I'm on my second tour of duty in rural Iowa. My first academic job—where I was for ten years—was at a fairly well-known small liberal-arts college in the eastern part of the state not far from the population center of Cedar Rapids and the cultural center of Iowa City. Now I'm up near the northwest corner of the state about 2-1/2 hours from both Des Moines and Omaha, Neb., our nearest real metropolitan areas, a far more isolated and rural part of the state.

Thus I have read with great interest the recent essay in The Chronicle Review, "The Rural Brain Drain," by Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas. I have thought at great length about the issues they raise, and have wrestled with my own experiences in rural Iowa for the past two decades. My wife is from near where we are now;...

Princeton University's president, Shirley M. Tilghman, sent an e-mail message Tuesday warning staff members to expect layoffs this fall, thanks to a 22.7-percent drop in the university's endowment, The Daily Princetonian reports. The university depends on its endowment — which in June 2008 was valued at $16.3-billion, but is now valued at $12.6-billion — to help cover 48 percent of its daily operating expenses, the student newspaper notes. There's no word yet on which positions will be cut, but Ms. Tilghman told the newspaper that she hoped the 145 Princeton employees who opted to take the early-retirement package that the university began offering last spring will help to minimize the cuts.

A new faculty member sat in the faculty lunch room listening to two seasoned senior faculty members (both of whom enjoyed reputations as very entertaining lecturers) lamenting the good old days. They spoke fondly of the personality quirks of now retired professors, describing in humorous and wistful ways how the life of the university was weakened by the relentless conformity of our current stage of history.

"Ah," one finally sighed, leaning back in his chair, "the trouble with us all today is that we have no real characters teaching on this campus." The new faculty member could barely suppress his laughter at this conversation: One of the senior faculty members was wearing a kilt (he enjoyed playing the bagpipes at the end of the day on Fridays) and the other was wearing a bathrobe (having just completed a swim at the university pool). "No real characters, eh?," he...

Are you sick of your tax dollars going to institutions that value big-time athletics over their educational missions? So is Benjamin E. Rosenberg, a New York lawyer who argues in a recent op-ed in The Christian Science Monitor that the U.S. government should withhold federal funds from universities that pay athletics coaches more than professors. The purpose of a university education, he writes, is to ...

gain professional skills and to cultivate a love for learning–tools that will ultimately help carry us through life. In a world that has become increasingly dependent on technology, information, and clear communication, American universities cannot afford to falter on this.

And yet, schools are paying outrageous compensation to the coaches of their football...

I am always interested in finding ways to make the faculty positions available at my institution attractive to potential candidates. As I've discussed before, we have some challenges: We are a small teaching-oriented and teaching-intensive university, and (probably more importantly) we are located in a fairly remote corner of northwest Iowa, which, while it can be beautiful if you like cornfields, groves of trees, and silos, is not the dream location for many young Ph.D.'s.

One thing we do have, though, is a very good campus climate. Faculty members on the whole are collaborative, collegial, and friendly. There is a climate of mutual respect among the various constituencies on campus, and given the generally high level of contentiousness academics are capable of displaying, our faculty members are at peace, enjoy their jobs, and work very well together. These qualities...

A literature professor teaches John Donne's infamous poem, "The Flea," each semester and asks his undergraduates, "How many of you find this argument to indulge in the pleasures of the flesh to be effective?" The unfortunate young ladies who raise their hands or their voices in affirmation thus find themselves on his radar for what he calls "a bracing game of cat and mouse between the male and female." As one of his colleagues observed about the habit of this libidinous professor, "Only an aging professor would use Donne as an opening line to get dates, but, unfortunately, only an emotionally needy, barely 20-year-old woman would fall for it."

I thought of that story (which is true, of course) when I read this Tweed post about a controversy in England in which an aging professor advised his...

• B. Joseph White, president of the University of Illinois system, resigned yesterday in the wake of an admissions scandal in which well-connected applicants were admitted over more qualified ones, The Chronicle reports. He'll step down on December 31. Meanwhile, the Chicago Tribune reports that a former U. of Illinois president, Stanley Ikenberry, could replace him as interim president.

• Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, has turned down a raise, the Associated Press reports.
 
• The president of Florida...

I ran across a recent comment by Alan Wolfe that gave me pause: "The academic world suffers from too many people trying to hire people too much like themselves."

While Wolfe was discussing ideological diversity, he really referred to one of the unfortunate tendencies that we have in academe: a relentless drive to retain comfort. Universities are, in many ways, the ultimate gated communities. A mentor once warned me of the ease with which searches can degenerate into a process of faculty members making copies of copies of copies of copies of themselves until departments become stale, tepid groups that are fearful of change. Such tendencies are not limited to faculty searches alone, but also to staff and, more dangerously, administrative searches. What he warned me about was not just people hiring...

• A recent Ticker post noted that some retired University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professors have offered to teach free. So why hasn't the administration jumped at their offer? Historiann and Margaret Soltan share their theories.

• Brian Leiter considers whether interviews are a help or a hindrance in hiring the best faculty members.

• GayProf...

On the day before classes were set to begin for the current semester at Oakland University, near Detroit, months of negotiating had yet to yield a new contract for faculty members. So the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors did what it has typically done when negotiations go down to the wire: The members voted on whether to strike.

The result, overwhelmingly in favor, gave the union's bargaining team needed leverage during negotiations. But the seven-day strike that followed was anything but typical for a faculty union, for which work stoppages of any length are uncommon.

The strike, which forced Oakland to cancel classes, ended in a tentative agreement. Even so, local union officials and higher-education labor experts say boycotting the classroom is a last resort. Students' education, after all, hangs in the balance.