The policy frame and resource base within which universities work in the UK have undergone drastic changes. Whilst the nature of changes at the governmental level has often been remarked upon, there is little empirical work on the impact of these changes on academic values and working. This paper reports findings from the English component of an Anglo–Norwegian-Swedish project nearing completion which gives an account of the policy changes and their impact on values, research agendas and criteria, and modes of creating and ‘delivering’ the curriculum. Whilst the research invites caution about overstating the discontinuities of policy over the last 20 years, it displays the considerable effects of policy changes which emerge, however, differently in different subject areas and types of institution.

Well-timed silence has more eloquence than speech. Martin Farquhar Tupper

Silence can express nothing or be meaningful. It is meaningful only in a communicative setting and, in an environment of words, silence is often the instrument of choice to communicate without explicit expression. After the last word, ‘the rest is silence’.

The implosion of the Soviet empire undermined most theories concerning International Relations. Only a few political scientists have conceded afterwards the weakness of their theories, which were mostly ahistorical, based on the deformation of politics with history omitted. The question asked in this article is what kind of International Relations as a discipline may be more reliable and helpful in the future.

Electronic publishing has many advantages, including speed, low cost and searchability. It has made most progress in the physical sciences. Peer review remains an essential requirement. The dominance of English should be countered by the use of extended character sets. The preservation of electronic data is a great challenge due to the impermanence of magnetic and optical storage, but even more by the rapid change in both software and hardware.

Created in 1974, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) has achieved renown for outstanding research, training and methodology development. It has also provided crucial services to European molecular biology. Its headquarters are in Heidelberg and it is funded by 15 member states. The combination of the Visitors Programme, Outstations and International PhD Programme provides access to resources rarely available in national laboratories. EMBL was conceived as a magnet to hold quality scientists in Europe or to attract them back after an education elsewhere, and has been signally successful in this. Its open international style sets a standard for the way that research is done in molecular biology in Europe.

Since the fall of the apartheid regime South African higher education has begun to undergo a process of fundamental transformation. First-world universities, which were beneficiaries (however unwilling) of past racial inequalities, have had to adapt to the urgent needs of what is a post-colonial and, for the majority of its citizens, a third-world society. South Africa, therefore, provides a particularly sharp example of the encounter between a higher education system established within the European tradition, in terms of both its institutional and its academic culture, and a society in the process of radical change. This encounter has been mediated through the work of the National Commission on Higher Education which attempted to produce a compromise that would enable South African higher education to be both ‘Western’ (in terms of academic values and scientific standards) and also ‘African’ (in terms of its contribution to building the capacities of all the people of South Africa). The tension between the university's claims to represent universal knowledge and the counter-claims that ‘local’ knowledge traditions should be accorded greater respect, therefore, is much sharper than in Europe.

Of the multitude of languages, many are endangered and threatened with extinction; this is a great potential loss of witnesses to human perception. Academies should support non-majority languages and oppose the acceleration of their loss due to the rise of computers with programs limited to majority languages.