Category: Academia
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A Theory of (British) University Business Cycles
Put simply, the theory of political business cycles goes like this: in the run up to elections, governments increase public spending or/and lower interest rates (if they can control them) in order to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment. They supply voters with more goods or cheap credit as a way to make them happy…
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A modest proposal to improve the efficiency of assessment in universities
Essay writing and assessment is a drag. For academics, it eats out an awful lot of time which could be devoted to research or other productive activities counting for tenure. For students, writing essays requires a great deal of investment and time which could be more productively spent on facebook or other things that the…
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“A useless pile of half-truths and sensationalistic linkbait”
Dear Mr. Salustri, I am the author of the piece “how academia resembles a drug gang” that you describe on your blog with the words above. You also write that it is “mortally flawed”, “laughable” and “a complete mischaracterization”. You call my argument “stupid” in a reply to a comment on your piece which defends mine.…
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Dealing with email bankruptcy
On January 1st, New York Times journalist Nick Bilton, acknowledging that he would never be able to answer all of them, deleted a backlog of 46,315 unanswered emails and, officially declared email bankruptcy. A number of high-profile individuals have declared email bankruptcy over the last decade, the first being Lawrence Lessig in 2004. Just like…
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A Modest Proposal to Improve Value for Money for Customers of Universities
Students increasingly want “value for money” from their university education. On a number of occasions, I have heard or read students concerned about what they get for the money they pay, especially with respect to the different individual components of their education. I have received emails calculating the price of individual modules saying that for…
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How Margaret Thatcher Made Britain a Soviet State
When I moved to the United Kingdom a year and a half ago, I thought that I was moving to a free market experiment. Margaret Thatcher and her followers – from Blair to Cameron – had crushed the unions, liberalized labour and financial markets, privatized public services, reformed the state following business principles and reduced…
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Do good universities teach better, or do they just select better students?
Research commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (and reported in the Times Higher Education Supplement) argues that the wage premium associated with studying at a Russell Group university is not statistically significant if you control for the social background of students and their A-levels. Graduates of Russell Group universities do earn 36%…
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The Purgatory of Academic Articles
I have an article forthcoming in *academic journal*. I sent the final version early 2010, and it has been put online for early view on September 6 of that year. It still hasn’t been included in an issue (1082 days later), and the journal currently has 141 articles in earlyview awaiting to be included in…
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Universities are Full of Bullshit Jobs
David Graeber writes: “Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they…