By Jeannine Bell. The grand juries’ decisions not to indict white police officers in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner bore all the hallmarks of sensitive topics that, to keep the peace, should be discussed only in private, or in small groups of people who share the same race and politics. More...

By Barbara Vacarr. As baby boomers flock toward retirement in ever-increasing numbers, industries are gearing up to capitalize on this historic demographic revolution. But for all the attention, one sector has been strangely absent from the conversation: higher education. More...

By Sven Beckert. Few topics have animated today’s chattering classes more than capitalism. In the wake of the global economic crisis, the discussion has spanned political boundaries, with conservative newspapers in Britain and Germany running stories on the "future of capitalism" (as if that were in doubt) and Korean Marxists analyzing its allegedly self-destructive tendencies. Pope Francis has made capitalism a central theme of his papacy, while the French economist Thomas Piketty attained rock-star status with a 700-page book full of tables and statistics and the succinct but decisively unsexy title Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press). More...

By Noel Kent. In "The Forever Professors" (The Chronicle Review, November 21), Laurie Fendrich warns us (in no uncertain terms) that "the inconvenient truth is that faculty who delay retirement harm students." She has a special animus for over-70 faculty members such as myself who ferociously cling to our full-time equivalents. We are, it seems, "greedy, selfish, and bad" for students. More...

By Andrew Ross. Everyone is talking about student debt, but almost nothing is being done about it. On the federal level, there is no debt relief in sight, as anyone can infer from the annual Congressional ritual in which lawmakers assemble to grandstand over lowering federal interest rates by a fraction. Nothing on Capitol Hill comes closer to the cliché of putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. Rising rates of default (half a million more last year) and delinquencies (more than 30 percent of all borrowers) are a sure sign that many student debts cannot, and never will, be repaid. More...

By Goldie Blumenstyk. While in character as a pompous and self-aggrandizing TV host, Stephen Colbert has invited a steady stream of academics to his show, The Colbert Report, to scold and ridicule them. He called Leon Botstein, an author, symphony conductor, and longtime college president, "an intellectual" and a "smarty pants." He grilled Stephen Prothero, a religious-studies professor, on "what’s the best religion." And he criticized Jason Bond, a biology professor, for naming a spider after Neil Young and not Stephen Colbert. More...

By Audrey Williams June. Postdoctoral researchers in the United States are often overworked, poorly paid, and stuck in jobs that don’t advance their careers. And efforts to improve the system have progressed slowly, in part because academics who supervise postdocs have little incentive to push for change. Those are some of the sobering conclusions of a new report published by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. More...