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Educational expertise in a post-truth society

by Richard Davies

The inauguration ceremony for Donald Trump was interesting to watch for several reasons, but the Battle Hymn of the Republic caught my ear. Whilst the song has cultural connections for Americans, its explicit religiosity and commitment to truth seems at odds with modern sensibilities. Rather than truth, recent political history, eg Johnson, Trump, Brexit and Covid-19 (anti)vaccination, has shone a light on our post-truth society, where, as Illing (2018) notes, there is a disappearance of ‘shared standards of truth’. In such a society politics shifts from being the discussion of ideas or even ‘what works’ to a play for the emotions of the majority. A context within which Michael Gove, an early adopter, was able to label a raft of educational luminaries ‘the blob’ (see Garner, 2014).

Whilst this is/might be irritating and socially disabling, I want to argue that it is also both deleterious to educational research and that its roots lie some 250 years ago.

Pring (2015) argued that what makes educational research distinctly educational is its intention to improve educational practice. So, research about education is not sufficient to qualify as  educational research; educational research intends to change educational practice for the good of learners (and often wider society). This requires several activities including shared dialogues between researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders with common ways of talking about education and common standards of truth (see Davies, 2016). An environment of post-truth undermines such possibilities, as I hope will become clearer as I explore the roots of the present malaise.

The roots lie around 1744 or just before, signalled by Vico’s New Science, or at least in the 18th century, where MacIntyre (1987) places the last foothold of the ‘educated public’ – and it is in MacIntyre that I ground the argument here. MacIntyre (1985) presents a historically informed account of the decline of ethical discourse and, on a more positive note, what is required for its restoration. Here I fillet that account for the resources I need for my purposes (see Davies, 2003, Davies, 2013 for more detailed reviews). He argues that ethical discourse has undergone a series of transformations, led by philosophers but now part of the public zeitgeist, causing a situation in which people believed there was no reasonable basis on which to resolve ethical disagreements.

Here, I identify just three key elements of the argument. Firstly, naïve relativism, the (false) view that because people disagree on a matter then, necessarily, there must be no rational means to resolve the disagreement. Secondly, MacIntyre identifies three, non-rational approaches to decision making: (i) personal taste, (ii) achieving the goals of the system of which one is a part, or (iii) through interpersonal agreement. These are embedded, MacIntyre claims, in our social activities and institutions. Thirdly, that these give rise to a distinctive form of political engagement, protest. In protest different sides shout their differing views at each other knowing both that their views will not change the views of their opponents nor that their opponents’ views will change their views.

When we see ‘toddler’ behaviour from politicians, it is a focus on personal taste and the tantrums that emerge when these are frustrated. What reasons, they might say, do others have to frustrate what I want, for no such reasons can exist. When we see claims that the democratic process must be followed, we are seeing a commitment to achieving the goals of the system; what else can be done? We regularly see examples of protest, often mistakenly seen as ‘facing down’ a critique of one’s behaviour. The views of others only count if they have some reasons for their views that might be better than mine. But for those embracing the obviousness of naïve relativism this cannot happen, rather protests (against Johnson, Trump, and others) are just attempts to make them feel bad. Such attempts must be resisted through and because of bravado.

How do the politician and policymaker operate in such an environment? Bauman (2000) offers a couple of practical conceptions consistent with MacIntyre’s critique. Firstly, Bauman draws attention to the effect of having no rational basis for decision making: it is increasingly difficult to aggregate individual desires into political coherent movements. Traditional political groupings on class, gender and race are dissolving (which is certainly a feature of the 2024 US election analysis). It matters less why you want to achieve something; it is just that we can have interpersonal agreement on what we claim we want to achieve. Secondly, Bauman talks of decision making as reflecting the ‘script of shopping’, we buy into things – friendship groups, lifestyles, etc – and as suddenly no longer do so when they do not satisfy our personal desires. Whilst this may seem overly pessimistic, Bauman and MacIntyre are identifying the unavoidable direction of human societies towards this already emergent conclusion.

Politicians and policymakers play, therefore, in this world of seeking sufficient co-operation to build a political base – to get elected and to get policies through. They do this by getting individuals to buy into the value of specific outcomes (or more often to stop other awful outcomes). They are not interested why individuals buy in, nor do they try to develop a broader consensus. There are no rational foundations, and any persuasive tactic will do, with different tactics deployed to influence different people. This scattergun approach is more likely to hit the personal desires of the maximum number of people.

Where does this leave the educational researcher seeking to influence educational policy and practice based on their research endeavours? At best, we might become the chosen instrument of a policymaker to persuade others – but only if our research agrees with their pre-existing desires. Truth is not the desired feature, just the ability to be persuasive.

But what if truth does matter, and we want to take seriously our moral responsibilities to support educational endeavours that are in the interests of students? There are four things we can do.

  1. Understand the situation. It is not just that the political environment is hostile to research, it does not see facts as a feature of policy and practice development.
  2. Decide if we want to be educational researchers or policymakers. The former means potentially less engagement, impact, and status, perhaps walking away from policymaking as more ethically defensible than staying to persuade using simulacra of evidence.
  3. Get our own house in order. We have too many conferences which provide too little time to discuss fundamental differences between researchers, with so many papers that we are only speaking to people with whom we more or less agree. The debates are over minutiae rather than significant differences. Dissenting voices tend to go elsewhere and move on to different foci rather than try and get a foot in the door. Bluntly, our academic system is already shaped by the same post-truth structures that have given rise to Trump, Johnson, et al (and no doubt most of us could identify our equivalents of them). Although we will never speak with one voice and will, I hope, always embrace fallibility, getting the house in order will enable us to model what rational dialogue and truth seeking can achieve in identifying how educational policy and practice can be enhanced. Of course, we should value each other’s contributions, but not confuse value with valid (it is just another form of naïve relativism).
  4. Find some allies who accept a similar account of the decline of reason from amongst politicians and policymakers and work out how we start to make educational research not only relevant but influential.

Richard Davies leads the MA Education Framework programmes at the University of Hertfordshire. His research interests include philosophical issues in higher education. He is a co-convenor of the Academic Practice Network at SRHE.


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Five challenges for policy research on higher education

by William Locke

Higher education research has grown in recent decades. For example, the number of journal articles published on higher education has increased five-fold in the last twenty years (Seeber, 2023). More is known about higher education than ever before, but there does not seem to be a corresponding growth in higher education policymaking being influenced by this expanding evidence base (Schendel and Knobel, 2024). Indeed, higher education seems to be more or less in crisis – and even under attack – in democratic as well as authoritarian systems, and in rich as well as middle- and low-income countries. Here, I offer five interrelated challenges for policy research on higher education. No doubt, there is more to be said about each of these, and there are other challenges that could be added. Perhaps readers might like to make suggestions in the comments.

1. How to expand international connection and collaboration in an increasingly fragmented and divided world?

Schendel and Knobel (2024) argue for greater collaboration among higher education scholars in different countries and regions, and between researchers and policymakers. They also argue for the translation of knowledge from academic discourse to more accessible forms and between languages, especially to and from the lingua franca of English. They call for connections to be made between different evidence bases, contexts and ways of understanding. These collaborations and connections should not just be among scholars from countries in the ‘West’, but arise from the formation of equitable partnerships between researchers based in the Global South and North, and among those based in expanding and emerging systems. These would allow an exchange of non-Western perspectives and indigenous knowledges within the higher education research and policy communities and “a more global, multi-national, transnational or cosmopolitan optic” (Brooks, 2023, Brooks & Waters, 2022).  Journal editors, for example, should be more sensitive to the location of researchers and the substantive focus of their research (Brooks, 2023).

2. How to place local and national research in regional and international contexts for a potentially global readership?

There is also evidence that higher education research has become more international in scope in recent years (Brooks, 2023; Daenekindt & Huisman, 2020; Kehm, 2015; Kwiek, 2021; Tight, 2021). However, it is important to distinguish between an increasing number of studies of the internationalisation of higher education – often limited to student mobility between nations – and an international or comparative perspective, which may focus on national, or even local, issues but place these within a broader context. Clearly, the collaboration of researchers from different countries and regions already mentioned can help this comparative and contextualised approach, provided there is a well-developed understanding of the differences between the objects of study as well as the similarities. Loosening the dominance of the English language in international higher education research networks will help to achieve this contextualised comparison.

3. How to encourage contributions from a wider range of disciplines and theoretical approaches?

Higher education is not just a topic of study for higher education researchers. As an ‘open access’ field (Harland, 2012), it is also a focus for disciplines such as sociology, economics, business studies, political science, psychology and even geography.  As in other porous areas of the social sciences, this is to be welcomed as a way of incorporating new perspectives, concepts, theories and methodologies into the field.  While this may have led to a certain lack of interaction and integration initially (Macfarlane, 2012; Tight, 2014), the trend towards interdisciplinary scholarship can bring these different perspectives together in creative ways. After all, it is likely that more holistic, multi-disciplinary and innovative approaches will be needed to understand and address current and future challenges, such as artificial intelligence, decolonising the curriculum, academic precarity and populist critiques of universities. Topic-based networks of scholars – where the focus of study rather than the discipline is prime – can encourage this. A major task, however, is to provide space for indigenous knowledges and new ways of knowing that may challenge traditional disciplinary hierarchies and ‘Western’ epistemologies.

4. How to focus on deeper, longer-term issues without losing immediate relevance for policymaking?

On the one hand, we might ask how evidence-based higher education research is? Some of what is submitted for publication is description, commentary, impressionistic interpretation and, even, polemic. We might also ask what form might an acceptable evidence base take? Policymakers tend to look for unambiguous findings that provide clear-cut guidance for decision-making – hard data of a quantitative rather than a qualitative kind. Yet, in education, meaningful quantitative studies are harder to accomplish than in some other areas of public policy. Systematic reviews of literature and randomised control trials do not work as well in education as in medicine, for example. Do we actively seek to build the evidence base? Or do we risk creating fragmented knowledge produced by a series of short-term, small-scale, barely connected projects, based on different and incompatible theoretical and conceptual foundations or employing methodologies that cannot be scaled up?

We should also acknowledge that higher education researchers are investigating their own world. They are interested parties in the object of their studies. Their research agendas are likely to be influenced by these ‘interests’. (Many readers will be familiar with doctoral students researching areas relating to their own experiences, for example, as students or higher education employees). Researchers are often on the receiving end of many of the policies and their impacts. As a result, too much research on higher education has been based on the assumption of a golden age which is being dismantled, rather than from a forward-looking perspective that seeks to meet broader, emerging societal needs.

So, we should recognise the limitations of this expanding higher education research. To date, much of it has been small scale, short-term and dependent on consultancy-style funding. It has had a fragmented and weak institutional base. It has tended to focus on the ‘public life’ of higher education, on strategic issues and their impact, rather than the ‘up close and personal’ issues that can be uncomfortable to investigate. Some of it is only just becoming “disinterested research on reasonably long timescales, with open agendas and based on reflective and critical intellectual values and practices” (Scott, 2000: 124).

On the other hand, how realistic (or idealised) are our conceptions of policymaking and implementation? It is rarely feasible simply to extrapolate the policy implications from a given set of findings, which may simply analyse a problem rather than propose a solution. “It is not a linear, rational-analytical process of examining all the evidence, ‘reading off’ the policy implications of this and then formulating well-designed interventions guaranteed to achieve the outcomes desired” (Locke, 2009: 124). If we are to understand policymaking, and the place of research evidence within it, we have to acknowledge “…the messy realities of influence, pressure, dogma, expediency, conflict, compromise, intransigence, resistance, error, opposition and pragmatism in the policy process” (Ball, 1990: 9). There are many other factors than research findings to take into account in the world of policymaking, not least politics and political expediency (for example, unifying the party, ideology, public opinion and budgets). “A better understanding of the policy-making process and the factors that facilitate or inhibit the take-up of research findings is needed, including the role of the commissioners of research and how findings are presented to, and understood by, policymakers” (Locke, 2009: 125). 

We should also be thinking about the relations between research, policy and practice.  After all, there are gaps between policy and practice: the infamous unintended consequences of policy implementation. However, there is also the danger of slipping into a utilitarian, ‘what works’ frame. The relations between research, policy and practice are empirical matters, themselves open to research and investigation. Studies of policymaking and implementation can enlighten us about the successes and failures of particular policies in specific contexts, and the factors that influence these.  Perhaps we should be aiming for policymaking that is influenced and informed, rather than driven, by evidence? 

5. How to explore the policy implications of research findings in ways that can be useful to policymakers?

The higher education research and policy communities are not always so separate. Research commissioned by policy bodies makes up quite a large proportion of funded higher education research. Most higher education researchers want their research to have impact, and policymakers (at least below ministerial level) want evidence on which to base their policymaking. There is some movement between these worlds, but there should be more and think tanks play a critical role in mediating between the worlds of research and policy. Finally, networked governance suggests we should be looking at audiences beyond government and parliament, to include wider public engagement with research findings, which is essential to democracies.

But how far should this constructive engagement go? It is naïve to think that educational research can solve problems on its own. The relationship between research and policy has been characterized as indirect and more about ‘sensitising’ policymakers to problems than solving them. Research might be seen more as a means of helping policymakers reconsider issues, think differently, reconceptualise what the problem is, and challenge old assumptions. This suggests a more serendipitous and loose relationship between research and policy. So, perhaps we need to be more modest in our aspirations for evidence-informed policy and practice and adopt a greater degree of realism about what can be achieved.

This is an abridged version of the editorial from the latest issue of Policy Reviews in Higher Education.

William Locke is a founding Joint Editor of the journal and a recovering academic. Recently retired, he is a former Director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE) at the University of Melbourne, Director of the Centre for Higher Education Studies (CHES) at the UCL Institute of Education and Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE). He has also had senior policy roles at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and Universities UK.


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Gamekeepers, poachers, policy wonks and knowledge

by Adam Matthews

I was excited to attend SRHE’s event, Bridging The Gap: Improving The Relationship Between Higher Education Research And Policy on 4 November 2022. It was the first time I’d been to London since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The event promised to bring together and bridge the gap between those making higher education policy and those researching it. The event description pitched the former, in government, thinking that academic research is too narrow, theoretical or impenetrable for their purposes focusing on critique rather than practical solutions. The latter were descried as thinking government only selectively engage with academic research evidence to support their desired arguments and outcomes. This then was quite a gap to be bridged.

SRHE put together two panels of highly experienced policy makers and academics – some having experience of both – described more than once as gamekeepers turned poachers. Maybe this is the start of, and one of many ways of, bridging that gap.

Sticking with the analogy, gamekeeping policy makers want to see accessible, broad and practically orientated research; the poachers are asking to be listened to even when the gamekeeper doesn’t like the answer. As the panel sessions developed it was clear that there are some vessels bridging the gap in the choppy waters below the unbuilt bridge – think tanks such as HEPI and Wonkhe (nicely described as a newspaper for people who work in universities). It was suggested several times that both were primary and vital sources of knowledge for policy makers and university leaders. HEPI’s Nick Hillman may be a little biased here but this does present a real challenge to higher education researchers and the influence of their work. Both HEPI and Wonkhe provide in many ways an insider’s view having former special advisers writing news, commentary and reports. Some (such as Peter Scott) have argued they are ideologically and politically influenced. Many voices are needed to help inform policy but, as was clear at the event, this isn’t a simple case of finding one possible solution.

Each panel member spoke from their own perspective on policy and systems, and education and students, expertly chaired by David Palfreyman and Nick Hillman. Policy levers mentioned were access, REF, TEF and system wide changes. These are areas I have engaged with in my own work on part-time access, the relationship between REF and TEF and the identity and practice of quasi-public university institutions. There was quite some frustration directed at ‘my lot’, the higher education researchers, for only being interested in complex writing, academic journal articles and not for writing blogs, starring in podcasts and simply presenting ‘the evidence’. In defence of me and my colleagues, we do try to do both. However, promotions and kudos sit firmly in citations and h-indexes rather than short form communication. Training in the form of a PhD often has little development in teaching, never mind media and blog posting; we needed to get to the magic 80,000 words!

I raised the very academic word of epistemology – knowledge and understanding and how different mediums and research methods produce different epistemic outcomes. Epistemology is something which academics in social science and humanities think and write a lot about – usually whole chapters in an 80,000-word thesis, and a field of study in its own right. Yes, I could have said knowledge and understanding instead of epistemology. This is an important point: understanding the gamekeeper, poacher and policy wonk is not always easy for each other and bridging gaps will take work, but this effort feels worth it for all parties. The event certainly made me realise how little I know about how policies are made, other than watching the West Wing over and over again. And as Leo McGarry says in the political drama: ‘There are two things in the world you never want to let people see how you make ’em – laws and sausages’. I am open to seeing how policy is made, not so much the sausages. More West Wing below.

Some ‘non-academic’ panel members conveyed a sense of frustration that knowledge wasn’t accessible in a neat package that could then be applied to policy. This epistemic cause-and-effect positivism defies the many different types of academic research – large scale quantitative, secondary data analysis, small scale qualitative, systematic reviews, speculative futures, developing theory, conference papers to develop ideas, public seminars … the list could go on. My point is that trawling ‘the literature’ won’t find the ultimate and objective truth or answer (my own epistemic position) but it might help. Another epistemic view of mine is that HE research in many cases isn’t an objective hard science.

In my own work, in particularly teaching, I have been working in interdisciplinary ways with Engineers, Computer and Data Scientists and Physicists. We speak in different disciplinary languages, epistemic languages with different knowledge and understanding of the world. Key to interdisciplinarity is integration. The Manifesto of Interdisciplinarity states:

The essential feature of interdisciplinarity is integration: interdisciplinary research and teaching should seek to synthesize the insights generated by the specialized research undertaken within disciplines.   

We all speak and work in our epistemic cultures, bodies of knowledge and experience that we know well. The key is integration – the bridge that this event has hopefully started to build. My experience of interdisciplinary teaching and learning is dialogue and centring around common goals and issues. Moreover, we should not underestimate long-term trusting relationships which allow for critique and admitting you haven’t a clue what your colleague is talking about!

The work of all parties is different and the outputs that we produce (policy, news articles, events, teaching, academic books and journals) are all designed for different audiences and purposes. The work of HEPI and Wonkhe is vitally important and it can move quickly, for example Nick Hillman and Mark Leach played out an insightful debate on student number controls, over 2 days and three pieces, highlighting no safe return to student number controls, the possibility of a different way of looking at number controls with some final words from Nick. The exchange offered an excellent resource on the debate of student number controls delivered quickly and from different perspectives. A more in depth, academic, peer reviewed piece of work on the same subject by one of the event organisers, Colin McCaig (Sheffield Hallam), equally adds to the knowledge base but in a different way. We do also need to consider academic freedom and distance between the game keepers and poachers and allow for critical analysis.

Yes, academics need to write in more creative ways to convey ideas and evidence but we also need book, thesis and journal length depth and analysis building on bodies of knowledge and literature – it’s what we do, but there are many forms of media to explore.

I am an avid reader of HEPI (and have written one blog for them) and Wonkhe – looking out for their references to policy wonking from political drama the West Wing. Writer Aaron Sorkin is a master of using dialogue to explore ideas and the SRHE event this November was a good starting point for dialogue on bridging the gap and improving the relationship between gamekeeping policy makers, HE-researching poachers and commentating policy wonks.

As Sorkin via President Bartlett reminds us, ten words are not enough …

The ten words and epistemic cause and effect of ‘This is what the research says, now make the policy’ is certainly not enough. I hope this is the first of many dialogues between policy makers, policy wonks and higher education researchers that I am involved in.

Dr. Adam Matthews is Lecturer in Education, Technology and Society at the University of Birmingham working across Social Sciences and Engineering and Physical Sciences. Adam’s research is focused on the idea of a university at system and policy level.

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Sir Gavalad, the Knight of the Wholly Failed

by Rob Cuthbert

There was a time when knighthood meant something. It started out as a career path for the elite, for those headed for the cavalry, but: “As knighthood evolved, a Christian ideal of knightly behaviour came to be accepted, involving respect for the church, protection of the poor and the weak, loyalty to one’s feudal or military superiors, and preservation of personal honour.” The concept may have peaked in medieval times, but myths and legends continue to frame the knight as someone whose exemplary conduct has won them distinction. The “most perfect of all knights” was Sir Galahad, one of the three Arthurian Knights of the Round Table who achieved the Holy Grail.

Knighthood continues as a reward bestowed by the monarch for supposedly meritorious service. The British Honours system has many faults and some would like to abolish it completely. Its structure and nomenclature still embodies class privilege and explicit echoes of empire, even in HE, where VCs and professors of ‘elite’ universities aspire to knighthoods while the best of the rest will usually go no higher than CBE. But with the announcement of a knighthood for Gavin Williamson the government has once again plumbed depths which would not long ago have seemed unimaginable.

There might be some embarrassment involved, even for this apparently shameless government, given that the announcement was sneaked out as the war in Ukraine was dominating newspapers and airwaves. For years Williamson had been by a country mile the least respected, least popular and least successful member of the Cabinet – and that was the view of the Conservative Party. He finally lost his ministerial post in the reshuffle in September 2021. For reasons known only to himself, the Prime Minister decided at the time to soften the blow of Williamson’s dismissal by giving him a knighthood, as Camilla Tominey’s column in The Telegraph on 5 March 2022 made clear. Presumably he could not be given a peerage, either because he did not have enough roubles, or because, against all reasonable expectation, the 46-year-old harboured ambitions of yet another political comeback. So a knighthood was the sweetener of choice. But what did he do to ‘merit’ it?

Gavin Williamson had risen without trace to become Chief Whip in Theresa May’s Cabinet. When Sir Michael Fallon resigned as Secretary of State for Defence in November 2017 the Prime Minister followed standard practice and turned to the Chief Whip for suggestions about his replacement. Williamson, to widespread astonishment, proposed himself and May, weakened after the 2017 general election, agreed. He was not successful, not respected by senior service personnel, and attracted widespread ridicule for telling Russia to “go away and shut up” in 2018. Vladimir Putin obviously took careful note. He was fired as defence secretary in 2019 for allegedly leaking details from a National Security Council meeting about Huawei’s involvement in Britain’s 5G network, which he denied.

He then supported Boris Johnson’s campaign for leadership of the Conservative Party and was rewarded by a return to Cabinet as Secretary of State for Education. It was, then, the education sector that bore the brunt of his incompetence at a time in the pandemic when effective leadership was desperately needed. Williamson stumbled from one disaster to the next, issuing vague or ambiguous advice to schools, or clear instructions just hours before they were meant to take effect, making school staff scramble to work out their implications. He announced that schools must stay open and then reversed his decision just days later. And, worst of all, he made the difficult problem of handling national examinations in 2020 far worse than it needed to be, with profound effects on schools, HE, individual students and their future careers. Policymaking in a pandemic needed to be decisive, transparent and inclusive. Instead it was indecisive, obscure and included only those outside the DfE who would be later blamed for getting it wrong. Higher education institutions did the best they could to cope with the flood of proportionately much better-qualified applicants, with no thanks to the flipflopping by the Secretary of State for Education and Ofqual which repeatedly changed the admissions arithmetic, right up to the last minute. Even so tens of thousands of young people were dissatisfied or destroyed by the results that finally emerged from the abandoned algorithm and centre-assessed grades, and denied any realistic chance of appeal. The surge in numbers in unexpected places changed institutional strategies for several years and immediately jeopardised the prospects of the next cohort of applicants.

The gratuitous damage to so many students brought to mind the last time a senior Cabinet minister had made a major promise affecting higher education and then completely reversed his decision. Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg pledged before the general election in 2010 to abolish student fees, then went into coalition with the Conservatives, He did not simply abandon his pledge – as Deputy Prime Minister he was party to the decision to treble student fees instead. A ‘National Scholarships Scheme’ was supposed to be some compensation but was, unsurprisingly, an insignificant damp squib; it had to be quietly abandoned. Mealy-mouthed protestations about the ‘compromises’ necessary in coalition did not dissuade the electorate from destroying the Liberal Democrats at the next general election. Clegg’s complete failure led, naturally, to a knighthood; he became Sir Nick and departed to make his fortune in the Metaverse.

It was perhaps the most egregious example of a complete failure in HE policy leading to ennoblement – until now, as Sir Gavalad becomes the second Knight of the Wholly Failed. This is not just failure, it is Massive and Shameful (M&S) Failure. But some politicians have no shame.

Such knighthoods deserve a special ceremony. Perhaps Prince Andrew could be persuaded to do the honours.

Rob Cuthbert is the editor of SRHE News and Blog, emeritus professor of higher education management, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Fellow of SRHE. He is an independent academic consultant whose previous roles include deputy vice-chancellor at the University of the West of England, editor of Higher Education Review, Chair of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and government policy adviser and consultant in the UK/Europe, North America, Africa, and China.

Email rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk, Twitter @RobCuthbert.