Links for 1/5/10

SAMANTHA STAINBURN

In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are. The rest are graduate students or adjunct and contingent faculty

KATE ZERNIKE

THOMAS COLLEGE, a liberal arts school in Maine, advertises itself as Home of the Guaranteed Job! Students who can’t find work in their fields within six months of graduation can come back to take classes free, or have the college pay their student loans for a year.

The University of Louisiana, Lafayette, is eliminating its philosophy major, while Michigan State University is doing away with American studies and classics, after years of declining enrollments in those majors…

students — and their parents — are increasingly focused on what comes after college. What’s the return on investment, especially as the cost of that investment keeps rising? How will that major translate into a job?

JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN on Columbia’s attempted exploitation of eminent domain.

The state can seize land that is considered blighted…

He acknowledges there is some blight but blames Columbia for it. As recently as August 2002, data prepared by the accounting firm of Ernst & Young for New York City's Economic Development Corporation showed that 54 of the 67 lots in question were in good, very good or fair condition. In November 2007, a study by AKRF Consultants reached a dramatically different conclusion—that the area was "substantially unsafe, unsanitary, substandard, and deteriorated."

What happened, argues Mr. Sprayregen, was that Columbia had increased its ownership or control from a handful of properties in 2001 to 51% in 2007 and 91% of the area today. Along the way it let the properties decay by erecting ugly scaffolding, pushing out commercial tenants, and allowing trash to pile up.

Scott Jaschik

The number of jobs listed with the American Historical Association fell 23.8 percent in 2008-9…

And the American Economic Association, which started its annual meeting Sunday, is reporting a drop in new academic jobs listed of 19 percent in the 2009 calendar year…