Blogs

This week I will attend my 14th annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) in Charlotte, NC. Each year I learn about which research topics are of interest to this community of scholars and try to gain a sense of which issues have the most potential to change the way we conceive problems or the way higher education professionals practice.

I have a close, longtime friend who has lived the mixed blessing of getting what she has wanted, when she has wanted it. Luckily for her, she generally has good taste, but she has boxed herself into corners a few times when circumstances refused to conspire to save her from herself. I’m thinking that the last couple of years are conspiring to save for-profit higher ed from itself.

The good news is that at several public universities in Brazil, students are being allowed space in the curriculum to add classes of their own choosing to the pre-defined program of study. Okay, most of these choices must be made within their area of study. But there is also an allowance to choose a certain number of credits from any degree program offered at the university. That’s where the good news ends

This is a quick round-up post with one update, a couple of observations, and some links.

A correspondent recently sent me a link to a Washington Post column. It's a couple of weeks old now, but major news stories still have legs longer than that.

I'm still curious if you are reading, or plan to read, Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs. (And I'd love to find a way to test my hypothesis that more people in the IHE community are simultaneously reading this book than any previous book - a question I don't know how to solve short of hacking into Amazon's servers).

You only think I make this stuff up.

A returning correspondent writes: Our FT faculty are exploring the creating of a Faculty Senate and allowing adjuncts to participate.