This article describes how researchers work with military to create the next generation of training technology. This article also describes the features of Flatworld, a virtual military training technology. Flatworld is one of many projects under development at the Institute for Creative Technologies, a research group that is supported primarily…

In this article, the author describes the hiring dilemma confronting liberal-arts colleges and offers advice to job seekers who are interested in working at liberal-arts colleges. One should read the college's mission statements and research its history. If it's serving a minority-students population and one has worked with those students, one…

Wilson reports on the resignation of Lawrence H. Summers from the presidency of Harvard University and discusses what Mr. Summers' action may indicate about the power afforded faculty members and whether an outspoken president can ever lead the renowned university. Wilson interviews individuals on both sides of the debate, contrasting the image of…

In recent years, both Harvard and Oxford Universities have been rattled by reform-minded--some say brash--leaders determined to question the status quo. At Harvard, President Lawrence H. Summers proved too controversial for his own good and is scheduled to step down this month after five contentious years in office. But at Oxford, John Hood, who…

During his life and career as a muckraking journalist in Washington, Jack Anderson cultivated secret sources throughout the halls of government--sources who passed on information that allowed Anderson to investigate and write about Watergate, CIA assassination schemes, and countless scandals. His syndicated column, Washington Merry-Go-Round,…

This article reports on a library renovation at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona which incurs complaints from professors and librarians about a shift from print to online materials. The $60-million project at Cal Poly is providing a difficult lesson in the challenges of library renovation, and in the changing role of one of the…

When social critiques of a book outweigh its own social critiques, should professors still require students to read it? In this article, the author shares how he responds to a student's critiques of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," a text in a course he was teaching on obsession. The author has been teaching "Heart of Darkness" for nearly 30…

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign decided last spring to increase its enrollment of non-Illinois students, noting that the Urbana-Champaign campus has the lowest proportion of out-of-state students among the Big Ten universities, with 11 percent. Out-of-state applicants have ACT scores up to a point and a half higher than in-state…

Microsoft has introduced a new search tool to help people find scholarly articles online. The service, which includes journal articles from prominent academic societies and publishers, puts Microsoft in direct competition with Google Scholar. The new free search tool, which should work on most Web browsers, is called Windows Live Academic Search…

The Teacher Education Accrediting Council, or TEAC, which is dwarfed in size by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, known as NCATE, has withstood its older rival's repeated attempts to beat it back, and continues to grow. But TEAC's approach, allowing colleges to set their own goals, is derided by some officials. In this…

A proposed revision in the American Bar Association's accrediting standards for law schools is coming under fire from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which says the proposal seems to require the schools to use racial preferences in hiring and admissions despite federal and state laws limiting such policies. Although a bar-association official…

Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" describes a callous America in which the dollar trumps justice. It famously exposed the American meatpacking industry's loathsome practices and prompted federal consumer-protection laws. It is, however, primarily a sympathetic sketch of the foreign born, those fabled "masses yearning to breathe free" that Americans…

The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) has unveiled plans for what appears to be the world's first online, peer-reviewed encyclopedia devoted to ancient Egypt. The "UCLA Encyclopedia of Egypt," which in April won a $325,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, will include material in Arabic as well as English. The…

Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a research professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles, presented a paper titled "Intelligence Is an Irreducible Aspect of Nature" at a secret conference on intelligent-design, held at Biola University, which describes itself as "a global center for Christian thought." Dr. Schwartz argued that his…

Amy Richlin, a professor of classics at the University of California at Los Angeles, has just translated "Poenulus," a comedy likely written between 224 B.C. and 184 B.C. by the Roman playwright Plautus. To make the comedy comprehensible for modern audiences, Richlin came up with with a bolder and deliberately controversial approach: Seek out…