An American academic delegation will visit P'yongyang next spring in the hope of forging ties between universities in North Korea and the United States. A bank will help pay for a new chemistry building at the University of Oxford in exchange for a share of the profits from any companies spun off from research conducted there. An annual study that ranks colleges and universities found serious erosion this year in the quality of many of the institutions. Scholars in 39 developing countries are benefiting from a project, financed by George Soros, to subsidize libraries' access to commercial databases. Universitas 21, a network of 18 universities in 10 countries, will develop online-education materials with a division of the Thomson Corporation.
Critics are angry over the government's aid to a for-profit online institution.
The difference between intelligent minds on campuses and in the world at large is only a matter of degrees, writes Peter Temes, president of the Great Books Foundation. To treat women more fairly, colleges need such approaches as a tenure track for faculty members who work part time, writes Joan Williams, a professor of law at American University. William F. Monroe, a professor of English and associate dean of the honors college at the University of Houston, considers. As an introduction to the music, Ken Burns's latest megadocumentary isn't bad. Now that we have some experience publishing electronically, it's time to determine whether it is changing research, teaching, and learning, writes Kate Wittenberg, director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia University.