When I stepped up from the presidency of George Washington University to become a professor, people asked me what new adventures I was considering. First and foremost, I replied, is a return to the classroom, to engage with graduate students about policy issues of higher education, my professional passion. (I have been doing that.) Second is to write a book, an activity that will move me away from the immediacy of daily decision making toward the more reflective world of analysis. (In 2008 two have been published: BMOC, Simon and Schuster and Letters to the Next President of the United States, Korn Ferry Institute). After that, I’m open, I said to the inquiring minds.

I’ve been fortunate to invest my time in many activities: some local engagements with civic organizations; and others with a broader reach — working with Korn Ferry...

The dire economic picture is forcing campus constituencies to rethink their choices — all constituencies, all choices. Assumptions are being thrown out the door.

Let’s start with the largest group — the students. This is shopping season, the time of year when students and their families complete their campus visits and begin filling out applications to the colleges of their choice. But what are their choices and how do they pick them? By location (near or far from home), type (Ivy League, Big Ten, elite, boutique, rural, urban), disciplines of study (liberal arts, engineering, technology, health sciences, education), and of course, price (tuition, room and board, fees, living expenses).

Price appears to be the trump card this year. Families are shopping...

When I was a boy there were a couple of truths we were taught we could rely on. One was that New York City water was the best in the world. No one would have thought of buying bottled water unless perhaps it was carbonated, in which case it wasn’t water exactly; it was seltzer. The second was that the New York City public schools were as good as it gets, and they were. The neighborhood schools that didn’t have names but had numbers (I myself was privileged to go to P.S. 254) and the local high school, and the examination high schools like Stuyvesant, Music and Art, and Bronx High School of Science — which we all knew with certainty were the crucibles of genius.

Comment on the water I will leave to others. But I believe the schools were as good as they were because the teachers were extraordinary. Back in those days, women of ambition and capacity had...

I don’t mean to minimize the concerns of adjunct faculty but it occurs to me that almost every time I post about any one of a whole range of subjects the responses are all interpreted from the point of view of a part-time professor. So when I raise a question about the pros and cons of the doctor of arts degrees the response is, “is it good or bad for contingent faculty?” The concerns of contingent faculty, however real, have got to take second place to the survival of the university itself.

This morning’s mail brought a letter from TIAA-CREF commenting on the state of the economic market: it is meant to reassure those of us who have our pensions invested with this entity. Important, of course, and what about university endowments? Not to mention the ability of...

This election season, George Washington University’s bipartisan Battleground Tracking Poll is in full spring, measuring the electorate, issues, and the various responses to specific candidates running for office; it also houses research archives for academic study. In Connecticut, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research is located in Storrs at the University of Connecticut and a few miles further south the Quinnipiac University Polling Center routinely queries people about national and local matters. Moving to the midwest, we can find the Big Ten Battleground Poll, directed by folks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying issues of the day. These are but some of the analytical institutes housed at colleges and universities around the country, academically...

The education column in the October 2, 2008 Washington Post is worth your attention. It raises some interesting questions about credentials and degrees held by local area school superintendents.

Having myself taught courses in law and education at Boston University and sat in on doctoral committees at GW’s School of Education and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I know that it is not sound to say that “a rose is a rose is a rose.” Doctorates in education are as useful and lame as the schools and the students that offer them and take them. Like so many other things in life, you get out of them what you put into them.

About a year ago, the Council of Graduate Schools asked me to address their...

Happy New Year to our readers, Jewish and otherwise. May 5769 be a sweet year for everybody of all faiths and even those of you without a religious persuasion. May it bring peace, health, and fulfillment.

During the early 1970s, the school I was at experienced a surge in enrollment. The yield that year — percentage of students accepts to those who enrolled — was extremely high, too high, in fact, in relation to the number of dormitory rooms available to house incoming students. Thus, what was great for the university’s bottom line created a problem. Where were we going to put these students? One option that appeared was an off-campus dormitory at a local theological seminary that had the opposite problem: not enough students to fill its quarters. However, when the students on my own campus heard about the off-campus alternative, they “requested” (a.k.a. protested) the administration to create triples out of the resident halls’ doubles and keep everyone around the quad....

It may be time to throw in the towel on the conventional application of the SAT and ACT tests. The report recently released by the National Association of College Admission Counseling is only the most current criticism of the exams (or, more precisely, the application of the scores) that have been excessively relied on in decisions made by college admissions officers. In some ways, the simplest thing to do is to use the exams we’ve got more intelligently, sensitively and with greater restraint. But that has been suggested in the past, to no avail.

The new proposal talks about dropping the use of the test and putting greater emphasis on evidence more likely to determine a student’s capacity for academic success....

We all know the old joke about the city slicker who asks the farmer how much milk does that cow of yours give? And is told, “she don’t give any. You’ve got to go take it away from her.”

That has been my experience over three decades as a university president. Neither milk nor money wander in on their own. If you raise money, it is because you are out there soliciting it. But once, a gentleman visited me proffering a check for $1-million. He said that he wanted to give it to the university in honor of two of its graduates. He had been a business partner of theirs and they’d gone bust. He had the deeper pocket and had ended up having to pay off all of their collective debt. Ten years had passed. Things had turned around for his two associates and one...