By Chuck Rybak. When I started on the tenure track, I was highly susceptible to bad advice because I simply didn't have enough knowledge and understanding of the complicated structures I was working in. There is a lot of bad advice out there for tenure-track faculty, much of it coming from people who think they understand a person's assigned professional duties better than the job-holders themselves. Sure, there are times when this may be true, but these instances are few. More importantly, bad advice can get people fired or denied tenure. Read more...

By Elizabeth H. Simmons. One of the most enjoyable parts of academic leadership is the chance to give people good news: they will be receiving the conference invitation, increased salary, or research grant they have requested.  But since invitations, raise dollars, and grant funds tend to be limited commodities, hard choices have usually preceded the happy announcement. Read more...

By Alexandra W. Logue and Samuel L. Shrank. Are we missing out on an opportunity to enhance the supply of people in the United States who are prepared for careers that require higher education? Should we encourage the presence of undocumented immigrants in that pool?
Discussion about who has the right to come to the United States and what they are entitled to after arrival has been ongoing since our country’s founding. Read more...

By Scott McLemee. As discussed here last week, Anna M. Young’s book Prophets, Gurus, and Pundits: Rhetorical Styles and Public Engagement (Southern Illinois University Press) is a recent addition to the literature on the opportunities and the burdens summed up in that slightly redundant expression “public intellectual.” The author is an associate professor of communication at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, and her approach to the topic comes from the oldest body of communications theory and practice: rhetoric. Read more...

By Sylvia Maxfield. Attacks on business and business education (including this one recently at Inside Higher Ed) are commonplace, and not just in higher education. The Obama administration’s call to action on income inequality more or less explicitly lays blame at the feet of corporate America, and Pope Francis wrote a letter last December widely interpreted as denigrating business. There is no doubt that the U.S. middle class is suffering downward mobility. Victims include the humanities professors who call for us to close business schools in order to save humanities education. Read more...

By Charlie Tyson. In recent years, many colleges and universities have turned to mentoring programs in an attempt to retain underperforming students. Federally supported mentoring programs have been around since the Higher Education Act of 1965, which created student services programs such as Upward Bound, said Stephanie Gordon, vice president for professional development of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. But as colleges and universities face more scrutiny on retention rates, more institutions have launched or expanded mentoring efforts, Gordon said. Read more...

By Charlie Tyson. Spinach is not an exceptional nutritional source of iron. The leafy green has iron, yes, but not much more than you’d find in other green vegetables. And the plant contains oxalic acid, which inhibits iron absorption. Why, then, do so many people believe spinach boasts such high iron levels? Scholars committed to unmasking spinach’s myths have long offered a story of academic sloppiness. German chemists in the 1930s misplaced a decimal point, the story goes. They thus overestimated the plant’s iron content tenfold. Read more...

By Ry Rivard. Top college fund-raisers are mostly optimistic about the future, but the poor colleges are getting poorer, according to a new survey of advancement officials at 335 North American institutions. The survey is by Academic Impressions, which provides training conferences and webinars to higher education leaders. The survey, conducted online in June, focused on the most typical type of endowment fund: the small kind. Read more...

By Ry Rivard. New College of Florida is a public institution with small classes and close faculty-student interaction in a state where most students attend mammoth universities with large classes. It attracts and graduates high-quality students, and it's known for its rigorous curriculum. But so far it has come out a loser under the state’s new performance funding plan. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. How can adjunct unions keep their members engaged after their first contracts have been negotiated? And what’s next on various higher education unions’ agendas? Those and other questions were the focus of a session on adjunct organizing at the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor conference, or COCAL, here Tuesday. Read more...