From the issue dated January 25, 2002
THE FACULTY
THE HALF-TIME OPTION
Some colleges are letting tenured and tenure-track professors cut their hours and pay to spend more time with their families.
THE PROFESSOR AND THE POPCORN
Eric Faden came to Bucknell University to teach film. Now he's learning the business, too, as proprietor of the town's only movie theater.
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- SWEET PROPHECY: A multimedia instructor doubles as a performance artist known as the Chocolate Messiah.
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- PEER REVIEW: Emory University lures a feminist scholar and pioneer of disability from Howard University. ... The University of Vermont gets traditional and nontraditional candidates for president.
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- SYLLABUS: A professor of English composition at a Georgia two-year college uses a game-show format to teach his students to pass the Regents' essay test.
RESEARCH & PUBLISHING
REVISITING A DEAD END
A professor of geology argues that science in China stalled hundreds of years ago because Chinese artists kept scholars from recognizing the three-dimensional structure of the landscape.
THE IMPACT OF 'TASINI'
A Supreme Court decision last year led publishers to make massive purges of newspaper databases, rendering them unreliable for many scholars.
UNFASHIONABLE SUBJECTS
Academics don't study the lower middle class, but that group has much to tell us about how class is lived in contemporary America, writes Rita Felski, a professor of English at the University of Virginia.
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- VERBATIM: Suzanna Danuta Walters, author of All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America, contends that the group's new cultural visibility not only is inadequate to ensure civil rights but is leading to subtler forms of homophobia.
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- NOTA BENE: In Rachilde and French Women's Authorship: From Decadence to Modernism, Melanie C. Hawthorne argues that the French writer was exceptionally good at publicizing herself.
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- HOT TYPE: The Creation of Psychopharmacology promises to make clinicians uneasy, while Why Psychoanalysis? defends the legacy of Sigmund Freud.
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- NEW SCHOLARLY BOOKS
GOVERNMENT & POLITICS
PREPARATION OR MONEY?
Which poses the greater obstacle to underprivileged students hoping to attend college? The question is creating a divide among those who study higher-education policy.
STIFFER STANDARDS
Some states are seeking to use admissions criteria to cut remediation and drive unprepared students to two-year colleges.
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- STANDOFF IN UTAH: The state says carrying a gun is permitted on college campuses, but seven public universities say otherwise.
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- GRANTS REVISION: The U.S. Education Department is considering narrowing the scope of the grants competition run by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education.
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- PRIVACY LAWS RECONSIDERED: The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether an individual can sue a college.
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- LEFT OUT: College lobbying groups lashed out at the Education Department after learning that they had been excluded from panels debating revisions to federal student-aid and other regulations.
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- BIOETHICS PANEL NAMED: Some of the members of President Bush's new advisory group on bioethics won praise from college lobbyists, but critics were surprised by the shortage of well-known researchers.
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- CONDITIONAL GIFT: The Oregon Institute of Technology is considering whether to convert itself from a public college into a private one in order to receive a major donation.
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- BREAK FOR IMMIGRANTS: University of California regents were expected to vote last week to allow many immigrants who have lived in the state illegally to pay cheaper, in-state tuition rates.
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- NEARING THE END: Mississippi legislators were expected this month to pass a resolution backing a $503-million plan to settle the state's long-running college-desegregation lawsuit.
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- POLITICAL BATTLE: The Southern University board fired the chancellor of the New Orleans campus.
MONEY & MANAGEMENT
INVESTMENT LOSSES
For the first time since 1984, the value of college endowments dropped last year. (A searchable database details the values of endowments at 610 colleges and universities.)
TRIAL BY FIRE
Carol Becker, dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, got a rapid, painful education into the realities of gender and leadership.
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- CONDITIONAL GIFT: The Oregon Institute of Technology is considering whether to convert itself from a public college into a private one in order to receive a major donation.
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- LAYOFFS ANNOUNCED: Two small colleges, Regis and William Jewell, have cut staff members and professors to ward off financial crises.
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- GOOD PEOPLE TO KNOW: Bard College's trustees teamed up to double the institution's endowment.
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- MIXED OUTLOOK: Two bond-rating agencies had different views of how colleges would fare in the recessionary economy.
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- DIGITAL LAWSUITS: Cornell and MIT are arguing in unrelated cases that patents on their computer-related inventions have been infringed.
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- PLASTIC DATA: Citibank, the world's largest issuer of credit cards, says few college students have ever seen their credit reports.
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- A GRUDGE TO THE GRAVE: A Kansas State University alumnus was so irked by his alma mater that he bequeathed $5-million to its archrival, the University of Kansas.
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- PEER REVIEW: Emory University lures a feminist scholar and pioneer of disability from Howard University. ... The University of Vermont gets traditional and nontraditional candidates for president.
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- FOUNDATION GRANTS; GIFTS AND BEQUESTS
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
THE IMPACT OF 'TASINI'
A Supreme Court decision last year led publishers to make massive purges of newspaper databases, rendering them unreliable for many scholars.
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- DIGITAL LAWSUITS: Cornell and MIT are arguing in unrelated cases that patents on their computer-related inventions have been infringed.
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- COSMOLOGY VS. SCREWDRIVER: Burglars who pried the circuit boards from Britain's most powerful academic computer, which is designed to replay the development of the universe, have put the machine out of commission for months.
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- POSTAGE-FREE: As of 2002, e-mail is the official form of communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Students are now required to check the mail that comes to their campus accounts.
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- AN 'A LIST' CHANGES HANDS: Blackboard, the educational-software company, is buying Prometheus, a competitor based at George Washington University.
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- MARKETING PARTNERS: America Online has opened a portal site to sell distance education to its subscribers.
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- BANKRUPTCY SALE: A federal bankruptcy judge has approved the sale of netLibrary's 40,000 e-books to OCLC, a nonprofit library organization.
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- A $29-MILLION CUT: Public-college administrators in Indiana are bracing for reductions in state technology spending.
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- BAD BILLS: More than 6,000 colleges and other organizations with ".edu" Internet addresses were incorrectly told that they owed money to a Web-registry company.
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- DISTANCE DEAL: UNext, a major provider of online management education, has signed agreements with two electronic-information companies to market and sell its courses.
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- BOOKMARK: An online archive at the University of Houston aims to remind Texas natives of some little-known locales in the Lone Star State.
STUDENTS
SEEKING LOCAL STUDENTS
Many colleges changed their enrollment strategies after September 11.
STIFFER STANDARDS
Some states are seeking to use admissions criteria to cut remediation and drive unprepared students to two-year colleges.
APPLYING FOR HELP
The best way for students to improve their college-application essays is to seek the advice of their parents, writes Sarah Myers McGinty, a university supervisor in the undergraduate teacher-education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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- HAZING PENALTY: East Tennessee State University suspended the Sigma Phi Epsilon chapter for two years after it staged an unusually degrading initiation.
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- PLASTIC DATA: Citibank, the world's largest issuer of credit cards, says few college students have ever seen their credit reports.
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- CULTURE WATCH: Stanford's dean of admissions deconstructs Orange County, a comedy about a teenager's frantic quest to win admission to the university.
ATHLETICS
CHANGE AT THE TOP
The NCAA's annual convention was uneventful but for its president's announcement that he would retire.
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- ORGANIZING A CHALLENGE: When the head of the Collegiate Athletes Coalition appeared on television with the president of a powerful union, NCAA officials weren't happy.
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- PAIN FOR GAIN: Grueling workouts are part of the college-sports experience. Here are some examples.
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- YOU BET YOUR LIFE: A family in Atlanta will be rooting for one college football team for the next 18 years. Their infant's college education depends on it.
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- PEOPLE IN ATHLETICS
INTERNATIONAL
MAKING 'MODERN OXFORD'
The world's oldest English-speaking university is struggling with issues of finance, governance, mission, and demographics.
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- SPECIAL TESTS IN THAILAND: As part of a "social-order campaign," the government plans to begin mandatory drug testing of all university students.
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- PROTESTS IN SPAIN: Nearly all academics oppose a new law on university administration that governs procedures for hiring professors and selecting rectors.
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- STRIKE ENDS IN BRAZIL: Thousands of professors returned to their jobs after a bitter three-month work stoppage over pay and hiring practices.
THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
APPLYING FOR HELP
The best way for students to improve their college-application essays is to seek the advice of their parents, writes Sarah Myers McGinty, a university supervisor in the undergraduate teacher-education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
MADNESS IN THE FIRST PERSON
Narratives of mental illness written by patients, rather than their doctors, offer extraordinary insights into the condition and its treatment, writes Gail A. Hornstein, a professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke College.
STILL LIFE
Photography has emerged as the most evocative medium in our attempts to deal with the aftermath of September 11. Is it disrespectful to photograph sites of trauma? Or could it be a form of mourning, asks Marianne Hirsch, a professor of languages and literature at Dartmouth College.
TRIAL BY FIRE
Carol Becker, dean of faculty and vice president for academic affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, got a rapid, painful education into the realities of gender and leadership.
IT DOESN'T ADD UP
A Beautiful Mind, about a Nobel laureate who suffered years of mental illness, shows how all hell breaks loose when mathematics goes to Hollywood, writes Daniel Rockmore, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Dartmouth College.
CUBA FOR BEGINNERS
Fidel, a new Showtime miniseries, includes some strong performances and plenty of melodrama, writes José Quiroga, an associate professor of romance languages and literatures at George Washington University.
CHRISTIAN CONVICTION
The Rev. McKendree Robbins Long (1888-1976), a Baptist minister, painted startling canvases about his beliefs.
UNFASHIONABLE SUBJECTS
Academics don't study the lower middle class, but that group has much to tell us about how class is lived in contemporary America, writes Rita Felski, a professor of English at the University of Virginia.
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- MELANGE: Selections from recent books of interest to academe.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
GAZETTE
CAREER NETWORK JOB NOTICES
DETAILS OF AVAILABLE POSTS,
including teaching and research positions in higher education, administrative and executive jobs, and openings outside academe
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