By Mark Keierleber. With state spending on public colleges recovering slowly and tuition rates still rising, a policy-advocacy group has proposed creating a competitive federal grant program to give states incentives to increase spending on and reduce the cost of higher education. The group, the Center for American Progress, on Tuesday released a report exploring the effects of what it called state disinvestment in public colleges and universities. In the report, the group proposed a program through which the federal government would match state funding for higher education if states agreed to carry out reforms that ensured students would have access to an affordable and high-quality education. More...

By Don Troop. Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, announced in a letter to alumni on Thursday that the institution had collected $6.1-billion in a seven-year capital campaign that concluded on December 31. It was the biggest sum raised by an Ivy League institution and the second largest in higher education, behind Stanford University’s $6.2-billion in a campaign that ended in 2011. Harvard University announced a $6.5-billion campaign last fall. More...

By Jabeen Bhatti, Janelle Dumalaon, and Aida Alami. The fight for more visibility and higher rankings on the global higher-education stage has wealthy Gulf Cooperation Council countries scrambling for international academic talent, and offering salary packages with a reputation for being generous. That reputation, it turns out, is not always deserved.
But for many struggling Arab academics from countries where teaching is less lucrative, a common solution is to look toward the Gulf. More...

By David D. Perlmutter. The first time I served as an external reviewer for a candidate’s tenure bid at another university, I had just gotten tenure myself. I was flattered to be asked and wanted to do a good job at what I felt, and still feel, is one of the most sacred tasks of the tenured professor: evaluating whether or not to induct someone into our guild.
So I was ready to do my duty. The only problem? The state of the tenure file I received. It could have been a test case in how not to present a tenure packet to an external reviewer. More...

By Merlin Chowkwanyun and Karen M. Tani. When historians gathered for their annual meeting in January, the future of the discipline itself was on the agenda. Amid the talk about the relevance of historical scholarship and the precarious employment prospects for history Ph.D.’s were promising proposals aimed at broadening the graduate curriculum and rewarding nonacademic career paths. But one potential solution seemed to be largely overlooked: the dual-degree program.
Graduate students in a dual-degree program simultaneously earn a history Ph.D. and a second degree, often a master’s from a professional school. An aspiring historian planning to write on the history of urban planning, for example, could earn degrees in both fields. More...

By Robert J. Sternberg. Back in graduate school, I remember thinking that successful academics seemed to lead consistently pleasant if somewhat uneventful lives. Now, by some measures, I’m one of those successful academics. After receiving a Ph.D. from Stanford, I spent 30 years as a professor at Yale and eight years as a dean, provost, and president at three different institutions. I have my share of honorary doctorates and memberships in prestigious national academies. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that over the course of 39 (gulp) years in academe, I have experienced countless career challenges and three serious crises. This essay is about how to cope with such crises, whatever your level of success. But before I dispense my advice, I suppose readers want the inside dirt. More...

By Milton Greenberg. The impending review and renewal of the Higher Education Act will be a defining moment in the tumultuous relationship between higher-education accreditation and the political forces of government. Many people in the academic world resist the inevitable and continuing political demands for greater openness, clinging to an almost romantic view of the academy, rooted in self governance, independence, and collegiality. Many academics believe that public funds should have no strings attached, and that the most mundane rules of business or finance have no place in the academy. Critics of academic institutions are usually met with assertions that colleges are unique entities, operating under practices that are generally misunderstood and in need of autonomy irrespective of sources of support. More...

By Beckie Supiano. Art history caught some unwelcome attention from President Obama in a speech on Thursday emphasizing the need for job training. To reinforce his point that manufacturing jobs pay off, Mr. Obama said that young people who train for them could outearn art-history majors.
The remark drew laughter from the president’s audience in Wisconsin. But some in higher education felt slighted, even though Mr. Obama quickly added in his speech that there is “nothing wrong with an art-history degree” (trying to ward off “a bunch of emails”). More...