Academics welcome summer with a collective sigh of relief. Finally they can get to those tasks that are nearly impossible to accomplish during a busy academic year: working on that manuscript, completing the revisions on an article, learning the new laboratory technique from the colleague across the hall. However, those going on the job market in…

At a time when intelligence agencies have never been more important, universities are teaching and studying just about everything else. In 2006 only four of the top 25 universities offered undergraduate courses on intelligence agencies or issues. Scholarly inattention is equally glaring in academic publishing. Between 2001 and 2006, the three most…

After generating months of anxiety among both proponents and opponents of public-school integration, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a predictably close 5-4 decision, ruled that the use of race in student-assignment policies by the Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky, school districts violated the rights of the white petitioners whose children were denied…

This article discusses the timeframe of programs of doctoral study. By the time the 10th anniversary of their enrollment in a Ph.D. program has rolled around, about 57 percent of doctoral students have their terminal degrees in hand, according to new data from the Council of Graduate Schools. Perhaps the most interesting of the council's findings…

Since President Bush named Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court, speculation has run high as to where the new court may be headed. Citing three recent cases ("Morse v. Frederick", "Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, Inc." and "Garcetti v. Ceballos"), Rahdert expresses concern…

For years administrators at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, in Richmond, Virginia, had a hunch that students were not taking full advantage of the college's advising services. Still, they were disappointed two years ago, when the Community College Survey of Student Engagement revealed that their students rarely used career services and…

Faculty salaries and support for professors' staff, equipment, and sabbaticals are among the key cost drivers of any higher-education institution. College administrators are hesitant to confront faculty members, who, as they defend their turf, often charge that cutting costs will damage the quality of education that they provide. At a national…

The National Labor College was created to increase educational opportunities for union members, and its bachelor's-degree programs, like labor studies and the political economy of labor, focus on material that is immediately applicable to workers' day-to-day union roles. The idea is to make those blue-collar workers more effective at negotiating,…

This article describes the meeting between Mr. Eugene M. Lang and about 30 other higher-education leaders in midtown Manhattan to discuss the future of Project Pericles. Project Pericles Inc., is the organization founded in 2001 by the 87-year-old multimillionaire and renowned philanthropist. The organization aimed to promote civic involvement not…

Scholars disagree about the relative importance of racism and economic inequality, but there's a consensus that both are significant and worthy of study. And much work is devoted to the question of when race matters and when it does not. Michaels recognizes that most poor kids, given their lack of resources, are not adequately prepared to succeed…

State appropriations often fail to keep up with the growth of colleges' budgets, forcing institutions to raise tuition for out-of-state students to fill budget gaps. However, the strategy could backfire if too many of these students look elsewhere, leaving colleges with even less tuition revenue than before the raises were put in place.

This article focuses on the coordinated effort of governors, business leaders and education leaders to prepare students for college. Governors from 45 states, corporate executives, policy experts, leaders from both secondary and higher education, and representatives from a wide range of philanthropic and other nonprofit organizations have all…

In this article, the author describes how institutions of higher education have changed over the course of 40 years, and notes some changes in higher education. In 1966 the total U.S. population was 196,560,338; this fall it hit 300 million. In about the same time, the number of colleges and universities rose from 2,329 to well over 4,000,…

This article, discusses Brown University's slavery report, a 106-page narrative examination of the early connections between Brown University and slavery, that has been greeted--so far--with silence. The report, done at the behest of Ruth J. Simmons, Brown's president and herself a descendant of slaves, is an unsparing look at a shameful side of…

Young American adults are spending more and more time on activities like sending e-mail messages or blogging, and less time on books, the arts, politics, and their studies, with the result being that they are cut off from the worlds beyond their social circuit. Observers say that the disengagement of students from the liberal-arts curriculum is…