Rhett Allain:

In the academic world, professors and faculty often meet with representatives of textbook publishers. These book reps like to stop by, or send an email, every so often to ask what my colleagues and I are using. My university uses a textbook rental system, which locks us into a particular book for a few years. When a book comes up for new adoption, you will surely see a book rep encouraging you to pick one of their textbooks.

Let me be up front and say I like these book reps. They are nice people and I enjoy talking to them. Even after adopting a publisher’s textbook, book reps often help out with extra material (like online supplemental material or instructor resources). However, I don’t always agree with the sales pitch. Let me go over a few.

Cyrus Farivar:

A full panel of judges at the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals has now overturned last summer’s notable decision by the standard trio of appellate judges, which had found that police needed a warrant to obtain more than 200 days’ worth of cell-site location information (CSLI) for two criminal suspects.

In the Tuesday en banc decision, the Fourth Circuit relied heavily upon the third-party doctrine, the 1970s-era Supreme Court case holding that there is no privacy interest in data voluntarily given up to a third party like a cell phone provider. That case, known as Smith v. Maryland, is what has provided the legal underpinning for lots of surveillance programs, ranging from local police all the way up to the National Security Agency.

James Grossman:

A historian, however, would know that it is essential to look beyond such simplistic logic. Yes, in the first few years after graduation, STEM and business majors have more obvious job prospects — especially in engineering and computer science. And in our recession-scarred economic context, of course students are concerned with landing that first job.

Over the long run, however, graduates in history and other humanities disciplines do well financially. Rubio would be surprised to learn that after 15 years, those philosophy majors have more lucrative careers than college graduates with business degrees. History majors’ mid-career salaries are on par with those holding business bachelor’s degrees. Notably these salary findings exclude those who went on to attain a law or other graduate degree.

The utility of disciplines that prepare critical thinkers escapes personnel offices, pundits and politicians (some of whom perhaps would prefer that colleges graduate more followers and fewer leaders). But it shouldn’t. Labor markets in the United States and other countries are unstable and unpredictable. In this environment — especially given the expectation of career changes — the most useful degrees are those that can open multiple doors, and those that prepare one to learn rather than do some specific thing.

squeakland:

The following list was prepared by Alan Kay for his students. We share it for those who want to learn more about some of the writing that influenced him and the creation of Etoys.

Darius Rubics:

discovered set of original Nikola Tesla drawings reveal a map to multiplication that contains all numbers in a simple to use system. The drawings were discovered at an antique shop in central Phoenix Arizona by local artist, Abe Zucca. They are believed to have been created during the last years of Tesla’s Free Energy lab, Wardenclyffe. The manuscript is thought to contain many solutions to unanswered questions about mathematics.

Carol Ann Alaimo

The University of Arizona has doubled down on diversity by hiring two top people instead of one and paying each of them more than the previous person earned.

Faced with choosing between two finalists for the recently advertised post of chief diversity officer, UA officials decided to hire both, creating a new, unadvertised position in the process.

Jesús Treviño will be paid $214,000 a year as the UA’s new senior diversity officer, and Rebecca Tsosie will be paid $215,000 as a law professor and special adviser to the provost on diversity.

Previously, the UA paid $118,000 to an assistant vice president in charge of diversity. But that person’s duties were more limited in scope than those of the two new hires, UA officials said.

The median salary for a chief diversity officer at a U.S. research university is less than $165,000, according to a March salary survey by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, the national association for human-resource professionals in higher education.

Nina Burleigh:

Graduates of the Class of 2016 are leaving behind campuses that have become petri dishes of extreme political correctness and heading out into a world without trigger warnings, safe spaces and free speech zones, with no rules forbidding offensive verbal conduct or microaggressions, and where the names of cruel, rapacious capitalists are embossed in brass and granite on buildings across the land. Baby seals during the Canadian hunting season may have a better chance of survival.

Their degrees look the same as ever, but in recent years the programs of study behind them have been altered to reflect the new sensitivities. Books now come with trigger warnings—a concept that originated on the internet to warn people with post-traumatic stress disorder (veterans, child abuse survivors) of content that might “trigger” a past trauma. Columbia’s English majors were opting out of reading Ovid (trigger: sexual assault), and some of their counterparts at Rutgers declined an assignment to study Virginia Woolf (trigger: suicidal ideation). Political science graduates from Modesto Junior College might have shied away from touching a copy of the U.S. Constitution in public, since a security guard stopped one of them from handing it out because he was not inside a 25-square-foot piece of concrete 30 yards away from the nearest walkway designated as the “free speech zone”—a space that needed to be booked 30 days in advance. Graduates of California public universities found it hard to discuss affirmative action policies, as administrators recently added such talk to a list of “microaggressions”—subtle but offensive comments or actions directed at a minority or other nondominant group that unintentionally reinforce a stereotype.

Times higher education:

announced plans for a new and pioneering college ranking for America – underpinned by the launch this week of a major national student engagement survey.

The US college ranking, due for publication in September 2016, has been developed after a year of consultation by THE’s senior data and editorial teams with key US sector bodies and experts, which concluded that the current range of university and college rankings in the US are not fit for purpose.

The new ranking will put student learning at its heart, with a focus on student outcomes – including completion and employment – and with unique features examining the value added by colleges. It will draw significantly on an entirely new national survey capturing student engagement.

Jaison R. Abel, Richard Deitz, and Yaqin Su:

A college education is an important investment that helps people build their skills and prepare for high-skilled jobs. Historically, those who have made this investment have received a substantial economic benefit that lasts over their lifetime. However, with the onset of the Great Recession and the sluggish labor market recovery that has ensued, there have been widespread reports of newly minted college graduates who are unsuccessful at nding jobs suited to their level of education. According to many accounts, recent graduates are finding it increasingly dificult to secure a job, and those who do nd work are o en con ned to low-wage positions. Stories of this nature raise troubling questions about whether a college degree still helps people find good jobs.

In this edition of Current Issues, we assess just how dificult the labor market
has become for recent college graduates. In doing so, we move beyond anecdotal evidence to examine more than two decades of data on the employment outcomes of recent college graduates. This approach allows us to put the experience of those entering the labor market during the latest business cycle into historical perspective.

Katie Murphy:

In the latest attempt to restore in-state students’ access to the University of California, legislators are proposing changes that would put the system on track to become the nation’s most expensive public college option for nonresidents.

The Assembly proposal, to be debated in the final weeks of state budget negotiations, calls for a 10 percent cap on out-of-state enrollment, paired with tuition hikes that would push annual nonresident tuition from about $37,000 to $54,000 over six years. The changes would help pay for an undergraduate expansion that is the plan’s centerpiece: 30,000 new spaces for California residents by 2022./i>