When state Sen. John Arthur Smith speaks, people listen — and that includes the rest of the Legislature and Gov. Susana Martinez. A Democrat from Deming, Smith is a respected voice on fiscal matters and serves as vice chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
That he has taken the trouble to write to Gov. Martinez about concerns with the financial state of Northern New Mexico College should alert its supporters. That would include students, faculty and staff, not to mention the people of Española and greater Rio Arriba County. More...

By Jack Curtin. During the period of prosperity after World War II, state coffers from tax revenues overflowed and its universities reaped the benefits. Great teaching, impressive facilities, and solid educational experiences offered an undergraduate residing within state boundaries an amazing deal.
Fast forward 40 years and you discover that tax revenues no longer kept pace with the rising costs of running state colleges. Construction, payroll, pension payouts, and technology all had big price tags. For a period of time, generous benefactors, winning football programs, and March Madness endowment investment strategies all moved things forward, but these dollars soon dried up as a powerful national recession took hold. A substantial funding gap triggered a dramatic increase in the cost of tuition for state residents to send their kids to college. More...

By Emily Deruy. President Barack Obama on Thursday called for sweeping higher-education reforms that aim to make college more affordable. The president proposed changing the way colleges get federal aid, encouraging institutions to use technology and online learning to make courses more accessible, and capping loan repayment plans depending on how much graduates earn. Rising tuition costs have far outpaced income gains in the past several decades and forced more students than ever to take out loans to pay for college. That’s delayed things like saving for retirement, and even buying a home and getting married for many young people.
“Higher education is the single best investment you can make in your future,” he told students at the University at Buffalo, during the start of a two-day bus tour on college affordability. But students today are saddled with a choice previous generations didn’t have to make, he continued, the choice between saying no to college or saying yes and accepting the burden of debt. More...

By Jonathan Rees. As you might imagine, I follow a lot of people on Twitter who have a different attitude towards MOOCs than I do. One of my favorites is the MOOC pioneer George Siemens. If you don’t know him, he’s one of those nice Canadian people who came up with the idea for MOOCs in the first place. Now though, both on his Twitter feed and on his blog, he gives the distinct impression of continually saying to himself, “What the heck have all these Americans done to our previously excellent idea?” To be honest, I still have trouble with the kinds of MOOCs that Siemens et. al. first imagined. Nevertheless, anybody whose ideas got mugged by a bunch of Clayton Christensen acolytes automatically has my sympathy.
Because I wanted to hear what MOOCs sounded like before MOOCmania began, I downloaded an old Tech Therapy podcast with Siemens on it the last time I was prepping my iPod for the gym. To summarize, Siemens saw MOOCs as 1) Experimental 2) Open 3) Intended for people who already have college degrees and 4) Not designed as a replacement for college courses. More...

By John LaBrie. To look at the data and read stories in the media, post-secondary education is in trouble. According to the Council of Graduate Schools, Enrollments dipped at U.S. graduate schools for both the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 academic years (the last two years for which there is data). Business and law degrees—those stalwarts of higher ed—have had decreases in applications in recent years. Even undergraduate institutions—which hadn’t seen enrollment dips in two decades—are feeling the pinch. More...

Specifically, friends in academia who have finished their own degrees and, seeing my own adviser-less situation, have generously offered to read my stuff and help me out.  I resisted for MONTHS, because if reading my old entries have taught me anything, it’s that I’m stubborn and don’t always have the best decision making skills.  If I was a cartoon animal, I’d be the coyote who repeatedly runs into the side of the mountain, even though bashing my face the first time should have been a clue that the tunnel was painted on.
I was afraid to send stuff to these well-meaning friends because they are smarter than me and better writers.  Sounds perfect, right?  Who else would you want to critique your academic bullshit?  And even though these people are truly good friends and have never been judgmental in any other respect, I was convinced that they would think I was a complete moron and wonder how the hell I got into grad school in the first place. More...

Two weeks ago the University of California system-wide Faculty Senate announced that they have passed an open access policy for all 10 campuses. The policy covers 8000 tenure-track faculty, and as many as 40,000 papers annually, making up 2-3% of the worldwide scholarly journal content. More details (and some videos of me looking really tired) are here.
This is a major success. It’s a huge university system, with an unusually powerful federal faculty governance system, and getting any organization that large to do anything forward thinking is itself a triumph, and I’m proud to have been part of it. The policy commits faculty to making their work available using the California Digital Library’s eScholarship platform, or any other open access repository. It will begin on Nov. 1st, and will roll out first at UCLA and UCI, in addition to UCSF which passed a policy in May of 2012.
There has been some attention to this policy in the news media (at the Chronicle, Reason, the Daily Cal at CDE, and a nice Atlantic article that makes the point that open access is crucial to making Wikipedia more reliable). More...

By Adrianne Wadewitz. When professors teach, they teach what they love. What they are experts in. What it is easy for them to learn. Thus, it is easy to forget what it is like to be the student who struggles in the classroom. In fact, many professors may never have had the experience of struggling to learn--they probably effortlessly got A’s or at least easily understood how to teach themselves a topic. How can they, then, sympathize with and, more importantly, effectively teach students who do not intuitively understand their subject matter? More...

By Dr. Crazy. My name is Dr. Crazy, and I have never recommended an article for publication.  One time, I suggested that a revise and resubmit was appropriate.  That felt pretty good.  But just the once.
In every other case, in the eight or 9 years that I’ve been serving as a reader for a handful of journals, of greater and lesser prestige and selectivity, I have said that the articles that I have read are not acceptable for publication.
And honestly, that really hurts my feelings.  I fantasize about the day when I get an article that I recommend to accept without changes, or to accept with only minor revisions.  You think (or at least I thought) that when you finally get the chance to serve as a peer reviewer that it will be this exciting experience wherein you discover the next new most awesome ideas in your field, and you get to support them.  But yeah, so far, not so much.  And according to my Fb friends, they have similar experiences to report. More...

I am feeling particularly down about my science these days, owing to a combination of professional events mixed with too little sleep and probably too much salt (darn you, Cheetos and beef jerky). So I am cranky and thinking nobody cares about any of this and it's been ages since I heard anything at a conference that makes me go "Wow! I wish I had thought of that." It's crushing boredom and disillusionment all around. But it's not like this blog has ever been all rainbows and unicorns, so no surprises there.
Here's an off-the-top-of-my-curmudgeony-head list of things that suck about being a professor as well as those I still realize are great despite my advanced grumpiness.
The sucky:
1) It is hard constantly facing criticism and rejection. Even acceptances don't come without criticism and a ton or work. Sure, we are all fighting the good fight for the accuracy of science, so sloppy or incomplete work should not get a pass, but, after what I have seen as an author, reviewer, and associate editor in the past month, I am finding it really, really hard not to start getting disillusioned by the peer review. There are a lot of douchebags with too much ego and too much time on their hands, ranging from obnoxiously nitpicky to downright malicious. More...