In a long-simmering national fight over compensation for public-college presidents, the State of California emerged this year as the primary battleground. More than any other institution in recent memory, California State University has publicly and sometimes bitterly wrestled with a vexing question for higher education: How much does a public…

An assistant professor in the social sciences at a regional state university considers herself open to criticism. She listens to suggestions from student evaluations and from senior faculty members. But she was puzzled about how to react to two contradictory critiques of her publication plans. One quality educators must cultivate is to know when…

Colleges looking to hire junior faculty members are enjoying something of a buyer's market these days. With job offers scarce in many fields, small, teaching-intensive colleges and regionally oriented state universities have been able to snag recent graduates of the nation's top programs, the kinds of candidates who would have probably gone to…

For 12 hours at Arizona State University, a sold-out crowd of 3,000 people gave a group of famous scientists a pop-star welcome, cheering their remarks and lining up for autographs after a day full of discussion about black holes, string theory, and evolutionary biology. At a time when program cuts and faculty layoffs dominate the headlines of…

Tags such as the radio-frequency identifications or RFIDs are devices that make it possible for individuals to be tracked and their location reported back to a database. The devices--chips with radio antennas--emit signals, and tracking them reveals the movement of people or things. Many stores use the technology to catch shoplifters at exits. To…

This article reports on the University of North Carolina's "phased-retirement" plan, which lets professors formally ease their way into retirement. The challenges of personnel planning in the North Carolina system, made tougher when higher education was stripped of a mandatory retirement age 14 years ago, have lessened because the…

Despite tough economic times, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte hopes to win trustees' approval to raise funds to field a Division I-AA football team. Athletics officials and supporters at Charlotte are hopeful that they will raise the more than $45-million in capital expenses necessary to get the program up and running. However, the…

Any university that is seriously committed to equity must value faculty contributions to diversity made through teaching, research, and service. If diversity is truly part of the core academic mission, it should be included in the criteria used to evaluate and reward faculty achievement. Toward this end, the faculty of the University of…

In this article, the author examines the financial crisis on Wall Street which resonates through higher education across the state, and beyond. The economic malaise is taking its toll in places like Rhode Island, where state budget cuts of 17 percent forced colleges to cut class offerings and leave more than 150 positions unfilled. Florida's…

While colleges across the nation are coping with the recession, public universities in Florida, a state with finances that resemble a Ponzi scheme, have spent years doing without. The recession hit Florida early, and in a big way. Without an income tax, state government has long depended on property and sales taxes. As real estate and tourism have…

To be at the University of Arizona these days is, in some ways, to be under siege. The flagship university in one of the nation's fastest-growing states may have to eliminate some 600 jobs and merge dozens of programs to deal with two rounds of budget cuts imposed since June. Now the governor is telling the university and other state agencies to…

When Midori Funatake came here to the University of Oregon in 1940, she never suspected that she would not get her degree until Sunday, April 6, 2008. Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, during her second year. Fellow students and campus officials expressed sympathy to her, she says, but "the newspapers said anybody of…

This paper reports on an entrepreneurial camp at Texas A&M's Mays Business School for disabled veterans. The program began at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management last year and expanded this summer to Texas A&M, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Florida State University, all of which completed camps for 16 to 20…

This article reports on a new and unusual tactic that Kent State University is trying to improve its status, retention rate, and fund raising--paying cash bonuses to faculty members if the university exceeds its goals in those areas. The bonuses are built into a contract, approved last month, that covers 864 full-time, tenure-track faculty members…

When people talk about the future of public universities, they are usually talking about the flagship state universities. Flagship state universities have greatly increased expenditures in the past decade. The goal of the flagship institutions has been to compete with the best private universities, based on the assumptions that state funds will be…