As many as four-fifths of high-school graduates will need some form of postsecondary education if they are to become self-sufficient and the nation is to remain economically competitive. At the same time, policy makers, business leaders, and national study groups say the quality of student learning is subpar and want measures of institutional and…

The politics of dual-career academic couples, and the policies directed toward them, have been dissected and debated at length. Rarely mentioned, however, is how an academic career can be affected by a husband, wife, or significant other who is not on the professorial track. Most pairings of professor and nonprofessor work just fine. The partners…

This essay regards the licensing of digital content in universities. The author states that the academic community has overwhelmingly adopted course-management software systems such as Blackboard to distribute electronic course materials to students. She argues that such use presents a significant problem: the absence of any institutional…

Colleges would be required to give students information to help them shop around among loan providers under proposed changes in student-loan programs announced by the U.S. Department of Education. The proposed regulations represent the department's most significant response to date to the continuing controversy over conflicts of interest in the…

This article describes the findings of a Florida commission on campus safety that was issued in May 2007. The commission contradicted assertions by officials at Virginia Tech that they could not share information about the gunman in April's fatal shooting rampage because of privacy laws. The commission was assembled by Governor Charlie Crist in…

Many small colleges have a dedicated fan base for their sports, yet ESPN will not be coming to campus anytime soon. The solution for some has been Webcasting. Faraway alumni are able to reconnect with their alma maters. Troops in Iraq who have ties to the university have been known to watch. Parents get to watch every time young Billy goes up to…

On March 2, Michael J. D'Andrea, professor of counselor education at the University of Hawaii Manoa campus, received a letter informing him that "effective immediately upon your receipt of this letter, you are being reassigned to work at home with pay while the University of Hawaii ... addresses several issues concerning your alleged intimidating,…

For more than half a century, the lucrative Detroit automobile industry drove Michigan's economy, providing the state with plenty of tax revenue to support its public colleges and universities. In recent years, however, the woes of the Big Three auto companies have caused state spending to plummet, resulting in cuts or minimal increases in the…

Donors give art collections worth millions of dollars to colleges, mostly to be displayed in their art museums. But some financially strapped colleges have started looking at the art as a way of escaping their financial woes. Fisk University expects to make $16-million from the sale of two paintings, one by Georgia O'Keeffe and another by Marsden…

Enrollment in undergraduate computer-science programs has dipped all over the country, and among women it has almost vanished, dropping 70 percent between 2000 and 2005. Observers cite different reasons for the drop, including the dot-com bust a few years ago is one, but universities are beginning to agree on one cause that is within their…

Head injuries in sports are nothing new, but in recent years, college athletes have reported a steady rise in concussions. Football players still get the most knocks to the head. Women have managed to keep up with, and often surpass, men in sports-related concussions in the last few years. In basketball, women reported 24 percent more concussions…

This article reports on higher education's failure to enforce rules against drinking that leads to tragedy. Like most parents of college-age children, the author was unaware of the Federal Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act. It only became significant to him when local police told him and his wife that their daughter, Kristine, had died in a…

As it enters its tenth decade, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) struggles with its image. As the chief higher-education organization representing professors nationwide, the AAUP is best known for its widely cited statements on academic freedom and tenure. But in the last generation, even as the number of professors in the…

As the Web evolves, so will the ways people measure scholarly authority. Scholarly authority is being influenced by many of the features that have collectively been dubbed Web 2.0 by Tim O'Reilly and others, and what the author will call Authority 2.0 in order to explore more fully the shifts that seem likely in the near future. In Web 1.0,…

In a much-discussed series of postings on the Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Web site, Michael Gorman, former president of the American Library Association and the recently retired dean of library services at California State University at Fresno, argues that the "often-anarchic world of the Internet" is saturating people's culture with a "tide…