By Scott McLemee. The most distracting thing about costume dramas set in any period before roughly the turn of the 20th century -- in my experience, anyway -- is the thought that everything and everyone on screen must have smelled really bad. Read more...

By Gates Bryant. The mudslinging in the debate over the use of digital courseware has reached Hatfield-and-McCoy levels of feuding. I have heard at least one higher education leader say, “The only faculty that are afraid of being replaced by digital courseware are those who deserve to be replaced by digital courseware.” Also heard are descriptors such as: rigid, skeptical, curmudgeon, Luddite, etc. On the other side, there are the “reformers” and “disruptive innovators” who are criticized for seeing technology as a panacea. Read more...

By Patrick O’Connor. It’s been a little over a year since Michelle Obama brought school counselors and the important work they do into the spotlight as never before. Read more...

By Karen Gross. Much has been written lately about the growing partnerships between private and public employers and institutions of higher education. This can be seen as a strategy for closing the achievement gap. Read more...

By W. Kent Barnds. For today’s enrollment manager, it’s nearly impossible to go a week without someone forwarding an article about another college trying a new way to describe the difference between its listed sticker price, the actual cost of attendance and the institution’s discount rate. Read more...

By Amy E. Slaton and Donna M. Riley. If the United States is facing a STEM workforce crisis, as so many economic and industry analysts argue, the worst thing we could possibly do is abandon the very thing that sets U.S.-educated STEM workers apart: the broad education that endows our workers with professional competencies, the perspective to lead organizations in private and public sectors, and the flexibility to adapt to the changing and complex technologies that pervade our culture. Read more...

By David C. Williard. The South is home for me, but to my students in Minnesota, it’s an exotic place from which I am an ambassador. So when Dylann Roof massacred congregants at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., last month and students began asking me about the killings and the debate they reignited over the Confederate flag, I did not know whether they sought my analysis as a scholar of the Confederacy and its legacies or my feelings as a transplanted Southerner. Read more...

By Gail DiSabatino. The calls for removing the Confederate battle flag in South Carolina and my experiences as vice president for student affairs at Clemson University might not seem to have much in common. But in the world of real-life leadership and teachable moments, the two are curiously intertwined. Read more...