Category Archives: Higher Education

Off the tenure track

By Michael Becker | Published: December 3, 2008
Non-tenure track instruc­tors teach nearly 49 per­cent of under­grad­u­ate courses in the United States, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. Many of those instruc­tors work part-time and aren’t paid as much as their tenured or tenure-track coun­ter­parts. Non-tenure track instruc­tors make up nearly 70 per­cent of the pro­fes­so­ri­ate in the U.S. This infor­ma­tion comes from a [...]
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Thought on the rhetorical and righteous mind

By Michael Becker | Published: November 29, 2008
Alex Reid, after some dis­cus­sion of the smaller-than-previously-thought role the con­scious mind actu­ally plays in human life, tells us that “teach­ing prac­tices work fairly well for the most part, even though they are built on a likely faulty model of the mind.” In part, that’s because writ­ing relies on a lot of the sub­con­scious func­tions built [...]
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Science fraud is common and often ignored, report says

By Michael Becker | Published: June 19, 2008
According to a report pub­lished in Nature, sci­en­tific fraud in acad­e­mia is “sur­pris­ingly com­mon” but is not often reported to uni­ver­sity officials. The sur­vey of mainly bio­med­ical stu­dents showed that about 9 per­cent had seen some kind of aca­d­e­mic mis­con­duct in the past three years; 37 per­cent of those breaches went unreported. The authors sur­veyed [...]
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Image tampering increasingly common in scientific journals

By Michael Becker | Published: June 6, 2008
The Federal Office of Research Integrity says that 44 per­cent of its cases between 2005 and 2006 involved image fraud. That’s up from 6 per­cent a decade ago. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education (sub­scrip­tion prob­a­bly required), out of the 300 or so arti­cles accepted each year by the Journal of Clinical Investigation, 10 [...]
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Online study kits irk one Florida professor

By Michael Becker | Published: May 21, 2008
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus Blog reported today on a pro­fes­sor at the University of Florida who is upset that an online com­pany, Einstein’s Notes, is sell­ing notes and quiz answers from his wildlife ecol­ogy classes. The pro­fes­sor, Michael Moulton, and his textbook’s pub­lisher have sued Einsten’s Notes, claim­ing that the com­pany is [...]
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