Getting a spring cancellation from a confirmed commencement speaker—particularly a high-profile one—is a planning team's nightmare. Pepperdine University's Seaver College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences had Sir Anthony Hopkins lined up to speak for its May 2 commencement, but a scheduling conflict for the actor called for a new plan. To the rescue: health technology […]

Comprising a three-story classroom building and a two-story advising center connected by a walkway, the Academic Village at Morningside College in Iowa is the first new construction on campus since the 1970s. From state-of-the-art simulation spaces for nursing programs to offices that promote first-year student success, this 35,000-square-foot facility serves a variety of purposes for […]

Higher ed institutions are expanding interdisciplinary research activity by hiring groups of faculty from multiple disciplines at the same time. The idea, pioneered by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1990s and sprouting up elsewhere since then, is to formalize the expectation of working collaboratively across the university. It may involve a variety of […]

The University of Miami has named Julio Frenk its next president. Currently dean of faculty at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, he was formerly Mexico's minister of health. During his six years at Harvard, Frenk quadrupled fundraising and steered a $350 million naming gift to his school—the largest single gift in Harvard's […]

Rumors about the nearly two miles of tunnels that lie beneath Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, often revolve around its location near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Some people have suspected the tunnels were designed as an Air Force/Wright State bomb shelter—or even that top-secret military experiments have been conducted in laboratories there. For graduating […]

A brighter alternative to the pedestrian tunnel is a ground-level enclosed pedestrian street. It's a concept that the University of Regina in Saskatchewan has taken to the extreme. Nearly 100 percent of the main campus buildings are connected by these walkways, which form a figure-8-like loop. "I think we have probably the most planned campus […]

Admissions marketing pros have heard a wide variety of reasons why prospective students don't believe they can go—or go back—to college. Park University in Missouri's "Excuses" campaign, wrapping up this spring, takes an entertaining approach to breaking down access barriers. Promos poke fun at excuses that range from "no pens" and "no matching socks" to […]

Though some instructors think flipping the classroom is as simple as students watching lectures online and doing their homework in class, version 2.0 of the practice is evolving to allow faculty to provide more rigorous, in-depth instruction. About half of U.S. higher ed faculty had taught in a flipped environment as of winter 2014, according […]