Every other summer, Sewanee: the University of the South invites a handful of prospective students to take an exclusive tour of its campus and surroundings, in Tennessee. This special treatment is reserved for "legacy" students. Sewanee, like many other small private colleges, aggressively recruits prospective students whose parents, grandparents,…

This article deals with issues of community-college transfers of students from Alamance Community College to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This article discusses the involvement of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation in the issue of community-college transfer. The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, based in Lansdowne, Va., near Washington,…

In this article, the author presents a trend in higher education wherein students assert their opinions immediately instead of mastering and reflecting first on a material being studied. The author presents a particular situation wherein a scholar of postmodern thought taught an honors seminar on the French philosopher Michel Foucault to a class…

As much as 90 percent of all documents and correspondence are created and maintained in electronic formats, according to information experts. So it is not surprising that the focus of many lawsuits is shifting to electronically stored information: how to preserve it, how to search vast quantities of it for relevant evidence, and how to produce it…

In this article, the author talks about the situation of Muslims in Western countries such as the United States. Here, the author talks about his experience wherein his visa was being revoked in late July 2004. The reason is that he made donations totaling approximately $900 to a Swiss Palestinian-support group that is now on the American…

Paul Snowden's appointment as a dean to the School of International Liberal Studies at Waseda University was considered so unusual that he compared it to the first moonwalk. Snowden's new position was the highest position reached by a non-Japanese at Waseda, Japan's top private university. Waseda's embrace of foreigners is still considered an…

Lurking behind the championships, trophies, and academic achievements of many top female athletes is a devastating battle with eating disorders--not a new problem, but one that has changed the way coaches talk to their teams about weight and nutrition. The illnesses, which are often difficult to detect, can throw an entire team into a tailspin.…

College campuses provide lots of institutions that look like those one finds in a democratic society--newspapers, government, courts--but ultimately the campus versions are not the same. When anybody sign up for college, he/she is volunteering (and paying) to be part of a particular community with particular rules. This article discusses the…

This article deals with the role that religion has played in dealing with environmental issues. For many years, environmental issues were considered to be the concern of scientists, lawyers, and policy makers. Now the ethical dimensions of the environmental crisis are becoming more evident. Until recently religious communities have been so…

This article talks about a special program implemented at Towson University, wherein students are admitted into college even if they don't qualify under the regular admissions. The Towson program is an experiment, and Deborah J. Leather, the associate provost who runs it, acknowledges that it is too soon to tell whether the effort has been worth…

In this article, the author shares his realizations as he changed careers from a former publisher to a dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He describes that his work as a dean in academe is not so much different from his job as a longtime editor. He also relates that…

Over the last 50 years, certain ideas have become dominant that make learning to read different than it once was than the ideas that children are neurologically "wired" to use language "competently" in certain ways. Noam Chomsky has promoted the idea that there are certain "syntactic structures" hard-wired in the human brain. That view, the author…

In this article, the author, who is a scientist, a wife and a mother of two preschool children talks about how these two roles exerted a disproportionate impact on her career choices. She is also an X-Gal, one of a group of nine female biologists who have banded together to offer one another advice and support as they seek careers in academic…

In this article, the author discusses Europe's anti-Americanism stance. He observes that Europe's aversion to America has become greater, louder, and more determined, and that it has unified Western Europeans more than any other political emotion (with the exception of a common hostility toward Israel). The author contends that the many disastrous…

Compliance officers investigate, report on, and oversee the correction of behaviors that fail to comply with the law. At colleges they monitor a vast array of regulatory requirements in areas as diverse as health care, scientific research, immigration, labor law, and environmental safety. Until recently the strongest argument in favor of a…