As a college president and chemist, I have worked throughout my career in areas connected to climate change. As an educator, I have written chemistry textbooks and regularly teach courses in which the most urgent issue is climate change. As a president, I frequently face decisions about investments in sustainable practices, whether green buildings (our […] … learn more→

If you stop and think about it for a moment, you will realise what an astonishing feat of precision engineering your colour printer is. It can take the primary colours – cyan, yellow, magenta and black – and mix them together carefully enough to achieve more than a million different hues and shades. Not only […] … learn more→

In recent years, I have begun each semester by asking my first-year composition students two questions, one theoretical and the other practical. First, the theoretical question: What is the purpose of testing? Then the practical question: What happens to the information they study for a test after students have taken the test. My students’ answers […] … learn more→

And this is good old Boston, The home of the bean and the cod, Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots, And the Cabots talk only to God. John Collins Bossidy’s old saw kept running through my mind as I read Thomas Frank’s “All These Effing Geniuses: Ezra Klein, Expert-Driven Journalism, and the Phony Washington […] … learn more→

I’ve certainly done my share of slamming community colleges for their ruthless exploitation of kids. I’ve not given universities a free pass, but it’s been a while since I’ve highlighted that university administration is not above exploiting the vulnerable, either. The textbook scam, where students pay hideously exorbitant fees for books that are filled almost […] … learn more→

Recently I posted a piece that asked, “Is ‘Incivility’ the New Communism?” In that post I suggested that recent attempts to enforce standards of “civility” at colleges and universities, often, as in the Salaita case at Illinois and the Marzec incident in Ohio, in response to pro-Palestinian expression, recalled previous efforts in the 1940s and […] … learn more→

The traditional, hour-long lecture that is so familiar to on-the-ground undergraduates has little place in an online learning environment. However, a shorter, more tightly focused microlecture can help engage learners and add a multimedia punch to a course. Cognitive science indicates that learners have a limited capacity for learning, both in terms of concentration time […] … learn more→

When we sat down last week to read The Economist’s dismaying—and subsequently retracted—review of Edward E. Baptist’s new history of American slavery, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, we experienced a strong sense of déjà vu. The anonymous Economist reviewer objected to Baptist’s portrayal of slavery as a […] … learn more→

A number of high-profile cases have put for-profit higher education in the US under the spotlight in recent months. In July, Corinithian Colleges, one of the largest for-profit providers in the country, agreed to sell 85 of its campuses and close another 12 after a number of investigations into its finances and marketing. This followed […] … learn more→

Incivility and lack of collegiality are on the rise in institutions of higher education (Cipriano, 2011). This phenomenon can range from disputes and tension at one end of the spectrum to violence at the other. There are many departments that suffer from non-collegial, uncivil, and nasty encounters between faculty members, faculty members and professional staff, […] … learn more→