Robert N. Bellah turns 80 early next year, and Duke University Press is honoring him with "The Robert Bellah Reader," edited by Bellah, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, and Steven M. Tipton, a professor of sociology at Emory University. The book, just published, presents a selection of Bellah's work…

In this article, the author discusses the enforcement of "hate speech" codes and confirms research that considers why U.S. colleges and universities continue to promulgate student disciplinary rules prohibiting expression that "subordinates" others or is "demeaning, offensive, or hateful." Such continued adherence to speech codes is by now…

To better understand the recruiting techniques used by for-profit education companies, the author, recently conducted a minor investigation of his own as part of a broader research program that aims to document examples of corruption and duplicity across the gamut of higher-education institutions. He assumed the identity of a 31-year-old…

One issue that drew a great deal of interest at the annual conference of the National Collegiate Athletic Association in Indianapolis January 2006 was how escalating costs are leading to increasing competitive imbalances between smaller colleges and their larger, wealthier rivals. Concern over these inequities led to a group of mostly smaller…

Teaching 11 agriculture-college students to make art--to see creatively, to represent imaginatively--has turned out to be a challenge, for an artist like Mr. Austin C. Heitzman who, during a year in Rome, painted a cheesy Wild West landscape, carried it down to the banks of the Tiber, and took photos of himself posing in front of it while wearing…

Last week the venerable publisher John Wiley & Sons made a surprise announcement that it would purchase Blackwell Publishing Ltd. for about $1.13-billion, an acquisition likely to have broad consequences for the world of academic journals and libraries. Assuming that the deal is completed, Wiley's scientific, technical, and medical division will…

There was a dearth of popular economics books in the early 1990s that showed a reader not only that economics meant something in everyday life, but that economists were people who understood what everyday life was. However, a decade later, books such as "Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science", by Charles J. Wheelan, show that it is…

San Jose State University is planning to ban Skype, a popular Internet telephone service, from the campus network because of concerns about security and bandwidth. University administrators say that the technical aspects that make Skype effective also make it dangerous and potentially crippling to a university's network bandwidth. Skype has a…

Colleges in the US raised a collective US$25.6-billion in private donations during the 2005 fiscal year, which is a 4.9% increase from the previous year, but the proportion of alumni who made gifts fell again. The wealth was also not evenly distributed, with the increase in giving to just the top ten institutions accounting for half of the total…

One of the most striking developments in Italian higher education in recent years has been the growth of commercial tutoring schools, which help college students prepare for the oral examinations on which their grades are based. By far the largest of such schools, the European Center for University Preparation, known by its Italian abbreviation,…

Academics in Afghanistan, with help from abroad, are struggling to repair the damage done to the country's higher-education system by decades of occupation, civil war, and fundamentalist Taliban rule. However, sporadic foreign aid, a lack of basic resources, and overwhelming demand leave plenty of room for improvement in the otherwise remarkable…

A number of colleges in the US are adopting conduct codes for their athletes, which set both expectations for behavior and punishments for specific infractions and give athletics directors, rather than coaches, the power to bench players who break the rules. Some athletic officials call such codes too rigid, though the proponents feel the…

Administrators at Union College, worried that the Greek system that dominated the campus was harming the college's students and its reputation, attempted to redefine campus social life in 2000. However, instead of dissolving fraternities, the Union decided to make the Greek system part of a social experiment, working with members of fraternities…

Beginning this past summer, all new employees at some Ohio public universities, including those accepting teaching positions, are being confronted with politically sensitive and intrusive questions. In addition to the "Have you solicited any individual for membership in an organization on the U.S. Department of State Terrorist Exclusion?" inquiry,…

American college students are increasingly posting videos of their lives online, due to Web sites like Vimeo and Google Video that host video material free and the ubiquity of camera phones and other devices that can take video-clips. However, the growing popularity of online socializing has many safety experts worried that students could be…