May 9, 2008
Universities in Lebanon Close Due to Fighting
All universities in Lebanon were ordered to cancel classes today by the Ministry of Higher Education, following an outbreak of fighting in Beirut on Thursday between Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group, and Sunni government forces.
Among the institutions that suspended classes are the American University of Beirut, Lebanese American University, Lebanese University, and Beirut Arab University.
LAU, which posted a brief statement on its Web site, also canceled entrance exams to be held on Saturday.
Ada Porter, AUB’s communications director in New York, said in an e-mail message that most people seemed to be staying home until the situation changes. But many people are leaving Beirut for safer cities around the country, and others are trying to leave Lebanon altogether, she said.
Beirut was paralyzed by strikes earlier this week. Tensions escalated after Hezbollah said that a government threat to shut down its private telephone network was an act of war. Fighting broke out on Thursday, but had calmed down by this morning, reported The New York Times. —Beth McMurtrie and Andrew Mills
Posted on Fri May 9, 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comment [1]Social Scientist in Army's 'Human Terrain' Program Dies in Afghanistan
Michael V. Bhatia, a graduate student in political science who was serving as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain program, died on Wednesday in Afghanistan.
Mr. Bhatia graduated from Brown University in 1999 and was pursuing a doctorate in political science and international relations at the University of Oxford. Since late last year, he had been working with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division as part of the Human Terrain program, a controversial effort in which scholars advise military personnel about local social structures.
The program has prompted widespread criticism, but Mr. Bhatia strongly supported it, according to a memorial notice that was posted on Thursday by Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies.
The institute quoted a November 2007 letter in which Mr. Bhatia wrote, “The program has a real chance of reducing both the Afghan and American lives lost, as well as ensuring that the US/NATO/ISAF strategy becomes better attuned to the population’s concerns, views, criticisms, and interests and better supports the Government of Afghanistan.”
The Watson Institute’s notice does not describe the circumstances of Mr. Bhatia’s death, but an e-mail message circulated on Thursday said that he had been killed by a roadside bomb near Khost, an eastern city near the Pakistan border, perhaps in an incident reported by the Voice of America. Two NATO soldiers died in that same attack.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Defense declined to comment on Thursday, citing a policy that forbids public discussion of casualties until at least 24 hours after the next of kin have been notified.
After graduating from Brown, Mr. Bhatia worked for several nongovernmental organizations and conducted research in East Timor and Kosovo. He was an author of two books, one of which was published just last month.
In a 2004 paper, Mr. Bhatia and two colleagues criticized the management of the NATO-led intervention in Afghanistan, arguing that U.S. and NATO troops relied too heavily on local militias and warlords and had done too little to help ordinary citizens feel secure. —David Glenn
Posted on Fri May 9, 07:19 AM | Permalink | Comment [8]May 8, 2008
Keep Admitting Immigrants, Governor Tells N.C. Community Colleges
A day after the state attorney general’s office advised North Carolina community colleges to drop their policy of admitting illegal immigrants who meet other eligibility criteria, the state’s governor is urging colleges to continue admitting immigrants, according to The News & Observer.
The earlier advice, in a letter to the system’s general counsel, suggested that the policy conflicted with federal law, but Gov. Michael F. Easley, a Democrat, said in a written statement today that federal law on the issue was not settled. He added that he was asking the attorney general to seek clarification from Washington on whether illegal immigrants were eligible to attend community colleges. —Charles Huckabee
Posted on Thu May 8, 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comment [17]Budget Crisis Prompts Berkeley to Halve Its Offerings in East Asian Studies
The California budget crisis has taken a toll on the University of California at Berkeley’s department of East Asian languages and cultures, which has announced that this fall it will eliminate classes for 1,500 students to make up for an unexpected financial shortfall.
The cuts are a response to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed state budget, which would reduce spending on Berkeley by $30-million to $40-million, the Daily Californian reported. The university has asked several academic departments to make cuts to courses and faculty members to close the gap, but hardest hit will be departments that employ many adjunct lecturers and graduate-student instructors.
As a result, the East Asian department, which expects to lose $300,000 in support, will cut 40 percent of its courses in Japanese, 54 percent of those in Chinese, and 66 percent of those in Korean. It will also not renew contracts for 13 lecturers. According to a notice on its Web site, the department will restrict enrollment in its courses to students in the College of Letters & Science.
The English department, which faces a $400,000 cut, has appealed to faculty members with endowed chairs to donate a portion of their private research grants to the department.
Berkeley students have organized an afternoon rally today to protest cuts in the East Asian language programs. An online petition asking university administrators to reconsider the cuts and to provide emergency funds for East Asian languages has collected 900 signatures so far. —Paula Wasley
Posted on Thu May 8, 05:37 PM | Permalink | Comment [2]Congressional Panel Considers Call for More Female Science Professors
Washington — For women contemplating careers as science professors, the numbers are daunting. More than half of the bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering these days go to women, but they run into a high hurdle when it comes to securing academic jobs. Fewer than one in three science and engineering professors are female, and the numbers for full professors drop to one in five. So Congress held a hearing today to consider how to raise those odds.
A draft bill introduced by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat, would promote the use of workshops “to increase awareness of implicit gender bias in grant review, hiring, tenure, promotion, and selection for other honors based on merit,” according to a news release issued by the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Research and Science Education. The committee has not yet released the proposed legislation, and the details of such workshops remain unclear. The workshops would be based, at least partly, on ones organized by academic chemists and by the American Physical Society, which have in the past two years convened gatherings of federal officials and the chairs of top university departments.
The legislation, titled “Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Act of 2008,” would also seek to gather better demographic data from federal grant-making agencies. But that may be a difficult endeavor. Lynda T. Carlson, director of the division of science-resource statistics at the National Science Foundation, told committee members that scientists who receive grants “are not, nor can they be, required to provide demographic information because of the Privacy Act.” Many scientists who win grants do not indicate the race and gender of the people working under their grants, she said. “NSF cannot support the proposed legislation as its requirements will be excessive as they exceed current data-collection capabilities,” according to a statement submitted by Ms. Carlson.
Although the hearing was devoted to the issue of female academic scientists, the witness list contained no practicing scientists, male or female. The lone academic was Donna K. Ginther, an associate professor of economics at the University of Kansas, who has studied gender differences in academic science. In her statement, she endorsed the idea of gender-bias workshops for academics and grant reviewers, but she cautioned that the sessions should be tested for effectiveness. While past workshops have focused on department chairs, Ms. Ginther said that it would be important to reach principal investigators who oversee postdoctoral fellows. Her data indicate that most women leave academic science during the postdoctoral years.
The best way Congress could help women in academic science, she said, would be to improve their access to child care. She proposed allowing universities to support child-care facilities with the indirect costs that they take from research grants made to faculty members.
At today’s hearing, Congress itself inadvertently showed how far the nation has to go in promoting the success of women in academe. Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers of Michigan, the top Republican on the subcommittee, said in a statement that “effective institutional change must be systemic since bias may hide behind even the simplest language used in recommendation letters.”
His Republican colleague Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett of Maryland demonstrated the power of language while smiling at the trio of female Ph.D.’s who were testifying. Mr. Bartlett hailed them as “effective representatives,” but then proceeded to call them “three very attractive women.” —Richard Monastersky
Posted on Thu May 8, 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comment [10]New Study on College-Going Rates Gives Mom Something Else to Worry About
Here’s a novel line for a Mother’s Day card: “Thanks, Mom, for loving me so much I never earned a college degree.”
Implausible as it might seem, a new study suggests that there might be some truth to such a sentiment. Based on the survey responses of more than 13,800 young Texans polled during their senior year of high school and then again a year later, the study concludes that seniors who reported having good relationships with their mothers and fathers were actually less likely than others to enroll in a four-year college.
Yep, it’s true: Parents just can’t win.
One reason such findings are counterintuitive is that a large body of other research shows that children who have good relationships with their parents do better at school. The new study — by Ruth N. López Turley, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Matthew Desmond, a doctoral student in the department — reached the same conclusion, finding that students who reported getting along well with the folks generally reported having better grades and higher class rankings than their peers did.
How, then, does a strong parent-child relationship hurt college-going prospects? It makes a high-school senior substantially more likely to express a strong desire to live at home during college. And those seniors who said it was important to them to live at home after high school were more than 40 percent less likely to enroll in a four-year college than their peers were.
The study found that many other traits — including socioeconomic disadvantage, being foreign-born, or not having degree aspirations — increased the likelihood that a young person would not want to leave the nest right after high school. Above and beyond the effects of such factors, Hispanic students were more than twice as likely as white students to report that it was important for them to stay home, suggesting that culture also plays an important role.
But, after using regression analysis to separate out the other possible factors, the researchers found that the unwillingness to leave home that comes from having good relationships with the parents has a negative-enough influence on college-going to cancel out the positive influence derived from the higher academic performance associated with such family relations.
In a paper summarizing their findings and submitted to the American Sociological Review, Ms. Turley and Mr. Desmond say: “Through our research, a paradox has come to light: Strong family ties, considered vital to a child’s success in school, can serve as an impediment to a child’s educational attainment. Parents who strive to develop an encouraging and communicative relationship with their children might produce a high-school honors student but not a four-year college graduate.” —Peter Schmidt
Posted on Thu May 8, 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comment [26]New Chancellor Named at U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced this afternoon that Holden Thorpe, dean of its College of Arts and Sciences, will be its new chancellor, according to a report in The News & Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh, N.C.
Mr. Thorpe, 43, is not only a North Carolina native but also an alumnus of the Chapel Hill campus. He has climbed the ranks there, beginning as an assistant professor of chemistry in 1993 and becoming chairman of the chemistry department before being named dean last summer. If Mr. Thorpe is appointed, he would succeed James C. Moeser, who announced last fall that he would step down at the end of this academic year. —Eric Kelderman
Posted on Thu May 8, 02:27 PM | Permalink | Comment [3]Michigan Supreme Court Upholds Ban on Same-Sex Benefits
The Michigan Supreme Court has upheld a lower-court ruling that Michigan’s public universities and other government agencies may not extend employee benefits to a worker’s same-sex partner.
The Supreme Court, in a 5-to-2 decision released on Wednesday, ruled that Michigan’s constitutional ban on gay marriage also covers employee benefits. Recognition of domestic partnerships is considered no different than marriage, the court said.
It’s unclear what effect the ruling may have on Michigan’s state employees because many public agencies have changed their benefits policies to include unmarried individuals living together but not legally related, the Detroit Free Press reported today. —Hurley Goodall
Posted on Thu May 8, 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comment [20]South Asia's First Regional University Hires a Leader
New Delhi — India will shoulder the initial cost of at least 80 million rupees, or about $2-million, to build South Asia’s first regional university, said the newly appointed chief executive of the institution, which is likely to open in 2010.
“Two years is the bare minimum we need, so we are certainly being called upon to work at high speed,” said G.S. Chadha, of the South Asian University.
Mr. Chadha, a former vice chancellor of New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, is a well-known economics scholar in Asia and is also a member of the Indian Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council.
In April 2007 leaders of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation’s member countries — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka — agreed to set up the South Asian University in India.
Mr. Chadha, who received notice on Wednesday that his hiring had been officially approved by the participating countries, has a two-year appointment. He will oversee almost all aspects of the university’s development, including construction, the curriculum, and faculty hiring, and he will be assisted by experts from all member countries.
Mr. Chadha said the association expected a lot of money to come from sources outside the member countries.
“We will be approaching various development agencies,” he said, declining to say how much it will cost to build the institution.
The Indian government has yet to acquire land for the university, but it has identified 100 acres in south Delhi, close to some of the capital’s universities, that could serve as a campus.
“Everybody in the Indian government is behind it,” Mr. Chadha said of the project. “Usually there is some bureaucratic problem, or ifs and buts crop up, but this one has run smoothly.” —Shailaja Neelakantan
Posted on Thu May 8, 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comment [3]May 7, 2008
House Spending Bill Leaves Out Money for Physical Sciences
Washington — Advocates for scientists have lost their bid to persuade Congress to raise spending on physical-sciences research during the remainder of the 2008 fiscal year. The money is not contained in a war-spending bill that the U.S. House of Representatives is to consider on Thursday.
Universities had lobbied to increase money specifically for the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Congress provided both agencies with minimal increases for 2008, far less than the amounts authorized by the America Competes Act, a law enacted last year to bolster technology development and the economy. As a result, layoffs are planned at Energy Department laboratories that serve academic researchers.
Thirty-one House members in both parties signed a letter in April endorsing a spending increase for the two agencies. But House leaders have been under pressure to squeeze increased spending into the bill for a variety of other civilian programs, including veterans’ benefits.
“We’re very disappointed” about the lack of research money, said Barry Toiv, a spokesman for the Association of American Universities. He said he hoped the proposal might yet gain traction in the Senate, where eight members signed a letter in March calling for the spending bill to include $350-million for the two agencies. —Jeffrey Brainard
Posted on Wed May 7, 07:02 PM | Permalink | Comment [4]
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