By John Churchill. Reporting on the Senate's confirmation of Theodore Mitchell as the U.S. Department of Education's chief higher education official, Inside Higher Ed quoted a statement from Secretary of Education: “He will lead us through this important time in higher education as we continue to work toward the President’s goal to produce the best-educated, most competitive workforce in the world by 2020.” While this brief remark is hardly a major policy statement, its tone and focus are typical of the way Secretary Duncan, President Obama, and many others in politics these days talk about higher education. Read more...

By Scott McLemee. “This might be too geeky for a column,” said the subject line of a reader's email, “but just in case …”
It sounded like a challenge, and I took the bait. The topic in question? A new statistical instrument to quantify the degree of open access for scholarly journals. In other words, exactly geeky enough. Read more...

By Glenn C. Altschuler. In 1869, Charles W. Eliot, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote an essay in The Atlantic Monthly entitled “The New Education.”  He began with a question on the mind of many American parents: “What can I do with my boy?” Parents who were able to afford the best available training and did not think their sons suited for the ministry of a learned profession, Eliot indicated, sought a practical education, suitable for business “or any other active calling”; they did not believe that the traditional course of study adopted by colleges and universities 50 years earlier was now relevant. Less than a year later, Eliot became president of Harvard. Among the reforms he initiated were an expansion of the undergraduate curriculum and substantial improvement in the quality and methods of instruction in the law school and the medical school. Read more...

By Johann Neem. Recently, the value of academic research, especially in the humanities and social sciences, has been questioned. The current majority party in the House of Representatives has proposed cutting science funding for social science research and eliminating all funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof accused faculty of engaging in specialized research disconnected from the interests of the reading public and policymakers, resulting in a broad conversation about whether or not faculty engage in the public sphere. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. A recently proposed model on open-access publishing has drawn praise for rethinking the roles institutions, libraries and professional organizations play in promoting scholarly communication, but can its collaborative structure be sustained?
The proposal envisions stakeholders forming partnerships, each handling one or more of the duties of funding, distributing and preserving open-access scholarly research -- specifically in the humanities and social sciences. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. A quick exchange on a university's faculty discussion board has led experts in Appalachian studies to consider again whether bias in academe (and society) is too accepted when it is about the people of the region they study. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. The faculty leaders behind the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education continued their barrage against massive open online courses on Tuesday, challenging the providers to come clean on “overblown, misleading or simply false” rhetoric.
In letters blasted off last week to the founders of Coursera, edX and Udacity, the organization expresses its concern that the MOOC providers are motivated not by the “needs of our students, but the needs of [their] investors.” Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Colleges may soon have a new reason -- an antitrust lawsuit -- to think twice about their relationship with the Common Application. CollegeNET, which provides a variety of admissions-related services to college, some in direct competition with the Common Application, sued Common App last week in federal court, charging antitrust violations. Read more...

By Julie Hare for The Australian. Australia's conservative government this week proposed a raft of drastic changes to higher education policies that will, taken together, mean that students are picking up a significantly greater share of the cost of their educations. The government, in its 2014 budget plan, gave universities the green light to set their own tuition fees. Read more...