By Allan Metcalf. For 2014 there seems to be no leading candidate for Word (or Phrase) of the Year, as I said last week. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of candidates. Just last week, for example, the news from Washington was generously sprinkled with enhanced interrogation techniques, the disputed CIA practice for obtaining information, and cromnibus, the disputed Congressional practice for obtaining government funding. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. As I promised last week, let me briefly discuss a further noteworthy fact about an interesting 1914 paper by George O. Curme. When I first saw the paper I thought there was a PDF encoding bug, or my eyes were playing tricks, but not so. It turns out that Curme was a radical reformer in one respect: He published his paper using an extensively revised spelling system. More...
By Jeffrey R. Young. Our hope is to cover a wide range of areas within the college world—teaching, scholarship, administration, libraries, student life, and more. So this is not just about decisions made in the top tech offices of colleges. And we hope to hear about a wide range of institutions—we’re just as interested in a scrappy project on a shoestring budget as we are about a big-ticket outlay. To see what we’ve done in past years, see our 2013 list, The Idea Makers, or our 2012 edition, Rebooting the Academy. We expect to publish the new articles in April 2015. Read more...By Jeffrey R. Young. We crunched the numbers to find the most popular coverage of 2014. The list—which includes predictions of big changes in classroom teaching, in academic publishing, in communicating with parents, and in the mission of libraries—highlights the range of aspects of campus life affected by technology. And it reminds us how mainstream technology coverage is these days. Read more...By Steve Kolowich. Everybody wants to know what college students are thinking, especially educators and marketers. What do they like? What are they like?By Rebecca Koenig. Just two months after a group of neuroscientists criticized commercially available brain games, a different group of scientists released an open letter on Wednesday saying the products do show promise. Read more...
By Sandhya Kambhampati. When research in 2011 showed that workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics earned a premium of 25 percent over other workers and have just a 5.5-percent unemployment rate, it reinforced strong economic incentives to get more people into those STEM fields. More...
By Marc Bousquet. This year marked the 25th anniversary of the most infamous academic-labor study of all time, "Prospects for the Faculty in Arts and Sciences." The study, led by William Bowen, then president of Princeton University, set itself the task of projecting "demand and supply" for faculty a full quarter-century into the future—forecasting the so-called job market right up into our present decade. More...
By Holly Case. Earlier this fall, I went to Cornell’s annual career fair. I wanted to learn what employers were telling students about how their college coursework might prepare them for careers. The topic comes up a lot when students—especially first-years—come to me in my capacity as an academic adviser and ask what they should be taking. My inclination is to tell them to do what I did: Take the courses with the best professors regardless of the discipline. That worked for me. Why shouldn’t it work for them. More...
By MaryFrances McCourt. “Many Students Don’t Know What They’re Paying, or Borrowing, for College” (The Chronicle, December 10) detailed a recent report, “Are College Students Borrowing Blindly?,” by Elizabeth J. Akers and Matthew M. Chingos. The authors of the report conclude that a majority of students don’t realize how much they have borrowed and the long-term impact of that debt. Our work with students on this very issue in recent years has delivered many of us at Indiana University to the same conclusion. More...
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