With roots going back to 1986, the Student Team on Alumni Relations or STAR was one of the first student-alumni groups in Canada and routinely attracted capable and enthusiastic volunteers. It offered to appreciative, albeit small, student audiences a suite of popular programs, including job shadowing and goodie boxes parents could send to their…

This essay explores Jacques Maritain's philosophy of education as a means to better understand Pope Francis's recent promotion of a "Global Compact on Education," and in particular Francis's commitment "to make human persons in their value and dignity the center of every educational program." After situating Maritain's…

Drawing on the concepts of mediatisation and celebrification, this paper analyses how the Nobel Prize is used as a proxy of excellence by the 'Big Three' university rankers and top-ranked universities. Ranking advisories, university leadership at top-ranked institutions, and Nobel Prize adjudication committees are overwhelming from the same…

Purpose: This paper aims to compose a systematic understanding of campus sustainability innovations and unpack the complex drivers behind the elaboration of specific innovations. More precisely, the authors ask two fundamental questions: What are the topics and modes of implementation of campus sustainability innovations? What are the external and…

Higher education institutions are joining many other social entities in shifting how participants are evaluated; work is undergoing increasing analysis through metrics, big data analytics, and related methodologies. As applications of academic metrics expand, new formulations of what is considered as "excellence" in teaching and research…

At one end, we are grappling with quantity i.e. enrollment but on the other hand the most serious concern is quality and relevance of higher education imparted to student. In terms of quality, the biggest lacuna in the system of higher education is mismatch between the need of society and what the students are taught in classrooms. Our…

In this article, the author talks about Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System or "STARS," a tool currently available that aims to help a campus answer the "how" and "how hard" questions. Created by AASHE (the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education), STARS presents guidelines and suggestions (based on…

The Bologna Process is almost at its end and European policy-makers currently reflect on appropriate objectives and policies for the next decade. Given that the Bologna Process is generally seen as an example of unprecedented change in European higher education and that the major overarching objective of the Process was to increase the…

Americans love ranking systems. Whether we are ranking the hottest celebrities, the top ten singles, the top chef, or the next design star, ranking seems to be built into the American psyche as a symptom of our competitive, aspirational nature, and our desire to quickly understand the value of things. This desire has fueled a veritable ranking…

Students in the University of Rhode Island's GLBT community are fed up with what they describe as their marginalization. They are seeking, among other resources, respectable headquarters, where they can invite professors, hold events, and develop a sense of belonging on the campus. Since a week-long protest this past fall, they are gaining ground.…

The educational equivalent of the reality show is the reflective assignment, often associated with the linked contents of a teaching "portfolio." This form of assessment is now increasingly common in higher education and examples can be found in subjects such as nursing or teacher education. Students are asked to reflect on their workplace…

Utilizing the same technologies pioneered by the embedded journalists in Iraq, the University of Central Florida (UCF) teamed up with TracStar, Inc to create a small-scale, satellite-based expedition transmission package to accompany a university film and digital media professor into parts of Utah and the Moab Desert that had a historical…

Argues that the educational system should encourage "down to earth" language by including oral recitation in the curricula, particularly recitation of popular poetry with accompaniment. Using the shuttle disaster as a striking example, claims that the modern media overuses conceptual language to disguise the hard meaning of what is being…

In the spring of 2005, the author, the retiring president of EDUCAUSE, was asked to be the keynote speaker at the EDUCAUSE Western Regional Conference. The conference theme was "Winds of Change: Charting the Course for Technology in Challenging Times." What that brought to his mind was the era of the great sailing ships of the eighteenth and…

Astronomers are using aspects of the fundamentals gleaned by the study of the dynamics of superfluids to help understand what happens inside the intensely hot, collapsed, neutron stars that spin and radiate as pulsars. Current research, focusing on the puzzling behavior of helium in its superfluid state, is discussed. (JN)