By Carl Straumsheim. In December the American Studies Association joined the Association for Asian American Studies in calling for a boycott of academic and intellectual exchanges with Israeli colleges, universities, and individual faculty in protest of that country’s treatment of the Palestinians. Since the ASA’s resolution, scores of college and university presidents and the American Association of University Professors have proclaimed that this action is a violation of academic freedom. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. According to Dick Moll, co-founder of the Common Application, “The unavoidable standardization of the Common Application, not to mention the online debacle for students trying to use it this year, causes serious questions regarding its service to both the candidate and the college … I sense that the Common App’s time is up.” Read more...

By Allie Grasgreen. As students keep struggling to find good jobs (or any jobs at all) in the post-recession environment, many colleges have developed new or revamped career services in an attempt to reach more students and show they are doing more to ensure gainful employment. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Harvard University will this spring offer three versions of its Introduction to Computer Science course, each with its own level of rigor and student-instructor interactivity. With a paid option that offers students a discount toward future studies at the university, the course represents yet another attempt to find a sustainable business model for massive open online courses. The course can be taken for no academic credit as a free, self-paced MOOC through HarvardX, the university’s branch of edX, and also as a credit-granting online course through the Harvard Extension School for $2,050. The school is also offering a third path that blends the flexibility of the HarvardX course with biweekly, online office hours with senior lecturer David J. Malan and a discussion forum moderated by teaching fellows. That hybrid option, which costs $350, can be completed for an official certificate, and the cost is returned in form of a discount on a future course through the Extension School or Summer School. Read more...

By Paul Fain. The much-maligned college transcript is finally going digital. A small group of private firms are seeing increasing demand for their repositories for e-transcripts, as colleges move away from paper versions for both incoming and outgoing students. Roughly 24 percent of institutions received some form of digital transcripts in 2009, according to a survey conducted by the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. An online course provider will this spring introduce bundles of courses created by top-tier universities that can be completed for certificates. That description fits both Academic Partnerships and Coursera, and both programs are called “Specializations." Read more...

By Allie Grasgreen. Liberal arts majors may start off slower than others when it comes to the postgraduate career path, but they close much of the salary and unemployment gap over time, a new report shows. By their mid-50s, liberal arts majors with an advanced or undergraduate degree are on average making more money those who studied in professional and pre-professional fields, and are employed at similar rates. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities on Wednesday took issue with certain parts of the Obama administration's proposed college ratings system -- but recommended an alternative approach that embraces some of its key principles, including linking colleges' performance to how much student aid money they receive. While praising the goals of the Obama administration's rating system, the group's president, Peter McPherson, said in a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan that the ratings system would produce “misleading information and perhaps create perverse incentives.” Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. A professor's plan to let students in his Coursera massive open online course moderate themselves went awry over the holidays as the conversation, in his words, “very quickly disintegrated into a snakepit of personal venom, religious bigotry and thinly disguised calls for violence.” But some students have accused him of abusive and tyrannical behavior in his attempts to restore civility. The 10-week course, titled “Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World,” is taught by Ebrahim Afsah, associate professor of public international law at the University of Copenhagen. His experiences highlight an important challenge that the scale of MOOCs presents: How do you wrangle tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of students into staying on topic? A traditional face-to-face course might fare well with one or two troublemakers, but those interruptions are magnified when enrollment reaches the thousands -- especially if those students can post anonymously. Read more...

By Dan Edelstein. Whether or not the humanities are truly in crisis, the current debates around them have a certain gun-to-the-head quality. “This is why you -- student, parent, Republican senator -- shouldn’t pull the trigger,” their promoters plead. “We deserve to live; we’re good productive citizens; we, too, contribute to the economy, national security, democracy, etc.” Most of these reasons are perfectly accurate. But it is nonetheless surprising that, in the face of what is depicted as an existential crisis, most believers shy away from existential claims (with some exceptions). And by not defending the humanities on their own turf, we risk alienating the very people on whose support the long-term survival of our disciplines depend: students. Read more...