By Ben Gose. There’s something about a nearly $35 billion endowment that just keeps Congress coming back. A decade ago, as lawmakers eyed legislation to require the richest colleges to spend more from their endowments, the Ivies and their counterparts bought time by voluntarily increasing financial aid for undergraduates. Then the financial crisis hit, the endowments sank in value, and the debate quieted down. More...

By Dan Berrett. Which students pushed themselves academically, and at what kinds of institutions, features prominently in the report of this year’s National Survey of Student Engagement, known as Nessie. The results, released on Thursday, are either sobering or predictable, depending on your view of students and colleges. More...

By L. Maren Wood. A few weeks ago, our JobTracker project took on a tricky question: How long do scholars on the academic job market stay marketable. More...

By David R. Wheeler. The narrative was irresistible. In the fall of 2015, PC culture had reached absurd proportions on college campuses. What began as the airing of legitimate grievances turned into a me-too circus of faux victimization, culminating with students seeking counseling because they saw a confederate-flag sticker on a laptop. More...

By Jeremy Adelman. Students, faculty members, and alumni are rightly questioning whether Woodrow Wilson’s name should represent a residential college and school of public policy at Princeton.
As a historian at the university, I’m agnostic on the naming issue, but I’m wholeheartedly for debating the matter. If we’re going to discuss Wilson’s legacy, however, let’s do so in a comprehensive, global way. More...

By Russell Jacoby. To revisit a book I published almost three decades ago means navigating between the pleasure that the book still elicits response and the pleasure of "I told you so." I might lack the skill. More...

In The Last Intellectuals (1987) Russell Jacoby argued that the iconic crop of midcentury public intellectuals — Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Edmund Wilson — had given way to a younger generation of scholars devoted to highly specialized knowledge, the obscure jargon of narrow disciplines, and the bureaucratic demands of university careers. They were, in effect, a "missing generation" — and led to a diminished public discourse and a diminished culture at large. More...