By Tim Goral. How university leaders can help level the playing field.
A March report commissioned by the cosmetics company L’Oréal focused on the disproportionate role of women in science. In a nation that prides itself on scientific achievement, the report reveals, less than a third of women actually enter the field, and even fewer graduate and go on to careers. More...
By Herman Berliner. My education was also facilitated by mass transit. High school was either a long walk or one subway stop away on the number 1 train. College was a half dozen stops away and graduate school was slightly more than a dozen stops away. But when I started working at Hofstra, life changed. Traveling to Hofstra from Manhattan via mass transit was a subway, train and bus ride away. If everything worked well, the commute was two hours each way; I quickly switched to traveling to and from campus by car. On most days, traveling by car cut my commute by 50%, though finding a legal parking space in Manhattan was sometimes a challenge. Read more...
By Kris Olds and Susan Robertson. For those of you interested in the theme of universities in a world of regions, please refer to this week's content in our MOOC Globalizing Higher Education and Research for the ‘Knowledge Economy.’ We're up to Week 4 of 7 as of Monday 14 April (see the syllabus here), though the course can be engaged with in a pick-and-choose method for the 'too busy' but curious of our readers. Read more...
By Darbi Roberts and David Stanfield. Several forms of cross-border or transnational engagement have received attention in the higher ed press recently. The articles focus on alternatives to the highly scrutinized brick and mortar international branch campuses. Numerous models of cross-border engagement exist and institutions are wise to consider the full spectrum when developing internationalization strategies. Descriptions of these alternatives tend to focus on what’s working and how a particular institution has benefited, while ignoring the many challenges that are inherent in transnational work. Much like the international branch campus, all forms of transnational engagement have advantages and disadvantages and pose unique challenges, including global centers and academic partnerships. Read more...
By Susan O'Doherty. I found everything about this project interesting and hopeful. I was especially struck, though, by the activists who cited getting administrators to understand the prevalence of rape culture as their biggest challenge. It is difficult for any bureaucracy (or any person, really) to acknowledge and address a systemic flaw. Read more...By Laura Tropp. At the beginning of every semester, I discuss my attendance policy with my students. I explain they can have two absences for any reason; after that, points are deducted no matter the cause. I tell them that I don’t need, or even want, to know why they were absent because I prefer not to be put in a position where I have to judge the quality of their reasons. However, I’ve begun to rethink my policy. Read more...
By Dan Butin. It used to be that medieval and renaissance maps placed sea monsters and dragons in those seemingly dangerous and unexplored places where seafarers were best to avoid. This is why “here be dragons” is a shorthand expression for stumbling into uncharted territory. Read more...
By James Marten. I am hardly an expert in the digital humanities, although I was the director of a fairly early example of the projects that characterized the field during the first phase of the movement, when content tended to trump technology and many of us had romantic and ultimately naïve notions of what it meant to “democratize” history, in the words of Ed Ayers, the developer of the iconic The Valley of the Shadow. In 1999, the year I started the Children in Urban America Project, Ayers published a kind of status report of the emerging field of digital history (you can see it at http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/PastsFutures.html). Read more...
By Barbara Fister. Not too long ago at a gathering of librarians (I can’t recall which, exactly) I overheard a snatch of something that sank in like a splinter. I didn’t hear it clearly so I can’t quite get it out, but it’s bothering me. It was an exasperated statement to the effect that ebooks are a huge headache and students often prefer print, but libraries are no longer supposed to give up valuable space to books, so what should we do? Read more...
By Tracy Mitrano. My first week on the job as Director of IT Policy at Cornell University in 2001, a manager in systems, Sarah, invited me into her office. After some meet and greet, she asked me what I knew technically about the Internet. Not much, I admitted. My husband was an electrical engineer. Forever I owe him gratitude for teaching me about it while I was in law school as well as providing me with a modem and an I.B.M. computer (while he used Apple :-). But because he worked on semi-conductors, I could better describe the gallium-arsenide atomic layering of a transistor than I could explain anything technological about the Internet. Read more...
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