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The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities sent a letter to U.S. Department of Education Under Secretary Ted Mitchell Thursday expressing disappointment in how the federal agency views the for-profit sector in the wake of the department's decision to provide debt relief to former Corinthian Colleges students. Read more...

The Association of American University Presses' sixth annual survey on digital book publishing finds presses are pursuing myriad strategies but balancing them against limited resources. Nearly all respondents, or 92 percent, are exploring digital ebook sales, but eight other strategies, from print on demand to ebook rentals, registered between 86 and 36 percent. Read more...

Some 65 percent of tenured senior faculty members plan to put off retirement for various reasons, according to a new study from the TIAA-CREF Institute. But the reasons behind that figure might not be what you think. Just 16 percent of respondents said they’d like to retire by the “normal” retirement age of 67 but expected to work longer for financial reasons. A much bigger proportion of respondents -- 49 percent -- said they’d want to work past age 67 by choice. Read more...

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will not lose accreditation over the academic fraud that occurred there, but it will face one year of probation, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges announced Thursday. In October, the university released a detailed report about widespread and long-lasting academic fraud at the university. Read more...

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...