Evaluations of peer universities a key component of U.S. News & World Report's college rankings have little to do with graduation rates, faculty or selectivity, according to new research published in the American Journal of Education. Michael N. Bastedo of the University of Michigan and Nicholas A. Bowman of the University of Notre Dame found that perceptions of academic quality among evaluators remained highly consistent over time, despite changes in universities' educational resources, according to Inside Higher Ed. "In other words, the way you get a good reputational score and in turn a good ranking is to already have a good ranking," Inside Higher Ed reported.
Google has threatened to withdraw its operations from China in the wake of large-scale "hacking attacks" on human rights advocates both within China and abroad, The New York Times reported Thursday. "These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China," David Drummond, Google's senior vice president for corporate development and chief legal officer, wrote on the company's official blog. The company also lifted filters on its Google.cn search engine, which had previously limited users' ability to research topics sensitive to the Chinese government, Time Magazine reported. As of Wednesday, searches for "Tiananmen Square" yielded information about the infamous 1989 protests and their violent aftermath, Time reported, whereas results have heretofore censored this information.
