Politics
Real internationalisation: thoughts after the gold rush
Establishing an overseas campus is very far from straightforward. Universities will better reap the rewards on their investment if they look beyond the short-term financial gains, writes Paul Greatrix.
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The morning after – election results, university seats and what’s next
As the results of the general election start to trickle in, Mark Leach takes a look at the high drama in many university seats.
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Post Truth by Matthew D’Ancona and Post-Truth by Evan Davis review – is this really a new era of politics?
Lying as the norm has been with us for a while. Is the idea of post-truth another example of liberals understanding people wrongly?
“In practice,” Evan Davis writes, “we evidently are quite happy to believe untruths.” Davis is stating what is, perhaps, the most indisputable fact regarding what has been trumpeted as the rise of a new kind of “post-truth” politics. Shrewdly, he describes the belief that we a living in a post-truth era as “an expression of frustration and anguish from a liberal class discombobulated by the political disruptions of 2016”. A catch-all term used by today’s liberals to describe upheavals that confounded their most basic beliefs, “post-truth” politics is like “populism” in implying that these unexpected shifts occurred because reason had been subverted. Duped by demagogues deploying new information technologies, voters disregarded argument and evidence in favour of manipulated emotion and fake news. The idea of truth was lost in a morass of relativism, and the politicians who controlled government for decades were abruptly dislodged from power.
It’s an appealingly simple tale, which many liberals are more than happy to believe. But if we have entered a post-truth era, when did this epoch begin? Matthew d’Ancona is highly specific as to the date: “2016 was the year that definitively launched the era of ‘Post-Truth’.” We have inhabited this new world for not much more than a year, but its dominant characteristic is all too clear. There has been “a crash in the value of truth, comparable to the collapse of a currency or a stock”. It’s not that politicians lie more than they did in the past. “Political lies, spin and falsehood are emphatically not the same as Post-Truth. What is new is not the mendacity of politicians but the public’s response to it. Lying is regarded as the norm, even in democracies.” But if there is such a thing as the post-truth era, it didn’t start last year with Brexit and Trump. It began with the Iraq war, which D’Ancona barely mentions. More than any other single event, it was this stupendous exercise in disinformation and denial that convinced the public that indifference to truth had become the norm in politics.
Lib Dem manifesto steers largely clear of universities
The Liberal Democrats are attempting to fight back, but not in higher education policy it seems. Catherine Boyd picks apart the party's HE proposals released today in its manifesto.
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This election will test the laws (and patience) of the wonkiverse
There are four fundamental laws of the higher education universe. Not even a general election can break them, or can it? Martin McQuillan looks behind the already mind-numbing sloganeering.
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New leaders, new approach: a watershed moment for NUS
Shakira Martin and Amatey Doku are the new faces of NUS for the higher education. Nona Buckley-Irvine explains what this means for the sector's engagement with NUS and students' unions.
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UPDATED: Agreement reached on HE Bill as it heads to final stages of debate
Some surprising concessions have been announced in new government amendments to the Higher Education and Research Bill, to be debated by Parliament later this week.
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Ministers must stop spreading bogus news about bogus colleges
The government regularly claims that it has cracked down on hundreds of 'bogus colleges' offering student visas, but is that really the case? Mike Ratcliffe has looked into who really has been coming on and off the Tier 4 register.
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Go back to your campuses and prepare for disappointment
The Prime Minister already looks set to return to Downing Street with an increased majority and a domestic policy programme of her own. Where do universities fit in Mayism, and the 'May' general election?
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Why students should be included in net migration figures
With the debate over international students front and centre of the HE Bill's endgame in Parliament, Ant Bagshaw argues that the political debate over the issue has too often missed the nuance of the policy.
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