College recruiting from churches

imgres-3State colleges in California have begun a new effort to recruit African American students. Going to churches.

Officials from the California State University system have been pioneering a program of seeking new prospective African-American students in church pews — a program that’s serving as a model for similar efforts elsewhere, reports a story today on NPR.org.

“Blacks make up about 6.6 percent of California’s population, according to 2011 census data. Jorge Haynes, a Cal State spokesman, said the university system’s African-American population is 5 percent.

“California is at the leading edge of a demographic shift affecting the country. The state’sHispanic population is slated to become its majority ethnic group by 2014.

Given this shift, according to the Los Angeles Times, ‘colleges have to work harder to attract African-American, Latino and other underrepresented students.’And last year, a federal court upheld a ban of race-based admissions in the state’s school system. Continue reading “College recruiting from churches”

Brown University health care to cover reassignment

imgres-1

This week Brown University announced that it will join the list of institutions for higher education expanding student health care services by providing sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) to transgender students.

According to the Brown Daily Herald, the Brown Student Health Insurance Plan will cover 14 different sexual reassignment surgery procedures starting in August, Director of Insurance and Purchasing Services Jeanne Hebert confirmed. The move puts Brown among of schools such as Cornell, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania  that cover at least some sex reassignment surgeries.

“’We identified this as an important benefit for students to have access to,’ Hebert wrote, adding that the change was in line with “Brown’s efforts to support all students.” The coverage will be funded through renewal rates paid for next year’s student healthcare coverage, she wrote. In general, the total package of sexual reassignment surgeries, hormone therapy and other services can cost up to $50,000.

“Kelly Garrett, LGBTQ Center coordinator, said she has strongly advocated this change for the past several years. A milestone in the movement to add coverage for these surgeries was the inclusion of hormone treatment in the current school year’s coverage plan, Garrett added. The sexual reassignment procedures that will be covered are “very standard and very comprehensive,” she said. Continue reading “Brown University health care to cover reassignment”

North Korea’s arithmetic

A new initiative was launched recently to teach statistics to university students and government workers in North Korea, a country with an authoritarian government that many researchers in the region think issues the fewest, and least reliable, statistics in the world. The Pyongyang Summer Institute in Survey

imgres-2

Science and Quantitative Methodology began with about 250 students last summer, taught by 13 instructors from the U.S. and Europe, reports the Wall Street Journal.  “Soon, organizers hope to have 30 instructors, about 250 university students and 100 North Korean government workers, taught in classes hosted by the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, the country’s first private university, opened in 2010.

“’Capacity building in the area of statistics is helpful to governments everywhere because quality data collection leads to informed policy decisions Continue reading “North Korea’s arithmetic”

China to reform re-education practices

The Chinese government will advance reforms for its controversial re-education through labor system this year, according to a national political and legal work conference held on Monday. As China.org reported in a story released yesterday, the move comes as a reform

imgres-2

to policies allowing police to detain people for up to four years without an open trial, leading experts to argue that it contradicts high-level laws, including China’s constitution. In a follow-up story, the New York Times reported that while the government report lack details, “legal advocates said they were hopeful that the five-decade-old system for locking up offenders without trial would be significantly modified, if not abolished altogether.

“’If true, this would be an important advance,’ said Zhang Qianfan, a law professor at Peking University who has long pushed for the system’s demise. ‘It’s a tool that is widely abused.” Continue reading “China to reform re-education practices”

University of California’s troubled new look

What ever were they thinking at the University of California?  After a hailstorm of negative responses to its new “modern” look

new-university-of-california-uc-identity-thumb-560x406-107907

the prestigious university has dropped the new monogram many said looked like a badly done corporate makeover. As university officials wrote in their press release today about its “visual identity system:”

“A controversy has developed over an element of an integrated visual identity designed for use by the University of California’s systemwide office. This controversy has created a major distraction for the UCOP External Relations Division as it pursues its broader mission: communicating to all Californians the vital contributions UC makes to the quality of their lives and the prosperity of the state. Continue reading “University of California’s troubled new look”

Private colleges offer deep discounts

“In recent years, tuition has significantly increased at public universities, driven by state budget cuts and prompting student protests around the country,” reports Huffington Post: “ Yet almost the opposite has happened at private colleges.”

Private college tuition grew at its lowest rate in decades this year and at a slower pace than public university tuition.“Tony Pals, director of communications at the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said he can’t remember another time in which so many private schools have held down tuition as he’s seen in the past two years. By the association’s Continue reading “Private colleges offer deep discounts”

Educators nationwide respond to Emory arts closure

Arts educators were stunned by the news in September that Emory University would eliminate its Visual Arts Department as part of a cost-cutting effort favoring science and engineering programs. Many observers cited the move as further evidence of a creeping corporatization of the American university. As reported by the College Art Association (CAA),  “Since the economic downturn in 2008, liberal arts colleges and universities across the country have reshaped their curriculums. They have narrowed the fields of study to prepare students for vocational work quantified by employment and statistical analysis, shearing the visual arts––in part or whole––from the intellectual mold that has underpinned students’ critical thinking in the United States over the past century.”

In response to the Emory decision, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) noted the authoritarian and anti-democratic character of Emory’s actions in suspending a range of programs in art, education, journalism, and Spanish––all with out faculty consultation. An excerpt of “An Open Letter from AAUP” appears below.

“On Sept. 14, 2012, Dean Robin Forman announced a number of changes to the curriculum, including the closing of the Department of Visual Arts, the Division of Educational Studies, the Program in Journalism and the Department of Physical Education (the last already in progress at the time of his letter). He also announced the suspension of admissions to the graduate programs in economics, Spanish, and the Institute of Liberal Arts (ILA). The ILA, he wrote, will be restructured as an “institute without permanent faculty.”

“Owing to these cuts, a number of lecture track faculty will not have their contracts renewed, two tenure-track assistant professors hired in educational studies last spring will be let go in advance of any formal review of their work and a number of tenured faculty will be relocated to other departments. Dean Forman has made it clear, in his letter and elsewhere, that he made the decisions in consultation with what he called the “Faculty Financial Advisory Committee,” a small (seven-to-eight person) group of appointed faculty; Lisa Tedesco, the dean of the Laney Graduate School; and Earl Lewis, the provost.

“On behalf of the Emory Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), we want to remind the deans, the provost, the president, the Board of Trustees and, most importantly, Emory’s faculty and students of AAUP guidelines. These state that primary responsibility for decision-making concerning curriculum resides in the hands of the faculty. AAUP guidelines make it clear that this responsibility covers not only the determination of those areas of study to be offered by a college or university, but extends to “appointments, reappointments, decisions not to reappoint, promotions, the granting of tenure, and dismissal” (from Section five of AAUP’s “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities”).

“We understand that restructurings and reallocation of funds are sometimes necessary to ensure that an institution remains strong. In this instance, however, the University failed to undertake that process of reallocation through properly constituted faculty deliberative bodies and to understand that important decisions having to do with these matters must come from those bodies to the deans, provost, president and Board of Trustees.

“Moreover, we are dismayed that a small committee, initially appointed to advise Dean Robert Paul informally on financial matters in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008, became a subcommittee of the College Governance Committee that advised the dean on curricular matters. Given the impact of the dean’s decisions on graduate education, we are also concerned that the Executive Council of the Laney Graduate School (LGS) — an elected body of faculty representatives — was not consulted in advance about these changes in accordance with stated practices. The LGS website states that “[t]he Executive Council reviews proposals … for changes in existing courses and programs on a rolling basis.” No proposals in this matter were brought before this council for deliberation. The fact that a College subcommittee seems to have issued recommendations to close programs in another unit, the Graduate School, also raises questions of purview.”

For the complete text of the letter, see “An Open Letter from AAUP”

 

http://www.emorywheel.com/an-open-letter-from-the-aaup/

 

http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/emory-university-eradicates-its-visual-arts-department-portending-an-ominous-trend-in-university-education/

Why women are driven from academic research

“The number of women studying science and engineering at undergraduate and postgraduate levels has increased markedly in recent decades.” says the webiste Oikos. ” However females have lower retention rates than males in these fields, and perform worse on average than men in terms of promotion and common research metrics. Two key differences between men and women are the larger role that women play in childcare and house work in most families, and the narrower window for female fertility. Here we explore how these two factors affect research output by applying a common ecological model to research performance, incorporating part-time work and the duration of career prior to the onset of part-time work. The model parameterizes the positive feedback between historical research Continue reading “Why women are driven from academic research”

Student loans to soon trigger economic crash

You may not want to hear this, but a threat is facing the U.S. economy that no one is talking. As discussed today in Le Monde, a veritable Frankenstorm of factors is now coalescing to crash the U.S. economy in the near future, along with other nations. Student loans are spiraling out-of-control  due to declining family incomes, skyrocketing tuition costs, and the wholesale abandonment of public universities by state governments. Christopher Newfield writes in “America’s Degree Scam” that “student debt may succeed subprime mortgages as the next disaster in the crisis of US capitalism. It is estimated at more than $1-trillion and has doubled over the last 12 years. Average debt for graduates with student loans rose to $23,200 in 2008; public university debt was only slightly lower, at $20,200. Despite the impossibility of discharging student debt through bankruptcy, the student loan default rate has gone from 5% to 10% between 2008 and 2011.” A similar story entitles “Debt Tops $1-Trillion” appears in the current Voice of Detroit. Continue reading “Student loans to soon trigger economic crash”

A different kind of poll

Ok, so we are all fed up with polls about the election. Check this out from Slate: “Poll Finds Majority of Americans Are Racist.”  As Daniel Politi summarizes, “In the four years since the United States elected the country’s first black president, a majority of Americans express outright prejudice toward blacks. Perhaps even more surprising though is that the numbers have slightly increased since 2008. A full 51 percent of Americans explicitly express anti-black prejudice, up from 48 percent in 2008, according to the Associated Press. When an implicit racial attitudes test is used the number increases to 56 percent, compared to 49 percent four years ago. The AP surveys, which were carried out by university researchers, ultimately found that President Obama could lose a net 2 percentage points of the popular vote due to anti-black attitudes. Continue reading “A different kind of poll”