By Jake New. While facing a skeptical Senate committee during a hearing in July, Mark Emmert, president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, insisted that the NCAA would soon have a way to finally adopt several long-discussed reforms addressing how college athletes are treated. Read more...
Banning Frats?
By Jake New. This month was not kind to the already-embattled image of the American college fraternity. Wesleyan University announced that its fraternities would have to go coeducational amid a push from students and faculty members who say that fraternities encourage sexism and mistreatment of women. Read more...
Confusion on Competency
By Paul Fain. A federal audit has renewed confusion about whether the U.S. Department of Education will support bids by colleges to try an emerging form of competency-based education. Read more...
Ranking and Networking
By Paul Fain. LinkedIn has officially joined the jam-packed college rankings party. And with 313 million users, the job networking site has a big data sample both for creating the rankings and for marketing them. The new ranking system tracks the success of college graduates in eight broad career paths, adding weight for jobs deemed “desirable.” It lists the top 25 institutions in each career category. Read more...
Managing Competency-Based Learning
Stable Priorities, Unstable Times
Unequal All Around
By Colleen Flaherty. “That’s kind of the headline finding to me, that in three-quarters of academic fields there’s a gender imbalance towards men,” said Andrew Gillen, a senior researcher in the institutes’ education program and co-author of Exploring Gender Imbalance Among STEM Doctoral Degree Recipients. Read more...
JSTOR, Daily
By Colleen Flaherty. Much of the world’s knowledge is contained in JSTOR, a vast digital academic library. But most of that content is behind a subscription wall. And if you’re not looking for something specific -- or even if you are -- attempting to take in all that knowledge can be an overwhelming experience. Read more...
Learning to Pitch (make it hard for me to say no)
By Brian Mathews. At conferences I often end up in conversations that go like this:
“I want to do this innovative thing but my administration won’t get onboard—what can I do?”
This is difficult because there are so many factors that need to be unbundled. A common problem I’ve realized is that librarians never learn the art of pitching. [Note to ACRL: I’m willing to do a free webinar on this topic sometime in Summer 2015.]
In the entrepreneurial world there is a lot of talk about recognizing the difference between ideas and opportunities. More...
Discussing ‘How College Works,’ Chapters 7 and 8
By Chris Takacs. Colleges are human institutions, with all the messiness and adaptability that living creatures bring with them. The best colleges realize this and operate accordingly. More...