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For the last decade, higher education has spent considerable and increasingly scarce funds defending itself from the publishing and entertainment industry, which, if they are sincere in their belief that it is colleges and universities causing their problems, both faculty and students, they would do well to listen carefully to the comments yesterday.

Much media attention has recently been given to the Thiel Fellowships, an effort described by The New York Times as “one of the most unusual experiments in higher education today.” But -- in these critical years for their development as persons -- will these young people spend time thinking about the meaning of their lives, about their moral obligations to fellow human beings?

A few years ago, I floated the idea of an upscale proprietary. (For convenience, I called it Mercedes U.) My argument was that for-profits have, until now, focused on the lower end of the market, where they have to compete with (subsidized) community colleges. Since they can’t compete on price at the low end, I suggested, better to try on the high end. (In California, at this point, they can compete simply by being open. But in the other 49 states, the argument still stands.) The only attempt I saw, Founders College, quickly ran aground on the shoals of Ayn Randian ideology and some pretty iffy management. Since then, nothing.

Last week, Cardale Jones, a first-year student at Ohio State University, posted the following to Twitter: "Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain't come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS." A short time after Jones' post, that tweet (and his account on Twitter) were removed. Jones was also suspended for last weekend's game against Nebraska. According to the Ohio State student directory, he is currently in the University's Exploration Program with a major in Management and Industry Exploration. Like a lot of first-year students, Jones is still trying to figure out his academic major. It's a typical experience.

Have you downloaded the IHE survey Debt, Jobs, Diversity and Who Gets In: A Survey of Admissions Directors?

We have several hundred responses so far and are hoping for more. If you have been working in higher education for at least a year, please take a few moments to fill out this short, nine question survey.

For the majority of my research career, I was a one-woman show. Except for the services of a research assistant to arrange my travels, make the field preparations and sort the paperwork, I do all of the thinking, from conceptualizing the proposal, implementing the project (including facilitating the focus groups and conducting the interviews) to the final write up. In this solitude, the only intellectual conversation transpires inside my head -- between the data and the literature to which I am hoping to contribute. I have had previous experiences of “research collaboration” but it was rather a short-hand for “I do it my own way; you do yours,” with the tying up of findings falling into my lap. The collaborative aspect has also proven contentious, with serious disagreements about methodology and fashioning a suitable output.

It is too easy to forget that communicating is much more than words and that language is anchored in culture. There are many words and phrases that simply do not translate and when people attempt to convey cultural concepts in a foreign language, meaning is often lost, or at least changed.