Administrative Staffing 1987-2011, A Statistical Profile by Institution, Part 4: Arkansas

The federal data that is being presented in this series of posts was analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NCIR) in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research. The NECIR story on the data and its implications, written by Jon Marcus, who is currently an editor at the Hechinger Report, is available at: http://necir.org/2014/02/06/new-analysis-shows-problematic-boom-in-higher-ed-administrators/.…

Show Me the Money: The Growing Financial Crisis in College Athletics

Last week, Erik Brady, Steve Berkowitz and Christopher Schnaars wrote about the growing money pressures faced by “non-power 5” college athletic programs in USA Today. They found that “by the NCAA’s benchmark for self-sufficiency, just 24 of the 230 public schools in Division I stand on their own, up from 20 a year earlier, “…

The Value of the Publication

In 1928, Horatio Alger: A Biography Without a Hero by Herbert R. Mayes appeared. For over 40 years, it was the “go to” source for information about the iconic boys’ writer. Mayes parlayed the success of his book into an editing career crowned, in the sixties, with a term as president of McCall Corporation, publisher…

Wordplay II

It has been a while since I made the initial post in what I intended to become a series. These are not headlines from The Onion or another satiric site. They are, instead, simply very clever, unusual, or sometimes tortured headlines from actual news stories:   Back, with New Wrinkles [Title of an article on…

More MOOCs, More… What?

Just as he is, in many ways, the godfather to the blogs, Benjamin Franklin’s spirit stands over the baptism of the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Something new and different? No. As are all children, MOOCs were birthed out of a long line of ancestors. Franklin’s Junto and subsequent libraries, the Lyceum movement, New Thought…

Why No One Will Ever Completely Master the English Language

Ahead of this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee, Business Insider published this list of the twelve most difficult winning words in the history of the contest. No doubt, the selections have become somewhat arbitrary: that is, I am certain that there are some equally obscure and difficult alternatives available from other years. 2011: cymotrichous (adj.) — having…

A Precocious Start to an Academic and Literary Career

In one of my posts yesterday, I gave a plug to Mental Floss, highlighting three items that I found of interest that were posted on a single day in February. In another post to that site on that same day, “Famous Novelists on Symbolism in Their Work and Whether It Was Intentional,” Lucas Reilly chronicles…

Administrative Staffing 1987-2011, A Statistical Profile by Institution, Part 2: Alabama (Part 2) and Alaska

The federal data that is being presented in this series of posts was analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NCIR) in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research. The NECIR story on the data and its implications, written by Jon Marcus, who is currently an editor at the Hechinger Report, is available at: http://necir.org/2014/02/06/new-analysis-shows-problematic-boom-in-higher-ed-administrators/.…