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©CartoonStock.com In black below is the text of a comment piece in the Times Higher Education by Jamie Martin , advisor to Michael Gove, on Higher Education in the UK entitled “Must Do Better”. In red are my thoughts on his arguments. In an increasingly testing global race, Britain’s competitive advantage must be built on education. What is this ‘increasingly testing global race’? Why should education be seen as part of an international competition rather than a benefit to all humankind? Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings show that we have three of the world’s top 10 universities to augment our fast-improving schools. Sustaining a competitive edge, however, requires constant improvement and innovation. We must ask hard questions about our universities’ failures on academic rigour and widening participation, and recognise the need for reform. Well, this seems a rather confused message. On the one hand, we are doing very well, but on the other hand we urgently need to ref...

The UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) is like a walrus: it is huge, cumbersome and has a very long gestation period. Most universities started preparing in earnest for the REF early in 2011, with submissions being made late in 2013. Results will be announced in late December, just in time to cheer up our seasonal festivities.   Like many others, I have moaned about the costs of the REF: not just in money, but also the time spent by university staff, who could be more cheerfully and productively engaged in academic activities. The walrus needs feeding copious amounts of data: research outputs must be carefully selected and then graded in terms of research quality. Over the summer, those dedicated souls who sit on REF panels were required to read and evaluate several hundred papers. Come December, the walrus digestive system will have condensed the concerted ponderings of some of the best academic minds in the UK into a handful of rankings. But is there a viable alternative? L...