By Clay Shirky. Academics have watched the internet change the music industry, books and news. And yet, now it's happening in higher education, we are about to screw it up, says Clay Shirky
Fifteen years ago, a research group called The Fraunhofer Institute announced a new digital format for compressing movie files. This wasn't a terribly momentous invention, but it did have one interesting side-effect: Fraunhofer also had to figure out how to compress the soundtrack. The result was the Motion Picture Experts Group Format 1, Audio Layer III, a format you know and love, though only by its acronym, MP3.
The recording industry concluded this new format would be no threat, because quality mattered most. Who would listen to an MP3 when they could buy a better-sounding CD? Then Napster launched, and quickly became the fastest-growing piece of software in history. The industry sued Napster and won, and it collapsed even more suddenly than it had arisen. Read more...

Anonymous. 'Your indifference bears no relation to my hours of preparation'
I look at the 23 of you in the room – a small group this year – and wonder if you're even aware of me as I teach. Might it be that because you're not talking to me, one-on-one, you forget to filter the expressions on your faces? Or is it that you imagine, in a crowd, you are somehow invisible?
So oblivious are some of you to my scrutiny that you all suspend your polite, public faces. Your expressions and bodies reveal far more than you know – self-preening, lip-curled sneering, eye-rolling, yawning, you can barely stay awake sometimes.
Your indifference bears no relation to my hours of preparation. The university asks you to comment, anonymously, on the quality of my teaching. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. After two years of growth in both English and foreign language faculty positions, English jobs are harder to find this year while foreign language jobs continue to grow, according to Modern Language Association data released Thursday.
Although the analysis of the Job Information List, released each year prior to the annual MLA convention, doesn’t include all jobs available within modern language departments, it’s seen as a reliable indicator of the job market in the current hiring season. Overall, MLA projects that 2012-13 will see about 11 percent more positions in foreign languages coupled with a 4 percent decline in English positions. In real numbers, that’s 1,246 jobs in foreign languages that were listed with the association, compared to 1,128 the year before. For jobs in English, that’s 1,191, compared to 1,235 a year ago.
Not since 1995-6 has hiring in the foreign languages exceeded hiring in English. Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA, attributed the upward foreign language trend to globalization initiatives that are increasingly part of colleges' and universities’ strategic plans, in addition to students’ increased interest in global and language studies. Read more...

By Anne Hyde. Giants can move. So can venerable, cautious scholarly organizations like the American Historical Association. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Kevin Carey of the New America Foundation asked "Who Will Hold Colleges Accountable?" As a professor at Colorado College, and faculty chair of the AHA’s Tuning Project, I can answer: we will. In a moment where college education and the value it provides students, their families, and American society in general seems continuously under attack, the American Historical Association has been quietly helping its members define and promote the value of history. Carey’s piece, pointing out the outdated notion of credit hours that grant students "credit" and eventually degrees for the act of sitting in chairs or staring at screens, thoughtfully calls for scholarly societies to "define and update what it means to be proficient in a field." Read more...

We've touched on this issue in the past, but it's worth revisiting in light of this e-mail from a job seeker:
I'm on the job market (not for the first time) and I worry I'll be perceived as "stale". From what I hear, lots of philosophers think it looks very bad that, after a few years out of a Ph.D. program, there's no tenure-track position on my CV.  I have a few questions that I hope you or your readers might be able to answer:
i. Do people have a sense of how much "staleness" continues to matter even for candidates who are in other ways attractive -- some good publications, lots of teaching experience? 
ii. If you continue to publish (or publish decent stuff) does that make you any less "stale", or are you still considered obsolete or defective simply in virtue of your defence date? 
iii. Is "staleness" less of an issue these days than in the recent past, in light of the terrible job markets and overall economy since 2008? 
iv. Do people have any tips about what a "stale" candidate might do to compensate?
The "staleness" issue, as I think about it, is this: the more years since the PhD that the candidate does not have a tenure-track job, the more likely hiring departments are to draw negative inferences from that fact. Prior to the economic collapse, my sense was that staleness worries kicked in after 4 or 5 years; I would hope that hiring departments are allowing that strong candidates may take considerably longer these days to find a tenure-track position.  As to the other questions, I'll make just one comment now, and open comments for thoughts for readers; my one comment is that the longer out from the PhD you are, the better it would be if one or more of your letter writers might speak to that and make clear why this does not support any negative inferences about your candidacy. Signed comments preferred, but job seekers may post anonymously.

By David Matthews for Times Higher Education. Wealthy donors to Ivy League universities can "buy a place" for their offspring, and admissions policies at elite U.S. universities are far less meritocratic than anything that would be accepted in Britain, the universities and science minister has argued.
David Willetts made the comments in a debate with Lord Rees of Ludlow, the astronomer royal, about the future of British higher education. He said that large donations to prestigious private universities in the United States meant that favors were returned in terms of the admission of donors' children.
"You can buy a place for your child, although obviously your child has to meet a pretty high minimum standard," Willetts said. "To escape the constraints of state funding, [the Ivy League universities] have to make other sacrifices so as to achieve alternative sources of income and ... they'll trade off some choice [over admissions] in return for securing a stream of income," he added. Read more...

By John Ross for The Australian. Private higher education has hit the wall in Australia, with its once-meteoric growth stalling.
Student numbers increased just 0.3 per cent this year and fell 1.8 per cent in equivalent full-time terms, according to data from the federal Department of Innovation.
This compared with average annual growth of about 7 per cent over the past two years, and about 40 per cent between 2007 and 2009.
Private colleges' international enrollments, which had seen annual rises of between 25 and 30 per cent during the boom years of 2007 to 2009, fell 10 per cent this year. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. It seemed almost too easy. Catharine Stimpson and Ann Kirschner start from such fundamentally different perspective in their views about technology-enabled education that staging a symposium at which the two of them talk about their experiences taking online courses (or writing about such an event) seemed like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course Kirschner would be a booster, and Stimpson a naysayer. What enlightenment could possibly emerge?
The event late last month at New York University here (where Stimpson is University Professor and dean emerita of the graduate school of arts and science) followed the expected script in some ways. Stimpson, a Columbia- and Cambridge-trained feminist literary scholar who presided over the Modern Language Association and is a staunch defender of the humanities, probably surprised no one in the audience when she expressed her qualms that online learning, at least as embodied by tightly controlled courses like the creative writing class she took at the University of Phoenix, contribute to a trend in which “teaching is losing its dignity.” Read more...

By Michael A. McRobbie. With each day, the so-called fiscal cliff looms larger as Congress and President Obama work to come to agreement on a federal-deficit compromise, which so far has proven elusive. Absent such an agreement by year's end, far-reaching spending cuts will be triggered as result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, through a mechanism called sequestration.
These reductions in federal spending, expected to total more than $1-trillion over the next nine years, would reduce the country's budget deficit—but would almost certainly come at a perilously high cost to the short-term stability and long-term vitality of the U.S. economy. Read more...

By Marc Parry. During the New Deal of the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration hired writers to document history across the United States. The best-known effort collected oral histories of former slaves. Those interviews became the bedrock of research for decades, contributing to a reinterpretation of slavery that took place from the 1950s to the 1980s, says William G. Thomas III, a historian at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Mr. Thomas sees something similar as possible today. He and others are trying to build a movement to gather “the people’s history.” And their project could spawn a new model for massive open online courses, or MOOC’s. Read more...