Even Gov. Tim Pawlenty thinks the $40,000 bonus for the chancellor of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system was a bad idea.

A Miami University team of researchers finds that girls may avoid STEM careers because they are “perceived as less likely than careers in other fields to fulfill communal goals.”

The scientific community’s apparent inability to convey the risks of climate change to the public propelled John Abraham of University of St. to dissect the claims of one of the world’s most-vocal and visible skeptics.

John Abraham’s 126-slide audio presentation, titled “A Scientist Replies to Christopher Monckton,” methodically takes apart Monckton’s claims that scientists are lying about global warming.

To me, it’s news when English majors see their average starting salary increase. It’s not news when engineering grads see another starting salary that’s sometimes double an English major’s.

The MnSCU system appears to have turned increasingly to temporary and adjunct faculty as its student enrollment grew 20 percent between 2000 and 2009.

Maybe Monday was a slow news day but I wasn’t the only reporter sheepishly asking the University of Minnesota why it’s selling a herd of about 130 milking cows and 130 young animals at its research and outreach center in Crookston, Minn.
 

After many years of writing the “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essay in the lower grades, I’ve always thought it would be interesting to turn it around and ask a teacher, professor or institution, “What Did You Accomplish on Summer Vacation?”

Tenure is not dead yet but it’s definitely on the decline for instructional staff at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, according to an analysis of statistics from the U’s Office of Institutional Research.

An analysis published in the Minnesota Daily found that hiring of tenure-track faculty is down and non-tenure track faculty is up. 

The cyberspace version of the Chronicle’s “Tenure, RIP” article is traveling through the inboxes at the U of M’s Twin Cities campus, but so far it isn’t causing panic.

Monte Bute must be one of the most-unusual winners of Metropolitan State University’s annual alumnus award.

Despite the recession and annihilation of the stock market in 2008, Carleton College reported Thursday that it had raised nearly $300.4 million in gifts and pledges from 23,148 donors.

And which out-of-state institutions attract the most Minnesota high-school grads? Student migration-trends report shows a net loss for the state.

I posed these questions to readers in last Thursday’s post: Did students do better online or in a classroom with the instructor, and why or why not? What kinds of classes work well online and which ones don’t?

This fall, St. Catherine University’s St. Paul campus will follow its Minneapolis sister, prohibiting smoking and tobacco use within its boundaries.

Yanshuo Zhang evoked her first days at St. Catherine University in her student commencement speech for the class of 2010.

It’s not every day that law students, or even lawyers, get to see meaningful change as a result of their efforts.

A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper pokes holes in a 2009 U.S. Department of Education meta-analysis that concluded students on average perform better in “online learning conditions than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”