Colleges have spent years trying to make their campuses as sustainable as possible, in part to mitigate the effects of global warming. But few of them have strategies to adapt to those effects as they happen. This summer, the most widespread drought in decades, coupled with extensive wildfires and hurricanes, has some administrators thinking about…

According to Freeman Dyson, an emeritus professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, the debate about global warming has become too narrow and opinions have become too entrenched. Relying on a computer model designed by the Yale University economist William D. Nordhaus, Dyson compared the effectiveness and economic feasibility of…

In the past few years, as issues like global warming and soaring energy costs have moved from the back offices of the company environmental adviser to the front office of the chief executive, businesses have joined students in demanding that schools pay closer attention to the issues. This article talks about business schools which have seen an…

For the past three years, leading scientists from more than 40 countries have been conducting a physical of the planet. They have monitored its vital signs, probed its parts, taken its temperature, measured its bodily fluids. This article deals with the global-warming report for the United Nations released by a panel of 1,200 scientists at a news…

This article reports on the message of an environmental activist during a speech last week at a conference of the National Council for Workforce Education. According to the environmental activist Van Jones, community colleges play a pivotal role in pushing the fossil-fuel-dependent economy toward a reliance on renewable energy. A community…

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,…

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize would be shared by Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the award implicitly celebrated a third party--academic institutions. Much of the research on global warming has come from university scientists, and higher…

On a mid-June day this year, 70 college and university presidents gathered in Washington and formed a conference of executive Isaiahs, preaching the message that the threat of global warming required American higher education to fundamentally change the way it did business. The presidents signed a pledge to make their campuses "climate…

Economics is a two-faced discipline. It claims to be a science, describing the world without preconception or value judgment. The reality is that descriptive economics has been shaped by a framework of assumptions geared more to its normative message than to its pretensions. The self-interested individual--who rationally calculates how to achieve…

"Chronicle of Higher Education" presents an abundant source of news and information for college and university faculty members and administrators. This March 4, 2005 issue of "Chronicle of Higher Education" includes the following articles: (1) "Advanced Symptoms of Advanced Degrees" (Douglas, Lawrence; George,…

"Chronicle of Higher Education" presents an abundant source of news and information for college and university faculty members and administrators. This January 7, 2005 issue of "Chronicle of Higher Education" includes the following articles: (1) "College Presidents Must Take Charge of College Sports" (Cowen, Scott…