California's 15 million Latinos have made strides in their educational attainment in recent decades, but deep achievement gaps persist, according to a new report from the Campaign for College Opportunity, an advocacy group. For example, only 12 percent of working-age Latinos in the state hold a bachelor's degree, the report found, compared to 42 percent of non-Hispanic white Californians. Read more...

Arizona State University’s contract with edX shows that the university and the massive open online course provider have yet to settle on the finer details concerning the Global Freshman Academy, an initiative announced last week that will let students earn a year’s worth of credit through MOOCs. Read more...

By Jonathan Wynn. And yet, in a survey of over 30,000 faculty members (20,000 of whom identified as contingent workers), the Coalition on the Academic Workforce found 80 percent reported teaching in part-time, non-tenure-track positions for three years, and 50 percent teaching off the tenure track for more than six years. Read more...

By Ulf Kirchdorfer. Surprisingly, but maybe not surprisingly, many of us have colleagues who do not write. I mean by this not colleagues who are unable to write, though I have heard in a former job an unkind administrator who thought this true of everyone but himself. I am referring to persons in the academy, even in the field of English, who do not write critical articles, poetry, book reviews or any of the usual suspect activities associated with the profession. Read more...

By Lisa Hager. In the past few years, transgender people and the discrimination they face have become much more visible through the work of folks like Laverne Cox, Mara Keisling, Janet Mock, Michael Munson and a whole host of everyday people standing up for the rights of trans people to be who they are. Read more...

By Julie Wollman. Hundreds of years ago, college leaders were faculty members who regularly taught undergraduates alongside their administrative duties. Even a century ago, someone might go from full-time professor to president, with teaching experience fresh in mind, and then return to the faculty. Read more...

By Judith Shapiro. This is not the best of times for faculty members. Many of the problems they face are beyond their control. And yet there are some they can address, especially if they are fortunate enough not to belong to the growing numbers of non-tenure-track, part-time, contingent faculty, but to those who can reasonably expect a secure future in the academy. Read more...

By Scott McLemee. In coining the word utopia, Thomas More was making a pun. The villain of Wolf Hall was, in real life, a learned man who wrote for people who could recognize a joke in Greek when he made one. The island republic of social perfection depicted in his most famous book was a good place (eu-topia), obviously. But it existed only in the imagination: it was also, literally, no place (ou-topia). Read more...

By John K. Wilson. Mehmet Oz, a cardiothoracic surgeon and vice chair of the Department of Surgery at Columbia University Medical Center has attracted some attention recently because he has a TV show, The Dr. Oz Show, on which he spouts some incredibly stupid ideas about phony weight-loss cures and how psychics make you feel better. Read more...

By Christine Seifert and Richard Chapman. Popular culture images of teaching would have us believe that the very best college professors speak from the front of a large lecture hall filled with eager young students listening to every word we utter. Or we sit at the head of a round table in a well-appointed seminar room peopled with rapt graduate students who wish to learn from our years of reading, thinking and writing. If cultural representations are any indication, professors are mere keepers of knowledge, the troll at the gate our students must pass. Read more...