College Matters from The Chronicle

In more than four decades of university leadership, E. Gordon Gee was seldom dull. During stints at Brown, Vanderbilt, and Ohio State Universities, Gee made news for tangling with trustees, controversial spending decisions, and impolitic jokes. In his final presidency, at West Virginia University, Gee presided over major budget cuts before retiring in 2025. Despite some public bruising, Gee is a f...

After a decisive electoral victory on Tuesday, Democrats will assume majorities in the U.S House and Senate, placing a partisan check on a presidential administration that has put the screws to colleges and universities for nearly two years. But what will voters’ rebuke of President Trump mean for a sector that many Americans still view as overpriced, out of touch, and insufficiently responsive to...

Listen to the first episode of The Chronicle's new podcast, Open Questions. The Chronicle Review is where academe comes to argue with itself. On Open Questions, The Review‘s podcast, Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin bring the argument to you by talking with leading scholars and thinkers about the debates that matter now. In This Episode: A Harvard dean recently suggested that "there should be accepta...

Young college students are getting a bad rap lately. To hear it from professors, many are struggling to read, they’re glued to their phones, and they’ve become heavily reliant on AI to do their work. But what do students have to say about all of this? When is the last time they actually read a book? Are they cheating as much as people say? The answers might surprise you. Related Reading Is Reading...

Colleges across the country are cutting programs and slashing budgets on a grand scale. What began as a slow trickle from some seemingly unlikely places, like Princeton and MIT, has become a sector-wide deluge. Wealthy private colleges, major public research universities, and lower-resourced institutions alike are eliminating courses of study, laying off staff, and cutting some faculty jobs. How b...

For weeks, the world has been reeling over allegations that multiple Cornell University students raped a woman at a fraternity house. The lurid case has renewed calls for banning fraternities, but pushback from alumni and fears of the groups going underground tend to scuttle these efforts. Fraternities, it seems, are a proverbial third rail in higher education. Not unlike big-spending athletics pr...

The details of a lawsuit filed last month by a former Cornell University student, who says she was raped two years ago by multiple men at the Chi Phi fraternity house, are tough to stomach. Ketamine, alcohol, and misogyny figure prominently into the account laid out by the plaintiff, who is identified in the lawsuit only as Jane Doe. The suit has raised troubling questions about how the university...

Nearly four years after the introduction of ChatGPT, colleges and universities have propagated plenty of rules related to students’ use of AI. But what about administrators and faculty? Can they live by the same standards they’ve handed down? Should they? As more faculty and even some college leaders admit to using AI in their writing, charges of hypocrisy abound. News last week that Dartmouth Col...

University of Texas at Austin football fans have good reason to be happy right now. After narrowly defeating the Ohio State University Buckeyes earlier this month, the Longhorns are sitting pretty at No. 1 in the college football rankings. But all is not well in Austin. The morning after the Longhorns’ big win, a Republican political candidate posted an inflammatory message on X, expressing dismay...

Jodi Kantor, whose reporting for The New York Times helped expose years of sexual-misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein, has been thinking a lot lately about the next generation. What will a fulfilling career look like a decade from now? How worried should college graduates be about AI gobbling up entry-level jobs? And how can employers, including universities, do a better job of stoppin...

Angela Duckworth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, burst onto the scene more than a decade ago with a seemingly simple theory about successful people. They are incredibly determined, Duckworth argued, exhibiting that quintessentially American trait called “grit.” In her new book, Situated, Duckworth says that people have enormous power to change their “situations,” en...

Is the student reading crisis real? Is AI panic justified? What’s next for the partisan battles over higher education? Each week, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s podcast delves into the thorniest issues facing colleges and universities. Through interviews with newsmakers and conversations with Chronicle staff, College Matters delivers sharp insights and deep analysis of the biggest stories in...

More than 60 years after its publication, John Williams’s novel Stoner remains a revelatory portrait of higher education and the professoriate. Spanning much of the first half of the 20th century, the novel follows William Stoner from his undergraduate days at the University of Missouri through his career as an English professor at the same institution. The common tropes of the academic...

The pandemic prompted many universities to drop standardized-testing requirements for applicants, and a lot of institutions remain test-optional today. But some high-profile universities, including all of the members of the Ivy League, have since reinstated their testing requirements. Even the University of California, which has been a leader in the “test free” movement, now plans to revisit its p...

As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, the nation’s colleges and universities are experiencing some growing pains. Older than the country itself, American higher education is a big, bold, polarizing enterprise that people don’t trust as much as they once did — but still can’t imagine living without. Sound like America? It is. Related Reading ‘Animal House’ at 30: O Bluto, Where Art Th...

The leadership carousel at the University of Florida has turned swiftly of late. Now on its second interim president in as many years, and fresh off of a failed presidential search last summer, the state’s flagship is desperate to install a permanent leader. This month, the university's Board of Trustees voted to give the job to Stuart Bell, defying critics who have assailed the former University...

College Matters listeners, we want to hear from you. Please help us to improve our show by completing a brief audience survey at chronicle.com/podcastsurvey. Last week, Kevin Guskiewicz took a pay cut to leave Michigan State University’s presidency for the top job at Clemson University. And he lobbed a grenade on the way out by criticizing the institution’s trustees, a group of eight elected offic...

College Matters listeners, we want to hear from you. Please help us to improve our show by completing a brief audience survey at chronicle.com/podcastsurvey. Dan Ariely has made a career of examining the dark side of humanity. As a social scientist and a Duke University professor, he has drawn attention — and some criticism — for his research into subjects like lying, cheating, and criminality. Of...

College Matters listeners, we want to hear from you. Please help us to improve our show by completing a brief audience survey at chronicle.com/podcastsurvey.  Last week’s shutdown of Canvas, an online learning-management system used by thousands of colleges and schools, was a sharp illustration of higher education’s increasing reliance on technology. Students, too, are leaning on artificial intell...

Ken Burns, who has helped to tell the story of the nation's history through celebrated documentaries, attributes much of his success to the education he received at Hampshire College. Faced with the recent news that his financially struggling alma mater will soon close its doors, Burns is reflecting on the larger forces that helped to seal the college’s fate. Hampshire bills itself as a learning l...

In recent months, politicians from both sides of the aisle have been busy exerting influence on state universities. In Virginia, a newly elected Democratic governor has quickly put her stamp on higher ed, adding political allies to university governing boards and reportedly forcing out some members with whom she disagrees. Citing concerns about recent personnel decisions at the University of Kentu...

Frank Bruni’s classroom has gotten a bit bleak lately. As a professor of the practice of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the longtime New York Times writer often finds himself talking about grim trends: the decline of local news, threats against a free press, and the corrosive nature of political polarization. But Bruni says he’s trying to strike a delicate balance with his studen...

In states across the country, conservative lawmakers and university governing boards are purging what they describe as gender ideology from college campuses. As part of a larger backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, several universities have in recent years shut down women’s and gender-studies programs and closed LGBTQ-focused campus spaces. These developments are particularl...

As a professor of computer science and engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, Ian Bogost spends a lot of time trying to connect with his Gen Z students. He knows the stereotypes about this crop of young people: lazy, grade-grubbing, incapable of resolving problems without running to an administrator. But Bogost, who frequently writes about his teaching experiences for The Atlantic, say...

As public attitudes toward higher education sour, many college presidents are either staying mum or defending their institutions. But a handful of high-profile college leaders have taken a different tack of late, publicly conceding that the sector’s critics have a point. Concerns about rising tuition, the value of degrees, and higher education’s liberal tilt are all valid, these leaders argue. But...