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January 13, 2020 Foresight Africa: Top priorities for the next decade   2020 marks the beginning of a promising decade for the African continent, indicated by economic growth, improving technology sectors, and mutually beneficial partnerships. Our annual Foresight Africa report...

By Campbell Robertson   Jan. 24, 2019 CLEVELAND — When things overheat, corrode and stop working, that is when they call in Gustavo Costa. It’s a rare expertise, critical to everything from space travel to fracking, and it keeps him in steady demand as a contractor at NASA’s John...

There are no tricks to make writing easier, just practices you can develop to get it done By Rachel Toor  Many writers I know love Joyce Carol Oates—some even refer to her as JCO, as if she were a brand as recognizable as CBS or BMW. But just as often, the mention of her name is...

By Claire P. Curtis  It is midweek and I am staring at the draft of a journal article. I just came home from a faculty senate meeting, and we have two job candidates visiting our department this week. I recently returned from a conference, and the semester is at that point where...

Write a lot, and often, we are told — but no one shows us how to keep track of all that work By Erin Marie Furtak Ever since I was a graduate student, I have tried to recapture the clarity of purpose I had while working on my dissertation. I got up every morning, made myself a...

By Rachel Toor Some years ago, an academic friend fell under the spell of Angela Duckworth’s work on grit. Hearing her argument only secondhand, I initially found it militaristic and anti-creative. Now, having finally read Duckworth’s book, Grit: The Power of Passion and...

By Rebecca Schuman I was not suited for academe in several — possibly important — ways. For example, I spaced out through every colloquium I ever attended, and will happily admit to never having read a single journal in my discipline cover-to-cover for “fun.” But...

By Vimal Patel Few relationships in academe matter more than the one between doctoral candidate and faculty adviser. It’s the incubator of the future professoriate, the heartbeat of the research university. The recent case of Avital Ronell, the star professor at New York...

By Leonard Cassuto OCTOBER 03, 2010 A former graduate student wrote me a note a few months ago to thank me for helping him drop out. What’s wrong with that picture? Nothing, except that we don’t see it often enough. Not every graduate student will finish a...

By Leonard Cassuto OCTOBER 31, 2010 Last month I wrote in these pages about how to help students decide to leave graduate school. Not all of them, of course—I meant the dissertation writers who just can’t get it done. I was concerned that readers might see that article as...