The week in higher education – 2 September 2021

With this year’s freshers losing almost 18 months of schooling in the pandemic, UK universities are gearing up for a significant amount of remedial work, the i newspaper reports. But efforts to help students catch up, including the Open University’s Jumpstart University resource package created in association with the Russell Group, will not focus on bringing academic skills up to scratch. According to one university employee, many of the efforts will target “socialisation issues” amid concerns that teenagers will go wild on arriving at university having “gone from a period of being locked down for almost two years, to something like as much freedom as you’re ever likely to get”. With undergraduates recently gaining a reputation as sensible teetotallers more likely to pull an all-night shift in the library than the nightclub, it seems this autumn’s post-Covid-era freshers may prove a somewhat different bunch.

The pandemic has created media stars of many scientists and scholars but the fame of Fauci, Ferguson and Farrar has surely been eclipsed by an American business school professor now better known as the TikTok star Dr Po Tato. The sudden celebrity of Ryan Ball, who teaches at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, follows his decision to introduce a master’s level Zoom lecture on accounting with his face masked with the stock image of a potato accompanied by the tune of “Let’s Get to Rumble”. Since a video of Ball’s surreal entrance was posted by one of his students – with his permission – more than 26 million people have viewed footage of “Dr Po Tato” floating around the screen waving sparklers. “It was at the end of a long day…so you’ve got to have some fun,” Ball told Newsweek about his alter ego’s creation.

Being allocated a student room in the picturesque English city of Bath wouldn’t normally be a cause for complaint. But hundreds of freshers housed in Jane Austen’s hometown this month will rightly feel aggrieved − because they study more than 10 miles away at the University of Bristol. The students now require either a 40-minute car trip or a lengthy train-bus-walk journey to get to class. “Distance-wise, it’s the equivalent of the University of Manchester housing students in Bolton or Nottingham housing them in Loughborough,” said one outraged student quoted by ITV News. Those stationed in Bath will receive a £500 bursary per term to cover travel costs but students are still not impressed by Bristol’s admissions strategy. “When you can’t even house your students in their city of study, surely you have to stop and think about what you are doing,” said one.

Students have faced a rotten year or two worldwide, but things have got much worse at a German university after six people were hospitalised in what police suspect may have been an attempted poisoning. Seven people fell ill at Darmstadt Technical University after consuming food and drink on its Lichtwiese campus, with police stating that freely accessible milk and water bottles within three separate small kitchens may have been contaminated over the weekend, the Guardian reported. Several students and members of staff experienced nausea and some watched their arms or legs turn blue after using kitchen facilities and a drinks machine, Hesse state police reported, with a 30-year-old student temporarily in a life-threatening condition before he was stabilised by doctors. “Investigations are running at high speed and police are doing everything to identify the culprit,” said investigators, whose team include a homicide squad with 40 detectives.

A bizarre bureaucratic mix-up has meant a kebab shop worker has been paying the student loans of a scientist who shares the same name, date of birth and home city, The Sun reports. Harpreet Singh, 25, was alerted to the blunder by HMRC after the takeaway employee, who moved from India to Peterborough last year, was sent the email address of the 25-year-old neuroscientist. “It’s a freak coincidence,” explained Singh, who discovered his namesake had been wrongly deducted hundreds of pounds. “He was being taxed for my undergraduate and postgraduate student loan and had never been to university in this country.” HMRC has apologised for the mistake, with Singh, now based in Bath, saying he was also working to untangle the situation. “I’m looking forward to meeting him when I go home and will definitely order a kebab,” he said.