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February 28, 2010
By Carolyn Foster Segal
At last we have the answer to the question that comes up at every one of my college's faculty meetings: Where have the liberal arts gone? China! It seems that China, concerned about creativity and critical thinking, will be handling them from now on—and in small classes, too, at least according to The Chronicle's own "Less Politics, More Poetry." Of course, the liberal arts in America aren't really dead (yet); they are alive and recognized in business schools, reports Lane Wallace in "Multicultural Critical Theory. At B-School?" in The New York Times. It's only at small liberal-arts colleges where they seem to be disappearing.

Interest in business programs is growing at women's colleges, and a second one recently won AACSB accreditation. More are expected to follow

February 24, 2010
By Alison Damast
When Deborah Merrill-Sands became dean of Simmons College's School of Management in 2004, she quickly got to work on the school's effort to become accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). Obtaining accreditation was a crucial step for the women's college, which competes with several other accredited business schools in the crowded Boston education market. She wanted to counteract any perception that the school didn't offer as rigorous a curriculum as its coed neighbors. "I was concerned that some people may perceive it as a soft MBA or an MBA-lite and imbue it with certain gender stereotypes," she says. "By having the accreditation, that question is off the table."

February 16, 2010
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Almost four decades after the federal education law called Title IX opened the door for girls to participate in high school and college athletics, a crucial question has remained unanswered: Do sports make a long-term difference in a woman’s life?

February 12, 2010
Excerpted from SONIC BOOM: Globalization at Mach Speed Copyright 2009 by Gregg Easterbrook, Published by Random House

Home prices keep falling, but productivity is rising fast. GDP grew 5.6 percent in the fourth quarter, yet unemployment remains stubbornly high. Inflation is nonexistent, while the consumer confidence index just rose to 55.9 from 53.6—whatever that means. Can't make sense of these economic indicators? Don't worry, because nobody else can, either.

Here is what you really need to know: a Sonic Boom is coming. It will be caused by globalization. And while globalization may be driving you crazy, it's just getting started. Thirty years ago, Shenzhen, China, did not exist; today, it has nearly 9 million residents, roughly the same as New York City. In a single generation, it has grown from a village of tar-paper shacks into an important urban center. It has become the world's fourth-busiest port, busier than Los Angeles and Long Beach combined. Never before has a great city been built so fast, nor a productive economy established from so little.

by Patricia A. McGuire
Trusteeship Magazine, January/February 2010

Yvonne is a typical college student in 2010. She’s working on a paper due in her american Fiction course. She has to finish some reading for her gender communication course, and has a nagging worry about passing statistics. She turns away from her computer to help her son, a second-grader, with his spelling homework, and then is distracted by her pre-school daughter’s insistence that she give equal time to her crayon drawing. Yvonne also remembers that she promised her boss that she’d be at work early the next day to help prepare an important contract presentation. Yvonne, a single parent, knows that her collegiate studies are a good example for her children, but she feels stressed about balancing all of the many demands on her time and energy—being a good mother, successful student, and productive worker.

February 5, 2010
by JENNIFER EPSTEIN
When Carmen Twillie Ambar tells people about her job, they’re impressed. When she tells them about her kids, they’re impressed, too. So when they put the two together -- that she’s a college president and the mother of triplets who aren’t quite three years old -- they’re in awe.

“I get a lot of 'wow's,” says Ambar, 40, who’s been president of Cedar Crest College, in Allentown, Pa., since August 2008. “People just can’t believe that I’m the president of a college, the mother of young triplets and somehow put on shoes that match each other.”

January 29, 2010
Julie Anna Potts ’91 has been named chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who chairs the committee, announced Potts’ appointment in December.

Potts, an Alabama native who majored in English at Bryn Mawr, earned her law degree from George Washington University Law School. Before her appointment, she served as general counsel to the American Farm Bureau Federation. She sits on the advisory board of the National Agricultural Law Center.

January 22, 2010
By TARA PARKER-POPE
EVER since Betty Friedan urged women to leave the house and pursue careers, people have argued over whether women’s marriages and romantic prospects would suffer for it. Was a financially successful woman a threat to her husband or a relief?

Last week, a report from the Pew Research Center about what it called “the rise of wives” revived the debate. Based on a study of Census data, Pew found that in nearly a third of marriages, the wife is better educated than her husband. And though men, over all, still earn more than women, wives are now the primary breadwinner in 22 percent of couples, up from 7 percent in 1970

January 12, 2010
-Tiffany O'Callaghan

E.Coli in the fountain soda supply?
Soda fountains may dispense more than Diet Coke and Dr. Pepper, according to new research to be published this month in the International Journal of Food Microbiology. In an analysis of 90 soda and water samples taken from fountains in 30 different fast food restaurants in the Roanoke Valley region of Virginia, researchers from Hollins University found that 48% tested positive for coliform bacteria, or bacteria found in human and animal feces, 11% tested positive for Escherichia coli, and more than 17% tested positive for Chryseobacterium meningosepticum, which has been shown to cause pneumonia and even meningitis in people with compromised immune systems. So, how are these microbes ending up in our cokes? And, what does it mean for public health?

by Aimee Lee Ball for Oprah.com
After her son's diagnosis, Gretchen Holt Witt had a sweet idea: a cookie business that raises funds for pediatric cancer.
For Gretchen Holt Witt, life is divided neatly into before and after February 2007. That's when her 2-year-old son, Liam, was diagnosed with stage IV neuroblastoma, a cancer of the nervous system. "It's like a bomb went off in my life," she says. "As a parent, the last thing you want to hear is that your child has the C word."

December 13, 2009
By SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT
THIS fall, I spoke at Women on Wall Street, an annual event in New York that attracts some 2,000 women, most of them executives in the financial sector. As a wrap-up to the program, the moderator threw me a softball question: What do women like me do to unwind?

December 10, 2009
by JENNIFER EPSTEIN
WEST HARTFORD, Conn. – The dozen or so buildings that make up the core of the small, tree-dotted campus of Saint Joseph College create the ideal environs to get lost in a world of books, art and ideas. But while the women’s college’s grassy quad and brown brick Georgian architecture may seem distant from reality, one of its newest academic offerings is firmly rooted in the here-and-now: helping teachers and parents understand autism spectrum disorders as diagnoses, if not the rate of incidence, continue to rise.

With Incidents Doubling In Five Years, It's Fair To Question Effect On Culture
By JEFFREY M. MCCALL
November 29, 2009
You might think any community would be outraged to discover that violence against its women had more than doubled during a five-year period. Our nation has seen such an increase in the on-air television community, but no outrage has yet materialized.

Mount Holyoke College (22%), Wellesley College (9%), Smith College (8%) and the College of Saint Benedict (7%)
November 16, 2009
By Karin Fischer
The number of foreign students attending American colleges hit an all-time high in 2008, capping three consecutive years of vigorous growth, according to new data from the Institute of International Education. Some 671,616 international students attended U.S. institutions in 2008-9, an increase of almost 8 percent from a year earlier. First-time-student enrollments grew even more robustly, by nearly 16 percent.

September / October 2009
by the Editors

In the space of a little more than a week this past June, two university presidents revealed just how cynical they’re willing to be.

First, Clemson University President James F. Barker admitted to rating Clemson as the single greatest university in America—better than Harvard, Yale, or any other—when he filled out the reputational survey that drives the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings. Soon after, a newspaper investigation uncovered similar shenanigans at the University of Florida, where President Bernie Machen ranked his institution as equal to the Ivies while downgrading all other public institutions in Florida as mediocre at best.

By JESSE LEAVENWORTH
October 12, 2009
From the fossilized teeth of ancient giraffes, antelopes and horses, scientist Gina Semprebon can begin to draw a prehistoric landscape. Tooth wear tells Semprebon what the animals of a region ate — whether they tore leaves from trees or chomped on grass. With the types of plants revealed and other evidence from fossils and soil, Semprebon and her fellow scientists can unfold a panorama of long-ago forests and fields, rivers that flowed and the climate that ruled a region's seasonal changes.

This is paleoecology, the study of ancient ecosystems. Semprebon, a biology professor at Bay Path College in Longmeadow, Mass., is widely known in the emerging field and was part of a recent study that changed the book on human evolution.

October 14, 2009
Robin Chase , Meadow Networks CEO and Zipcar co-founder

On the car of the future
The cost of owning and operating a car today is about 18% of the average American's income — about $8,500 a year. That doesn't include what we are going to see over the next five years, which is increased fossil-fuel prices, increased congestion taxes, increased parking costs in cities. So the car of the future will be a shared car that's fully used, because I won't be paying for the parking space and I will be driving it very little.

October 4, 2009
By LISA BELKIN
At first blush, the history of women in the workplace seems a trajectory of success. From the assumption that they would be secretaries to the expectation that they can be C.E.O.’s, they have crashed through ceilings (though not enough of them), made workplaces more flexible (not completely, but significantly) and transformed the face of work. They have gone from holding 34.9 percent of all jobs 40 years ago to 49.8 percent today. They are on track to hold more than half of them any moment now; it might have happened while you were reading this.

September 28, 2009
By HARRIET L. SCHWARTZ

A neighbor is busy, a colleague is tired, a long-lost friend wants to know which 80s band best describes me. A few of my students are stressed about their forthcoming internships, and another is working on her research. I know this because their Facebook postings tell me so.

September 27, 2009
Wartime Soldier, Conflicted Mom
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
When Specialist Jaymie Holschlag returned home after 12 months in Iraq, a new set of children awaited her. Her son, Seth, 10, who had moved in with his grandfather, switching towns and schools, was angry and depressed. His grades had plummeted and his weight had ballooned by 60 pounds. Her 4-year-old daughter, Celeste, scarcely knew her. And in Specialist Holschlag’s absence, new rules had taken hold — chocolate syrup on waffles, Mountain Dew with dinner. Any hint of a return to the old order met with tirades and tantrums.

2009

September 26, 2009
Baltimore Maryland
Diane Anci – Dean of Admission at Mount Holyoke College, Jenn Desjarlais – Dean of Admission at Wellesley College, Heidi Fletcher – Vice President for Enrollment Management at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, Susan Lennon – President of the Women’s College, and Dana Weekes – Wellesley ’03 spoke at the national conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

September 24, 2009
Wellesley College’s Class of 1959 grows up and out.
By Judith Martin
Fifty years ago this summer, I left Wellesley College with a sense of superiority that would have startled anyone who had seen my grades. The pleasure I now get from attending reunions does not arise from the traditional rewards of discovering old rivals who have aged badly or old beaux who have not. (Anyway, at a women’s college, the old beaux would only be there if they had married one’s classmates.)

September 15, 2009

In 1998 when the Most Powerful Women in Business list premiered, just two of our honorees ran Fortune 500 companies. This year 13 do.

September 13, 2009
Would Wall Street have crashed as badly a year ago if women were in charge? Maybe not, says Barnard College president Debora Spar. She tells host Guy Raz about research that suggests higher levels of testosterone may lead to riskier financial decisions.

By Lynn O'Shaughnessy
August 31, 2009
If someone asked me to name the 10 most amazing experiences of my life, this would be No. 4 on my list: Attending an all girls’ school.

Spending four years at a girls’ high school was life changing. I not only received a first-class education, but I regained the confidence that slipped away during my middle-schools years and I discovered that boys aren’t the only ones who can be leaders.