Posts by Denise Magner
June 10, 2008, 11:17 AM ET
Budget Cuts and Layoffs
June 10, 2008, 10:08 AM ET
The Coming Wave of Retirements
With the first round of baby boomers reaching 62 this year, TIAA-CREF has been making changes to prepare for the “academic-retirement parade,” The Chronicle reports.
“Over the last three years, the company has tripled its number of regional offices, to 61, and opened a third site where customer-service representatives take telephone calls. This year, the company increased its number of financial-planning advisers to 1,000.”
At the same time, many colleges and universities “are using managerial tools such as buyouts and ‘phased retirement.’” The Chronicle’s report on retirement trends in academe includes a look at how the University of North Carolina allows faculty members to ease into retirement and a report on how community colleges hope to retain aging professors.
Professors, on average, retire at 66, but that age is “drifting upward,” according to the story. Many faculty ...
Read MoreJune 6, 2008, 01:07 PM ET
President of West Virginia U. to Resign
After repeated calls for his resignation, Michael S. Garrison, president of West Virginia University, has announced that he will step down, effective September 1. Garrison has been at the center of a controversy over a degree that was improperly awarded to a politically connected figure. Read The Chronicle’s story here.
In May faculty members at the university voted no confidence in Garrison and called for him to step down “for the good of the institution.”
Demands for his resignation came in the wake of a recent scandal in which the university retroactively awarded an M.B.A. to the state governor’s daughter, Heather M. Bresch, even though she had not completed enough credits to earn the degree.
Read MoreJune 4, 2008, 01:21 PM ET
So Much for Reasoned Debate
After Anna Kushnir wrote a post for Wired Science called “Why Are Senior Female Scientists So Heavily Outnumbered by Men?,” she steeled herself for the usual backlash. But, as she writes on her blog, Lab Life, this time the backlash was even more “vicious” than usual.
In her Wired Science post, Kushnir noted that seven women and one man were in her graduate-school class, but the faculty members in her department were 48 men and seven women.
“What is happening to all the women en route from graduate school to professorship? Where is the leak? Then again, is it a leak, or more like a pressurized stream?”
“It would be all right if the scientific community is still paying catch up with the rest of society in accepting women into their midst and the ratio will equalize in the next decade (not sure there is evidence either for or against this, but I feel compelled to...
Read MoreJune 3, 2008, 02:40 PM ET
U. of Oxford Chooses New Leader
Andrew Hamilton, provost of Yale University, has been nominated as the new vice chancellor of the University of Oxford, according to a report on The Chronicle’s News Blog.
The appointment is the second time in recent years that a major British university has turned to Yale to fill a top leadership post. In 2003 the University of Cambridge hired Alison F. Richard, Yale’s provost at the time, as vice chancellor.
Read MoreMay 30, 2008, 11:10 AM ET
Presidential News
May 29, 2008, 08:00 AM ET
A New Chancellor for UW-Madison
Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin has been selected as the next chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Chronicle‘s News Blog reports.
Ms. Martin earned her Ph.D. in German literature from Madison in 1985 and has been provost at Cornell University since 2000. In a written statement, she said, “Faculty salaries will be a very high priority for me.”
Read MoreMay 28, 2008, 02:10 PM ET
Hiring and Firing News
May 28, 2008, 11:25 AM ET
'The Economics of Teeth'
Do good teeth improve a job candidate’s chances of getting hired? Stephen J. Dubner tackles that question on the Freakonomics blog. He writes about a new study called “The Economic Value of Teeth” in which two researchers “used a clever methodology to measure the impact of teeth on earnings”:
“They found that women who grew up drinking fluoridated water earn about 4 percent more than women who didn’t, although they found no effect for men. ‘Furthermore,’ they write, ‘the effect is almost exclusively concentrated amongst women from families of low socioeconomic status.’”
“Any way you look at it, the teeth paper is yet another reminder that, as much as we might like to think that wages are perfectly correlated with talent and effort, more trivial factors come into play.”
How much is the “beauty premium” a factor in academic and administrative hiring in higher education?
Read MoreMay 23, 2008, 02:21 PM ET
On Hiring is The Chronicle's blog about the ins and outs of college hiring, with articles and advice from around the Web.