Since 2003, more than 40 athletics programs have joined the National Junior College Athletic Association (NJCAA) ranks. Membership now represents about 500 colleges, and Wayne Baker, the group's executive director, expects to keep adding colleges. Membership in the association began declining slightly in the early 1990s, as private two-year…

The government agency responsible for enforcing gender equity in college sports is falling down on the job, according to a report released by the National Women's Law Center. Over the past five years, the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights -- the administrative guardian of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the law that…

A surprise request for proposals from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a forthcoming report on university publishing in the digital age were among topics discussed at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses. The offer from the Mellon Foundation concerns support for collaborative, monograph-centered projects in…

The Senate education committee approved a pair of bills that would reduce government subsidies to student-loan companies, increase student aid, and set higher-education policy for the next five years. The Senate's budget-reconciliation measure would use the savings derived from reducing subsidies to student-loan companies to pay down a portion of…

At some point in 1938, Joseph Stalin sat down, alone, and literally rewrote history -- marking up a draft of "The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union", which would be published by the party's Central Committee in 1939. First, the Soviet leader used a gray pencil. Then he switched to quill and indigo ink. He scribbled in the margins…

The Internet has great difficulty coping with the sharp increase in mobile devices like cellphones and laptops, and handling bandwidth-hungry traffic such as video, now demanded by an increasing number of users. According to Ellen W. Zegura, chairwoman of computer sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Internet is like a big…

Last week ApplicationsOnline LLC, in Baltimore, unveiled its Universal College Application, which has already won a baker's dozen of clients dissatisfied with the Common Application, including Duke and Harvard Universities. Although some of the 13 institutions plan to use ApplicationsOnline's service in addition to the Common Application, the…

This article reports on an annual copyright license for colleges created by the Copyright Clearance Center, a nonprofit group that manages licenses for the reuse of published material, that will allow institutions to pay a blanket fee to use copyrighted material instead of securing the rights to such content on a case-by-case basis. The blanket…

Undergraduate enrollments have grown sixfold in the last half-century and continue to boom; today more than 80 percent of high-school graduates go to college within approximately eight years of graduation. One might expect those accomplishments to be celebrated, but the expansion of higher education has been accompanied by ambivalence, anxiety,…

Women are expected to own half the wealth in the United States by 2010. They also account for 58 percent of undergraduates at colleges today. Those statistics should loom large for higher-education fund raisers at a time when almost every institution is either in the middle of its largest fund-raising campaign ever or planning to announce one. But…

This article reports on a U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down two voluntary school-integration plans in a 5-to-4 ruling issued last week. Its decision left solidly intact its precedents dealing with affirmative action in higher education. Rather than signaling any clear desire to revisit its past decisions on race-conscious admissions…

As a professor of law and higher education, Lake compares the April 2007 shootings to those at Kent State nearly 40 years earlier. The mishandling of the Kent State crisis brought heavy criticism of higher education, and a culture of rules, procedures, and policies arose to replace old patterns of using force and violence to manage conflicts. …

Recent decades have produced millions of medieval re-enactors, role players, and fantasy buffs -- and billions of dollars for the industries that fuel them. However, writes Gravois, academic medievalists have viewed this engorged popular interest not as an embarrassment of riches, but as simply embarrassment. Yet those same re-enactors, role…

Of all the Islamic universities in Sudan, none has a more controversial, and complicated history than the country's International University of Africa. The university traces its political roots to a 1989 military coup that brought to power an Islamist regime with ideological ambitions for the region. The institution began as the International…

In 1991 three Christian students sued the University of Virginia after they were denied funds for their evangelical newspaper. The students said the case was about free speech; the university argued it was about separation of church and state. The U.S. Supreme Court found in favor of the students, a landmark ruling that guaranteed equal treatment…