Inside Higher Ed

Imagine that you have to come to a mutually acceptable decision with competing interests, fast, in a group and under the spotlight. Being a trustee is one tough job, argue Cathy Trower and Peter Eckel.

Student activists at the University of Arizona issued a list of demands on Tuesday that included urging the university to provide free tampons and menstrual pads on campus. The demand was immediately mocked by some conservative commentators (“campus crybullies demand free tampons,” theBreitbart headline reads), but the request is not unusual. It’s a call that is becoming increasingly common on col

Soon after Governor Andrew Cuomo unveiled his budget for fiscal year 2017, the protests began at New York City’s public colleges. Nearly 500 students and faculty members traveled to Albany two weeks ago to attend a rally, and another group returned Tuesday to meet with legislators. Last week,

Rejecting a set of amendments that faculty members argued would have preserved tenure as they know it, the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents approved Thursday new tenure policies to fill a hole left by recent changes in state law. 

Dear students in my Race & Ethnicity course, The questions -- really, belligerent interrogations -- you posed in class today seem pertinent both pedagogically and epistemologically. And, your in-class comments were accompanied by confrontational emails that you sent later in the day, which gave me some pause.

If a college reduces its students to mere statistics, its fundamental purpose will be lost, writes Seamus Carey, who was a candidate to head Mount St. Mary's University before Simon Newman became president.

When I was six years old, I asked my mother if it were true that we would all die someday. My question drew a laconic yes. After a few seconds of doleful reflection, I asked, “Then why do we work?” She didn’t answer. 

Proposals abound to change the modern university. But how did universities end up the way they are? In Wisdom's Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University, forthcoming this month from Princeton University Press, Jim Axtell explains how the history of universities played out, from medieval Europe to modern America. Axtell, the Kenan Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the College of William & Mary

Early last month I started reading Maria Konnikova’s The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It … Every Time (Viking) but had to put the book aside under the pressure of other matters -- only to have the expression “con artist” hit the headlines in short order. And in the context of electoral politics, no less, with one Republican presidential candidate applying it to another. (No names! Otherwise pe

Academics routinely lie and exaggerate when telling funding agencies what impact their research will have, a series of candid interviews with scholars in Britain and Australia has suggested. Their dismissive comments about the “charade” of impact statements brings to light what appears to be an open secret in academe -- that academics simply do not take such projections seriously.