At a conference I recently attended, a sizeable wave of paper presenters failed to attend. The papers were submitted back in February, but travel funds had since vanished and, in some cases, wages had been cut and the presenters could not afford to pay for the airfare/hotel out of their pockets. In the past, a no-show was the kiss of death toward future presentations, but I had the definite sense that most of the attendees felt genuine empathy toward the folks who were unable to attend.

As I pondered this reality, I also remembered that next year's travel budgets are already gone. The academic conference as we know it is about to undergo a substantial transformation. After all, how long can we support giving faculty members $1,000 to read a paper to a half-dozen other professors in a small conference room in a distant city? Note that I'm not saying that it's a...

The other day, I was at a meeting of the chief academic officers from institutions affiliated with the Iowa Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. IAICU serves as the consolidated voice of Iowa's private institutions (almost all of which are active members) in state and national governmental affairs, and as a clearinghouse for information-sharing and other activities that serve the common interests of those institutions.

For the last two years, we've been discussing how to increase the diversity of our faculty at IAICU institutions. For many reasons, this is a very tall challenge. Most importantly, Iowa has a reputation for being not very diverse, and therefore perhaps not very welcoming to people who do not have a European-American heritage and ethnicity. In addition, most of the private institutions in Iowa are, like mine, relatively small and...

• In the spirit of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, Zuska explains why all you faculty scientists out there should give thanks to science administrators, who have to deal with this kind of stuff regularly so that you don't have to.

• The City University of New York's plan to raise its profile in the sciences by luring nationally recognized scientists in emerging disciplines and building new science buildings on several campuses is coming to fruition, The New York Times reports.

• According to an annual report released this week by the U.S. Education Department, one-third of college...

Need a good chuckle? Then check out Grad Hacker, a blog about how to act productive, because "simply being productive is not enough" (especially these days when so many people are being laid off). "What good is your inner, clandestine productivity, if your bosses, colleagues, and you yourself don’t really know the extent of just how unbelievably productive, busy, stressed, in a rush, and important you really are?," writes GH, an anonymous graduate student. Be sure to read his/her latest tip: "Set Your Chat Status to Busy but Don't Sign Off."

Meanwhile, over at Feminist Law Professors,...

As I perused the stacks of books in the exhibition area of a recent conference, I started eavesdropping on a nearby conversation between two young men who were discussing their dissertations. I chuckled when I heard their exchange of dissertation-ese that was loaded with jargon and used overly complicated sentence structures.

Several past threads in the Chronicle forums have noted the importance of understanding that job candidates must learn to use care in discussing their dissertations in job interviews. The reality is that while their dissertations are the most important things in their lives at the moment, once defended, those dissertations will pass into a kind of academic purgatory. For most faculty members, especially those at teaching institutions, new projects will come along, new course preps, and...

The days of research sabbaticals and teaching-load reductions are taking, shall we say, their own sabbatical for a while. For those who are employed at teaching-intensive institutions and strive to maintain active scholarly agendas, this is a significant problem, especially if the cuts to such programs are timed with a book contract or significant grant opportunity.

There are other load tricks, however, that sometimes can help faculty members who are trying to sustain their scholarly production. I've seen teaching schedules consolidated to three or four days to allow for at least a bit of extended time to write. I've seen course assignments altered to reduce the number of preps in a given semester. I've seen enrollment caps in sections quietly reduced to cut down on grading loads. I've even seen courses shifted from fall or spring semesters to summer terms to free up a...

Dilbert once had a story arc about the horrible trinkets and tokens that corporate employers give out to recognize employee contributions. The most common ones are probably logo shirts that only come in XXS or XXXL or the infamous logo belt buckles that are designed to fit rodeo-clown belts. Higher education is not immune to such trinkets. When I was a student, I always thought that faculty members had first crack at all the really nice swag, things like sweatshirts and ball caps and the occasional coffee mug. Then I became a faculty member and started getting the ill-fitting T-shirts, belt buckles, and key fobs that fall apart after five minutes. On the other hand, I have landed some sweet logo pens over the years, along with one or two sweatshirts and some nice golf shirts.

Poor budget years, however, seem to do away with the good stuff and increase the junk. When...

My last entry on small private colleges' need to find faculty members who can cover a wide range of courses was inspired by comments I heard at various sessions of the Council of Independent Colleges' annual institute for chief academic officers. Another interesting, and somewhat related conversation occurred at the dinner meeting of the CAOs at Presbyterian colleges, which was sponsored by the Association of Presbyterian Colleges & Universities. The discussion, led by Robert Holyer, Provost at Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC, concerned recruiting and socializing new faculty members to meet the mission of member colleges in APCU.

APCU institutions have a wide range of missions and characters. A couple of the CAOs participating in the...

Several articles in The Chronicle (including this piece in The Chronicle Review and my recent column) have discussed U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander's proposal in Newsweek that we increase opportunities for undergraduate degrees to be completed in three years. His proposal has been influential because of his past service as a former University of Tennessee president and as secretary of the U.S. Department of Education. In administrative circles, this discussion is ramping up considerably. Federal and state governments have a sense that it will provide a means of relief for budgets, and families believe that it may save both tuition dollars and lost income...

I've spent the past several days at the Council of Independent Colleges' annual Institute for Chief Academic Officers. The CIC is an association of small and midsize private institutions that offers its members developmental conferences such as this one, a similar one for presidents, a series of workshops for chairs, and other programs and projects including a valuable tuition-exchange program for children of faculty and staff members.

While a number of the more elite private institutions are members, for the most part the academic officers attending this institute were from the less rarified strata of private higher education. As such, many of the discussions revolved around the issues that have been the subject of my entries here for some time: attracting and retaining a strong faculty out of the limelight of prestige and outside compelling locations; how graduate...