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Brilliant paper by Diana here. A must-read for anyone wanting to understand the plight of UK universities at the moment - particularly aimed at university leaders, governors and policymakers, plus SU sabbs of course:

It is good to see this transparency from Office for Statistics Regulation, who state: “OSR is not in a position to comment on the public discussion about the financial benefits, or otherwise, of higher education.” osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/correspondence…

Great to see my colleague Josh Freeman’s paper about the encampments on UK campuses continuing to generate thoughtful debate and conversation: srheblog.com Rob Cuthbert

Sad news about The Leadmill, where I spent time a lot of time as a teenager (including once meeting Deee-Lite there...). I said this in a speech in Sheffield in 2014:

I think, if I worked at Office for Statistics Regulation, I would be very angry by the way I was being played by the anti-university campaigner Paul Wiltshire: telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/0…

I was honoured to be taught by Peter Hennessy during my MA - indeed, I chose the course so that I could benefit from his wisdom. Never regretted it as he’s a great man, just as this review makes clear: churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2025/…

The 2025 spending review is four days away. So it's worth remembering perhaps that, five years ago in 2020, the previous Government launched a Budget in which they promised to spend £22 billion on R&D by 2024/25. They u-turned on this afterwards, but that was the plan.

The new announcement is for “more than £22.5bn a year by 2029–30.” Policymakers should be careful not to oversell this and the research community should not pretend it will allow lots of new research, given it seems to be “a real-terms freeze”. researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-pol…

My take on today’s £86,000,000,000 announcement on research and development spending:

“Finally, I am left wondering what this five-year settlement means for the commitment in Labour’s 2024 election manifesto to ‘scrap short funding cycles for key R&D institutions in favour of ten-year budgets that allow meaningful partnerships with industry”

We’ve surpassed our target number of registrations for Thursday’s HEPI Annual Conference, but could still squeeze in a few more people. There are two free tickets for each organisation that supports HEPI. HEPI's Annual Conference, Thursday 12 June 2025 hepi.ac.uk/2024/09/05/hep…

A few weeks ago, I bashed out some musings in response to a story in The Times and The Sunday Times on the possibility that EU students might face lower fees once more if studying in the UK. The level of interest has been huge (making it the most well-read post I've ever done) hepi.ac.uk/2025/05/18/are…

If you’re doing research right you should feel a little dumb some of the time. I’m an incredible researcher because I feel severely dumb almost all of the time

Brilliant from Daniel Finkelstein: “At some point we are going to need, collectively, to stop encouraging politicians to lie to us. & we are going to have to get lucky, finding a leader able simultaneously to tell the truth & get themselves re-elected.” thetimes.com/comment/column…

If you didn’t get my joke on Stourbridge / Pop Will Eat Itself at Duolingo 🇬🇧’s DetCon 1, this may help: youtu.be/Xef60FAN6Vk?si…

Are there good figures for different transport options pre- and post-Covid? My main trainline, Chiltern Railways, feels like it’s still much worse than it used to be - slower trains, fewer seats etc - & has never got back to what it was. Or I am imagining a falsely rosy past?

What is going on with 18-year old demand for higher education? Jo Saxton of UCAS reveals all the Higher Education Policy Institute Annual Conference:

Jo Saxton says she is against reducing the number of places that people can apply to as part of the UCAS process, based on feedback received.

I’ve been very excited by this new Q in our annual survey with Advance HE. But I still don’t know if the answer is as people would expect or not. What do you think?