City University of New York's (CUNY) new community college, planned almost entirely by administrators and slated to open in 2012, seems designed to shunt its student body into narrow, mostly terminal career-technical programs with the promise of an associate's degree at the end. But to what purpose? To "reimagine community college education…

An academic plan is a business plan disguised in the regalia donned for significant public ceremonies--black cap and gown, colorful hood, and, of course, gold tassel. Several years ago, the University of Connecticut started to plan for the economic disaster that was at the time so obviously in the future of higher education institutions. A formal…

The authors recently completed an unparalleled survey, with more than eight thousand doctoral student respondents across the University of California system, and what they heard is worrisome: major research universities may be losing some of the most talented tenure-track academics before they even arrive. In the eyes of many doctoral students,…

About 25 percent of faculty working in the United States will reportedly consider retiring in the next five to seven years. As one of this 25 percent, the author has been researching what she needs to know to retire. What she found initially was a lot of misinformation. To complicate matters, the world has changed over the past year, causing those…

Those in America are confronting a stark alternative: either open themselves to an appreciation of human plurality and the diversity of cultures around the globe or limit themselves to a narrowly normative culture. Will American schools and colleges provide students with opportunities to learn to understand other voices, or will the educational…

In 2005, TIAA-CREF sponsored its first-ever "Retirement Confidence Survey of College and University Faculty" to discover the answer to this question: How well are faculty members taking advantage of employer-sponsored pension plans and saving for retirement? An additional objective of the project was to compare the survey's findings for higher…

This article discusses how one small liberal arts school, Wheaton College in Massachusetts, devised a strategic plan to improve faculty salaries by linking improvements in salaries to improvements in college resources. The benefits of the salary plan went beyond improving salaries. First, the plan dictated that faculty salaries be determined at…