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 International searching for the next generation of…

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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 for discounts — both on the list price and on financial aid. In a recent survey quoted in USA Today, 50 percent of families…

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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 four choices: they could become …

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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 parents and students to pay tuition.

Robert Brown, the president of Boston University, has called for an immediate…

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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 rigorous and bipartisan centers, making important contributions not only to the social sciences but also to the image a…

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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 annual gathering in Seattle, and I gave a talk in which I raise the question of whether or not degrees — not only doctorates in education but academic doctorates as well — were crafted…

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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. We obliged, converted student lounges into rooms, put bunk beds in the doubles and the extra students were in…

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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. William R. Fitzsimmons, who in real life is the dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, chaired the NACAC study. He points out that inevitably standardized tests like…

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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 afternoon they showed up saying that they wanted to hold him harmless for their share of what they had lost, with interest.

He …

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In the midst of this current political campaign I find myself thinking about the word “leadership.” After all, the president (and presumably the vice-president) of the United States is considered by many to be a leader of the free world. But the precise definition of the term leadership can be at times opaque, signifying many things, not all uniform. Jackie Gleason and John F. Kennedy both wanted to send someone to the moon, but their words (and gestures) were very different, even if both inspired a generation!

Companion words muddy the waters even further, creeping alongside and making a compound statement that results in yet another meaning. One example is “visionary leadership”—a phrase that routinely appears in the employment section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, advertising positions for deans, vice-president, and presidents. Why, I wonder, do few if any ads for faculty …

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I joined the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) almost immediately after I first became a professor way back in the day. I thought it went with the profession, in much the same way that I joined the New York State Bar Association shortly after I became a lawyer. And then I discovered when I became an administrator that I was the enemy. I hung in for a while but eventually some issue or another took me over the top and I stopped paying dues and never looked back.

But I always believed it important that there be an AAUP, even if I myself was no longer going to participate. It was sort of like the student newspaper. I found myself regularly explaining to editors of undergraduate periodicals that even when the paper was criticizing me I thought it was imperative that there be a student newspaper. And yet, I confess to a little bit of schadenfreude when I started reading…

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I always hate it when vacations end. You come back and discover that the world you left behind is much as it was when you departed. Even if things change they remain the same. So, for example, while I was taking a break the question of the appropriate drinking age reemerged.

John M. McCardell Jr., president emeritus of Middlebury College and William G. Durden, president of Dickinson College, have recently persuaded 100 or more of their colleagues to sign a petition, the Amethyst Initiative, to begin a conversation about lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18 (the age it was when I myself went off to college).

Obviously, the debate about the legal drinking age is far broader than the boundaries of any particular college campus. Beyond the age question itself are the actions — at times illegal and often inappropriate — by people who drink beyond their ability to maintain personal…

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Many of the people who responded to my post that invited consideration of high school teaching as an alternative to being an adjunct faculty member commented on the state of secondary education in America. I wonder if they might be interested in reading a piece on the subject that I had in July 2008 issue of The Ripon Forum, the title of which is, “What are ‘World Class’ Schools?”

This is an earnest question. I’m not trying to provoke advocates of the adjunct-faculty agenda. But I couldn’t help wondering today as I was reading an advance copy of tomorrow morning’s Washington Post Magazine: Education Review about an apparent contradiction.

The headline on the cover is “Outsourcing Our Schools.” The paper reports that the Prince George’s County public schools are desperate for qualified teachers and have begun to import hundreds of them from the Philippines. Reading the story, I was reminded of a piece I read in The New York Times sometime in the last year or two about New York City bringing faculty members to the public schools from Europe and Latin America. This teacher shortage is going on at the same time that several of the nation’s public school systems (New York and Washington are two) are putting in place radical reforms in an effort to improve the…

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The phrase has entered our lexicon. Pose a challanging query to someone and you’ll get the response, “That is the $64,000 question!” It’s the big enchilada, something you probably don’t know the answer to and if it turns out you do know it, well then you’re perceived to be unusually smart. Back in the mid-1950s, however, the expression was a symbol of the magic of television, the merger of entertainment and education.

After all is said and done, it was a game show. Reality television may think of itself as “of the moment” but its origins are with the earlier days of television when live contestants — regular guys and gals looking very much like your next door neighbor — performed on game shows: The Price is Right, Name that Tune, What’s My Line? The $64,000 Question. These programs (or the incarnations that are on the air today) are a little bit of reality, a small dose of magic, an…

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In the later years of the 19th century through the early days of the 20th century, a group of Eastern European wood carvers immigrated to the United States and began to make furniture and decorative objects in their new world. Specializing in carved animal figures (many with European roots from areas that were heavily forested), these men made decorative elements for synagogues and cemeteries: lions, torah arks, memorial tablets, pediments and other such elements. And soon they began to create commercial items as well: cigar store figures, totems and carousel animals, ornate three-dimensional horses elaborately decorated with paint, lacquer, gilding, glass jewels — filled with detailing that beguiles the eye. I tell you all this because I visited a marvelous exhibition, “Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses: The Synagogue to the Carousel,” that originated at the American Folk Art Museum in NY…

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Yes, it is true. Law schools have been playing by the rules. Which means since they are full of people who know enough to ask what “it” means, they understand the loopholes. Robert Morse, the editor at U.S. News & World Report in charge of college, graduate, and professional school rankings, has discovered that there is gambling going on and he’s shocked.

America’s law schools, inevitably competitive as are so many segments of American culture, are constantly concerned about how they are perceived by potential applicants, their current students, alumni, faculty, and all other stake holders including the board of trustees, the president, and benefactors. They want to be seen to be as good as they can possibly be, and maybe even a little better. At least 20 of them believe they are in the top 10.

So, they have been “fudging” a little on the data they have been submitting to U.S….

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Every four years, Americans vote for a president. And every four years while on the campaign trail the media run short of stories about the candidates and fill in with tales about their spouses. This year has been no exception and spouses have filled the column inches and airwaves portrayed as the strength behind the scenes, best friend and confident, loose canon, assertive, retiring, and overcoming adversity — health, wealth and/or not enough happiness.

Presidential spouses have coped with the issues of office since Martha & George’s time. For decades, it was nearly impossible to improve upon the story of Dolley Madison’s daring rescue of the large Gilbert Stuart portrait of the first president from the British army’s torching of the White House. A lady who puts art before self — now that is my kind of gal!

Soon we learned that Mrs. Lincoln was depressed and Mrs. Wilson ran the …

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Fox News photo of Gallaudet protestors in 2006

Two decades ago, those of us who care about such things watched as Elisabeth Zinser, the newly appointed president of Gallaudet University, was repudiated by the student body demanding that the leader of an institution created to serve the deaf had to be deaf.

The trustees had picked somebody conventional. The students said “no.” They did so with brio, the board was persuaded and my friend, I. King Jordan, was ultimately selected. King had been born hearing but became deaf in a motorcycle accident as a young man. It made sense for all kinds of symbolic reasons, I thought, for an institution serving special people to have a special person as their president. And while I lamented the means, I was empathetic with the end. And for two decades President Jordan was terrific.

At the conclusion of his term, the Gallaudet board of trustees …

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