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In the grand scheme of grad life, teaching responsibilities loom large. Teaching is an important part of the professor’s career and yet learning to teach every student well is a process. In academic spaces, mentioning the word “inclusion” to grads and faculty has eye-turning effects. Some faculty and grads do not glance over to the people of difference in the room to check if in fact, they are still female, differently-abled, bilingual, working class, homosexual, non-White, Jewish, immigrant, bi-racial, or atheist; yet many do.

I get a little twitchy whenever I read about “undermatching” as a problem. Broadly, “undermatching” is the claim that high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds often attend colleges that are “beneath” them academically, and that therefore they miss certain kinds of opportunities. If only the elites were more thoughtful about reaching the masses, the argument goes, they’d do a better job of creating a pure meritocracy, and the talented tenth (or twentieth, depending on taste) wouldn’t be shackled to institutions built for the unwashed masses.

Things aren't looking good for public higher education in two different countries. I'm not happy about it.

If you haven't had a chance to read about Noodle's acquisition of the Lore, please go check out Doug Lederman's piece from 3/15. Before we get to our questions for Noodle's founder and chairman John Katzman , I think we should first congratulate Joseph Cohen and his partners and colleagues at Lore. We need more people like the Lore founders to start edtech businesses.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines quicksand as “sand readily yielding to pressure; especially : a deep mass of loose sand mixed with water into which heavy objects readily sink.” In the movies, some horrid interloper or intrepid explorer ends up in quicksand and starts to sink fast in the murky mess. Panic sets in. Arms flail! Curses are said! Death is imminent. A welcome savior comes to rescue you. Or you die in the muck. The end.

After nearly 12 years living in the United States, I continue to be perplexed by this country. As I said when acting as a respondent to Anya Kamenetz at ED Talks Wisconsin last Friday night, the US is an amazing place when it it comes to unleashing and scaling up a multiplicity of innovations related to higher education.

Comprehensive reforms of Polish higher education and research systems started in 2010-2011. Their major part was the 2010 law on a new national research council called the “National Science Centre” (NCN). The rationale behind its establishment was twofold: to leave decisions about research funding for fundamental research to the academic community and to increase the competition for research funding. The competitive funding made available through the NCN will gradually lead to the emergence of a new class of Polish research-intensive universities.

For a university to fully fulfill its mission, it needs to be inextricably interwoven with the community, both the internal community and the surrounding community. Some universities pay limited attention to their surroundings but I have always been proud of Hofstra’s history of embracing the community in ways that clearly meet important needs.