This article features Antioch College, an old campus with a new future. With no tuition, no accreditation, and a mostly empty campus, the college is making a slow and careful start. Reopening a college that had been shuttered for three years certainly qualifies--especially a college with a rich history that, at this point, is equal parts blessing…

Einstein was blessed with a rare genius. He also understood the intellectual weight of a flight of fancy. He turned over the idea in his mind for a decade before concluding that the light beam next to him would appear to be at rest even though it was traveling at the speed of light. While it may be tempting to focus on Einstein's cognitive…

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…

Universities and their inventors earned more than $1.8-billion from commercializing their academic research in the 2011 fiscal year, collecting royalties from new breeds of wheat, from a new drug for the treatment of HIV, and from longstanding arrangements over enduring products like Gatorade. Northwestern University earned the most of any…

The perception that academic scientists must pursue money from government agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health is subverting the aims of science and making it harder for institutions and individual professors to do innovative and original research. Of course winning a large federal grant attracts a…

Around the world, the fight for affordable medical treatment is intensifying. Headline-grabbing battles are being waged in India, where the Chennai High Court recently decided a major constitutional case over access to lifesaving cancer medication. In Thailand, Abbott Laboratories, a multinational pharmaceutical giant, has withdrawn registration…

Describes how a combination of professional interests, sought-after expertise, and good fortune produced appealing first jobs for four new Ph.D.s in political science, philosophy, literature, and physiology. (EV)

Describes how a new approach to setting standards for colleges, the Academic Quality Improvement Project, follows principles from manufacturing and industry. (EV)

At a recent national conference, colleagues from different academic disciplines but all worked in college or university teaching-improvement programs found that the subject most frequently discussed was how to improve the teaching of "tired" faculty members. Tired faculty members are most often senior professors who have worked at their…

Describes how, by sponsoring donor-advised funds, colleges are allowing contributors to enjoy tax breaks and philanthropic experience normally reserved for billionaires with their own foundations. (EV)

Research anthropologists are using experimental ethnographic writing to reveal the kinds of hidden agenda that both researchers and informants bring to anthropological field work, questioning what constitutes truth in an ethnographic account. (MSE)

Seventeen student volunteers form the Franklin Pierce College Fire Department. When the firefighters are on duty, they must carry electronic pagers at all times. They also participate in dormitory inspections and attend weekend sessions at a local firefighters' training school. (MLW)

The innovative program enables students to enroll, for additional academic credit, in regular disciplinary courses which have supplementary readings and class meetings in a foreign language. Currently 25 professors are experimenting with the special courses and 45 students are enrolled in the foreign language tracks of 4 courses. (DB)

The Charles A. Dana Foundation is trying to bring attention to innovations that improve the quality of undergraduate education and those that prevent disease and promote health. It is especially interested in ideas that can be copied on other campuses or in other communities or medical institutes. (MLW)

Under a new policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, spouses of the system president and chancellors can apply for the title "associate of the chancellor" and receive benefits such as business cards, library cards, travel expenses for university business, insurance coverage, etc. (MLW)