By G. Rendell. Right up front . . . no, I'm not done wrestling with the question of how to teach sustainability to 21st century students.  Rather, I've gotten to the point where my initial back-of-an-envelope analysis of my answer to that question is starting to show its flaws. I need to take a step back, look again at the whole picture, rethink what the pieces are and how they fit together. The bits that I've already posted are in no danger -- the relative clarity which induced me to address them early on makes that fair to say.  But the bits that remain don't separate quite as cleanly from one another as I'd originally thought, which means that I probably haven't picked the right scheme for teasing them apart. More, a bit later. Read more...

By Barbara Fister. Two of the communities I hang out in talk a lot about publishing. For academics, being published in the right places and enough times is a measure of worth. The peer review system attached to scholarly publishing is widely presumed more unbiased and less prone to the vagaries of local politics than peer evaluations of teaching, even at institutions at which student learning is more central to its mission than research. It’s also more fungible. The reputation a scholar builds for teaching tends to be a local currency. Scholarship is the currency of an entire discipline. Read more...

By Matt Reed. From yesterday’s reports, President Obama’s plan for changing how higher education is paid for is very much a mixed bag. It sounds mostly well-intended, and parts of it are quite good: I was heartened to hear an embrace of competency-based education, for example, and it’s hard to argue with the idea of allowing students with bachelor’s degrees to get aid for vocational training if they need it. A little well-timed brushing up on, say, software skills can go a long way. But with money, the devil is in the details. And I’ve already spotted one slippery devil. The plan is based mostly on “ratings” of colleges, based on their performance on a set of measures to be determined. Students who choose “better” colleges, as defined by the rating system, will be eligible for larger Pell grants and subsidized loans. Read more...

By Tracy Mitrano. In the fall of 1989, I was a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Buffalo. I loved the job, I loved the city, I loved my apartment in downtown Buffalo and I loved my colleagues. Had I sought a career in history, I would have followed the footsteps of Ellen DuBois, the wonderful historian of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who had recently departed from there for UCLA. Having decided in 1981 to get a doctorate in history, and then go to law school on my way to a career in academic administration, that trajectory was not in the cards. Just before I left Ithaca, where I was teaching, I met the man who would become my husband.  We married in August of 1991. In December I made my last trek from Buffalo back to Ithaca, pregnant with my first boy, who is now 21. Read more...

By Tracy Mitrano. After an emotional build-up watching video of the President’s visit to University of Buffalo, I had a wistful experience being not more than 100 yards away from him when he spoke at a Town Hall Meeting at Binghamton University.  As far as memory lane went, on the way there I observed much of the same old rural poverty that has been evident to any observer on route 96b south between Ithaca and Binghamton for the decades I have driven it.  Many of President’s proposals for higher education reform are aimed at that population. When youth make their move out of Tioga County, it is most often through the military.  Listening to him I came to understand that it is the young people from urban and rural poverty who are the focus of these reforms. When asked about predatory for-profit colleges, he described how some had preyed on military personnel and veterans in particular; this is from where his scorecard idea derives. The media would have been smart to pick up on that point rather than his comment about limiting law school education to three years. Read more...

By Matti Bunzl. It’s been a few weeks since "The Heart of the Matter," the congressionally ordered report on the state of the humanities and social sciences, was issued by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And while there is little to object to in the actual text, which brims with veracities on the importance of education and good citizenship, the smarting hasn’t stopped. In The New York Timesalone, we heard from three pundocratic naysayers. David Brooks, a member of the commission, bemoaned the collective suicide of the humanities professoriate, Verlyn Klinkenborg lamented the decline and fall of the English major, and Stanley Fish excoriated the report itself for its "bland commonplaces" and "recommendations that could bear fruit only in a Utopia" (and as a Miltonist, he knows that’s not the world we live in). Read more...

By Karen Gross. On his education bus tour, President Obama is urging, among other suggestions, a new rating system to ensure that more families are able to afford higher education. I think we can all (well, almost all of us) agree that the rising costs of a bachelor’s degree need to be constrained, and we must find ways that facilitate middle- and lower-income students entering and graduating from college. The value proposition matters, and “debt without diploma” is unacceptable. What is vastly harder to agree upon is how to address the problem, rather than just wringing our hands over it -- which we have been doing for far too long. Read more...

By Laura Wright. In May, I gave a reading from my contribution to Defiant Daughters: 21 Women on Art, Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat, a book edited by Kara Davis and Wendy Lee. The text pays homage to Carol J. Adams’s foundational ecofeminist animal studies work The Sexual Politics of Meat,first published in 1990 and in print and much-discussed by scholars ever since. I read my entry at a local bookstore packed to the rafters with friends and strangers alike, all of whom hung on my every word. At the end of the reading, people hugged me. They bought the book and asked me to sign it. In my professional life, I have never given such a reading and, as a result, I have never experienced anything that felt quite as rewarding as what I experienced that evening. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. Invest in higher education in good times, drain it (and expect students and families to make up the difference) when the economy sours. State governments have embraced that pattern for decades, even as many analysts deride it as flawed if not foolish. As most states set their budgets for the 2014 fiscal year this spring and early summer, public higher education fared better than it has in several years. The American Association of State Colleges and Universities reported last month that 37 of the 48 states for which it had received information showed year-over-year increases in operating support for public colleges and universities, with an average gain of 3.1 percent over 2012. That compared to 30 states showing increases from fiscal 2012 to 2013, and just eight on the plus side from 2011 to 2012. The fact that these increases come as college enrollments in many states actually begin to slow makes them all the more significant. Read more...