A university journalism professor explains the concept of "public journalism," a movement in support of socially constructive journalism, and by extension, the idea that scholarship and public service can be integrated in scholarly activities that benefit the larger community. (MSE)

Analysis of data on faculty workload, time expenditures, and pay support the idea that the college faculty reward system tends to emphasize the discreteness, not the mutuality, of teaching and research. Most institutions expect faculty to make conscious choices between those activities rather than assume that one reinforces the other. (MSE)

It is proposed that cooperative learning and collaborative learning are related but essentially different processes, developed for educating people of different ages, experiences, and levels of interdependence and based on distinctive assumptions about the nature and authority of knowledge. Moreover, cooperative learning may undercut collaborative…

Liberal arts colleges occupy a unique place in the landscape of higher education. Whether defined, as David Breneman has, as an exclusive group of about 200 schools that award a large percentage of their degrees in traditional liberal arts fields, or as a more inclusive group of baccalaureate institutions, liberal arts colleges focus on…

Decline in quality of undergraduate instruction is due not to general decline in faculty values but to an active market for faculty in which prestige-seeking colleges and universities compete to build institutional excellence through the faculty they hire, at the expense of undergraduate teaching. (MSE)

This article argues that the capacity for innovation in American higher education is at risk. Colleges and universities are persistently slow in accepting advancing technology, increasingly labor-intensive, and resistant to evaluation by their customers or in terms of efficiency. A rethinking of the roles and tasks of faculty and staff is…

Significant increases in college faculty productivity will require fundamental restructuring of faculty members' work, which will meet with resistance. It will mean maximizing essential faculty-student interaction, integrating new technology fully into student learning processes, and enhancing learning through peer interaction. (MSE)

Describes the Pew Charitable Trusts' Pew Leadership Award for revitalization and reform in higher education and summarizes characteristics of the 45 nominated institutions. The institutions develop portfolios documenting accomplishments in the areas of curriculum redesign, faculty roles and responsibilities, and resource reallocation. Profiles the…