By Matt Reed. When the Atlantic decided to tell us how to escape the “community college trap,” I had to look. It’s the same part of my mind that makes me smell the milk even though I know it’s spoiled.  Nothing good is likely to come of it, but curiosity is a force in itself. The article wasn’t nearly as awful as its title suggested. It was largely a profile of the ASAP program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. ASAP has improved student retention rates by being remarkably prescriptive about what students do. They have to enroll full-time, for example, and every student gets an “intrusive” advisor who functions as something between a truant officer and a personal trainer. Read more...

Following a vote by the leaders of the sociology department, the University of Colorado at Boulder says that Patricia Adler is clear to return to teaching her popular course on deviance. Adler has been warned last month that she needed to stop teaching the course because of concerns raised by administrators about a classroom exercise in which some assistant teaching assistants dressed as different types of prostitutes. The university gave a series of conflicting reasons for the concern about the course, which had been taught for years, with strong student reviews. Eventually, the university said that if Adler's course was reviewed, she could teach it again, and that review process is now complete. Read more...

By Frank D. LoMonte. For decades, the Supreme Court has kept vigil over the campuses of state universities as, in the words of one memorable 1995 ruling, "peculiarly the marketplace for ideas." No opinion, the Supreme Court has emphasized, is too challenging or unsettling that it can be banned from the college classroom. Forget the classroom – professors today are fortunate if they can be safe from punishment for an unkind word posted from a home computer on a personal, off-campus blog. The Kansas Board of Regents triggered academic-freedom alarm bells across America last month with a hastily adopted revision to university personnel policies that makes “improper use of social media” grounds for discipline up to and including termination. Read more...

By Paul Fain. The University of California at Davis is creating what may be higher education’s most promising digital badge system. But the badges are no threat to the university’s degrees. They’re add-ons – perhaps valuable ones for students.
“Badges can tell a different story,” says Joanna Normoyle, the experiential and digital media learning coordinator at the university’s Agricultural Sustainability Institute. She says they allow students to “differentiate themselves and tell a narrative.” Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. After four years of legal battles, a hearing-impaired student has won the court order he sought to force Creighton University's medical school to provide specific accommodations that he says will allow him to succeed academically. U.S. District Judge Laurie Smith Camp on Friday ordered Creighton to provide Michael S. Argenyi with Communication Access Real-time Transcription (CART) and sign-supported oral interpreters. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. The early decision deadlines of many colleges this fall grew confusing and chaotic -- to applicants and colleges alike -- when glitches in a new version of the Common Application resulted in system crashes that made it impossible for many to complete applications. Many colleges pushed back their deadlines and college counselors tried to calm anxious applicants and parents. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty and Scott Jaschik. An administrative law judge in Florida last week upheld new rules by the State Department of Education that require significantly more of state college faculty members – particularly in the areas of student success – for them to earn continuing contracts. The ruling also upholds a change to the time it takes professors to earn their first contract. Instead of three years, faculty members will now only be eligible after five years of service. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. As doctoral students of history urge their departments to allow more experimental types of dissertations, the desire for free flow of information between scholars may end up trumping the need to keep the research embargoed. A roundtable session on the “digitally informed dissertation” during the American Historical Association's annual meeting here on Thursday brought together two current and two recent doctoral students who used digital tools to aid their projects, but the discussion quickly turned to reconciling the differences between the scholars’ views on sharing and the host organization’s stance on promoting the right to keep digital version of their research embargoed. In a policy introduced last July, the AHA recommended doctoral students be allowed to place their dissertations under embargoes lasting as long as six year. Read more...