December 31, 2007
Indiana U. of Pennsylvania Settles With Doctoral Student
An Indiana University of Pennsylvania doctoral student who said his professor had tried to sabotage his doctoral thesis when he rejected her sexual advances has “amicably” settled a lawsuit against her and the university, the Associated Press reported.
The AP said terms of the settlement were not described in documents filed in the U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh, but apparently the student, Shane Sandridge, can remain in the university’s doctoral program.
The suit, filed in June, drew attention because the professor, Jennifer Gossett, had published several articles about faculty-student romances. —Jennifer Ruark
Sallie Mae Faces Education Dept. Audit Over 9.5% Loans
Washington — Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student-loan company, is facing a further investigation by the Education Department concerning its billing practices.
In a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sallie Mae said late last week that the department’s Office of the Inspector General is examining whether the company had complied with federal law when billing for subsidy payments under the 9.5-percent loan program.
The inspector general has issued a series of reports accusing lenders of improperly claiming hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies through the program, which was intended to give lenders a reimbursement rate of at least 9.5 percent in the 1980s, when general interest rates on the open market were much higher.
The lenders allegedly received windfall profits by continuing to bill for the 9.5-percent reimbursement even after general interest rates fell well below that level. The Education Department announced this year that it would allow lenders to keep those profits if the lenders agreed to stop seeking subsidies through the program.
Sallie Mae, in its regulatory filing, said company officials “believe that our billing practices were consistent with longstanding department guidance, but there can be no assurance that the OIG will not advocate an interpretation that differs from the department’s previous guidance.”
The regulatory filing came a day after Sallie Mae sold $3-billion in securities, $500-million more than planned, to finance a repurchasing of company stock, among other things. —Paul Basken
December 28, 2007
Cornell 'Alert Team' Tries to Identify Troubled Students
Student mental-health problems pose a troubling dilemma for colleges: Intervene, and risk violating privacy and being sued for it. Ignore the problems, and they could deepen, resulting in suicide or harm to others.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Cornell University is confronting the conundrum by relying on an exception to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or Ferpa: The university assumes that students are financial dependents, freeing officials to share concerns with parents.
Those concerns might arise from reports by staff members, who are trained to spot mental-health problems among students. The Journal describes how a custodian identified a bulimic student after cleaning up her messes in a dormitory.
Since 2005, Cornell has also relied on an “alert team” of administrators, campus-police officers, and counselors who meet weekly to compare notes on potentially troubled students. Timothy Marchell, the university’s director of mental-health initiatives, says the group was founded after a campus advisory council realized that warning signs that might have averted campus tragedies went unheeded because “each person knew pieces of the story but no one saw the whole picture.”
“When parents send their sons and daughters off to college,” says Mr. Marchell, “there’s an expectation … that there will be people looking out for them.” —Don Troop
December 26, 2007
Sallie Mae to Raise $2.5-Billion in Stock Offering
Sallie Mae announced Wednesday that it planned to sell $2.5-billion of stock. The company, known formally as the SLM Corporation, said it would use most of the money — about $2-billion — to pay off equity forward contracts, buying back 44 million shares of the company. The rest of the money would go to general corporate purposes, the company said in a news release.
This week is the end of a rough year for Sallie Mae. The company’s shares fell to a five-year low this month after the student lender’s chief executive, Albert L. Lord, failed to assure investors about the health of the company.
In September, a $25-billion takeover of Sallie Mae fell apart, the victim of a new law that cuts federal subsidies to student-loan providers.
The company’s stock rose 7 cents on Wednesday, finishing at $22.13, far below its 52-week high of $58. —Scott Smallwood
December 24, 2007
Murray State U. and Preacher Settle Lawsuit
Murray State University, in Kentucky, has settled a lawsuit with a well-known evangelical preacher who sued the public institution in 2006 after he was barred from speaking there.
Murray State changed its policy on outside speakers on the campus by creating a free-speech zone available to anyone who signed up. That change satisfied James G. (Brother Jim) Gilles. Notice of the settlement was filed in the U.S. District Court in Louisville, Ky.
This was not the first time Mr. Gilles sued a public institution over restrictions on his speaking engagements. In 2002, Vincennes University, in Indiana, found the preacher on the campus and told him he needed to file paperwork to engage in “solicitation” there. The permit the university granted limited Mr. Gilles to a walkway in front of the student union.
He sued in 2004 and lost. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed the lower court’s ruling that the university could legally limit Mr. Gilles’s speech to a certain location. —Jeffrey Selingo
Texas College Overbills State for Bogus Instruction
Galveston College in Texas overbilled the state at least $700,000 and possibly $1.4-million for instruction since 2000 that was never given, state officials have found, according to an article in The Galveston Daily News.
Auditors also found that the college awarded students in a GED program college credit and associate degrees for taking remedial courses. The district attorney in Galveston released the findings of the audit after determining that criminal charges won’t be filed because poor record keeping appeared to be to blame. —Jeffrey Selingo
December 21, 2007
West Virginia U. Accused of Rewriting Well-Connected Official's Academic Record
West Virginia University revised the academic record of a politically connected high-ranking official at a big drug company to show that she had earned an M.B.A. even though she was still 22 credits short of the degree, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported today in a long, carefully researched article.
The executive, Heather Bresch, is chief operating officer of Mylan, a leading producer of generic drugs. She is the daughter of the state’s governor, Joe Manchin III. The chairman of her company, Milan Puskar, is one of the university’s most generous benefactors. And Mike Garrison, the university’s president, was her classmate through high school and college.
When the Post-Gazette called the university in October to verify her academic credentials, for a routine article about her promotion at Mylan, university officials initially said she did not earn the degree for lack of credits. But days later, the university reversed itself, saying she had indeed received her M.B.A.
The newspaper followed up with extensive reporting that raises many questions about what happened. Those questions are likely to be pursued anew by members of the university’s faculty, some of whom bitterly opposed the appointment of Mr. Garrison as president last spring. Some of the faculty critics even said the presidential search had been rigged in his favor. And in an exceptionally rare step, the Faculty Senate voted to oppose Mr. Garrison’s selection even before it was official. —Andrew Mytelka
Academic Winners and Losers in the Vast Federal Spending Bill for 2008
Washington — The vast spending bill that Congress passed this week, nearly three months late, created many prominent winners and losers in academe. On the minus side of the ledger, the National Institutes of Health took nearly a $1-billion hit to its 2008 budget, while scientific research and education programs were also cut substantially, as Congress slashed millions in domestic spending in order to meet President Bush’s budget request and thereby avoid a veto.
Mr. Bush is expected to sign the bill, which covers nearly every federal agency for the fiscal year that began on October 1.
Among the big losers was the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Illinois, which will lay off 10 percent of its staff, force workers to take unpaid days off, and cut back on research, according to today’s Chicago Tribune.
Among the winners were supporters of open access in scientific publishing, the view that the results of taxpayer-financed research should be freely available to the public, not locked up in costly journals. Under the legislation, recipients of NIH grants will have to provide copies of their research papers to an NIH database once they are accepted for publication in a journal. The database would then post the papers within 12 months.
The two-year-old repository has so far received faltering use because posting papers was requested, not required. The Association of American Publishers, which lobbied against the provision, told The Washington Post that “the issue isn’t finished yet.” That’s certainly true enough; the provision will expire at the end of the 2008 fiscal year.
Other big winners were the many recipients of academic earmarks in the huge bill. Some recipients of academic and other earmarks — grants directed by members of Congress to favored constituents — can be examined on a list posted on the Web site of Sen. Jim W. DeMint, a Republican of South Carolina. According to a tally by Citizens Against Government Waste, the overall number of earmarks increased 11 percent over the last such federal appropriations bill. —Andrew Mytelka
Case Western Reserve U. Halts Use of Live Animals in Medical Classes
Case Western Reserve University’s medical school no longer uses live cats, dogs, and ferrets to train its surgery students, and it also will stop using pigs in lab courses, The Plain Dealer reported today. The university’s move follows similar announcements by other institutions, most recently New York Medical College. The trend is being driven by, among other factors, the availability of realistic alternatives, such as computer simulations, and pressure from students and from animal-rights groups. —Andrew Mytelka
Yale Professor at Peking U. Assails Widespread Plagiarism in China
A Yale University professor has written a stern letter expressing concern about widespread plagiarism by students he taught at Peking University this fall.
“The fact that I have encountered this much plagiarism … tells me something about the behavior of other professors and administrators here,” Stephen Stearns, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, wrote to his students. “They must tolerate a lot of it, and when they detect it, they cover it up without serious punishment, probably because they do not want to lose face. If they did punish it, it would not be this frequent.”
Plagiarism and other forms of academic corruption have been common in Chinese higher education for years, even as the authorities try to raise academic standards.
Mr. Stearns went on to attack the lack of protection for intellectual-property rights in China, even citing the pirating of his own textbook by Peking University itself, a premier Chinese institution that is often called Beida. “Disturbingly, plagiarism fits into a larger pattern of behavior in China,” he wrote. “China ignores international intellectual-property rights. Beida sees nothing wrong in copying my textbook, for example, in complete violation of international copyright agreements, causing me to lose income, stealing from me quite directly.”
Chinese translations of the strongly worded letter, titled “To My Students in Beijing, Fall 2007,” quickly spread around the Chinese-language Internet. It was also published on New Threads, a Chinese Web site that reports cases of plagiarism in China. (The English original follows the Chinese translation.)
The headline on New Threads says, “The loss of face goes international: Yale University Professor Stearns rebukes PKU students for the prevalence of plagiarism.” —Paul Mooney
December 20, 2007
Nursing Students File $21-Million Lawsuit Against 2-Year College
Virginia Western Community College was hit with a lawsuit filed today by 59 current and former nursing students, who say it never told them its nursing program had lost its national accreditation, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.
The students, who say they will have trouble getting jobs with credentials from an unaccredited program, are demanding recompense of $350,000 each, a total of $20,650,000. The Times-Dispatch could not reach any officials at the college for comment because it is on winter break. —Andrew Mytelka
Australian University May Discipline Staff in Plagiarism Scandal, but Not Students
Sydney, Australia — An inquiry into alleged plagiarism at Australia’s University of New England has exonerated the students involved but exposed the staff to discipline.
The plagiarism scandal, one of several in recent years to cloud the reputation of Australian universities with large enrollments of foreign students, came to light in August, when the university revealed it had examined the work of 210 international students who were pursuing master’s degrees in information technology from 2004 to 2006. In its analysis, the university found a “significant proportion” of the work contained material copied from the Internet.
The curriculum was taught by a private partner, the Melbourne Institute of Technology, but the students graduated with University of New England credentials.
In a prepared statement the university pledged this week to “take appropriate disciplinary action against some staff,” introduce new measures against plagiarism, and more closely monitor the marking of papers at its affiliated private colleges.
But the university’s chancellor, John Cassidy, said that after receiving advice from a lawyer and a review panel, he had decided not to take retrospective action against the students, who have already graduated.
He said the panel had “raised questions to do with UNE’s conduct and management of the unit, the distinction between intentional and unintentional plagiarism, cultural understanding, natural justice, and the time since graduation.”
“There is an ongoing enquiry into the conduct of the staff involved,” he said. “We have also held talks with the partner institution to ensure that the appropriate processes are in place and that there is a full understanding of our mutual obligations.” —Luke Slattery
Brain-Boosting Drugs Hit the Faculty Lounge
Some university faculty members have started popping “smart” pills to enhance their mental energy and ability to work long hours.
In a commentary published in Nature on Thursday, Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir of the University of Cambridge revealed an informal survey showing that a handful of colleagues, all involved in studying drugs that help people perform better mentally, would take the drugs.
The notion raises hackles in some parts of academe. “It smells to me a lot like taking steroids for physical prowess,” said Barbara Prudhomme White, an associate professor of occupational therapy at the University of New Hampshire, who has studied the abuse of Ritalin by college students. With the recent revelations about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball, she sees parallels between striving athletes and faculty members. Read the full story here.
Should the life of the mind be chemically enhanced when, say, a professor needs to crank out a tenure-worthy paper? Let us know your thoughts in a comment below.
New Chief of Student-Aid Officials' Group Is Veteran Leader of 2-Year Colleges
Washington — The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators has named Philip R. Day as its new president and chief executive.
Mr. Day, most recently chancellor of the City College of San Francisco, replaces Dallas Martin, who is retiring after 32 years at the lobbying association, known as Nasfaa, which represents more than 12,000 financial-aid professionals nationwide.
Before leading City College, Mr. Day served as president of Daytona Beach Community College, Cape Cod Community College, and Dundalk Community College, in Maryland.
Nasfaa is coming through a year in which it became the target of criticism concerning scandals in the student-loan industry, including complaints that the association fostered an unhealthy relationship between college aid administrators and student-loan companies.
Mr. Martin initially accused New York’s attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, of unfairly tarnishing Nasfaa members, before apologizing when the scale of some of the abuses became clearer.
The chairman of the board of Nasfaa, Michael J. Bennett, said today in a statement that Mr. Day would bring the “strong leadership” that the association now needs. “This is a critical time for our association and our profession,” Mr. Bennett said. —Paul Basken
State Department Publishes New Rules on Exchange Programs
Washington — New federal rules will streamline the process for imposing sanctions on institutions that sponsor foreign-exchange programs, but the groups that sponsor such programs complain that the regulations are overly broad and provide inadequate opportunities for due process.
The rules, published by the U.S. Department of State in today’s Federal Register, take effect on January 22, 2008.
Under the rules, the State Department no longer has to find that alleged violations of regulations governing the Exchange Visitors Program are willful or negligent before imposing sanctions. The rules also allow exchange programs to be terminated if the department determines that they compromise national security or do not further its public-diplomacy mission.
Organizations that support such exchanges, however, criticized the rules, saying that they authorize the department to take “far-reaching steps — based on very general criteria — that will prove extraordinarily damaging to an affected sponsor,” with “limited recourse to appeal sanctions decisions.”
The new rules, they said, also do not apply adequate standards of transparency and accountability on the State Department. —Karin Fischer
Ex-Professor Pleads Guilty to Charges in Murder-for-Hire Plot Against Colleague
A former professor at Tidewater Community College was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison on Wednesday after pleading guilty to hiring hit men to bump off a colleague who had filed a sexual-harassment complaint against him.
According to court testimony, Jay A. Glosser, an associate professor of information-systems technology at the college in Norfolk, Va., offered two men $3,000 to $4,000 to persuade Kimberly A. Perez, an associate professor in the same department, to withdraw her complaint, or, alternatively, $10,000 to “take her out,” The Virginian-Pilot reported.
The scheme quickly unraveled in a taped police sting in June 2006.
Mr. Glosser pleaded guilty on Wednesday to conspiracy to commit murder for hire, solicitation, and conspiracy to commit extortion. Two co-conspirators received lesser sentences earlier this year. —Paula Wasley
N.Y. City Council Approves Columbia U. Expansion Into West Harlem
The New York City Council voted on Wednesday to approve Columbia University’s plan to expand into West Harlem.
Columbia’s plan to redevelop 35 acres of light industrial property, which has long been under way, has raised tensions between the university and the neighborhood. Residents have argued that if the university moved in, it could destroy the fabric of the community and displace low-income residents. Three weeks ago, when New York’s City Planning Commission approved the plan and sent it to the City Council, residents vowed to fight the university every step of the way.
It seems that residents made good on that vow at Wednesday’s City Council meeting, according to today’s New York Times.
“I’m sure there will be lawsuits coming out of this, but we will continue to try to get Columbia to be a good neighbor,” the Rev. Earl Kooperkamp, who opposes the expansion, told the Times. The article also notes that many residents had been told that a vote on the plan would come in January and were surprised by the City Council’s sudden move. The vote was 35 to 5, with 6 abstentions and 5 absences.
In a written statement, Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia’s president, said that “after five years and innumerable discussions, negotiations, plans, documents, hearings, and votes, we have arrived at a significant turning point on the matter of space for the university to grow together with our communities.”
Columbia has said that it will contribute $150-million to the community as part of the deal. The expansion may create 6,000 jobs. —Scott Carlson
December 19, 2007
Congress Approves Budget Package With Less for Academe
Washington — The U.S. House of Representatives approved this afternoon a $555-billion budget package for 2008 that includes less-generous amounts for academic research and student aid than previous bills favored by Democratic leaders in Congress had contained. The sprawling measure, which the Senate passed on Tuesday, now heads to President Bush, who is expected to sign it.
Passage of the bill follows a month of tense negotiations between Congress and the president, who refused to sign any bill that exceeded his budget request. Ultimately, lawmakers were forced to shave millions of dollars from their proposed appropriations for domestic programs. Among the cuts: nearly $1-billion from the budget for the National Institutes of Health, which is the largest single source of funds for university research.
Under the bill, HR 2764, the maximum Pell grant, which is now $4,310, would be trimmed to $4,241, although the actual award would rise to $4,731 once funds from a student-aid bill enacted in September are included. The earlier measure provided enough money for a $490 increase above the maximum in the bill approved today. The new omnibus appropriations bill would finance every federal agency except the Pentagon for the 2008 fiscal year, which began October 1.
Funds for the TRIO and Gear Up programs, which prepare low-income students for college, would be frozen at 2007 levels, while spending would drop on several other student-aid programs, including Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, Perkins Loans, and the Leveraging Education Assistance Program, or LEAP.
Science programs and research would also take a substantial hit. The director of the federally supported Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Illinois, warned in an article in today’s Chicago Tribune that the laboratory may have to shut down for a month or more and suspend some research if the bill is signed into law. —Kelly Field
Big Ten Referee's Criminal-Background Report Prompts Scrutiny
The Big Ten will begin conducting annual background checks on all of its football and men’s and women’s basketball referees after a report that one of the conference’s top game officials has a history of problems with the law.
Stephen Pamon, who led a Big Ten football officiating crew that came under fire for its performance in two games this season, has a history of bankruptcy, casino gambling, child abuse, and allegations of sexual harassment, Yahoo Sports reported.
The revelations come several months after an NBA referee pleaded guilty to felony charges that he had bet on games he officiated and provided inside information to gamblers.
There is no evidence Mr. Pamon gambled on college football. But the article says that the referee filed for bankruptcy in 2002, when and his wife had more than $400,000 in liabilities, and that two of the creditors were casinos. The article also says that Mr. Pamon allegedly admitted beating his girlfriend’s sons with an electrical cord, and that he was fired from his job with the Chicago Police Department in 1996 after being accused of sexually harassing female officers. —Brad Wolverton
Top 10 Stories of the Year on This Blog
An end-of-year look at this blog’s top stories of 2007 shows that readers come here for genuine news as well as the frothy, piquant stories that sometimes get us in trouble with our editors. So there’s reason for both hope and dismay that the following 10 articles drew the most Chronicle readers to the News Blog, out of the roughly 2,200 posts published since January 1.
College Student’s Fashion Sense Gets Grounded on Runway (September 6) — student removed from airplane after her eye-catching attire drew unwanted attention.
Death Toll Rises to at Least 33 in Mass Shootings at Virginia Tech (April 16) — an oft-updated article on the day of the Virginia Tech shootings.
Student Was ‘Troubled,’ Says English Department Chair (April 17) — revelation of the Virginia Tech gunman’s history.
Free-Speech Group Accuses U. of Delaware of ‘Thought Reform’ (October 31) — controversy over a residence-life program that critics likened to Orwellian thought control.
New Ranking Tallies Colleges’ ‘Gay-Point Average’ (September 25) — a gauge of campuses’ “gay friendliness.”
DePaul Rejects Tenure Bid by Finkelstein and Says Dershowitz Pressure Played No Role (June 8) — one of the year’s biggest battles in the culture wars.
Berkeley Tree-Sitter Falls, Breaks 2 Limbs (November 12) — a tree-perching protester fractured an arm and a leg; the tree was apparently unharmed.
20 Professors Cite Response to Murder in Calling for President’s Ouster (June 20) — aftermath of Eastern Michigan University’s handling of a student’s death on the campus.
President Resigns After Only 4 Months on the Job (November 9) — a mysterious departure at Cedar Crest College.
High-School Grades Are Best Predictors of College Success, Study Finds (June 19) — a key paper drawing on data on 80,000 University of California students in the 1990s.
Thank you for your readership and your comments. We hope you’ll keep coming back for more. —Andrew Mytelka
The Chronicle Wins Award for Best Political Coverage
The editors of the Utne Reader, a digest of news and opinion, announced today that The Chronicle had won the 2007 Utne Independent Press Award for best political coverage.
“The premier source for all things scholarly, this weekly reader combines grade-A reportage with sharp, smart (dare we say, non-academic?) prose, to make a seemingly specialized beat both accessible and relevant to the broadest of audiences,” the Utne Reader said of The Chronicle in its news release announcing the winners.
The Chronicle Review received special praise, with the Utne Reader describing it as a “fearless, free-thinking section where academia’s best and brightest can take their gloves off and swing with abandon at both sides of the increasingly predictable political divide.”
Among the Review’s opinion essays cited were those about the crisis of the near poor, why we should call terrorists names, and conservative thinkers who are excellent writers but facile thinkers.
“Politically correct?” the Utne Reader news release asked. “Hardly. Ahead of the curve? Always.”
In the release, the Utne Reader also praised the The Chronicle’s international coverage: “The state of higher education is a political concern of deep import both domestically and around the globe. For that reason alone, this comprehensive, cleanly designed newspaper deserves recognition for its international scope.”
The editors of the Utne Reader, which describes itself as the nation’s leading digest of new ideas and groundbreaking journalism, say they scan more than 1,300 magazines, newsletters, and journals for the most forward-thinking writing, reporting, and opinion as they select and consider nominees for their annual awards.
The editors select the nominees based on their day-to-day interaction with the publications. The editors say they seek to honor the efforts of “small, sometimes unnoticed publications that provide innovative, thought-provoking perspectives often ignored or overlooked by mass media.”
The other finalists in the political-coverage category were The American Prospect, City Journal, Dissent, Governing, The Nation, The New Republic, and Reason.
2 Fellowship Programs to Award Millions to Prospective Teachers
The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has just announced the creation of two programs that will subsidize the advanced education of prospective teachers to help better prepare them for elementary- and secondary-school classrooms.
One program will be state-based, with the pilot effort in Indiana. Fellows there will receive a $30,000 stipend to complete a yearlong master’s program, and will be required to teach mathematics and science for three years in urban or rural schools, where good teachers are in short supply.
The undertaking will involve four higher-education institutions: Ball State University, Purdue University, the University of Indianapolis, and Indiana and Purdue Universities’ joint campus in Indianapolis. All have agreed to overhaul their teacher-education programs with a more clinical approach that entails working closely with schools to provide mentors for their graduates and monitor their progress.
In its initial year, the Indiana program will be financed with $10-million from the Lilly Endowment and will cover 80 new math and science teachers. The Wilson foundation hopes eventually to expand the Indiana program to give annual awards to 400 prospective math and science teachers.
The second fellowship program is national in scope. To be financed with $5-million from the Annenberg Foundation and $1-million from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, it will provide outstanding recent college graduates and people changing their careers with $30,000 stipends and a year of graduate education at one of four participating institutions: Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, and the University of Washington.
Applicants for the fellowships must agree to teach for three years in a low-income school.
In a prepared statement, Arthur Levine, the Wilson foundation’s president, said the programs had been “designed to develop new models for effective teacher preparation that can produce a new corps of outstanding teachers where they are needed most.” —Peter Schmidt
Technical Glitch Hits Students Seeking to Take English-Language Test
Students arriving to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language were turned away last weekend at test centers in North America, Europe, and India because of a technical glitch.
A spokesman for the Educational Testing Service, the nonprofit organization that owns and administers the Toefl, as the test is known, explained via e-mail that, on “Saturday the 15th, we encountered an internal service disruption that resulted in difficulties for students checking in to take their Toefl exams.” Neither the spokesman nor a statement on the Toefl Web site indicates how many students were affected.
Many universities in the United States and Britain, and even in a growing number of non-English speaking countries that offer programs in English, require foreign students to submit their Toefl results as part of their applications.
Test centers in East Asia, a fast-growing and lucrative source of students for Western universities, were unaffected by the glitch, according to ETS. The organization has faced criticism in the past year for how it has handled the transition to Internet-based versions of some of its tests, which include the Graduate Record Examination.
ETS has scheduled a makeup date for the Toefl on January 5 and, said the spokesman, will also “provide a letter of explanation to any test taker who wants it, that we will send to the colleges where they are applying indicating that any delay in them receiving Toefl scores from the student is through no fault of the test taker.”
A link on the Toefl site allows students who want copies of the letter to submit their requests. The organization also apologized for the inconvenience. —Aisha Labi
German Research Institution's Plan to Build Lab in Florida Advances
Florida has agreed to pony up $94-million to help the Max Planck Society, a scientific institution in Germany, build a research center in Jupiter, Fla., the Associated Press reported. Palm Beach County has pledged to put $93-million more into the project. The facility, if built, would join several others in the works. —Andrew Mytelka
$175-Million Gift Will Create Scholarship Program for Wisconsin Students
Two University of Wisconsin at Madison alumni are donating $175-million to create a fund to help financially needy Wisconsin students attend college, reports the Associated Press.
The gift is being made by John Morgridge, a former chairman of Cisco Systems, which supplies computer-networking products, and his wife, Tashia. Both graduated from the university more than 50 years ago.
The program, known as the Fund for Wisconsin Scholars, will provide about 2,000 grants of $1,000 to $5,000 each for the 2008-9 academic year, and more than 3,000 grants annually after that. The beneficiaries will be low-income graduates of public high schools in the state.
The idea behind the fund is to complement the Wisconsin Covenant program, which guarantees a spot in one of the state’s universities or technical colleges to all eighth graders who sign a pledge and earn a B average in high school, take college-preparatory courses, perform community service, and stay out of trouble. —Dan Carnevale
December 18, 2007
Florida State U. Football Team Could Lose 25 Players for Bowl Game
Florida State University will be down as many as 25 players when the Seminoles face the University of Kentucky at the Music City Bowl on December 31. The Florida State coach, Bobby Bowden, said today that up to 25 players will not participate in the bowl game. Among those who will not travel to Nashville are players who have been deemed academically ineligible.
“We have some players not traveling for one reason and some for another, including those who are ineligible for the bowl because of academic issues,” Mr. Bowden said in a statement. He did not say what the other reason was.
In September an internal investigation conducted by Florida State and reported to the National Collegiate Athletic Association accused 23 Florida State athletes of cheating on tests administered over the Internet. Two athletics-department employees lost their jobs in the wake of the investigation. —Libby Sander
Justice Center at NYU Law School Faults Ohio on Voting
Some scholars and voting-rights activists sounded the alarm today about changes in Ohio’s voting system suggested last week by Ohio’s secretary of state, Jennifer L. Brunner. The secretary, a Democrat, proposed replacing all of the state’s voting machines with optical-scan machines, consolidating small polling places, eliminating vote counting at precincts in favor of a central location, and moving to a vote-by-mail system for special elections.
Ms. Brunner made the recommendations after receiving a report from computer scientists that said the state’s voting machines could easily be hacked and votes stolen.
Lawrence Norden, chairman of the Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security at the New York University School of Law, said the proposed changes could disfranchise tens of thousands of voters, particularly the elderly, the poor, and members of minority groups. Sometimes those voters choose multiple candidates for a given race, disqualifying their ballots. If their ballots are scanned at precincts or they vote on touchscreen machines, voters are able to recast their votes, he said. In the 2004 presidential race about one million voters were given an opportunity to recast their votes after accidentally “overvoting” at precincts, he said.
He said Ms. Brunner’s plan for counting votes at a central location would introduce the possibility of voter fraud on a huge scale. It’s better if election workers detect software glitches or malfeasance at individual precincts, he said.
In addition, he said, eliminating smaller precincts could harm voters who can’t travel to faraway voting centers because they don’t have cars or access to public transportation. —Andrea L. Foster
Clear-Cutting of Oregon State U. Forest Is Partly Blamed for Devastating Landslides
After homes and a section of U.S. 30 were inundated near of the northwestern Oregon town of Clatskanie last week, rain got the blame, at first.
Turns out, though, that Oregon State University’s College of Forestry now seems partly to blame because the two landslides that caused the flooding stemmed in good part from university foresters’ clear-cutting of trees in 2004 on a 2,440-acre tract of land that it manages. That was the beginning of a chain of events that resulted in a cascade of what The Oregonian calculated as “thousands of truckloads’ worth of mud and debris.” Much of it ended up in the small town of Woodson, half a mile north of the slide site.
Fortunately no one was injured, although many properties were seriously damaged.
As university forestry officials study the landslides, they are finding that the event chain dates back at least 15 years. Among the “multiple mechanisms” that led to the landslides, a university geologist told The Oregonian, were the collapse of areas of rain-soaked ground, the clogging by silt of a small dam, and accelerated erosion caused by a bursting dam. —Peter Monaghan
With Eye on China, Canadian Education Company Buys Community College
CIBT Education Group, a Canadian education-management company that runs 17 postsecondary institutions in China, has bought one of the oldest career colleges in Vancouver, British Columbia, Sprott Shaw Community College, with plans to export many of its 140 vocational programs to China.
The company paid $12-million in cash for the private college, which was founded in 1903, the Vancouver Sun reported.
CIBT runs what it terms 2+2 programs for students who study for two years in China and then go overseas, usually to Britain for the final two years. Tony Chu, CIBT’s president, said his company had started looking for a destination in Canada because Chinese students say they want to study there.
“Currently, the biggest markets are the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.,” he told the Sun. “Canada, however, is the most competitive market in terms of lower living costs.”
It’s also possible CIBT will acquire or become a partner with other Canadian colleges. Managers from China are evaluating Sprott Shaw’s courses to decide which to export first, including hotel management, animation, and construction management.
CIBT is regarded as having an inside track in China, according to a report published this year by the Asia Pacific Foundation and Western Economic Diversification.
“Because CIBT’s senior management are mostly overseas Chinese, [it] can make inroads into lesser known cities where there is little foreign competition,” the report said, noting that CIBT started turning a profit last year and is committed to investing millions of dollars in its campuses and operations by 2010. —Karen Birchard
Scholars and Pop-Culture Fans Create Nonprofit Group to Fight for Creative Rights
Scholars have joined with pop-culture fans to form the Organization for Transformative Works, which will fight for the legal right to produce creative works that mash-up characters from a range of media.
“We envision a future in which all fannish works are recognized as legal and transformative and are accepted as a legitimate creative activity,” says a statement on the group’s Web site. More and more people are creating so-called fan fiction, in which they write stories incorporating characters from popular television shows, movies, or other media, reimagining the fictional worlds in which they live.
Several academics are listed as serving on the group’s Board of Directors, including Francesca Coppa, director of film studies and an associate professor of English at Muhlenberg College, and Rebecca Tushnet, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.
Henry Jenkins, co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Comparative Media Studies Program, calls the group an “unprecedented effort.” The scholar, who was profiled in The Chronicle last summer, was one of the first academics to give serious attention to fan fiction.
“The Web 2.0 era offers a chance for fans to gain greater visibility and impact, but it also raises risks which fans wanted to be ready to confront,” said Mr. Jenkins, in an e-mail interview today.
Mr. Jenkins cited a situation this past summer in which a company called FanLib upset its customers by building a Web site to share fan fiction and then claiming control of the homemade content. He and other pop-culture fans pushed back, as he wrote on his blog.
“The Fan Lib flap was simply one of a series of conflicts this year which raised awareness within the fan community of the need to take action to protect the integrity of their own traditions and to maintain control over their own cultural practices,” said Mr. Jenkins today. “Fans are pooling their knowledge and skills to push their community to the next level.” —Jeffrey R. Young
Federal Court Won't Rehear Case Against In-State Tuition for Illegal Immigrants
A federal appeals court denied a request on Monday to rehear a challenge to a Kansas law that allows some illegal immigrants to pay cheaper, in-state tuition at the state’s public colleges.
The decision, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, upheld the court’s ruling in August on the matter.
In that decision, the panel ruled that a group of students and parents who paid higher, out-of-state tuition at public colleges in Kansas, and who were challenging the tuition law, did not have standing to sue. The court, upholding a 2005 ruling by a federal district judge, said the students and parents had failed to provide evidence that they had been directly harmed by the Kansas law, or that they would benefit if the statute were removed.
The plaintiffs — all of whom are U.S. citizens who live outside of Kansas — have argued that the Kansas law on immigrant tuition violates the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as well as a 1996 federal immigration law.
They wanted federal courts to require the state to either eliminate the tuition benefit or offer the same tuition rates to all U.S. citizens, regardless of their state of residence.
The Kansas law, which took effect in 2004, allows immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates at state institutions if they attended a Kansas high school for at least three years and graduated, or if they earned a General Educational Development certificate, commonly known as a GED, in Kansas. The individuals also must prove that they are actively seeking legal immigrant status or plan to do so as soon as they are able. —Sara Hebel
U. of California to Pay $2.8-Million for Los Alamos Security Breach
Washington — The University of California system has agreed to pay a fine of $2.8-million because large amounts of classified information were removed from Los Alamos National Laboratory and discovered in a subcontractor’s home. The university managed the nuclear-weapons laboratory until June 2006 and remains part of a larger management team.
The university agreed not to legally challenge the fine and to accept responsibility for the violations, the U.S. Department of Energy said in a written statement. The fine, announced in July, originally amounted to $3-million.
The university said in a statement that it strives to provide the strongest security for classified material and “recognizes that further protections could and should have been provided to reduce the opportunity for the cited unauthorized removal.” The statement said the fine will be paid out of the university’s revenues from the management contract.
In October 2006, Los Alamos police officers discovered more than 1,000 pages of classified documents during a drug raid at the trailer of a former worker for a lab subcontractor. The worker later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, saying she had taken the information home to catch up on scanning documents. Another person living in the trailer was the target of the police search.
The university had denied violating security requirements and blamed the subcontractor.
Los Alamos has been plagued by security problems in recent years, which is one reason the Energy Department announced in 2003 that it would open the lab’s management contract for competition for the first time since the lab was created, in 1943, as a top-secret project to develop the atomic bomb. —Jeffrey Brainard
December 17, 2007
N.Y.'s Interboro Institute to Close on Friday
Interboro Institute, a for-profit college in New York City that had been scrutinized and subjected to limits on enrollment by the New York State Board of Regents, will close on Friday, the end of its fall semester.
The company that owns Interboro said it would close the college after it realized that most of its students would no longer qualify for state or federal student aid under the tougher academic standards instituted this fall by the regents.
The company, the EVCI Career Colleges Holding Corporation, said in an announcement on Monday that it had failed to raise capital for Interboro that “would allow the college to transition its educational programs to a model that could succeed” under the changed policies. The company said students now attending Interboro would be allowed to finish their degree programs at another of its colleges, Technical Career Institutes.
Interboro specialized in recruiting students who had not graduated from high school but who could receive federal and state student aid by demonstrating that they had “an ability to benefit” from higher education.
In September the regents enacted new rules for testing students on whether they could benefit. Interboro found that only one-third of the applicants who had passed its old test could pass a new, harder test. As of January 2008, the old test can no longer be used to qualify students for New York State’s student-aid grants.
Earlier this year, state and federal authorities ordered Interboro to repay millions in student-aid funds after finding that some of the money had gone to students who were ineligible. —Goldie Blumenstyk
Princeton U. Student Admits to Faking Attack Against Himself
A student at Princeton University who claimed that he was the victim of vicious e-mail messages and a physical assault because of his conservative views admitted last week that he had fabricated the story, the Associated Press reports.
Francisco Nava, a junior, confessed to local police officials that scrapes and scratches on his face were self-inflicted, and that he had sent threatening e-mail messages to himself, to fellow members of Princeton’s socially conservative Anscombe Society, and to Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at the university.
Brandon McGinley, a fellow student and columnist for The Daily Princetonian, told the AP: “Everyone feels saddened, shocked, and surprised to have been dragged along in this.” In the campus newspaper on Friday, Mr. McGinley had accused Princeton officials of not taking the threats against Mr. Nava as seriously as they had taken anti-gay graffiti that appeared outside some students’ dormitory rooms this semester.
A spokeswoman for the university told the AP that administrators had not decided how to discipline Mr. Nava, who is 23. Mr. Nava, a politics major and resident assistant from Bedford, Tex., has not been charged with any crime.
Fake reports of racially and ideologically motivated attacks are not new in higher education. Such hoaxes unsettled several campuses in the late 1990s, and a professor at Claremont McKenna College vandalized her own car in 2004, claiming she was the victim of a hate crime. —Sara Lipka
New Editor of 'Science' Is Former National Academy of Sciences President
Bruce Alberts, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California at San Francisco and a two-time president of the National Academy of Sciences, has been named the next editor in chief of the journal Science.
Mr. Alberts, a prominent figure in science and science education, succeeds Donald Kennedy, who announced this year that he planned to retire from the editor’s job in February 2008. Mr. Alberts will take over in that month.
Science is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It has had a tradition of naming well-known scientists or scientific administrators to the editor’s post. Before Mr. Kennedy, a former president of Stanford University, the editor’s job was held by Floyd Bloom, a pioneering neuroscientist, and the late Daniel E. Koshland, a biochemist who helped explain how enzymes catalyze the chemical reactions that sustain life.
Like his predecessors, Mr. Alberts will devote half of his time to Science, retaining his faculty position at San Francisco. —Josh Fischman
Harvard Pledges to Continue Research Into Embryonic Stem Cells
Harvard University has vowed to continue its work on developing controversial embryonic stem cells through cloned human embryos, according to today’s Boston Globe.
Last month American and Japanese researchers announced they had developed a new technique for reprogramming adult cells to act like embryonic stem cells — a method that could bypass the contentious issue of whether researchers should be allowed to destroy human embryos to develop lines of stem cells for research or therapies. At the time of the announcement, many researchers predicted that the new technique, called induced pluripotent stem cells, would eventually replace embryonic stem cells.
But researchers also predicted that embryonic stem cells would continue to be useful for research and that they might provide the foundation for therapies before induced pluripotent stem cells could yield treatments. The problem with the new technique is that researchers must insert viral genes into the adult cells to reprogram them — a technique that could alter the cells in detrimental ways.
The Globe reports that Harvard researchers are continuing with their $60-million stem-cell effort, part of which is devoted to developing lines of embryonic stem cells from cloned embryos. “There is a core of scientists, myself included, who deeply believe this an ethical and highly valuable area of research,” said George Q. Daley, a Harvard stem-cell researcher, in the Globe article. —Richard Monastersky
N.Y. Report Recommends Ways to Improve Higher Education
A commission convened by New York’s governor, Eliot Spitzer, issued a preliminary report today, recommending how the state can improve its universities and use both public and private institutions to help fuel the economy.
Governor Spitzer, a Democrat, created the New York State Commission on Higher Education in May, asking its members to identify ways the state could strengthen its two public-university systems, the State University of New York and the City University of New York. He also sought ideas for how public and private colleges could better prepare students to fill high-skill jobs.
The panel, which includes state legislators, college presidents, faculty members, and students, is scheduled to issue its final report by June.
The governor called the report “bold” and “comprehensive,” but noted that its recommendations would be “expensive” to adopt.
Mr. Spitzer said he would review the proposals to determine which of them he will press next year as part of his budget plan and in his State of the State address to lawmakers.
“It is critically important that New York upgrade and invest in its systems of higher education,” he said in a news conference today. Doing so, he emphasized, is especially important for New York’s economic future.
“Where the great universities are, there the jobs have migrated,” the governor said.
Among other things, the report says, New York must refrain from “overregulation” and allow its public universities to raise tuition and charge different prices without legislative approval.
The report also urges the state to reinvigorate its higher-education system by establishing a $3-billion research fund to support economic development; creating a “low cost” student-loan program; and hiring 2,000 more full-time professors, including 250 “eminent scholars,” over the next five years.
The state should agree to multiyear “compacts” with the public universities, which would guarantee them a certain level of funds for basic operating costs, including salaries, the panel recommended. In return the universities would agree to limit the growth of tuition. —Sara Hebel
People at Colorado Seminary, Eyewitnesses to Shootings, Report What They Saw
Lost in the coverage of last week’s shooting spree in Colorado, in which a gunman killed four people at a missionary-training center near Denver and at a church in Colorado Springs, is that a college campus was housed at the church as well, and a number of professors and students were eyewitnesses to the gunplay and deaths there. The campus at New Life Church is part of the King’s College and Seminary, based in Los Angeles. No one directly connected to the college was killed in the attack, but neither were they left untouched by the tragedy.
Herewith are some accounts of their experiences, which were provided to The Chronicle by a professor at the college, who requested anonymity for himself and his colleagues and students.
A professor wrote: “My wife and I were at New Life Church … [and were] just about to cross the very hallway where the shooter was, when we heard multiple gunshots inside the church about 15 yards away. Someone shouted, ‘Run!!’ and we did. We left all our possessions and our coats at our table, and literally ran toward the exit. We took cover out in the parking lot, behind some metal dumpsters. I walked about 100 feet (well out in the parking lot) to my car, and decided to drive home.”
A divinity student wrote: “We, too, were in the chapel as the shots rang out. My two kids, and a neighbor, were in our car leaving the parking lot. They saw people being shot. The gunman looked at my kids in the car, raised his gun toward them, then chose to shoot at another car. They are safe.”
Another student wrote: “I was in the TAG chapel when the shooting started with my wife and three kids. We ran out into the parking lot but were not near our van. A man gave us a ride to our van, which was by the entrance where the shooter entered (we did not realize the shooter was in that area). Two of the victims were lying on the ground about 10 yards from our van. They had a couple of people helping them until the police arrived. We were able to get out of there safely, but were pretty shaken. Our kids saw the bodies and were scared by the gunshots. It was a crazy day. The police interviewed us later that evening, which revealed to us how close we had been to the shooter. We praise God for his protection.”
A college official wrote to colleagues and students: “Not knowing if anything had happened to any of you in the Chapel, we were in prayer for you at those very moments, standing in the gap for you, praying for God’s protection over each and everyone of you. ... Please be praying for New Life Church and those that lost loved ones. I also encourage you to minister to one another as the Body of Christ … His community. Let’s let the Holy Spirit work through each one of us with His love and grace as we minister to one another.”
New Immigration Rules Will Cost British Universities Plenty, Critic Says
Stricter new immigration regulations threaten to cost British universities tens of millions of dollars in revenue when the rules go into effect next year, the president of the umbrella organization representing university chief executives warned in an interview in Sunday’s Guardian, a British newspaper.
The points-based system, which was developed by the Home Office, represents the most sweeping overhaul of British immigration rules in 40 years. “The new system will require universities to choose students earlier, sponsor them, and have them registered with the Home Office,” the newspaper reported.
Rick Trainor, president of the umbrella group, Universities UK, told the paper that “there is a very real danger that the Home Office agenda will undermine the international and trade agenda of the rest of government, which seeks to increase the number of international students in the UK.” —Aisha Labi
December 16, 2007
U. of California Faculty Is Split Over Proposed New Admissions Criteria
University of California faculty leaders are divided over a complicated and controversial proposal to change the system’s admissions policy that they are scheduled to consider this week, the Los Angeles Times reported. The proposal aims to increase the number of applicants over all, but it would also limit the the number of students who are guaranteed admission to at least one campus of the university system.
Under the proposal, developed by a faculty admissions committee, the university would still take students from the top 12.5 percent of their high-school class, but alter how it defines that group. Among the changes, it would drop a requirement that applicants take two standardized subject tests in addition to the SAT or the ACT, and it would lower the minimum grade-point average in required classes to 2.8, instead of 3.0.
The university would also still guarantee admission to students in the top 4 percent of their high-school class, but students who now qualify for that guarantee in other ways — through grades and test scores — would be promised only a full review of their applications.
Several professors told the Times they thought the proposal would require major revisions in order to win the endorsement of the university’s systemwide Academic Council of faculty leaders, which meets on Wednesday. The council will forward its recommendations to the university’s Board of Regents for final approval. —Charles Huckabee
New Law School in South Carolina Benefits From Grade Changes on Bar Exam
A decision by the South Carolina Supreme Court to invalidate one section of the American Bar Association examination administered in the state last July could improve the accreditation prospects of the Charleston School of Law, The State, a newspaper in Columbia, S.C., reported.
Before the ruling, 65.1 percent of the school’s first class of graduates passed the exam. But new grades calculated without the questioned section brought that figure to 69.9 percent. The school, which has provisional accreditation now, needed a 70-percent passage rate to meet an unofficial benchmark that the American Bar Association is expected to consider in deciding whether to grant it full accreditation.
The court’s decision improved the grades of 20 test takers who initially had failed, eight of whom were graduates of the Charleston institution. Those eight included the daughter of a state circuit judge. Another who benefited, a graduate of the University of South Carolina’s School of Law, in Columbia, is the daughter of a state legislator. The Supreme Court justices denied that their decision had been influenced by politics or any intention of helping the Charleston school, which opened in 2004. —Charles Huckabee
December 15, 2007
Former FDA Chief Is Fired as Medical Dean at U. of California at San Francisco
The University of California at San Francisco has fired its medical-school dean, David A. Kessler, after a months-long dispute over what he says were “financial irregularities” at the medical school that dated from before his appointment four years ago.
Dr. Kessler, a former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, was fired Thursday, according to The Washington Post. The medical school’s Web site carried statements from both Dr. Kessler and the university’s chancellor, J. Michael Bishop.
The university said it had conducted three investigations into Dr. Kessler’s allegations of irregularities, and concluded that the allegations were unjustified. But Dr. Kessler told The New York Times: “Everyplace I have had the privilege of being a part of has wanted, when it sees a problem, to get to the bottom of it, but that was not the case here.”
Dr. Kessler, who is a tenured member of the university’s faculty, said he would stay and teach. —Lawrence Biemiller
Texas Board Will Consider Letting Creationist Institute Offer Teaching Degrees
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will be called on to decide next month whether an organization called the Institute for Creation Research can offer an online graduate-degree curriculum for students hoping to become science teachers, according to The Dallas Morning News.
The institute’s Web site says it “equips believers with evidences of the Bible’s accuracy and authority through scientific research, educational programs, and media presentations, all conducted within a thoroughly biblical framework.”
When officials from the coordinating board visited the institute in November, one of the officials said, they found that it offered a standard science curriculum. “What’s different — and what’s got everybody’s attention — is the name of the institution,” said the official.
The institute recently moved to Texas from California, where it was accredited by the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools. But because Texas doesn’t recognize that association’s accreditation, the institute needs the coordinating board’s permission to offer degrees until it wins accreditation from an accrediting body that Texas recognizes. —Lawrence Biemiller
December 14, 2007
Sierra Nevada College's New President Is Former Chief at UNLV
Robert C. Maxson has been appointed president of Sierra Nevada College, the institution said today, as reported in the North Lake Tahoe Bonanza, at a time when the college is looking to merge with another institution.
Sierra Nevada has been seeking partnerships with other institutions. Already it has already accepted an infusion of cash from Knowledge Universe Learning Group, which runs a for-profit institution, in exchange for some control of Sierra Nevada.
Paul B. Ranslow, who was president, resigned after the institution went in this new direction. “My role as president has changed,” he said, “from that for which I was hired and for which I was prepared to dedicate all of my energy and talent.” An interim president has been in place since then.
Mr. Maxson served as president of California State University at Long Beach from 1994 to 2006 and has been special assistant to the chancellor of California State University for the past two years, the Sierra Nevada announcement said. Before that he was president of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas for 10 years. —Dan Carnevale
U. of South Dakota Foundation Files Complaint Against Donor
The University of South Dakota Foundation says it guaranteed a donor only that his name would be on the business-school building, not the business school’s operating program. So a