The director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute (North Carolina) is committed to making better use of patient information for medical research, and is building a database from the institute's clinical trials. His approach is to provide biomedical researchers with daily involvement in medicine rather than management. (MSE)

Increasingly, college faculty are complaining about unacceptable and disruptive student behavior in the classroom. Scholars are publishing articles on the problem and institutions are offering workshops to help faculty cope. Blame is placed on a crisis of authority in American society. Some find the trend is not new, but the behavior has worsened.…

Increasingly, students enrolled in regular college classes are taking online courses for convenience. Offering students these options raises administrative issues, including how to balance faculty teaching loads and pay for both forms of instruction. Critics say students choosing online courses are not getting the education they pay for, and…

A survey of United States colleges and universities that enroll the largest numbers of students from Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and Thailand, which have experienced currency devaluations and economic uncertainty, found a less than 10% drop in those enrollments, a much lower rate than anticipated. Institutions have taken steps to ease the…

A 1997 Texas law requires universities to admit the top 10% percent of seniors from each Texas high school, opening a door for many Hispanic and Black seniors in schools with high minority populations. Observers are concerned some students may be underprepared for university work. Elite public universities around the country are watching to see if…

The proportion of women in top collegiate sports programs, 38%, and women's share of athletics budgets increased slightly in 1996-1997. Men still received almost twice as much money as women for operating expenses, recruiting, and athletically related financial aid. Advocates for women's athletics find the gains too small. College football…

Provides data on undergraduate enrollment, athletes (number and proportion of enrollment), operating expenses (amount/proportion), recruiting expenses (amount/proportion), sports-related student financial aid (amount/proportion), football program revenue and expenses, and total athletics budgets for the 1996-97 academic year for 306 institutional…

Changes are occurring in college-level English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction. An accrediting body has been created for ESL programs to begin using uniform standards to evaluate varied programs. ESL teachers, many teaching part-time in more than one institution, are eager for better recognition of their profession, which has suffered in…

Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA) and College Retirement Equities Fund (CREF), the largest pension system in the country, has lost its tax exemption, a change that has both created problems and opened doors to new ventures. TIAA-CREF is now seeking opportunities to manage state tuition-savings plans, and has also established six…

Many colleges have summer academic programs for high school students; some design special courses, while others admit the students to regular college courses. Some target gifted students. While participation in the programs, which are easy to get into, does not assure later entry to the institution, many parents have that expectation. The programs…

In sciences, postdoctoral fellowships have become the terminal academic credential for a research career. Positions are supposed to be temporary, but amount to a holding pattern for many unable to find permanent jobs in research or needing to assemble the required publishing record. Some institutions are beginning to acknowledge this problem and…

Stanford University (California) and the Yamaha Corporation have agreed to pool over 400 patents and patent applications, most involving sound synthesis, and to license them as a package along with rights to the trademark, and share the royalties. The deal builds on a 23-year relationship between Stanford and Yamaha, one which is both fruitful and…

College summer basketball camps and tournaments have become crucial to elite high school players wanting to showcase their talents to obtain college scholarships or gain attention of professional basketball scouts. Critics of the camp system feel it contributes to a "sick" culture in college basketball that devalues education and emphasizes money,…

Leaders of the movement to unionize graduate teaching/research assistants are learning organizing tactics through the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions, and plotting strategies for a critical campaign year. Graduate students at 20 universities already have collective bargaining units, students at 15 institutions are campaigning for union…

An experiment involving 10 university libraries and their patrons suggests that libraries may eventually buy access only to the specific journal articles that scholars want to read, rather than subscribe to the journals' complete contents. Three subscription types are being tested. So far, institutions are buying the least traditional form: access…