Congress has passed a bill that would reauthorize the Higher Education Act. Now five years overdue, the new act created many programs and requirements for colleges and universities. Given all the time and effort that went into it, do aspects of the final legislation fall short? What key measures have been left out? In this article, six policy…

It took five years, dozens of drafts, and a total of 14 extensions, but Congress last week was finally on the verge of passing a bill to renew the Higher Education Act, the major law governing federal student aid. The bill, after approval by the U.S. House of Representatives, was headed to the Senate, where a final vote was planned for late last…

Reading through news-media clippings about James Wood, one might reasonably conclude that "pre-eminent critic" is his official job title. In fact, Wood is a staff writer for "The New Yorker" and a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University. But at a time when there is much hand-wringing about the death of the…

Before the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iranian graduate students and academics frequently studied or worked in the United States. That year, for example, the 51,300 Iranian students in the United States were the single largest group of foreign students in the country. Many, if not most, Iranian professors received their doctorates from American…

Australia has been stunningly successful in its ability to recruit foreign students. An estimated 250,000 of them study at Australia's 39 universities and their offshore programs. That's an estimated 6 percent of the world market. This article reports that even as Australia has gained admiration overseas for its recruiting successes, university…

Annual reports aren't exactly beach reading, but for anyone interested in the current condition of scholarly communication, the just-published 2007 report of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation--particularly the essay on "Scholarly Publishing Initiatives" by Donald J. Waters and Joseph S. Meisel--is a page turner. The foundation's deep pockets and…

This article reports on a conflict between the inventor of a medicine for dry eyes and the university where she worked, which highlights the pitfalls in commercialization of academic discoveries. Renee L. Kaswan, the former professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Georgia has been prodding the institution to be more aggressive in…

In this article, the author points out that the cultural bias against serious study of science and technology is rarely recognized as a reason for American students' poor performance. Students respond more profoundly to cultural imperatives than to market forces. In the United States, students are insulated from the commercial market's demand for…

This article reports on the imprisonment of a Muslim former student on charges related to terrorism that has struck a chord among academics and public intellectuals. Syed Fahad Hashmi, a 28-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, is being held in solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, on multiple…

Last June the author, a teacher of political theory at Tsinghua University, was asked by a Canadian television crew to get hold of some students for a special on modern China. During the discussion, the author observed that his Chinese students express a thoughtful and informed nationalism, and a distrust of Western-style democracy. Some of the…

As Congress rushed to finish the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (after five years and 14 short-term extensions), nearly 3,000 miles away, on a corner of the Stanford University campus, Lee S. Shulman officially said goodbye to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching after 11 years as its president. In this article, Mr.…

A perennial talking point of politicians and scientists, since the time of the Greeks, is to lament how American youth are sliding into moral decrepitude, lawlessness, and poor mental health. Indeed, to hear some observers talk, particularly in this election year, young people in the United States are being battered by a coarsened culture that…

This article profiles Neil Slater, the longtime leader of the jazz program at the University of North Texas who encouraged both musical perfection and artistic freedom among his star pupils. Standards are high at North Texas, which has become a Camelot where aspiring jazz musicians have come to hone their skills since 1947, when it offered one of…

Digital-humanities centers have sprung up on many campuses, and the field has already launched many careers--but not always smoothly. A panel at the Modern Language Association conference in December focused on a particular subset of work that the organizers described as "literary geospaces." Two of the featured projects--Janelle Jenstad's Map of…

This article describes how professors became magnets for crackpots bearing pet theories and searching for validation. Scott A. Hughes, an associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received a 22-page, single-spaced screed this May just begging for a place in the crackpot file. The subject line read, in part,…