Deep dives
Univers(al)ités read the university as a civic institution, not only as a place of teaching. Across more than a thousand posts, Bernard Rentier followed autonomy, governance, public funding, digital education, and the pressure of market language on academic life. The tone was close to an insider’s field journal: local enough to know ULiège from within, international enough to place Liège inside the wider crisis of higher education.
"Requiem pour l'Université" - Nicolas Thirion - LeVif Mobile
The topic also treated academic freedom as a political alarm bell. Posts on attacks against universities, Brexit, Trump-era science policy, and European research funding were gathered as evidence that the university’s freedom depends on laws, budgets, and public culture, not just on scholarly ideals.
Italy has edged closer to fascism with a startling attack on academic freedom
Its local thread mattered. ULiège, Liège, Wallonia, and francophone Belgium appeared not as narrow territory but as a testing ground for larger questions: how a university serves a city, how it recognizes global figures, and how it keeps public knowledge alive.
L’ULiège crée la Chaire internationale Mukwege
Open-Up Public Science! was the most explicit expression of Rentier’s reformist line. It advanced a public, non-commercial vision of scholarly communication, one in which access to knowledge is treated as an ethical infrastructure rather than a publisher’s product.
Global Alliance of Open Access Scholarly Communication Platforms to democratize knowledge
The strongest pattern was collective action. The topic followed institutional breaks with Elsevier, big-deal cancellations, library tools, open platforms, and funder pressure. It showed open science not as a slogan but as a sequence of concrete negotiations, boycotts, technical fixes, and policy choices.
University of California break with Elsevier tipped to boost ‘global revolt’
The topic also moved beyond access to articles. Reproducibility, open peer review, hidden data, and copyright appeared as connected parts of the same system. Rentier’s emphasis was clear: opening science meant changing incentives, ownership, verification, and the tools scholars use.
Introducing ’s first computationally reproducible article
Evaluations, classements: mythes et réalités formed the critical spine of the archive. It challenged the idea that quality, teaching, discovery, and institutional worth can be cleanly reduced to rankings or metrics. The recurring objection was not that numbers are imperfect, but that they can distort the purposes they claim to measure.
Overpowered Metrics Eat Underspecified Goals (via @ArneBab)
University rankings were treated as both symptom and driver of a managerial culture. The topic followed Shanghai, Times Higher Education, teaching frameworks, impact factors, h-indexes, altmetrics, and self-citation debates, often with a tone of impatience toward what it saw as false objectivity.
University rankings ignore teaching - University World News
This was also where the open-science argument became evaluative: if research careers reward the wrong signs, openness remains fragile. The topic pointed toward more responsible assessment, with peer judgment and qualitative context restored to the center.
Time to remodel the journal impact factor
