Innovations

Innovations readers: We’re excited to call your attention to The Conversation, The Chronicle’s new home for opinion and ideas online. Building on Brainstorm and Innovations, it includes many of the regular contributors you have seen over the years and offers new ones as well.

Hailed as a liberal defense of racial preferences, Obama’s legal brief represents a missed opportunity to promote something better, says Richard Kahlenberg.

Frank Donoghue revisits plans to close the University of Missouri Press.

Peter Wood reviews a recent report that found that a third of American colleges and universities have unhealthy financial outlooks.

A new legal brief defending racial preferences is unlikely to persuade the Supreme Court, says Richard Kahlenberg.

Peter Wood argues that President Obama’s goal of redirecting wealth from the suburbs to the cities could pop the college bubble.

States pay a high price for admitting nearly everyone who applies, writes Richard Vedder.

Frank Donoghue discusses the implications of a court decision to reveal the identity of a student who complained about an instructor’s teaching practices.

Sen. Tom Harkin’s and Rep. Elijah Cummings’s recent attacks on for-profit higher education seem more based on ideological fixations than on objective, balanced assessment of what is good for students, Richard Vedder writes.

Peter Wood continues the debate with Macalester College president Brian Rosenberg on whether the U.S. should pursue the goal of further increases in college enrollments.