By . Commercialising research can do ‘far more’ for humanity than Nobel Prizes, says Mayor of London. UK scientists should be more willing to embrace the idea that commercialising breakthroughs can do “far more” for humanity than winning Nobel Prizes, according to Boris Johnson. More...
By Robby Soave. Hypersensitive students and professors all over the country are about to score another victory for political correctness if they succeed in their mission to normalize the use of “trigger warnings,” which are intended to protect people from taking part in class discussions and media that might offend them. Read more...
Blog Focus Campus de Jean-Claude Lewandowski. Ainsi donc, Canal + et BeIn Sports vont payer quelque 750 millions d'euros par an aux clubs de football français pour diffuser leurs matches. Soit près de trois milliards sur quatre ans. Sans parler de nouvelles sommes mirobolantes à verser pour acquérir les droits télévisuels des matches de Coupe d'Europe.
Et pendant ce temps-là, nos universités sont à la diète, qui pourraient créer des milliers d'emplois - on sait en effet que chaque euro investi dans l'éducation supérieure possède un puissant effet multiplicateur, et produit trois ou quatre autres euros. Partout, on rogne sur les dépenses, on limite les recrutements, on repousse les investissements. Suite...
By Jacqui Shine - Chronicle Vitae. I’m not much for proxy wars among nation-states or for feats of heroic athleticism, so the Winter Olympics largely escaped my notice—except for one thing.
At the moment, we’re avidly revisiting a range of cultural phenomena on their 20th anniversaries (right now, for example, Gary Sinise is on my television, talking about playing Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump). And at the intersection of nostalgia and Olympic fever, much attention has been given to an anniversary of dubious distinction: the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships. You know, the one in which Jeff Gillooly, the husband of Olympic hopeful Tonya Harding, engineered an assault on rival skater Nancy Kerrigan after a practice session. See more...
By Vincent DeFrancesco. Hello, and welcome to The Chronicle Book Club’s first discussion! This week we are discussing the introduction and first chapter of What Is College For? The Public Purpose of Higher Education, edited by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann and Harry Lewis. The duo express at the outset that their book is “unabashedly normative” and that their intention is to encourage debate. With that in mind, let’s have a civil discussion, whether or not you agree with the book’s underlying premises. More...
By Steve Joordens. In a previous post I described the general philosophy of our lab as one focused on building “Stairways to Heaven”; that is, tools that allow us to transform education from where it is now, to what we’d like it to be. That post was a little nonspecific, so in this post I present three of our current “stairways” in a little more detail. Our most established staircase; peerScholar was originally developed to bring written assignments back to our very large (then about 1000 students) Introduction to Psychology class. Read more...
By John Warner. Yesterday the South Carolina state house released a revised proposal regarding the merger of the College of Charleston with the Medical University of South Carolina. Perhaps stung by the blowback regarding the original proposed merger, Representatives Jim Merrill (R) and Leon Stavrinakis (D) put forward a plan to scotch the shotgun marriage and “create a research university at the existing University of Charleston, South Carolina.” Read more...
By Laura Tropp. I was at a big chain store with my children, and I had to use the restroom. My 9½-year-old son refused to go in with me, saying that he will not go in a “girl’s” restroom. He insisted he would wait in front of the door for me. Though he wasn’t acknowledging it, this marked a significant turning point in our relationship: this was the first time I would leave him unattended in a public place. Read more...By Rosemarie Emanuele. As the semester begins to wind down, I come to the end of teaching a semester of Calculus II. This is the semester of Calculus that sometimes gives the subject a bad name. Included in it are such things as revolving a function around a line that may or may not be the x or y axis, substituting in for trigonometric functions using special trigonometric identities, and a technique known as “integration by parts,” in which a difficult integral is decomposed into an equation including an integral that is much easier to solve. As we plod through these topics, I often find myself giving my students advice on how they might go about the often “creative” process of making the required substitutions. As one student told me “I see what you are doing, but I don’t know if I would think to do that myself.” I found myself thinking of this coaching when I read an essay in TIME this past week about advice that is given to young women just starting their careers. Read more...
By Joshua Kim. Let’s start by trying to come to some agreement about the major challenges facing higher ed.
Our higher ed challenges all fall under categories of cost, access, and quality - and our challenges are large.
I’ll list a few, and you can add to the list. (And this list will not be exhaustive, as any complete list of higher ed problems would keep us here all day). Read more...
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