Debbie McVitty

1 month ago | wonkhe.com | Mark Peace |Mark Leach |Debbie McVitty

It started, as so many great conversations do, over coffee. On a chilly January day as we swapped tales of small children and shared cultural touchstones, we found ourselves riffing on the Trolls movie (which it turns out we have both seen a painful number of times). In particular, we found ourselves in Borgentown: a drab, grey world of monotony and drudgery, where fleeting joy depends on eating the vibrant, music-loving Trolls.

1 month ago | wonkhe.com | Debbie McVitty |Mark Leach

The pervasive sense that five years or a decade or 20 years hence the sector will look radically different might be an exciting topic for panel discussions but it’s not clear whether radical transformation is desirable – not least because the form that transformation might take remains far from clear.

2 months ago | wonkhe.com | Debbie McVitty |Mark Leach

Depending on how you look at it, mergers are either very common or very unusual in UK higher education. Dig deep enough into the annals of any institutional history and you will most likely find at some point that the institution as we know it today emerged from the combination or absorption of various nineteenth or twentieth-century mechanics institutes, colleges of teaching or technical colleges.

Jan 19, 2025 | wonkhe.com | Debbie McVitty |Mark Leach

Universities have a critical role to play at the intersection of academic thought, organisational practice, and social benefits of technology. It’s easy when thinking about universities’ digital strategies to see that as a technical question of organisational capability and solutions rather than one part of the wider public role universities have in leading thinking and shaping practice for the benefit of society.

Nov 17, 2024 | wonkhe.com | Debbie McVitty |Mark Leach

There was plenty of nuance in the debate and discussion about higher education finances at last week’s Festival of Higher Education but broadly those who said things publicly and bent my ear behind the scenes divided into two perspectives on how the next few years are likely to look.