There are many more important points in the full report: /https://lnkd.in/eC9MY-Jy and the THE story here: lnkd.in/eMk4WZSk

📢Uneven student admission changes: Despite fairly stable admissions across the sector, 38% of departments experienced decreased undergraduate numbers in the last (2024-25) recruitment round.

📢At the same time: Large Russell Group institutions in London or the south are expanding.

📢Smaller non-Russell Group institutions are encountering the greatest pressure: they are experiencing the greatest reduction in student admission numbers, the greatest reduction in module choice and field class options

Moreover, the growing inequality between institutions means rolling back on promises of meritocracy, the reinforcement of elitism, reducing provision and opportunities for students from a variety of circumstances and based in different regions. This report calls for urgent action.

It seems incredibly short-sighted to undermine such programmes when we face serious societal challenges such as climate change and need better understanding of local responses provided by disciplines such as human geography and urban sociology which focus on the resilience of communities.

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From the vantage point of today, it is sad that such foolish coveting of ‘fame and fortune’ still very much dominates political agendas to the peril of the beautiful world we live in.

Peary wrote a famous letter to his mother, describing his ambition to be known as the discoverer of the North pole: “Remember, mother, I must have fame."

Consider the famous controversy over who discovered the North Pole, Robert Peary or Frederick Cook, a debate that largely ignores the role of the indigenous guides that both men relied upon, and who had likely set foot on that piece of floating ice we call the North Pole well before.

Such imperialist demands are to the detriment of humanity as a whole: a point that anti-colonial scholarship continues to make. It is difficult however to change modes of thinking.

The common lore of the Arctic being a seat of brave exploration plays straight into the hands of the powerful who see it as a seat of unending ambition.

This isolation is no more. As ice melts leaving valuable resources exposed, and opening new trading routes, it will be to our folly, “Polar war” argues, to continue to perceive the Arctic as “too cold, too harsh, too inaccessible, too unpredictable”.

The book is full of fascinating musings on the uncompromising “all-too powerful nature” of the Arctic - a plane of being from which the author in 1934 could observe “the anxious face of Europe, which here I had quite forgotten”.

One of my favourite books is Christiane Ritter’s “A woman in the polar night. The classic memoir of a year in the arctic wilderness”, “the first European woman to spend the winter so far north”.

There are many signs that a “Polar war” is on the cards that threatens to 'trump' the Cold war – a conflict that we now widely recognize as “the clash of cultures and traditions marked by exceeding arrogance for lands apart from those superpowers’ own”.

It is not a coincidence that President Trump, in August 2025, used a military base in Anchorage as the backdrop for a summit with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.

Importantly, “Polar war” traces the proliferation of militarized fishing vessels, nuclear weapons tests, and a reallocation of state funds from regional community-oriented enterprises to natural-resource extraction and defense spending in the Arctic that should be a grave cause of concern to us all.

Another very important book however came out this week that calls for their and frankly everybody’s attention, Kenneth Rosen’s “Polar war. Submarines, spies and the struggle for power in a melting Arctic”. This was highly enjoyable and unsettling read.