By Steve Kolowich. Resisting the urge to pull out your phone in class is quite difficult for many students, apparently. There are texts to answer, emails to read, snapchats to send, and rude comments to post on Yik Yak. But two students at California State University at Chico have created something they hope will persuade students to keep their phones tucked firmly in their pockets: An app that rewards them with coupons for local businesses when they exhibit self-control and leave their phones untouched during class. More...

By Steve Kolowich. Few people would now be willing to argue that massive open online courses are the future of higher education. The percentage of institutions offering a MOOC seems to be leveling off, at around 14 percent, while suspicions persist that MOOCs will not generate money or reduce costs for universities—and are not, in fact, sustainable. More...

By Marc Bousquet. Three recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board challenge lawmaking from the bench that has been hostile to faculty organizing at private universities ever since the decision in NLRB v. Yeshiva University, in 1980, established most tenure-track faculty members as part of "management."
The NLRB has required employers to permit the use of work email for union organizing and to provide organizers with email addresses and phone numbers for all employees. More...

By Amanda Moore McBride and Eric Mlyn. Innovation as a cure for societal ills is overrated. This is a controversial claim, but one we encourage our colleagues in higher education to ponder as our institutions seek to solve some of the world’s most pressing social problems through research, teaching, and service. The emphasis on social innovation in higher education and the social sector is ascendant; however, this current collective obsession can be an obstacle to real social change and should not be treated as a substitute for it. More...

By William Ian Miller. Amazing, is it not, how much magical thinking self-described secularists will engage in? I grew up in Green Bay, Wis., and much of my sense of well-being still depends on the fortunes of the Packers. What did I do to deserve—no, actually to cause—the recent debacle in Seattle? That loss will live with me until my memory fully collapses, which given the rate at which it is declining might occur anywhere from a year to a full decade from now, depending, well, depending on my luck. More...

By Dalton Conley et al. After decades of fretting over declining response rates to traditional surveys (the mainstay of 20th-century social research), an exciting new era would appear to be dawning thanks to the rise of big data. Social contagion can be studied by scraping Twitter feeds; peer effects are tested on Facebook; long-term trends in inequality and mobility can be assessed by linking tax records across years and generations; social-psychology experiments can be run on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service; and cultural change can be mapped by studying the rise and fall of specific Google search terms. In many ways there has been no better time to be a scholar in sociology, political science, economics, or related fields. More...

By Nicholas B. Dirks. When Allan Bloom’s infamous book, The Closing of the American Mind, was published in 1987, it was, as Camille Paglia later declared, the "first shot of the culture wars." Bloom’s book—by any account an odd amalgam of polemical denunciation of academe, philosophical argument, and memoir—quickly generated a spirited debate about college life, the place of the liberal arts, and, as Bloom himself put it, "the state of our souls." More...

By Casey Fabris. Students have a lot to say. And when they can hide behind anonymity, they’re not afraid to say it.
Recently, students have taken to social-media platforms like Yik Yak to anonymously air gripes against their professors. Often, the conversation is less than productive. In one recent incident at Eastern Michigan University, students in a large lecture course wrote more than 100 demeaning Yik Yak posts about the three female professors who led the class, including sexual remarks and insults about their appearance and teaching. More...