Italy deems the future to be too expensive

Italy has decided to take from the Universities to fund the bankers. In practical terms, the subjects that will suffer most are those which require a large number of support staff - in other words, technicians in the research labs.

Italy suffers distinctly in that research staff there are civil servants rather than appointed by the Universities themselves, and the past decade has seen almost no permanent recruitment. Instead, the labs are maintained by short-term contract staff. In Italy, these are nicknamed precari, acknowledging the precarious position of such a post.

Now they want to get rid of thousands of them. This is no way to run research. Italy is already well behind the likes of France and Germany in research expenditure per GDP. This will not help. I hope the Italian government enjoys the whooshing sound of Eastern European countries overtaking them.

Too many academics?

A letter in today's Nature magazine suggests one solution to th ecurrent UK grant funding problem - less academics.

universities currently have the freedom to over-staff and are rewarded for doing so under the present system.

Uh... really? Are we really over-staffed (uh.. I mean in the teaching and research positions, not the central facilities)? If so... who are the buggers who aren't doing anything, and why can't we get them to take on the surplus work of those who are working overtime to raise funds, do research, write courses, mark, etc. etc. etc.?

To me, it would appear that problem would be not that there are too many academics, but that there are too many members of staff at universities who are meant to justify their existence by research activity when they actually have to spend much of their time teaching. A greater acceptance and acknowledgement of the role teaching has in universities is perhaps required.

Money where your mouth is

Nice to see some people value education - I mean really, really value education.

Cambridge colleges do like their alumni. They're not, on average, as generous as Ivy League alumni are in the US, but they do tend to supply a fair chunk of money. New Hall College, part of the University of Cambridge, are particularly delighted with one of their old girls, though. Ros Smith, after graduating, began working with an IT consultant called Steve Edwards. They later married and set up a company that is now a world leader in telecom billings systems, Geneva Technology. Smart people. They sold out in 2001 (see what I mean by smart people?) and although their shares, assuming they held onto them, will have taken a dive since, the Times estimated their net wealth as 70 million pounds.

Well, make that 40 million. They've just given 30 million pounds to Ros' old college. As "New Hall" was the name of the college while it waited for a donor, this is a big enough gift to rename the college. In this case Murray Edwards College - Murray being the late Dame Rosemary Murray, who originally founded the college in the 1950s.