Do Data Dashboards Truly Illuminate?
In 2010, when I first entered the institutional-research field, the most common request from academic departments was a simple, almost humble “I need data.” A decade later, that request had…
Posts tagged with
“academic research”
A Much-Needed Exposé of Academic Fraud
Should we trust the research published by professors? The scholars who write books and papers have impressive degrees and teach at respected universities, and their work has to undergo rigorous…
Peer Review Gone Wild
Faculty members at public universities are expected to educate students and advance knowledge through research in their fields of expertise. Academic research, however, has increasingly promoted ideological agendas over the…
American Higher Education Restoration Act
Rather than emphasize excellence in teaching, America’s public universities now produce a glut of academic “research” that almost no one reads and which does not meaningfully advance human knowledge. Unfortunately,…
Peer Review Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.
Within academia, there seems to be a growing consensus that the peer-review system—once the backbone of academic scholarship—is broken. But is it irreparably so? Perhaps. At the very least, the…
Approaching Academic Armageddon
Over a mere two days recently (May 14-15), the major daily news outlets serving higher education, Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, reported the following: Data collected…
Stop Overregulating Research
The newly inaugurated second Trump administration has arrived, and among the changes that the president and his allies have proposed is large-scale simplification and elimination of government regulations. President Trump…
So Now the Feds Will Monitor Research Integrity?
In its first year, the Biden administration launched a fast-track Scientific Integrity Task Force, intended to “lift up the voices of Federal scientists of many perspectives and backgrounds” and put…
UNC-System Schools and the “R1” Wars
Some North Carolina public universities hope to leverage revisions to higher education’s preeminent classification methodology to achieve game-changing status reserved presently for a small handful of state schools. If they…
Why Research Fraud Is Getting Worse
Once a rarity, research fraud is on the rise at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities. What is most disturbing is that the fraud in question too often involves…