Opinion

The complexities of the 21st century and Japan’s demographic decline demand more interdisciplinarity and internationalisation, says Teruo Fujii

The executive cadre clearly didn’t see the crises around revenue, leadership and public standing coming, say Hamish Coates and Leo Goedegebuure

To maintain the graduate premium, universities must anticipate skills needs, guide good course choices and be open to everyone, says Shitij Kapur

The new administration will marginalise or even prohibit the kind of inclusive, challenging, non-traditional syllabus I taught, fears Glyn Robbins

Why harm high-quality provision at established universities because of a small number of providers with questionable motives, asks Mark Clark

Policy institutes’ lack of strategic variation risks overheating the competition for airtime with national policymakers, says Diana Beech

Scaled and standardised, lowering entry requirements for disadvantaged applicants can contribute to a fairer society, says Jon Datta

The scientific record should reflect what actually happened, not a sanitised narrative that leaves out the messy bits, say Ivan Oransky and David B. Allison

Local context is important in overhauling trustee recruitment – and payment may help, says Nikki Le Faou 

Better tech alignment, industry guidance and identity verification would all help – as would meaningful and visible punishments, says Kim Eggleton

Tec de Monterrey’s partnership with Boston’s Ragon Institute shows how Latin America can connect to global centres of excellence, says David Garza-Salazar

Last summer’s Southport riots brought home the importance of fostering mutual understanding in neighbouring communities, says Duncan Ivison

The all-consuming nature of their work means that academics risk a loss of connection and even identity when their careers end, says John Tregoning

Claims that efforts are tokenistic must be countered with bold actions to retain buy-in, make progress and maintain momentum, says Cat Davies

The celebrated campus novelist and former University of Birmingham literature professor has died. Christopher Bigsby recounts the life of ‘a serious man who wrote comic novels’

By working together, England’s FE colleges and universities can create a seamless skills pipeline that benefits everyone, says David Warnes

As more of the research process is exposed, the readiness and resources of researchers and their institutions must be considered, says Tim Errington

No one transitions overnight from a full-time academic career to a much more self-determined and lightly specified routine, says Harvey Graff

Technology can offer a very useful helping hand, but there are an array of pitfalls that need careful handling, says John Miles

Disciplinary nuance and optimum word usage are likely to remain beyond chatbots trained on the imperfect existing corpus, says Brian Bloch

Security guards’ jobs would be easier if others also had the knowledge and equipment to respond to medical incidents, says George Bass

Academics are only revealing their own biases if they believe the television presenter’s behaviour represents working-class values, says Joe Baden

Drawn-out complaints procedures that aren’t resolved before visas expire are unethical – and a poor advertisement for UK HE, says Sanaz Raji 

Our evidence-led recommendations will challenge universities – but within the parameters of the possible, says Nigel Carrington

Social scientists must work hard to verify their conclusions. Too many that do not are rewarded anyway, says Martyn Hammersley

We can’t just concede that usage is ethical if within universities’ narrowly conceived rules. What about the pursuit of truth, asks Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin

There are plenty of global examples of how academic expertise could be better applied to companies’ real-life skills deficits, says Sarah Gordon

A columnist has dared to voice the blasphemy that spending huge sums on higher education doesn’t always open new doors, writes Pushkar

The country’s leaders must recognise that emigration is not a betrayal but a symptom of deeper societal issues that must be addressed, says Roohola Ramezani

The political freedom currently exists for Palestinians to debate how to build back better. But it may be short-lived, warns Bill Williamson

Centres of Research Excellence, officially launched today, will also strengthen the UK’s leading position in biomedical sciences, says Patrick Chinnery

The far-right president rails against academics’ supposed sense that they are superior. A scholar forced to sell books to make ends meet feels anything but

Managers should take inspiration from student organising, but we need more than diversity window-dressing, say Alexander Hensby and Barbara Adewuni

The choice is to innovate or, potentially, to die. Focusing on customer experience and tech is the best way to avoid the latter, says Eric Skipper

The year is ending with an ongoing permacrisis for higher education. Political rhetoric has improved but the sector still needs a vision for its future

Publishers used to recognise that theirs was a relationships business. But now the road to immortality is much lonelier, says Adrian Furnham

We’re already not as susceptible as we were, but the threat posed by deepfakes has not gone away, say Andrew Chadwick and Nick Jennings

To maintain vital internationalisation, US institutions might have to partner with industry to expand their overseas footprints, says Fernando Reimers

Higher education funding in the UK may still be inadequate, but cost-cutting cannot come at the expense of social mobility, says Fiona Devine

Scholars who win foreign scholarships will have no jobs to return to in Afghanistan if they decide to take them up, says an Afghan academic

The new commission must answer the big questions without delay and consult universities, say Jan Palmowski and Kurt Deketelaere

We can no longer deem as educated a student who knows nothing about statistics, data analytics or computing, says Daniel Diermeier

The financial woes can’t be solved without job losses; the key issue is to ensure they set the university up for a realistic long-term future, says Malcolm Prowle

But their long-term sustainability needs a clearer political strategy, including reflection on whether there are too many, says Luc Sels

Avoiding layoffs is the issue of the hour. The UCU would do better to prioritise negotiations on pay-related issues such as workload, says Jak Peake

Better to revise the previous government’s tuition fee hikes than redirect taxpayers’ money into wealthy graduates’ pockets, says Maxwell Yong

As questions about the size and shape of UK higher education persist, debates about the part number controls could play are making a comeback

Encouraged to use ChatGPT to help them with the hard stuff, my students let it do all their thinking for them. Maybe I should give up, says Dan Sarofian-Butin

Burnout is rife in an era when the traditional attractions of academia to obsessives are diluted by many new duties, observes Joseph Cronin

Enthusiasts claim that authentic tasks boost work-readiness, promote inclusion and diminish cheating, but the evidence remains unclear, says Tim Fawns

The controversy over Dhankhar’s poor choice of words has overshadowed the wisdom of calling for poorer Indians to be better informed, says Pushkar

As universities are encouraged to undertake ever more local engagement, my four Bs framework will help them think it through, says Craig Jeffrey

A tactical takeover might have been easier in the short term, but Adelaide University will be better for being a marriage of equals, say David Lloyd and Peter Høj

Misappropriation of junior colleagues’ ideas is a betrayal. Requiring them to wait years for redress adds insult to injury, says Wyn Evans

Universities often say they are pursuing transnational education for both love and money. But that can make for a strategic muddle, warns Stephen Thomas

Political interventions on a host of issues suggest marketisation’s opponents are wrong to see neoliberalism as the root of all evil, says Gerbrand Tholen

The rules should quash the idea that a formal investigation is the only way to take action on disclosures or rumours of abuse by staff, says Anna Bull

But we must be sure to protect research and future subscription budgets, as well as building a sensible authentication system, says Cathy Foley

Inflation-linked increase is only a sticking plaster for crisis-hit universities, but shows a willingness to work towards a more sustainable funding system

Breezy assertions about what research shows undermine public trust as, however confidently stated, they are easy to challenge, says Rob Briner