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We are teetering on a very fine line between the right of scholars to express informed opinion and the right of enterprises to be protected from libel. Yet the increasing threats of lawsuits inhibit expression as scholars weigh risks before voicing opinions. There are serious consequences for academic freedom.

In the aggregate, higher ed fund raising seems to be rebounding.

We are getting close to implementing our Honor Code and Honor Board and I am very excited by the our progress in this critical area. It is not that our campus is any different from most other campuses. We know that there is academic dishonesty taking place on virtually every college or university campus. We have just, however, made a commitment to push for a measureable decrease in such behavior.

When I was in my twenties and early thirties, I studied acting and singing here in New York. I got work in small productions and the occasional film, but I never made enough money to quit my day jobs. This may have been partly due to a lack of talent, but I'll never know, because the fact is that I didn't try very hard. I hated auditioning; hated the feeling of selling myself; and I jumped on every possible excuse to avoid them.

In a previous post, we shared responses to the question “What has been the most significant change (either positive or negative) in the higher education 'industry' since you began working in it?" Although answers relating to the increased influence of business in higher ed and the ‘corporatization’ of the university came in fourth place in terms of number of mentions (close to a three-way tie for second, though), it would have come in first place had we measured responses by the heat or passion of the response.

The dean of the Health division -- which includes nursing -- and I took a field trip to a local health care provider to talk about working together to give nursing students some exposure to what goes on there. These wouldn’t be full-fledged clinical placements -- we already have those -- but a sort of structured introduction to a part of the health care system that isn’t always top-of-mind for nursing students.

We are all, in some sense, curators of our cultural lives, and always have been. Commonplace books were a popular means of arranging nuggets of valuable material selected by the compiler. Marginalia is another time-honored form of highlighting and annotating texts, personalizing them and noting the most meaningful bits. In a digital era, this activity is social. But "anthological copying" that libraries claim can be a fair use is something three major book publishers find illegal and indefensible.

Did anyone outside of New York City happen to catch this story about Baruch College? In the scope of international Internet policy it is a proverbial drop in the bucket. But for higher education information technology policy it is an important story. And a good step that administrators there made in how they handled a challenge that in the past has stymied administrators and angered students.