President Obama will be in Tennessee Friday and is expected to make a proposal involving access to college, The Tennessean reported. Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Biden and a community college professor, is also expected, suggesting a possible focus on community college. Tennessee recently started a program -- proposed by its Republican governor, Bill Haslam -- to make two years of community college free to high school graduates. Read more...

Stockholm University is the latest university to announce that it will close its Confucius Institute, one of hundreds of Chinese government-funded centers for Chinese language and cultural education that have been established at universities around the globe. The University of Chicago and Pennsylvania State University have also recently closed their Confucius Institutes amid growing concerns about whether universities that host them are granting undue influence to the Chinese government in matters of curriculum and staffing. Read more...

As China builds up its research infrastructure, one question asked in that country and elsewhere has been whether it can fight research misconduct that many report to be widespread. The National Natural Science Foundation of China reported last week that it is seeing fewer cases of research misconduct than in previous years, Nature reported. The agency received 206 misconduct allegations in 2014, including 66 cases flagged by plagiarism-detection software. Investigations confirmed 33 cases of misconduct, including falsification, fabrication and plagiarism, purchasing grant proposals and use of false personal information. Previous recent years have seen an average of 49 confirmed cases a year. Read more...

By Elizabeth H. Simmons. In a previous column, I described spending a year learning about academic leadership as an American Council on Education (ACE) Fellow.  One of the best parts of the experience was talking extensively and honestly with new and experienced administrators from a wide variety of backgrounds, disciplines and institutions. Read more...

By Christopher Garland. I’ll start this with a caveat. It’s a year since I was on the academic job market looking for a position in rhetoric and composition/professional writing, so this advice has not been marinating for a long time, the result of years of being on search committees, attending Modern Language Association conferences, or going to interviews in one capacity or another. Read more...

By Karla P. Zepeda. What is graduate school anyway? Is it an extension of the ideal carefree years of undergrad? Is it a safe haven from choosing an occupation and entering the job market? Is it a space to learn for learning’s sake? Given the state of higher education today, students cannot afford to attend grad school to figure things out or just for the love of learning (Ironically, I did it for just that reason), and hope for fate to favor them. Read more...

By Randy Best. For MOOCs to be important long term, they must be more than a curiosity.  A 2014 study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education found that only 4 percent of those who had registered for a MOOC actually completed it. The curious are obviously much less likely to see a course through to completion than are serious students seeking a credential to help them advance in their lives. Read more...

By Agata Szczeszak-Brewer. Departures are stressful affairs. In 1904, James Joyce, an Irish Modernist writer, and Nora Barnacle, his girlfriend, began their lifelong pilgrimage through Europe. They had just met, a few months before — she a hotel maid from Galway, he a Jesuit-educated young man with poor eyesight and an ambition to become a famous writer. Joyce didn’t deceive Nora when he predicted the discomfort of their upcoming elopement and their life in exile. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. You can’t argue with hard data about gender bias in science. Except that lots of people do, especially men in online comments about research on the topic. That’s the major finding of a study published today in Psychology of Women Quarterly – that men are much more likely than women to reject findings of sexism in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and even to make sexist comments in response to such research. Read more...

By Jake New. Women and students of color continue to encounter psychologically damaging racism and sexism on college campuses, creating a climate where students struggle to graduate and are unsure who to turn to for help.
That’s according to an article published this week based on the findings of Harvard University’s Voices of Diversity project. Read more...