Checking HE for Cracks…

As an HE policy blogger, apparently, (Higher education policy: 12 UK blogs worth bookmarking), I thought I’d log a handful of contextual links around Martin Weller’s playful post suggesting a conspiracy around How to dismantle a sector, stage 2 relating to some of the other possible cracks I’ve noticed recently (feel free to add more in the comments). These are offered in the spirit of conspiracy development, (cf. Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum or The Prague Cemetry…), and provide a few more jigsaw pieces to play with…

• Revocation of London Met’s licence to sponsor overseas students (the lead in to Martin’s post), along with suspensions over the last year of the licence’s at Glasgow Caledonian University and Teesside University.
• New ways of fund raising: Universities Look to Bond Markets for Additional Funding?
• Consultation on dissolution of HE Corporations, “[t]he first involving the dissolution of both Cardiff Metropolitan HE Corporation and University of Wales, Newport HE Corporation and the second the dissolution of the University of Wales, Newport HE Corporation alone.”
• Reconfiguration of the university groupings: Russell Group expansion leaves 1994 Group short
• A letter from HEFCE to HEIs from earlier this year: Collaborations, alliances and mergers in higher education: Consultation on lessons learned and guidance for institutions
• Councils working with universities to establish university colleges: ‘University College Milton Keynes’ to open in 2012
• Publishers such as Pearson and Condé Nast getting in on the private university act: The Business of HE Moves On…
• Academic wrappers around vendor certification – the OU has been doing this for some time with Cisco Networking, for example, but also appears to be extending the model to other vendors: Open University and Global Knowledge launch new postgraduate certificate in IT service management.

By the by, on the conspiracies front, I notice via John Naughton the announcement of a bunch of postdoc research positions on Conspiracy and Democracy: History, Political Theory and Internet Research:

History
1. Conspiracy Theories in 19th-Century Europe
2. Cultural Transfer and Comparison: Europe and America
3. Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories in the Contemporary World

Political Theory
4. Rational Choice and Democratic Conspiracies
5. Ideals of Transparency and Suspicion of Democracy

The Internet
6. The impact of global networking on the nature, dissemination and impact of conspiracy theories.

What’s missing from that list (for me) is something on the network/graph structure of conspiracy theories…?