Einstein was blessed with a rare genius. He also understood the intellectual weight of a flight of fancy. He turned over the idea in his mind for a decade before concluding that the light beam next to him would appear to be at rest even though it was traveling at the speed of light. While it may be tempting to focus on Einstein's cognitive…

Colleges and universities looking to recruit leaders from within the faculty ranks will face more and more difficulty. From their respective positions--as a provost (Janel) and a search consultant (Dennis)--they often hear senior executives in higher education say that building a new generation of faculty leaders will be a major challenge in the…

Just listen to Dimitrius Graham sing. As a music major at Morgan State University, he seems keenly aware of certain realities about his life: His talent is undeniable and probably innate, and his future is promising but uncertain. He could make a career singing on Broadway or climbing the charts as a Billboard phenomenon. Because he went to…

Lately there has been a great deal of discussion about the importance of measuring a college's "return on investment." Is the point of a college education quantifiable results or personal and intellectual growth? In pursuit of answers, "The Chronicle" asked a selection of higher-education leaders. Phyllis M. Wise, Chancellor of the University of…

When Heather Berg arrived at the University of Virginia in the fall of 2011, she was struck by the seemingly posh lifestyle many of her fellow students enjoyed. Now finishing her second year, she has friends who also felt that culture shock at first. But it's been hard to find them, and to speak candidly with anyone about the impact of money--or…

In his first book, "Acts of Faith," Eboo Patel describes his early encounters with interfaith events in the late 1990s. He was not impressed. "They were excruciatingly boring," he writes. Why so much talk and so little action, his restless, twenty-something self had wondered. "And where were the young people?" Fast forward a dozen years. Now 37,…

The past year has seen the meteoric rise of the MOOC, or massive open online course, which lets 100,000 strangers--or more--log on to free classes branded "Stanford" or "Harvard." "The New York Times" went so far as to call 2012 the "Year of the MOOC." Amid the cacophony of voices calling for colleges to cut costs and reduce student debt, many of…

Academics can be too snug in their institutional silos. They sometimes think of one another as competitors for students, and as a result they duplicate scarce resources in mutually damaging ways. In this article, the author wants to argue that teaching-focused institutions have much to gain from partnerships with research universities on the…

The largest-ever survey of professors who have taught MOOCs, or massive open online courses, shows that the process is time-consuming, but, according to the instructors, often successful. Nearly half of the professors felt their online courses were as rigorous academically as the versions they taught in the classroom. The survey, conducted by "The…

Rarely do political scandal and academe collide so publicly as they have now, in Europe. In February, Germany's education minister stepped down after Heinrich Heine University, in Dusseldorf, revoked her doctorate because her thesis lifted passages from other sources without proper attribution. Her departure came after scandals over plagiarized…

It's no secret that states and the federal government have found themselves in a financial pinch when it comes to higher education. After years of recession and sluggish recovery, states have slashed per-pupil public spending on higher education by 14.6 percent since 2008. At the federal level, though money for Pell Grants has more than doubled…

For 40 years, federal money has sustained higher education while enabling its worst tendencies. That is about to change. The end may have come on February 12, 2013, when President Barack Obama delivered his State of the Union address. "Skyrocketing costs," the president said, "price way too many young people out of a higher education, or saddle…

This article profiles A.C. Grayling, a British intellectual who pioneers a new model for college. In his role as founder of the New College of the Humanities, Britain's newest and most controversial institution of higher education, A.C. Grayling could have chosen among several titles. The senior academic officer at most English higher-education…

About 16 percent of veterans use the GI Bill to attend private institutions, roughly the same proportion as students generally. But at the most highly selective colleges, veterans using the Post-9/11 GI Bill barely fill a single classroom--38 at Penn, 22 at Cornell, and at Princeton, just one. The sparse numbers do not go unnoticed, veterans say.…

For years, faculty members have pointed to the sluggish growth in the number of tenured professors and complained that university payrolls are filled with too many administrators. This, they maintain, adds unnecessary costs and takes the focus away from teaching and learning. But whether such "administrative bloat" is really occurring and how much…