Category Archives: Academics

Inside Higher Ed: Up to 80 Degrees at WVU May Be Suspect

It turns out that you don’t need to be the governor’s daughter to get an unearned M.B.A. from West Virginia University.

The institution has endured considerable controversy since December over allegations — first reported by The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and since acknowledged as correct — that Heather Bresch, a business executive and the daughter of West Virginia’s governor, received an M.B.A. without earning it. The scandal has already resulted in several resignations, including that of the president at WVU.

Follow

The Chronicle: Incompetence Tops List of Complaints About Peer Reviewers

Incompetence by their reviewers was the most common problem reported by scientists who submitted manuscripts to scholarly journals. Almost two-thirds voiced that beef in a survey administered to scientists employed by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

The supposedly expert reviewers, scientists complained, had not carefully read articles, were unfamiliar with the subject matter, or made mistakes of fact or reasoning. The survey results, the first of their kind, were reported in the September issue of the journal Science and Engineering Ethics.

Follow

The Independent: Alarm at rising drop-out rate for student teachers

15 per cent of all trainee teachers drop out before the end of their course

The drop-out rate for would-be teachers is rising – with modern language and maths courses among those with the worst record.

A report out today shows that 15 per cent of all trainees drop out before the end of their course (up from 14 per cent last year) with 28 per cent failing to take up a teaching post once they graduate.

The report, an annual survey of teacher training courses by Alan Smithers and Pamela Robinson from the University of Buckingham’s Centre for Education and Employment, shows fewer modern languages trainees go on to work in the classroom than any other subject – with just 63 per cent ending up in teaching. Classics has the best rate, at 93 per cent.

Follow

Guardian: Teacher training courses take on ‘risky’ students

Universities with teacher training courses are taking on “risky” students in shortage subjects to fill their quotas, researchers claimed today.

Science and maths subjects attract fewer teacher trainees with first and 2:1 degrees who are more likely to drop out or not get jobs in the classroom, according to the Good Teacher Training Guide 2008 published today.

But the government’s teaching training agency, the TDA, attacked the report’s findings for suggesting students without good degrees would make bad teachers.

Follow

Chicago Tribune: PhD, the easy way

Tribune reporter Russell Working tells about his adventures with diploma mills, where $699 and ‘life experience’ would earn him a degree in just about anything.

Follow

Ynetnews.com: Anti-Darwinists turned away by Israeli academia

Turkish scientists receive last minute cancellation from Hebrew University who fears Jewish-Muslim reconciliation conference may give stage to anti-Darwinist propaganda

Follow

Daily Gleanor: Professors raise red flags about teaching in colleges

University professors are cool to the idea of first- and second-year university courses being taught in New Brunswick’s community colleges.

That was one of the recommendations in the new $90-million post-secondary education plan released by the provincial government Thursday.

Follow

The Chronicle: U. of Michigan Press Will Stop Distributing Titles for ‘Radical’ Publisher

The University of Michigan Press is ending its controversial relationship with Pluto Press at the end of this year. As of December 31, it will no longer distribute titles for Pluto Press, a London-based independent publisher. Pluto counts Noam Chomsky among its authors and espouses what it calls a “radical political agenda.” The Michigan press took fire last year for one of Pluto’s books, Overcoming Zionism, by Joel Kovel, a professor of social studies at Bard College. The pro-Israel lobbying group StandWithUs spearheaded a vocal protest, attacking the book as “a polemic against Israel” and a “collection of propaganda, misquotes, and discredited news stories.”

Follow

Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-fi-guatemala6-2008jun06,0,1032636.story?track=rssLeftist thinking left off the syllabus

Guatemala City

Leftist ideology may be gaining ground in Latin America. But it will never set foot on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University.

For nearly 40 years, this private college has been a citadel of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners quoting “The Wealth of Nations” author Adam Smith — he of the powdered wig and invisible hand — flutter over the campus food court.

Follow

The Chronicle: UMass-Amherst Rescinds Honorary Degree for Robert Mugabe

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Board of Trustees voted unanimously today to withdraw an honorary law doctorate that was awarded in 1986 to President Robert G. Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

Follow

Plain Dealer: State grants over $143 million to get top researchers

— Ohio took a bold step Tuesday in its efforts to bolster its economy and the research at its universities, granting more than $143 million to attract world-class scholars.

The state’s Third Frontier Commission and University System of Ohio want 10 university collaborations to get the money so they can woo researchers and their federal research grants and staff members to Ohio.

Follow

The Chronicle News Blog: Washington State U. Proposes Slashing Its Course Offerings

Washington State University has proposed a universitywide audit of all courses and degree programs with the goal of cutting its course offerings by 20 percent, reducing the number of majors and minors, and concentrating university resources on areas of academic strength.

Follow

The Chronicle: Creationism Persists in American Science Classrooms

A significant fraction of high-school biology teachers acknowledge teaching some form of creationism, according to the first large national survey to probe how that issue is handled inside American classrooms. At the same time, teachers with the most college-level biology credits were likely to spend the most time teaching evolution, indicating that college training shapes the way teachers treat this cornerstone of scientific thought.

One in eight teachers said they taught creationism as a “valid scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species,” reports a team led by Michael B. Berkman, a professor of political science at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. The survey results, published in the journal PLoS Biology on Monday, also reveal that one in six biology teachers believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

Follow

The Chronicle: Academic Capital Flows: U. of Chicago Plans $200-Million Milton Friedman Institute

A decade ago, officials in Mongolia reportedly considered building a statue in honor of Milton Friedman, who was one of the 20th century’s most influential proponents of laissez-faire economics.

Today the University of Chicago announced its own monument to Mr. Friedman, who died in 2006 at the age of 94. The university plans to invest $200-million in a research center to be known as the Milton Friedman Institute.

Follow

Inside Higher Ed: ‘Time Out’ to Reconsider Core Changes

Many a curricular overhaul is controversial. At the University System of Georgia, where two preliminary plans were met with intense skepticism from some quarters earlier this year, the uproar is causing second thoughts among administrators, who wrote in a letter to faculty members on Monday that they would “halt the current core revision process until later in the year” to allow for more input from faculty at each of the 35 campuses, and “to take stock of where we are.”

The decision, announced by Susan Herbst, the system’s chief academic officer and executive vice chancellor, was a partial about-face that was cheered by many of the plans’ critics. Since the changes were announced, they maintained that faculty were not properly included in the planning stages and that the proposals — still preliminary and short on specifics, to be sure — would water down instruction and training in vital subject areas.

Follow

The Chronicle: A New College Challenges Canada’s Public Model

The first private, secular, liberal-arts institution in the country promises a different approach to teaching

Squamish, British Columbia

David J. Helfand, chairman of the astronomy department at Columbia University, dashes around the classroom as students fire questions at him from all sides.

In this freshman physics-and-astronomy course, he has asked his small group to tackle a big project: design a solar system.

“You’ve got the science,” he tells them. “Now here’s the fiction part.”

The students seem eager for the challenge. Not surprising, perhaps, for an Ivy League undergraduate course. But Mr. Helfand isn’t at Columbia. He’s about 3,000 miles northwest, in the midst of snow-topped Canadian mountains, at a brand-new liberal-arts university. It is, in fact, the first private, nonprofit, secular college in the country.

That a scholar in the prime of his career would be teaching at such an institution illustrates the enthusiasm that pervades Quest University, which opened its doors last August. It has attracted professors with stellar credentials. And its student body isn’t too shabby, either. Of its 79 freshmen, most are graduates of the rigorous International Baccalaureate high-school program, and half come from outside Canada.

Follow

Inside Higher Ed: Is Phyllis Schlafly Worthy of an Honorary Doctorate?

Most of the graduating seniors at Washington University in St. Louis weren’t even born when Phyllis Schlafly led the successful campaign in the 1970s to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. But they will get to learn about her at commencement ceremonies next week when the university awards her a doctorate of humane letters.

Follow

The New York Times: A Deadhead’s Dream for a Campus Archive

SAN FRANCISCO — It may be the ultimate collection of paraphernalia of a band known for its fondness of paraphernalia, legal and otherwise.

The Grateful Dead, whose songs celebrated personal freedom, American idealism and mind-altering drugs, will donate a cache of their papers, posters and props on Thursday to the University of California, Santa Cruz, which plans to use the musical miscellany as part of a research center to be known as Dead Central.

Follow

Dallas Morning News: Texas higher education board rejects ‘creation science’ degree proposal

AUSTIN — A bid by the Dallas-based Institute for Creation Research to train future science teachers — focusing on creationism instead of Darwin’s theory of evolution — was flatly rejected by Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board members on Wednesday.

Follow