On February 13, administrators at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University began to worry that $114-million they had invested with two Wall Street veterans might have disappeared. Their worst fears were realized two weeks later, as federal agents arrested Paul R. Greenwood and Stephen Walsh on multiple counts of fraud and…

In his 1990 book "Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate", Ernest L. Boyer, who was then president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, analyzed the balance between teaching and research in the scholarly endeavors of that era. His conclusion that the university rewarded research at the expense of teaching…

Most statistics courses emphasize the power of statistics. Michele DiPietro's course focuses on the failures. Gay and lesbian studies are certainly fertile ground for bad guesses and unreliable statistics. The most famous number, that 10 percent of the population is gay, was taken from a biased Kinsey sample of white men ages 16 to 55 in 1948, and…

Michael Wesch has been on the lecture circuit for years touting new models of active teaching with technology. The associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University has given TED talks. "Wired" magazine gave him a Rave Award. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching once named him a national professor…

Engineering has long been recognized as a key to the U.S. economy. Yet for more than 20 years, colleges of engineering have been warned that they are failing to keep their curricula and teaching methods relevant, threatening the profession and, by extension, the nation's economic prosperity. After a close-up look at 40 American engineering…

Einstein was blessed with a rare genius. He also understood the intellectual weight of a flight of fancy. He turned over the idea in his mind for a decade before concluding that the light beam next to him would appear to be at rest even though it was traveling at the speed of light. While it may be tempting to focus on Einstein's cognitive…

In 1966 a group of friends gathered for a dinner party in Manhattan. As the evening was winding down, one of the guests, Lloyd N. Morrisett, a vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, turned to his host, a television executive named Joan Ganz Cooney, and asked a seemingly innocuous question: Can television educate young children? Unknown to…

When a student at Carnegie Mellon University became concerned about perceived grading bias in 2005, he proposed an amendment to the university's student-rights policy. Drawn from David Horowitz's "academic bill of rights," the proposal included assertion of a student's right to have his or her "work evaluated based on the stated…

A growing number of business schools, including those at Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and Stanford Universities and the University of Texas at Austin, have instituted programs to catch promising students early. The result, they hope, will be a more diverse student body, with more women and members of minority groups, as well as talented and ambitious…

The revised college and university classification system of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching reflects health and expansion in higher education, with net growth in number of institutions listed. The greatest numerical increase was in two-year colleges, the greatest percentage increase in one research university category. Over…

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.…

When Robert D. Felner applied to become dean of education at the University of Louisville in 2003, he carried a genuinely impressive vita. But two of the most recent large grants listed on that vita could not have survived close scrutiny--and it isn't clear that Louisville's search committee scrutinized them at all. First, the impressive part:…

The text of a statement by the board of trustees of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, concerning the federal role in higher education and the role of education in the nation's and the world's future, is presented. (MSE)

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching will move from the East Coast to the West and have a new president, Lee S. Shulman, whose professional focus has been teaching and teacher education. Some observers feel the foundation has not been active enough in public policy formation recently. However, the new focus will be more on…

Partial text is presented of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's recent report, "College: The Undergraduate Experience in America" concerning confused priorities and competing interests jeopardizing the college experience's quality and future. (MSE)