The home pages on university web sites aren't created overnight.

Lots of thought goes into the design, look and message of a .edu homepage, the first impression most folks these days will have of a university.

Some dazzle with high-tech graphics, video or photography. Others inundate you with information. Some play to the sports fan by promoting Big State U's latest national champion.

But do they do what people really need?

That's the question raised now by a simple but quite telling cartoon penned by Randall Munroe, whose web comic is called "xkcd."

Here's the cartoon.

Get it?

As Inside Higher Ed reports, the cartoon has reverberated across American higher education.

While universities try to pack tons of information into their home pages, are they doing anything more than simply muddying the waters?

Does a prospective student really care about Big State U's mission statement, or the latest press release trumpeting Professor SmartyPants' new lab discovery?

Or do they simply want, as the cartoon suggests, a decent map and a mailing address?

You think budget cuts are crippling public universities in North Carolina?

At least they still have toilet paper.

Starting next year, that won't be the case at Texas A&M.

Is the stereotypical American college student lazy, entitled and more interested in video games than homework?

That's the message coming across in this opinion piece penned recently in the Boston Globe.  The author, Kara Miller, is a lecturer at Babson College in Boston, and she takes aim at the American students in her rhetoric and history courses. 

Those students, she says, routinely account for the C's, D's and F's she gives out, while international students, who arrive in Boston with a much better work ethic, score A's and B's even while battling a language barrier.

Not surprisingly, the story sparked quite the reaction in Boston, a city of academics. As I post this, there are 603 comments attached to the story. 

Inside Higher Ed, a higher education trade publication, deconstructed the story a bit, as well. You can read that here.

To give you just a taste of what Miller's talking about, consider this snippet:

"Chinese undergraduates have consistently impressed me with their work ethic, though I have seen similar habits in students from India, Thailand, Brazil, and Venezuela. Often, they’ve done little English-language writing in their home countries, and they frequently struggle to understand my lectures.

But their respect for professors - and for knowledge itself - is palpable. The students listen intently to everything I say, whether in class or during office hours, and try to engage in the conversation.

Too many 18-year-old Americans, meanwhile, text one another under their desks (certain they are sly enough to go unnoticed), check e-mail, decline to take notes, and appear tired and disengaged."

There's a mess brewing within the athletics program at Florida State, and a campus trustee is right in the middle of it.

Florida State used to be one of the kings of college football but of late has fallen on hard times, relatively speaking. FSU is no longer a perennial national title contender and many believe longtime Coach Bobby Bowden is to blame.

Bowden, who has headed the program for 34 years, came under attack recently from an unlikely foe: Jim Smith, chairman of the university's board of trustees.

Smith opened fire on Bowden in two local newspaper articles following the Seminoles' recent loss to Boston College. In the second interview, with the St. Pete Times, he actually compared Bowden to a loyal old dog that  you have to put down.

"You know it's the right thing to do but you sure feel bad about it," he said.

Yikes.

Smith holds a position of great power at Florida State, but as Inside Higher Ed reported this week, he appears to have overstepped his bounds a bit. Trustees, you see, are not supposed to meddle in athletics affairs. Or, at least not publicly.

Here's the story.

In Inside Higher Ed, we have an essay today from professor to student explaining why plagiarism is such a stupid idea.

The letter is written by a Hofstra University professor explaining why academic cheating is self-defeating.

He writes in part:

"The opposite of academic honesty is not actually academic dishonesty; it's dishonesty that is decidely unacademic. To commit is to suggest that you don't understand, or don't value, the kind of education for which you (or your parents) are paying so much. The problem is not so much rule breaking as point missing."

Read the whole article here.

Okay. This is just fascinating.

Each year, U.S. News & World Report releases its college rankings issue, a top seller that plays at least some role in helping high school students assess universities.

Getting a high ranking is a big deal. Keeping it is a big deal as well. Around here, our local institutions generally do well - Duke is a top national institution, UNC Chapel Hill is one of the nation's top public universities, and Wake Forest, N.C. State and others are well-regarded as well.

Now, consider the case of Clemson University, just several hours south of here. Over the past few years, Clemson has increased from 38 to 22 in the public university rankings, a nice jump that has folks in South Carolina smiling.

Well, this week down in Atlanta, a group called the Association for Institutional Research is meeting. These are folks who keep the numbers for universities - statisitics on everything from enrollment to faculty salaries. 

And a presentation from a representative from Clemson brought the house down. Catherine Watt, whose job at Clemson has been to prepare the data submitted to U.S. News for its rankings issue, offered a peek behind the curtain, suggesting at several points that she and the university essentially game the numbers to show Clemson in the best possible light.

As reported in Inside Higher Ed, Watt said Clemson submitted questionable data on faculty salaries that included the value of benefits, thus making faculty appear compensated at a higher level; encouraged donors to give the university as little as $5 so it could increase the overall "giving" rate, and increased the number of classes with fewer than 20 students - something U.S. News looks for - by pushing classes of 50 to as high as 70.

But the coup de grace was Watt's admission that, in filling out a reputation survey for university presidents, Clemson gave all other institutions a "below average" ranking to make Clemson look better.

That admission brought "actual gasps" from the audience, Inside Higher Ed reported.

"And I'm confident my president is not the only one who does that," Watt concluded.

Read Inside Higher Ed's coverage of the issue here.

A higher education trade journal has parachuted into the UNC Chapel Hill/Tom Tancredo/tuition-for-illegal-immigrants/student protestors brouhaha with a story about Youth for Western Civilization, the student organization that brought the controversial congressman to campus last week.

If you recall, Tancredo's planned speaking engagement didn't go so well. He barely got started before student protesters essentially drove him from the room amid the sound of a shattered window pane.

Youth for Western Civilization is a small student group. It has less than 10 chapters nationally and on the Chapel Hill campus, it has about that many members. But it certainly got people's eye last week bringing Tancredo in.

As Riley Matheson, the head of the local chapter, put it in this Inside Higher Ed article: "We're still considered probably by most students to be sort of a rogue group right now."

American medical associations have become too closely linked with pharmacueutical firms and medical device makers and need to break those ties in order to retain integrity.

This view comes from a new paper published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In it, the article's seven authors argue that medical assocations ban most funding from private industry.

Inside Higher Ed has the details here.

UNC Chapel Hill's highly scrutinized relationship with Bain & Company, a private consulting firm hired to look for ways to cut the university's budget, is the subject of an article in today's Inside Higher Ed.

The article touches on many of the concerns folks in Chapel Hill have had since UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp agreed to hire Bain with money provided by a private donor.

The donor has remained anonymous, as has the cost of the study Bain is conducting. The tight-lipped nature of this deal has many on campus bothered, particularly since Bain doesn't have a ton of experience in higher education.

In this article, Thorp defends his decision.

"I think if you ask people about the way that I've handled most things in the administrative roles that I've had, it's been pretty open," he told Inside Higher Ed. "This was not quite as open as I normally do things, but when you get in these positions sometimes you have to make difficult choices. But I'm confident it was the right choice."

Thorp addressed some concerns at a recent campus forum. 

Advocates for the nation's historically black colleges and universities pushed this week for a favorable chunk of economic stimulus money.

As Inside higher Ed reports, HBCU leaders are asking President Barack Obama to give their institutions top priority for money to trickle down to higher education.