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Ministers are ultimately responsible for weakening the arts and humanities. They are taking the country backwards
The announcement that the University of East Anglia is to cut 31 arts and humanities posts – out of a total of 36 academic job cuts – has rightly prompted anger as well as dismay. UEA became a literary flagship among the new universities that opened in the 1960s. This year is its 60th birthday, and since 1970 it has been home to one of the most famous creative writing courses in the world: founded by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson, its students have included Anne Enright, Ian McEwan and the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro.
There is shock, among alumni and observers, that the financial problems of the UK’s higher education sector now threaten such prestigious institutions. Once celebrated for their innovative approaches, 1960s campus universities were where different kinds of courses were developed. Creative writing is one example; media, development and women’s studies are others. In cutting the arts and humanities in these universities, managers and policymakers are turning back the clock – at a time when, arguably, there has never been a greater need for courageous innovation. Any idea that the risks are limited to the post-1992 universities should be junked.
Continue reading...Most university students supporting themselves say it is negatively affecting their studies, survey finds
The cost of living crisis is forcing more university students to take on more hours in their part-time jobs, with most saying that supporting themselves is affecting their studies, according to a new study.
More than half of the 10,000 students surveyed by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) said they did paid work during term time, with most saying they were using their wages to support their studies.
Continue reading...Graduates now owe an average amount of £45,000, Student Loans Company figures have revealed
Outstanding student loans in England have surpassed £200bn for the first time – 20 years earlier than previous government forecasts, as the number of students at universities continues to outstrip expectations.
The Student Loans Company (SLC), which administers tuition and maintenance loans in England, said that the balance of government-backed loans reached £205bn in the current academic year, including £19bn worth of new loans to undergraduates. The figure has doubled in just six years. It reached more than £100bn in 2016-17 after the coalition government decided to increase undergraduate tuition fees from £3,600 a year to £9,000 in 2012.
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Rethink Ventures just announced a €50 million specialist fund focused on mobility, automotive and logistics. With keywords “clean, safe, and digital,” the Munich-based firm is focusing especially on Europe-based startups at the early stage, stretching into Series A financing. LPs include ZF Ventures, Hellmann Worldwide Logistics, KION Group, Berylls and HAVI, as well as the European Investment Fund and a handful of family offices.
“The transportation sector faces significant challenges as the global demand for mobility and logistics continues to grow. With more than 25% of greenhouse gas emissions coming from this sector and additional negative externalities such as congestion and the significant usage of physical space, there is a lot of pressure to rapidly change the way we move people and goods,” says Jens-Philipp Klein, general partner at Rethink. “Our mission is to back early-stage startups that address these challenges and help them scale their technologies and products using our capital, deep expertise and access to a strong network of corporates. Together with all stakeholders in the industry, we aim to foster solutions that eventually will provide clean, digital and safe mobility for everyone.”
The fund says that its top priority is to provide unparalleled support to its portfolio companies while adding long-term value to their corporate partners, creating a mutually beneficial ecosystem that creates a positive impact for all.
The fund’s thesis-driven investment focus is on next-generation vehicle technologies (software defined, autonomously operated, new powertrains), mobility (providing comfortable, safe and affordable mobility for everyone), logistics (digital, automated and sustainable operations) and energy (infrastructure to power a clean, emission-free future of transportation).
The new fund has made three investments to date: Deftpower, an automotive charging platform that enables companies to launch, manage and scale electric charging offerings to their customers; Shipzero, a data-driven platform to measure and reduce CO2 emissions in global freight transportation; and Rydes, a SaaS solution for corporations to foster sustainable employee mobility by giving their employees access to various transport offerings.
Rethink rethinks mobility and logistics with new €50M fund by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
When it comes to sustainable infrastructure development, technology is making terrific leaps and bounds. The money to make it happen, however? That leaves a thing or two to be desired. For one thing, the processes remain largely manual, with financing in this sector remaining reliant on emails, spreadsheets and documents in a variety of formats. Streamlined, and indeed sustainable, it ain’t. With its $25 million Series B funding — which takes its total funding to over $42 million — Banyan Infrastructure is seeking to align sustainable project finance with the technology it is meant to support and develop.
Old-school systems probably didn’t quite do it for old-school oil and gas investments, but they damn sure don’t cut it for newer, greener, more sustainable technologies. These are usually smaller deals — typical commercial and industrial deals are between $1 million and $5 million — where financing comes from more distributed sources, which means that the time required to coordinate them and perform due diligence is sizable.
For Banyan, these inefficiencies in communication and monitoring are pain points it wants to solve with its purpose-built project finance software. With it, banks, financiers and developers should be able to automate and track complex project finance transactions with a unified risk and data management system. It estimates that it can save up to 1,000 hours for every loan processed.
Farewell tedious and time-consuming manual systems, good morning digitized loans and workflows in addition to automating data ingestion, risk monitoring and contractual compliance for each loan. This, Banyan hopes, will enable its customers to rapidly grow their sustainable infrastructure portfolio and help to close the estimated $3.5 trillion per year investment gap in renewable infrastructure that is required in order to meet our net zero targets by 2050.
“Because standardization is lacking for sustainable technology, risk-averse investors are hesitant to move quickly in this relatively new industry,” Will Greene, Banyan Infrastructure’s co-founder and CEO said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Our software focuses on reducing transaction costs and increasing transparency to create previously unseen speed and scale of project finance.”
Banyan believes that right now is the moment to push forward with its software, following the introduction of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the USA. This injection of $369 billion of government money is aimed at supporting and developing clean energy technology, manufacturing and innovation. There’s not just more money coming into the sector, but there’s more attention being paid to it, too. Being able to track, monitor and complete deals with greater efficiency means that these funds can go further, faster. The theory is that it will make investment in sustainable infrastructure a more attractive proposition, too.
“The fresh commitment of $369 billion from the IRA is fantastic, but we believe we won’t be able to deploy it without technology to multiply human capacity,” Greene said. “We’re looking forward to building out new features to unlock the IRA and other opportunities that our customers need to act on.”
The $25 million funding round was led by climate software investor Energize Ventures. It was joined by new investors SE Ventures and Elemental Excelerator, and existing investors VoLo Earth and Ulu Ventures. Furthermore, Banyan announced that Juan Muldoon, partner at Energize, has joined its board of directors.
Banyan has two focal points for its new funds: people and product. When it comes to people, Banyan is looking to double its headcount over the next year, with particular emphasis on its product, success and go-to-market teams. With an eye on international expansion, Banyan is keen to transition from product-led growth to sales-led growth.
“We’re also growing our product to build best practice new regulatory requirements,” says Greene, “including offering a robust product offering that can support our customers in unlocking the benefits of policies like the IRA, as well as support new and emerging technologies, like carbon capture, hydrogen, batteries and more.”
Greene and his co-founder Amanda Li came together to found Banyan Infrastructure recognizing the skills they each brought to better finance infrastructures that can have an impact on climate change.
“Our combined unique backgrounds were exactly what was needed when starting Banyan Infrastructure: with Amanda bringing on-the-ground project finance experience, and myself bringing technical know-how of building enterprise SaaS companies at varying scales,” says Greene. “This company is deeply important to us both as we believe the biggest lever you can pull in changing the trajectory of climate change is investing in renewable infrastructure, and project finance is the underpinning industry and mechanism behind the funnel of investment from financiers to projects.”
For Greene, Banyan is about moving project finance from Web 1.0 to Web 3.0 and speeding up the rate at which capital can be deployed in sustainable industries. It’s about at least meeting, and ideally exceeding, climate goals by using technology to remove funding bottlenecks.
“In 10 years, I would love to look back and know that the world has significantly more deployed renewable energy and other sustainable infrastructure projects because of what Banyan has enabled, Greene concluded.”
Banyan wants to unlock financing for a (more) sustainable future by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Under what conditions, if any, should a graduate program in philosophy admit PhD students for whom it cannot provide funding?
A professor at a department of philosophy sent in that question for consideration among the readers of Daily Nous. They write:
There is disagreement among the faculty in my department about the issue of whether (and if so when) to admit PhD students without funding. For context, we have a small number of funded lines and we often have more qualified applicants who seem like they would be good fits for our program than we have funded lines. Our placement record is just okay. We have had fairly good success in recent years placing our PhDs in long-term positions (like continuing lecturers or teaching professors), but we rarely place PhDs on the tenure track and it’s not uncommon for our PhDs to either become adjuncts and/or to take alt-ac jobs (which on some occasions is what the graduates themselves want).
Some of us worry that it is exploitative to admit someone to our PhD program when we’re not willing to fund them (unless there are unusual circumstances whereby we know that their PhD will otherwise be funded, say through an employer or the military. In such rare cases, the faculty agrees admitting them is permissible). We worry that for at least some applicants we’ll create misleading evidence about the wisdom of enrolling in our PhD program unfunded if we admit applicants who are unfunded. In addition, at least some of us think that admitting unfunded PhD students goes against an implicit best practice in philosophy as an academic discipline, and we’d rather stick to best practices.
On the other hand, some of my colleagues worry that it is paternalistic to remove from unfunded applicants the power to decide for themselves whether or not to attend our PhD program unfunded, which is what results if we reject such applicants rather than admitting them without funding. Several of those colleagues also worry that we may lose out on students who are in a position to self-fund their PhDs (either through wealth they have or through subsidization by other means) if we’re not made aware that they have such sources of funding and we reject them on the grounds that we don’t have funding to offer them.
I’d be interested in learning what others in philosophy, both faculty and students, have to say about this issue.
Readers, what say you?
[A note to help move the discussion in a useful direction: generally, it is highly inadvisable for a person to attend a PhD program in the humanities without full funding from some source (ideally a tuition waiver and a fellowship stipend from the program, which is a kind of vote of confidence in the student). But it doesn’t follow from that alone that it would be wrong to offer people the choice to do so. It may be wrong to offer such a choice; but more would need to be said as to why.]
Related: “Against Reducing the Number of Philosophy PhDs”
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