April 30, 2008
Colorado State U. Moves to Cool a Hot Story About a Global-Warming Dispute
Amid news reports suggesting that Colorado State University was limiting its support of a hurricane researcher who has become a leading skeptic of global warming, the university issued a statement this week in which both the researcher and the dean of his college asserted that their relationship was unchanged.
The researcher, William M. Gray, an emeritus professor known as a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasting, produces a widely noticed forecast of Atlantic hurricanes in conjuncton with a colleague, Philip J. Klotzbach. Reports in the Houston Chronicle and other news-media outlets this week have also widely publicized a memorandum Mr. Gray wrote to university officials last year when it seemed they were pulling the plug on the hurricane forecasts because of the distraction of having to deal with news-media inquiries. In the memo, he called the media-distraction explanation “a flimsy excuse” and a cover for an attempt to muzzle his criticism of the idea that global warming is caused by human activity.
But in the university statement issued on Tuesday, he stated: “There has been no change in my status at CSU. We’re still putting the forecast out. CSU continues to support me.”
And Sandra Wood, dean of the College of Engineering, which oversees atmospheric sciences, flatly denied that Mr. Gray was “being silenced or being forced out because of his views on global warming.” She added that the university would continue to support the hurricane forecast as long as he and Mr. Klotzbach want to issue it, but that if Mr. Klotzbach leaves the university, “he will most likely take the forecast with him.” Mr. Gray, who officially retired in 2004, “has been positioning Dr. Klotzbach to take over the forecast,” she said. “That’s nothing new.” —Charles Huckabee
Tennessee Provost Is Chosen to Lead U. of Massachusetts at Amherst
Robert C. Holub, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, has been selected to become the next chancellor of the University of Massachusetts’ flagship campus at Amherst.
UMass’s president, Jack M. Wilson, selected Mr. Holub from among four finalists, the university announced today. The system’s Board of Trustees will consider the recommendation at a special meeting on Monday. Mr. Holub would replace John V. Lombardi, who left Amherst last summer amid controversial plans to shake up the top management of the five-campus Massachusetts system. Mr. Lombardi is now president of the Louisiana State University system.
Mr. Holub, who came to Tennessee in 2006, had previously served in several positions at the University of California at Berkeley, including dean of the undergraduate division of the College of Letters and Science.
He told the Associated Press he was “very honored” by the Massachusetts appointment and was keeping an open mind about the past year’s tensions between the Amherst campus and the system administration, in Boston. “It’s really hard for me to judge the situation from so far away, and I am going to see what the lay of the land is first and find out everybody’s feelings,” he said. “But I do know that you don’t move a university forward by yourself. You have to have everyone on board.” —Charles Huckabee
Severe Flooding Shuts Down U. of Maine at Fort Kent
Dormitories at the University of Maine at Fort Kent were evacuated today, and classes have been canceled for the week, because of flooding on the campus, at the state’s northernmost tip.
About 150 students were relocated to facilities at the University of Maine at Presque Isle and at Northern Maine Community College, as water overflowed the banks of the Fish and St. John Rivers. The inundation forced the municipal sewer plant to close, knocking out showers and toilets on the campus.
The swift melting of this past winter’s heavy snows and three inches of rain within 24 hours are the cause of the flooding, the Associated Press says.
Classes are scheduled to resume on Monday, May 5, and final examinations will be held the following Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. —Hurley Goodall
Alabama Judge Throws Out $5-Million Verdict Against NCAA
An Alabama judge has dismissed a jury’s $5-million award to a University of Alabama booster, who had prevailed in a defamation lawsuit against the NCAA last November, The Huntsville Times reported today.
Judge William Gordon, of the Montgomery County Circuit Court, ruled that the jury’s verdict was “the product of passion or prejudice.” He also said that an infractions announcement by the NCAA in 2002 — the impetus for the lawsuit — did not meet the standards for constitutional malice.
The booster, Ray Keller, asserted in his lawsuit that the NCAA’s announcement, which used strong language to describe him and two other boosters, represented defamation. In the announcement, the NCAA did not identify Mr. Keller by name, but subsequent news reports did.
A new trial date has not yet been set. —Hurley Goodall
Turkey's Parliament Amends Controversial Law Often Used Against Academics
The Turkish parliament voted today, by a tally of 250 to 65, to alter a controversial law that has been used repeatedly against academics, journalists, and writers.
The law, Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, had criminalized the act of “insulting Turkishness.” It will now be amended to instead criminalize “insulting the Turkish nation.” The justice minister will be required to approve any Article 301 prosecutions, under the amended law, and the maximum jail term for offenders will be reduced to two years from three.
Critics of Article 301, including human-rights groups and European Union officials, who hold the key to Turkey’s hopes of joining the 27-nation bloc, say the law has been used to limit freedom of speech. Some of those same critics dismissed today’s changes as merely cosmetic.
One lawmaker told the Associated Press that “it was ‘illusive’ to believe that the amendment would advance free speech.”
In a written statement issued in anticipation of the amendments’ passage, Human Rights Watch said “the government’s half-hearted revision is a real disappointment.” —Aisha Labi
Labor Department Audit Faults Accountability of Job-Training Grant Recipients
Washington — A federal program that helps finance job-training programs, including some at colleges, is coming under renewed scrutiny for lack of accountability, according to today’s Washington Post.
The High Growth Job Training Initiative has issued more than $270-million in grants since 2000, and supports several programs in higher education. A yet-to-be-released report by the Labor Department’s inspector general audited 10 recent grants, and found that a majority failed to meet objectives or evaluate their grant outcomes. Two such grantees in the audit were community colleges.
The criticism in the report appears more aimed at poor oversight and lax accountability measures from the Labor Department than at the recipients themselves. A similar investigation in 2007 found that 87 percent of the job-training grants had been awarded without competition.
Both audits were requested by Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat of Iowa who is chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Labor Department. “This report reveals a double insult for American taxpayers — not only did the Bush administration’s Labor Department handpick the organizations to receive DOL grants, but many of those organizations failed to deliver measurable results,” Senator Harkin told the Post. —JJ Hermes
April 29, 2008
Graduate Student Sues Georgetown U. for Alleged Racial-Profiling Incident
Washington — An Iranian-American graduate student at Georgetown University has sued the institution, accusing it of racial profiling when it detained him at a graduation ceremony in May 2007.
Kambiz Fattahi — a student in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and a dual citizen of the United States and Iran — says he was watching the ceremony in the university’s main gymnasium when a public-safety officer insisted that he leave and told him he was “making some people nervous.” According to the lawsuit, two officers questioned Mr. Fattahi in a public hallway, searching his backpack and making sarcastic remarks about “Babylon and the Tigris River.”
Mr. Fattahi filed suit on Tuesday against the university, the two officers, and the director of their department. He alleges several violations of his rights under the Constitution and the District of Columbia’s Human Rights Act, and he seeks a revision of Georgetown’s antidiscrimination policies, related training for its security officers, and unspecified damages.
A Georgetown spokeswoman said in an interview that Mr. Fattahi’s charges were “without merit.”
“We would expect to vigorously defend ourselves,” said the spokeswoman, Julie Green Bataille.
Last August, Georgetown announced that it had investigated the original incident and concluded that its officers had acted appropriately. The university received an anonymous threat 10 days before the commencement, Ms. Bataille said in a written statement, and an audience member had reported that Mr. Fattahi was behaving suspiciously. —Sara Lipka
Kentucky College Board's New Leader Quits Amid Hiring Dispute
Just over two weeks after being named president of Kentucky’s higher-education coordinating board, Brad Cowgill announced today that he was resigning, according to news reports.
Kentucky’s governor, Steven L. Beshear, a Democrat, had objected to the selection of Mr. Cowgill to lead the Council on Postsecondary Education. The governor asked the state’s attorney general to determine whether the council had ignored legal requirements that it conduct a national search for a president with an established reputation and experience in postsecondary education.
Last week the attorney general ruled in a legal opinion that the council’s hiring process had violated state law.
In a statement Mr. Cowgill released today, he said he was stepping down for “one reason,” according to the Lexington Herald-Leader. The reason, the newspaper quoted him as saying, was that “in the foreseeable future, it would be necessary to devote excessive time and effort to unproductive activities, denying me the satisfaction of fruitful work.”
Mr. Cowgill had been serving as interim president of the council for eight months. Previously he was budget director for Governor Beshear’s predecessor, Ernie Fletcher, a Republican.
Governor Beshear was quoted by the Lexington newspaper as saying that he appreciated Mr. Cowgill’s decision, “which puts an end to a very difficult situation for everyone.” —Sara Hebel
Report Questions Higher-Education Spending in North Carolina
North Carolina taxpayers aren’t getting much bang for their higher-education buck, according to a new report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
Despite consistently large increases in state and federal money for North Carolina’s public universities, the state lags nationally and regionally in its percentage of college graduates.
The report — the first in a series that also will examine higher education in Georgia, Iowa, Texas, Virginia, and Washington — challenges the conventional argument that big spending on university research in North Carolina has been an engine for widespread economic development.
The study, which uses data from the federal Department of Education, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau, and other education sources, also alleges that some higher-spending universities have become “gated” institutions that use more money for bolstering the salaries of key faculty members than on improving instruction or access for lower-income students.
“It’s clear that the majority of students are not graduating college,” said Richard K. Vedder, the center’s director, and Andrew Gillen, its research director, in the report. “The students that do graduate are doing so with even greater debt loads, despite the increased subsidies from the state.”
Mr. Vedder, an economist at Ohio University, visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and former member of the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education, formed the center two years ago. —Eric Kelderman
College Board Settles With Test-Prep Company Accused of Copyright Infringement
A Texas-based test-preparatory company has agreed to pay $1-million in a settlement with the College Board two months after the organization filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against the company, Karen Dillard’s College Prep LP.
In February the College Board said the company, known as KDCP, had illegally obtained copies of SAT forms before they were available to the public, and had used questions from those forms in practice materials distributed to its test-prep clients. In response, KDCP countersued the College Board, accusing it of improperly obtaining proprietary information about the company from a former employee.
Under the terms of the settlement, announced today, both sides have dropped their lawsuits, and the College Board will not cancel the SAT scores of students who used KDCP’s test-prep materials and classes. Also, $400,000 of the $1-million settlement will be paid by KDCP by offering free SAT test-prep services to low-income high-school students.
Karen Dillard, managing partner of KDCP, said in a news release that her company now recognized that it “should have been more careful in handling College Board materials, and going forward KDCP is committed to respecting the College Board’s intellectual-property rights.”
Both the company and the College Board have agreed to limit their comments on the matter to the news release. —Elizabeth F. Farrell
Appeals Court Rejects Challenge to Law Denying Student Aid to Drug Offenders
Opponents of a law that prevents students who are convicted of drug offenses from receiving federal financial aid were handed another legal defeat today.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, upholding a 2006 decision by a U.S. District Court, has refused to reinstate a lawsuit that sought to strike down the law.
In its ruling the appeals court rejected arguments by the Students for Sensible Drug Policy Foundation, which filed the appeal, that the federal law is unconstitutional.
The group argued, in part, that denial of financial aid by the Education Department to students who have already served a court-imposed sentence violates the U.S. Constitution’s ban on double jeopardy, criminally punishing someone twice for the same offense. But the appeals court said that the federal law’s sanctions cannot be considered criminally punitive, especially in the double-jeopardy context. —Sara Hebel
16 Women Elected to National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences announced today the election of 72 new members, including 16 women. That’s a significant reversal from just one year ago, when only nine women were inducted, the fewest since 2001.
The record year remains 2005, when 19 women were elected.
The academy, most of whose members are white and male, says it has been trying to do better to identify qualified candidates who are women and members of minority groups underrepresented in science. (The academy has also said, however, that it does not track members by race.) Under the academy’s rules, new members must be nominated and elected by the existing membership.
The academy is a private organization chartered by Congress to advise policy makers on technical matters, and being elected a member is considered one of the highest honors in American science. With the latest election, the academy’s total number of active members now numbers 2,041, most of them at universities.
The academy also announced the election of 18 foreign associates from nine countries. —Jeffrey Brainard
Chinese Students on American Campuses Tackle Western Critics
The New York Times reports today on efforts by Chinese nationals studying in the United States to rebut what they consider “biased” Western portrayals of their homeland.
The article recalls a number of recent Tibet-related incidents in which Chinese students angrily disputed characterizations of the conflict via e-mail and in demonstrations, sometimes turning to violent language and threats.
“I believe in democracy,” one student told the Times, “but I can’t stand for someone to criticize my country using biased ways. You are wearing Chinese clothes and you are using Chinese goods.”
The article also notes that Chinese students’ occasionally threatening outbursts put American universities in an awkward position, particularly if those institutions have or are working to build partnerships with the Chinese government. —Catherine Rampell
April 28, 2008
U. of Wisconsin at Madison Mistakenly Releases Name of Applicant for Chancellor Job
Whether to make public the list of applicants for the top job at a university can be a tricky proposition, as the University of Wisconsin at Madison has just been reminded.
The university said last week that 55 people had applied to be the next chancellor of the Madison campus. University officials also released the names of nine candidates who they said had not requested confidentiality. But, unfortunately, one of the now-public candidates had indeed asked that his name be kept private.
Jorge V. José, vice president for research at the State University of New York at Buffalo, told The Badger Herald, the Madison student newspaper, that he was “stunned” to hear that his name had been released. Both the university and Academic Search Inc., the firm that is handling the search, apologized for the mistake, according to the Associated Press. —Paul Fain
National Academies to Revisit 'Gathering Storm' on Science and the Economy
Washington — Two years ago, the National Academies sounded the alarm in a widely cited report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” that America was slipping behind other countries in science and technology. On Tuesday leaders from academe and business will meet here to try to refocus Congress’s attention on the report’s many recommendations that require lawmakers’ action.
One expected topic of discussion on Tuesday is a lobbying effort already under way to persuade Congress to increase federal spending for physical-sciences research significantly this year. The money could be squeezed into a broader supplemental-appropriations bill that legislators are expected to consider in the coming weeks to finance the Iraq war.
Congress provided only minimal increases for the National Science Foundation and the Energy Department’s Office of Science for the 2008 fiscal year, which ends in September, even though much-bigger raises had been authorized by the America Competes Act, which was enacted last year to improve economic competitiveness.
Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, has reportedly expressed support for redressing that situation in the forthcoming spending bill. The proposal remains on the table, even though she also has promised a tight rein on nonmilitary spending. President Bush has threatened to veto the bill if it contains spending unrelated to the war.
The lobbying effort has included a letter of support to House leaders from 31 members of both parties and a separate letter to the president from more than 200 universities and corporations. —Jeffrey Brainard
Another Nobel Prize Winner Donates Share of Award to Endow Fellowship
John C. Mather, a 2006 Nobel laureate in physics, will donate $300,000 of his $700,000 share of the prize to the Hertz Foundation. The money will endow a fellowship for one graduate student in astrophysics and cosmology every year.
Mr. Mather, a senior astrophysicist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center, split the prize with George F. Smoot, who donated part of his share in December.
A 1974 Hertz Fellow himself, Mr. Mather will announce his donation officially on Sunday, May 4, at the Goddard Space Flight Center. —Hurley Goodall
Report Calls for Directing Federal Aid to Neediest Students
Washington — If Congress wants more low-income students to enroll in college, it should provide larger Pell Grants to the poorest of them, says a new report out today.
The report, “Window of Opportunity: Targeting Federal Grant Aid to Students With the Lowest Incomes,” asks lawmakers to give up to $750 in additional aid to students whose families are so needy that their expected contribution to tuition is a negative number. Under current law, such students receive the same-size Pell Grant as higher-income students whose expected family contribution, or EFC, is zero.
The idea is already gaining traction in the U.S. Senate. This month, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a Democrat of Massachusetts, introduced legislation that would allow students with negative EFC’s to receive larger awards. The provision is part of a broader bill aimed at dealing with the credit crunch in the student-loan industry.
The report, which was published by the Institute for Higher Education Policy on behalf of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, also calls on Congress to raise the minimum and maximum Pell awards. That change would provide additional grant aid to the neediest students while ensuring that students with incomes close to the cutoff do not lose their awards. —Kelly Field
Medical-School Association Urges Ban on Industry Gifts
Academic medical centers should prohibit doctors, medical residents, and students from accepting gifts, free food, or free travel from drug and medical-device manufacturers, the Association of American Medical Colleges recommends in a report released today.
The report is the result of two years of study by a panel charged with finding ways to avoid potentially dangerous conflicts of interest at the nation’s 129 medical schools.
Although the report focuses on interactions with drug and medical-device companies, the association said conflict-of-interest policies should be broad enough to encompass ties with makers of other medical equipment and services. It called on those industries to “voluntarily discontinue those practices that compromise professionalism as well as public trust.”
“Over recent decades, medical schools and teaching hospitals have become increasingly dependent on industry support of their core educational missions,” the report states. “This reliance raises concerns because such support, including gifts, can influence the objectivity and integrity of academic teaching, learning, and practice.”
Among the practices the association concluded were inappropriate are: “providing gifts to individuals (even when these gifts have educational or practice-related utility); distributing samples directly to practitioners; providing food, meals, or travel expenses; establishing speakers’ bureaus; and ghostwriting.”
Although many doctors and residents say they are not swayed by freebies, the report notes that such gifts can cause subtle shifts in prescribing behaviors and create the perception that doctors are being “bought” by industry.
Several top medical doctors recommended a similar crackdown on industry gifts in an article published two years ago in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
The medical-college association’s Executive Council is scheduled to consider the report in June. —Katherine Mangan
Prominent U. of Florida Professor Is Caught Plagiarizing in His Books
Over the last decade James B. Twitchell has become one of the most-quoted experts on marketing and consumerism. The English professor at the University of Florida is the author of numerous books, including Adcult USA and Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld, which explore how corporations have invaded our lives.
He is also, according to a months-long investigation published on Friday by The Gainesville Sun, a plagiarist. The Sun’s article includes several damning passages in which Mr. Twitchell borrows entire paragraphs almost word for word without crediting their authors. At first Mr. Twitchell denied that he had a plagiarism problem, but then he offered a written apology in which he explained that he was “always in a hurry to get past descriptions to make my points.”
Mr. Twitchell’s plagiarism was brought to light by Roy Rivenburg, a fomer reporter for the Los Angeles Times, who discovered that the professor had borrowed from one of his articles.
In one particularly egregious paragraph in his 2002 book Living It Up: Our Love Affair With Luxury, Mr. Twitchell copied a description from a 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review. A portion of that book (not containing the offending section) was printed in The Chronicle Review.
The University of Florida has begun an investigation, and Mr. Twitchell’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, has announced that it’s delaying the paperback edition of his latest book, Shopping for God.
You can read more about the case on Virginia Postrel’s blog (Mr. Twitchell lifted several sentences and descriptions from one of her articles). Also, see an investigation by The Chronicle of plagiarism in academe, published a few years back. —Thomas Bartlett
Studies Give Rare Suggestion of Success for Gene Therapy
The field of gene therapy has had its share of troubles, including two studies in which patients died and others in which already-ill subjects developed additional conditions. But now a hint of success has arrived, in the form of two small clinical trials involving people with a rare blinding disease.
The subjects suffer from Leber’s congenital amaurosis, which causes poor vision at birth and sight that steadily worsens. Because the disease is caused by an error in a single gene, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and at University College London independently decided to try to correct it with gene therapy.
They report online in The New England Journal of Medicine that three patients in each study experienced improvement in their vision after receiving an injection of a virus containing the healthy gene.
The improvements were modest, and a few other patients did not improve, but the results still give hope that a better version of the treatment will prove itself in larger, longer-term studies. Videos at the journal’s Web site show patients before the procedure bumping into walls and obstacles, and afterward navigating the courses with ease. —Lila Guterman
Another West Virginia U. Official Resigns Over Degree Scandal
R. Stephen Sears, dean of West Virginia University’s College of Business and Economics, has resigned, according to a university-issued news release, making him the second official at the university to quit today. Also stepping down is West Virginia’s longtime provost, Gerald E. Lang.
Both officials were cited often in a report, released last week by an independent panel, that criticized university administrators for retroactively awarding an unearned executive M.B.A. to Heather M. Bresch, the state governor’s daughter and a top executive at a pharmaceutical company whose chairman is a major benefactor to the university.
The trouble may not be over in Morgantown. The Daily Athenaeum, the university’s student newspaper, reported on Friday that a faculty member may propose a no-confidence measure concerning Michael S. Garrison, the university’s president, while other faculty critics are calling for Mr. Garrison’s ouster, according to the Associated Press.
Mr. Lang, the university’s provost for 13 years, told The Chronicle in January that the degree controversy pained him as a “steward of the university.” He also defended Mr. Garrison’s actions. “It’s unfortunate that this particular case has been linked to the president,” he said. “It is a case that really resides in the College of Business and Economics. The president was not involved in any of the decision making on this.” —Paul Fain
Controversial Clinical Trial Draws Renewed Criticism, for Withholding Damning Results
A study testing a blood substitute called PolyHeme, which was previously criticized as unethical, has now been taken to task along with other artificial-blood research for causing unnecessary deaths.
The clinical trials, many of which were reported late or not at all in peer-reviewed journals, have now been analyzed together to show that patients who received the experimental treatments were 30 percent more likely to die, and were almost three times as likely to have heart attacks. The analysis was published online today in The Journal of the American Medical Society.
In 16 trials involving 3,711 patients, some received a transfusion of one of five different blood substitutes. Among those who received an experimental treatment, 164 patients died, while 123 died among those who did not get transfusions of artificial blood. Fifty-nine patients who received experimental transfusions had heart attacks, versus 16 in the control groups.
The researchers who performed the analysis were from the National Institutes of Health and Public Citizen, a consumer-advocacy group.
They said that if disclosure of the results of all clinical trials of experimental drugs had been required, lives would have been saved. The authors singled out three trials of PolyHeme for particular criticism because none of the results have been published. —Lila Guterman
Australian University Leader Admits Lifting Passages in Essay but Denies Wrongdoing
An Australian university leader who once publicly criticized Internet-based scholarship has admitted that passages of a recent newspaper commentary he wrote were cut and pasted from Wikipedia, according to a report in The Australian.
Ian O’Connor, who is vice chancellor of Griffith University, might have gotten away with the plagiarism, except his essay caused an outcry when he equated Unitarianism with Wahhabism, an extremist Islamic ideology that is practiced in Saudi Arabia. Mr. O’Connor was apparently using the essay, which appeared on The Australian’s op-ed page on Thursday, to defend the university’s decision to accept a $100,000 grant from Saudi Arabia by giving Wahhabism a kinder, gentler image.
The vice chancellor has now admitted that he misused the term “Unitarianism,” but he has rejected the suggestion that he did anything wrong in using Wikipedia. A newspaper op-ed is not a piece of academic scholarship, he protested, and therefore isn’t subject to his university’s rules on plagiarism.
In an article today, The Australian reports that local Muslim leaders are now urging the university to return the money to the Saudi Arabian Embassy. They complain that the Saudi government is known for providing funds with strings attached. —Martha Ann Overland
April 27, 2008
West Virginia U. Provost Resigns Over Transcript Scandal Involving Governor's Daughter
Gerald E. Lang has resigned as provost of West Virginia University, following the release of a harshly worded report that found that administrators at the university had violated procedures and displayed poor judgment in awarding an executive M.B.A. to Heather M. Bresch, the daughter of West Virginia’s governor, the Associated Press reported. Ms. Bresch had not completed her course work when she got the degree.
In a letter to the university, Mr. Lang cited his accomplishments during his tenure as provost, which included overseeing construction of new research facilities and raising the salaries of faculty members. But he said that the controversy surrounding the Bresch case had harmed the university’s reputation.
“Given my history with West Virginia University, I am very sorry that my one action in ratifying a dean’s decision in a single situation has had a negative impact on the institution,” he wrote. “I love this place and would never intentionally take an action that would reflect negatively upon it. Even though the panel looking into the Bresch case did not find any willful misconduct, their conclusion that the result was flawed and erroneous has convinced me to resign as provost and vice president for academic affairs and research. I hope this decision will begin the healing process and focus attention onto the future.”
The resignation is effective June 30. —Scott Carlson
Antioch College, Troubled but Tenacious, Marks Last Graduation
Embattled Antioch College held what may be its final graduation on Saturday, celebrating students who had scrambled to finish their degrees.
Budget deficits and dwindling enrollments had become too much for the college, which was founded in 1852 and known for its pioneering spirit and social activism, as well as famous alumni like Stephen Jay Gould and Coretta Scott King. Despite last-ditch efforts to save the college, which is part of Antioch University, it will close this summer for the foreseeable future. Officials have said the college may reopen in 2012, but people have wondered if it could do so while retaining its historic identity.
Antioch College’s indefinite fate — as well as tributes to the grit and zeal of “Antiochians” — colored the bittersweet ceremony on Saturday in Yellow Springs, Ohio, the Dayton Daily News reported. Many alumni and former faculty and staff members traveled to the campus for the occasion, the newspaper said.
“I wish I had something to tell you, but I don’t,” Sharon Merriman, an alumna of the college and a member of the university’s Board of Trustees, told a crowded, sneering audience, according to the Daily News. “We know many of you broke your necks to graduate,” she said, “and the trustees are very proud of you.”
One student, Shane Creepingbear, told the newspaper that this past year had been one of the most intense of his life: “I kind of envisioned it as running down the hall and out the door while the building was burning.”
Saturday’s ceremony awarded almost half of the 101 graduates tentative degrees, as they still have requirements to complete over the summer and into the fall, the Daily News reported. Faculty members vowed to continue teaching somewhere in Yellow Springs. —Sara Lipka
April 26, 2008
Student Falls Unconscious at Professor's Home and Dies
Michael Todd, a psychology professor at Paradise Valley Community College, was placed on paid administrative leave after one of his students fell into a coma at his North Phoenix home and died last week, according to a report in the East Valley Tribune.
The Phoenix Fire Department responded to a call of an unconscious woman early last Sunday morning. At a local hospital 30 minutes later, Andria Ziegler, 19, was pronounced dead. No cause has been determined, and toxicology results are pending, the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office said.
Ms. Ziegler’s parents reported her missing on Monday afternoon, and Phoenix police officials became involved when they learned that the woman’s body was lying unidentified at the medical examiner’s office.
Mr. Todd called in sick on Monday and Tuesday, a college official said. He was placed on leave after Ms. Ziegler’s parents alerted the college of her death.
A private investigator who is looking into the case said that Ms. Ziegler’s best friend told him that Mr. Todd had previously sought to date Ms. Ziegler but that she had initially declined, according to the newspaper’s report.
The case is not being investigated as a homicide, police officials said. —Don Troop
Prime Minister Calls India's Universities 'Teaching Shops'
New Delhi — India’s prime minister, who last year described the country’s universities as dysfunctional, has again lashed out at them, calling them “teaching shops and degree-giving authorities” that have lost their tradition of research-oriented teaching.
“I say this as someone who has been a teacher,” Manmohan Singh said on Friday in a commencement address at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. “I have often said that I have strayed into politics by accident but my preferred career was teaching. I recall that in the days I used to be a student and a teacher, universities placed great emphasis on doing research along with teaching.”
Since taking office, in 2004, the prime minister has often criticized the state of India’s higher-education system. Last year he lambasted the governance of state universities and described them as below average. “A dysfunctional education system can only produce dysfunctional future citizens,” he said then.
On Friday Mr. Singh said his government had spent more money on public education than any other recent administration. But “it is not enough to spend it on buildings and salaries alone,” he said. “Some of it should be earmarked for research … and for providing scholarships to promising students.” —Shailaja Neelakantan
Shots Are Fired at Grambling State U., and the Campus Is Locked Down
Grambling State University was locked down on Friday after shots were fired on the campus following a series of fights, The News-Star, of Monroe, La., reported today. Five men were arrested in the incident, which was triggered by a brawl on Thursday in a local nightclub.
Police officers arrest men outside Bethune Hall, a women’s dormitory at Grambling State U.
(Terrance Armstard, The News-Star)
A bulletin posted on Friday on the university’s Web site said that the shots had been fired into the air and that no one had been hurt.
“The GSU campus is quiet, safe, and secure,” the bulletin said.
The university activated its new emergency text-messaging notification system at 2 p.m. on Friday, but a student told the newspaper that the alert did not arrive until 5:24 p.m.
“It said, ‘Campus at Grambling State University is closed. Classes resume on Monday,’” said the student, Darryl Smith. “It didn’t say anything about a shooting.”
Colleges that use such emergency-notification systems have wrestled with how quickly they should activate them and how detailed the messages should be. —Don Troop
April 25, 2008
IRS to Wade Deeper Into Debate Over Endowment 'Hoarding'
Washington — Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have recently taken aim at what they see as stingy spending by wealthy colleges of their endowments. Leading the charge has been an influential Republican senator, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, who has floated the idea of requiring those institutions to spend at least 5 percent of their endowments each year.
Now the Internal Revenue Service is gearing up to be “more aggressive in this area,” said Steven T. Miller, commissioner of the IRS’s tax-exempt division. Mr. Miller told an audience at Georgetown University on Thursday that the IRS was exploring a standard to ensure that colleges and other nonprofit organizations spend their endowments at levels commensurate with their assets, according to his written remarks.
The discussed standard, referred to as the “commensurate test,” has been championed by Senator Grassley. However, Mr. Miller said the IRS would not necessarily develop “inflexible rules” on spending levels, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported.
“No one wants the service dictating how a charity should do its job,” he said. “But every charity should make responsible and appropriate use of its resources to achieve its charitable purposes.” —Paul Fain
Financial Crisis Forces Illinois Seminary to Make Radical Cuts
An Episcopalian seminary outside Chicago has stopped accepting new students and has told its professors that their appointments will be terminated next year, according to the Episcopal News Service.
Officials at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, located in Evanston, Ill., said the institution was not closing, but would instead focus on distance learning and other nontraditional approaches in an attempt to keep its doors open. The move was prompted by what the seminary’s trustees called a “financial crisis that threatens the survival of the institution.”
Seabury-Western isn’t the only Episcopalian seminary in trouble. Beset by rising costs and falling enrollment, three others have also cut back their services. —Thomas Bartlett
Randolph College Moves Forward With Planned Sale of Art
Randolph College is taking another step to sell four valuable paintings despite efforts by critics to block the sales. The Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo’s “Trovador” will be on the block during a May auction in New York City, said the Virginia college’s president, John E. Klein, in a written statement distributed this morning.
“Trovador,” by Rufino Tamayo
The shaky finances of the former Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, which began admitting men last fall, earned it a 2006 warning from its accreditor. College officials had planned to auction off the four paintings last November, and they hoped to get more than $32-million for the artworks. They estimated Mr. Tamayo’s work would fetch as much as $3-million.
But a group of alumni, donors, students, and others, calling itself Preserve Educational Choice, sued to block the sale. The lawsuit was one of several high-profile legal battles in higher education over donor intent.
Then the group announced in March that it was dropping that case, and was focusing instead on a broader lawsuit against Randolph that challenges its right to use any of its assets in a coeducational setting. Virginia’s Supreme Court heard arguments in that case earlier this month. —Paul Fain
Harvard Announces $100-Million Gift for Study Abroad and the Arts
David Rockefeller, a former chairman and chief executive of Chase Manhattan Bank and a grandson of John D. Rockefeller, has pledged the largest gift from an alumnus in Harvard University’s history: $100-million. About 70 percent of the gift, a bequest, will finance study-abroad programs for Harvard undergraduates, and the remaining $30-million has been earmarked for arts programs.
Mr. Rockefeller, who is 92, has given more than $40-million to Harvard in the past. In 2006 The Wall Street Journal reported that he was putting this gift on hold in the aftermath of the resignation of Lawrence H. Summers as Harvard’s president. In 2005 Mr. Rockefeller pledged $100-million to Rockefeller University, which was founded by his grandfather.
For more on the Harvard gift, see an article from The Chronicle of Philanthropy. —JJ Hermes
Writing Test Found to Be Better Predictor of College Success Than Other Parts of SAT
Math and critical reading may be important, but according to two recent studies, the writing portion of the SAT test is a better predictor of first-year college grades than the other sections.
The College Board reached that preliminary conclusion after analyzing the test scores and first-year grades for a total of 150,000 freshmen at 110 colleges, USA Today reported this morning. Another study, conducted by the University of California, reached a similar conclusion based on data from first-year students in that system.
Sam Agronow, coordinator of admissions research and evaluation at the University of California’s office of the president, told USA Today that while the SAT writing test was the single most important component of the SAT, high-school grades were still the best predictor of college performance. —Elizabeth F. Farrell
Kentucky College Board Said to Have Ignored Law in Hiring New Leader
Kentucky’s higher-education coordinating board violated state law when it hired its new president this month, the state’s attorney general ruled in a legal opinion issued on Thursday, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.
The attorney general, Jack Conway, a Democrat, issued the 12-page opinion after Kentucky’s governor, Steven L. Beshear, also a Democrat, asked him to determine whether the Council on Postsecondary Education had ignored legal requirements that it conduct a national search for a president with an established reputation and experience in postsecondary education.
The council named Brad Cowgill, who had been serving as interim president, as its permanent president. Previously he was budget director for Governor Beshear’s predecessor, Ernie Fletcher, a Republican.
After Mr. Beshear raised concerns about Mr. Cowgill’s appointment, the council’s chairman, John Turner, released a statement in which he defended the presidential-selection process. He said he believed it had complied with both the spirit and the letter of the law, adding that the council had conducted “a thorough and exhaustive national search” and had picked “a candidate who satisfied the qualifications sought.”
The previous president of the council, Thomas Layzell, weighed in on the dispute last week, sending a letter to the governor warning him that a continuing battle between the governor and the council could stall, or even reverse, progress Kentucky has made in improving higher education, the Courier-Journal, a Louisville newspaper, reported. —Sara Hebel
April 24, 2008
Another College Picks a Trustee as Interim President
The president of Simmons College, Susan C. Scrimshaw, is stepping down after two years on the job. She will be replaced, on an interim basis, by Helen Drinan, who heads the Boston college’s Board of Trustees, according to a news release issued today by Simmons. Ms. Drinan will serve a two-to-three-year term, a relatively long assignment for an interim president.
The announcement followed news this month that a trustee had been appointed interim chancellor of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. A trustee-turned-president is rare in higher education. While board members may be well prepared for the job, most institutions turn to administrators to fill interim presidencies.
Samuel Goldman, the new interim chief at Carbondale, is a former professor and administrator. Ms. Drinan, however, hails from business and has not worked in higher education. The health-care executive is an alumna and has been on Simmons’s board since 2003. —Paul Fain
Venezuelan Student Leader Wins $500,000 Award
A Venezuelan student leader who helped lead protests last year against the policies of Hugo Chávez’s leftist government has been awarded the Cato Institute’s $500,000 Milton Friedman Liberty Prize.
Yon Goicoechea, a 23-year-old law student at Catholic University in Caracas, helped to create a student opposition movement that organized vast protests last year, first against a government decision not to renew transmission rights for a popular opposition television station and later against proposals that would have greatly expanded the power of President Chávez and removed presidential term limits. The proposals were narrowly defeated in a referendum.
Government officials repeatedly accused the protesters of being tools of the United States meddling in Venezuelan affairs. The Venezuelan government has not commented on the award.
The student movement filled a vacuum in Venezuelan politics after the traditional political parties lost popular support and credibility following a series of political defeats to Mr. Chávez, first elected president in 1998. Student leaders say they do not favor or oppose Mr. Chávez’s government but are defending the nation’s democratic systems.
In announcing the prize, Edward Crane, president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank based in Washington, D.C., said that Mr. Goicoechea was “making an extraordinary contribution to liberty.”
Mr. Chávez has repeatedly clashed with the Bush administration, the Roman Catholic Church, and others who accuse him of amassing extraordinary powers and threatening Venezuela’s democractic institutions. The nation’s large public and private universities remain among the last bastions of anti-government sentiment, but student leaders have accused the government of trying to weaken the universities’ autonomy.
Mr. Goicoechea told local reporters that the prize was a “great backing” for the student movement and that he would use the award’s $500,000 prize to create a school teaching “leadership for liberty.”
“We want to create a school of political formation where they talk about public service, of overcoming poverty, of effective mechanisms for overcoming crime,” he said.
Mr. Goicoechea said he planned to finish his final year of law school and then was considering a political career. —Mike Ceaser
Where Particles Collide, Sexism Is Rampant, Study Finds
A study of postdoctoral researchers involved in a major particle-physics experiment reveals pervasive gender discrimination there, according to a physicist who formerly worked on the experiment at the Fermi National Acceleratory Laboratory, known as Fermilab.
The study, which was conducted by Sherry Towers, looked at the work output of 57 postdoctoral physicists associated with Fermilab’s DZero collaboration, an experiment that includes some 700 physicists around the world. Her review documented how many internal papers each postdoctoral researcher had written and compared that figure with the number of times that each was allowed by the collaboration to make presentations at academic conferences. Such presentations help advance the careers of young physicists.
Fermilab data suggest that female postdocs had to be three times as productive as male postdocs in order to be granted the opportunity to present work at academic conferences, according to Ms. Towers.
Ms. Towers is pursuing a master’s degree in statistics at Purdue University and has a statistical consulting service. She formerly worked on DZero at Fermilab as a postdoctoral researcher in particle physics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She left the field of physics in 2005 because, she says, her supervisor and Stony Brook engaged in gender discrimination against her following the birth of her second child. Ms. Towers is currently suing the university, as detailed in a 2005 article in The Chronicle.
An article about her new study appeared this week in Nature. —Richard Monastersky
For Student Borrowers, Chase Proves Elusive
Washington — Two months ago, as a sense of crisis descended upon the student-loan industry, JP Morgan Chase & Company stood up and said that it not only would continue to supply government-backed loans, but would do so at a discount.
“It sounds so self-serving,” a company spokesman, Thomas A. Kelly, said at the time, “but if you are doing business with a major bank doing student lending, they’re going to be there tomorrow.”
That was two months ago.
Last week the bank’s student-loan division, Chase Education Finance, announced that because of higher financing costs and lower federal subsidy rates, it would no longer offer government-backed loans at colleges with high-risk borrowers.
And today officials at Chase are telephoning the colleges that the bank is still willing to serve to tell them that the discounts it promised in February to maintain — reimbursing students for both the borrower origination fee and the default fee that are required under the federal program — will no longer be paid by Chase on the borrower’s behalf.
Chase provided about $3-billion in federally guaranteed student loans this academic year, the fourth-largest supplier in the government-subsidized program. Mr. Kelly said in February that Chase and other large banks could afford to stay in the program, and even offer discounts, at a time when other lenders were leaving because banks had their own customer deposits and therefore did not need to rely on securities or other forms of outside investment to finance their student lending.
Education Department officials, including the secretary, Margaret Spellings, have cited such assurances from Chase as evidence that the government-backed student-loan program should have enough willing participants this coming academic year.
Mr. Kelly said today, however, that he did not expect Chase to grow beyond the level of student lending it did this year.
“We’re still going to be there,” Mr. Kelly said today, “for as many people as we can afford to do.” —Paul Basken
Abstract Math Produces Tangible Learning, Study Finds
When it comes to teaching mathematical concepts, abstract formulas may be more effective than the familiar examples of speeding trains and tossed coins favored by algebra instructors, according to a study published today in Science magazine.
In the study, which was described in a paper titled “The Advantage of Abstract Examples in Learning Math,” researchers at Ohio State University divided 80 undergraduates into groups and taught a mathematical rule to one group using a combination of abstract symbols. The researchers taught the same principle to the remaining students using one or more “concrete” examples that involved measuring cups of liquid, slices of pizza, or canisters of tennis balls.
When asked later to play a game using the rule, the students who had learned the concept in abstract form were better able to apply their knowledge to the new situation than were their counterparts who had studied concrete examples.
While math teachers need not abandon real-life illustrations altogether, the paper’s authors conclude, the experiment’s results suggest that relying exclusively on concrete examples might limit students’ ability to transfer what they learn to other situations. —Paula Wasley
$250,000 Prize Awarded to Penn Professor, a Fierce Critic of Speech Codes
Alan Charles Kors, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania who has been a longtime scourge of political correctness, speech codes, and other issues in higher education, has been awarded a $250,000 prize by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The citation for the Bradley Prize, to be presented in June, recognizes Mr. Kors as both a scholar of European intellectual history and a defender of free speech.
Mr. Kors drew notice in 1998 as a co-author of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, a withering attack on “campus Stalinists” bent on enforcing left-wing views. He and his co-author, Harvey A. Silverglate, subsequently founded an organization dedicated to protecting what they described as victims of political correctness. The group, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, has since made a name for itself as an outspoken critic of campus speech codes and advocate for people said to have violated the codes. —Andrew Mytelka
Lawmakers Should Focus on Adult Students, Says Report With State-by-State Data
Washington — Colleges and universities are increasingly looking for ways to lure adult students to their campuses, believing that the education of older students may well hold the ticket to bolstering local and regional economies.
But lawmakers who set state and federal higher-education policies are still largely focused on the traditional educational path of 16-to-24-year-old students from high school to a college degree, according to a new report.
The report, “Adult Learning in Focus,” has compiled, for the first time, a wealth of national and state-by-state data about how states serve their adult learners. Produced by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, the report draws on data from various sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the GED Testing Service. It also provides state-by-state profiles of how adult learners fare in individual states.
“We felt it was time to actually gather some real data on how states are doing,” said Pamela Tate, the council’s president and chief executive, in announcing the release of the report today at the National Conference of State Legislatures’ spring meeting here.
For example, many states, Ms. Tate said, do not track how many of their GED recipients go on to postsecondary education. “How do you implement policy change if you don’t have any data to base it on?” she said.
The full report, as well as the state-by-state profiles and other related materials, will be available online in coming weeks at http://www.cael.org/adultlearninginfocus.htm. —Libby Sander
New Report Trumpets Value of Advanced Degrees
Universities may be labeled “ivory towers,” but many people find a master’s degree or a doctorate an important steppingstone to career advancement in the wider world as well. But how does all of that advanced education translate into the betterment of society at large? And, more important, do legislators, policy makers, and the average citizen know how much graduate education matters?
A new report released today by the Council of Graduate Schools argues that those advanced degrees not only make a tangible difference in people’s lives, but provide American society with a vital knowledge base, economic capital, and social cohesion.
The report, “Graduate Education and the Public Good,” cites knock-on effects from graduate education that extend past technological advances in medicine and other disciplines to include higher average salaries (which yield greater tax revenue) and replenishment of the nation’s teaching corps.
Furthermore, the report observes, “the new global competition for talent places increasing importance on maintaining a world-class graduate higher-education system.” —Richard Byrne
UC-Santa Cruz, New Home for the Dead Letter Society
Yet more evidence came out today that studying a rock band can be a legitimate academic pursuit.
Just a few months after the University of Massachusetts played host to a three-day conference on the legacy of the Grateful Dead, the University of California at Santa Cruz is announcing today that it has struck a deal to archive and house thousands of pieces of the band’s memorabilia, collected over three decades of touring.
The collection of photographs, letters, artwork, newspaper clippings, posters, and backstage passes will be blown safely home to the library at UC-Santa Cruz, just 75 miles south of the San Francisco streets where the Dead began its crawl to fame more than 40 years ago.
The items currently fill 2,000 square feet of a warehouse in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, and are valued in the millions of dollars. The band’s surviving members considered donating the trove to such places as Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, but settled on UC-Santa Cruz in part because it agreed to terms allowing the band continued access for future albums and other projects.
UC-Santa Cruz was the institution most “flexible in understanding our contractual needs,” Tim Jorstad, general manager and chief financial officer of Grateful Dead Productions, told The Wall Street Journal.
The university also was helped by the overall culture in and around UC-Santa Cruz, which offers a popular undergraduate course about the Grateful Dead’s music. “Santa Cruz seemed the coziest possible home for it,” one band member, Bob Weir, told The New York Times. —Paul Basken
April 23, 2008
Announcement: At Chronicle Forum, Daniel Pink to Discuss the Abilities College Graduates Will Need
Computer programmers, lawyers, and business people have often led the way in the Information Age, but the future belongs to a different kind of person, with a different mode of thinking, according to Daniel H. Pink, the best-selling author of A Whole New Mind: Moving From the Information Age to the Conceptual Age and Free Agent Nation.
Higher-education institutions, he argues, should be educating students in new ways to encourage six increasingly important abilities. Colleges should also be hiring faculty members and administrators with those abilities.
Mr. Pink will give the Welcome Address at The Chronicle’s Executive Leadership Forum, in June.
For the complete program and more information about registering for the forum at a special rate that expires on Monday, go to http://chronicle.com/leadershipforum/program.htm
Panel of Texas Higher-Education Board Turns Down Bid From Creationist Institute
A proposal by the Institute for Creation Research to offer online master’s degrees in science education was rejected today by a committee of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. The full board will vote on the proposal on Thursday. According to the Associated Press, it’s likely that the board will ratify the committee’s recommendation.
A lawyer for the institute argued that it was a matter of free speech and indicated that the institute may take legal action, according to The Dallas Morning News. The group’s mission, according to its Web site, is to provide “evidence of the Bible’s accuracy and authority through scientific research, educational programs, and media presentations, all conducted within a thoroughly biblical framework.” —Thomas Bartlett
Evergreen State College Suspends Its Chapter of Students for a Democratic Society
Evergreen State College has suspended its campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society after the group planned an antiwar folk-music performance there, in violation of the institution’s ban on concerts, The Olympian, a local newspaper, reported on Tuesday.
The college imposed the ban after a concert on the campus in February sparked a riot. Following a performance by the hip-hop duo Dead Prez, police officers arrested a student whom they suspected of assault, and other students reacted by confronting the officers and damaging two police cars.
“Our campus community is shocked and concerned by the violence,” Evergreen State said in a written statement at the time. The college later imposed a temporary ban on concerts in order to review its security procedures, The Olympian reported.
Students for a Democratic Society had planned two events for last month: a panel discussion on what it called police and government repression and the folk-music performance. Evergreen State canceled both, saying they were “wrapped up together,” according to the newspaper.