This article takes a look at five mistakes that candidates should avoid making during their research presentations. These mistakes are the following: (1) they didn't do any research on the norms of the campus culture; (2) they presented a single, well-thought-out project that had no future; (3) they didn't use the opportunity to demonstrate their…

On July 2, 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed Justin Morrill's second agriculture-school bill into law. Along with another measure he championed, in 1890, it created a system of land-grant colleges that rooted agriculture firmly in university research and helped democratize American higher education, creating institutions not for the sons and daughters…

Pogo recognized long ago that we often are our own worst enemies. Sure, he was a cartoon character, but he had a point--especially in higher education, where self-sabotage seems to be a standard characteristic of academic careers. In the author's 30 years as a professor, five years as a dean, and three years as a provost, he has observed many…

James M. Fadool, an associate professor of biology at Florida State University, got a federal grant of more than $300,000 to study eye defects using zebra-fish. Some of that money went to pay another researcher, $1,536 biweekly, to assist with the research and manage the lab where the fish were kept. But an audit by the Office of Inspector General…

In this article, the author describes a multimillion-dollar project that aims to save traditional expressions of music from around the world and reflects a shift in ethnomusicology. The $5-million project led by Huib Schippers on "sustainable cultures for music futures" is using nine case studies, including Western opera, Balinese…

In this article, the author discusses a mutilation that he has encountered involving Google Book Search. That massive text-digitization project, working in collaboration with several of the world's most important library collections, has now made available, in both PDF and text view, tens of thousands of 19th-century titles while it awaits the…

The author discusses the shift from criticism-as-explanation to criticism-as-performance that has taken place in literary criticism over the past five decades, and the resultant surge in published offerings to what has become a diminishing audience. The question of supersaturation applies to the institutions that demand and reward humanities…

According to a new survey conducted by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, about 80% of the governing boards of public universities say they are dealing with state budget cuts this year. Trustees also said they are working extra hours to cope with the financial strains on their universities, and they have enacted or…

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…

This article reports that at Rollins College, a liberal-arts institution, professors are paid to get away for overseas travel so that their students will learn to be more globally minded. The college's president, Lewis M. Duncan, has pledged to send every faculty and staff member with teaching duties abroad once every three years. Since 2006, 128…

Switzerland is the land of Big Ideas, where even the streets have Nobel prizes. At the European particle physics lab known as CERN, the roads through campus bear the names of Einstein, Curie, Bohr, and Heisenberg. Working amid those tributes to giants of the past century, physicists from around the world are trying to make history of their own and…

Scientists feel that progress in artificial intelligence and the availability of thousands of experimental results make this the right time to build and test theories on how people think and learn, using the computer to model minds. (MSE)

Specific campus projects that Congress has directed federal agencies to support this year at over 120 colleges and universities are listed. The agencies neither requested support nor sponsored merit-based competitions for the awards. In some cases, the institutions have a history of receiving special federal treatment. (MSE)

Dollar totals of funding for Pell Grants and veterans' education benefits and grants awarded by the Department of Health and Human Services, National Science Foundation, National Air and Space Administration, and National Endowment for the Humanities for research are listed by state or territory. (MSE)

A consortium of universities has charged that research money has been concentrated in a small number of states that have already established close ties between higher education and small businesses. Some small-business advocates believe the consortium is trying to win money that has been earmarked for small businesses. (MLW)