The week in higher education – 27 May 2021

A group of students at the Royal College of Art are considering taking the institution to court after they say important artwork they spent months working on was damaged in a studio clear-out. According to The Guardian, the RCA’s students’ union has recorded about 130 artists with missing or damaged items as a result of the work last summer to prepare the campus for the academic year while it was shut because of the pandemic. One master’s student, Farvash Razavi, told the newspaper that that she had spent two years developing colour-changing inks with scientists for an installation at her graduation show only to find pieces of her work broken in a box. “It’s heartbreaking,” she said. “This is a type of technology that’s still in research, that’s not available.” Another student described the pile of boxes where their work had been stored after the clear-out as an “absolute bomb site”. The RCA said it was working to reunite students with missing work and would discuss compensation with the “small number of students” who had contacted them to say belongings had been lost or damaged.

Everyone has heard of the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race but it now seems the latest way the two historic institutions want to do battle is through diversity PR wars. In the light blue corner, we have Mary Beard’s £80,000 retirement gift to help support two students from under-represented groups to study Classics at the University of Cambridge. The historian said that her department had already worked hard to diversify student intakes but she lamented that the faculty was still “very white”. Her generosity garnered warm headlines, but the response seemed more mixed for the dark blues’ effort this week: the decision by Oriel College, Oxford, not to remove (at least not yet) the controversial statue of Victorian imperialist Cecil Rhodes that adorns one of its buildings. Oriel said that regulatory and financial challenges had led it to the (in)action despite governors, and an independent commission, backing its theoretical removal.

A university president has resigned after admitting he plagiarised part of a speech by a prominent US military leader. Robert Caslen, the president of the University of South Carolina since August 2019, said he would leave office immediately after a few days of trying to quell a growing uproar over a commencement speech in which he largely repeated, without attribution, major portions of comments delivered by Admiral William McRaven – the former head of US Special Operations Command who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden – to University of Texas graduates in 2014. “Trust is the most important ingredient of effective leadership, and when it is lost, it is nearly impossible to lead,” Mr Caslen, a former superintendent of the US Military Academy at West Point, said in announcing his decision.

A degree in magic may seem the complete antithesis of a mainstream scientific education – unless you’re Harry Potter – but France is claiming to have the first officially recognised qualification at such a level in the subject, according to The Times. The degree is being offered by Double Fond, a Parisian theatre specialising in magic, with students tested by performing before a jury as well as taking written exams in areas such as the history of magic and managing a magician’s business. “It took us five years to convince the state to recognise the profession of magician as a proper profession,” Adeline Galland, the head of teaching, told the newspaper. The cost of the degree – which normally takes two years – is €17,820 (£15,400), or nothing if you manage to make your fees disappear.

When a YouTube video with 21-year-old twins from the US celebrating Phil Collins’ 1980s hit In The Air Tonight and its famous drum fill went viral last year, little did they know that they were helping to demonstrate a cultural process – detailed in a new academic paper – where a previously maligned figure can be “rediscovered” as a popular artist. According to the authors of the paper – who call such a comeback the “Phil Collins effect” – his career trajectory encapsulates how popular figures can go through initial adulation, before being rejected by their audience and critics, and then later being lionised again as later generations and critics reappraise their work. Of course, there will be others who think that one clever drum fill doesn’t quite add up to greatness and remember having to listen to Sussudio on daily radio repeat; otherwise known as the “once crap, always crap” effect.