4 juillet 2015

By Carl Straumsheim. The report, published in this quarter’s edition of Communication Monographs, explores how witnesses choose to act -- or not act -- in response to cyberbullying. Read more...

By Paul Fain. The messy dismantling of Corinthian Colleges is moving through a federal bankruptcy court, as a judge mulls whether to halt loan repayments for up to 350,000 former students and the defunct for-profit chain seeks the court’s approval for the fire sale of its remaining assets – including trademarks, furniture and even old diplomas and typewriters. Read more...

By Paul Fain. The federal government will not compare colleges or pass judgment on their relative merits as part of the ratings system the U.S. Department of Education plans to release before the end of the summer, department officials said Wednesday. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to review the constitutionality of the consideration of race and ethnicity in college admissions cases. And many legal experts believe the justices are likely to be skeptical of such consideration. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to consider a case that could effectively make union membership dues optional for public employees. The vast majority of faculty members who are represented by unions are in public higher education, and such a shift could be devastating to the financing of their unions. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Friday's Supreme Court decision that states must authorize and recognize gay and lesbian marriages could create major legal challenges for religious colleges -- primarily evangelical Christian colleges that bar same-sex relationships among students and faculty members. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Historically black colleges -- public and private -- were created amid an era of overt discrimination and hostility to their mission. A new book traces how they responded to those challenges, typically without the financing enjoyed by other institutions, as well as to challenges that followed the theoretical end of Jim Crow. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. What have long set U.S.-trained engineers apart from their global peers -- at least in the minds of lots of employers -- are their softer skills. While universities in many other countries focus almost entirely on technical mastery, American engineering programs also stress the development of additional competencies, such as critical thinking, writing and the ability to work across disciplines and in diverse settings. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Critics have long said graduate students in the humanities take too long -- a decade is not uncommon -- to earn their Ph.D.s. But the calls for reform attracted new converts and grew louder after 2008, when available tenure-track positions in the humanities dropped in number. With fewer available positions, some said, programs needed to help their students accrue less debt and get them out on the job market faster. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Some 15 years ago, the Lilly Endowment funded a massive experiment to see what happened when colleges asked students to think critically about how they might lead meaningful lives. Such purposeful exploration programs, as they were called, popped up on 88 campuses, at a few million dollars each. Read more...