janvier 2017

By Colleen Flaherty. Lawmakers in two states this week introduced legislation that would eliminate tenure for public college and university professors. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Beverly Wendland, James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, has no plans to close the historic Humanities Center, she assured faculty members and students Wednesday. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. The American Historical Association Council rejected one petition from a group of historians critical of Israel and reworded another at its recent meeting. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Teaching jobs for historians are down, but data suggest their opportunities outside the professoriate are on the rise. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Many professors laugh off their reviews at RateMyProfessors -- after all, “hotness,” one of the site’s metrics (connoted by a chili pepper), doesn’t really translate to tenure or promotion. Yet some research suggests that, like it or not, the site’s ratings correlate with ratings professors earn on their institutions’ student evaluations of teaching. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Study suggests that number of students taught has relatively little to do with faculty salaries, but that universities act efficiently in allocating resources to teaching and research. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. A new report from the National Association of Scholars warns against the rise of what it calls “new civics” and recommends that legislators mandate a course in “traditional” American civics as a graduation requirement at all colleges and universities that receive public funding. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Postdoctoral positions in the biomedical sciences are now considered almost a prerequisite for a permanent position in the field. But a new study published in Nature Biotechnology suggests that postdoc stints don’t yield positive returns in the labor market and likely cost graduates three years’ worth of salary in their first 15 years of work. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Students and professors tend to loathe survey-style history courses for the same reasons: they’re often large and impersonal, cover long periods of time in little detail, and amount to a slew of dates, events and names over something more meaningful. Yet (or perhaps as a result) survey courses are, for many undergraduates, the only history courses they’ll ever take. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. The Labor Department has updated its guidance for temporary unemployment in ways that adjunct advocates say may make it easier to collect benefits between academic terms. Read more...