The modern world's understanding of American university press has long been shaped by university-press books. American university-press books are good international advertisements for the universities whose logos grace their spines. The growth of transnational scholarship and the expansion of digital communications networks are converging in ways…

Colleges looking to hire junior faculty members are enjoying something of a buyer's market these days. With job offers scarce in many fields, small, teaching-intensive colleges and regionally oriented state universities have been able to snag recent graduates of the nation's top programs, the kinds of candidates who would have probably gone to…

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has invented or improved many world-changing things--radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It is called MITx.…

Mark Anderson, a professor of philosophy at Belmont University, publishes an account of Nietzsche's life and work. He remembered liking "Friedrich Nietzsche" (Overlook Press, 2005), by the late independent scholar Curtis Cate, so he started rereading that one. But then he had second thoughts. After all, "Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical…

In recent years, some very smart people--like Michael Berube, Marc Bousquet, Anthony Grafton, and William Pannapacker, to name a few--have offered on these pages their thoughts about how to fix graduate education and, by extension, the academic labor market, which, everyone seems to agree, has "unraveled". The author approaches this issue from a…

Western Governors University Texas (WGU Texas), where the author is chancellor, is not an easy institution to describe. It just does not fit the profile of most traditional universities, even the newer for-profit and online ones. It brings the work of a national, online, nonprofit university into a state, and it embraces a competency-based…

In the long-running debate over how many administrators are too many, two economic researchers believe they have identified an ideal ratio. For colleges to operate most effectively, they say, each institution should employ three tenured or tenure-track faculty for every one full-time administrator. What the ratio is now is difficult to say, though…

Students brave roadside bombs and Taliban threats while on class assignments. Professors are kidnapped and killed. Campus radio stations get regular visits from military intelligence. Welcome to journalism education in Pakistan's tribal areas. The region is off-limits to most outsiders, so students find themselves reporting for Pakistani and…

In a long-simmering national fight over compensation for public-college presidents, the State of California emerged this year as the primary battleground. More than any other institution in recent memory, California State University has publicly and sometimes bitterly wrestled with a vexing question for higher education: How much does a public…

In late December, a set of articles and essays in "The New York Times" focused on the public library as a place, and on the changing meaning of that place with the rise of electronic books and the demise of brick-and-mortar bookstores like Borders. As librarians "struggle with the task of redefining their roles and responsibilities in a digital…

Limiting access to some methods of suicide, a strategy known as means restriction, is gaining support among mental-health researchers. Some suicides can be prevented, the logic goes, if it is more challenging for an impulsive individual to harm himself. But on most campuses, that strategy has not taken hold. Instead, counseling and education tend…

With goals of fostering an intellectual atmosphere, building relationships, and increasing students' involvement on campus--and, ultimately, their rates of retention--universities around the country, including Elon, Michigan State, and Southern Methodist, are looking to residence life. House systems, residential neighborhoods, and living-learning…

The battle over public access to federally financed research is heating up again. The basic question is this: When taxpayers help pay for scholarly research, should those taxpayers get to see the results in the form of free access to the resulting journal articles? Actions in Washington this month highlight how far from settled the question is,…

An assistant professor in the social sciences at a regional state university considers herself open to criticism. She listens to suggestions from student evaluations and from senior faculty members. But she was puzzled about how to react to two contradictory critiques of her publication plans. One quality educators must cultivate is to know when…

Rarely do political scandal and academe collide so publicly as they have now, in Europe. In February, Germany's education minister stepped down after Heinrich Heine University, in Dusseldorf, revoked her doctorate because her thesis lifted passages from other sources without proper attribution. Her departure came after scandals over plagiarized…