Thoreau's "Walden" is a text that has been misinterpreted in various ways, one consequence of which is a failure to appreciate its significance as a perfectionist and visionary text for education. This paper explores aspects of what might be called its teaching, especially via the kind of teaching that is offered by Stanley Cavell's commentary,…

"Library Quarterly's" seventy-fifth anniversary invites an analysis of the journal's bibliometric dimension, including contributor attributes, various author rankings, and citation impact. Eugene Garfield's HistCite software, linked to Thomson Scientific's Web of Science, as made available by Garfield, for the period 1956-2004, was used as the…

In 2002, the geographic knowledge of college-age students in the North was highlighted in a survey sponsored by the National Geographic Society. Students in the U.S. ranked second to last among those surveyed on questions assessing basic knowledge of world geography. That many young adults got "the facts" wrong about particular places…

Purpose: Public funding of institutions offering higher education is becoming scarcer, more complex, and to an ever-increasing extent performance-based. Concerning the teaching area the financing is partly based on student credits and professional degrees. Thus student loyalty has become an important strategic theme. The purpose is to study…

This article reports the results of an investigation to identify the disciplinary strengths and the international standing of the higher education institutions in South Africa. Even though comparative assessments provide valuable information for research administrations, researchers and students such information is not available in South Africa…

"IMHE-Info" is a newsletter published by the Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) programme of OECD. This issue includes: (1) Breaking Ranks: Assessing Quality in Higher Education (Lyndon Thompson); (2) How to Improve Quality in Higher Education: A Study of Institutional Strategies; and (3) No More Ivory Towers: New Phase…

The soul expressed in a college's traditions is the constant amidst radically changing equipment, techniques, styles, and individuals. The essential college or university is the sum of all the people who have made it--its traditions built on good times, pranks, friendships, serious concerns, devotion to something beyond one's self. (MLW)

Investigates the relation between preschoolers' peer behavior and status during a school year by exploring whether early behaviors predict changes in peer status and vice versa. Results support the hypothesis that children's behaviors contribute to their social status among peers. (RJC)

Explores how for-profit colleges want to be defined as higher education institutions, for both the prestige and the money. The institutions are pushing Congress to change a key definition that prevents them from receiving certain kinds of federal aid. (EV)

A convicted criminal, eluding police, has conned dozens of college faculty out of over $200,000 over two years by pretending to be a prominent scholar, calling on colleagues to provide financial assistance to a friend, and offering academic services or personal favors in return. Targeted professors have been in the fields of history, sociology,…

Develops an inter-temporal optimization model linking academic achievement reputation, and the pool of student quality available to an institution. Describes empirical study of student-quality dynamics and its relation to the model. Finds that SAT levels of attracted students follow a convergent process as predicted, with graduation rates,…

Presents an empirical study of the Fortune 500 companies suggesting that "reputation management" is gaining ground as a driving philosophy behind corporate public relations. Finds some interesting correlations between reputation and specific categories of spending. Concludes that if reputation management is the new face of corporate…

We used data from 1,733 college students to explore whether adolescents' avenues to prestige differ in public and private high schools. Students attending seven large universities during the 1997-98 academic year provided information on the ways in which adolescents in their high schools had gained prestige with peers. The analyses revealed no…

This paper examines the relationship between university ranks and outcome measurements. Many students select the university that they will attend based on these rankings In this paper the rankings conducted by two studies are examined. U.S. News and World Report rankings are based upon measures of the quality of input, retention while in school…

Sociologists of knowledge find that academic stratification is present among individual scholars, genders, networks, fields, and all kinds of scientific organizations, while communications scholars have been studying global cultural asymmetry for a long time. Yet few researchers have explored the global dimension of academic stratification. In…