Stanford University News

It may seem like an odd question given that the Massive Open Online Courses have been touted as the future of higher education, and that it seems like just yesterday that the country's major universities were rushing to create courses to grab their share of the expected global market.

Sarah MacLean 's new instant bestseller , "No Good Duke Goes Unpunished," opens with this strikingly unsubtle line: "He woke with a splitting head and a hard [barnyard fowl]."

Western colleges forced to confront the unsavoury reality of censorship in their rush to set up shop in world's No 2 economy Members of the Wellesley College faculty reacted strongly when word spread that Peking University might fire professor Xia Yeliang , a Beijing critic.

Here's a Stanford U. press release from 2009 that somehow strikes me as relevant to the current editorial in the New York Times about how white males are hogging all the science education, and to the subsequent debate over whether the only reason women seem to prefer biology and the other life sciences to physics and the other death sciences is ... (more)

The Pacific Collegiate School board voted unanimously Wednesday to appoint Simon Fletcher, a leader at the acclaimed public charter school since its founding, as its next principal.

President Barack Obama has already offered the job to Stanley Fischer, former governor of the Bank of Israel, who accepted it, according to another person familiar with the process.

HAROLD Soriaga at 39, Dad to Mati and Cylo and hubby to Jolla, still plays with his toys until today.

Former State Sen. Bill Baroni, center, of the Port Authority of NY & NJ, receives the Ner Tamid Award from Rutgers Chabad, with, from left, Rabbi Mendy Carlebach, a Port Authority chaplain; dinner cochair Danny Kahane; Rutgers Chabad executive director Rabbi Yosef Carlebach; and dinner cochair Jerold Zaro.

"Kelly Clarkson's Cautionary Christmas Music Tale" : The pop star headlines an offbeat special that has her learning some lessons about the meaning of the holiday.

Barra, 51, will be the first female to head a global car manufacturer. Barra is executive vice president, global product development, purchasing and supply chain at GM.

The teen driver reported the accident on La Donna Avenue to police. Victim is in the hospital with major injuries.

Drugs used to help smokers quit are safe for the heart, and one of them cut risk of major heart events in half, according to results from the largest analysis of these medications ever done.

Professor Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California and Professor Michael Levitt of Stanford University, who collaborated at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, were set to receive the Nobel Prize for chemistry along with Professor Martin Karplus of Harvard University and the University of Strasbourg.

For the first time, more than 50 percent of children who live in Detroit attend a charter school, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death world-wide. About half of all long-term smokers will die because of their addiction.

Building upon the enrollment of more than 100,000 students in open courses offered by Stanford University, companies such as Udacity, Coursera, and edX were launched with the goal of offering free, open, academic courses, taught by distinguished faculty to students all over the world.

The standardized tests known as the Program for International Student Assessment are considered so important that when the latest results were released last week, the U.S. Department of Education participated in a so-called PISA Day.

Phil and Penny Knight, pictured here in a 2011 photo at Stanford University, have already given $225 million to OHSU since 2008.

Author Betsy Franco and her son, artist Tom Franco, are on the same wavelength. Frequent collaborators, they're given to finishing each other's sentences.

The award comes with a $500,000 grant to Duke to support academic initiatives. The other winners were: Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University; John Hennessy, president of Stanford University; and Beverly Daniel Tatum, president of Spelman College.