination of...