'Universities have sidelined the science,' says academics' leader

-

The new president of the University and College Union, herself suffering from long Covid, says staff are increasingly angry, as branches ballot their members

One weekend in May, when Vicky Blake, the new president of the University and College Union, was supposed to be helping her father with some decorating, she realised she could not lift her arms. “I felt I’d dissolved from the inside out and there was just no power left in my body,” she says.

It was the start of months of what her doctor thinks is long Covid, with symptoms including “brain fog” and total exhaustion. But with so many of her members terrified or angry about being expected to teach face to face on campuses where Covid is spreading, and her union fighting to force institutions to move courses online, this has not been a time to slacken off.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/37XH67G

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ply in the sky: the new materials to take us beyond concrete | Fiona Harvey

-
Concrete is everywhere, but it’s bad for the planet, generating large amounts of carbon dioxide. Creative alternatives are in the pipeline They call them plyscrapers: the sudden emergence of tall buildings constructed almost entirely from timber. Vancouver , Vienna and Brumunddal in Norway have all claimed recently to have the tallest wooden building in the world, and now Tokyo has its own designs on the informal title. Related: Share your photos of beautiful or ugly concrete Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2UeDOmU
Read more

Forgotten plays: No 5 – Owners (1972) by Caryl Churchill

-
The writer unleashed her gift for black comedy to excoriate British attitudes to property and possessions in this sprightly drama Caryl Churchill is rightly admired for many qualities : her formal inventiveness, her questing intelligence, her dystopian vision of everything from cloning to climate catastrophe. But she has one gift that is rarely discussed: her wild humour. It is there in the sudden eruption of a 10-foot bird into the family brouhaha in Blue Heart (1997) and in the backyard banter in the more recent Escaped Alone (2016). It is also vividly present in one of her earliest stage plays, Owners. Given that the piece had a brief run at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1972 and, as far as I know, only one revival, it is one of Churchill’s least-known works yet cries out to be rediscovered. On the surface, it sounds bleak. It is about the urge for ownership and shows Marion, a rampant property developer, eating up everything around her: she’s not only prepared to turf two...
Read more

The 20 best songs of 2020

-
Our writers considered hundreds of contenders – and here are their picks of the year. Listen to all 390 tracks they voted for on our playlist Delivered from a nightmare: why our No 1 song works so well We kick off our end of 2020 music coverage with Guardian critics’ favourite songs, with our album of the year countdown starting tomorrow. As ever, each critic votes for top 20 songs and albums, with points allocated for each placing, and those points tallied to make these lists. There were 390 songs voted for in all – we’ve put ( almost) all of them in a Spotify playlist . Please share your own favourite songs of the year in the comments below, and we’ll hopefully see you in a festival field in 2021 … Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3liPlhp
Read more