An undergraduate education is traditionally supposed to provide students with both breadth and depth of knowledge, which derive from their general-education requirements and major, respectively. Increasingly, education experts also want students to develop a third skill, integrative thinking. It entails learning the deeper, underlying meaning of a…

Human rights are rapidly entering the academic curriculum, with programs appearing all over the country--including at Duke, Harvard, Northeastern, and Stanford Universities; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Universities of Chicago, of Connecticut, of California at Berkeley, and of Minnesota; and Trinity College. Most of these…

The author talks about a new generation of Ph.D.'s that is advancing the field with a multidisciplinary approach. Like their predecessors who worked to establish black studies as a respected academic discipline, today's Ph.D. students are also attracted to the social mission of the field. But younger black-studies scholars are willing to work with…

In this article, the authors talk about research relationships in higher education. Research partnerships are generally inexpensive and highly productive (their synergies produce much more work than the sum of the parts). The two partners are generally honest about their collaborations and their roles within them; rigorous in their…

No one doubts that globalization is one of the most important trends of today. As American universities expand their global footprint with branch campuses in Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere, many faculty are concerned about oppressive governance, human-rights violations, and lack of academic freedom abroad. Meanwhile administrators grapple…

A persistent criticism of the digital-humanities movement is that it is elitist and exclusive because it requires the resources of a major university (faculty, infrastructure, money), and is thus more suited to campuses with a research focus. Academics and administrators at small liberal-arts colleges may read about DH and, however exciting it…

The College of the Atlantic (COA)--330 students and 43 faculty members ensconced on Maine's remote Mount Desert Island--has resisted growth, seeing smallness as key to providing an unusual education that cuts across disciplines, rejects academic conventions, and takes a highly personalized approach to teaching and learning. The emphasis on…

This past year, Baylor University created a program to reward some of its best teachers and challenge them to do something truly daring: teach their students how to think--not just how to think "about" course material, but rather how to think "through" the material. The idea is to help students learn how teachers, as…

What should graduate teaching look like when it aims to prepare students for a range of careers? That's a welcome question, but it is not an easy one. The author takes up the problem in two parts, this month from the individual faculty member's perspective, and next month on the curricular level (that is, from the point of view of departments and…

By most accounts, the position of German studies in the American academy is no longer secure. To a large extent, that is due to reasons beyond the control of individual faculty or departments, including the general crisis faced by the humanities and the diminished importance in the eyes of the public of literary criticism, a vital part of the…

For 12 hours at Arizona State University, a sold-out crowd of 3,000 people gave a group of famous scientists a pop-star welcome, cheering their remarks and lining up for autographs after a day full of discussion about black holes, string theory, and evolutionary biology. At a time when program cuts and faculty layoffs dominate the headlines of…

This article reports on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) public-access policy, which requires that agency-financed research results be made publicly available within 12 months of publication. The policy, which went into effect in April 2008, came under assault last year when Rep. John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, introduced the Fair…

In an effort to find a feasible way to provide quality interdisciplinary teaching on a small campus, Southern Vermont College has introduced a program called Roving Professors. The Rovers, a select group of professors, visit multiple classes across the college's five divisions, and each one integrates his or her specialty into each course visited,…

This article describes a brand-new liberal-arts university which promises a different approach to teaching. Quest University is the first private, nonprofit, secular college in Canada. It has attracted professors with stellar credentials. Of its 79 freshmen, most are graduates of the rigorous International Baccalaureate high-school program, and…

In response to the threat of global climate change, more than 550 campus leaders have signed the Presidents Climate Commitment, pledging their colleges to become carbon-neutral. But some educators worry that colleges are fulfilling only half of their environmental duties. The other half, of course, should take place in the classroom, where…