There comes a time when every assistant professor, if he or she is to survive in academe, must learn how to "manage up." In this article, the author presents some things every assistant professor should know about how to get along with the boss. It is vital to be aware of the benchmarks that are particularly attractive to the leadership of one's…

As more college students are relying on part- or full-time work to help pay for their education, federally financed work-study jobs are becoming harder to find. The percentage of freshmen who planned to hold full-time jobs while in college jumped to 4.7 percent this year, from 2.7 percent in 2000. But as more students are seeking jobs, federal…

In this article, the author, dean of academic affairs at Augustana College in Illinois, reflects on an alumnus, English major David Allen, who has gained prominence in his field. A photo of the alumnus, wearing nothing but a cap, a pair of boots, and a strategically-placed guitar, appeared on the front page of a local newspaper, under a headline…

In this article, the author shares his experience as he traveled from island to island with a single objective--to reach the archives. He found out that not all archives are the same. In recent months, his daydreaming in various facilities has yielded a recurrent question on what would constitute the Ideal Archive. What follows, in no particular…

This article presents a discussion about lifelogging and its applications. The author provides a brief history of lifelogging tracing back to 1945, when Vannevar Bush, a prominent American scientist, wrote an essay for The Atlantic Monthly called "As We May Think." Scientists deal with an increasingly unmanageable trove of data and other…

Last month Duke University's student newspaper published a letter signed by 17 economics professors. It said that, in the wake of the lacrosse scandal, the professors regretted the perception that Duke faculty members were prejudiced against some students. It also publicly welcomed all students--including lacrosse players--to enroll in the…

This article reports an open-access journal from the Public Library of Science that has begun an online publication, offering all readers the opportunity to post comments. The site is in trial status, but registered readers will soon be able to rate each article on merit. The idea is that the best papers will bubble to the top; the wisdom of the…

So opined Adam Cohen recently in the "International Herald Tribune", and so, too, according to a recent book by Joshua Foa Dienstag, a political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, "Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit "(Princeton University Press, 2006). In his defense of pessimism as an appropriate and realistic philosophy,…

When a student at Carnegie Mellon University became concerned about perceived grading bias in 2005, he proposed an amendment to the university's student-rights policy. Drawn from David Horowitz's "academic bill of rights," the proposal included assertion of a student's right to have his or her "work evaluated based on the stated course and program…

This article reports on the findings of a study of college presidents released by the American Council on Education. Although more members of minority groups and women lead higher-education institutions today than in the past, the study shows the rate of diversification in the president's office has been slow, particularly since the late 1990s.…

This article presents the personal narrative of the author, a former Episcopal priest, who is in search for deep religious dialogue. In this article, she shares how she finds richer spiritual exploration teaching students at Piedmont College than she did leading congregations and how she has finally found a place where she can engage in religious…

The Association of American Publishers has hired a public-relations firm with a hard-hitting reputation to respond to the open-access-publishing movement, which campaigns for scientific results to be made freely available to the public. The firm, Dezenhall Resources, designs aggressive public-relations campaigns to counter activist groups. The…

The author found the academic blog of Gwynn Dujardin interesting for two reasons. Dujardin was newly hired into a tenure-track position, which she started in the fall at Queen's University at Kingston in Ontario. And her scholarly research concerned spelling reform and education in Renaissance England, so her posts provided witty and…

Reading First is a $900-million-a-year project that offers states grants to improve reading instruction for children in kindergarten through third grade. However, Reading First is now awash in allegations of mismanagement and conflicts of interest. The Education Department's inspector general issued a report that declared that the program's…

In a speech at the University of Regensburg, the pope emphasized the role of theology in correlating faith with reason. He argued that within the university it should be accepted without question that "it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason." That speech created an uproar in the Muslim…