Thursday Polling A Farcical Situation – USI
Posted in Governance and administration on August 31st, 2011 by steve
“The Union of Students in Ireland (USI) has slammed the Fine Gael/Labour Government for setting the polling day for the upcoming Presidential Election & Referenda on a Thursday. Yesterday, Minister for Environment Phil Hogan TD signed the Polling Day Order unfairly scheduling polling to take place on a Thursday, on October 27th, which will prevent thousands of students from being able to cast their vote …” (more)
[USI, 31 August]
“Lenny Cassuto defends comments made in our live chat on academic publishing and explains why he thinks print still trumps blogging for academics trying to establish themselves …” (
“Libya’s new government, the National Transitional Council (NTC), has said it plans to restart higher education this coming month. But the country’s universities remain unsure when doors will actually reopen for students. Many universities across the country have been closed or operating shoestring services, since Libya’s rebellion started in February …” (
“… But as author and academic George Monbiot points out in a recent piece in The Guardian, there is one large publishing market that not only remains undisrupted but continues to produce huge returns for those who control it: the publishing of academic journals. Why has this market been able to resist the tide of change sweeping through the rest of the industry, and what will it take to finally disrupt it? …” (
“I spent yesterday at the annual conference of CASE Europe – the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on blogging and tweeting by university heads. That, I might say, is a space I am used to being in on my own …” (
“Only days after the new education bill was voted into law, bringing sweeping changes to Greece’s higher education system (immense funding cuts, abolition of the academic asylum etc), students on the ground have been organising their response …” (
“Across the world, higher education has experienced dramatic changes in recent years. There is no doubt that it should be viewed in the global context and not solely from a domestic point of view. Internationalization of higher education is no longer just about the mobility of students and signing of international memoranda of understanding …” (
“One of the issues that has prevented the full participation of females in math and the sciences is the persistent belief that males have innate math skills that are superior to those of females. Even as studies show that the math gap disappears in countries with greater gender equality, it seems to persist in higher education, which allows it to be transmitted to new generations …” (
