By . Interest rates on new federal student loans will rise for the 2014-15 academic year, with the rate on undergraduate Stafford loans increasing to 4.66 percent, Bloomberg reported. Congress voted last year to tie interest rates to the high yield on the 10-year Treasury note. This year’s auction took place on Wednesday, with the yield on the note set at 2.61 percent. More...
By Tom Bartlett. Kierkegaard took long walks in the afternoon. Dickens once hoofed it 30 miles from London to his country home. Diogenes’ advice was said to be “solvitur ambulando”—it is solved by walking around. In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit unpacks the appeal of perambulation: “Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”
By Beckie Supiano. If this year is like the last few, the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s annual “College Openings Update” will be trotted out as one more piece of evidence that American higher education is in crisis. More...
By Jennifer Howard. A lament for a dead child, written by her mother in pencil on the endpaper of an 1843 copy of The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans. A sewing needle, thread still attached, inserted in the back of an 1860 edition of The Letters of Hannah More to Zachary Macauley. Bittersweet annotations in an 1891 copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Ballads and Other Poems (left), in which the book’s owner recalls times spent reading it with her lost beloved: “You read this, July 1st, Sunday, the day you said—‘goodbye,’ sitting in the great armchair in the Infirmary parlor—O friend of mine!”
Those traces of long-gone readers live on, preserved in the books themselves, in the stacks of the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library. More...
By Danya Perez-Hernandez. Universities have long embraced digital technology that improves students’ academic performance. Now the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is embracing another, simpler performance booster—sleep. More...
By Danya Perez-Hernandez. Responding to a campaign by law professors, a leading legal publisher said on Thursday that its new casebook-publishing program would not threaten students’ ability to buy and sell used textbooks. The professors feared that Casebook Connect, a new offering from Wolters Kluwer’s Aspen Law imprint, would be a step toward the eradication of students’ first-sale rights, which allow book owners to do whatever they please with their copies of a book, including sell it. More...
By Jonah Newman. Diversity is a difficult thing to quantify. Measuring racial and ethnic diversity at a college or university is made all the more difficult, as we explained in our last post, by how the U.S. Department of Education categorizes students’ race—and how the department has changed its categorization methods over time. More...
To the Editor:
While a great deal of Aaron Hughes’s "Jewish Studies Is Too Jewish" (The Chronicle Review, March 28) is spurious and objectionable, we will restrict our comments to his cheap shots at the Jewish Review of Books. The JRB, he writes, is a magazine "in which scholars (some of whom are associated with other Tikvah programs) air personal grievances, review one another’s books, and trash those with whom they disagree."
It is hard, as William Paley famously noted, to refute a sneer, but when it is as unfounded as this, it isn’t that hard. Can he name the scholars who air their personal grievances in our pages? We know that he cannot. In fact, we routinely ask reviewers whether they have any relationship with the writer that might shape or impair their review. More...
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