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UK universities flash the cash in seat-filling war Love in the time of politics of sciences
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UK universities flash the cash in seat-filling war CASH incentives to students are being stepped up as UK universities go to war with each other to fill places this autumn, an investigation by The Independent on Sunday (IoS) has found. Some are even offering rewards to students who fail to meet the government’s criteria of at least one A grade and two Bs for allowing universities to increase the number of places they offer. Last week it emerged some top universities were offering mini iPads and laptops to lure students onto courses. At Coventry, students applying to the Computing and Engineering Department with three B-grade passes are being offered an incentive of £1,000 towards fees or £1,500 towards the cost of university accommodation. Newman University in Birmingham is also extending a £10,000 grant available to students over their three-year study period to those with a minimum of three B-grade passes on its non-teacher training courses. It said it has also received an unusually high number of applications from students with A or B grade passes. The growth in incentives comes as the recruitment war between universities intensifies, with many of the country’s leading universities taking advantage of the government’s new policy to increase their intake. Exeter University is recruiting 600 extra students this year, while Northampton said it was taking up the government’s offer in order to expand the number of places it was offering through clearing. Around 80 universities responded to an IoS investigation into student admissions this year, the first of the new policy. It was being predicted that the expansion of elite universities’ numbers could mean others struggle to fill their places. Universities Minister David Willetts said: “There will be some that fill up quickly and others who don’t do so well. That’s how an open, more flexible system works.” Other incentives offered include a fee waiver by Goldsmiths, University of London, for the 10 most exceptional students from its local borough of Lewisham. Cash incentives of up to £2,000 a year were also being offered by Salford, Bangor, Bradford and Glasgow. This year’s A-level results saw a slight drop in the number of A* and A grades awarded, down by 0.3 percentage points to 26.3 per cent. However, the percentage of students achieving A* to B-grade passes rose from 52.6 per cent to 52.9 per cent. City University in London, as a result, was encouraging those who exceeded grades for a firm offer at other universities to contact them and “adjust” to their own equivalent course. The subjects still on offer differed from university to university: Coventry and Pearson College, the latter run by the FTSE company and granted degree-awarding powers, reported places left on their business and economics degrees, as did the for-profit private university BPP. Suffolk, the University of West England and Bangor had spaces in creative arts, the humanities, social science and business subjects. Healthcare courses were popular with Bradford, and South Bank University in London closed many of its nursing courses. Manchester University, which whittled down its remaining vacancies from 300 to 100, said most unfilled places were on modern language courses. The New College of the Humanities, the university in London whose master is the philosopher Professor A.C. Grayling, and which charges fees of £18,000 a year, reported vacancies through clearing on all its courses but pointed out that, as a private university, it was not restricted by government rules on student numbers. Some of those universities left in clearing said they had high minimum qualifications for their remaining places and that only students with at least one B-grade and two A-grade passes should apply. At least six of the 24 Russell Group of elite universities — Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Bristol, Imperial College and the London School of Economics — are not involved in clearing because all of their places are filled. There are still spaces available to students with lesser qualifications: Bedfordshire and Bath Spa were among those universities willing to accept three D-grade passes, but which said that they would judge prospective students on a case-by-case basis.
— The Independent
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Love in the time of politics of sciences THE battle of superiority between natural and social sciences is being played out at one of India’s oldest universities, and good old love may just become a casualty. Professor Emeritus Prasanta Roy, who was instrumental in setting up the Department of Sociology at Presidency University, said, “The course on love has been getting a lot of attention. “It will be taught as a foundation course to the students of natural sciences and will sensitise them towards love.” Roy hopes to cover several elements of love — from love as romance to love as an industry. He is hoping to bank on love theorists like Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman and Eric Fromm, who have enriched sociological discourses with “The Transformation of Intimacy; Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies”, “Liquid Love” and “The Art of Loving”, respectively. He confirmed there has been no precedent for the course in the country. “Delhi’s two leading departments of sociology at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University are not teaching emotions — love being an important emotion.” Upal Chakraborty, an Assistant Professor with the Department of Sociology at Presidency, is likely to teach the course on love which will be offered in the second semester. “From Bollywood flicks to Bhakti literature, from feminist critiques to structuralist treatises, from Sufi music to ethnographic contexts to classical and contemporary philosophy, this course will try to put ‘love’ under a critical sociological microscope,” Chakraborty said. “In the process it will also question the oft-repeated, commonly believed oppositions between rationality and emotion, subjectivity and objectivity, romance and utility, and other similar ones.” Chakraborty said for him the course on love was like any other topic such as class, caste or urban sociology. “But that does not, of course, take away the uniqueness of the course. The originality in the idea of teaching love in a sociology programme comes from the fact that by discussing such an ubiquitous, commonsensical, mundane, popular expression of human interaction in an analytical light, we will be able to critically analyse how society shapes expressions of love, what kind of structural inclusions and exclusions are generated in the process, and how they vary historically and culturally,” Chakravorty told PTI. He said the entire idea in teaching this course is to make the familiar unfamiliar, or render the concrete abstract. “We wish to represent the everyday in a philosophical light, and we thought that love would be a particularly relevant theme, because the audience we would address is constituted of young college students in whose lives this expression surely plays an important role,” he added. Delhi-based sociologist Neshat Quaiser said love as a subject is generally taken care of by English literature and philosophy departments. “But it (the course) will certainly enable students to go beyond the commonsensical and everyday view of love — also view of love based on religion — thereby to have a more meaningful understanding of love with its multiple representations, which in turn holds possibilities to affect/ change the human relations from banal to more meaningful ones,” he said. Roy’s department is offering three other courses “Laboratory Life”, “The Mechanics of the Mind” and “Why Study Society” as well. “These courses will help bridge the divide between natural and social sciences. For instance, “Laboratory Life” will inform students of natural sciences about politics inside the laboratory; the sharing of time and space issues and the struggle for consensus. It will help them understand that social sciences are also a science,” he said. |
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Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar Re-evaluation simplified THE university has simplified the process of re-evaluation of answer sheets. According to the new process, any student will be able to download detailed marks card and apply for re-evaluation within 15 days of the declaration of result. This decision was approved by the university Syndicate. Professor Ajaib Singh Brar, Vice-Chancellor, said that earlier, the system of re-evaluation was lengthy and time consuming, but with the introduction of the new system, the students would be able to get re-evaluation result well in time without waiting for their detail marks cards. Proteins in wheat A research project worth Rs 42.5 lakh has been granted to Professor Dalbir Singh Sogi of the Department of Food Science and Technology to study the level of proteins in North Indian wheat varieties. This project is sanctioned by the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology. Professor P.K. Sehajpal, Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry of the university, is the co-investigator of the project. The team will carry out advance research to help the celiac disease patient to have wider dietary choices. Biotechnological techniques will be used to degrade the proteins present in wheat responsible for adverse reaction in the intestine leading to celiac disease. The research will focus on the development of protocol to evaluate gluten-free products for the absence of gluten contamination. Professor Sogi, a Fulbright Fellow, had recently visited Michigan State University to carry out research work in this field. He is associated with Dr Venu Gangur, Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, Michigan State University, USA, who has been working on plant and animal allergenic proteins. The work will help to understand the nature of allergen present in local cultivars. Fellowship awarded Professor Paramjit Singh Judge from the Department of Sociology of the university has been awarded the prestigious Dr B.R. Ambedkar National Fellowship for studies in social justice. The fellowship has been offered to Professor Judge by the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Ministry of Human Resource Development. Professor Judge said the fellowship would be for the period of two years and during this, he would carry out research on the topic "Culture and Violence in Making of Post-Colonial Modernity", with special focus on Amritsar city. Pt. B.D.Sharma University of Health Sciences, Rohtak Nodal centre for hepatitis-C The Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS), affiliated to Pt. B.D Sharma University of Health Sciences, has set up the first dedicated nodal centre for the treatment and training of doctors here to deal with hepatitis-C, a growing epidemic in the state and the country. The Gastroenterology Department of the PGIMS, where the nodal centre has come up, has treated as many as 170 patients of hepatitis-C in the past two and half years, said Dr Parveen Malhotra, head of the department. He said the number of hepatitis- C patients in Haryana was on the rise. At least four districts of Kaithal, Fatehabad, Karnal and Jind in the state have been identified, where the disease has already taken an epidemic form. According to Dr Malhotra, the nodal centre will provide training to doctors working at civil hospitals, so that they could diagnose and provide treatment to affected persons at the local level. — Contributed by G.S. Paul and |
Among general education courses to familiarise humanities and science students with each others’ disciplines, Kolkata’s Presidency University is offering unique optional papers like “Digital Humanities”, “The Physics of Everyday Life”, and “Love” — likely to be option number one for most undergraduate students! The subject of love, hitherto the premise of departments of English and philosophy, will be addressed for the first time by the department of sociology in an Indian university. The only other known precedent is the “Sociology of Love” undergraduate course offered at the University of Massachusetts in the US.