In recent years, some very smart people--like Michael Berube, Marc Bousquet, Anthony Grafton, and William Pannapacker, to name a few--have offered on these pages their thoughts about how to fix graduate education and, by extension, the academic labor market, which, everyone seems to agree, has "unraveled". The author approaches this issue from a…

Life as an associate professor with tenure can be even more isolating and overwhelming than being an assistant professor on the tenure track. The path to achieving what amounts to higher education's golden ring is well marked and includes guidance from more-experienced peers. But once a professor earns tenure, that guidance disappears, the amount…

In academe, the game of how to win friends and influence people is serious business. Administrators and grant makers want proof that a researcher's work has life beyond the library or the lab. But the current system of measuring scholarly influence does not reflect the way many researchers work in an environment driven more and more by the social…

When VCRs became affordable, the film industry worried that people would stop going to the movies. Theaters have not gone away, but they have changed, with many now focused on delivering spectacles that can be seen only in a grand setting, with a big screen and booming sound. Traditional colleges now face a similar challenge, thanks to free or…

The battle over public access to federally financed research is heating up again. The basic question is this: When taxpayers help pay for scholarly research, should those taxpayers get to see the results in the form of free access to the resulting journal articles? Actions in Washington this month highlight how far from settled the question is,…

Independent scholars are a growing part of the academic landscape. They may have been jilted by the academic job market, or are uninterested in either being on the tenure track or in cobbling together full-time work as adjuncts. Like traditional professors, they perform research, secure grants, and publish books and papers. In some cases, their…

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was in the university-building business. The elite institute is back in the university-building business. In addition to the thousands of faculty research collaborations around the globe, the university over the past five years has once more engaged in ambitious efforts to…

On the road to producing the best possible work, one encounters dead ends and speed traps that are difficult to avoid because they are disguised as promising, rewarding, or helpful. In this series on "good deeds" that can backfire in one's career, the author does not challenge the virtue of doing good deeds, in theory or in practice. However, some…

A persistent criticism of the digital-humanities movement is that it is elitist and exclusive because it requires the resources of a major university (faculty, infrastructure, money), and is thus more suited to campuses with a research focus. Academics and administrators at small liberal-arts colleges may read about DH and, however exciting it…

American colleges have to be in India. After all, no other country in this century, save China, is likely to be as important geopolitically, financially, demographically, or culturally. Globally savvy students ought to study here. There are research opportunities for political scientists and public-health specialists, economists, and…

The author reports on how Arizona State University (ASU) pursues transformation on a grand scale while embracing inclusiveness. Michael Crow, Arizona State University's president and idea man, is pushing the institution to innovate and still fulfill its mission to be inclusive. By itself, Arizona State University's transformation over the past…

This article features four colleges and how they take on veterans' issues in research and real life. These colleges are (1) Syracuse University; (2) Purdue University; (3) University of Southern California; and (4) University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Last year Syracuse established the Institute for Veterans and Military Families to focus…

When a person sends in his or her job-application materials, he or she is not just assembling separate documents to fulfill the requirements of an ad. Those documents are part of a larger rhetorical whole, and together they form an argument for the viability of his or her candidacy for a particular job. Documents should be crafted meticulously,…

This article describes the Citrus Variety Collection with its curator, Tracy L. Kahn. The collection has two trees each of 1,010 citrus types. They stand in row after row on 22 acres at one edge of the University of California campus at Riverside and serve as a resource for research and a safeguard for diversity. Citrus is a key crop in…

For some colleges and professors, classified research promises prestige and money. Powerhouses like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Johns Hopkins University have for decades run large classified laboratories. But most other universities either do not allow such research or conduct it quietly, and in small doses. The…