Back in 1999, private prisons housed 3,828 federal prisoners in America. Now that number is more than 33,000, a more than 800 percent gain. In the state of Arizona, the comparable figure went up 285 percent in a decade, in Idaho — 459 percent. States, and even the federal government, increasingly have looked to private companies to house and manage America’s expanding prison population. Three decades ago private lockups were nearly nonexistent in the U.S. Over this period, while the number of prisoners in the U.S. grew by 17 percent, the population inside the walls of fully privatized ... Read More
If LSU Cuts Football, Academia Can Panic
December 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
History professor John V. Lombardi, the president of the Louisiana State University System, inevitably takes a long view when asked about the parlous state of research universities in the United States. “You pick your decade and there will be a whole bunch of books on how things are in crisis,” he observes. “You know: an American university in crisis. You could have an American university in crisis book written every 10 years, and they’ll all say the same thing. You know: ‘we’re coming to a dramatic shift in the way in which universities are operated, and they’ll never be the ... Read More
Consistency Key to Renewable Energy Policy
October 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The bankruptcy of the solar startup Solyndra last month has placed government funding for renewable energy projects under a microscope. Were the government-guaranteed loans a wise way to use public funding to help green technologies? An analysis conducted by the George Soros-funded Climate Policy Initiative (“Evaluating Policies for Low Carbon Growth”) looked at six large-scale renewable energy projects in the United States and Europe, seeking answers about how their real costs matched up with their estimates, and "how policy affects project economics." The six projects were: wind ... Read More
Innovation Must Get in Line for Academic Funding
October 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
“I think researchers are really struggling to survive in a world where resources are really scarce and innovation is not always the highest priority,” says Francine Berman, a computer scientist and vice president for research at upstate New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Speaking as part of Miller-McCune.com’s series of interviews on the challenges facing research universities, she explained that the innovation enterprise requires complex scaffolding, access to a pool of adequately paid graduate students, up-to-date equipment and money for things like travel to professional ... Read More
Are Professors Picking the Public’s Pockets?
August 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
From his arrival in the U.S. some 25 years ago, Tatsuya Suda deftly cut a path to the upper echelons of academic computer research. Fresh from prestigious Kyoto University, he steadily rose to become a tenured professor at the University of California, Irvine, earning a reputation for dynamic theories in computer networking at the dawn of the cell-phone age. He even wed Grammy-winning singer Rita Coolidge. But along this intellectual course, studded with access to valuable discoveries—Suda was one of the first nanotechnology researchers to explore the idea of using biological molecules ... Read More
Crowdfunding Puts Money with Public Interest
August 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
After losing their London-based publisher, co-editors Ruby Russell and Katherine Hunt of the grassroots art magazine Teller were forced to look in a new direction for their second issue. Self-funding was out of the question, so the editors launched a campaign on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to ask the public for help. "It allowed us to pre-sell copies of our magazine and put the full cover price toward production costs, with some people donating larger sums," says Russell. "It's very easy to set up and use, and people responded very generously." With an original funding goal of ... Read More
States Prove Weak Link in Supporting Research Universities
August 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Robert M. Berdahl is an American historian, author and university administrator. He was chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1997 to 2004, and president of the Association of American Universities from May 2000 until May of this year. Q: Are universities in crisis today? How big a crisis are we in now? Is it mostly cyclical, or is it structural? What lasting impact is it likely to have and does it alter in any significant way, the model that then-Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development Vannevar Bush envisioned in his seminal 1945 paper, "Science, ... Read More
Retaining Excellence in U.S. Research Universities
August 5, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The same week that President Obama called for the United States to regain its lead as the world's best-educated nation, the University of California system turned away 30,000 students. This was roughly two years ago, but since then the fiscal picture has only darkened — for the federal government as well on the state level. The Golden State labors under a particularly gargantuan deficit — and the regents of the University of California responded by raising tuition a second time this year — but its predicament is emblematic of a central challenge for higher education across the United ... Read More
Might Public Broadcasting Follow BBC Model?
February 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
As politicians in Washington debate defunding public media outlets like NPR and PBS, out of a mix of concern for the deficit and political animosity for the concept, there’s one larger piece of context worth considering. America is the only major democracy in the West to rely almost entirely on commercial media to comprehensively inform its citizens. Public media here is a small niche, the domain, depending on your preferred stereotype, of urbanites, educated elites and liberal insiders. Out of a population of 300 million people in the U.S., about 8 percent in an average week listen to ... Read More
Hanging Up and Logging Into Universal Service
February 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Universal Service Fund, the $8 billion government subsidy program that helps bring telephone lines to hard-to-reach rural communities, has a lot of problems. It’s inefficient, it’s costly, it’s easily scammed by phone companies that pocket the program’s money. “For example, the fund pays almost $2,000 per month — more than $20,000 a year — for some households to have phone service,” admitted Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski this week. In some parts of the country, the program pays for as many as four phone companies to serve the same rural ... Read More
