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Thoughts and prayers — sincerely! I had to use Windows for Reasons some time ago and I do actually know about environment variables and the registry and things and it was still a slog.

Well tbf that doesn’t sound like an academic expense to me so why would it be relevant to youse? Makes sense amirite.

How many people in Westminster have read The Crisis of the Meritocracy? Should we all chip in and send every MP a copy?

I chuckled when I logged into ELM and was greeted by the message ‘great to see everyone so enthusiastic about these latest models… just a wee bit of warning, they are really expensive so a bit of restraint would be appreciated’. I guess some costs are just more important!

We still have the skills centre in the school, though who knows for how long yet… of course when spending restraint came along it was the pre-Hons appointments that were cut. Make it make sense. (Though obviously the curriculum needs to support it too, and that is… patchy at best.)

Right! But this runs up against a culture that, in different ways, pits ‘skills’ against ‘knowledge’ and fetishises high-stakes single-point assessment. So we get either 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 (all knowledge, exam anxiety where skills should be) or 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 (not enough knowledge, not great at skills either), but either way…

Same here. The 12yo says ‘search it up’, where three years ago she’d say ‘google it up’.

I have a new paper out in Science today with colleagues Damian Blasi, Marcus Hamilton, and Russell Gray. www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

This is so cool

There has to be some kind of Laffer curve for when the UK PGT degree stops having the cost advantage over the otherwise clearly superior two-year postgraduate model.

Yep — this is already happening, but in a boiling-the-frog manner. I do wonder if there will be a reckoning a few years down the line when something happens to really turn the focus onto how much the UKHE model of student experience has mutated into a pile-em-high progression factory.

I grew up in 1990s Russia, a small elite plus a Wild West of cheap business/management/law degrees by basically unregulated providers is a viable system that gives wide access to tertiary-level training. As @stephenkb.bsky.social says, it’s unlikely to be a *good* end state but it’s *viable*

Oh, it will still look like a university. It just won’t be what the British public had come to expect from one. There’s more than one way to run HE, I’m just not sure the government will like what we end up with. Academics with memories of the old UKHE will loathe it but will disappear eventually.

I really do think it’s as simple as: a combination of past decisions and external shocks has made it into a wicked problem, it’s competing with other wicked problems for attention, our political and managerial class is simply not up to thinking it through, they’re flailing, hoping something turns up

It’s really hard to shake the impression both the government and the VC class think this but unironically.

Historical linguists of all persuasions: come join in us in Edinburgh for the biannual historical linguistics bash!

What are the university leaderships doing about this? Just getting really hard to give them the benefit of the doubt about whether they’re seriously committed to SHAPE disciplines when this keeps happening. (Which is bad by itself and bad for overall trust.)

Just wild that we can look at the Iran war and go ‘yes, we should fight wars without asking any questions about our adversary that aren’t just “how many divisions do they have?”’.

Just wild that this is coming out at the same time as the British Adademy’s report on the continued shrinking of languages in UKHE.

So this Defence Universities Alliance thing… we do actually need defence capacity but it’s a bit insane that somehow the defence sector still has nothing to do with languages, area studies, history and suchlike. Complete loss of institutional memory. This used to be widely recognised!