A coalition of 12 organizations, including New America, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Center for Law and Social Policy, on Wednesday released a set of shared principles for policy makers to consider in the run-up to the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the law that governs federal aid programs. Read more...

Union College in New York, founded in 1795, is among the oldest colleges in the United States. From shortly after its founding, the college's motto, in French, was “Sous les lois de Minerve nous devenons tous frères” (“Under the laws of Minerva we all become brothers”). But the board of Union has approved a change to acknowledge that not all Union students are men. The new motto is: “Sous les lois de Minerve nous devenons tous frères et sœurs” (“Under the laws of Minerva, we all become brothers and sisters”). Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Get to the root of the problem and work upward, argues Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University, in his new book out this month, The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press).
“If the problems with graduate school are a tree, a lot of people are fixated on this branch or that branch,” Cassuto said in an interview. “But you can’t fix the branch if the trouble is in the roots of the tree. And in graduate school, there are a lot of common problems that go down to the roots.”
For Cassuto, the fundamental problem for graduate school education in the humanities and humanistic social sciences is one of teaching. Tenure-line professors at research institutions prepare students to become “mini mes,” even though the odds are less than one in two that they’ll get the chance at becoming one, and that is more than a practical failure, he argues -- it’s a moral one.
“There’s an enormous trust that’s being extended here, and that’s something that people who run graduate education programs need to take seriously,” Cassuto said. “If you’re not teaching them to do and value the work they’ll actually be doing, you’re really teaching them to be unhappy.”
He argues in Mess that graduate school professors must “convey their own awareness and approval” of taking teaching-intensive positions outside research institutions, or outside academe entirely. And programs must make readily available placement data for past graduates so students know what they’re getting into, Cassuto says. Next, he argues -- since graduate schools are no longer letting in “armies” of students -- faculty members must begin to better “tailor” students’ experiences to their professional goals. Cassuto's not big on quotas, but he says that a program's ability to provide this kind of attention should drive its admission numbers. Read more...

By Joseph Barber. One of the many interesting quirks of the academic job market is that the first job you get can actually be the only job you might ever have. Oh, yes, you might turn from an assistant professor into an associate professor into a professor. Read more...

By Joya Misra and Jennifer Lundquist. The increasingly few faculty members lucky enough to land in tenure-stream jobs and successfully attain tenure are sometimes surprised to find tenure a letdown. One key to this disappointment is that work hours rarely change as faculty members move up in rank. Read more...

By Natalie Lundsteen. I spend most of my days in meetings with graduate students and postdocs, talking about where their careers might go. I jokingly say, “Nobody leaves my office without a networking tutorial.” And it’s true: for Ph.D.s engaged in a nonacademic job search, the concept of networking is omnipresent and unavoidable. Read more...

By James M. Van Wyck. If graduate students are (to borrow Leonard Cassuto’s phrase) the CEOs of their own graduate education, then a key aspect of this multifaceted role is public relations. Read more...

By Paul B. Sturtevant. At a town hall campaign stop in South Carolina, Jeb Bush recently singled out an interesting group for attack: psychology, philosophy and liberal arts majors. He said:

“When a student shows up, they [their college or university] ought to say, ‘Hey, that psych major deal, that philosophy major thing, that's great, it's important to have liberal arts … but realize, you're going to be working a Chick-fil-A.’”

In the week since, Bush has drawn some well-deserved ire for his remarks. But those of us in the humanities would be deluding ourselves if we didn’t admit that we have a serious image problem. Read more...

By Cathy N. Davidson. This past Friday morning on Facebook, an English professor at the University of Missouri and former doctoral student of mine, John Evelev, made what he says will be his last post about the protests against racism at the University of Missouri. Read more...

By Fabio Rojas. Last week, students and administrators at Yale University fought over a series of racial incidents. A fraternity at the university was accused of excluding nonwhite women from a party. Read more...