Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner '83 will join the Council on Foreign Relations as a distinguished fellow later this month, the think tank announced last Wednesday. Geithner also plans to write a book focusing on his response to the financial crisis, the Associated Press reported. Geithner, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2001, first joined the Treasury in 1998, working in different positions under three presidential administrations. Geithner was the main architect of President Barack Obama's strategy to combat the recession, avoid economic collapse and reform the financial system. Geithner majored in government and Asian studies at the College and earned a master's in international economics and East Asian studies at Johns Hopkins University.
University faculty and administrators across the country are debating the elimination of traditional dissertations as a requirement for graduate programs, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. Universities face pressure to reduce the time it takes to finish degrees, increase retention and prepare doctoral candidates for careers outside of academia. Dissertations can take four to seven years to complete, are often very specific and are not always applicable to a broad variety of fields. Various graduate programs, including those at the City University of New York and the University of Virginia, are investing in digital-humanities centers and new media and collaborative research programs to support students interested in preparing non-traditional dissertations. Other graduate programs allow candidates to publish multiple articles or design dissertations for public consumption.
Yale University's College committee on grading policy recently recommended that Yale transition from a letter grade system to a 100-point scale beginning in the 2014-2015 academic year, The Yale Daily News reported. The committee plans to submit final proposals for a vote at a faculty meeting in April. The committee's report found a trend of rising average grades, with most students earning A's, A-minuses and B-pluses. The report also found grade discrepancies among academic departments. The committee did not call for mandatory grade distributions, but suggested a set of guidelines for the percentage of grades given out in each range that would effectively make Yale's mean grade an 85.5 percent, The Daily News reported.
