So it's farewell to the History subject area at the University of Hertfordshire, not the first nor the last to go. One of the best departments in the country, just extinguished like a snap of the fingers. Think of the waste. (1/2)

Between the 1970s and 1990s the UK state made a strategic bet to expand Higher Ed. They poured in untold billions of your money. Now it's been handed over to private creditors to burn in a furnace. Then they just laugh at you: at all the taxes you've ever paid or will ever pay. True story. (2/2)

The sheer scale of the closures and job losses in UK HE are plain today. Departure posts and lifeboats visible across all of HE Linkedin, lots here too. In what is now an annual exercise, I tap the sign, which reads: "This has nothing to do with how 'good' these depts or staff are, or were."

Beyond sick of the inaction and head-in-the-sand from this government on HE.

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 2w ago

'Ministers have rejected calls to establish a “special regime” for bailing out universities facing insolvency, saying that political intervention should not be the “default response” in such scenarios.' 1/3

Good piece from @allymcgovern.bsky.social showing how R&D, innovation and universities as regional economic anchors have to be key to achieving the new Govt’s economic and social goals www.ft.com/content/7916...

So a key question now is whether the new @andyburnham.bsky.social led administration will take the higher education funding crisis seriously as a threat to his aspirations around regional growth and skills…

‘Thousands of university job cuts in humanities and social sciences are creating widespread cold spots for languages, classics and theology degrees, the British Academy has warned’ www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Humanities among degrees being ‘extinguished’ by hard-up universities

Exclusive: Experts fear rise in education ‘cold spots’ and social immobility as 4,000 academic posts lost in one year

theguardian.com

Wander back through time on Knepp’s 'Wilding With Archaeology' safari 🌿 Thursday 23 July |11:00-13:30 Part of the @archaeologyuk.bsky.social #FestivalOfArchaeology, join Knepp ecologist Tony Whitbread and the ‘Rewilding’ Later Prehistory team. More information here: shorturl.at/PZ5Bq

Wilding With Archaeology: How past human practices shape wilding now

<p>Knepp&rsquo;s inspiring wilding journey over the last 20 years has been shaped in surprising ways by the past. Take a journey back in time to unearth the extraordinary archaeological details that u...

shorturl.at

The heritage sector generates £15 billion for the economy. If we cut archaeology as a subject, we lose the engine that helps generate it. We also lose our knowledge of past societies. We lose any grasp of who we are, who we’ve been, and who we might yet be.

Rachel Pope@prehistorian.bsky.social · 4w ago

“In a letter to the Office for Students, which distributes the funding, Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, said funding should no longer be given to support nursing, computing, history, creative arts, performing arts, archaeology, and geography courses.” removepaywalls.com/https://www....

Likewise archaeology and the heritage sector, planning, museums/tourism. Our expertise *is* the economy.

Cristina Temenos@ctemenos.bsky.social · 4w ago

Remarkably short sighted decision-making here. Geography remains one of the highest employability degrees across the U.K. cutting funding along with nursing and computing completely undermines U.K. economic and industrial strategies.

History books by women are also available

I genuinely believe that university education is one of the few real levers of social mobility and, well, here we are

Times Higher Education (THE)@timeshighered.bsky.social · last mo.

The Department for Education has confirmed that universities will receive £50.9 million less in teaching grants next academic year. Bridget Phillipson, the education minister has defended the reduction in light of tuition fee rises. https://ow.ly/6UWJ50ZkLlf

I don’t ever ever ever ever want to hear one more ignorant person saying “hurp durp more vocational training”. If nursing ain’t that then nothing is. This Labour government do not want our young people educated. Period.

David Kernohan@dkernohan.bsky.social · last mo.

wonkhe.com/wonk-corner/... Yikes.

How higher education is vandalised in the UK. Here is our last published annual report (www.exeter.ac.uk/v8media/univ...) containing info about "a year of continued financial stability with operating cash generation of £48m and an increase in cash of £11m to end the year with balance of £211m."

The last three years have seen over 30,000 jobs lost in UK Higher Ed. Acting as if this doesn't grievously impact the economy, and the nation's future prospects in all areas, is, at this point, nothing short of wilful self-harm / purposeful vandalism.

Petition against redundancies at Exeter. Humanities and Social Sciences staff are hardest hit, with 25% of posts in subjects including History, English, Modern Languages and Politics slated to be cut.

Sign the Petition

Stop Redundancies at the University of Exeter

c.org

Oh, it me!

History Today@historytoday.com · last mo.

Bede wrote that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded Britain en masse in the fifth century. Does the evidence agree? 🔓 This article is free for 7 days www.historytoday.com/archive/head...

Feel free to contact us about the position which closes in 2 weeks.

Archaeological Proteomics Lab@archaeoprotein.bsky.social · 2mo ago

🚨Job alert🚨We are hiring a Laboratory Technician (24 months) to support our research in Archaeological Proteomics (ZooMS) at the University of Reading (UK), including our COEXIST project. More info here: tinyurl.com/bdfvawh8 #palaeoproteomics #ZooMS

It's now forecast to be 40 degrees here on Thursday. Our average daily high temperature for this time of year is 18. So angry for all of the people who're going to be unnecessarily harmed by this. So angry for our ecosystems that have not remotely evolved for this.

Is binning expert correspondents in eastern Europe a good idea at a time like this? Disinformation on the rise, Russia interfering in many countries, threatening several and actually at war with one? Well, BBC News management seems to think so. It's disposing of me and 4 of my colleagues.

It seems a good day to remind people that in the UK 3 times as many people work in Indian restaurants or for McDonalds as in the whole coal and steel industry. 5 times as many are academic staff at universities. If Labour does not understand its electorate, there is no way to appeal to it.

This week: an evening at Society of Antiquaries, London, for a celebration of the Low Ham publication as part of their summer soiree. Here's us authors (@davidrobertsarch.bsky.social, Roger Leech and me) posing with the hard copy from Pen & Sword books but it's also open access - link in comments 👇

1. How common is LLM use in scientific publishing, and how does it vary across field, publisher, journal prestige, author demographics etc.? @kylesiler.bsky.social has new paper in PNAS that addresses this question on a massive scale: 7.3 million papers from Elsevier, PLOS, MDPI, and Frontiers.

The diffusion of large language models in published academic articles | PNAS

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing academic research, raising questions of who is adopting these tools and under what conditions. Th...

pnas.org

Work for a UK university? Want to see how below-inflation settlements have eroded your pay? @bparsia.bsky.social has produced a handy tool. Put in your spine point, starting date... then get angry all over again about how even this massive, sustained pay cut hasn't been enough to keep sector afloat

Bijan Parsia@bparsia.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Hey #UCU, I just released v1 of another @ucucommons.org project: JNCHES vs Inflation. Site: jnchesvinflation.streamlit.app Blog post: ucucommons.org/project-jnches-vs-inflation/ It's depressing but may be helpful!

Today Microsoft moved all its GitHub copilot subscribers to token-based billing. If you want to see what happens when people have to pay the actual costs of AI, the day is finally here. It's obvious that every customer sees the deep, meaningful value and isn't angry at all.

How do we enhance the engagement of history students in their degree programmes? A new article - 'Rethinking Engagement: Insights from UK History Departments' - bit.ly/4viEKru, by Sarah Jones and Simon Peplow offers discipline-specific proposals. Latest Open Access article in 'Transactions' 1/2

A long account in @lrb.co.uk by Stefan Collini of the causes of what feels like a death spiral for UK Universities. Recent estimates are that UK HE contributes >£130Bn annually to the UK economy, resulting in >750 000 jobs across all regions of the UK lordslibrary.parliament.uk/higher-educa...

London Review of Books@lrb.co.uk · 2mo ago

‘The truth is that both ministers and vice-chancellors are locked into a financial model whose premise is misconceived and whose side effects are profoundly damaging for higher education.’ Stefan Collini on the UK’s university problems, online now from the next issue. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Good summary. One interesting nugget is that there are currently around 2.8 million students, which seems to me a staggering number and yet more proof of the importance of the ‘industry’. If the solution to the crisis is more collaboration I’m not sure how it happens with that scale in mind.

Mark Berry@boulezian.eurosky.social · 2mo ago

Very good, if extremely depressing, piece by Stefan Collini to explain what has been and is being done to this country’s universities. If interested to find out, I recommend reading it.

John Schofield of York University on the value of archaeology - it’s not just about the past. theconversation.com/six-reasons-...

Six reasons to save archaeology from funding cuts

The government plans to cut university subsidy for teaching archaeology by 50%, yet it’s never been more relevant to society.

theconversation.com

If you work in development-led archaeology in England, whether it's curatorial advice, consultancy or running projects, Historic England and Reading University would welcome your feedback on HE's guidance on the Palaeolithic 🦣🏺 Please follow this link to access a short online survey: bit.ly/3PcKMul

Curating the Palaeolithic | Historic England

The importance of the English Palaeolithic record in its Pleistocene context and best practices for protecting it through the planning process.

historicengland.org.uk