John Flood's Random Academic Thoughts (RATs)

CUNY (City University of New York) is one of those universities you wonder how it exists. It’s in the middle of New York with 60,000 students, no great campuses, no dorms, and as the Economist reported, not much in the way of academic credibility, until recently.A mixture of overly-optimistic admissions programs and failing city finances [...]

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In my last entry I said that the Kurds believed federalism might be a solution to the new Iraq. Today I received an announcement of a new bulletin about federalism that is being made freely available to scholars._____________________________________________________The first issue of the Bibliographical Bulletin on Federalism, edited by the Centre for Studies on Federalism of [...]

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Since the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, Iraq has been a schizophrenic society with the majority of the country under Saddam’s authority and a significant part of the north under Kurdish rule with British and US protection enforcing the “no-fly” zone (including one in the south). The second Gulf War and subsequent events [...]

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I thought I had finally buried this topic. But no. The University of Westminster has managed another surprise. I have previously described the university’s efforts in trying to evaluate what professors do. Unfortunately, what was to have taken a couple of months on their part has dragged on for over 6 months due to ineptitude.My [...]

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Since Clifford Chance became the biggest law firm in the UK by merging in the late 1980s, merger mania set in. It’s something that affects law firms everywhere, but especially in Britain and the US. Mergers are mixed affairs. Some really hit it off, others head for divorce. But all of them need marriage counselling [...]

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