POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Business Insider, Sam Shead has been tracking an escalating dust-up between Oxford and Cambridge Universities over which elite institution provides a better environment for digital start-ups. The two institutions have obviously been competing in academics, athletics, and many other areas for centuries, and this competition over digital start-ups existed…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This chart is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: The list is surprising in the following ways: Of the 30 occupations on the list, 22 are what are traditionally considered “blue-collar” occupations. Of those 22 “blue-collar” occupations, all have been major sources of employment for decades: 7 are in general…
BY AARON BARLOW In early 2016, I shared on this blog a statement by a tenured professor recently fired by the University of California at Riverside. One of the comments, by a former colleague of the ex-professor, accused me of posting his statement solely as “clickbait.” I chuckled, but the accusation rankled: the Academe blog…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL As colleges lay out their strategies to become more sustainable over the long term, there are uncertainties that can dramatically affect their abilities to do so. Some are programmatic, based upon unpredictable market conditions. Others rely on personnel decisions that shape an institution’s ability to be both flexible and creative. A…
BY MARTIN KICH The Trump Administration’s “Made in America Week” is a cruel con on the working-class Americans who voted for him—and not just because almost all Trump, Inc., products continue to be produced by cheap foreign labor. It is an insult to the intelligence working-class Americans because it ignores the very obvious reality that…
BY HANK REICHMAN Responding to the Trump administration’s decision to replace the National Commission on Forensic Science with an in-house law enforcement task force and a yet-unnamed adviser, four prominent associations of scientists, led by the 120,000-member American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), on June 9 called on the Justice Department to reverse…
BY JONATHAN REES AND JONATHAN PORITZ A lot of people we know were beating up on an essay by Jeff Selingo in the Washington Post a few weeks ago. [See, for instance, Hank Reichman’s analysis here.] We certainly agree that putting tenure on some kind of clock won’t do anything to save universities money in…
BY MARTIN KICH In an article published by Smithsonian Magazine, Megan Gambino interviews data journalist Ben Blatt on his recent efforts to apply data analysis to literary works. Here are the opening paragraphs of Gambino’s article, which frame the interview: In most college-level literature courses, you find students dissecting small portions of literary classics: Shakespeare’s…
BY BILL BERGMAN Guest blogger Bill Bergman is Instructor of Marketing at the University of Richmond’s Robins School of Business. Students in the college classroom are growing much quieter these days. Technology is robbing them of self-assured verbal skills displayed by previous generations. They also live in dread of giving the wrong answer in class that could tarnish…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In an article for the San Diego Union-Tribune, Gary Robbins reports: “Los Angeles Valley College in Valley Glen said it paid $28,000 in bitcoins to the hackers, who had used malicious software to commandeer a variety of systems, including key computers and emails. “’It was the assessment of our outside cybersecurity experts that…