Will Davies

@will-davies.bsky.social

Contributing Editor @lrb.co.uk Substack https://substack.com/@willd10 Subscribe for latest writing etc at Williamdavies.blog

The long, doleful story of how the University of Kent sank. Can't vouch for all the details, but apparently it took 7yrs, £29m in restructuring and £2m in consultancy to accept the inevitable: effective takeover. My view? You can delay, but not avoid, the inevitable. shepwayvox.org/2026/08/05/u...

University of Kent Financial Crisis: Cuts, Consultants and Merger with Greenwich

For six years the University of Kent cut jobs, closed subjects, sold financial breathing space and promised recovery. It spent £29.4 million restructuring itself and awarded at least £1.9 million o…

shepwayvox.org

I've written about Neets for the LRB. It is odd listening to recent debates about this completely ignore the overwhelming fact of this current crisis, that it is one of inactivity, disability, mental ill-health and neurodevelopmental disorders (as I discuss) www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

William Davies · Young People Are Different: What do Neets need?

The majority of Neets are not looking for work, but living outside of the labour market and the education system,...

lrb.co.uk

“The tragic implication of Plümper and Neumayer’s analysis is not that individual scientists are unusually dishonest, but that a system designed to incentivise truth-seeking has been incrementally transformed into one that often rewards its distortion” blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofb...

Is publication, not truth, now the driving pursuit of science? - LSE Review of Books

The Credibility Crisis in Science by Thomas Plümper and Eric Neumayer explores how researcher incentives and publication bias distort scientific knowledge

blogs.lse.ac.uk

There's a new curse stalking social platforms It involves writing Not any writing Not just even LLM-generated writing This kind of writing And I get the feeling actual humans are doing it

The Rod Liddle biography suggests a certain post-1968 'type' who was just idiotically drawn to norm-breaching, moving via adolescent rebellion, punk, revolutionary socialism, and eventually ending up at racism, because by the 21st century that was the most efficient transgression still on offer

Weird headline here, given Kramer a) doesn't appear to name Labour b) identifies a series of policies - frozen tuition fees, TEF, REF, OfS freedom of speech - that arose from Tory-led administrations. Starmer's first HE policy was to raise tuition fees www.ft.com/content/e14d...

Labour has harmed universities as much as Trump, London School of Economics head says

LSE vice-chancellor Larry Kramer points to domestic student fees freeze, international student limits and rise in employers’ national insurance

ft.com

Am assuming that at least 50% of the courses ‘in AI’ that universities are currently blanket advertising will be cobbled together and/or out of date, and taught by people whose own skills - coding - have already been rendered defunct by AI

Having made the unpopular (amongst our kids) decision to take our summer holiday in Donegal, am now wondering whether I can spin some nonsense to a Travel supplement editor that this is a bleeding edge trend of 'Climate Tourism'

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log in to facebook to find wall-to-wall ads for university clearing places, including many from ThePresitigiousRussellGroupOfUniversitiesTM. August is going to be a fight to the death.