The following are news bulletins from The Chronicle of Higher Education for Thursday, March 29. Academe Today is brought to you as a service of the Department of University Relations. The board concluded that teaching and research assistantships develop students' critical-thinking skills, thus furthering their studies. Grants for research in the Antarctic. Supernovae, school reform, and more.
Modern viewers take the primacy of color for granted.
A new book looks back on the career of influential film critic Andrew Sarris, his encyclopedic mind, and his bold, controversial pronouncements, writes Thomas Doherty, associate professor of film studies at Brandeis University. They're written for other lexicographers and critics, and in fact they're not really introductory at all but polemical. Methodological descriptivists, for example, prefer a scientific approach to determining what is proper usage. This is proper language, used improperly, in a sense. He's a pariah and a geek.