By Beckie Supiano. If this year is like the last few, the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual “College Openings Update” will be trotted out as one more piece of evidence that American higher education is in crisis. More...
By Jennifer Howard. A lament for a dead child, written by her mother in pencil on the endpaper of an 1843 copy of The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans. A sewing needle, thread still attached, inserted in the back of an 1860 edition of The Letters of Hannah More to Zachary Macauley. Bittersweet annotations in an 1891 copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Ballads and Other Poems (left), in which the book’s owner recalls times spent reading it with her lost beloved: “You read this, July 1st, Sunday, the day you said—‘goodbye,’ sitting in the great armchair in the Infirmary parlor—O friend of mine!”
Those traces of long-gone readers live on, preserved in the books themselves, in the stacks of the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library. More...
By Danya Perez-Hernandez. Universities have long embraced digital technology that improves students’ academic performance. Now the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is embracing another, simpler performance booster—sleep. More...
By Danya Perez-Hernandez. Responding to a campaign by law professors, a leading legal publisher said on Thursday that its new casebook-publishing program would not threaten students’ ability to buy and sell used textbooks. The professors feared that Casebook Connect, a new offering from Wolters Kluwer’s Aspen Law imprint, would be a step toward the eradication of students’ first-sale rights, which allow book owners to do whatever they please with their copies of a book, including sell it. More...
By Jonah Newman. Diversity is a difficult thing to quantify. Measuring racial and ethnic diversity at a college or university is made all the more difficult, as we explained in our last post, by how the U.S. Department of Education categorizes students’ race—and how the department has changed its categorization methods over time. More...
To the Editor:
While a great deal of Aaron Hughes’s "Jewish Studies Is Too Jewish" (The Chronicle Review, March 28) is spurious and objectionable, we will restrict our comments to his cheap shots at the Jewish Review of Books. The JRB, he writes, is a magazine "in which scholars (some of whom are associated with other Tikvah programs) air personal grievances, review one another’s books, and trash those with whom they disagree."
It is hard, as William Paley famously noted, to refute a sneer, but when it is as unfounded as this, it isn’t that hard. Can he name the scholars who air their personal grievances in our pages? We know that he cannot. In fact, we routinely ask reviewers whether they have any relationship with the writer that might shape or impair their review. More...
By Anne Sobel. There’s no shortage of inspirational quotes on failure, but have you ever noticed that they never come from an anonymous source? A good failure quote has staying power only if someone with grand achievements says it. Americans love a nice, meaty failure—as long as it ends with success. More...
By Robert Zaretsky. During a meeting off campus this semester, a colleague in the business college spoke to me about a course on the history of globalization that we had once taught together. She told me, with some consternation, that the class, cross-listed with business and history when we taught it, had been dropped from the history-department listing when, with my blessing, she had gone solo with it. With her enrollment numbers flagging, she wondered if I could find out what had happened. More...
By Jeffrey Selingo. In the summer of 1994, I interned at U.S. News & World Report, where I was assigned to collect data for the magazine’s annual college rankings, just beginning to grow in influence. A few years later, when I started reporting for The Chronicle, college-enrollment managers and presidents asked me about the methodology employed by U.S. News and just how much they could manipulate the rankings by attracting higher-caliber students. Their approach for moving up in the rankings was relatively simple: Offer financial aid to smart students, whether they needed the money or not. More...
By Justin E.H. Smith. There is a great die-off under way, one that may justly be compared to the disappearance of dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, or the sudden downfall of so many great mammals at the beginning of the Holocene. But how far can such a comparison really take us in assessing the present moment?
The hard data tell us that what is happening to animals right now is part of the same broad historical process that has swept up humans: We are all being homogenized, subjected to uniform standards, domesticated. More...
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