Daniel Luzer

The latest issue of the Monthly features a piece by Kevin Carey, “Asleep at the Seal,” about how college accreditation fails to ensure that American colleges are any good. More on that: There was a fascinating item by Daniel Golden in Bloomberg News yesterday about another part of the accreditation game. Ever wonder how online […]

Nevada’s governor, Jim Gibbons, who refuses to raise states taxes despite the fact that the university system needs like $110 million to operate next year, has a new plan for Nevada higher education. According to an article in Las Vegas TSG, “Nevada Governor Gibbons Proposes Sweeping Changes To Modernize Higher Education.” As the governor says: […]

Pundits have bemoaned grade inflation, the increase over time of American college students’ academic grades, for more than 100 years. But a new study indicates that, while students’ mean grade point average has increased by about 0.1 each decade since the 1960s, grade inflation doesn’t affect everyone equally. Duke University’s Stuart Rojstaczer and Furman University’s […]

Advisory board members affiliated with Toyota resigned their positions at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale after a professor from the school criticized the company. According to an article by Jeff Green and Margaret Cronin Fisk in Business Week: Two Toyota Motor Corp. managers resigned… after a professor from the school told a congressional committee the automaker’s […]

The Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard University today released a report that: Challenges the common misperception of “Generation X” college faculty as self-centered careerists. Gen X faculty prefer, in fact, to establish long-term relationships with colleagues and others in their professional and personal communities. The study revealed other characteristics of the […]

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went before the House education committee yesterday morning to defend the administration’s plan to move to direct lending. Under the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act now stuck in the Senate, all federal student loans would be distributed by colleges, eliminating the student lending industry that currently services and manages […]

One of the more compelling arguments for expanding online course offerings has to do with price. With no need for facilities at all, theoretically the only cost of online education is paying the professor. The students, after all, pay for their own computers. As Westminster College’s Michael Bassis argued in Business Week last month: “More […]

For decades professors have been frustrated and annoyed with colleges’ increasing use of adjunct professors, non-salaried, non-tenure track faculty who are paid for each class they teach. As Inside Higher Ed reported back in 2008: While many adjunct instructors are great classroom teachers, their working conditions — such as lack of office hours, being cut […]

An atheist student group at the University of Texas at San Antonio has brought back a gimmick whereby members of the campus community can exchange religious texts for pornographic magazines. According to an article by Melissa Ludwig in the San Antonio Express-News: In the view of club members, religious texts are as smutty as pornography […]

While arguably recruiting students from different religious backgrounds might be a good way to promote interesting discussions—a “diversity of opinion”—on college campuses, diversity in college admissions is generally taken to mean racial diversity. This is true unless one was affiliated with Northwest College, a community college in Powell, Wyoming. On February 5 Northwest President Paul […]