Scholarly books with "identity" and "culture" in the title have loomed large on academic publishing lists for several years. Scholarly books with "Sinatra" in the title are a more recent phenomenon. Despite his six-decade career as the Voice (the 1940s), the Chairman of the Board (the 50s and 60s), and Ol' Blue Eyes (the 70s through his death, in…

Higher education traffics in reputations. To thrive as an institution means keeping up with competitors while setting yourself apart. But as good as colleges have become at building brands, the game is shifting to social media, where there is perpetual motion and little control. Data from the Center for Marketing Research at the University of…

Temple University's program with Tsinghua University, now in its 10th year, is the oldest of its kind in China. It may take years to understand how a program that trains a few dozen legal professionals a year may affect the legal rights of 1.3 billion Chinese. But there is no question about the benefits that this program has produced for Temple's…

This article profiles Loren Pope, a college consultant and a former education editor at "The New York Times" who touted "no name" colleges and called the nation's most famous university, Harvard University, a rip-off. In his influential book "Colleges That Change Lives" (Penguin, 1996), Mr. Pope profiled 40 institutions--most of them small…

Being subject to the political whims of the campaigns (such as the Republican candidate's declaration two days earlier that he wanted to postpone the debate to deal with an escalating economic crisis) is just one risk for campuses that raise millions of dollars and endure an array of logistical complexities to play host to presidential or…

The perception that academic scientists must pursue money from government agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health is subverting the aims of science and making it harder for institutions and individual professors to do innovative and original research. Of course winning a large federal grant attracts a…

Most people who stumble across the YouTube video of the self-proclaimed rock star Gory Bateson singing to a scantily clad prostitute in Amsterdam's red-light district probably have no idea that the work is part of a research project--or that the man holding the guitar is a tenured professor. The video has attracted more than 12,000 views and won a…

This paper reports that a large-scale, multinational attempt in Europe to rank humanities journals has set off a revolt. In a protest letter, some journal editors have called it "a dangerous and misguided exercise." The project has also started a drumbeat of alarm in this country, as U.S.-based scholars begin to grasp the implications…

The memory of the academy is long, and its scope is national. Disagreements of no real consequence are remembered for entire careers, mutating and multiplying among allies and advisees into a kind of poisonous gas that can sour the air of an entire sector of the profession for generations. The author maintains that there is no other profession,…

Drexel University is offering laid-off workers a 50-percent discount on tuition at its new graduate campus in California. Davis & Elkins College reduced its price by nearly $15,000 for residents from its home county and six surrounding ones to match the tuition of the state's flagship West Virginia University. And Southern Illinois University at…

The pursuit of institutional prestige has done little to improve the reputations of most colleges, and it may be causing many of them to become less distinguishable from their competitors, new research shows. In one study presented at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Kyle V. Sweitzer, a data-resource…

This summer, Forbes magazine published its new rankings of "America's Best Colleges," implying that it had developed a methodology that would give the public the information that it needed to choose a college wisely. "U.S. News & World Report," which in 1983 published the first annual ranking, just announced its latest ratings last week--including…

A Chinese list of the world's top universities would seem an unlikely concern for French politicians. But this year, France's legislature took aim at the annual rankings produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which claims to list the 500 best universities in the world. The highest-ranked French entry, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, comes in…

Everyone on the tenure track should get tenure. However, not everybody can get tenure everywhere. In fact, one of the main reasons why some educators fail to get tenure is that they are fighting the wrong war on the wrong battlefield, at an institution where they do not quite fit. One can only get tenure if only he or she is realistic in his or…

In every assistant professor there seems to lurk a Karate Kid seeking a Mr. Miyagi who will train his acolyte to be a skilled warrior in the art of research, teaching, and service and impart pithy life lessons along the way. Such singular folks exist. But it's far more likely that one will find several mentors who, while not well-versed in all…