By Jack Grove for Times Higher Education. Universities in developing countries are ignoring potential areas of strength because they are too focused on imitating successful Anglo or American institutions, according to a South African university leader. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. Congressional leaders agreed Tuesday on a spending bill that would avoid a government shutdown and provide modest increases to student aid programs and scientific research. The compromise deal, which would fund most of the federal government until next October, would also restore a pathway to student aid for students who do not have a high school diploma or its equivalent, like a GED. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Several library directors at liberal arts institutions have lost their jobs as they clash with faculty and administrators over how much -- and how fast -- the academic library should change. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced Monday that it has removed the online courses of a prominent physics professor after finding that he had engaged in the online sexual harassment of a female student. Read more...

By Kaitlin Mulhere. College students' assessments of their instructors' teaching ability is linked to whether they think those instructors are male or female, according to new research from North Carolina State University. In the study, students in an online course gave better evaluations to the instructors they thought were male, even though the two instructors – one male and one female – had switched their identities. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. The economic downturn appears to have pushed back the timeframe for many higher education employees to retire -- but when they ultimately do, they will be better prepared financially and otherwise than other Americans, a new survey suggests.
The survey, by the pension giant TIAA-CREF, asked a group of higher education professionals a set of questions about their retirement plans and preparation, and compared those findings with a similar survey of all Americans. Read more...

By Paul Fain. The U.S. Department of Education last week defended the deal it helped broker for Corinthian Colleges, a disintegrating for-profit chain, to sell 56 of its campuses to a nonprofit student loan guarantee agency, ECMC. If approved, the proposed $24 million purchase “fends off disastrous consequences,” the department said in a written statement. Read more...

By Paul Fain. Student loan guarantee agencies faced an uncertain future in 2010, when the Obama administration and the U.S. Congress eliminated government-backed private lending. With the federal government issuing only direct loans, the guarantee business of insuring bank loans was destined to dry up. As a result, the more than 30 guarantee agencies have been trying to diversify in recent years. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. Universities are awarding doctoral degrees at an accelerating pace, despite the fact that the career prospects of those who receive their Ph.D.s appear to be worsening.
That dichotomy is among the starker findings of the annual data on doctorate recipients from the National Science Foundation, drawn from a survey sponsored by the foundation and other federal agencies and conducted by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. The data may for some reinforce the idea that institutions are turning out more Ph.D. recipients than can be absorbed, at least in some fields.American universities awarded 52,760 doctorates in 2013, up 3.5 percent from nearly 50,977 in 2012 and nearly 8 percent from 48,903 in 2011. Those large increases followed several years of much smaller increases and one decline (in 2010) since the onset of the economic downturn in 2008, as seen in the chart below. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. Put five public university administrators in a room, and chances are good that within an hour one of them will joke about the fact that his or her institution has gone from being "state supported" to "state assisted" to "state located." As funding for public higher education has shrunk (or at least failed to keep up with growing enrollments) in many states, public colleges and universities have increasingly sought other forms of funding that, over time, make them look less and less like state entities and more and more like their cousins in the private nonprofit sector. Read more...