12 October, 2011 // Category: Education, Politics, Vision/Strategy
Melissa Benn is a journalist, novelist and campaigner. Her most recent book is School Wars: The Battle for Britain’s Education. In it she analyses the Coalition government’s attempts to revolutionise the British school system through a privatising agenda, the troubled history of education reform...
24 June, 2011 // Category: Corporate power, Education
Among the near universal expressions of dismay that greeted the announcement of the establishment of Grayling Hall, renamed the New College of the Humanities, there was some lamenting that iconic self-professed humanists, most of whom had been thought to exemplify the humanities’ most fundamental...
17 June, 2011 // Category: Corporate power, Education
Dark warnings about what the future holds for higher education, the fear that American system was ‘coming here’, have been ten-a-penny for years. Today, though, it’s a different story. What the meteorologists call ‘nowcasting’ – when you turn your head up to the sky to check the...
09 June, 2011 // Category: Corporate power, Education, Employment & Welfare, Politics
Ross Perlin is a researcher for the Himalayan Languages Project in southwest China. He has written on forgotten histories and disappearing languages in the U.S., China, and the former Soviet Union. His first book, Intern Nation, has recently been published by Verso. He met with John Brissenden to...
15 May, 2011 // Category: Education
‘In its relation to society, a free university should be expected to be, in a sense, “subversive.” We take for granted that creative work in any field will challenge prevailing orthodoxy. A physicist who refines yesterday’s experiment, an engineer who merely seeks to improve existing...
13 May, 2011 // Category: Activism, Education
The occupation at The University of Glasgow - which has been in force since the 1st of February 2011, save for one short break during an eviction - celebrated its 100th day on 11th of May. That is 100 days since the ‘defunct’ Hetherington Research Club was reopened as the ‘Free...
26 April, 2011 // Category: Education, Employment & Welfare, Philosophy and Theory
This interview is with the late political theorist, Brian Barry (1936-2009), and was conducted in 2006. The interview was initially carried out for the now defunct radical left website UK Watch, which in some ways was a predecessor of NLP. The interview focused on Barry’s last book, Why Social...
01 March, 2011 // Category: Education
This is an exclusive excerpt from Chris Lehman’s book, Rich People Things, an acerbic examination of how the other 0.1% live. In this extract, he explains how American higher education works. Given the admiration for the American system evident in British higher education policy trends, and often...
28 December, 2010 // Category: Activism, Economy, Education, Politics
When he praised the students’ movement as “magnificent”, and credited it with setting an example for the rest of the left to follow in the battle against the Tory-Liberal austerity programme, Unite leader Len McCluskey spoke for a great many of the government’s opponents who drew real hope...
15 December, 2010 // Category: Economy, Education
Ha-Joon Chang is a leading development economist and critic of neoliberalism. His 2002 book Kicking Away the Ladder showed that today’s rich countries became rich by following precisely the policies they now deny to developing countries – his follow-up Bad Samaritans prompted Financial Times...
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