Category Archives: Government

Miami Herald: Suit filed over state schools’ tuition rates

Florida legislators should be stripped of their power to set tuition at the state’s 11 public universities, a lawsuit filed Friday by former Gov. Bob Graham and a group of university professors says.

Graham, a former U.S. senator, said the cost of going to Florida International University and other schools should be set by the 17-member state Board of Governors and that it is unconstitutional for legislators to annually set tuition rates. The Board of Governors was created by voters in 2002 to oversee the state university system.

Follow

Inside Higher Ed: Salt in the Wounds on Solomon Amendment

Law schools say Pentagon is trying unfairly to go beyond recruiting rights Supreme Court assured it.

Follow

Tallahassee Democrat: Graham sues over tuition

Former Gov. Bob Graham sued the Legislature on Friday, setting up a constitutional showdown over control of the state’s public universities.

The suit asks a Leon County circuit judge to declare that the Board of Governors has the power to set tuition, not lawmakers. Voters in 2002 approved a constitutional amendment that created the board to oversee the state’s university system.

Follow

St Louis Post Dispatch: Pols-turned-professors? New law gets 3rd degree

What does it take to become a college professor? In Missouri, a bachelor’s degree and eight years in the state Legislature might do it.

A bill recently signed into law by Gov. Matt Blunt does not guarantee that former legislators will be hired as professors, but it bars public universities from rejecting them for faculty positions just because they lack a graduate degree.

Some politicians and faculty members don’t like the idea of special treatment for politicians.

“We all pay a lot of dues to get where we are, and the dues are graduate school,” said Lana Stein, chairwoman of the political science department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Said Sen. Jeff Smith, D-St. Louis, an adjunct professor with a doctorate degree: “It doesn’t look good when legislators with term limits open up job opportunities for ourselves after retirement.”

Follow

The Chronicle News Blog: Cabinet Appointees in New Mexico Get Pay From Universities

Three appointees of Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico are receiving paychecks from state universities, raising concerns among some state senators about possible conflicts of interest, according to the Albuquerque Journal.

The University of New Mexico will pay a portion of the annual salaries of the state’s higher-education secretary, Reed Dasenbrock, and of the state’s health secretary, Alfredo Vigil.

Mr. Dasenbrock, who is set to receive a total salary of $257,250, will receive almost $100,000 from the university, according to the newspaper. He left his position as provost at the institution to take the state job. Under an agreement with the university, he will receive the $100,000 as payment for an unused yearlong sabbatical.

Mr. Vigil, whose annual salary will be $175,000, will get $60,000 from the university, the Journal said. Under the agreement with him, the university will pay him for the teaching and community services he performs at the institution’s medical school.

Follow

Austin American Statesman: Perry signs budget, blasts higher education funding
Governor vetoes nearly $650 million in spending.

Gov. Rick Perry signed a two-year, $151.9 billion state budget into law Friday, vetoing nearly $650 million in spending and making a special point of excoriating legislators and college officials for what he described as a seriously flawed process of funding higher education.

In a proclamation regarding the budget measure, House Bill 1, the governor accused community colleges of falsifying their appropriations requests for group health insurance and universities of pressuring local legislative delegations to fund construction projects, research and other so-called special items. He vetoed $154 million in community college spending and about $36 million in special items.

Follow

Pacific Free Press: Alberta: Storming the Ivory Tower

In Alberta an attack is gathering force on the most fundamental principles essential to the academic viability of universities. This attack has implications that go far beyond the jurisdiction most stereotypically associated with cowboy culture and the lucrative vastness of this province’s oil and gas resources.

As demonstrated by the political genesis of Canada’s current federal government, developments in Alberta tend to lie at the origins of changes with broad ranging implications. Alberta has long been a laboratory for experimentation in right-wing techniques of political manipulation and governance. This experimentation is aimed most often at subordinating the activities of public institutions to the will and desires of the executive branches of private corporations, but especially the Texas-based energy conglomerates that dominate Calgary. Hence the stakes are large in the current drive to make Albertan universities conform to the energy industry’s preferred models of business management. If this insidious power grab succeeds here, it may soon spill over to contaminate the educational policies of other provinces and states.

Follow

The Boston Globe: FBI warns colleges of terror threat

Federal agents are warning leaders at some of the region’s top universities — including MIT, Boston College, and the University of Massachusetts — to be on the lookout for foreign spies or potential terrorists trying to steal their research, the head of the FBI’s Boston office said yesterday.

Agents plan to visit many more New England colleges in the coming months and are offering to provide briefings about what they call “espionage indicators” to faculty, students, or security staff as part of a national outreach to college campuses.

Follow

Inside Higher Ed: A Fence Could Run Through It

With the main campus adjacent to the Rio Grande and between two international bridges, the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College sit at an intersection in the intransigent immigration tug-of-wars. But never before did officials worry that the institution itself, an integrated community college and university that share a physical plant, could literally be tugged apart, one campus separated from another by new border fencing planned for the valley.

Follow

Houston Chronicle: Fence could leave part of Texas university on Mexico’s side

A proposed fence along the Mexico-U.S. border could leave a portion of the University of Texas at Brownsville and a Texas Southmost College campus on the Mexican side of the fence, a university official said Monday.

“I don’t think it would be appropriate to fence off the university on the Mexican side of the fence,” Antonio D. Zavaleta, UTB-TSC vice president for external affairs, said he told a government official. “I told him I wanted to go on the record pointing out a couple of things that are important that (he) may not have thought of,” he said in a story in today’s editions of the Brownsville Herald.

Follow

San Francisco Chronicle: Prison vs. education spending reveals California’s priorities

It has been said that a government’s budget isn’t only a statement of priorities, but also a reflection of a society’s values. California’s proposed budget reveals skewed priorities and hollow values.

For the first time, and unique among large states, California will soon spend more on its prisons than on its public universities. It has been projected that over the next five years, the state’s budget for locking up people will rise by 9 percent annually, compared with its spending on higher education, which will rise only by 5 percent. By the 2012-2013 fiscal year, $15.4 billion will be spent on incarcerating Californians, as compared with $15.3 billion spent on educating them. Yet, despite this historic increase in prison funding, leading legislators — including supporters of the increase — and even Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office agree that this is simply throwing good money after bad, given the rank mismanagement plaguing California’s corrections system.

Follow

The Boston Globe: UMass faculty, students boo Card

Hundreds of students and faculty erupted in a chorus of boos yesterday when Andrew Card, President Bush’s former chief of staff, rose to accept an honorary doctorate in public service at the University of Massachusetts.

The protesters blamed Card in part for the Iraq war.

The boos and catcalls, including those from faculty who stood on stage with Card, drowned out provost Charlena Seymour’s remarks as she awarded the degree. Protesters say Card lied to the American people in the early days of the Iraq war and should not have been honored at the graduate student commencement.

Follow

Globe and Mail: Colleges must return to vocational role, B.C. report says

A sweeping review of B.C.’s postsecondary system is making waves with its proposal to re-establish clear distinctions between colleges and universities in an effort to focus resources and improve higher education.

Follow

The Chronicle News Blog: Bush Assails Colleges That Shun ROTC Units

President Bush took the opportunity during an ROTC-commissioning ceremony at the White House this afternoon to criticize colleges and universities that “do not allow ROTC on campus,” according to an official transcript.

In an applause line, Mr. Bush said, “To the cadets and midshipmen who are graduating from a college or university that believes ROTC is not worthy of a place on campus, here is my message: Your university may not honor your military service, but the United States of America does.” He did not single out any college by name, although there are quite a few of them.

Mr. Bush also didn’t mention the Pentagon’s role in pulling ROTC out of many campuses. As The Wall Street Journal reported in February, the Defense Department has shut down dozens of ROTC units where it saw poor prospects of finding good recruits. Some campuses were seen as havens of antimilitary sentiment; others simply didn’t fit into the Pentagon’s post-cold-war calculus. (See Chronicle articles from 1990, 1991, 1994, 1995, and 2004.)

But many of them, the Journal reported, were in big, ethnically diverse Northern cities that had sizable populations of Arabic or Pashto speakers — key languages nowadays. —Andrew Mytelka

Follow