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Universities are financially autonomous...Not! #4

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  #4 Universities are financially autonomous.Not! I haven’t blogged in a while, as I have been unwell, with several problems that have flummoxed our socialised medicine system here in the UK. I would put system in air quotes here, but I fell that that gag has been overused (Oh no it hasn’t).   I have also been spoiled for choice about topics, because loads of really unbelievable things have happened in the world that continue to inspire us to think that many people are more than a few cards short of a full deck. But enough about the Labour government. Sorry “Labour” [1] government (for my Canadian and British world wide fan base---OMG we have a Dutch person here [2] ). I am mocking the current “Labour” government who so far are not governing very much like a Labour government. This is British understatement, for my growing Canadian and worldwide audience.   Many of us in UK academia have been “doomscrolling” in social media and mainstream news outlets because the re...
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There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza....or It was a dark and stormy night. #3

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  There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza...or It was a dark and stormy night. It was a dark and stormy night . Felicity Brown wondered if she had closed all of the shutters on her adjacent guest house (a side business to supplement her already impressive managerial income), as she shut down her AI-enhanced tablet for the night. Another busy day for her, checking the work of the Quality Enhancement (QE) subdivision of her Media and External Relations Department at the University of the North (U_NO). The QE folks were mostly computer-literate nerds who created and manipulated the social media bots which were waging the constant information war with Oxbridge University. Oxbridge, like the U_NO, was formed after several government-encouraged efforts at consolidation in higher education provision. These would have been called “hostile takeovers” in the archaic non-management speak of the 20 th and early 21 st centuries. Back in 2025, when the Labour government began to ...
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Neo, neoliberals, and nonsense #2

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  Neo, neoliberals, and nonsense. After taking the plunge with blog number 1, I now have to decide on some sort of direction of travel (making the assumption that more blogs will follow and that they may actually have to lead to somewhere or something). Thinking about coming up with that direction reminded me of how many years ago a colleague at another University asked me about my “five year research plan”. At that stage of my career, I was quietly confident of a rough sketch covering the subsequent 5 days or so, but months or years was well beyond my limited attention..>-SQUIRREL! [1] Now of course I have some ideas about things I would like to read about, summarise and share with you, but I have some concerns. First, a hypothesis 6 (about why I might want to write a blog), might be that it would compel me to read at least something of an economic and political literature that isn’t exactly unpleasant per se, but has a tendency to raise my blood pressure beyond its typi...
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