Stories of transient students missing deadlines or being misled about their voting rights are nothing new. But this year, the role younger voters played in Barack Obama's win in Iowa's Democratic presidential primary seems to have motivated a wave of college students in other states. Some of those students--and the campaigns courting them--are out…

Stories of "helicopter parents" abound. But several longtime student-affairs officials agree that while helicopter parents are real, their numbers--and behaviors--have been exaggerated. Parental involvement on campus, they say, is usually more of a help than a headache, for students and colleges alike. Some officials believe colleges must do even…

Kevin C. Elliott, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, asserts in the January issue of the journal "Accountability in Research" that the three pillars of academe's attempts to police conflict of interest--disclosure, management, and elimination of conflicts--are beset by serious flaws. Charges of…

Curriculum management is at the source of issues consuming academics, including high tuition, low adjunct pay, shared governance, graduate education, academic calendars, and budgetary models. The issue has the most impact at Ph.D.-granting public universities, but any institution can benefit from analyzing the source of poorly managed pedagogy,…

Libraries need to share records more with one another, make greater use of the Web, and bring more attention to their special collections, according to a report released last month by the Library of Congress. The new study examines how libraries can improve the distribution and use of their materials in a technology-centric environment. But "On…

Faculty members gnash their teeth and wring their hands when students plagiarize. They cry for offenders to be punished. But now an online text-search program directed at their own work suggests that professors in biomedicine may be just as guilty of paper-writing sins. More than 70,000 article abstracts appeared disturbingly similar to other…

Nine years ago, the American Association of Retired Persons officially shortened its name to its abbreviation, AARP. One big reason was that so many of its older members balked at the notion of a "retirement" that connoted time spent only on leisure activities, when so many of them were continuing to work longer--in the same career or in a new…

This article reports the results of a new study on the impact of bans on race-conscious admissions policies which seem to confirm what many critics of affirmative action have long suspected: It is Asian-Americans, rather than whites, who are most disadvantaged by elite universities' consideration of ethnicity and race. Left unanswered are the…

Most professors will never experience a serious threat to their independence or free expression. They may even resent the expectation that they join or support organizations that defend such freedoms when the risks seem so remote to their own careers and fields. Yet for the small fraction of faculty members who do encounter such pressures,…

In response to the threat of global climate change, more than 550 campus leaders have signed the Presidents Climate Commitment, pledging their colleges to become carbon-neutral. But some educators worry that colleges are fulfilling only half of their environmental duties. The other half, of course, should take place in the classroom, where…

A life-and-death battle is going on over public access to federally financed research--life for taxpayers and many scientists, and death for publishers. Or so each side claims. That battle, whose outcome will affect many university researchers, kicked into high gear on Capitol Hill on September 11, as the combatants debated the merits of a bill…

Nationally, students have pushed hard for local-food programs, and the amount of local produce in the dining hall is sometimes used as a litmus test for a college's overall commitment to sustainability. Local food has been a hot topic in popular culture in recent years, thanks in part to books by Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, movies like…

Don't drink too much, download pirated files, light candles, or prop open doors. Warnings like those pervade the weighty work of admonition known as the student handbook. However, Allen J. Bova wonders, "Who ever reads that?" So Mr. Bova, director of risk management and insurance at Cornell University, tried to reach students with a video. This…

Throughout the 1980s, the marketing of American colleges and universities became both more aggressive and more sophisticated. Colleges created new administrative posts with titles like vice president for enrollment management. Videotapes gave way to CD's and DVD's and, eventually, to virtual tours and e-mail messages and YouTube and all of the…

At a time when national attention is focused on the relative numbers of women and men on college campuses, little is known about the characteristics of the two genders and how aspects of college further shape those characteristics. The popular messages are oversimplified: Gender equity has been achieved, women are an academic success story, and…