This Sunday, Oxford and Cambridge will race from Putney to Mortlake – a little over 7km – in one of the most famous events on the British sporting calendar. The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race is watched by millions around the world, with audiences far beyond the two universities and rowing community. Yet the...
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Archive for March, 2009
It’s time we gave up the lazy clichés and appreciated the Boat Race
Engineers in ‘crap with women’ shocker
Every university course has a student stereotype. Archaeology students are generally imagined as overweight, bearded and with a love for death metal. The English student, meanwhile, tends to have a penchant for skinny jeans, skinny scarves and Jarvis Cocker spectacles. Engineering students, however, are seen as such social incompetents that they have to be...
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Credit crunch survival for just £500. Kind of.
The Credit Crunch is going to affect practically all universities, especially their endowments - Harvard lost $8 billion (yes, that's billion with a B) when the stock exchanges of the world went south. As a result, an advert for a conference on 'Managing University Estates' arrived in my inbox from THE. The day long...
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Popped collars, a surplus of second names, and a scary Canadian: it’s Bristol University’s Union Elections!
Bristol’s Student Union is, apparently, the most apathetic in the country. There’s some statistics to back it up, but I’m so apathetic I can’t be arsed to find them. Hopefully this demonstrates the point adequately.
However, turnout this year at the Union elections was reasonably good. There are probably many reasons for this – being...
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VCs get fat-cat pay, but are they worth it?
It's never a good time for bosses to reveal massive pay rises for themselves. But the timing of this particular story takes the biscuit.
After grudgingly giving staff a pay rise of, on average around 5.7%, it turns out Vice-Chancellors last year received a pay increase of 9%. Oh dear.
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Can occupations ever be successful?
Over at the Sheffield Uni Occupation blog they have a big long list of successful University occupations. I stand well and truly corrected. I was barking up the wrong tree with this post. It was simply a 'total lie' - something I realised when confronted with the overwhelming evidence offered by the Occupiers.
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Occupational hazard
The University of Sheffield has been occupied by students! How. Retro. Can. You. Get. A group of forty or so students are currently ensconced in the Hicks building’s lecture halls, snuggling down for the night. Sprinting after a bandwagon that is now quite far in the distance, they are protesting Israeli actions in Gaza...
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A*? It won’t get you far.
There's a big hoo-hah over the new A* grade at A-level - and it's all over nothing. The new grade is meant to distinguish between very clever teenagers and fantastically clever teenagers. Basically, if you get over 90% in your A2 year, you get an A* and a big sticker saying NERD.
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Relative funding cuts for Russell Group universities
The RAE has not been kind to Russell Group universities. Every single member of the group has experienced a reduction in the amount of research funding per researcher for their 2009-10 allocation. This amounts to £6,000 per researcher. Ouch. Read more here.
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Happy campus
At the beginning of the year, two of Britain’s great institutions join forces. In an unprecedented move The University of Chichester and Butlins came together to offer a degree in becoming a Redcoat. A quick glance at a Redcoats alumni list shows Michael Barrymore, Darren Day and H from Steps all started life as...
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