A historian in Thailand is facing lèse-majesté charges, brought by "ultra-royalists," Khaosod English reported. Such charges can lead to serious punishments in Thailand. Sulak Sivaraksa, the historian, faces the charges over comments he made at an academic forum at Thammasat University in which he questioned whether there was evidence behind the story of King Naresuan winning an elephant battle against a Burmese general 400 years ago. Read more...

In an interview in The New Yorker, President Obama expressed support for affirmative action in higher education, and questioned how precisely a Supreme Court deadline for phasing out the consideration of race should be viewed. The article looks broadly at President Obama's influence on the federal court system, and touches on affirmative action toward the end of the piece. Read more...

The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) and the Presidents' Forum this week released a policy report that explores the potential for an external quality review process for "non-institutional" providers in higher education. This emerging field include companies and nonprofits that offer courses, modules or badges. Most of this sector is online, non-credit and low-cost. Read more...

Israel's universities will shift admissions policies so that one-third of students may be admitted without considering of their scores on a national psychometric exam, The Jerusalem Post reported. Instead, those students will be admitted solely based on achievement in high school. Education Minister Shai Piron explained the change this way. Read more...

Despite increasing public scrutiny and a number of lawsuits in recent years, including one against the National Collegiate Athletic Association that ended in a $70 million settlement and stricter injury guidelines, most colleges believe their concussion management plans do a good job of protecting students from head trauma, according to a study published Tuesday in the American Journal of Sports Medicine. Nearly 99 percent of the 907 institutions who participated in the study said their concussion management plans protected athletes "well" or "very well." Read more...

The U.S. Department of Education has a response to colleges and universities confused by how they are supposed to count students enrolled in distance education courses: Read the instructions.
In a study released last month, higher education consultant Phil Hill and the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies found many colleges and universities have under- or overreported thousands of students to the federal government, which tracks those numbers through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System program, or IPEDS. Read more...

By Mandi Stewart. Conferences are not cheap. They are exhausting and usually require you to travel. You are taking time away from work, which means risking feeling behind when you return. You arrive home sleep-deprived, information-overloaded, and struggling to play catch-up. So why do we go? We attend conferences to learn, network, and take new ideas back to our institutions. Read more...

By Patrick Iber. It is the time of year when graduate students, unemployed Ph.D.s, contingent faculty, and various rubberneckers are clogging the lanes of the internet looking for job announcements. And, in spite of improvement in certain areas of the economy, there are few to be seen. Read more...

By Joseph Storch. In Friday’s decision in Cambridge University Press v. Patton, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit followed decades of jurisprudence in casting aside bright line rules for determining whether faculty made fair use of copyrighted material. This is regrettable, as the celebrated 2012 district court opinion in the same case had opened up the possibility of teaching faculty how to properly make fair use of material using plain terms and easy-to-understand concepts, while the appeals court opinion returns us to the days of case-by-case holistic analysis and detailed exceptions, loopholes, and caveats. Read more...

By Arthur Levine. The newspaper and book businesses have been transformed in recent years. But not education. After a 30-year school reform movement, no major urban school district in the country has been successfully turned around. Meanwhile, despite loud and persistent criticism from government, media and families, the cost of college continues to rise faster than inflation and student loan debt is ballooning. Read more...