The UK government’s new policy to reduce bureaucracy in research institutions aims at an easy target. But the bonfire of administration lit by the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, risks burning down the foundations of much-needed efforts to value the many different people on which the future health of UK R&D depends
Should an interest in bureaucracy be a protected characteris Continue reading
The end of this month marks my retirement from my professorial position at Cambridge, something that I still find rather surprising. My career on that front has just faded out, yet another victim of the pandemic; the conference planned for the week just past to celebrate my career, bit the dust a long time ago. There is absolutely no rite of passage, other than (mistakenly) being sent an ‘exit que Continue reading
A week after the Science and University Ministers announced with respect to chartermarks such as Athena Swan
“We have therefore asked the OfS, UKRI and NIHR to ensure that they place no weight upon the presence or absence of such markers or scheme memberships in any of their regulatory or funding activities”
as I discussed in my last blogpost, there seems uncertainty what that means in pract Continue reading
When Rita Colwell was born in 1934, neither Oxford nor Cambridge Universities had yet appointed a female professor in any discipline; Dorothy Garrod, the first woman to hold such a chair (the Disney Chair of Archaeology at Cambridge), was not appointed until 1939. Colwell herself went on to a distinguished career in environmental microbiology – she was particularly important in unravelling part of Continue reading
You’ll both no doubt recall that I have started to record some music at home, as a displacement activity while I cannot play with my regular beat combo for reasons that will hardly need to be explained. You can listen to it here, in this free-to-air link on SoundCloud, a social media app for sharing one’s own music. The set is called Locked Down and Blue. Here are some liner notes.
Continue readingAt 6:18 on the afternoon of Tuesday 4th August a huge store of ammonium nitrate exploded at the port of Beirut. The blast, one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in history, killed nearly 200 people, injured thousands more, and left over a quarter of a million homeless. In the immediate vicinity, the blast wave overturned cars and tore the cladding from buildings; windows were shattered i Continue reading
Readers of the Guardian may, over the years, have had reason to dip into Oliver Burkeman’s columns. As he hangs up his metaphorical boots, he summarised what he had personally learned from the exercise of writing these ‘self-help’ articles. In this last article he advises, for instance, something that will resonate with many an academic, harried even over the summer vacation by the endless to-do l Continue reading
The Gee Family had planned to spend the past week in Wales, but we postponed our trip until next year after a well-placed tzores sauce source told us that there’d be sheep at the border with guns. Instead we vacationed at home. Not that there was much vacationing going on as three of the four human elements of the Gee Family, none of them me, are students involved in various sorts of advance Continue reading
Early years provision has suffered during austerity, and is continuing to see cutbacks, as Polly Toynbee pointed out last week. Yet children who fall behind at the outset of their education will find it very difficult to catch up later. If letters and reading are a mystery at 5 or 6, let alone at 7, how hard it will be to get decent grades at GCSE without a huge amount of support and 1:1 teaching Continue reading
Martin onstage at “Trop-a-Delic”
Last night I lost a friend.
I couldn’t think of a more graceful way to start this post, as I am still a little bit in shock. But last night, I lost a friend.
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