Condensed concepts

Elite universities in the USA have nurtured and enhanced my whole academic life. In 1983, I moved to the USA as an international student, co...

The world is being run by accountants, lawyers, and marketing consultants. They work for corporations, universities, trade unions, and gover...

This past Monday, May 8, was a public holiday in Queensland, marking Labor Day. I don't know why we don't celebrate it on May 1, but...

 In the School of Mathematics and Physics at UQ there is an Early- and Mid-Career Academic group who organise activities to support one anot...

 Any organisation is composed of many interacting parts. For example, a university is not just composed of staff and students, but also incl...

 Previously, I have argued that being in management is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for showing leadership. I have also di...

My wife and I started watching the series  The Chair , a comedy about an English department in an affluent liberal arts university in the No...

 It is no surprise to most readers that I do not believe that "the university is a (billion-dollar) business and so should be run accor...

Will there be big new discoveries? Will old problems be solved?   I have finished my draft of, "An endless frontier"  the last cha...

A helpful starting point for me when considering universities after the pandemic is the cover story of The Economist , from two weeks ago, ...

There is a growing discussion of what changes might result from the pandemic: changes in societies, in institutions, and to us as individual...

As years go by the PhD thesis in science and engineering is less and less of a ``thesis'' and more just a box to tick. There was a t...

A recent issue of The Economist has an interesting article about the massive expansion in higher education, both private and public, in Afri...

Unfortunately, like many universities, UQ has become a construction site in the rush to build shiny new buildings , particularly to accommod...

In the next month, I have been asked to give a talk and to write an article about universities in two different forums. What are universitie...

I was recently asked to give a talk to an NGO about how universities are changing. There is no doubt that there are rapid changes, many for...

When reflecting on the current state of an organisation (whether a university, a research group, an NGO, a funding agency, a state governmen...

Universities are going off the rails because of the blind use of metrics. Unfortunately, this reflects what is also happening in wider socie...

In different words,  No College Kid Needs a Water Park to Study This is a disturbing New York Times opinion piece by James V Koch, who has ...

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an excellent (but depressing) article, Higher Education is Drowning in BS , by Christian Smith. In...