By Doug Lederman. More than one person told Chris Romer that his vision of creating a national network of high-quality community college programs and selective four-year colleges committed to enrolling their graduates was folly. It's hard enough to get community colleges and elite public and private colleges in a given area to articulate transfer agreements, let alone create something on a national scale, he was told. But the American Honors program that Romer and colleagues unveiled early this year has indeed created such a network, and it is beginning to bear fruit. Read more...

By Michael Stratford and Paul Fain. During a hearing Thursday, several Democratic senators mulled whether the federal government should get more involved in the accrediting process. They might have been less enthusiastic if they saw what was happening at another meeting two blocks away. The federal panel that reviews accreditors, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, held that gathering. Faculty members and students from the City College of San Francisco, who for the past year have essentially waged war against the accrediting agency that is threatening to revoke the accreditation of their college, pleaded their case to the panel. Read more...

By Peter Stokes and Sean Gallagher. A little over 12 months ago, The New York Times famously dubbed 2012 “The Year of the MOOC.” What a difference 365 little days can make. Here at the back end of another calendar year, we wonder if 2013 might come to be thought of as “The Year of the Backlash” within the online higher education community. Even Udacity's founder, Sebastian Thrun, one of the entrepreneurs whose businesses kicked off MOOC mania, seems to be getting into the backlash game. Read more...

By Sara Goldrick-Rab. A recent New York Times op-ed blames the rules and regulations of the federal Pell Grant program for many of our nation’s higher education access and completion problems. In short, the authors contend that the rule that defines a full-time course load as 12 or more credits per term hinders students from graduating early or even on time. Read more...

By Scott McLemee. This year is the 50th anniversary of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter, whose greatest achievement, someone once said, was keeping it to just the one volume. As discussed here a short while ago, the revisionist interpretation of American populism appearing in Hofstadter’s book The Age of Reform (1955) has taken a lot of positivistic hits by subsequent historians. He over-generalized on the basis of a (very) narrowly selected pool of primary sources -- and in the final analysis, he wasn’t really writing about the 1890s at all, but rather his own times, equating the mood and worldview of McCarthyism with the agrarian radicals of the People’s Party. Read more...