By Amy Cavender. I’d been waiting for that for a long time. I love Evernote (as do several of my colleagues here at ProfHacker, as is clear from the number of posts in which it gets a mention). I’m so fond of it, in fact, that I’m a premium subscriber, so I’m not about to walk away from it anytime soon. It’s fantastic for keeping track of information I want to access later. More...
3 Higher-Education Leaders Urge Lawmakers to Raise Research Funding
By Andy Thomason. Three higher-education leaders are urging federal lawmakers to repeal sequestration and increase research funding in the budget for the 2016 fiscal year. In a letter on Friday, the presidents of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the Association of American Universities, and the American Council on Education wrote that continued limits on federal investment in scientific research and higher education would threaten the position of the United States as the world’s top economic power. More...
Education Dept. to Drop 5 Collection Agencies Over ‘Deceptive Practices’
By Andrew Mytelka. The U.S. Education Department is cutting ties with five private collection agencies that it says provided inaccurate information to student-loan borrowers. In an announcement late Friday, the department also said it would step up its monitoring and guidance of such collection agencies, which work under government contracts, to ensure that they give borrowers accurate data on their loans. More...
Diversity Declined at Medical Schools Barred From Considering Applicants’ Race
By Chronicle Staff. Report: “Racial Diversity in the Medical Profession: The Impact of Affirmative Action Bans on Underrepresented Student of Color Matriculation in Medical Schools”
Authors: Liliana M. Garces, assistant professor of higher education at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, and David Mickey-Pabello, doctoral student in sociology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
Summary: The study, published in the March/April issue of The Journal of Higher Education, attempts to gauge how medical schools’ enrollments have been affected by bans on race-conscious admissions. More...
Free iPads, With a Catch: They’ll Squeal if You Cut Class
By Steve Kolowich. The university is planning to try out a new app, called Class120, to “ping” its students’ iPads during class periods. If GPS or the campus wi-fi network indicates that someone’s device is not present, the app will send the student an automated reminder, and may notify his or her academic coach as well. More...
Southern New Hampshire President to Advise Education Dept. on Competency-Based Learning
By Casey Fabris. Mr. LeBlanc will be involved with the department’s innovation agenda, specifically its experiments with competency-based education and with establishing new accreditation methods for innovative programs. More...
New Social Network Is All College, All the Time
By Casey Fabris. Once upon a time, Facebook was reserved for college students only. A new social network is trying to reboot that idea, with a college-only service called Friendsy.
The service is the creation of two Princeton University undergraduates, Michael Pinsky and Vaidhy Murti, who hope to help facilitate connections among college students who might otherwise never meet. More...
The Unintended Consequences of Borrowing Business Tools to Run a University
By Mark Burstein. As colleges and universities compete more vigorously than ever to attract applicants from a smaller population of high-school seniors and strive to provide a deeper, more compelling education, many of us in academic leadership have looked to business practices and concepts to manage our institutions. We have created marketing plans, sought advice from management consultants, and developed metrics and strategic plans. More...Why Terrorism Works
By Bruce Hoffman. Does terrorism work? Its targets and victims steadfastly maintain that it does not, while its practitioners and apologists claim that it does. Scholars and analysts are divided. Given the untold death and destruction wrought by terrorists throughout history, the question has an undeniable relevance that has only intensified since the September 11 attacks. Yet a definitive answer unaccountably remains as elusive as a universally accepted definition of terrorism itself. More...Houellebecq Skewers French Academe
By Robert Zaretsky. For several years, Michel Houellebecq has been France’s most celebrated writer and also its most controversial. But the infamy sparked by his earlier novels like Whatever, Elementary Particles, and Platform, evaporates under the klieg lights trained on his most recent work, Soumission. It has topped French best-seller lists since its publication in early January—the same week as the terrorist attacks in Paris, when a caricature of Houellebecq was featured on the cover of Charlie Hebdo. More than a literary sensation, Soumission has become a historical event.Houellebecq, then, needs no introduction—except in French universities. There, professors of contemporary literature have, for the most part, ignored the chain-smoking, wild-haired, and bleary-eyed novelist. More...