My knowledge of Vienna, the capital of Austria, was for many years based on the impression given in the great movie The Third Man.  Based on a script by Graham Greene, the story is of an American pulp-fiction writer who goes to Vienna, just after the Second World War, to meet with an old friend, Harry Lime. Arriving, he finds that Lime has supposedly been killed in an accident. It turns out however that Lime forged his own death. He is a crook, stealing penicillin and selling it on the black market. 

Eventually, Lime gets his comeuppance, killed after a terrifically exciting chase through the sewers of the city. But not before, from the top of a Ferris wheel, in one of the most wonderful passages in the whole of cinema, Lime (played, brilliantly, by Orson Wells) tells his friend of his cynical view of world history. "Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had ...

Here are two front-page headlines that hit me yesterday morning here in Georgia: "77% tuition increases needed to offset cuts" and "Campuses run low on courses, faculty."

I can't find links to the full stories on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution site, so I'll summarize. The first story opens, "It would take a 77-percent tuition increase at Georgia's colleges and universities to meet the demand for a $385-million cut in the state's higher education system budget." (That dwarfs tuition spikes at the University of California.)

The second story's second paragraph runs, "Classrooms are crammed with students. Some students are postponing graduation because they can't get all their required courses. Others have trouble meeting with professors because they're teaching more classes or aren't on campus during required furlough days."

Enough said. If faculty members care about their own job...

No matter that the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world not to have universal health care. We Americans are different. We’re independent. We don’t need others -- especially our government -- telling us what to do. No less a giant than Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay, “Self-Reliance,” gave us a clarion call (“trust thyself”) reminding us that real men make decisions for themselves.

The 19th-century Emersonian idea of self-reliance, slapped on top of 21st-century realities, yields a very odd result. On the one hand, many Americans -- especially Republicans -- deeply loathe “government nanny-state programs.” They argue that whenever the government interferes in the marketplace, people lose their sense of initiative and their freedoms, costs go up, and whatever was wrong in the first place simply gets worse. They say it’s best to leave as much as possible to the...

Can we get something straight here? "10 Items or Fewer" -- NOT "10 Items or Less" -- is what is should say on the signs for express lines at supermarkets. 

Whew. I feel better already.

Wanna know the difference? "Fewer" is used when you're talking about items that can be counted and "less" is used when talking about general amounts. "I love you less" is different from "I love fewer of you." Just imagine how that phrase could confuse someone in an intimate relationship if used incorrectly.

(And while we're talking about stuff that can drive a person crazy, I want to say three things: "utilize," "proactive," and "lifestyle." Never, EVER use these words. They're not incorrect. They're just horrible.)

Everybody has a gripe when it comes to how certain words or phrases are used, especially those of us in the teaching/writing biz. But, believe me, there are also rules we ourselves ignore. ...

General David Petraeus was an undergraduate at West Point, but he received his Ph.D. from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, where I teach. I never knew him when he was a grad student here, but since then I have gotten to know him just a bit through my friend Dick Ullman, his doctoral mentor. Jim Leach, the current Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, was a Princeton undergrad, majoring in politics. We became friends during the years that Jim taught at WWS after leaving Congress, where he represented Iowa for 30 years. 

What Petraeus and Leach have in common, besides a profound commitment to public service, is that last Saturday they were both presented with Princeton's highest alumni awards. The general was given the James Madison Medal for his "outstanding record of public service" and the former congressman was given the Woodrow Wilson Award for his career...

In a draft article published to its website today, Scientific American blasts some of the junk analysis bedeviling mainstream higher-ed coverage and what passes for policy "thought" about academic labor. "The real crisis in American science education," the article concludes, "is a distorted job market's inability to provide [young scientists] careers worthy of their abilities." Bingo.

The piece turns around an apparent contradiction: half the policy analysis decries a "shortage" of U.S. scientists and engineers, and the other half claims an "oversupply" of persons with doctorates in science.

That doesn't make sense -- except when you understand that both camps are wrong.

There is no shortage of U.S.-trained scientists and engineers and there's no oversupply of persons with doctorates in science or any other field.

What's really happening is restructuring of the labor market from a...

Today my colleagues Erin Dillon and Robin Smiles published a new report detailing how a group of HBCU's successfully and dramatically reduced student-loan default rates (Chronicle coverage here). It offers an important lesson about incentives and public accountability.

The story begins in 1990, when the federal government cracked down on thousands of fly-by-night colleges that were defrauding the government by signing up students for bogus loans. The national loan default rate peaked at 22.4 percent that year, costing taxpayers billions. Congress responded by banning any college where more than 25 percent of borrowers defaulted for three consecutive years from the program. The law was a spectacular success -- over 1,000 colleges were kicked out and the national default rate dropped to the mid-single digits.

Most legitimate colleges were unaffected by the 25 percent standard. But a few ...

A Guest Post by Norman D. Stevens

One of Gina's blogs, The Pleasures of a Disorganized Library, evoked memories of my first days working in libraries some 60 years ago. At that time, the conventional wisdom was that small libraries were vastly superior to large libraries. While some iconoclasts, like my mentor Ralph Shaw, were fond of pointing out, for example, that in a small library a catalog was not essential as a good librarian would have memorized her -- there were few male librarians in small libraries -- collection.

But small libraries could not begin to meet all of the needs of their patrons and offered inadequate salaries and working conditions. As a result, capable and ambitious librarians were forced to work in larger libraries. But secretly many of us dreamt of working in a small library. In my case it was the Harrisville (N.H.) Public Library that is located in a small...

Every time I visit a college campus, I am reminded of why it is that I am so drawn to higher education and why the U.S. system of higher education remains the envy of the world.

Sure, our higher-education system struggles with some significant challenges, including the extraordinarily high cost of attending some institutions. But the sort of innovation that goes on at college campuses across our nation is nothing short of breathtaking. Meeting with professors and administrators and hearing about the various programs and opportunities they make available to students is energizing and uplifting, especially during these difficult economic times when one cannot help but worry about future U.S. competitiveness.
   
Sitting in Washington, it is easy to get caught up in narrow data sets that paint a picture of institutional shortcomings and failure. Never mind that the data are inadequate and...

Recently, education reporter Jay Mathews of The Washington Post has been writing about reading in the public schools, two of those pieces appearing here and here.  One reason for doing so stems from a report issued by Renaissance Learning, a reading program that helps teachers and parents determine how well children understand the reading they do for homework and on their own.

Because of the popularity of the program, Renaissance Learning has a vast database on the books kids in public schools from kindergarten to 12th Grade actually read voluntarily and for class. The most recent findings, for the 2008-09 school year, are now released in a paper entitled "What Kids Are Reading: The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Schools" (here's for the link).

The list of most popular titles for Grades 9 through 12 show just how powerful the social element of reading is at that age.  The ...