By Anamaria Dutceac Segesten. There was a time when university presses, defined not as enterprises but as simple printing facilities, had as primary function the publication/diffusion of research texts produced at the university with which they were affiliated. One of the primary text forms to be published was the doctoral or magisterial dissertation.
The range of readers and buyers of dissertations and other such academic texts has never been very wide, and that posed a series of problems for these academic labels. Should they be self-sustaining and thus work commercially, or should they be financed by the universities themselves? If the latter, should they only publish works produced at the respective “mother” university, or should they be open to research coming from outside? If the former, how can they find a market that would make the publishing profitable? Read more...

By UD. It takes guts to be a high-profile moral - nay, spiritual - leader and a plagiarist.  Ask Richard Land. Given the likelihood of capture, you need to have that Elmer Gantry, je m'en fous, caution to the winds, borderline-psycho thing.  You need to have Gantry's arrogant assurance that you can break the rules in all sorts of additional ways - in the case of Gilles Bernheim, Chief Rabbi of France, that you can employ a ghostwriter and not tell your publisher; that you can accuse a dead man who was your student of having plagiarized you; that you can plagiarize in other places in the book in question as well as in earlier books bearing your name; and that you can, for the final flourish on your intellectual fraudulence, lie about having earned an agrégation degree.  You need to believe that you can do all of these things and not get caught.  You need to believe that when you are discovered to have lied about having done these things, people won't feel contempt for you and ask you to resign the position you've corrupted. Read more...

Last Friday, we had a good discussion on how to pick a graduate program. One issue that came up was debt. I strongly recommended that people only go to graduate programs that provide ample funding. People disagreed (a little) so I wanted to take a moment to explain the underlying logic:
- First, about 50% of doctoral students will not earn a PhD. So it makes no sense to pile up debt for a degree you may not get.
- Second, about 50% of doctoral degree recipients will not work in academia or a tenure track position. It makes little sense to take debt for a job you may not get.
- Third, tenure track jobs have modest salaries. Professors aren’t poor, but we make a middle class salary, not MD salaries.
In financial terms, the academic career is high risk and low pay off. The pay off is mostly in non-financial terms. Once you understand that money is not the guiding principle of the typical academic career, then it makes little sense to invest money in it. Read more...

The European University Association has released a new analysis of the state of global university rankings. Various evaluation systems continue to proliferate and existing ones refine their methodologies, the report says. But some things do not change. The study notes "biases and flaws" that favor elite universities. Further, the report says that most rankings -- which tend to focus on research - "still not able to do justice to research carried out in the area of arts, humanities and social sciences." Read more...

By Jamil Salmi. A study of recent university mergers in Russia confirms some of the findings presented in my 2009 book “The Challenge of Establishing World-Class Universities” about the difficulties of constructing top institutions following the merger approach.  Igor Chirikov, senior researcher at the Moscow School of Economics, reports that the various programs of excellence launched by the Russian government since 2005, which “encouraged” many universities to merge, have achieved mixed results. For the past 7 years, the Russian government has actively sought ways of enhancing the performance and contribution of its leading universities.  It initiated the Federal University program in 2005, followed by the Innovative University program in 2006, and the National Research University program in 2009.  In many cases, setting up the new federal universities involved mergers. Read more...

By Aisha Labi. The number of international university rankings continues to grow, transforming a crowded and increasingly controversial field with new methodologies and new uses for rankings and the data compiled to produce them.
A report, "Global University Rankings and Their Impact II," published on Friday by the European University Association, outlines recent developments and trends and is a follow-up to a 2011 report published by the Brussels-based group.
Since the last report, although criticism of rankings has intensified, reliance on them has expanded, and they are increasingly being used to shape institutional and public policy, the report says. The number of rankings has also grown. For the first time last year, for example, both Times Higher Education and Quacquarelli-Symonds, better known as QS, each published a ranking of universities less than 50 years old. The report also singles out a new comparative ranking of 48 national higher-education systems by Universitas 21, an international university network. Read more...

By Gina Stewart. Many years ago, I had dinner with my wise friend Sheila Campbell, who used to run a very successful advertising business in Washington, D.C. She related this story to me.
When we hired at the agency, we interviewed candidates, decided which one we wanted to hire, and then asked for that person’s salary requirements. If we could afford the requested salary, we would make an offer. One year when I was reviewing the books, I realized (to my growing horror) that I was paying men much more than women for performing the same work. But it was what they had asked for … . So I went to each underpaid employee, offered a salary adjustment, explained why, and said to each, ‘This is probably the only time in your life that someone else will do this. From now on, you have to know what you are worth, and ask for it.” Read more...

By Jeffrey S. Lehman. I believe very strongly in the value of a transnational education. Indeed, I would not be surprised if my colleagues use words like “zealot” and “fanatic” when I am out of earshot. My strong belief is, perhaps not surprisingly, rooted in personal experience: my year of study in the Sweet Briar College Junior Year in France.
The year began with a five-week orientation in the city of Tours. I lived with four classmates in the home of a woman whose interest in us was overwhelmingly financial. She plastered her home with signs reminding us that use of electricity was prohibited; all our electronic devices had to run on batteries. Dinners were usually horse meat or blood sausage, barely warmed so as not to waste oven gas. Read more...