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#higher-education — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #higher-education, aggregated by home.social.

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  1. Philosophy is what is left over when you bracket out common sense and expertise

    From Richard Rorty’s Philosophy as Cultural Politics pg 125:

    Contemplating this failure helps one realize that philosophy is what is left over after one has bracketed both common sense and all the various expert cultures It was never supposed to be such a culture. Whenever it has attempted to become one it has degenerated into scholasticism, into controversies which are of no interest to anyone outside the philosophical profession. The idea that either literary criticism or philosophy should become an expert culture is a result of unfortunate attempts to squeeze these areas of culture into a university system tailored to the needs of lawyers, physicians, and natural scientists.

    #commonSense #expertise #higherEducation #Philosophy #pragamatism #richardRorty
  2. The Guardian University Guide 2027 – the rankings
    By Guardian Staff

    Find a course at one of the top universities in the country. Our league tables rank them all subject by subject, as well as by student satisfaction, staff numbers, spending and career prospects

    theguardian.com/education/ng-i

    #Universityguide #Education #Students #Highereducation #Universities #TheGuardian #GuardianStaff

  3. How Ron DeSantis politicized Florida’s higher education by placing his loyalists at the top
    By Richard Luscombe in Miami

    Term-limited, hard-right governor instituted an ideological infiltration of universities by placing allies in powerful posts

    theguardian.com/us-news/2026/s

    #Florida #RonDeSantis #Highereducation #Education #USnews #USuniversities #TheGuardian #RichardLuscombeinMiami

  4. The risks of integrating AI too rapidly into higher education

    I thought this was an interesting announcement from Surrey. I certainly see the appeal of being able to publicly say you’re doing this:

    Rather than introducing AI as an additional skill, Surrey is undertaking a systematic redesign of every degree programme. This transformation will ensure that, as AI becomes embedded across society and the economy, Surrey students retain deep disciplinary expertise, develop critical judgement, and understand the implications of deploying AI within their field. In a course on voting behaviour, for instance, students are given a simple brief: pick an election, ask ChatGPT to explain the result, then interrogate whether AI got it right – testing its response against established theories of political behaviour, datasets from the British Election Study and published academic research. Students are enabled to identify and explain where the AI is vague or inaccurate, so that AI is not a shortcut but a prompt for deeper analysis. 

    Every student – from foundation year through to postgraduate – will develop applied, discipline-specific AI capability as a core part of their studies. Surrey graduates will be equipped to shape how AI is used, challenged and governed in real-world contexts – ensuring that they remain trusted, capable and competitive in a labour market reshaped by AI.

    What does “discipline-specific AI capability” mean though? My concern is that the current commercial landscape is so profoundly uncertain (given token economics etc) that a masterplan about what capacities to equip graduates with is doomed to failure. You either specify ‘capability’ in abstraction from current tools and risk a lack of practical relevance or you specify it in terms of current tools and risk being rendered out of date when those tools go through a rapid shift in terms of access, resourcing and capabilities. It’s not tenable to do nothing. But I think doing too much, all at once, risks being counter productive by locking in approaches and techniques which risk obsolence.

    There is a stated commitment that AI “will be used selectively and purposefully, only where it improves educational outcomes, while ensuring that core competencies, from clinical reasoning and legal judgement to engineering design and creative practice, are preserved and strengthened”. I agree! But this is work which needs careful learning design, it needs identification of best practice, it needs willing colleagues. It’s a long-term direction of travel, rather than an outcome. I just don’t see how you do it without having an army of learning designs working 24/7 with academic teams suddenly full of time for development.

    #AI #higherEducation #skills #Surrey #tokenEconomics
  5. Moravian University: Moravian University Launches AI Lab to Model Ethical Innovation. “Moravian University announced the official launch of its AI Innovation Lab, a hands-on physical and collaborative space where students from any academic discipline can test ideas, learn emerging technologies, and build practical AI tools to address real-world challenges.”

    https://rbfirehose.com/2026/09/10/moravian-university-moravian-university-launches-ai-lab-to-model-ethical-innovation/
  6. Critiquing
    Archer, E. (2017) ‘The Assessment Purpose Triangle: Balancing the Purposes of Educational Assessment’, Frontiers in Education, 2. Available at: doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2017.000.

    #AcademicChatter #HigherEducation #Assessment

  7. Indonesian foragers may have sucked on mind-altering nuts 25,000 years ago, research finds
    By Ian Sample Science editor

    Analysis of two skeletons reveals tooth wear and traces of psychoactive substance in what may be earliest known evidence for human drug taking

    theguardian.com/science/2026/s

    #Science #Palaeontology #Drugs #Indonesia #Worldnews #AsiaPacific #Research #Highereducation #TheGuardian #IanSampleScienceeditor

  8. Bright minds, a scholarship, required visa and universities waiting for them. But also physically trapped in #Gaza because our xenophobic minister of migration (yes. enough people voted for that to become a reality) is painting a picture of the hordes of other (equally bright, ambitious and desperate) people who will no doubt be attracted by what might turn out to be just the right thing to do for people in need.
    Feel free to sign the petition...
    #education #highereducation #humanrights
    c.org/GWGyTZPXPP

  9. Our new Springer Nature chapter, “Mental Health and Academic Life in Ukraine During Wartime,” is out today.

    Resilience should not mean endless endurance. It should mean creating institutions that help people preserve themselves while continuing education and research.

    doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-7013

    #MentalHealth #HigherEducation #Ukraine #WartimeAcademia #AcademicMentalHealth

  10. Students are suffering from US colleges’ shaky finances. Trump policies are making everything worse
    By Marina Villeneuve in Lynchburg, Virginia

    Many four-year colleges will resort to laying off faculty, cutting services and increasing prices amid financial stress

    theguardian.com/education/2026

    #USeducation #Trumpadministration #Highereducation #Education #USnews #USpolitics #TheGuardian #MarinaVilleneuveinLynchburg #Virginia

  11. I went to Ikea with my son – and was confronted with my parenting failures | Zoe Williams
    By Zoe Williams

    The pre-university shop is the moment you find out how much domestic wisdom you’ve managed to impart. In my case, none

    theguardian.com/commentisfree/

    #Parentsandparenting #Ikea #Students #Family #Lifeandstyle #Highereducation #Education #TheGuardian #ZoeWilliams