This article reports on an unsettled tenure case at Columbia University. The high-profile and controversial tenure bid of Joseph A. Massad, a Palestinian-American professor of Arab politics, was turned down by Columbia University's provost, Alan Brinkley. Mr. Massad's case follows closely on two other high-profile tenure bids affected by the…

It is most surprising that Yale University is spending $126-million to renovate and add to a 1963 Modernist building that almost everyone has hated for decades. Aside from that, the project's champion is a high-society architect whose own career refutes pretty much the whole Modernist design theology. This article talks about the renovation of…

After nearly three years of planning, Ohio's higher-education officials are finalizing an ambitious program to grant college credit for some technical courses offered at the state's adult-education centers. The program, called the Career-Technical Credit Transfer, is the latest in a string of state efforts to more closely link work-force training…

By the end of June, the U.S. Supreme Court will issue its first decision in many decades on the meaning of the right to keep and bear arms under the Constitution. The ruling could have a significant impact on federal gun-control regulations. The Second Amendment has historically not been held to apply to state regulations, but a decision by the…

At colleges, presidents, provosts, and even faculty senates are taking a fresh look at how to manage professors' retirements. A few institutions that have sought to trim their tenured-faculty ranks for other reasons offer early lessons for those institutions that want to encourage retirements. Many institutions are doing just that, using…

This article discusses how community colleges respond to the rising number of faculty members who are eligible for retirement. Many faculty members at community colleges are near retirement largely because many of the colleges were created and did the bulk of their hiring between 1965 and 1975, when the first group of baby boomers was entering the…

This article describes how a 26-panel altarpiece that once adorned a 15th-century Spanish cathedral inspired faculty members and students at Southern Methodist University to spend a semester dissecting the piece in a multidisciplinary course that featured songs, floats, videos, and painting. The course sprang out of a discussion Mark Roglan,…

Blowing the whistle on liars, cheaters, or thieves is likely to impose a cost on the whistle-blower, while everyone else benefits from this act of conscience. If this is so, then why don't people just mind their own business and let someone else do the dirty work? A conceivable explanation is that if no one else perceives the transgression or,…

Students with complaints about faculty members--baseless or otherwise--take up a great deal of a typical department head's day. This author, a department chairman for seven years, supervised close to 200 full-time and part-time faculty members, and received complaints about every single one. At least 70 percent of those complaints were of the "my…

In this article, the author describes his and a colleague's experience of selecting and interviewing candidates for a tenure-track faculty position. He relates how they thought that they had selected 18 excellent candidates until they met them for interview. The author found that the majority of those they interviewed knew nothing about the…

How should one think about assessment in general education--or what is sometimes called liberal education--in the pluralistic environment of American higher education? Generalizations about longitudinal collegiate assessment are difficult, not least because of the remarkable range of four-year institutions and the students who attend them.…

When a freshman at San Diego State University (SDSU) died of a cocaine overdose last May, the campus police chief decided to pursue a full-scale investigation. In December, he summoned undercover agents from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to pose as students and roam the campus in search of illegal drugs. According to college…

More than three decades ago, the debate for Higher Education Act was open to the public. Today the process of crafting a compromise bill looks very different, and the forces shaping the major law governing student aid have shifted in ways both significant and subtle. The changes have given new voices a say in policy decisions and made it harder…

The present financial and credit crisis is unprecedented in recent history, resembling in many ways the onset of the Depression of the 1930s more than subsequent recessions. Presumably, one has learned something about managing such events and will not permit the current economic mess to deteriorate to Depression levels. In this article, the author…

Community colleges serve a large proportion of low-income students each year, but nearly 40 percent of their full-time students don't even fill out a Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Students offer a number of reasons for not making the effort, according to a report, "Apply to Succeed: Ensuring Community College Students Benefit From…