Sometimes, especially in winter, Kenneth Westhues can hear a flock of crows tormenting a great horned owl outside his study in Waterloo, Ontario. It is a fitting soundtrack for his work. Mr. Westhues has made a career out of the study of mobbing. Since the late 1990s, he has written or edited five volumes on the topic. However, the mobbers that most captivate him are not sparrows, fieldfares, or jackdaws. They are modern-day college professors. [more inside]
posted by parudox on Nov 11, 2008 - 58 comments

Forget again to enroll at Oxford? Some of what you've been missing.
posted by Rykey on Oct 22, 2008 - 26 comments

Remember Laura K. Pahl, the girl who was famously humiliated for trying to buy a term paper over the internet? Perhaps she should have gone to a professional.
posted by Afroblanco on Oct 16, 2008 - 67 comments

In the wake of The Scarlet Pimpernel, countless figures have flamboyantly stalked the night. Among them were the scofflaw Arsene Lupin and his more violent contemporary, Fantomas. So influential was the latter that imitators soon arose, plying their merciless wiles on others. Among them were Fu Manchu, the nefarious Dr. Mabuse, the hooded Diabolik, and Matt Wagoner's Grendel. Not even Donald Duck was immune from the seductive lure of crime. [more inside]
posted by Smart Dalek on Aug 8, 2008 - 9 comments

The National Association of Scholars has been publishing a series of articles called "If I Ran the Zoo" (inspired by Seuss) in which various contributors describe what they would do if they were in charge of higher education. (via) [more inside]
posted by prefpara on Jul 9, 2008 - 25 comments

95% of degree courses in video gaming at British universities leave graduates unfit to work in the industry, according to Games Up?, an organisation set up to address the UKs video games skills shortage. Maths skills are a particular weakness.
posted by Artw on Jun 24, 2008 - 71 comments

The Scholar Ship , an international floating university stewarded by top universities in Morocco, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, Mexico, USA, and Ghana, have temporarily suspended all voyages due to lack of funds - mainly caused by the withdrawal of main sponsor and initiator Royal Caribbean International. The program ran two voyages in 2007 and 2008 before shutdown. Alumni and prospective students on Facebook and Ning are busily sourcing options to revive the organization, while Semester at Sea is offering spaces to students who were accepted for the now-cancelled voyages. [more inside]
posted by divabat on Jun 14, 2008 - 9 comments

KnowHow2Go wants you to take on the tough classes - such as Biology, Foreign Languages, and Algebra II - to prepare yourself for college.
posted by divabat on May 26, 2008 - 31 comments

What's one of the best ways to break into UK radio? Hospital Radio of course! There are over 408 radio stations in the UK that originate from hospitals. Fully staffed and loaded with volunteers, they are a lifeline to patients and produce modern, original programming. Who got their start on hospital radio? Hundreds of legends in the UK radio industry! Including Chris Moyles, Scott Mills, Jacqui Oatley, and Heena Tailor.
posted by parmanparman on Apr 9, 2008 - 16 comments

Slate asks, "What's behind the boom in homeland-security and emergency-management majors?"
posted by Afroblanco on Mar 29, 2008 - 28 comments

Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas becomes the first university in the US to give out iPhones to incoming freshmen. Concept videos describing how they will be used here (social), here (academic) and here (overview).
posted by Pater Aletheias on Mar 5, 2008 - 26 comments

Lost bag! Reward if found! Returned! But it's a fake! Finally someone took the advice to GYOFB. But it's a fake! Students at CUNY's Hunter College in a class sponsored by the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition produced the blog and related guerrilla marketing activities related to counterfeiting last spring. But "while a television viewer is aware that he or she is watching advertising, those viewing the blog or her posters at Hunter thought they were learning about the experiences of a real student — not a class project crafted by an industry association (that was sufficiently proud to boast about it)." Reports Inside Higher Ed.
posted by pithy comment on Mar 3, 2008 - 15 comments

Use your library. Make more GIF files. Trust the process. Make art - it's good for your heart. from advice to sink in slowly.
posted by divabat on Jan 24, 2008 - 8 comments

Open Culture's "10 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube" features "intellectually redeemable" channels from UC Berkeley, @GoogleTalks, TheNobelPrize, TED Talks, FORA.tv, the European Graduate School, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, BBC Worldwide, National Geographic, PBS, UChannel, MIT, Vanderbilt, and USC.
posted by Soup on Dec 27, 2007 - 21 comments

Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department.
posted by AceRock on Nov 25, 2007 - 98 comments

U.S. Public Service Academy : A proposal by two Teach for America alum to provide fully-funded top-notch undergraduate education in public service in the style of military academies, but with a mandatory 5-year local/state/federal service work requirement. A bill for this school was put into Congress by Senators Hillary Clinton and Arlen Specter.
posted by divabat on Nov 24, 2007 - 54 comments

Defying Demographics: A look at University Park Campus School, a 7-12th grade school located in the poorest neighborhood in blue-collar Worcester, MA. Approximately 73% of students hover at or below the poverty line and 61% are minorities, yet over 80% go on to college and 99% pass the Massachusetts graduation exams. The partnership between Clark University and Worcester Public Schools has created an environment so successful that a number of cities are looking to emulate it. Have they discovered the key to closing the achievement gap?
posted by rollbiz on Nov 23, 2007 - 32 comments

And I thought us UC Santa Cruz students and alums only had to deal with the defensive ticks we developed by being the stepchild to that other University of California in the Bay Area. But no! We apparently attended the Worst School in America!

The always endearing David Horowitz, in addition to posting an article showing the university's crimes-against-academia/cool-classes, was on Fox News decrying the University's policy of turning patriotic Midwestern kids into Molotov-throwing Marxists. After watching that clip, I do have to wonder what career paths are available to someone with a skillset that includes "Can organize anti-capitalist revolutions."
posted by Weebot on Oct 9, 2007 - 43 comments

On average, college students are having a medium amount of sex.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Sep 23, 2007 - 59 comments

Think you're smart? Apply for a Prize Fellowship at Oxford's All Souls College. [via adrianhon]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Sep 12, 2007 - 24 comments

Is College Worth the Cost? In strict dollar terms, is that degree going to be worth the parchment it's printed on?
posted by blue_beetle on Aug 29, 2007 - 134 comments

Radar picks the worst colleges in America. At least one of the picks is rather dubious, although I suppose being the "worst" Ivy League is a position of some note, and another one of the picks was where my school's valedictorian went. Either way, it's always nice to see the Moonies somersaulting into otherwise non-Moonie related stories.
posted by Sticherbeast on Aug 27, 2007 - 75 comments

Soulforce Equality Ride! Soulforce, a nationwide organization working to end religious discrimination of gays and lesbians are in the middle of their second annual Equality Ride to raise awareness of Christian colleges and universities that discriminate against queer students. GLBTQ students are discriminated against everywhere. The Riders have been met with both open arms and anger. The Reverend Mel White, who runs Soul Force, ghost wrote Billy Graham's and Jerry Falwell's autobiographies and worships at Falwell's church in Lynchburg, VA in silent protest. Previously.
posted by parmanparman on Mar 23, 2007 - 51 comments

The World Lecture Hall is a compedium of links to open university materials. Some include lecture notes, text books and even video. The OCW at MIT is probably the most well known but there are many universities that provide online access to course materials. Want to learn about medicine? John Hopkin's kindly provides some popular courses (Cadaver not included). Notre Dame provides a number of courses focused on the liberal arts. The University of Washington provides Computer Science and Engineering courses. Tufts provides a potpourri of courses, including dentistry.
posted by substrate on Feb 24, 2007 - 13 comments

Do you love learning? I know you do. This might help keep you busy for a while.
posted by loquacious on Jan 13, 2007 - 44 comments

The Productive Strategies blog links directly to 145 podcast feeds from universities.
posted by jbickers on Dec 27, 2006 - 14 comments

The Open University was founded in 1971 in the "white heat" of the communications revolution. Late-night lectures delivered over the television would revolutionise education - but they quickly became a much-loved/much-mocked UK icon, ideal for insomniacs (it was all that was on telly at that time of night), and replete with kipper ties, beards and Periodic tables. They also helped to inspire some affectionate piss takes and spoofs. This weekend the OU will broadcast its last ever TV documentary - from now on they will be sticking to DVDs and the internet. Last link goes to embedded BBC News video.
posted by greycap on Dec 15, 2006 - 10 comments

The Harvard University Worklife Wizard , created by an international team of journalists, economists, and statisticians, is Barbara Ehrenreich's wet dream. It's also a fantastic resource that has flown pretty much under everyone's radar. The Worklife Survey drives the constantly-revised, constantly-refined Salary Comparison Tool, which is always hungry for more data about employment from around the world. And when they say they want data from everyone, they mean it-- there's even a VIP Salary Checker that pits the wages of the Yankees against those of the Red Sox. (Plus if you take the survey, you can apparently earn a chance to win a trip to South Africa). Personally, I love the Workplace Horror Stories (and there's a competition there too). I can't look at a nail clipper the same way now.
posted by yellowcandy on Nov 20, 2006 - 26 comments

Physics for Future Presidents is a class taught at UC Berkeley by Physics professor Richard Muller. It's a class specifically for non-physics majors and teaches the real world results of the sometimes impenetrable math involved in university physics. After every lecture, you should come away with the feeling that what was just covered is important for every world leader to know. I just sat through the entire hour and 13 minute nukes lecture and was riveted.
posted by quite unimportant on Nov 7, 2006 - 26 comments

"I hate grades.... [But] I am obliged to follow the rules set forth by my employer and the larger education industry in general. Consequently, I assign grades."
posted by grumblebee on Sep 28, 2006 - 97 comments

Long .pdf paper on the state of mainstream "analytic" philosophy. In a recent thread, we discussed the current state of philosophy departments in English-speaking countries. Philosophers are often asked why we don't take Ayn Rand seriously as a philosopher, or why we aren't up on literary Theory or deconstruction, etc. The short answer is that most academic philosophers in universities in the English-speaking world are engaged in a broad consensus (about how to do philosophy, what counts as a good question, etc) that's called "analytic philosophy" for short. Here is a long, informative encyclopedia entry by Scott Soames describing the history and current state of play in analytic philosophy. If you want to understand the background of the currently dominant school of philosophy in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, this will explain it. Link goes directly to a 44-page .pdf file.

Here are a few bonus bits: Jerry Fodor on Why no one reads analytic philosophy. One of the Philosophy talk podcasts from the Stanford philosophy department, on The Future of Philosophy. Some answers at askphilosophers.org -- a site where you can ask questions directly of professional philosophers -- that say the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy should be retired. (In a way, I agree, but the terms are used so widely that it's useful to get a sense of what they're meant to describe.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on what different philosophers have meant by "analysis".
posted by LobsterMitten on Aug 24, 2006 - 56 comments

2%. (bugmenot login fleeb@fleeble.com, password fleeble) That is the percentage of students in UCLA's incoming freshman class that self-identify as black. Only 96 students in an entering class of 4,852, and the lowest percentage since 1973. Many believe Proposition 209 is to blame, but some want to stop collecting this data altogether.
posted by fugitivefromchaingang on Jun 8, 2006 - 46 comments

Northwestern engineering professor Arthur R. Butz has over 6,000 signatures denouncing his commendation of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's assertion that the Holocaust is a myth. Rumor has it the university was going to stop hosting faculty sites instead of singling out Butz. His (lousy) university webpage is still up though. Prompted in part by prev discussion here
posted by Smedleyman on Mar 10, 2006 - 100 comments

The Kids are Alright, Dammit. Reason's Nick Gillespie weighs-in on the 2005 Modern Language Association annual convention. "...faced with a choice between a sort of bitter righteousness and increasing irrelevance on the one hand and engaging students with more fair-minded argumentation and open-ended discussion, some academics are choosing the latter. That's certainly good news for kids stuck in freshman composition classes, those dreary required classes which are often little more than clumsy attempts at political indoctrination."
posted by ZenMasterThis on Dec 28, 2005 - 42 comments

NYU President John Sexton warns striking grad students that they must resume teaching or lose their benefits. After weeks of marching outside Bobst library and refusing to teach classes, NYU grad students have been sent a letter from President John Sexton, warning them that any TA who does not return to work next week will lose their stipends and eligibility to teach next semester. Until recently, NYU was the only private school that allowed graduate teaching assistants to unionize, following a 2000 NLRB decision, which was subsequently reversed. NYU claims that it has negotiated in good faith and that the union's demands would limit decision making that should remain in the hands of academics, while the grad students argue that they cannot trust NYU's admistration to take care of them without unionization (and representation by the UAW). Meanwhile, many undergrads paying tuition upwards of 50K/year will have to retake classes or opt for pass/fail. Do you sympathize with highly educated American grad students who receive free tuition, health insurance, and stipends in exchange for modest teaching duties (when many other students depend on student loans), especially compared the with 19th century coal miners, third-world factory workers, and modern-day wage slaves we normally associate with unions and strikes?
posted by banishedimmortal on Nov 30, 2005 - 98 comments

Does the First Amendment matter on campus? A column in the Winthrop University (SC) student newspaper comparing today's racial climate for whites to the oppression blacks faced before the Civil Rights movement has caused quite a stir south of the Mason -Dixon line. The column by Christine Byington, who is biracial, criticized blacks who complain about the University. She eventually had to withdraw from school due to overwhelming pressure. Should she have known better than to write about a very touchy situation?
posted by Macboy on Nov 30, 2005 - 48 comments

What would you do with $100 million? OK, scratch that. What would you do if you were the head of a top US university with an anonymous gift of $100 million? Well, if you're Richard C. Levin, you'd take a cue from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and decide to let music students in for free.
posted by emelenjr on Nov 7, 2005 - 31 comments

85% of college students now use Facebook. With such popularity schools such as MU are examing Facebook usage and "a few students have been turned in for content that violates the conduct code." The phone-directory-on-steroids even attracts employers, "Linda Kaiser ... spoke with two people — an employer and a parent — who used Facebook to screen candidates for employment." Oh and for the Greeks the Facebook is creating problems of its own.
posted by geoff. on Nov 7, 2005 - 50 comments

The Times Higher Education Supplement's World University Rankings [link to PDF]
posted by Gyan on Oct 10, 2005 - 15 comments

War has been declared, the legislative body has been abolished, and the elected leader changed his title to "supreme leader" Do not question the "School Spirit".
posted by delmoi on Sep 21, 2005 - 26 comments

Rankings of world universities as published by the Beijing Jiaotong University. This is the third year this list has been published.
posted by nervousfritz on Aug 22, 2005 - 55 comments

One Bright Idea After Another ... Well, not always. But some interesting viewing here.
posted by Fozzie on Jun 18, 2005 - 2 comments

does he think we really care??
posted by pwedza on May 3, 2005 - 48 comments

More On Anti-Semitism at Columbia My interest in this story is primarily about how the New York Times, considered one of the great newspapers world-wide, in fact sucks!---"A week ago, Deacon and the Trunk posted on the release of a report by Columbia University on its investigation of students' charges of anti-semitic conduct by several of the university's professors. The report mostly exonerated the professors, while, at the same time, recording behavior by them which was appalling. One of the points we noted was the craven behavior of the New York Times, which said that it agreed not to report the viewpoint of the complaining students in exchange for early access to Columbia's report. The Trunk wrote: But what about the New York Times? Is it conceivable that the Times would enter into an agreement not to talk to the subjects of a report in exchange for being given access to the report a few hours before it is made available to the public? [The Times admits it!]
posted by Postroad on Apr 6, 2005 - 50 comments

At least 10 percent of high-tech gifts this holiday season may fall victim to "computer rage" - acts of uncontrolled frustration by their owners - estimates University of Maryland professor Kent Norman, a cognitive psychologist who directs the Laboratory for Automation Psychology and Decision Processes.
posted by mhaw on Dec 13, 2004 - 10 comments

People talk about how universities have almost turned into diploma mills, churning out degrees to almost anyone that breathes. So what do students think about the current situation? According to this student, it doesn't go far enough: "I have come to the conclusion that the University system makes absolutely no sense. Students pay teachers to educate us, yet they are then allowed to tell us how much we're learning...I'll be the one to tell the receiver of my hard-earned money exactly how well they did. Shouldn't it be the same with education?" That's right, students want, nay, demand an A, since they paid for it.
posted by mathowie on Dec 8, 2004 - 77 comments

Junkscience: Top Ten "Most Embarrassing Moments" of 2004 Whoops: "10. University of Arkansas researchers attacked the Atkins Diet in January with a report linking a high-carbohydrate diet with weight loss, saying it was possible to lose weight without cutting calories and without exercising. What they didn’t reveal, however, was that the study subjects who lost weight actually ate 400-600 calories per day less than those who didn’t lose weight." I don't see the big deal behind number 6.
posted by skallas on Dec 5, 2004 - 45 comments

Computer as author. (NYT) "Dave Striver loved the university - its ivy-covered clocktowers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and its sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. The university, contrary to popular opinion, is far from free of the stark unforgiving trials of the business world: academia has its own tests, and some are as merciless as any in the marketplace. A prime example is the dissertation defense: to earn the Ph.D., to become a doctor, one must pass an oral examination on one's dissertation. This was a test Professor Edward Hart enjoyed giving." by Brutus.1
posted by semmi on Nov 22, 2004 - 16 comments

Fired for grading honestly? Historically black Benedict College's president recently fired two professors for "insubordination" after they refused to comply with the school's SEE ("Success Equals Effort") policy. One of the fired faculty members claims his academic freedom had been violated. (Gratuitious opinion: I think what's getting violated here is the idea that you're supposed to do college-level work in college....)
posted by alumshubby on Aug 22, 2004 - 25 comments

Just found this one. The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a Berkeley website for supporting science teachers teaching evolution. The project was built with a grant from the National Science Foundation and has received an additional grant to expand the site to develop content for students and adults. More coverage from The Daily Bruin at UCLA and a brief clip from Science News.
posted by KirkJobSluder on Apr 15, 2004 - 5 comments