The week in higher education – 2 March 2023

As any sleep-deprived student with early morning classes knows, waking up for an 8am course can be painful – especially when you’ve been up until 2.30am writing that long-procrastinated sociology paper. It turns out that attending lectures first thing in the day isn’t just utterly miserable in the moment; it’s also bad for students’ grade point average. Authors of a recent study examining the grades of tens of thousands of students at the National University of Singapore found “concerning associations” between early-morning classes and learning outcomes. Students with an early class faced two “undesirable choices”, sleep longer and miss a lecture, or attend class but get less shut-eye – neither an ideal option for maintaining good grades. The fix? Universities should consider avoiding mandatory early-morning classes, the researchers concluded. Students, no doubt, would agree.

Sitting through a turgid play put on by the campus amdram society because a friend has a bit-part role might lead many to question how student theatre has inspired anyone, let alone the world’s most famous playwright. Yet William Shakespeare’s work was influenced by university productions in the 16th and 17th centuries, a new book claims, giving hope to wannabe thespians everywhere. Daniel Blank, assistant professor in early modern literature at Durham University and author of Shakespeare and University Drama in Early Modern England, which is published on 2 March, has tracked how characters such as Macbeth and Hamlet have their roots in student productions, and how debates at the time influenced Shakespeare’s depiction of academic life. A play staged at Oxford in 1592 which “critiqued and mocked the insularity of the university” was among those to capture the bard’s imagination. Many are still mining this particular source of creative inspiration today.

ChatGPT’s ability to perform menial writing tasks has excited many a university administrator. Getting artificial intelligence to draft a campus-wide note about the closure of the second-floor toilets may well be the future, but some university communications perhaps require more of a human touch. Campus shootings, most would agree, is one such area. But staff at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College apparently decided to see if the chatbot has developed any empathy when they used it to draft a message to students in the wake of three people being shot dead at Michigan State University, The Times reported. “One of the key ways to promote a culture of care on our campus is through building strong relationships with one another,” ChatGPT offered. Hard to disagree, but perhaps not quite the words of comfort many may have been hoping for. Peabody has apologised and said that an assistant dean would “step back from their responsibilities”.

Separated lovers, fear not. At last, researchers have created a device to allow long-distance couples to feel the happiness of their love’s kiss. As described by the English-language Chinese newspaper Global Times, the device is Bluetooth-enabled, with a “mouth-shaped module, serving as an inducing area for lovers to make the kiss and then it can transfer the kiss gesture and force to the ‘mouth’ on the other side”. Jiang Zhongli, the leading inventor of the design and a graduate of the Changzhou Vocational Institute of Mechatronic Technology, got the idea from his own long-distance relationship. According to the report, the researcher was surprised by the popularity of his invention, which can also benefit those with oral diseases. He hopes someone who is interested in this device can “expand and perfect the design”, the Global Times writes.

Universities have multimillion-pound budgets these days but it is still hard to imagine how £2.4 million can go missing before anyone notices. It helps if it disappears over a period of 30 years and if the person who took it is in charge of the accounts, as the University of Brighton has found out. Over three decades the institution’s head of income and payments, David Hall, used his position to embezzle funds. His deception only came to light in November 2021, at which point investigations by the university and Sussex Police uncovered a “string of financial cover-ups”. Hall has admitted fraud, and faces sentencing on 16 March. You suspect his next few years will be spent in considerably less comfort than he has enjoyed to date.