By Brett Bruen. American universities mostly miscalculate international engagement. Many see online education as the best means to expand globally. Some invest in creating expensive overseas campuses in places like Dubai and Shanghai. Read more...

By Nicole Matos and Sheldon Walcher. Fall begins, and the email arrives: “Dear Faculty, welcome to the 67th annual blah, blah, blah. So-and-so won this award, so-and-so had a baby, don’t forget your new copy codes (sorry they come with fewer actual copies), have a wonderful new academic year.” Read more...

By Sara B. Pritchard and Adeline Koh and Michelle Moravec. OneLogin’s recent recruitment campaign showing diverse engineers on billboards in the San Francisco Bay Area inspired a viral hashtag: #ILookLikeAnEngineer.
Frustrated by the microaggressions we experience as “nontraditional” faculty, we started a new hashtag: #ILookLikeAProfessor. The flurry of photos, retweets and horror stories since last Thursday suggests that we are not alone in experiencing entrenched stereotypes and bias -- both subtle and explicit. Read more...

By Alexandra W. Logue and Ian Shrank. Conflicts of interest are inherent in faculty control over curriculum. When not addressed, these conflicts can result in faculty behavior that is neither in the best interest of their students nor of their colleges and universities. Read more...

By Kate Blanchard. I have spent the last several years participating in the collective hand-wringing that has occupied humanists and liberal arts educators everywhere. There is no point in rehashing the indignities that academe has suffered at the hands of legislators, administrators, corporations, and student-consumers. Read more...

By Scott McLemee. Franz Kafka left explicit directions concerning the journals, letters and manuscripts that would be found following his death: they were to be burned -- all of them -- unread. Whether he expected Max Brod, the executor of his estate, to follow through with his instructions is a matter of some debate. In any case, Brod refused, and the first volume of Kafka’s posthumous works came out shortly after the author’s death in 1925. Read more...

By Scott McLemee. In 2011, Paul Clemens, a writer from Detroit published an up-close and personal look at deindustrialization called Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant. It recorded the year he spent on a work team hired to dismantle and gut one of the city’s remaining factories. I wrote about the book when it came out, and won’t recycle anything here, but recall a few paragraphs expressing a particular kind of frustration that a non-Detroiter can only sympathize with, not really share. Read more...

By Paul Fain. What’s in a name? A lot, evidently.
A year after Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences introduced new titles for full-time, non-tenure-track faculty members, along with longer contracts and clearer paths to promotion, proponents say the system has helped them recruit quality teachers and attracted outside interest. Read more...

By Paul Fain. Traditional colleges have been mostly on the sidelines for the early development of online microcredentials or badges -- the kind that aren't linked to conventional courses and the credit hour. Educational technology companies and other alternative providers have taken the lead in working with employers on these skills-based credentials. Read more...

By Paul Fain. The Association of American Colleges and Universities has worked to make its voice heard in discussions about competency-based education, MOOCs and other trendy alternatives to traditional higher education. Read more...