Most people agree that faculty performance evaluations should be based on more than student feedback, grants and publication counts. But what does a more complete evaluation process look like? And how would a more progressive department function? The New American Colleges and Universities’ answer is Redefining the Paradigm: Faculty Models to Support Student Learning. The new monograph is based on new faculty evaluation models at NAC&U member institutions, and pushes other colleges and universities to rethink traditional department structures and processes to better support student learning. Read more...

A new special report in the Index on Censorship examines threats to academic freedom around the world. The report includes case studies from Belarus, China, India, Ireland, Mexico, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as an account of girls standing up for education in Nigeria, Pakistan and Uganda. Read more...

The Obama administration has instructed regulators at the U.S. Department of Education to more aggressively pursue colleges found violating the federal ban on paying bonuses to recruiters. Read more...

Stuttgart Media University, in Germany, has scuttled plans to establish a Confucius Institute due to stated concerns over finances, the Stuttgarter-Zeitung reported (in German). The university had signed a contract to found a Confucius Institute with Hanban, the Chinese government entity that oversees and funds the overseas institutes for Chinese language and culture study, in August of 2014. Read more...

Assuming “Bothered” is still interested, Science Careers is offering new advice to the postdoc who asked what to do about a professor who tries to look down her shirt. The original advice offered by Science Careers columnist Alice Huang, a senior faculty associate in biology at California Institute of Technology and former president of Science’s publisher, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, attracted widespread criticism last week for being “sexist.” Read more...

The group of former Corinthian Colleges students refusing to repay their federal loans and pressing the Education Department to forgive their debt announced Friday that their membership had again grown. Read more...

The American Council on Education and Universities Canada have reiterated their longstanding opposition to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s AHELO (Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes) project, an effort to measure teaching quality globally that is often described as a higher education equivalent of the K-12 level Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Read more...

Barnard College, the women's college associated with Columbia University, will begin admitting transgender women in fall 2016. The Barnard College Board of Trustees approved the new policy at its June 3 meeting following "a full year of conversations" about the issue. "As expected, a wide range of passionate and deeply held beliefs were discussed and debated," Debora Spar, Barnard's president, and Jolyne Caruso-FitzGerald, chair of the Board of Trustees, said in a statement. Read more...

Bill Gates is among a group of rich college dropouts people often cite when questioning the value of a college degree. He isn't buying that argument.
“Although I dropped out of college and got lucky pursuing a career in software, getting a degree is a much surer path to success,” Gates wrote on Wednesday. Read more...

Analyst, electoral forecaster and University of Virginia Robert Kent Gooch Professor of Politics Larry J. Sabato looks to continue his streak at the Emmy Awards this year, as his massive open online course The Kennedy Half Century has been nominated in the Best Instructional Programming category. Read more...