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Sir Graham Hills, 1926-2014

A former principal and vice-chancellor of the University of Strathclyde, acclaimed for his efforts to widen access to higher education for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, has died

ɫ��ֱ�� Scholarly Web - 3 April 2014

Weekly transmissions from the blogosphere

News in brief - 3 April 2014

Undergraduate achievementDifferent classes’ different classesA new study indicates that state school pupils go on to get better degrees than private school peers with the same A-level grades. The...

World in brief - 3 April 2014

United StatesYale professor changes courseUS massive open online course provider Coursera has appointed former Yale University president Richard Levin its chief executive officer. Professor Levin, 66...

Grant winners - 3 April 2014

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research CouncilResearch GrantsAward winner: Rowland KaoInstitution: University of GlasgowValue: £773,448Joint estimation of epidemiological and genetic...

The week in higher education - 3 April 2014

Labour is to slash maximum tuition fees to £6,000 a year and may reduce them to as little as £4,000, The Sunday Times reported on 30 March. Ed Miliband, the party’s leader, is expected to pledge to...

Piled Higher and Deeper, by Jorge Cham - 3 April 2014

Inhale…and relax

Further to “Advice squad”, the feature about PhD supervision ( March). In 1988, when I still smoked, I had my PhD viva in the department of government at the University of Manchester. My supervisor,...

Vital facts pinned down

Ray Stoneham worries that a “seismic shift to online discourse” will leave academics, who are not on first-name terms with modern-day referencing, “in their ivory towers calculating the number of...

Unhappy resolution

I am a senior lecturer at a UK university who has been in post for more than 10 years. Until two years ago, I would have paid scant attention to the story “PhD scholarship appeal bid fails” (News,...

Reading problems

I think that Julian Elliott has not gone far enough in his criticisms of the dyslexia myth and industry (Letters, 20 March; “Is it time to rethink dyslexia?”, Opinion, 6 March). As a practising...

Upping access Down Under

In regard to “Lifting the cap ‘fails to widen access’ in Australia” (News, March), your article on the impact that Australia’s approach to funding higher education by demand rather than supply has...

Primed and readied

The feature “The rise of the route masters” (20 March) could have benefited from contrasting private pre-degree schemes with the aims and values of some of the earliest university foundation...

Open must be affordable

We are grateful to members of the web community, including Peter Murray-Rust (“Blogger set on smoothing road to open access”, News, March), who are working hard to enrich the data on open access...

On academic issues, law bows to managers

Having sat through most of the hearing and considered the judges’ remarks as the case proceeded (“Queen Mary critic loses unfair dismissal claim”, March), I formed the view that what most colleagues...