By Jeff Selingo. Tuition resets—essentially, slashing the sticker price of tuition to the discounted price most students pay anyway—have become a popular public-relations stunt recently for a few colleges that are trying to reframe the conversation about the rising cost of higher ed and, most important, to help them fill their classroom seats and dorms. More...

By David J. Leonard. Not a day passes without my questioning my abilities: as a writer, a commentator, and—most of all—as an academic. I wonder if I have talent, or am I just faking it?
Despite those insecurities, I don’t feel like an impostor. On paper, I fit the profile of an academic. I am a white male. I trod a typical school-to-university path that—in addition to providing ample opportunities and advantages—normalized becoming an academic. I have been taught over and over again that my identity fits that of a scholar. More...

By George Williams. At the beginning of last month, I asked ProfHacker readers to share their favorite apps for the new year, and there are many great contributions in the comments section of that post. Lately, I’ve been talking with my campus colleagues about ways to use the iPad in the classroom. More...

By Anne Curzan. I was reminded the other day of two things about prescriptive usage rules: (a) the power that comes with feeling like you know rules of usage that other people don’t (or have forgotten); and (b) the sometimes fine line between a usage rule that promotes standard usage and one that falls into nostalgia, stuffiness, or obscurity. As I’ve written about on Lingua Franca before, I am a fairly meticulous copy editor (or at least I like to think I am). More...

By Ilan Stavans. At Amherst College, where I’ve taught for more 20 years (oy, gevalt!), a couple of years ago a tenure case was brought down in part because of the word “solid.” I’ve put it in quote marks in part because tenure cases are multiheaded monsters: Their rise or fall as a result of countless factors. In this particular one, one of the factors—and, ultimately, a stumbling block—was this much-contested word. More...

By Allan Metcalf. This week in his superb, extraordinary, unparalleled, remarkable Lingua Franca post on the “tenure code” (I hope I’ve included enough superlatives to properly sustain his reputation at Amherst), Ilan Stavans wrote, “What I don’t know, where I’m in the dark (as other outside reviewers surely are, too), is in regards to particular institutional codes.”
When a usage change occurs in such a highly regarded platform as Lingua Franca, it deserves a second look. More...

By Geoffrey Pullum. The sports section of the The Guardian last week carried an article by Jamie Jackson about developments in the Manchester United soccer team, where a number of players are apparently not sure they will stay. The article cited the opinions of one player who is probably not coming back from Fiorentina, where he is currently on loan; and then it continued with this shockingly uninformative sentence. More...

By Lucy Ferriss. I’ll be taking a work-intensive book leave from Lingua Franca beginning next week. Just before I return, I’ll be relaxing for a week in Tuscany, where we chose a villa based on the reviews. The negative reviews, that is, the ones that said, “Wi-Fi here is really terrible.” Yes. More...