Johanna Blakley: Social media and the end of gender. Susan Herbst: What Do Professors Do, Anyway? On March 23, the Washington Post ran an op-ed by David Levy, a former chancellor at the New School University, asking: "Do college professors work hard enough? " He suggests that faculty at non-research institutions don't put in enough hours for the pay they receive. Not surprisingly, this created a small firestorm among faculty nationwide who weren't shy about telling him what they thought. I have held faculty and administrative positions only at research institutions -- where the mission is both teaching and research -- so I wouldn't presume to speak for faculty at schools focused exclusively on teaching.
Yet there are some across-the-board myths about academic life in general, and professors sometimes seem to be a target. This likely has to do with the fact that unless someone has been a professor or graduate student or worked with them, they probably don't fully understand what professors do. So perhaps the best question isn't, "Do college professors work hard enough? " The One Percent Is 288 Times Wealthier Than The Median U.S. Household. The World's Most Powerful People. 3 | In China, New Sustainable Cities Are Rising From Nothing. In 1902, a self-taught urban planner named Ebenezer Howard published his utopian vision for "Garden Cities"--self-contained circular towns radiating from a central city, connected only by train. Neither town nor country, they were a dense, compact fusion of the two: suburbia without sprawl. Although Garden Cities never really caught on in the West, the Chicago-based Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture has resurrected the idea with Chinese characteristics: a “prototype city” twice as populous and 20 times as dense, with a tower taller than the Empire State Building at its core.
Working with one of China’s largest real estate developers, the firm aims to build them by the score. The first is slated for a patch of farmland roughly 10 miles from the core of Chengdu, China’s westernmost mega-city. To achieve that level of density--which is comparable to the Chicago Loop--“the average height of the buildings would have to be 18 stories,” says Adrian Smith.