The Chronicle of Higher Education

chronicle.com — Building off recent momentum behind their cause, a group of public-access advocates has started apetition asking the Obama administration to require that work supported by taxpayer money be accessible online. The petition, from Access2Research, went live on the White House's We the People public-petition site late Sunday night.

chronicle.com — Updated (5/23/2012, 4:23 p.m.) with reaction from the Obama campaign.] Mitt Romney, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, outlined his higher-education platform on Wednesday, promising to simplify the federal student-aid system, eliminate burdensome regulations, and revive bank-based student lending.

chronicle.com — Dartmouth College has cut ties with a campus pharmacist whose license was suspended by New Hampshire regulators this month after he was charged with improperly diverting medication from the campus pharmacy, the Valley News reports. Jeffrey Licht was hired by Dartmouth despite admitting that he had stolen medication from three pharmacies in Maine earlier in his career.

chronicle.com — Tens of thousands of protesters marched through Montreal's streets on Tuesday to mark the 100th day of a student strike against planned tuition increases, reports The Gazette. The demonstration, which some organizers called the single biggest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, was peaceful by day but turned violent at night, with 100 arrests.

chronicle.com — For anybody who missed it, there was an edu-wonk brouhaha this week over an embarrassing error in the New York Times' big series on student debt. The Times vastly overstated the percentage of students with debt - a particularly significant mistake given that this statistic was the linchpin of the story - then ran a rather defensive correction three days later.

chronicle.com — The University of Rhode Island colleagues each had a problem. Hermann Viets, then dean of engineering, felt strongly that his students needed international experience to be competitive in a globalizing job market-and, like many engineering majors, they weren't getting it. His fellow administrator and next-door neighbor, John M.

chronicle.com — Lawyers for a white student who is challenging the race-conscious admissions policy of the University of Texas at Austin have told the U.S. Supreme Court that the dispute may give the justices reason to revisit, and potentially overrule, a landmark 2003 decision upholding the use of affirmative-action preferences to promote campus diversity.

chronicle.com — A recent State Department policy directive was not intended to disrupt the activities of Confucius Institutes, the university-based, Chinese-sponsored language and cultural centers, but rather was an effort to ensure that foreign academics and teachers at the institutes come to the United States under the correct visa categories, a State Department official said on Tuesday.

chronicle.com — The New York Times made a huge statistical error in their overwrought article about higher education borrowing on Sunday. They reported that 94 percent of bachelor's graduates leave college with educational debt. The correct number is around two-thirds.

chronicle.com — Back in 2004, I was a newly minted Ph.D. I was also eight months pregnant with my second child and interviewing for tenure-track positions in my field. What I am about to reveal, dear reader, is the very true story of a job candidate's worst nightmare. And it happened to me.

chronicle.com — Most working artists in America (certainly most who teach at colleges and universities) hold a Master of Fine Arts degree, established by the College Art Association, more than 50 years ago, as the terminal degree in the fine arts. As Dan Berrett writes in this week's however, that may be about to change.

chronicle.com — The second floor of 425 2nd Street, in the hip SoMa district of San Francisco, does not appear, at first glance, to be the birthplace of a faculty insurrection.

chronicle.com — To the Editor: I recently moved from the American Northeast to take up an academic position in Singapore. I'd like to offer a few insights into what "global education" looks like on the ground. Singapore is undergoing massive social, political, and demographic transformations.

chronicle.com — David Wallace FOR THE CHRONICLE On a recent Tuesday at Northern Arizona University, Car­ly Farr made an end-of-semester presentation about the woodlands of Zambia. Speaking to her classmates in "Forestry in Developing Countries," the junior said that with human settlements and the demand for fuel threatening Miombo trees and other flora, perhaps the country should try a "cash for clunkers" deal, encouraging Zambians to trade in their old woodstoves for energy-efficient ones.

chronicle.com — Presidential Compensation Edges Upward We surveyed presidential pay at 190 public research institutions. Criticized for rising pay among its presidents, California State trustees struggle to appease critics without losing competitive edge in recruitment.

chronicle.com — May 16, 2012 Live Chat: Innovators in Internationalization: The University of Rhode Island

chronicle.com — Note: This chart only includes presidents serving the full 2011 fiscal year. Professor compensation includes more variables than presidential compensation, such as insurance premiums and retirement compensation, and are not directly comparable. By Josh Keller and Andrea Fuller / Feedback About these data These data show the compensation received in the 2010-11 fiscal year by 199 chief executives at 190 public universities and systems in the United States.

chronicle.com — University-run English-language programs fear that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security may require them to apply for separate specialized accreditation or lose their ability to enroll students from abroad.

chronicle.com — A policy directive sent by the U.S. Department of State to universities that sponsor Confucius Institutes suggests that the language and cultural centers that are a key piece of the Chinese government's diplomatic outreach will have to change how they operate or fall afoul of American visa laws.

chronicle.com — When Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced this month that they were forming a partnership to offer online courses free to the masses, they pledged $60-million to the effort, dubbed edX. That's about twice the median budget of four-year colleges and universities in the United States.