By Allan Metcalf. The hashtag is a major innovation in language. It was invented just a few years ago, to allow quick and easy categorizing of tweets. And then hashtags became an easy way to comment on the topic of a tweet, as in You had one job: A show about a detective with OCD, and that’s how they designed the box for the last season. #wellplayed Often a hashtag is a comment on a comment: I’m done with science #stopcorrectingparties2k14 Im extremely obsessive about everything I love Fall Out Boy so much #Superwholockian #soccer #softball #nickyrubio #random Destiel is my life Acknowledging its importance to linguists, the American Dialect Society chose #hashtag as its Word of the Year 2012. Two years later, the society recognized hashtags as a separate language category and promptly chose the hashtag #blacklivesmatter as Word of the Year 2014. Surveying the various uses and forms of hashtags nowadays, I was going to claim that a hashtag has no grammatical limits. It can be a complete sentence, an isolated word or two, an abbreviation, an emoticon—anything your keyboard will allow. More...
Federal Agency Asks Banks for Straight Talk on Help for Student-Loan Borrowers
By Kelly Field. Federal regulators are keeping up the pressure on banks to do more to help struggling student-loan borrowers. A year ago, Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, convened the nation’s largest lenders and loan servicers to urge them to offer modified repayment plans to borrowers facing default. More...
Cal State Students Will Get More Say Over Campus ‘Success Fees’
By Charles Huckabee. The trustees of California State University voted on Wednesday to give students more say over the “success fees” some campuses tack onto their tuition bills, The Sacramento Bee reports. Critics have accused institutions of using the controversial fees, which are now in place on 12 of the system’s 23 campuses and can run to several hundred dollars a semester, to circumvent a tuition freeze that Cal State and the University of California agreed to in 2012 in exchange for increased state support. More...
Could Video Feedback Replace the Red Pen?
By Steve Kolowich. Writing useful comments on students’ work can be a fine art. And for instructors who put a lot of effort into crafting a critique, there’s always a substantial risk students will skip the written feedback and go right to the grade. More...
Dispute Among Scholars Dooms Gift to Russian-Studies Group
By Nick DeSantis. A controversy among scholars of Russian studies has resulted in the death of a proposed gift to a major association that would have provided much-needed financial support for the discipline, The New York Times reports. More...
New Project Will Turn Out-of-Print Humanities Texts Into Free E-Books
By Nick DeSantis. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are teaming up on a new grant program that seeks to turn out-of-print books in the humanities into freely available e-books. The project is known as Humanities Open Book. More...
University Can Deny a Medical Degree Over Lack of ‘Professionalism,’ Court Rules
By Nick DeSantis. A federal appeals court has ruled that Case Western Reserve University can deny a student a medical degree if it determines the student lacks “professionalism,” The Plain Dealer reported. More...
Amid Political Pressure, Obama Drops Plan to Curb College-Savings Plans
By Andy Thomason. President Obama has backed away from his proposal to roll back tax breaks for 529 college-savings plans amid mounting political pressure, The New York Times reports. The proposal was slated to be a piece of Mr. Obama’s budget plan for the 2016 fiscal year, due on Monday. More...
Another San Francisco Campus Closes Over Earthquake-Safety Concerns
By Andy Thomason. Officials at the community college announced on Thursday that it would close its second campus in three weeks out of earthquake-safety concerns, the San Francisco Examiner reports. The announcement three weeks ago—one day before classes were set to begin—that the college’s Civic Center campus would close was greeted with consternation from faculty members. More...
Science and Engineering Degrees Inch Up, but Progress for Women Is Mixed
By Chronicle Staff. Report: Snapshot ReportOrganization: National Student Clearinghouse Research CenterSummary: The past decade has seen a slight uptick in the share of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the so-called STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Women lost ground to men at the bachelor’s level, while gaining at the doctoral level. More...