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Academe and the Decline of News Media - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Chronicle of Higher Education - Feb. 07 (Opinion) -

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Fear of Repression Spurs Scholars and Activists to Build Alternate Internets

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Jeffrey R. Young - Sep. 18 (News) - one weekend each month, a small group of computer programmers gathers at a residence here to build a homemade Internet—named Project Byzantium—that could go online if parts of the current global Internet becomes blocked by a repressive government.

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Balance Your Budget by Cleaning House - Do Your Job Better

Tue, 03 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Michael J. Bugeja - May. 03 (Opinion) - As we approach the end of another academic term, some institutions are still living off of stimulus money that did little to inspire solutions to mammoth budget cuts looming for the 2012 academic year, which promises to be one of the most difficult in memory for higher education.

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Decoding the Value of Computer Science

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Kevin Carey - Nov. 22 (Comment) - Coding taught me the shape of logic, the value of brevity, and the attention to detail that debugging requires. I learned that a beautiful program with a single misplaced semicolon is like a sports car with one piston out of line. Both are dead machines, functionally indistinguishable from junk. I learned that you are good enough to build things that do what they are supposed to do, or you are not.

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A Modern Scholar's Ailments: Link Rot and Footnote Flight

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - Oct. 10 (Opinion) - Plenty of Web content is the information equivalent of a bag of potato chips, created to be consumed and forgotten. Not for scholars, though. Authors and journal editors link to Web-based resources in citations meant to last, but the phenomenon of "link rot"—when links, or URL's, stop working—can undermine the usefulness of those references. If a URL leads nowhere, another researcher might not be able to find the source material. In the case of, say, medical studies, a dead link could have deadly consequences, if a health-care provider can't locate information needed for a treatment plan.

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The Dream Act Is Dead, at Least for Now - Government

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 09:56:42 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - Sep. 22 -

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12 Rules for New Administrators - Run Your Campus

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Michael J. Bugeja - Sep. 13 (Opinion) - During the summer, two of my best friends and former colleagues asked me for guidance about making the transition from professor to administrator. Both had just been named directors of major academic programs at large public universities.

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We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Mark Bauerlein, Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Wayne Grody, Bill McKelvey, Stanley W. Trimble - Jun. 24 (Opinion) - the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006.

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The Elephant in the Room: Curricular Glut

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Michael Bugeja - Mar. 28 (Opinion) - In our current recession, which has led to deep budget cuts, few public institutions are operating normally—except, perhaps, in an area that expands at the expense of faculty and staff members even in less straitened times: the curriculum.

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Final Student-Loan Bill Offers Aid to Colleges and Students

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Paul Basken - Mar. 19 (News Report) - Congressional Democrats and the Obama administration on Thursday outlined their final agreement on legislation to overhaul the government's student-loan system, with the savings providing annual inflation-adjusted increases in the Pell Grant and billions of dollars in additional aid for higher education.

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The Rural Brain Drain

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Patrick J. Carr, Maria J. Kefalas - Sep. 24 (Special Report) - American youth are abandoning the Midwest's small towns. The sociologists Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas explore causes and remedies.

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Stop the Presses! Revamped Journalism Courses Attract Students - Curriculum

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Katherine Mangan - Sep. 22 (News) - At a time when the newspaper industry is in free fall and thousands of jobs are being cut each year, one would think that the halls of the nation's journalism schools would be awfully quiet. Think again.

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Understanding How Tenure Decisions Are Made

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Michael Bugeja - Jul. 04 (Opinion) - Some negative promotion and tenure decisions seem predetermined the moment a newly hired scholar signs a job contract. Chalk it up to a bad institutional match: The job candidate chose the college for the wrong reasons, rejecting another that would have better suited his or her talents. Other negative decisions can be traced to institutional and research variables that many candidates overlook.

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How a Student-Friendly Kindle Could Change the Textbook Market

Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Jeffrey R. Young - May. 06 (News Report) - Rumors that Amazon will introduce a wide-format Kindle have the news media and bloggers speculating about whether the new gadget will spark an electronic-textbook revolution and lighten backpacks nationwide.

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Colleges Using Technology to Recruit Students Try to Hang On to the Conversation

Sat, 02 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Sara Lipka - May. 02 (Special Report) - With social media, anyone can chime in. Colleges that were once occupied with staying on message are warily opening up to the e-masses—and trying to get used to that.

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Student Lending Would Change Under Senate's Budget Plan

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Kelly Field - May. 01 (News Report) - The U.S. Senate last night gave final approval to a budget blueprint that sets the stage for an overhaul of student lending.

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Books Can't Compete

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Mark Bauerlein - Jan. 23 (Opinion) - Here’s a depressing and blunt comment from Larry McMurtry, speaking not only as a novelist but as a bookstore owner (it’s an interview): The end of the culture of the book. I’m pessimistic. Mainly it’s the flow of people into my bookshop in Archer City. They’re almost always people over 40. I don’t see kids, and I don’t see kids reading. I think little kids love to have stories read to them, but when they get to 10 or 11 or 12, they run into this tsunami of technology: iPod, iPhone, Blackberries. They don’t resist it, and it’s normal that they wouldn’t; it’s their culture. I’m not so sure they ever come back to reading. Some will, but most won’t. The tsunami metaphor is apt, and it points out the relationship between books and other media in kids’ lives. The list of options has grown, with books now joined by games, Web surfing, music downloading, Photoshop, YouTube, social networking, blogs, texting, IM, and the rest. Lots of folks think that the environment has grown more challenging and rewarding and enlightening, the addition of digital diversions fostering a rich plurality of texts and images and stories and sounds in which books maintain a central place.

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The Legacy of the Bush-Cheney Years: Trends That May Linger

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Karen J. Winkler - Jan. 04 (News Analysis) - New York — For the last eight years, progressive historians have been vocally critical of the Bush-Cheney administration’s war in Iraq, war on terror, stress on free markets, and push to privatize government services like charter schools and social-welfare programs. But at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association here, the collective judgment seems to be that those trends haven’t been all that new — and won’t be easy to change. In 2007 a group called Historians Against the War was successful in its call on the membership of the association to pass a resolution against the invasion of Iraq, over the objections of some historians that doing so would take a political stand as a group of scholars. The antiwar group has continued to meet, holding national conferences and sponsoring online publications that include an analysis of the historical record of the Bush administration and studies of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the war in Iraq, and resistance movements in World War II. At this year’s AHA meeting, the group gathered to reflect on the legacy of the Bush-Cheney years. While the session was not advertised in the official program, it drew more than 100 scholars. “Much of my work as a historian has had to do with ideology and its role in shaping lives and policy,” said Alice Kessler-Harris, a professor of history at Columbia University. In the Bush-Cheney years, she said, three ideologies have had a major impact on American society. An “elusive concept” of terror has allowed the administration to wage pre-emptive war, support military force over diplomacy, and hide the human cost of the war in Iraq; the ideology of free markets has undercut government regulation of the economy and the workplace; and a “shift in the ideology of the individual” has emphasized that individuals need to have control over decisions — like what kind of health care they want.

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Classroom Clickers and the Cost of Technology

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Michael Bugeja - Dec. 02 (Investigative Report) - Last spring I received an e-mail message from my university's Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching that read like an advertisement: "If you are thinking of ordering personal response system units, or clickers, for your class next fall, be sure to attend the upcoming CELT session, Using TurningPoint Clickers to Engage Students in the Classroom." Staff members at the center provide valuable services to evaluate and improve teaching. Their first impulse is to help, a trait they share with information-technology and bookstore personnel. In this case, though, the center was helping a company by providing workshops and promotion for a device resembling a television remote control.

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Progressive Patriotism

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Warren Goldstein - Nov. 17 (Comment) - I was listening to my local NPR station when the host asked, "Is there a new progressive patriotism in America?" Calls flooded in proclaiming a resounding Yes, and I began figuring out how to put an American flag on my front door.

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Health Care: a Campaign Primer

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By David Glenn - Oct. 09 (News Analysis) - John McCain and Barack Obama have offered proposals that would — in very different ways — reshape the landscape of American health care. The Chronicle spoke with several scholars about how the study of health economics and health policy has evolved since the Clinton plan collapsed in 1994 — and whether this year's candidates seem to have learned anything from that scholarship.

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The Russians Are Coming

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Stephen Kotkin, Nina L. Khrushcheva, Edward Lucas, Ellen Carnaghan, Marshall I. Goldman, Sean Kay - Sep. 05 (Opinion) - When the Russian army invaded the former Soviet republic of Georgia last month, it was little surprise to many observers, who have noted for several years the increasingly assertive and aggressive foreign policy of Vladimir V. Putin, Russia's prime minister and former president. But is Russia as resurgent as its recent military posturing might suggest? The Chronicle asked several experts to comment on the country's likely political, social, and economic prospects over the next 10 years.

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Supply-Side Education

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By David Glenn - Jul. 25 (Review) - "There was enormous growth in educational attainment between 1900 and 1970," Goldin says in an interview. "But after 1970, the growth in attainment became much more sluggish. Putting those two parts together, you can explain a large amount of the story of wage inequality in the 20th century."

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New-Media Scholars' Place in 'the Pool' Could Lead to Tenure

Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Andrea Foster - May. 30 (News Report) - Re:Poste, a Web application that encourages academics to pick apart online articles from the mass media, is only in its infancy. But the program has already generated buzz on a social-networking Web site called the Pool. "The way you have thought this through is impressive," writes Jon Ippolito in the Pool. He is an associate professor of new media at the University of Maine at Orono. Re:Poste is one of 600 creative works -- games, art, and more -- by new-media students and faculty members, most of them on the Orono campus, described in the Pool, which also contains about 2,000 reviews of those works. Starting in June, the Pool will have a much wider reach, as people in general will be invited to add material to the site, rate others' projects, build on their ideas, and find collaborators for their own projects. The Pool, as yet little known, could provide a new avenue for new-media scholars to do their jobs. Eventually it could play a role in their tenure and promotion as well.

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How Did Honor Evolve?

Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By David P. Barash - May. 21 (Special Report) - people are, at least on occasion, inclined to do things that are detrimental to their personal benefit so long as their actions are sufficiently beneficial to the larger social unit.

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