It's Broken Britain week @ft and @guardiannews. The FT's great 3 part series on why the UK can't build public anything is capped by @edwinheathcote slam of the Great Dismantling: "Asset stripping the public realm has been disastrous." /1bit.ly/3SfRSM2 "Who are cities for? To sell off what would never be built today suggests they are run for the benefit of developers." Meanwhile, "Helsinki is building huge public libraries for its citizens, Tokyo has commissioned its most revered architects to design public toilets. ..."/2

Did any #HigherEducation people read this dreadful @FT piece by the VC of @KingsCollegeLon? These bad ideas really need to be contested whenever they appear, here for the upper business community /1 @EricRoyalLybeck

https://twitter.com/policyatkings/status/1731597657750049158

The first is that the UK uni system is too equal. It should be more like the system I taught in for decades -California's. The idea, w/o Kapur's euphemisms. is that most UK universities should be busted down to community colleges with reduced fee income: make the poor poorer

US News is following the NY Times who is following Raj Chetty et al into marketing higher ed as social mobility.
That's better than marketing it as prestige or status, as rankings have done since the late 1980s. But it doesn't fix three other problems. 1/6 bit.ly/3t1qXuo First, capitalism rather than education should be on the hook for employment outcomes, but the US News revision makes employment even more important as a factor in rating colleges (I put it at 42% for the "national universities"-- see my work in the photo below). 2/6

this is a great piece by Asheesh Kapur Siddique on the humanities research funding crisis. Partly I'm thrilled to see someone write about this other than me :) but more to the point, to see the key points put together so well. Key points: bit.ly/3P793zb 1. national fellowships that supported humanities PhD research are being terminated. The loss of Ford last year is huge, and Siddique has a handy list of this collapse of early-career support. @rgfeal @HumanitiesAll

After @nytimes & @ChronicleReview slammed UC Berkeley's closure of its Anthropology library, @gilliantett @FT does the same. In the process she or the students make a bunch of important, straightforward points 1/7 @FacultyBerkeley ft.com/content/661eae… 1. the budget excuse is completely unconvincing (netting $400,000 in annual savings on a nearly $3 billion annual budget). (Apparently, the faculty Senate opposed the closure in part on this ground.)

I got excited when I read this headline because I've been wanting UC Health to bust out as a huge public asset in a time of fear and crisis. I thought @UCSF was making test kits and spreading them around CA. Not what @TeresaWatanabe 's piece says lat.ms/2xwl9fB The most successful #Covid19 responses have been in China and South Korea--China with invasive testing and checking and travel lockdowns, and S Korea with free widespread testing--auto drive-throughs that would be great in California bit.ly/3aYC60y

historically, the teaching curriculum was one thing college faculty assumed they controlled, free of administrative reach-in. That was never entirely true, but it was ended at many places by ed-tech & the Lynne Cheney fueled trustee empowerment movement of the last 20 years Financial exigency is the main reach-in to curriculum @AAUP acknowledges. They define it narrowly, so it does NOT mean admin preferring to spend money on a loss-making nanotech center instead of Spanish, as in the SUNY Albany case I've written about bit.ly/2CmOngj

@chronicle has published another piece arguing that #highered is out of touch with regular Americans and disliked by them. It stages the eternal battle between a dynamic society and backward educators. The conclusion is always the same: colleges must "change how they do business" The frame is compiled from Republican talking points, particularly that college means liberal brainwashing. bit.ly/2tyh31u
@karinfischer puts this out there as though it were a common opinion, not a refutable falsehood (start w @AaronRHanlon bit.ly/2SeAINK) /2

I like @AlexUsherHESA's work and read his newsletter more or less every day. So I was surprised by his patronizing take on Stefan Collini conta.cc/2SUddhd I like Collini personally and professionally, I should say up front. But Usher gets the UK highered crisis wrong /1 He says,"certainly the UK policy debate is driven by third-rate econ-talk" that is "pretty thin stuff." True, but this thin stuff eliminated public funding for UK #highered in most subjects, allowed the instant tripling of fees, and undermined the nonelite end of the sector. /2