Category Archives: Faculty

The Chronicle News Blog: Nobel Laureate Follows Apologies for Racial Comments With Resignation From Lab

James D. Watson, who shared a Nobel Prize for helping decipher the structure of DNA, resigned this morning as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and from his position on the New York institution’s board, on which he had served for more than four decades. The resignation followed an uproar stemming from an interview, published last week, in which Mr. Watson declared that Africans were intellectually inferior to Europeans.

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The Chronicle: Students at Brigham Young U. get paid to give professors the straight dope on what works — and what doesn’t — in the classroom

Faculty members at Brighman Young say the paid student observers are less threatening than peer evaluators and provide a perspective that education specialists can’t.

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A Statement from Susan Fuhrman, President of Teachers College

Teachers College is continuing to cooperate fully with Deputy Inspector Michael Osgood and members of the Hate Crime Squad of New York City Police Department, who are working hard at attempting to identify the person(s) responsible for the despicable act of placing a noose on the door of Professor Madonna Constantine.

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Star-Tribune: Tutu-St. Thomas dustup isn’t over

Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu says he will not accept an invitation to speak at the University of St. Thomas unless a demoted professor is reinstated as director of the university’s peace and justice studies program.

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Inside Higher Ed: Female Faculty and the Sciences

During a Congressional hearing focused on the recruitment and retention of female faculty members in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields Wednesday, witnesses discussed how the federal government can combat the underrepresentation of women through targeted grants and incentives — and even the creation of a new quasi-governmental agency that would expand the enforcement of Title IX, the landmark 1972 gender equity law, to better encompass academic practices.

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Rebel Yell: Regents shoot down gun proposal

In an 8-5 decision, the Nevada System of Higher Education Board of Regents shot down a proposal to enact a program that would create a reserve police force on campus comprised of UNLV instructors.

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The New York Times: Noose Case Puts Focus on a Scholar of Race

In Madonna G. Constantine’s classroom at Columbia University’s Teachers College, emotions can run high.

“People have cried in class,” said Dr. Constantine, 44, a professor of psychology and education who specializes in the study of how race and racial prejudice can affect clinical and educational interactions. “Uncovering those issues, students often get to a place where it can be painful.”

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The Gazette: Looming shortage of nurses begins in the classroom

Nursing schools are suffering from a shortage of teachers to educate the next wave of Canadian nurses, and stalled recruitment is hurting efforts to deal with an expected shortfall of tens of thousands of nurses in the next few years.

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St Louis Post-Dispatch: UM websites will track grievances against professors

Students at the University of Missouri’s four campuses soon will be able to lodge complaints on university websites about professors who they think have discriminated against them based on their viewpoints.

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Inside Higher Ed: The Liberal (and Moderating) Professoriate

Faculty members identify as liberals and vote Democratic in far greater proportions than found in the American public at large. That finding by itself won’t shock many, but the national study released Saturday at a Harvard University symposium may be notable both for its methodology and other, more surprising findings.

The Chronicle: Few Conservatives but Many Centrists Found in American Academe
Conservatives are a small minority within the American professoriate, according to a major study whose results were released on Saturday. The study — which is arguably the best-designed survey of American faculty beliefs since the early 1970s — found that only 9.2 percent of college instructors are conservatives, and that only 20.4 percent voted for George W. Bush in 2004.

But at a symposium on Saturday at Harvard University, the study’s authors cast doubt on certain claims made by conservative critics of academe. They emphasized that American faculty members are not uniformly left-wing. On most issues, they said, college instructors’ views are better characterized as “centrist” or “center-left.” And there is evidence of a convergence toward moderation: Faculty members who are 35 or younger are less likely than their elders to be left-wing (and also less likely to be conservative).

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Omaha World-Herald: UNL professor who took explosives to class makes deal to resign

A chemistry professor who had explosives in class has agreed to resign from a tenured position at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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The Chronicle New Blog: German Universities See Sharp Drop in Number of Professors

New data from Germany’s federal statistics office indicate that the number of professors at German universities declined sharply from 1995 to 2000. The German Association of University Professors and Lecturers analyzed the government figures and found that 663 faculty openings in the fields of linguistics and cultural studies had been left vacant during the 10-year period, representing a decline in the number of professors in those fields of 11.6 percent. Moreover, 1,451 faculty posts had been eliminated outright.

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