Colloquy discussion archive, 2004

What is the extent to which professors plagiarize work done by the graduate students they advise, and what can be done to deal with the problem? Will universities' new laboratory designs, which feature large open spaces instead of rooms separated into individual research fiefs, help or hurt good science? Why are top research universities in the United States not hiring many female faculty members, even at a time when American women are earning a majority of the Ph.D.'s conferred by American universities? What, if anything, should be done about the ".edu" Web addresses held by hundreds of diploma mills, a status that some students think means the institutions are fully accredited? Can fingerprint screening be an effective part of background checks on college employees, and can faculty members reasonably seek to be exempted from such checks? Does affirmative action in admissions hurt black law students, as a forthcoming law-review article contends? Does TIAA-CREF's financial performance for its investors justify a multimillion-dollar marketing blitz? Can the dysfunctional process by which presidents nominate academics to posts in the federal government ever be reformed, and should professors consider accepting such jobs if offered? What will be the legacy of Jacques Derrida, the French thinker who created the concept of "deconstruction" and who died this month? Is the growing practice at some colleges of buying online course materials developed at other institutions a good idea? Are state rules that bar adjunct professors from receiving unemployment benefits inherently unfair, given the nature of part-time academic work today? Should the rules be changed? Does a new biography of Shakespeare do him justice and make reasonable inferences about his family life, personality, faith, and influences? Can the scientists conducting research on behalf of the adversaries in the Exxon Valdez oil-spill case do good science and maintain their integrity in the atmosphere of a multimillion-dollar litigation? Do colleges' purchases of gadgets like iPod music players and tablet PC's for their students reflect genuine educational priorities or simply institutional needs for publicity? Does nanotechnology research present more peril than promise? Are universities' hopes to profit from lucrative nano-inventions likely to be realized? Do college students get a distorted, unscientific picture of the differences between the sexes, a view that overstates disparities and minimizes the enormous overlap and similarity? Should faculty members receive extra pay for devising and teaching online courses, or is such work so mainstream nowadays that it should be considered part of a professor's basic job description? Does the increasing use of high-tech tags to keep track of library books pose a threat to privacy and civil liberties by enabling library patrons to be tracked? What are the implications of a Chronicle investigation showing that the student-loan industry and for-profit colleges have contributed $1-million to the members of a Congressional committee that is considering a bill to renew the Higher Education Act? A new report from the National Endowment for the Arts describes an apparent decline in reading habits by Americans. Who, if anyone, is to blame for the trend? How should colleges respond to the apparently growing use by students of cellphones and PDA's to cheat during examinations? Does the United States face a true science crisis? If so, what role can universities play in averting it? Have states prepared adequately for the coming boom in enrollments, and will public colleges be able to handle the demand even as state spending on higher education is shrinking? Is the federal government devoting too many resources to bioterrorism research? Should labs like the one proposed in Boston be built in highly populated areas? For what will Mr. Reagan most be remembered in higher education? Are views of his legacy in academe unavoidably colored by the liberal views of most academics? Was he a great president, for higher education or otherwise? Should Illinois and the 57 other colleges that have American Indian mascots retire them, given that most institutions with such mascots have gotten rid of them in the last two decades? How can colleges with American Indian mascots honor their traditions while eliminating their official mascot? Are colleges willing or able to write policies to make all their Web sites accessible to people with disabilities? By dealing with the needs of disabled students on a case-by-case basis, do colleges expose themselves to lawsuits and accusations of discrimination? Public four-year colleges would lose millions of dollars, while community and for-profit colleges would gain millions, if Congress changes the formula used to allocate federal money to campus-based student-aid programs. Would the proposed change make the system fairer than it is now? Are the proposal's critics driven only by a desire to hang onto money they would lose under the plan? Is research on elementary and secondary education, partly under prodding from the Bush administration, becoming more rigorous because it is increasingly based on randomized experiments? Is President Bush's advisory panel on bioethics being led by its chairman, Leon R. Kass, to issue reports that treat scientific innovation with suspicion and offer little in the way of useful policy recommendations? 50 years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, has the process of desegregating colleges and universities worked, and has it has helped or hurt historically black institutions? Can the many colleges with gaping holes in their computer security make their networks more secure without jeopardizing their culture of openness and collaboration? Is a reliance on adjunct faculty members, spurred by a boom in distance learning, hurting the quality of online education? Have the humanities and social sciences so diverged from the natural sciences that they now require new governing structures to promote intellectual diversity? There is a new type of full-time faculty member on some campuses, the "professor of the practice," who focuses on teaching but is not on the tenure track. Would such a system work at your institution? Would you give up a tenure-track job for such a position? How should colleges deal with the problem of boorish behavior by foul-mouthed fans at sporting events? Is astrobiology, whose growth has been fueled by federal dollars and a stream of intriguing discoveries, a field with a future or destined to remain on the fringes for years to come? Has the University of Colorado responded sufficiently to the scandal besetting its football team, and has the university's president, Elizabeth Hoffman, taken the right steps to deal with the crisis? Can programs designed to help minority students succeed remain true to their mission if colleges open the programs to other students in order to avoid legal trouble? Should universities, rather than look for windfalls from inventions, use licenses to build long-term relationships with businesses? What should the college students who were key supporters of Howard Dean do now that the former Vermont governor has withdrawn from the presidential race? How should colleges respond to a recent court ruling in which a judge said private colleges must open their campus-police logs to public scrutiny under state open-records laws? Should parents and lawmakers have a role in determining how college health professionals deal with such health issues as meningitis on campuses? A number of countries give special preference to students in the university-admissions process because of their race, ethnicity, gender, or religion. Do such policies, which often are enacted to right historical wrongs, make sense? How did university researchers and public health benefit from the doubling of the National Institutes of Health's budget from 1998 to 2003? Has it begun a golden age of biomedical research? Were opportunities missed? Will, and should, admissions policies that give an edge to the relatives of alumni become a thing of the past? Which presidential candidate would do the most for higher education? Can writing computer viruses be taught responsibly, and is it appropriate to do so in a computer-security curriculum?