By Nigel Thrift. The liberal arts have always been a North American preoccupation. It has traditionally been one of the main ways in which American and Canadian higher education has presented itself to the world. Liberal-arts colleges are some of the jewels in the crown of American higher education, and the spirit of the liberal arts has impressed itself on many of the great American universities. But now the liberal arts are moving out into the world. For example, in Europe, liberal-arts colleges are beginning to grow in number, especially in the Netherlands. So are liberal-arts degrees. For example, a number of British universities, including University College London and King’s College London, are now offering liberal-arts degrees, and more will follow. In Asia the founding of the Yale-NUS College, in Singapore, is a brave experiment. Read more...05 novembre 2013
The Return of the Liberal Arts to Europe
By Nigel Thrift. The liberal arts have always been a North American preoccupation. It has traditionally been one of the main ways in which American and Canadian higher education has presented itself to the world. Liberal-arts colleges are some of the jewels in the crown of American higher education, and the spirit of the liberal arts has impressed itself on many of the great American universities. But now the liberal arts are moving out into the world. For example, in Europe, liberal-arts colleges are beginning to grow in number, especially in the Netherlands. So are liberal-arts degrees. For example, a number of British universities, including University College London and King’s College London, are now offering liberal-arts degrees, and more will follow. In Asia the founding of the Yale-NUS College, in Singapore, is a brave experiment. Read more...Must Attention Be Paid?
By Ben Yagoda. For some time, I have been planning to write a Lingua Franca post on Somebody Said Something Stupid Syndrome. SSSSS (as I abbreviate it) begins when an individual writes or is recorded as saying something strikingly venal, inhumane, and/or dumb. The quote is then taken up and derided—in social media or blogs—by thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of other individuals. And then it spreads from there. More...
Linguistic Fuel for a Political Brushfire
By Geoffrey Pullum. A significant body of press coverage suggests that the Conservative-led government of Britain recently recommended wearing jumpers (sweaters) as a response to increases in heating costs, and later did a U-turn. None of this is true; yet somehow the British press managed to create a mini-scandal dubbed Jumpergate out of it. Jumpergate was spawned mostly by quotational inaccuracy verging on mendacity. But it was helped along by certain facts about pragmatic strengthening of specificity of negation. Let me explain. With verbs and adjectives having certain weakly modal meanings (mainly relating to desire, perception, likelihood, opinion, and advice; see The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Pages 838-843), negation is subject to pragmatic strengthening: It is liable to be understood more specifically than the grammar dictates. More...
Ah, the Unhumanities!
By David Yaffe. We’ve been hearing these stories for years. Humanities majors are declining. Tenure-track jobs are dwindling. No one cares about books by English professors anymore, at least not this year. The Chronicle has run many articles on this, and Thursday’s New York Times offers a reprise. More...
Is Facebook the Place to Say It?
By Chad Abushanab. The temptation is always there. As educators, we know from the start that not every day is going to be the best or most productive day of our careers. We know that while we are prone to love our students and take a serious personal interest in their development, each one who comes along is not going to be our favorite. Likewise, we’ve all had that one student who is continually problematic in some way or another. We’re faced with this reality early on, and for a young, idealistic professor, it can be a hard pill to swallow. More...
Report Lays Out Recommendations for Reassessing Faculty Evaluations
By . A report released on Friday by the American Educational Research Association offers recommendations for reassessing faculty evaluations at a time when colleges have faced serious financial pressures and increased scrutiny about the quality of teaching and learning. The report, “Rethinking Faculty Evaluation,” lays out recommendations in the assessment of three areas: teaching, research, and how faculty members communicate the results of their scholarship with policy makers and the public. More...
Negotiators Offer Proposals Ahead of 2nd Session on ‘Gainful Employment’ Rule
By . The U.S. Department of Education has posted online a series of proposals submitted by negotiators who are seeking to shape its revised “gainful employment” rule, ahead of a negotiating panel’s second formal gathering, set to take place this month. A federal judge last year struck down the department’s previous version of the controversial rule after the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the main trade group representing for-profit colleges, challenged the regulation in court. In August the department released draft language for a new version of the rule, which would penalize career-oriented programs whose graduates struggle to repay their student loans, as defined by two benchmarks—a debt-to-income ratio and a debt-to-discretionary-income ratio. More...
First-Generation Students Lag in College Readiness, Report Says
By Beckie Supiano. About a quarter of high-school graduates who took the ACT in 2013 met all four of its college-readiness benchmarks, in English, reading, mathematics, and science. But students whose parents did not go to college fared quite a bit worse: Only 9 percent of them met all four benchmarks. That finding comes from a report, “The Condition of College & Career Readiness 2013: First-Generation Students,” released on Monday by ACT and the Council for Opportunity in Education, a nonprofit group focused on access to college. More...
Is College Worth It? 2 New Reports Say Yes (Mostly)
By Scott Carlson. In recent years, folks as different as Mitt Romney, Peter Thiel, William J. Bennett, and the disaffected people of the Occupy movement started turning their attention to the cost of college—and the underlying question always seemed to be whether college was still worth its cost. There has been a lot of evidence to suggest that college is indeed worth it, and plenty of studies and pundits lining up to tout the evidence.
One of the latest comes from College Summit, a nonprofit group that promotes broader college access. More...
Defrauded Colleges Vary in How Much They Disclose
By Andy Thomason. A recent investigation by The Washington Post found that nonprofit organizations have responded to a new requirement to disclose significant financial losses on the Internal Revenue Service’s Form 990 often by providing little detail about cases of fraud or embezzlement. A Chronicle analysis shows that colleges are no exception. More...
