July 5, 2009

Connecticut Public Colleges Lose 200 Professors to Early Retirement

Connecticut’s public colleges and universities lost more than 200 professors last week as thousands of state workers took advantage of an early-retirement incentive, the Hartford Courant reported, and administrators now are scrambling to plug the holes in their course schedules for fall. Complicating their task, the state still has not set its budget for the new fiscal year.

The state’s 12 community colleges, which lost more than 70 faculty members, are concerned that they may have to cap enrollments, just as record numbers of potential new students are turning to them for training.

The University of Connecticut also lost more than 70 professors, through the retirement program. Jeremy Teitelbaum, dean of its College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, told the newspaper that while each department was making its own plans, most would probably meet course demand this fall by employing more adjunct professors and increasing some class sizes.

The four-campus Connecticut State University System lost more than 75 faculty members. The system hopes to maintain academic quality, a spokesman, Bernard Kavaler, said, by “doing more with less.”

Over all, the early retirements are expected to save the state at least $110-million a year as it struggles to close a projected $8.7-billion budget gap over the next two years. —Charles Huckabee

July 1, 2009

Former Professor Gets 4 Years for Allowing Unauthorized Access to Sensitive Technology

A former professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville was sentenced today to serve four years in federal prison for allowing unauthorized foreign citizens access to restricted military technology, The Knoxville News-Sentinel reported.

J. Reece Roth, a retired professor of electrical and computer engineering, was convicted last September of violating the Arms Export Control Act. Prosecutors said he did so by giving two graduate research assistants — one from Iran and one from China — unauthorized access to sensitive military arms information and by disclosing some of the information in lectures abroad. Mr. Roth, who is 71, was working at the time for a company on a contract to study the use of plasma technology on unmanned military aircraft.

The former professor pleaded not guilty to the charges. But A. William Mackie, the assistant U.S. attorney who led the prosecution, said that Mr. Roth had deliberately broken the law. While government officials have stressed that the case does not signal a crackdown on enforcing regulations about who can work with sensitive technologies, Mr. Mackie said he hoped the case would make university researchers more careful about how they handle such information. —Marc Beja

Georgia State U. Accused of Retaliating Against Professor Who Alleged Anti-Muslim Bias

A professor at Georgia State University has resigned as director of its Middle East Institute and filed a federal discrimination complaint because, she alleges, the university failed to adequately deal with incidents of anti-Muslim bias and retaliated against her and a student for pressing it to act.

Dona J. Stewart, a professor of geosciences, and her lawyer announced in a news release issued today that she had left her post as the institute’s director to protest the university’s handling of her discrimination complaint and retaliatory actions that have “impaired her ability to fulfill federal grant commitments and harmed her career.”

A spokeswoman for Georgia State, Andrea Jones, issued a statement today saying the university treats complaints of discrimination “very seriously” and took appropriate action last year in response to Ms. Stewart’s discrimination complaint. “Due to federal privacy guidelines, the university cannot address the details of the complaint and its resolution,” the statement says. But, it says, “in no way” were retaliatory actions taken against the student or Ms. Stewart, who, it notes, had recently been promoted from associate professor to full professor.

Both Ms. Stewart’s news release and her complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, filed in January, allege that she came into conflict with the university’s administration last year, after alleging discrimination on behalf of a Muslim-American doctoral student who had been repeatedly asked by another faculty member whether she was “carrying any bombs” under her head scarf.

When Ms. Stewart and the student pressed administrators to deal with the incidents, the dean’s office at the college of arts and science demanded that Ms. Stewart remove the student from a visiting-instructor position at the Middle East Institute, canceled the student’s registration for her doctoral courses, and declared the student ineligible to lead a study-abroad program in Egypt that had already been approved, the EEOC complaint alleges.

Administrators subsequently withdrew their support for Ms. Stewart’s plan to use a federal grant to establish a bachelor-of-arts program in Middle Eastern studies, and otherwise undermined her and her institute, the complaint alleges.

Ms. Stewart remains a member of the university’s faculty, but has taken unpaid leave for the coming year. The university’s statement says it is “fully cooperating with the EEOC on this investigation and looks forward to resolving this matter.” —Peter Schmidt

Cancer Researcher at U. of Chicago Wins $500,000 Genetics Prize

Janet Davison Rowley has won this year’s Gruber Prize in genetics for research that has “revolutionized how cancer is understood and treated,” the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation, which presents the prize, announced today.

Dr. Rowley, whose research is believed to have established cancer as a genetic disease, is the Blum-Riese distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago. She will receive the $500,000 prize in October at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, in Honolulu.

Viewed as a leader in cancer cytogenetics and molecular oncology, Dr. Rowley was among the few scientists in the 1960s who believed chromosomal aberrations caused tumors. Her discoveries since then have also uncovered mutated genes in leukemia and lymphoma cells, which help transform normal cells into cancerous ones. Thanks to her research, new techniques have been developed to identify DNA damage within cells. The methods offer a more precise diagnosis as well as a more effective treatment.

The Gruber International Prize Program awards prizes annually in cosmology, genetics, neuroscience, justice, and women’s rights. —Erica R. Hendry

June 30, 2009

U. of Wisconsin Academics Win Collective-Bargaining Rights

More than 20,000 academic employees in the University of Wisconsin system have collective-bargaining rights now that the state’s new budget has been signed into law. Those covered include tenured and tenure-track faculty members, part-time and full-time lecturers, and adjuncts, among others. The law, long sought by the Wisconsin chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, paves the way for the federation to begin organizing
campaigns. —Audrey Williams June

June 29, 2009

Oregon Set to Adopt Legislation That Helps Adjunct Faculty Members

The governor of Oregon is expected to sign a bill that includes principles of the American Federation of Teachers’ Faculty and College Excellence campaign. The legislature approved the bill over the weekend, as the State Senate voted unanimously to make Oregon the first state to enact such a law.

The union’s national campaign, which began in early 2007, urges colleges to hire more full-time faculty members, to give part-timers health benefits, and to adopt policies of “equal pay for equal work.”

Oregon’s bill would require colleges to document just who makes up a college faculty — many adjuncts fall between the cracks when it comes to official data — and would give part-timers access to the state health-care plan. —Audrey Williams June

June 25, 2009

Panel Clears U. of California Professor Whose E-Mail About Israel Drew Complaints

A controversial investigation at the University of California at Santa Barbara of a professor’s harsh criticism of Israel in an e-mail message to students has cleared the professor of academic misconduct, the Associated Press reported.

Some critics of the investigation, by a committee of the university’s Academic Senate, had speculated that it was begun in response to pressure from the Anti-Defamation League, whose leader had met with university administrators and faculty members in March. University officials denied any such motive, saying the investigation was already under way at the time of that meeting.

The investigative committee determined that William I. Robinson, a professor of sociology, had not violated a university policy that bars professors from using campus resources for political reasons unrelated to teaching when he sent the e-mail message to students. In the message, sent on January 19 to students in his “Sociology of Globalization” class, Mr. Robinson accused Israel of war crimes for its military actions in Gaza, and forwarded juxtaposed photographs of what he called “Nazi atrocities against the Jews and Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians.” —Charles Huckabee

June 24, 2009

Worse Than an F: Canadian University Pioneers New Grade for Failure

Students bent on cheating should steer clear of Simon Fraser University. If they are caught, they could end up with a grade that breaks new ground in the realm of academic failure.

The British Columbia university’s Board of Governors and Faculty Senate approved the new grade — “FD,” meaning failed for academic dishonesty — and students will receive the dismal distinction for plagiarism and other forms of academic cheating, according to the Simon Fraser University News, a university publication. The “FD” policy went into effect last month.

Only department chairs can hand out the grades, which will remain on students’ transcripts until two years after they graduate. At that point, the grades will become plain old F’s. It may be the first time that getting an F represents an upgrade. —Andrew Mytelka

Northwestern U. Professor to Receive $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize

A Northwestern University professor will be awarded the Lemelson-MIT Prize for his work in the field of nanotechnology.

Chad Mirkin, a professor of materials science and engineering, chemistry, and medicine, and director of the university’s International Institute for Nanotechnology, has been credited with creating a method to better identify and test molecules that indicate early warning signs of disease.

Mr. Mirkin will receive the $500,000 award at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week.

In April, he was invited to join President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. —Marc Beja

June 23, 2009

Trustees Defer College's Plan to Rename Courses for Paid Sponsors

The City College of San Francisco’s Board of Trustees has temporarily repealed a plan to allow donors to sponsor classes that would otherwise be canceled, and to rename them in honor of their benefactors. The trustees said they had not been informed of the plan and needed to discuss it at a meeting on Thursday.

The college’s chancellor, Don Griffin, announced the plan on Monday but failed to notify the seven-member board beforehand. Board members told the San Francisco Chronicle they were irritated after they learned of the plan in Monday’s newspaper.

“Public education is not for sale,” Milton Marks, the board’s president, told the paper. “If someone wants to give money, that’s great. But getting publicity or feel-good points shouldn’t be necessary. It smacks of some sort of paternalism.”

Mr. Marks said there was no guarantee the proposal would ever be approved, but with the college facing cuts of $8-million to $12-million over the next few years, the board wasn’t ruling it out, either.

Since the plan was announced, no donors have offered the minimum $6,000 gift to save a course, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, though several potential sponsors have asked if they could make partial donations. —Erica R. Hendry