May 14, 2008
Scholar of Asian Art Is Found Dead in U.S. Detention Center
A university museum director and prominent scholar of Asian antiquities, who had traveled to the United States to attend a conference, was found dead of an apparent heart attack today in a federal detention center, the Associated Press reported.
Roxanna Brown, director of the Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum at Bangkok University, in Thailand, was arrested on Friday in Seattle, where she was scheduled to speak at the University of Washington. Ms. Brown, a U.S. citizen, was accused of wire fraud in connection with an antiquities smuggling case and had been awaiting transfer to Los Angeles to face charges there. During her detention she complained of being ill and missed a court date.
The charges against Ms. Brown stemmed from a federal investigation of two Los Angeles art dealers who were suspected of looting Southeast Asian artifacts. Authorities said they had found her electronic signature on appraisal forms listing inflated values for antiquities.
Bangkok University officials denied that they or Ms. Brown had any involvement in looting antiquities, according to the Bangkok Post. “To us, she has always been a dedicated scholar with a passion for ancient ceramics,” said Mathana Santiwat, the university’s president. —Martha Ann Overland
President Who Left Texas Tech Lands Top Job at San Jose State
Jon S. Whitmore, who stunned faculty members and students at Texas Tech University in February when he announced his resignation from that institution, has landed a new job as the leader of San Jose State University.
His appointment at San Jose, announced by the California State University system today, is effective August 1. He will succeed Don W. Kassing, who is retiring.
Mr. Whitmore has been popular with faculty members at Texas Tech, but he has taken some heat this year after the university’s accreditor put it on probation in December. He also has hinted that he was uncomfortable with leading a plan to expand the university’s enrollment by 42 percent, to 40,000, by 2020. Some faculty members have questioned the expansion plan, but the chancellor who oversees Texas Tech and two other institutions believes it is necessary. —Charles Huckabee
Key Higher-Education Official Is Leaving Education Department
Washington — Diane Auer Jones announced her resignation today as the U.S. Education Department’s assistant secretary for postsecondary education, one year after taking the job.
“She did let her senior staff know today that she will be leaving,” said Samara Yudof, a department spokeswoman. Ms. Yudof said she had no immediate details on the reasons for Ms. Jones’s departure.
Ms. Jones was nominated by President Bush in May 2007. She had served as a science-policy adviser in the White House, and as director for government affairs at Princeton University. She also served as a program director at the National Science Foundation and as an associate professor at the Community College of Baltimore County.
That combination of experiences made her valued in the college community, said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education.
“Diane brought enormous skill and knowledge to the assistant-secretary position,” Mr. Hartle said, citing her efforts to draft regulations governing loan and grant programs for students, and to oversee their implementation. Her departure “is disappointing but not totally surprising,” given that appointed government officials often seek new career opportunities toward the end of an administration, he said. —Paul Basken
State Budgets for Higher Education Look Up in California and New Jersey
State budgets in two prominent states that promised a grim fiscal year for higher education just a few months ago have taken a turn for the better.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California announced today a new budget plan with a smaller fiscal shortfall of $15-billion and a proposal to borrow that amount against future state-lottery profits, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Earlier this month the governor, a Republican, was warning of a $20-billion budget gap.
Borrowing against lottery proceeds, a plan that would have to be approved by voters in November to go into effect, could allow the Golden State to avoid some of the painful budget cuts that the governor had proposed in January, including a 10-percent reduction in higher-education spending. The California State University system issued a news release saying that the revised plan would restore nearly $98-million to its budget for next year, but $288-million in cuts were still possible.
In New Jersey, lawmakers got welcome news that the state had collected $533-million more in tax revenue in 2007 than anticipated, according to The New York Times. Gov. Jon Corzine, a Democrat, recommended earlier this year that higher education take only a 3.5-percent budget cut, and he has suggested that the latest infusion of tax dollars be doled out in aid to towns and state parks — areas that were slated for more-severe cuts under his budget proposal.
The news of state spending on higher education was not uniformly upbeat, however. The University of Florida’s Board of Trustees today approved $47-million in budget cuts that will reduce enrollment by 1,000 students a year for four years and cut more than 400 staff and faculty members, reported the Associated Press. The Florida Legislature cut higher-education funds by 6 percent this month. —Eric Kelderman
Chronicle Reporter Honored for Coverage of Minority Issues
Peter Schmidt, a senior writer at The Chronicle, has received a national award for his coverage of minority issues. Lincoln University, a historically black college in Missouri, confers the Unity Awards in Media annually for coverage of issues affecting members of minority groups and people with disabilities. Mr. Schmidt won the Unity Award for education reporting for a series of articles on affirmative action in higher education in 2006:
- “The Bush White House Picks Its Civil-Rights Fights Carefully” (5/19/2006)
- “A Referendum on Race Preferences Divides Michigan” (10/27/2006)
- “U. of Michigan Is Accused of Continued Discrimination in Admissions” (10/27/2006)
- “ETS Accused of Squelching New Approach on Racial Bias” (11/10/2006)
- “Michigan Overwhelmingly Adopts Ban on Affirmative-Action Preferences” (11/17/2006)
Sallie Mae Borrowers Snagged by Error in Reports to Credit Bureaus
Washington — As many as one million customers of Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student-loan company, may be facing problems with their credit ratings after a computer error that the company has worked to fix.
Sallie Mae says it mistakenly reported to credit bureaus that thousands of its customers were delinquent in paying back their loans. That caused their credit scores to drop by 100 points or more, Bankrate.com reported today.
Sallie Mae says the error occurred last Thursday, when it reported extended repayment plans as meaning the borrower was making a partial payment. That report led Equifax, one of the three national credit-reporting agencies, to code the accounts as delinquent, Sallie Mae spokesmen said.
A Sallie Mae spokesman said the error had affected less than 10 percent of its 10 million borrowers. All affected credit reports were corrected by late Tuesday, and Sallie Mae will take corrective steps, including supplying a credit-reference letter to anyone who needs help in proving the source of the mistake. —Paul Basken
New Ads Encourage High-School Students to Sign Up for Tough Courses
A series of public-service announcements aimed at encouraging low-income high-school students to sign up for challenging courses began airing today, courtesy of the Advertising Council, the Lumina Foundation for Education, and the American Council on Education.
The advertisements, which target students who would be the first in their families to attend college, are part of a multimedia campaign designed to raise public awareness of the steps required to prepare for college. The ads feature warrior characters personifying algebra II, biology, and foreign languages. A companion Web site has “biographies” of the warriors as well as videos that take a humorous look at the subject areas. Both the ads and the videos will be featured on YouTube.
The campaign, dubbed KnowHow2Go, began in January 2007. In its first year, donated media support totaled $69.6-million, ranking KnowHow2Go among the Ad Council’s top-supported campaigns. —Kelly Field
College-Preparatory Programs Can Learn From Technical Education, Report Says
High schools could better prepare many students for college and careers by adopting the applied teaching strategies used by career- and technical-education programs, according to a new report from the Southern Regional Education Board.
The report says many students would have an easier time learning academic skills if their teachers applied two strategies commonly used by good career and technical programs: project-based learning and problem solving. Because a growing number of technical jobs require advanced academic skills, career- and technical-education programs would benefit from changes in teaching that kept students more engaged in their regular academic classes.
Among its recommendations, the report urges states to create panels composed of high-school and college educators and employers in high-demand fields. Their charge would be to design high-school courses that blended academic and technical content and to encourage students to pursue specialized career preparation after they graduate. —Peter Schmidt
Grand Canyon U. Announces $230-Million Public Offering of Stock
Grand Canyon Education Inc., the privately held parent company of Grand Canyon University, plans to go public with an initial public offering of $230-million in stock, according to a filing on Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In a memorandum to employees, Brent Richardson, the company’s chief executive officer, said the university would become a publicly traded entity on the Nasdaq stock market. Backers of the IPO include Credit Suisse and Merrill Lynch.
A group of investors purchased the financially struggling Grand Canyon University in 2004, creating the first for-profit Christian college. Since then, enrollment has increased by 10,000, most of them online, and the university’s finances have stabilized, the Phoenix Business Journal reported. —Hurley Goodall
Mr. Mayor Is a Freshman
John Tyler Hammons could have spent his first year of college playing around on Facebook, like everybody else. Instead, he decided to run for office.
On Tuesday, Mr. Hammons, a freshman at the University of Oklahoma, was elected mayor of Muskogee, a city of 38,000 in the northeastern part of the state. Mr. Hammons, 19, won 70 percent of the vote over his opponent, according to the Associated Press.
“The public placing their trust in me is the greatest, humbling, and most awesome experience I’ve ever had in my life,” said Mr. Hammons, a native of Muskogee.
A student’s winning election as mayor is not unprecedented in recent years. But alas, the University of Oklahoma, in Norman, may not get to brag about him for long: Mr. Hammons said he expected to transfer to a college closer to Muskogee. —Eric Hoover
May 13, 2008
Proposal Would Restrict Certain Gifts to Colleges That Hoard Endowments
Washington — In recent weeks, all sorts of rumors have been flying around about Congressional proposals that would penalize college endowments that hoard their assets.
The latest comes from Rep. Peter F. Welch, a Democrat of Vermont, who today proposed restricting IRA rollover contributions to colleges that don’t use their endowments to help low- and middle-income students pay for college.
In a letter to the House Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Welch said wealthy colleges were among the biggest beneficiaries of those IRA distributions and should not be eligible to receive them unless they started using their endowments “specifically for containing college costs” for needy students. He urged the Ways and Means Committee to modify the Internal Revenue code as part of its drafting of a tax bill under consideration.
Mr. Welch has previously proposed requiring colleges to spend at least 5 percent of their endowments every year, and to report annually on how much of their endowments had been spent. The latter proposal is part of the House’s legislation to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. —Brad Wolverton
Tension Over Title IX Shows Itself in Lawsuits
A series of lawsuits filed in California and other states over the past three years reflects “ongoing tension” over Title IX, according to a package of articles about the key federal gender-equity law appearing in USA Today.
Among the many cases highlighted in the main article are the lawsuits of two coaches and an administrator at California State University at Fresno who sued that university under Title IX, alleging that the institution retaliated against them because they blew the whistle on gender inequities. —Libby Sander
U. of Colorado at Boulder Wants to Hire 'Professor of Conservative Thought'
The chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder hopes to raise $9-million to endow a faculty chair for a professor of conservative thought and policy.
According to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, the chancellor, G.P. (Bud) Peterson, believes the new chair would help create “intellectual diversity” on the campus.
Activists like David Horowitz have been pushing that concept for years, amid complaints that the professoriate is full of liberals. But, in the article, Mr. Horowitz is quoted as saying that creating such an endowed chair might simply establish a place on the campus for a token right-winger. And as Mr. Peterson notes, the professor might not even be a genuine conservative, just a scholar of the movement.
Boulder has long had a reputation as a hotbed of liberal activism. Last year the university’s regents voted to fire Ward Churchill, an ethnic-studies professor who six years earlier said that businessmen killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks were legitimate targets because they were “little Eichmanns.” —Robin Wilson
N.C. Community Colleges Will Not Admit Illegal Immigrants After All
The tug of war over what to do with illegal immigrants who seek to attend community colleges in North Carolina continues, as the state’s 58-college system announced today that it would no longer admit students who had entered the country illegally.
“We asked the attorney general’s office for clarification of our present policy and will abide by their advice,” said the system’s president, R. Scott Ralls, in a written statement announcing the decision.
Last week federal immigration officials released a statement saying that “it is left for the school to decide whether or not to enroll” undocumented students. The community-college system is now heeding the advice of the state attorney general, Roy A. Cooper III, a Democrat. His office has asked the system to revert to a directive, issued in December 2001, that barred illegal immigrants from working toward a degree.
But the issue may not be dead yet. North Carolina’s governor, Michael F. Easley, also a Democrat, has challenged the attorney general’s opinion, The News & Observer reported today. Last week Governor Easley called on community colleges to continue admitting illegal immigrants who meet eligibility requirements.
The community-college system estimated that just 112 out of more than 297,000 degree-seeking students are illegal immigrants. Those students will be allowed to complete their degree programs at out-of-state tuition rates. —JJ Hermes
Colorado Set to Fill Hole in Higher-Education Construction
Gov. Bill Ritter of Colorado stood in front of an infamous hole in the ground at the Auraria Higher Education Center on Monday to sign a bill giving colleges at least $200-million to help pay for a dozen construction projects across the state, the Cherry Creek News reported.
The hole is the site of a planned science building, where construction was briefly put on hold in March after the legislature yanked $37.5-million for the project. Lawmakers subsequently reversed course and passed a measure to raise oil and gas taxes to pay for that building as well as 11 more.
The construction money comes on top of a 9-percent increase that Colorado lawmakers doled out to higher education from the state’s general fund in next year’s budget. Governor Ritter, a Democrat, also is backing a ballot measure to raise state scholarship funds by an estimated $120-million. —Eric Kelderman
Pakistan Announces Big Increase in Education Budget
Pakistan’s prime minister, Syed Yousuf Raza Gillani, announced on Monday that the government would increase its education budget to 4 percent of the gross national product over the next three years, with about 30 percent of the money going toward higher education, according to a local news report.
In recent years, Pakistan has put a lot of money and effort into improving its higher-education system, although even now higher education accounts for less than 1 percent of the gross national product.
The reforms have been controversial, however, with critics saying that they have led to corruption, plagiarism, and favoritism. At the heart of the criticism has been the national Higher Education Commission, formed by President Pervez Musharraf in 2002 to regulate public universities.
In a separate news report, another local newspaper quoted an unnamed Ministry of Education official as saying that control of the commission would be handed over to the education ministry, rather than report directly to the president.
Ahsan Iqbal, the education minister, has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Musharraf and believes that putting the commission directly under the education ministry would deal with some of those problems. —Shailaja Neelakantan
May 12, 2008
State Governments Pony Up a Half-Billion Dollars for Specific Research
State-government agencies commissioned just over $500-million in 2006 for specific research and development projects at universities, the National Science Foundation reported in its first such survey in more than a decade.
The NSF contacted 423 state agencies nationwide, of which 209 reported any such expenditures for academic research. The result is a finer-grain analysis than the NSF’s annual survey of universities about their research spending from various financing sources, including state governments. The annual survey covers a broad range of state support, including nonspecific appropriations for the operations of university laboratories and agricultural research stations. The spending totaled $3-billion in the 2006 fiscal year, the most recent reported by the NSF.
The specifically commissioned research described in the new report is a subset of that total, and so the new survey offers “a more complete and consistent accounting of states’ role in supporting R&D” than the annual survey alone, said John E. Jankowski, director of the NSF’s program on R&D statistics and the author of the new report.
Of the 209 agencies reporting any commissioned expenditures for academic R&D, the most common were responsible for natural resources (52 agencies), transportation (48), agriculture (37), health (22), and the environment (19). The leading states were Pennsylvania ($68.7-million), New York ($57.4-million), California ($57.2-million), Michigan ($37.9-million), and Ohio ($34-million). Spending by those states accounted for about half the total.
At the bottom of the list were New Mexico ($65,000), Rhode Island ($150,000), Mississippi ($454,000), Vermont ($610,000), and Alaska ($621,000). The NSF plans to repeat the survey for the 2007 fiscal year, Mr. Jankowski said. —Jeffrey Brainard
Roman Catholic College Disinvites Pro-Choice Speaker
A South Dakota state senator was supposed to deliver the commencement address at Presentation College on Saturday. But, at the last minute, the Roman Catholic college withdrew its invitation because of the senator’s pro-choice views on abortion.
According to The Aberdeen News, a South Dakota newspaper, Sen. Nancy Turbak Berry was told the decision stemmed from her failure to share the Vatican’s stance that abortion should be illegal. Ms. Berry said she considers abortion a “very personal” decision.
The college replaced her with a much-safer choice: the bishop of the Sioux Falls Catholic Diocese. That move was in keeping with a trend, as reported today in The Boston Globe, of Catholic colleges’ steering clear of on-campus speakers with un-Catholic views, often under pressure from outside groups. —Thomas Bartlett
U.S. Labels MIT Students as 'Security Threats' and Denies Clearance at Ports
Eight graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been denied a security clearance by the Department of Homeland Security, which has labeled two of the students “security threats.”
The Tech, the student newspaper at MIT, reports that the eight students, who are affiliated with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, were denied the new Transportation Worker Identification Credential, a clearance that allows people to more easily board and leave ships at American ports. When Woods Hole appealed the decision on their behalf, at least two of the students — from Britain and from Germany — were declared a threat, the newspaper reports.
James A. Yoder, dean at Woods Hole, said the lack of a credential could make it more difficult for the students working on its three research ships.
It is unclear, however, why the students, who were required to submit their fingerprints and copies of their passports, were declared threats. According to the legal code governing the program, a person can be deemed a threat if he or she does not have the right kind of visa. Student visas are not explicitly listed as one of the kinds the government may accept for the program, although the rules allow the Department of Homeland Security some leeway, The Tech reports. Other oceanographic institutions have not tried to get credentials for all staff members and students, and so have not encountered the same problem.
Mr. Yoder said Woods Hole would continue to appeal the decision. “We’re a long way from giving up,” he said. —Karin Fischer
NSF's Waterman Award Goes to Mathematics Researcher
Terence Tao, a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the 2008 recipient of the Alan T. Waterman Award, the National Science Foundation announced on Friday.
Mr. Tao was recognized for his mathematical research, which includes partial differential equations, number theory, and harmonic analysis, among other areas. The Waterman award recognizes a young researcher who is no more than 35 years old or seven years beyond receiving a doctorate, in any field of science or engineering supported by the foundation. In addition to a medal, Mr. Tao will receive a grant of $500,000, to be distributed over a three-year period, for further research.
Mr. Tao has also been recognized for his mathematical research both as a recipient of the prestigious Fields Medal and as a MacArthur Fellow in 2006. —Hurley Goodall
Pennsylvania's Higher-Education System Selects New Leader
John C. Cavanaugh, president of the University of West Florida, will become the new leader of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, which includes 14 state-owned universities, the system’s board announced today.
Mr. Cavanaugh, who has led the University of West Florida since 2002, will take over as chancellor of the Pennsylvania system on July 1.
In 2006 he and his wife wrote an opinion piece for The Chronicle in which they argued that American colleges and universities, facing pressures to reduce costs, would be forced to face the same reality of global competition that American businesses had already met. And that, they argued, could lead to an “extremely dangerous” outcome: the franchising of postsecondary education overseas, which could blur the American brand of education and cause the United States to lose its competitive edge. —Sara Hebel
University Classes Remain Canceled Across Lebanon
Classes will remain canceled at most Lebanese universities on Tuesday, as fighting between pro- and anti-government forces continued sporadically outside Beirut today and the country’s future, disrupted by days of violence last week, remained mired in uncertainty.
On the Web site of the Lebanese American University, President Joseph G. Jabbra announced that the campus would be open on Tuesday although there would be no classes. Faculty and staff members were encouraged to “use their judgment before coming to work, taking into consideration road conditions and their personal safety,” Mr. Jabbra wrote.
Although most of the fighting ended in Beirut proper on Saturday, when Hezbollah and its anti-government allies pulled their gunmen off the streets, the occasional firefight has continued in the neighborhood directly adjacent to the Lebanese American University, as recently as Sunday night.
The university reassured parents and students that, even though the deteriorating security situation meant most students had been unable to attend classes since last Wednesday, students would be able to make up classes and complete the semester.
“Those students who will fulfill the requirements for graduation can graduate on time, and the others can complete successfully the semester’s coursework and move on to the next year in their advancement toward graduation,” Mr. Jabbra wrote.
The American University of Beirut posted a notice on its Web site this afternoon announcing that most classes would be canceled on Tuesday, but faculty and staff members were expected to report to work.
“As on previous similar occasions,” the message stated, “any day of absence will be charged towards days of regular vacation to be deducted from the employee’s earned annual leave.” —Andrew Mills
New Details of 'Minerva' Project Emerge, as Social Scientists Weigh Pentagon Ties
The Department of Defense hopes to finance the earliest projects in the fledgling social-science program known as the Minerva Consortium by the end of 2008, a Pentagon official told a group of writers last week.
In a roundtable discussion with military-oriented bloggers, Thomas G. Mahnken, deputy assistant secretary for policy planning, offered only sketchy details about the program, which was announced last month in a speech by Robert M. Gates, the secretary of defense. The program will offer grants to groups of universities to investigate topics including “religious and ideological studies” and the Chinese military.
During last week’s roundtable, Mr. Mahnken said the program’s budget would be relatively modest: “millions of dollars,” but not tens of millions.
Asked why the Pentagon was turning to civilian universities for the projects, rather than working with its own research centers and think tanks, Mr. Mahnken said that the government ought to be able to draw on university expertise in the social sciences, just as it does in physics and engineering.
Mr. Mahnken acknowledged that some social scientists had greeted the program with skepticism, but said that the university presidents he had contacted were enthusiastic. “Many of these folks are people for whom this is uncontroversial,” he said. “I mean, they come from the physical sciences, they come from engineering, and government funding is part of the way they do business.”
Among the most visible skeptics are scholars in the informal group known as the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which issued a statement last month criticizing the Minerva proposal. That statement is part of a broader debate about relations between anthropologists and the military, much of which has centered on the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System.
At last year’s annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, its members passed a resolution that supported a ban on secrecy in ethnographic research. The association’s president, Setha M. Low, said in an interview last week that the group’s ethics committee and executive board were crafting language for the ban. Depending on how it is worded, the new rule might effectively forbid the association’s members to take part in the Human Terrain program and certain other military projects. (In a separate controversy, the ban might also forbid much of the work that private-sector anthropologists do for corporate clients.)
Ms. Low, a professor of environmental psychology at the City University of New York, said that she hoped to release a draft rule by September 15 that would be debated at the association’s annual meeting two months later. The rule will be put before the group’s members in an e-mail ballot before it is made final. —David Glenn
UMass Under Renewed Pressure to Revoke Mugabe's Honorary Degree
Robert G. Mugabe’s honorary degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is under renewed threat. Mr. Mugabe, the autocrat clinging to power in Zimbabwe, received the honor in 1986, when he was still fairly well regarded as a leader of the country’s struggle for independence and black-majority rule.
A generation later, Mr. Mugabe is an international pariah, his country is in economic ruins, human-rights abuses by his government are legion, and his regime is trying by various means to thwart the apparent victory, in elections this spring, of the opposition party.
Last year UMass trustees rebuked Mr. Mugabe but declined to revoke his degree, saying that they had no procedure for rescinding such an honor. Now, according to today’s Boston Globe, a leading state lawmaker has reiterated a call for the degree to be revoked.
In a letter dated last Friday, the lawmaker, Rep. Kevin J. Murphy, said he planned to bring up the matter at the UMass board’s meeting in June. And the Globe quoted a UMass spokesman as saying that the lack of a precedent may no longer be an obstacle to board action.
The University of Edinburgh revoked its honorary degree to Mr. Mugabe last year. —Andrew Mytelka
May 10, 2008
N.C. Community Colleges May Admit Illegal Immigrants, Federal Agency Says
After two days of confusion over whether North Carolina’s 58 community colleges may admit illegal immigrants, federal officials cleared the air somewhat on Friday, stating that “it is left for the school to decide whether or not to enroll” those students, The News & Observer reported today.
In a statement released by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the officials said, “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not require any school to determine a student’s status.” The statement, issued at the request of the newspaper, noted that illegal immigrants were subject to being prosecuted and deported. But the statement said colleges were not required to report such students unless they had violated the terms of their student visas under the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System.
Earlier this week, a lawyer in the North Carolina attorney general’s office issued a letter advising the colleges to drop their policy of admitting all illegal immigrants who meet the institutions’ other eligibility criteria. The lawyer said the policy appeared to conflict with federal law.
The letter, which said admission should be limited to students who meet standards outlined in federal law, contradicted a community-college policy based on a 1997 opinion by the state’s attorney general at the time — Michael F. Easley, a Democrat who is now governor. Governor Easley said this week that the colleges should continue enrolling illegal immigrants while any confusion over federal law was sorted out.
In a short statement on Friday, the state attorney general’s office said that its advisory letter earlier in the week had told colleges to “rely on the Department of Homeland Security for guidance,” The News & Observer reported.
Also on Friday, community-college officials released a new estimate of how many illegal immigrants were enrolled in the system: 112 out of 297,000 degree-seeking students. —Andrew Mytelka
Robert Bork and Yale Club Settle $1-Million Lawsuit Out of Court
Robert H. Bork, the rejected Supreme Court nominee and longtime scourge of liberals, has settled his $1-million lawsuit against the Yale Club of New York City, where he tripped, fell, and hurt himself while stepping onto a dais in 2006.
Mr. Bork’s lawsuit, filed last year, accused the club of “wanton, willful, and reckless disregard for the safety of its guests,” and blamed it for the “excruciating pain” he has suffered since the accident and subsequent surgery.
According to the Associated Press, the terms of the settlement are secret, so it’s not clear if Mr. Bork, who is 81, won justice or the $1-million he sought.
One thing’s for sure, however. The settlement keeps the case out of court, and spares the litigants any further unwelcome moments in the spotlight. —Andrew Mytelka
May 9, 2008
Chairman of West Virginia U. Board Quits Post but Will Not Leave Board
Stephen P. Goodwin, chairman of West Virginia University’s Board of Governors, announced today that he would step down from its top position in July, the Associated Press reported. However, he said he would not leave the board before his term ends, in 2010.
Mr. Goodwin has close ties to the university’s embattled president, Michael S. Garrison. And Mr. Goodwin himself has come under fire as part of the wide-reaching controversy over the university’s awarding of an unearned degree to the daughter of West Virginia’s governor. He acknowledged that his decision to cede the leadership role was related to the uproar over the degree, which led two top administrators to resign last week.
“I don’t anticipate it will satisfy my critics,” Mr. Goodwin told the AP. “I just don’t want it to be the story. I want to take it out of the equation.”
Mr. Goodwin’s announcement came four days after the university’s Faculty Senate voted overwhelmingly to call for Mr. Garrison’s resignation. And it came on the same day that The Chronicle reported that Mr. Garrison and other university officials were considering appointing the governor’s daughter, Heather M. Bresch, to key advisory committees at roughly the same time she was awarded the unearned degree.
Mr. Goodwin has been a staunch supporter of Mr. Garrison. But it is unclear if his departure as chairman will harm Mr. Garrison, who appears to have the backing of the rest of the board. —Paul Fain
Universities in Lebanon Close Because of Fighting
All universities in Lebanon were ordered to cancel classes today by the Ministry of Higher Education, following an outbreak of fighting in Beirut on Thursday between Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group, and Sunni government forces.
Among the institutions that suspended classes are the American University of Beirut, Lebanese American University, Lebanese University, and Beirut Arab University.
LAU, which posted a brief statement on its Web site, also canceled entrance exams to be held on Saturday.
Ada Porter, AUB’s communications director in New York, said in an e-mail message that most people seemed to be staying home until the situation changes. But many people are leaving Beirut for safer cities around the country, and others are trying to leave Lebanon altogether, she said.
Beirut was paralyzed by strikes earlier this week. Tensions escalated after Hezbollah said that a government threat to shut down its private telephone network was an act of war. Fighting broke out on Thursday, but had calmed down by this morning, reported The New York Times. —Beth McMurtrie and Andrew Mills
Social Scientist in Army's 'Human Terrain' Program Dies in Afghanistan
Michael V. Bhatia, a graduate student in political science who was serving as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain program, died on Wednesday in Afghanistan.
Mr. Bhatia graduated from Brown University in 1999 and was pursuing a doctorate in political science and international relations at the University of Oxford. Since late last year, he had been working with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division as part of the Human Terrain program, a controversial effort in which scholars advise military personnel about local social structures.
The program has prompted widespread criticism, but Mr. Bhatia strongly supported it, according to a memorial notice that was posted on Thursday by Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies.
The institute quoted a November 2007 letter in which Mr. Bhatia wrote, “The program has a real chance of reducing both the Afghan and American lives lost, as well as ensuring that the US/NATO/ISAF strategy becomes better attuned to the population’s concerns, views, criticisms, and interests and better supports the Government of Afghanistan.”
The Watson Institute’s notice does not describe the circumstances of Mr. Bhatia’s death, but an e-mail message circulated on Thursday said that he had been killed by a roadside bomb near Khost, an eastern city near the Pakistan border, perhaps in an incident reported by the Voice of America. Two NATO soldiers died in that same attack.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Defense declined to comment on Thursday, citing a policy that forbids public discussion of casualties until at least 24 hours after the next of kin have been notified.
After graduating from Brown, Mr. Bhatia worked for several nongovernmental organizations and conducted research in East Timor and Kosovo. He was an author of two books, one of which was published just last month.
In a 2004 paper, Mr. Bhatia and two colleagues criticized the management of the NATO-led intervention in Afghanistan, arguing that U.S. and NATO troops relied too heavily on local militias and warlords and had done too little to help ordinary citizens feel secure. —David Glenn
May 8, 2008
Keep Admitting Immigrants, Governor Tells N.C. Community Colleges
A day after the state attorney general’s office advised North Carolina community colleges to drop their policy of admitting illegal immigrants who meet other eligibility criteria, the state’s governor is urging colleges to continue admitting immigrants, according to The News & Observer.
The earlier advice, in a letter to the system’s general counsel, suggested that the policy conflicted with federal law, but Gov. Michael F. Easley, a Democrat, said in a written statement today that federal law on the issue was not settled. He added that he was asking the attorney general to seek clarification from Washington on whether illegal immigrants were eligible to attend community colleges. —Charles Huckabee
Budget Crisis Prompts Berkeley to Halve Its Offerings in East Asian Studies
The California budget crisis has taken a toll on the University of California at Berkeley’s department of East Asian languages and cultures, which has announced that this fall it will eliminate classes for 1,500 students to make up for an unexpected financial shortfall.
The cuts are a response to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed state budget, which would reduce spending on Berkeley by $30-million to $40-million, the Daily Californian reported. The university has asked several academic departments to make cuts to courses and faculty members to close the gap, but hardest hit will be departments that employ many adjunct lecturers and graduate-student instructors.
As a result, the East Asian department, which expects to lose $300,000 in support, will cut 40 percent of its courses in Japanese, 54 percent of those in Chinese, and 66 percent of those in Korean. It will also not renew contracts for 13 lecturers. According to a notice on its Web site, the department will restrict enrollment in its courses to students in the College of Letters & Science.
The English department, which faces a $400,000 cut, has appealed to faculty members with endowed chairs to donate a portion of their private research grants to the department.
Berkeley students have organized an afternoon rally today to protest cuts in the East Asian language programs. An online petition asking university administrators to reconsider the cuts and to provide emergency funds for East Asian languages has collected 900 signatures so far. —Paula Wasley
Congressional Panel Considers Call for More Female Science Professors
Washington — For women contemplating careers as science professors, the numbers are daunting. More than half of the bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering these days go to women, but they run into a high hurdle when it comes to securing academic jobs. Fewer than one in three science and engineering professors are female, and the numbers for full professors drop to one in five. So Congress held a hearing today to consider how to raise those odds.
A draft bill introduced by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat, would promote the use of workshops “to increase awareness of implicit gender bias in grant review, hiring, tenure, promotion, and selection for other honors based on merit,” according to a news release issued by the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Research and Science Education. The committee has not yet released the proposed legislation, and the details of such workshops remain unclear. The workshops would be based, at least partly, on ones organized by academic chemists and by the American Physical Society, which have in the past two years convened gatherings of federal officials and the chairs of top university departments.
The legislation, titled “Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Act of 2008,” would also seek to gather better demographic data from federal grant-making agencies. But that may be a difficult endeavor. Lynda T. Carlson, director of the division of science-resource statistics at the National Science Foundation, told committee members that scientists who receive grants “are not, nor can they be, required to provide demographic information because of the Privacy Act.” Many scientists who win grants do not indicate the race and gender of the people working under their grants, she said. “NSF cannot support the proposed legislation as its requirements will be excessive as they exceed current data-collection capabilities,” according to a statement submitted by Ms. Carlson.
Although the hearing was devoted to the issue of female academic scientists, the witness list contained no practicing scientists, male or female. The lone academic was Donna K. Ginther, an associate professor of economics at the University of Kansas, who has studied gender differences in academic science. In her statement, she endorsed the idea of gender-bias workshops for academics and grant reviewers, but she cautioned that the sessions should be tested for effectiveness. While past workshops have focused on department chairs, Ms. Ginther said that it would be important to reach principal investigators who oversee postdoctoral fellows. Her data indicate that most women leave academic science during the postdoctoral years.
The best way Congress could help women in academic science, she said, would be to improve their access to child care. She proposed allowing universities to support child-care facilities with the indirect costs that they take from research grants made to faculty members.
At today’s hearing, Congress itself inadvertently showed how far the nation has to go in promoting the success of women in academe. Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers of Michigan, the top Republican on the subcommittee, said in a statement that “effective institutional change must be systemic since bias may hide behind even the simplest language used in recommendation letters.”
His Republican colleague Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett of Maryland demonstrated the power of language while smiling at the trio of female Ph.D.’s who were testifying. Mr. Bartlett hailed them as “effective representatives,” but then proceeded to call them “three very attractive women.” —Richard Monastersky
New Study on College-Going Rates Gives Mom Something Else to Worry About
Here’s a novel line for a Mother’s Day card: “Thanks, Mom, for loving me so much I never earned a college degree.”
Implausible as it might seem, a new study suggests that there might be some truth to such a sentiment. Based on the survey responses of more than 13,800 young Texans polled during their senior year of high school and then again a year later, the study concludes that seniors who reported having good relationships with their mothers and fathers were actually less likely than others to enroll in a four-year college.
Yep, it’s true: Parents just can’t win.
One reason such findings are counterintuitive is that a large body of other research shows that children who have good relationships with their parents do better at school. The new study — by Ruth N. López Turley, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Matthew Desmond, a doctoral student in the department — reached the same conclusion, finding that students who reported getting along well with the folks generally reported having better grades and higher class rankings than their peers did.
How, then, does a strong parent-child relationship hurt college-going prospects? It makes a high-school senior substantially more likely to express a strong desire to live at home during college. And those seniors who said it was important to them to live at home after high school were more than 40 percent less likely to enroll in a four-year college than their peers were.
The study found that many other traits — including socioeconomic disadvantage, being foreign-born, or not having degree aspirations — increased the likelihood that a young person would not want to leave the nest right after high school. Above and beyond the effects of such factors, Hispanic students were more than twice as likely as white students to report that it was important for them to stay home, suggesting that culture also plays an important role.
But, after using regression analysis to separate out the other possible factors, the researchers found that the unwillingness to leave home that comes from having good relationships with the parents has a negative-enough influence on college-going to cancel out the positive influence derived from the higher academic performance associated with such family relations.
In a paper summarizing their findings and submitted to the American Sociological Review, Ms. Turley and Mr. Desmond say: “Through our research, a paradox has come to light: Strong family ties, considered vital to a child’s success in school, can serve as an impediment to a child’s educational attainment. Parents who strive to develop an encouraging and communicative relationship with their children might produce a high-school honors student but not a four-year college graduate.” —Peter Schmidt
New Chancellor Named at U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced this afternoon that Holden Thorpe, dean of its College of Arts and Sciences, will be its new chancellor, according to a report in The News & Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh, N.C.
Mr. Thorpe, 43, is not only a North Carolina native but also an alumnus of the Chapel Hill campus. He has climbed the ranks there, beginning as an assistant professor of chemistry in 1993 and becoming chairman of the chemistry department before being named dean last summer. If Mr. Thorpe is appointed, he would succeed James C. Moeser, who announced last fall that he would step down at the end of this academic year. —Eric Kelderman
Michigan Supreme Court Upholds Ban on Same-Sex Benefits
The Michigan Supreme Court has upheld a lower-court ruling that Michigan’s public universities and other government agencies may not extend employee benefits to a worker’s same-sex partner.
The Supreme Court, in a 5-to-2 decision released on Wednesday, ruled that Michigan’s constitutional ban on gay marriage also covers employee benefits. Recognition of domestic partnerships is considered no different than marriage, the court said.
It’s unclear what effect the ruling may have on Michigan’s state employees because many public agencies have changed their benefits policies to include unmarried individuals living together but not legally related, the Detroit Free Press reported today. —Hurley Goodall
South Asia's First Regional University Hires a Leader
New Delhi — India will shoulder the initial cost of at least 80 million rupees, or about $2-million, to build South Asia’s first regional university, said the newly appointed chief executive of the institution, which is likely to open in 2010.
“Two years is the bare minimum we need, so we are certainly being called upon to work at high speed,” said G.S. Chadha, of the South Asian University.
Mr. Chadha, a former vice chancellor of New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, is a well-known economics scholar in Asia and is also a member of the Indian Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council.
In April 2007 leaders of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation’s member countries — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka — agreed to set up the South Asian University in India.
Mr. Chadha, who received notice on Wednesday that his hiring had been officially approved by the participating countries, has a two-year appointment. He will oversee almost all aspects of the university’s development, including construction, the curriculum, and faculty hiring, and he will be assisted by experts from all member countries.
Mr. Chadha said the association expected a lot of money to come from sources outside the member countries.
“We will be approaching various development agencies,” he said, declining to say how much it will cost to build the institution.
The Indian government has yet to acquire land for the university, but it has identified 100 acres in south Delhi, close to some of the capital’s universities, that could serve as a campus.
“Everybody in the Indian government is behind it,” Mr. Chadha said of the project. “Usually there is some bureaucratic problem, or ifs and buts crop up, but this one has run smoothly.” —Shailaja Neelakantan
May 7, 2008
House Spending Bill Leaves Out Money for Physical Sciences
Washington — Advocates for scientists have lost their bid to persuade Congress to raise spending on physical-sciences research during the remainder of the 2008 fiscal year. The money is not contained in a war-spending bill that the U.S. House of Representatives is to consider on Thursday.
Universities had lobbied to increase money specifically for the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Congress provided both agencies with minimal increases for 2008, far less than the amounts authorized by the America Competes Act, a law enacted last year to bolster technology development and the economy. As a result, layoffs are planned at Energy Department laboratories that serve academic researchers.
Thirty-one House members in both parties signed a letter in April endorsing a spending increase for the two agencies. But House leaders have been under pressure to squeeze increased spending into the bill for a variety of other civilian programs, including veterans’ benefits.
“We’re very disappointed” about the lack of research money, said Barry Toiv, a spokesman for the Association of American Universities. He said he hoped the proposal might yet gain traction in the Senate, where eight members signed a letter in March calling for the spending bill to include $350-million for the two agencies. —Jeffrey Brainard
A Major Anthropology Conference in China Faces Postponement
In what might be another sign of pre-Olympics tension in China, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences has warned its members that a major conference planned for July is likely to be postponed.
The association, which was formed in Brussels in 1948, meets every five years. This year’s meeting is scheduled for mid-July at Yunnan University, in Kunming, a city in southwestern China not far from Tibet. Kunming was the site last month of large demonstrations against the Tibetan independence movement and perceived anti-Chinese bias in the West.
On Tuesday the association’s Chinese affiliate wrote to the group’s international executive committee, saying that it had “encountered complex difficulties hard to resolve in its preparation work recently, which makes it impossible for us to hold the congress at the time originally planned.”
The executive committee has rejected the idea of a postponement, but it has not yet received a reply from its Chinese colleagues. “We still have no concrete information about the results of our plea not to postpone the congress,” wrote the association’s president, Luis Alberto Vargas, a professor of physical anthropology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle today.
Mr. Vargas and other members of the executive committee declined to comment further, citing the delicacy of the situation.
The conference’s program includes a number of panels on potentially sensitive topics, including dozens of papers on ethnic and linguistic diversity and four papers specifically on Tibet.
The association’s newsletter published last month a May 2007 memorandum that outlined 20 points of agreement between the association and its Chinese affiliate, including an understanding that Chinese scholars would organize a conference panel titled “The Achievement of China’s Policy Toward Ethnic Minority Groups and Ethnic Administration.” —David Glenn
N.C. Community Colleges Urged by State Lawyer to Limit Enrollment of Illegal Immigrants
North Carolina’s 58 community colleges should drop their policy of admitting all illegal immigrants who meet the institutions’ other eligibility criteria and restrict access to those who meet standards outlined in federal law, the general counsel for the state’s attorney general said in an advisory letter issued today, according to the The News & Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh, N.C.
The general counsel’s advice runs counter to a directive issued last fall by the community-college system’s lawyer. In November, David Sullivan, the system’s general counsel, issued a memorandum in which he said that the community colleges should immediately begin admitting undocumented immigrants who meet the basic requirements of either having graduated from high school or being at least 18 years old. That overturned a policy of allowing the campuses to decide individually whether to consider applicants’ immigration status.
When he issued the memorandum last fall, Mr. Sullivan said his directive was based on a 1997 opinion by the state’s attorney general at the time — Michael F. Easley, a Democrat who is now governor — which said that the colleges could not impose nonacademic criteria for admission.
A spokeswoman for the community-college system was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that officials there would take today’s letter — from J.B. Kelly, the general counsel in the state attorney general’s office — under advisement. —Sara Hebel
Ward Connerly's Point Man in Missouri Loses Lawsuit Against College
It has been a rough week for Timothy P. Asher, executive director of a campaign to get Missouri voters to ban the use of affirmative-action preferences by public colleges and other state and local agencies.
On Sunday, Mr. Asher’s campaign organization missed a deadline for gathering enough signatures to get its measure on the November ballot.
On Tuesday, the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District handed him more bad news. It upheld a lower court’s ruling against him in his lawsuit against North Central Missouri College, which he had accused of firing him from his job as admissions director in 2004 because he complained that one of its scholarship programs discriminated against white students.
The lower court had held, in a March 2007 summary judgment against Mr. Asher, that he had not technically been fired from his job because he had been a contract employee. It also rejected his lawsuit’s claim that his termination had been handled in a manner that violated the state’s open-meetings laws. The court also found that the college was shielded from lawsuits like his under the doctrine of sovereign immunity.
In its ruling announced on Tuesday, the state appeals court said only that it was letting stand the lower court’s decision to rule against Mr. Asher without bringing the case to trial.
Ward Connerly, the prominent affirmative-action critic who is coordinating efforts in several states to get proposed restrictions on affirmative action on the November ballot, has said he will continue his fight in Missouri and try to get a measure on the ballot there in 2010. —Peter Schmidt
Blaze Devastates Main Building at Our Lady of the Lake U.
A fire struck the Main Building last night at Our Lady of the Lake University, in San Antonio, inflicting major damage but no injuries, the San Antonio Express-News reported today.
While there were no reported injuries or deaths, the loss of the 113-year-old gothic-style Main Building is a major blow to the Roman Catholic university, which has a modest endowment of $27-million. It’s not yet clear how the university will pay for repairs. The fire displaced 118 students from two campus dormitories.
The cause of the blaze is unknown, but authorities are investigating the scene for signs of arson. The Express-News posted a gallery of photographs showing the fire and its effects.
Classes at the university were canceled today. Final exams will resume next week, and graduation is scheduled for the following Saturday. —Hurley Goodall
Bush Signs Student-Loan Bailout Bill Into Law
Washington — President Bush signed into law this morning legislation that aims to avert a shortfall in student loans.
The law, which the House and Senate passed swiftly and which Mr. Bush endorsed in a radio address, seeks to stem the departure of loan companies from the federally guaranteed student-loan program and to reassure families that student loans will be available in the fall. More than 50 lenders have left the federal program in recent weeks, amid a credit crunch that has spread from the housing market to the student-loan industry.
To encourage lenders to remain in the federal program, the law allows the secretary of education to buy loans that lenders have struggled to sell to investors. The law also clarifies that the Education Department has the authority to advance federal funds to guarantee agencies, so those agencies could make loans, if necessary, under a “lender of last resort” system.
The law will ease the process of applying for a student loan under such a system, allowing the secretary to designate emergency lenders of last resort on a collegewide basis, rather than student by student. —Kelly Field
Harvard Law School Votes for Open Access to Scholarship
Hot on the heels of their colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, professors at Harvard Law School voted unanimously last week to provide free access to their articles.
The Law School announced its move today in a news release. It will now make its scholarly articles available in a free online database.
Harvard Law School followed a similar decision in February by the university’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which became the first academic institution in the United States to make open access the default position, requiring authors to opt out rather than opt in. —Lila Guterman
Canadians Shocked by Britain's Decision on Prestigious Scholarship Program
Canadian supporters of Commonwealth scholarships for graduate students say the British government’s recent decision to bar applicants from developed countries like Canada is “short-sighted” and “a slap in the face,” according to today’s Globe and Mail, a Toronto-based newspaper.
The scholarship program, now in its 50th year, will remain open to students from developing countries, particularly those seen as most closely aligned with Britain’s foreign-policy interests, such as China and India.
The shift was announced quietly in a written ministerial statement presented in Parliament in March by David Miliband, Britain’s secretary of state for foreign and Commonwealth affairs.
“We will maintain a global scheme, but we will focus scholarships particularly on those countries, such as China and India, which are going to be most important to our foreign-policy success over coming years,” the statement said.
The changes, which were opposed by Britain’s university association, are expected to save the British government nearly $20-million a year.
Current Canadian recipients of the scholarships will be allowed to finish their degree programs. About 30 Canadians each year have received the scholarships — some 1,500 in all since 1960. —Karen Birchard
May 6, 2008
Adjuncts at Wayne State U. to Vote on Contract
Part-time faculty members at Wayne State University have reached a tentative agreement on their first contract with the institution, the university announced today.
The agreement, which is subject to a ratification vote by union members, calls for a salary increase of about 23 percent over the four years of the contract. The union, which won recognition last spring and is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, has about 900 members, according to information on its Web site.
The university said it expected the new contract would be in place by the fall semester. —Charles Huckabee
Wisconsin Supreme Court Denies Students' Push for Cheap Drinks
Students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison won’t be raising a glass to a decision today by the state’s Supreme Court.
The court dismissed a lawsuit — filed in 2004 on behalf of students and other pub crawlers — that challenged local bars’ agreement to limit drink specials on weekends. The students had called the agreement an illegal price-fixing conspiracy and