By Barbara Fister. I have a tendency to gush about studies coming from Project Information Literacy. Alison Head and her research partners have produced the most rigorous wide-angle lens on the very thing I’ve been puzzling over for my entire career: how students approach research and how libraries can support their learning. More...
By Barbara Fister. I was discouraged, hearing Trump repeat the bogus conspiracy theory that George Soros is behind the demonstrations against his Supreme Court nominee, claiming that all of those women storming Congress were paid “crisis actors,” that Trump is channeling Info Wars from the White House. More...
By Barbara Fister. So much of our attention has been focused on the drama of the Supreme Court nomination, other news stories tend to slip by. Over 1,600 kids have been roused in the middle of the night to be taken to an isolated detention camp in the desert. Donald Trump’s fortune was not, as he has claimed, due to his own business acumen but rather thanks to inventive and possibly illegal tax avoidance schemes cooked up with his father. More...
By Barbara Fister. There are two things I love about Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. First, he makes a great case for things that matter to me – public investment in basic infrastructure that encourages us to live together in healthy ways. More...
By Barbara Fister. In a world of information that includes scholarly articles, news, opinion, Tweets, and political memes, decoding messages can be tricky. More...
Higher education commentators frequently suggest that being a president is hard today because of the unique times in which we live: times defined by limited resources, protest, conflict, and social media controversy. More...
There is universal agreement that college costs too much. Currently, an elite liberal arts education costs an average of $68,000 per year. This has two major negative consequences. More...
What do college and university presidents talk about when they meet together in private? That has changed over time. When I first became a president in 2012, presidential meetings were dominated by discussion of MOOCs, massive open online courses. More...
Americans spend countless hours creating, reading, and analyzing college and university report cards and ranking systems, but almost no time assessing how the higher education system is performing as a whole. The reason for this is simple: students only attend one institution at a time, and so their concern (and those of parents, if they are involved in the process) before and after enrollment is focused on a small number of schools they are considering attending or to which they might transfer. More...
Lessons in teaching undergraduates from across the (imagined) Humanities/STEM line. More...
/https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
