King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, the ambitious $10-billion research institution that Saudi Arabia plans to open in 2009, has signed agreements with three leading universities to help it design a curriculum and hire faculty members. The agreements, with Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the…

As the small states that line the Arabian Peninsula spend billions of petrodollars picking up luxury hotels, satellite television stations, first-class airlines, and high-tech weaponry, three of the emirates (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar) are engaged in a high-stakes game of one-upmanship involving universities, American universities in particular.…

As community-college leaders around the country defend against across-the-board budget cuts, they need to mobilize key groups to make the case that their colleges offer the best hope of turning around the United States economy. The author discusses how his and his colleagues' research on community colleges indicate that the public does not…

With more than a dozen American universities opening branches and campuses on the Persian Gulf, the oil-rich emirates of the Arabian peninsula are threatening to dethrone cities like Cairo, Baghdad, and Beirut as the academic centers of the Middle East. Wealthy, safe, and relatively stable, these emirates are vying to become the new intellectual…

A "striking number" of professors involved in governance at universities with high-profile athletics programs say they are disconnected from and do not know much about the issues facing college sports, according to survey findings released last week by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. The survey, which was conducted by…

More than 30 years after the U.S. ambassador was airlifted from the embassy rooftop in Saigon with the flag tucked under his arm, a new American flag is going up in the city. This one won't be flying over the embassy. The Stars and Stripes, as well as the Texas state flag, are going up at the Saigon Institute of Technology, the only Vietnamese…

Professors from American University and artists and educators from Imagination Stage, a children's theater and arts-education organization in nearby Bethesda, Maryland, have combined their intellectual and artistic strengths over the past 12 years to create an arts-integrated educational program for elementary and secondary schools throughout the…

The important contributions that community colleges make to American society are well known and documented, but many people may not be aware of the huge influence that community colleges are having overseas. The U.S. model of the two-year college with a vocational emphasis is being exported, and foreign institutions that focus on career education…

Security restrictions imposed since 2001 have unnecessarily constrained university researchers, and those controls should be loosened in order to enhance the nation's economic and strategic competitiveness, says a report issued by the National Research Council of the National Academies. The report's authors, a committee of high-ranking officials…

About a year ago, Heidelberg College pumped up its spending for a new, streamlined scholarship program, and then promoted its simplified formula so that students would know how much they could get before they even applied. Heidelberg's strategies worked as it was able to brought in the second-largest class in its 158-year history and a gain in its…

More than 130 faculty members and athletics administrators from some of the country's largest universities gathered in Washington, D.C. last week to discuss the relationship between faculty members and intercollegiate athletics at what organizers said was the first national forum dedicated to the topic. During a series of panel discussions,…

This article deals with the role that religion has played in dealing with environmental issues. For many years, environmental issues were considered to be the concern of scientists, lawyers, and policy makers. Now the ethical dimensions of the environmental crisis are becoming more evident. Until recently religious communities have been so…

Over the last 50 years, certain ideas have become dominant that make learning to read different than it once was than the ideas that children are neurologically "wired" to use language "competently" in certain ways. Noam Chomsky has promoted the idea that there are certain "syntactic structures" hard-wired in the human brain. That view, the author…

Over the past quarter-century David Petrie, a 56-year-old Scotsman has attended, in the capacity of plaintiff or interested observer, at least 80 court hearings at various levels of the Italian and pan-European judicial systems--all in cases of alleged job discrimination by Italian universities. In the process, Mr. Petrie has become the public…

This article reports a unique partnership between Kennesaw State University and the Georgia state government involving the participation of computer experts in the deployment or electronic voting machines. The effort has received attention in Washington as scientists and government officials search for ways to reform election procedures across the…