By Max Ramseyer. A debate among higher-education leaders at Duke University broke out in 2003, when news emerged that Nannerl O. Keohane, then president, was working with faculty members, led by Elizabeth Kiss, then an associate professor of political science and philosophy, to found the Kenan Institute for Ethics. More...

By Clifford A. Robinson. I am a perfect example of the kind of unlearning and relearning that Professor Davidson discusses this week in her MOOC, “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education.” As a Ph.D. candidate in classical studies, I am more comfortable researching and writing alone in a carrel, handling antiquities such as Greek papyri or Latin manuscripts, than plunging into new media in collaboration with my peers. More...

By Charles Huckabee. The Washington State Legislature has approved a bill that will allow students brought into the country illegally as children to be eligible for state financial aid, The Seattle Times reported. The state’s governor supports the measure, Senate Bill 6523, and is expected to sign it into law. Under the legislation, students will be eligible for a need-based grant program if they have been given federal “deferred action” status and meet other conditions, such as getting a high-school diploma in the state. More...

By Charles Huckabee. Seven former employees have filed a federal lawsuit against the Harris School of Business, a chain of for-profit institutions with campuses in several states, and its parent company, the Premier Education Group, The New York Times reported. The lawsuit accuses the schools and the company of defrauding the federal government through practices like misleading students about their career prospects and falsifying records to keep them enrolled, so the schools could continue receiving the students’ federal grants and loans. More...

By Nick DeSantis. At least nine students and one event organizer were killed on Monday, and others were feared to be trapped, after a roof collapsed during a South Korean university’s freshman-orientation event, according to reports by the Associated Press and Xinhua, the state news agency of China. About 560 students of the Busan University of Foreign Studies had gathered for the event, which took place at a resort in the southeastern city of Gyeongju. More...

By Nick DeSantis. President Obama has sent a handwritten apology to an art historian at the University of Texas at Austin who wrote to him to defend her discipline after he joked last month about the value of art-history degrees, according to the art blog Hyperallergic.
Mr. Obama made the remark during a speech about job training, saying, “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art-history degree.”
Ann Collins Johns, a senior lecturer in the university’s department of art and art history, wrote a letter to Mr. Obama through the White House’s website shortly after he made the joke, which upset many in higher education. More...

By Nick DeSantis. The president of the University of North Carolina system and the chancellor of the system’s Chapel Hill campus on Friday announced that they had hired an independent lawyer to conduct another inquiry into Chapel Hill’s academic-fraud scandal, the News & Observer reported. Late last year the former chairman of Chapel Hill’s department of African and Afro-American studies was indicted in connection with allegations that he had accepted money for a class he did not teach. The former chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, and a former department manager were placed at the center of the scandal in previous investigations, one of which found that suspect courses in the department dated as far back as 1997. More...

By Beckie Supiano. $29,400. That’s the average student-loan burden of 2012 graduates of four-year colleges who borrowed. But averages obscure variation. With that in mind, the New America Foundation released this week a new analysis that looks at how much undergraduates borrowed for different credentials in different sectors over time. More...