Opinion

Somewhere, a provost is feeling a little naked.

Call a lawyer today! That is more or less why I have come to D.C. for the NACUA conference on compliance for the last couple of days. I wanted to hone in on what, precisely, the legal language would be in a vendor contract to address the need that higher education has to protect its institutional information and take advantage of selective cloud providers of transmission and storage services.

The future, for colleges and universities, will require that we re-establish the local ties that many of us have been moving away from for generations. Operating a campus sustainably -- simply administering, lighting, heating, and plumbing its buildings; feeding their occupants; providing necessary supplies and handling physical output streams -- will require that the institution adjust, adapt, and rethink very much in integration with moves made by the surrounding community.

The students he met at Fort Benning changed the way he looks at poetry and at life choices, writes H. William Rice.

Rob Weir discusses how to deal with student complaints about grades on papers.

Today a colleague and I were feeling discouraged about the library sessions we’d been having with first year students.

I will threaten financial, if not physical, punishment for the next student who sits opposite me and glibly announces that s/he desires, “time off.” These seniors then expect me to find them a fellowship for the self-proclaimed period of inaction.