04 January 2010

The 'impact' agenda and cuts

Apart from the petition below, we should mention three more opposing the government's 'impact' agenda:

Petition sponsored by a group of early career academics and postgraduate students in the humanities and social sciences, 520 signatures, now submitted.

Petition sponsored by James Ladyman, 2,751 signatures so far, ends October 2010.

'Stand up for research', petition sponsored by UCU, 17,570 signatures, submitted December 2009.

The announcement of savage funding cuts on UK higher education in the last few weeks greatly raises the stakes over the direction of the sector. As things stand, it looks as if the cuts will be used to accelerate the drive towards commercialisation and instrumentalisation of higher education that we have tried to identify in this blog. This makes it even more important to understand the causes and consequences of this drive. The blog now has an expanded set of links to academic work that tries to do just that.
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