Category Archives: Future of the University

3quarksdaily: Philosophy is a Bunch of Empty Ideas: Interview with Peter Unger

Philosophy: you either get it or you don’t. The field has its passionate defenders, but according to its critics, philosophy is irrelevant, unproductive, and right at the height of the ivory towers. And now, the philosophy-bashing camp can count a … Continue reading

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Finding Life After Academia — and Not Feeling Bad About It – NYTimes.com

According to a 2011 National Science Foundation survey, 35 percent of doctorate recipients — and 43 percent of those in the humanities — had no commitment for employment at the time of completion. Fewer than half of Ph.D.’s are expected … Continue reading

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The Overwhelm

Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, talks with the Atlantic Monthly. Schulte scrutinizes this state of affairs: Why do we all feel so overworked? How is that feeling different for men … Continue reading

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The Youngest Technorati – NYTimes.com

Ryan [Orbuch]… is among the many entrepreneurially minded, technologically skilled teenagers who are striving to do serious business. Their work is enabled by low-cost or free tools to make apps or to design games, and they are encouraged by tech … Continue reading

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How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation: A Conversation with Sydney Brenner | King’s Review – Magazine

An interview with molecular biologist Sydney Brenner… In most places in the world, you live your social life and your ordinary life in the lab. You don’t know anybody else. Sometimes you don’t even know other people in the same … Continue reading

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Graduate Student Research Symposium – TWU Federation of North Texas Area Universities – Texas Woman’s University

The Federation of North Texas Area Universities is pleased to sponsor its fifth annual Graduate Student Research Symposium on April 25, 2014, at Texas Woman’s University (Symposium Location & Directions). At the Symposium, graduate students from Federation disciplines across the three universities–Texas A&M-Commerce, … Continue reading

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Public Books — Stop Defending the Humanities

Those who matter most to the humanities fall, I think, into two classes. The most important is that relatively small group of 18-year-olds (disproportionately few from poorer families) who are inclined to study the humanities. Our immediate future rests primarily … Continue reading

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Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers : Nature News & Comment

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense. Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in … Continue reading

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College Applicants Sweat The SATs. Perhaps They Shouldn’t : NPR

[William] Hiss’ study, “Defining Promise: Optional Standardized Testing Policies in American College and University Admissions,” examined data from nearly three-dozen “test-optional” U.S. schools, ranging from small liberal arts schools to large public universities, over several years. Hiss found that there … Continue reading

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1 In 4 Americans Thinks The Sun Goes Around The Earth, Survey Says : The Two-Way : NPR

A quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, according to a report out Friday from the National Science Foundation. The survey of 2,200 people in the … Continue reading

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Scientists reading fewer papers for first time in 35 years : Nature News & Comment

A survey of the reading habits of US university researchers saw a drop in the traditional, paper-based consumption of information. A 35-year trend of researchers reading ever more scholarly papers seems to have halted. In 2012, US scientists and social … Continue reading

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Coursera Blog • An Experimental “Meta-MOOC” Shaping the Future of Higher Education

When Professor Cathy Davidson of Duke University agreed to teach a Coursera course on the “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education,” which will launch on January 27, 2014, she was determined to see how the course itself could help … Continue reading

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College papers: Students hate writing them. Professors hate grading them. Let’s stop assigning them.

Is this a good idea? We should be thinking about what it is students should take away from a required course in the humanities and in the sciences. We might call it trivia training, but maybe the best thing for … Continue reading

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Budget deal expected to alleviate automatic cuts to scientific research | Inside Higher Ed

The federal budget deal announced by Congressional negotiators Tuesday evening would largely alleviate cuts to research funding and campus-based student aid programs… The proposal does not lay out specific amounts of money for federal agencies but it would increase, from … Continue reading

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Would teaching economics backwards help students be ready for the world?

Who really knows… but it might be worth the experiment! …here’s one temporary fix for introductory economics: teach it backwards. Reversing the order in which introductory economic classes are taught today might be the easiest way to respond to the … Continue reading

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Supporting Good Teaching

It’s a 50-year-old physics textbook that runs to 1,500 pages and whose contents were declared a failure by its famous author. It is also, according to various online reviews “spellbinding” and “an extraordinary book written by an extraordinary man”. One … Continue reading

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Brain Drain / Brain Gain

In a new book, “Paying the Professoriate,” to be published this month, Mr. Altbach and his co-editors examine academic salaries, contracts and benefits in publicly funded universities in 28 countries. They depict a world increasingly divided “into two categories — … Continue reading

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Udacity, Coursera: Should celebrities teach MOOCs?

Free online courses do big numbers these days. So-called MOOCs, or massive open online courses, typically get tens of thousands of sign-ups to watch video lectures delivered by tweedy academics, some more photogenic than others. But imagine how many students … Continue reading

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More and more teachers migrate online for professional development

since joining online learning communities, the writing I jot down on discussion forums, blogs, and Twitter, for example, far extend my thinking beyond what’s in my personal notebooks. My MiddleWeb blog, Two Teachers in the Room, keeps me connected with many educators like myself … Continue reading

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Quitting academic jobs: professor Zachary Ernst and other leaving tenure and tenure-track jobs. Why?

Continuing the theme of a reblog we posted yesterday: ..there’s an important way that Ernst’s essay distinguishes itself: Most I Quitters are like me, which is to say failed academics, or like Lord, whose disillusion hit her midway down the … Continue reading

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The Economy Does Not Depend on Higher Education – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education

The notion that a person without a degree is doomed to unemployment is at best a widespread misconception, as unwarranted as blaming an economic recession on a paucity of skilled workers. The high unemployment numbers are not due to workers’ … Continue reading

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Despite new studies, flipping the classroom still enjoys widespread support | Inside Higher Ed

…”Our goal is to better understand the conditions under which flipped classrooms lead to better student outcomes”… via Despite new studies, flipping the classroom still enjoys widespread support | Inside Higher Ed.

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Inklings: Why I Jumped Off The Ivory Tower

For a long time, I”ve been the uncomfortable owner of a coveted faculty position that I didn’t want. My decision to leave isn\’t really about my department or university in particular, but about a perverse incentive structure that maintains the … Continue reading

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A Wizard of Oz Moment for the Web: Pull back the Curtains

Lightbeam, a download produced by Mozilla, the US free software community behind the popular Firefox browser, claims to be a “watershed” moment in the battle for web transparency. Everyone who browses the Internet leaves a digital trail used by advertisers … Continue reading

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How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses | Wired Business | Wired.com

…Juárez Correa didn’t know it yet, but he had happened on an emerging educational philosophy, one that applies the logic of the digital age to the classroom. That logic is inexorable: Access to a world of infinite information has changed … Continue reading

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