The week in higher education – 15 April 2021

Before we start, a trigger warning: two items contain references to yet more clickbait stories in national newspapers about Generation Z students, designed to get their readerships riled. Right, now that’s out of the way, we can report that students at the University of Aberdeen have voted for trigger warnings in lectures when material could include discussion of topics that might “cause harm to students”, such as racism. According to The Times, the student council at Aberdeen endorsed a call for such warnings to help students “self-guard” when they were about to encounter content they might find difficult to deal with. Aberdeen said it was aware that the council had voted in favour of such a motion but said that it was in “very early stage discussions” about whether to make this a policy and “no decisions have been made”.

Meanwhile, The Mail on Sunday took aim at English university policies advising academics not to mark students down in exams for bad spelling and punctuation because this could discriminate against those from disadvantaged backgrounds. According to the article, such “inclusive assessment” policies have come in response to the Office for Students asking institutions to close attainment gaps between some groups of students. The Mail quotes examples such as the University of Hull, which it says has a new policy warning that requiring high proficiency in written English can be seen as “homogenous, North European, white, male, and elite”. Naturally, cue the go-to academic for education standards stories, Alan Smithers at the University of Buckingham, who said that inclusive assessment made him “want to weep”. Probably the same goes for any more stories in the generation snowflake genre.

A row between management and academics over planned redundancies at the University of Leicester has moved up a notch after an emeritus professor said he was threatened with losing his honorary title after criticising the institution online. Peter Armstrong, an 81-year-old critical accounting scholar, told Twitter followers that Leicester’s management had told him they could take away the title because he had made comments breaching the university’s “dignity at work” policy, The Guardian reported. Professor Armstrong has openly criticised managers and the financial situation at Leicester, where staff are holding a ballot for strike action over plans for up to 145 redundancies. Leicester said that it would not comment on individual cases but added that members of its community were expected “to behave with respect and courtesy at all times”.

As far as admissions fiascos go, probably nothing beats the U-turn over exam grades in the UK last year. However, the University of Kentucky in the US had a good try this week by emailing 500,000 high school students to tell them they had been accepted on to a course that normally has just 35 to 40 places. According to WLEX-TV, the university had to send out a follow-up message informing the recipients, many of whom had not even applied to Kentucky, that the email had been sent in error. The confusion that the email caused across the US was probably best summarised by the comments of Mary Dougherty, a high school senior from Texas, who was quoted in the WLEX-TV article: “I was like, ‘Mom, I just got accepted into the University of Kentucky.’ And she’s like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you applied to University of Kentucky.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I did not.’”

It is “illogical” that shops, gyms and tourist attractions have reopened in England but a million students remain unable to return to university campuses, according to vice-chancellors. The next stage of the country’s easing from Covid restrictions on 12 April saw the reopening of non-essential shops and allowed people to dine and drink outside at pubs and restaurants for the first time in months. But at the time of writing no further changes had been announced for students, who can still only receive in-person tuition on practical and priority courses. In a letter to Boris Johnson, Universities UK president Julia Buckingham and chief executive Alistair Jarvis point out that the easing from 12 April meant people could also take self-catering holidays. “It therefore seems illogical that students are not allowed to return to their self-catering accommodation and resume their studies in Covid-safe university facilities, particularly at this crucial time of the academic year,” the pair write.