An Australian report identifying "generic skills, attributes, and values" as the central achievements of higher education is criticized as vague and inconsistent. A more systematic analysis is offered of higher order generic skills as they manifest themselves in thinking, research, and communication, and of the way in which these skills…

Using the 1995 National Research Council ratings of doctoral programs in 41 fields, a statistical methodology is offered for assessing how measures of program size, faculty seniority, faculty research productivity, and faculty productivity in producing doctoral degrees influenced raters' decisions. Then using data for one field, economics,…

An annual national survey of college faculty salaries found faculty at public institutions faring better than those at private schools, with the latter receiving smaller raises than last year. The survey's focus is on undergraduate programs. Engineering faculty had the highest and nursing faculty the lowest average salaries. Average salaries, by…

Describes a collaborative model developed at the Chestnut Hill campus of Massachusetts' Boston College to work across professions to address community needs. Indicates that professional schools at the college collaborate in four overlapping areas: educational efforts, community outreach, scholarship, and research and service. Discusses the model's…

Points out the similarities and differences between library instruction and writing instruction in the higher education curriculum. Topics include an historical overview; teaching language; writing and research as processes; discourse communities, or academic disciplines; workshops to initiate and sustain writing across the curriculum; assessment;…

Analyzes education and comparative education as intellectual disciplines, stressing learning over teaching. Traces changes in comparative education research policies, citing the influence of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). Suggests African comparative education research should use alternative…

Columbia and New York University probably served as the breeding grounds for the debates about whether nursing is a practice discipline, a clinical science, or a basic science, as well as for arguments about how practice and research should be related and, ultimately, how the DNS differs from the PhD. (MLW)

Describes a study that identified both technical aptitudes and personality characteristics that are related to academic orientation variables previously found to predict information retrieval performance. It is argued that individual characteristics should be described so that they can be accommodated through design and training. (74 references)…

The enthusiasm generated by workshops in writing across the curriculum can be translated into lasting curricular change, particularly in freshman composition, general education courses, and upper-division writing emphasis courses. Committees, central to any change effort, can take any of a variety of forms. (MSE)

Continuing problems, troubling trends, and many opportunities face writing-across-the-curriculum planners in the future. Proponents must continue to believe in the benefits of writing-across-the-curriculum programs and widen and intensify networks of support. (MSE)

Qualitative aspects of human resource management and leadership are seen as most essential. Based on observations of problematic department management, recommendations are made with respect to selection, training, evaluation, and research and development. (MLW)

A study investigated whether Biglan clusters of academic disciplines (hard/soft, pure/applied, life/nonlife) could be used to explain disciplinary differences in college student ratings of instruction. It was found that Biglan clusters do not explain the differences, many disciplines still emphasize knowledge acquisition over higher-order skills,…

Reports the major findings of the Pedagogical Relations between Adult Literacy and Communication project, which examined the relationship between the fields of adult literacy education and communications. It was found that the knowledge each field has of the other is, overall, very limited and often erroneous. (six references) (MDM)

Reports on a study of trends in the segregation in fields of study by sex for recipients of college degrees in the 1980s. Examines three dimensions of segregation: (1) unevenness; (2) concentration or crowding; and (3) intergroup academic contact. Finds a slowdown in the trend toward gender integration after 1985. (CFR)

It is argued that scholarship is the primary teaching resource for college faculty: the content, structure, and process knowledge inherent in scholarship can contribute to effective teaching and learning when explicitly taught to students by the scholar-teacher. Instruction may be designed to approximate the ideal of apprenticeship. (MSE)