By Alexander L. Wisnoski III. First-year graduate students have now settled into their new environs ready to embark on the life of the mind. They have met with advisers and department chairs, and likely gone through some formal orientation. The sessions normally address how their research money can be used (provided there is any), how to write a teaching assistant syllabus, how to write a grant application, and a number of other topics with varying levels of utility. Read more...

By Rebecca Schuman. This morning, after a poor night’s sleep punctuated by weird pregnancy nightmares and hourly wakings due to the discomforts of being newly behemoth, I lumbered over to my “office” (aka the other side of my apartment), and, loins girded, prepared to see what the internet beheld. As a freelancer with many different gigs, it’s not uncommon to have to “put out fires” first thing in the a.m., as they say, but this morning, all three rings in the circus of my life conflagrated at once. Read more...

By Belle S. Wheelan and Mark A. Elgart. Calls for scorecards and rating systems of higher education institutions that have been floating around Washington, if used for purposes beyond providing comparable consumer information, would make the federal government an arbiter of quality and judge of institutional performance. Read more...

By Telegraph View. It sounds like a winning formula for the good life: “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness.” That is how Omar Khayyam pictured his poetic life, at least according to the Victorian romantic Edward Fitzgerald, who recast his verses. But it wasn’t as easy as that desert idyll made out. In reality, Omar made his name as an early exponent of algebra. Yet today, young students of mathematics are gaining top grades at GCSE with little or no algebra. More...