̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - higher education

Vice-Chancellor on how Cambridge can drive UK economic growth

ps748 — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 14:53:05 +0000

In her article, she starts by comparing her current role with the one she had at Princeton in the United States where she worked for more than 30 years, latterly as its Provost. She discusses how Cambridge contributes to the UK at a scale and with a significance that no single US university can match, outlining its clear role to play as a national university, in the service of the country:

"Cambridge already contributes around £30bn each year to the UK economy. This delivers benefits right across the country. It is Europe’s 'unicorn' capital. Over the past three decades, 178 spin-outs and more than 200 start-ups connected to it have emerged, including semi-conductor giant Arm and the global life sciences firm Abcam. This success is no accident. For years, Cambridge has done things differently. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ��’s intellectual property management policy is liberal, providing greater freedom to our researchers and ensuring that they benefit from the commercialisation of their ideas. We have established science parks, venture capital funds and accelerator programmes. Cambridge is now a globally significant place to start and grow businesses."

To continue with this success, she argues, Cambridge needs to be able to attract the brightest minds to the UK, something she considers to be at risk if the new government continues to pursue policies that make it appear unwelcoming to those from outside the UK:

"... they send a not-so-subtle message that foreigners are not welcome here. That alone is enough to deter talented students and academics, who are increasingly looking to the US, Asia, to other parts of Europe — our competitors for talent — for a warm welcome. Indeed, for Cambridge to sustain the success of our innovation ecosystem we need the brightest and best from the UK and around the world to come here — especially as postgraduate research students — and for a better environment to support them."

She urges that government to not just focus on infrastructure but to create an environment that supports other objectives in areas such as patents, licences, spin outs, industry collaborations and venture funding. This kind of reform, she says, would help universities like Cambridge really take off:

"Britain is in a global competition; I know first-hand that what US universities spend on research in Boston and Silicon Valley is many times larger than what we see coming from our leading institutions in the UK. Despite this, Cambridge is ranked first globally for science intensity; we should aspire for it also to be the leader in translating research for economic impact. At the moment it is very good, but not yet great. ̽��ֱ��lessons for incoming ministers set on solving this country’s productivity under-performance are there to be learnt from our example, in terms of the barriers we face and the support we lack. This is both a huge challenge and huge opportunity for whoever wins the general election."

Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Prentice has written an article for the Financial Times reflecting on the ̽��ֱ��’s role as a driver of economic growth, innovation and productivity far beyond the city and its surrounding region.

We need the brightest and best from the UK and around the world to come here.

Professor Deborah Prentice

Deborah Prentice

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Cambridge heads to COP28

plc32 — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 17:43:08 +0000

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge heads to COP28 in Dubai, UAE, with a film premiere and a host of higher education and research events.

Butterflies, Bees and Broader Horizons

plc32 — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 16:22:18 +0000

Cambridge Zero programme prepares young climate leaders for the future

Where's the trust? US climate deniers have no faith in universities

plc32 — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 18:04:06 +0000

Based on a survey of thousands of US voters, co-authors Cambridge Zero Fellow and Assistant Professor Ramit Debnath, Professor R Michael Alvarez and Mr Danny Ebanks from Caltech, found that Americans who expressed negative and distrustful opinions about universities and academics were also the most likely to believe climate change is not caused by humans and is not a problem for the United States.

Despite increasing catastrophic weather events such as wildfires, flooding and news reports that hurricanes like Idalia this year have become wetter, windier and more intense because of rising global temperatures, the study revealed that almost half of US voters (45%) believe climate change isn’t a problem at all, and 41% of voters believe that climate change is a natural phenomenon not caused by humans.

Professor Debnath said: “This lack of trust in higher education and evidence-based research makes the public more vulnerable to opinion-based arguments from powerful actors who disproportionately profit from climate denialism.“

Among all the variables studied, such as age, gender, race, education and region, the most statistically significant factor in driving climate denialism was trust in institutions, the authors said. Young registered voters were most likely to trust institutions.

̽��ֱ��co-authors said that this distrust in climate science is one of the challenges to the successful implementation of climate action policies, such as climate change taxes (carbon taxes), congestion charges and efforts to end sales of the most-polluting vehicles.

Professor Debnath said: “If voters don’t believe in the proven outcomes of fundamental research, then how can politicians make the changes we need in the next decade to stop climate change?”

Additionally, the paper referenced a 2016 US poll, in which 57% of conservative Republicans were found to believe that climate research findings were influenced by scientists keen to advance their careers, while up to 22% of Americans declared they had no trust or not much trust in climate scientists.

In the paper, the authors included quotes from climate scientists whose growing frustrations with US climate denialism and lack of trust in academic research led them to refer to a “broken society-science contract” in desperate need of repair.

They conclude the paper by urging universities and scientists to re-establish public trust with improved science communication, providing public education that helps people to discern facts from opinion, improving the curriculum on understanding the scientific process at primary and secondary schools and persuading trusted religious leaders and influencers to pass on the proven facts of climate science.

Professor Debnath said: “If science wants to move the dial on the climate crisis, then we need to get out of our ivory towers and make regaining the public’s trust a key mission for every university.”

Reference

Alvarez, R M, Debnath, R, and Ebanks, D (2023). Why don’t Americans trust university researchers and why it matters for climate change. PLOS Climate; DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000147

US voters who don’t trust universities are also more likely to believe that human activity doesn’t cause climate change, a new collaborative study from researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) revealed in PLOS Climate.

We need to get out of our ivory towers and make regaining the public’s trust a key mission for every university

Professor Ramit Debnath

Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

A man holds a sign that says 'Act now or swim later'

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Women economists underrepresented ‘at every level’ in UK academia – report

fpjl2 — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 09:37:44 +0000

Women are underrepresented "at almost every level" within the discipline of economics at UK universities, according to a new report co-authored by a Cambridge economist.

Dr Victoria Bateman says that her research for the Royal Economics Society (RES) found signs of “stagnation and retreat” in the closing of gender gaps across the study of economics – with female intake (relative to male) actually falling at both undergraduate and master’s levels over the last two decades.

Published today, the report ‘Gender Imbalance in UK Economics’ marks 25 years since the establishment of the RES Women’s Committee, which was set up to monitor and advance the representation of women in UK economics.

“ ̽��ֱ��economy affects everyone, and economists need to represent us all,” said Bateman, an Economics Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. “If they don’t, that’s a major barrier to building a solid understanding of the economy.”

“Across all students, from undergraduate to PhD, there are twice as many men studying economics as there are women in UK universities. While in many respects the discipline of economics has come a long way in the 21st century, the gender gap is clearly still real, persistent and in some ways getting worse.”

Bateman and colleagues argue that attracting, retaining and promoting female economists is a “particular problem” within UK academia when compared to areas of government and third sector organisations such as think tanks.

Only a quarter (26%) of economists working in UK academia are female, and only 15% of economics professors are women, compared to 38% of the economists at the UK Treasury and 44% of researchers at economic think tanks.

Among UK students entering the discipline, the gender gap has actually widened since 2002, when 31% of economics undergraduates and 37% of master’s students were women. By 2018, this had fallen to 27% and 31% respectively. Bateman says these statistics show that the closure of the gender gap in economics “isn’t simply a matter of time”.

“Only a third of economics lecturers in the UK are women, and just 15% of economics professors,” said report co-author Dr Erin Hengel, who received her PhD in economics from Cambridge before going on to lecture at the ̽��ֱ�� of Liverpool.

“While these figures are better than they were 25 years ago, the improving trend has levelled off. It appears that progress is starting to slow far before we reach any kind of gender parity.”

When the report’s authors factored in ethnicity, the percentage of female students was higher. In 2018, a third (33%) of Black economics undergraduates and 31% of Asian ethnicity undergraduates were women, compared to a quarter (25%) of White students.

However, women from ethnic minority backgrounds are not staying in academic economics. ̽��ֱ��report also found that at PhD level, the proportion of women is ten percentage points lower among minority candidates than white candidates.

Perhaps startlingly, the report found that between 2012 and 2018 there was not a single Black woman employed as a professor of economics anywhere in the UK.

Bateman says she hopes the new report will serve as a “call to arms” for the discipline of economics. “We are calling on universities to ask themselves why so few UK women are attracted to studying and researching the economy and why, even when they are, they do not stay,” she said.

Bateman’s 2019 book ̽��ֱ��Sex Factor showed how the status and freedom of women are central to prosperity, and that 'gender blindness' in economics has left the discipline wide of the mark on everything from poverty and inequality to understanding cycles of boom and bust.

“Unless economists are diverse, we cannot hope to build a complete understanding of the economy, and, with it, formulate the right kinds of policies,” Bateman added.

New research shows the gender gap in the teaching and study of economics is still dramatic and actually getting worse. Economists argue that this is not just a problem for the discipline, but for society as a whole.

Unless economists are diverse, we cannot hope to build a complete understanding of the economy, and, with it, formulate the right kinds of policies

Victoria Bateman

̽��ֱ��Gender Imbalance in UK Economics Short Edit

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Thought experiment on post-COVID Cambridge suggests that for universities, blending is a new beginning

tdk25 — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 12:07:09 +0000

̽��ֱ��finding comes from a study which began when the UK first went into lockdown in March 2020, forcing universities to move some teaching online. Ten months on, it suggests that academics and students would favour more ‘blended’ learning – a balance between virtual and face-to-face education – even when the pandemic is over.

Many are concerned, however, that some universities will be tempted to take courses fully online – a move they worry would kill off the traditional student experience of living and learning away from home. During the study, participants were asked to describe the most dystopian near-future for university teaching that they could imagine. In terms that sometimes read like a lost script from the science fiction series Black Mirror, they responded with visions of students ‘attending’ Cambridge through VR headsets, while courses are cut up and sold off in highly-marketable, bite-sized components.

Despite this, the research found that many staff and students regard the rapid adoption of new, online learning methods during the pandemic as an opportunity: to make universities more accessible, affordable, and to strengthen their relationships within wider society.

̽��ֱ��study was carried out by Simone Eringfeld, a graduate student at the Faculty of Education, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. She said: “ ̽��ֱ��project deliberately asked people to speculate about what might happen to university education, basing their answers on trends that we are already seeing in the sector today. At a time when universities are having to change very quickly, an exercise like this can give us a clearer picture of the kind of university we want to emerge from that transformation, as well as what we don’t want.”

Eringfeld began the study when a planned research project in refugee camps in Uganda was cancelled due to COVID-related travel restrictions. Confined to Cambridge, she decided to research the ‘post-coronial’ future of universities instead. This emerging field of academic enquiry is examining how the changes prompted by COVID-19 might offer an opportunity to re-evaluate what universities are for, to whom they belong and how they can become more inclusive.

She devised an action-research project built around a podcast, Cambridge Quaranchats, in which she interviewed academics, students and other staff, about life and work in Cambridge during the pandemic. She then carried out detailed, private interviews with another 10 staff and students. These participants were asked to listen to clips from the podcast and to imagine how online teaching might transform post-coronial higher education – for better, or worse.

Their biggest fear was that institutions might decide to move all teaching online. Some envisaged that universities might then seek to increase revenues by breaking up these online courses and selling individual lectures or classes to mass audiences in ‘bite-sized’ form. At its most bleak, the research suggests, online learning threatens to turn universities into ‘placeless’ institutions, where students no longer enjoy social activities, or encounter a healthy mix of people, cultures and ideas.

Asked to describe his not-too-distant dystopian vision, one student said: “Imagine virtual reality has gotten better and better. We can now host the entire experience online, so you wake up in the morning, put your headset on and go to lectures. You sort of simulate life. I think that’s the worst-case scenario… the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge would be like a network or file. It wouldn’t even be a place anymore.”

Perhaps surprisingly after months of remote learning, however, all of the interviewees saw opportunities in moving at least some university education online. Many felt this would give academics and students greater flexibility in their working lives, reduce stress, and provide them with more time to explore other interests.

̽��ֱ��study also suggests that this could conceivably help to make university more affordable. Institutions could, for instance, repackage courses so that students are not necessarily obliged to live on campus for as much of the year, thus reducing living costs.

A number of staff and students also viewed the wider availability of online learning as an opportunity to remodel university education in other, fundamental ways. Many, for example, favour making some streamed lectures widely available for free. And because online learning removes some infrastructural limitations of physical campuses, such as departmental divisions, participants also saw the potential to design new interdisciplinary courses; or to blend academic courses with vocational training by joining forces with further education colleges and other training bodies.

For some students, this represents an opportunity to ensure that higher education produces not just academically-accomplished graduates, but rounded citizens. “It’s not that I hope that we produce fewer Nobel Prize-winners,” one undergraduate told Eringfeld, “but I would hope that we would be more concerned with producing people… I would hope that the process of education makes people more human.”

Whether or not such ideas are realised, Eringfeld concludes that post-coronial universities will need to devise ways to combine virtual and face-to-face teaching safely and flexibly.

“Neither a fully online university, nor a complete return to face-to-face higher education, will be desirable in the post-COVID era,” she said. “People genuinely fear the possibility that we will lose the more embodied, communal aspects of being at university. At the same time, they realise that online teaching makes it more accessible. ̽��ֱ��challenge for post-coronial universities will be to encourage new forms of ‘belonging’ so that even with more blended learning, higher education remains a connected and meaningful experience.”

̽��ֱ��research is published in Studies in Higher Education.

A research project which asked ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge staff and students to describe their biggest hopes – and darkest fears – for post-pandemic higher education has found that many would support a permanent, but partial, shift to online learning.

Neither a fully online university, nor a complete return to face-to-face higher education, will be desirable in the post-COVID era

Simone Eringfeld

Student in Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Yes

CUP opens access to support learning and research

ta385 — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 08:30:02 +0000

Higher education textbooks and reference works have been made freely available to students online through their universities, while coronavirus research has been placed into a free online collection, with new articles fast-tracked through the peer review and publishing process to join them.

Teachers, pupils and parents are also being given free online access to the Press’s schoolbooks, along with worksheets and instructional videos. Blogs are being constantly updated with new content to support those adjusting to teaching and learning remotely.

Peter Phillips, CUP’s Chief Executive, said: “ ̽��ֱ��pandemic is disrupting normal life almost everywhere. It’s vital that we do what we can to minimise its effects on learning and research, but also to get world-class research on this virus into the hands of anyone who needs it.”

Action has been taken across all three of the Press’s publishing groups.

Academic publishing has made more than 700 textbooks in HTML format available online to students through their university libraries. In addition, existing customers are being offered free access to key reference works on request to help them overcome the disruption caused by the global response to the pandemic.

At the same time, there is free access to a growing collection of COVID-19 and coronavirus-related research on Cambridge Core – the online home of the Press’s academic books and journals. New research is being added all the time, with editorial processes adapted to ensure publication within 24 hours of receipt of the accepted manuscript, so the most-up-to-date information is shared as rapidly as possible. Press-published ‘Gold’ Open Access journals are also waiving the normal Article Processing Charges for COVID-19 or coronavirus-related research up until June 2020, meaning there is no cost to the authors or their institutions.

̽��ֱ��Press has also joined more than 30 leading publishers in committing to making all of its COVID-19 and coronavirus-related publications, and the available data supporting them, immediately accessible in PubMed Central (PMC) and other public repositories. More information here.

ELT publishing group has launched a global campaign – Supporting Every Teacher – working with colleagues in Cambridge Assessment English to deliver free, online content to support teachers and learners. Begun in March, the campaign has already reached two million people, with resources on offer including free digital access to the popular Cambridge English Exam Boosters series, which support those preparing for English language examinations. Teachers can also find daily content on the Press’s English Language Teaching blog, ‘World of Better Learning’, to ease the transition to home learning.

Education group are also providing support for primary and secondary teachers around the world. There is free access to more than 100 secondary school textbooks, specially-designed worksheet bundles for pupils aged five to 11 and Penpals handwriting videos for those aged three to six. Secondary school resources can be accessed through the Press’s digital education platform Cambridge Elevate. This includes material covering Cambridge IGCSE, Cambridge International AS & A Level as well as several UK GCSE and A Level texts. ̽��ֱ��Press is also rolling out free access to its interactive maths resources GCSE Mathematics Online in the UK and Cambridge Online Mathematics for Lower Secondary Checkpoint, IGCSE and A Level Mathematics, globally.

Further support is available from colleagues already in touch with schools around the world to provide assistance when moving to or using online and blended learning products.

More info about the Press’s response to COVID-19 here.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press is providing free access to a huge range of books, research and learning materials for teachers, students and researchers impacted by COVID-19.

It’s vital that we do what we can to minimise the virus' effects on learning and research

Peter Phillips

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press

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̽��ֱ��great university land-grab

ta385 — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 16:33:36 +0000

Over 50 American universities built their fortunes using 11 million acres of Indian land, signed over amid violence, corruption and coercion. A major new study and website reveals how.