Earlier, it was a dramatic cut in indirect costs on all federal grants and outright cancellation of some grants. Now, congressional Republicans are mulling a steep tax on university endowments. “Republicans are considering increases to the university endowment tax to help reduce the national deficit and as a potential lever to force universities to comply […]

I’m seeing people attacking universities, particularly private universities, for accumulating large endowments while allowing their graduates to accrue education loans that saddle them with debt for years or decades and cannot normally be discharged by bankruptcy. Why aren’t these universities the lenders? Setting aside the question of whether it is in the national interest to […]

10-15 years ago, Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) were a higher education fad. Universities could dispense with physical (lecture halls, heating, cooling, cleaning, security) and administrative (room scheduling) costs and just teach students online. During this period, I was associate dean for research and the Dean of our medical school brought up the suggestion that […]

I’ve recently stumbled on a twitter account called New Real Peer Review. The twitter account is largely (but not entirely) dedicated to posting abstracts of journal articles and links to the papers. Here’s one such abstract: This article explores the formation of a tranimal, hippopotamus alter-ego. Confronting transgender with transpecies, the author claims that his […]