People's ambivalence about the role that group membership plays in the public sphere is unfolding before everyone's eyes in the 2008 presidential campaign. While a "New York Times"/CBS News poll said that 69 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. is ready for a black president, a lot of Americans still believe that society still treats blacks…

Nearly 10 years ago, the author wrote an essay for "The Chronicle" on the underrepresentation of Asian-Americans in academic leadership, especially in institutions and disciplines that have a high percentage of students and faculty members of Asian or Pacific Island ancestry. There have been changes over the past 10 years, but not so much for…

Nationwide, minority and female faculty members were trailblazers in the 1960s and 1970s. Only in the past generation have most colleges adopted large-scale plans to diversify their faculties. This article revisited ambitious plans announced at five universities during the past two decades to see how they have fared. They are Duke University,…

Although the author is a computer scientist, he has been involved with issues of diversity for many years. He developed an online gamelike environment to teach inner-city kids algebra, using culturally relevant learning technologies, and he has applied data-mining techniques to help universities admit diverse classes without relying on just one…

Scholars spend years working on a book, toiling in archives, poring over sources, examining and re-examining data, only to discover that they are not alone. Someone else is working on more or less the same book. This article presents vignettes of scholars doing research for their books, thinking they are the first, yet feeling shocked at…

Last year the National Association for College Admission Counseling (Nacac) asked William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard University, to lead a panel that would examine testing issues and recommend how colleges might better use entrance exams. The dean and his fellow panelists were to present their findings this…

From the halls of Congress to the kitchen tables of American families, that long-simmering complaint--Why does college cost so much?--is getting louder and more urgent. As a slew of recent reports, public forums, and growing media interest suggest, the rising cost of college looms larger and larger as a personal and national concern. In this…

Steven Bitterman was fired by his school after he offended his students for telling them that they could easily appreciate the biblical story of Adam and Eve if they considered it a myth. Several adjunct and full-time professors who work off the tenure track have been fired after saying something, as Mr. Bitterman did, that offended students or…

Competitive debate has traditionally served as a laboratory for the democratic process and an important training ground for future policy makers. In recent years, a growing number of teams have played the game out of traditional bounds. They have turned events into commentaries on debate itself, in performances that bear little resemblance to the…

Investors were hardly the only ones shaken by the tumult in the financial markets this month. Business schools suddenly found themselves struggling to make sense of events on Wall Street, with some critics blaming an ethically challenged curriculum for the troubles. Current and prospective students, meanwhile, worried about job prospects. On…

Who needs college credit when one can have a makeshift diploma from a superstar professor? One such example is David Wiley who taught an online course at Utah State University recently and let anyone fully participate, even if they were not enrolled. The unofficial students paid no tuition and got no formal credit, but they did end up with…

This article reports that after years of double-digit gains, college endowments are feeling the pinch from distressed financial markets. Some colleges are reporting negative rates of return for the fiscal year that just ended, and even those that performed better are wondering what the current financial crisis will mean. If the market's slide…

This article reports that members of Congress were poised to leave Washington last week with some major higher-education accomplishments to campaign on and a slate of unfinished business important to colleges. Topping the higher-education to-do list for the next Congressional session is federal spending for the 2009 fiscal year, which began…

Few Americans outside the Bible Belt understand the pressure placed on nonconformists in the South. The historical roots are deep: The people who had been defeated in the Civil War felt they had to stick together, so they feared the man or woman who spoke up and said, "I do not agree." As a Southerner whose parents passionately supported the…

This article reports that despite the doubts about education financing, Israel's innovative companies spun off by universities show no signs of slowing down, as new drugs and other discoveries have produced huge incomes. Thirty years ago, two researchers at Hebrew University set about to make a better tomato. One that was firmer, stayed fresher…