Toronto Star: York students rally against racism
University `has to do a better job of protecting us,’ says one after racist graffiti, sexual attacks
In loud, clear and united voices they had a simple message: Enough is enough.
Hundreds of angry York University students yesterday lashed out at racists – and school administration – after anti-black graffiti was scrawled at two campus locations.
Financial Times: Turkey set to drop university headscarf ban
Turkey was last night braced for moves to end a controversial ban on women wearing headscarves at universities after the government won the support of a key opposition party for the move, which is likely to enrage the country’s secular establishment.
The governing Justice and Development party (AKP), which has its roots in political Islam, struck a deal with Turkey’s nationalist opposition party to lift the constitutional ban on the headscarf on campus.
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Posted in International
The New York Times: Swedes Ponder Whether Killer Can Be a Doctor
STOCKHOLM — The Karolinska Institute here is famed for choosing the winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine each year, and as one of the world’s most prestigious medical schools it rejects many students with the highest grades.
Last summer, Karl Helge Hampus Svensson, 31, was among the 180 students admitted to the freshman class after receiving top grades in high school and courses he took online over the previous six years.
But last fall, institute officials received two anonymous letters claiming that Mr. Svensson had been a Nazi sympathizer who was paroled from a maximum-security prison after being convicted in 2000 of murder, a killing the police called a hate crime.
After confirming the information, the institute had to decide: should Mr. Svensson be allowed to become a doctor?
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Posted in Students
The Chronicle News Blog: Judge Reinstates Lawsuit Against UC-Irvine Professor
The saga of a paper purporting to find that prayer doubles the success rate of fertility treatment continues. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge has reinstated a defamation lawsuit that he tossed out two months ago against a professor at the University of California at Irvine who has been the study’s main debunker.
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Posted in Legal issues
The Chronicle News Blog: ACLU Appeals Ruling That Upheld Visa Denial to Tariq Ramadan
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed an appeal of a 2007 federal-court ruling that the U.S. government acted legally when it denied a visa to Tariq Ramadan, a prominent European Muslim scholar.
The ACLU continues to argue that the visa denial was political. “In Professor Ramadan’s case and many others, the government is using immigration laws to exclude its critics and censor and control the ideas that Americans can hear,” said Jameel Jaffer, the head of the ACLU’s National Security Projects, in a written statement.
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Posted in Faculty, Government
The Chronicle News Blog: Racial Discrimination Lawsuit Filed at Historically Black College
An employee of Bluefield State College has filed a racial-discrimination lawsuit against the West Virginia college, according to a report by WVVA, a local television station.
Rebecca Martin, who has worked at the college for more than 25 years, says that she was passed up for two positions, which went to white women.
The college, a historically black institution, has had trouble with discrimination charges in the past. In 1998 the college was ordered to reinstate a professor who said he had been harassed and fired after he criticized the racial composition of the college. At that time, the college was only 7 percent black and had recently fired its last black professor, although it was getting more than $1-million a year in federal funds as a historically black institution.
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Posted in Diversity
The Chronicle News Blog: Rio Salado College: Not for Sale
It seems that an offer by a private investor to buy Rio Salado College will go nowhere.
Michael K. Clifford had sent a letter to Arizona’s Maricopa County Community College District, of which Rio Salado is a part, offering $5,000 per student or $400-million, whichever amount was greater, to purchase the two-year institution. Mr. Clifford, a born-again Christian, has an interest in online and evangelical colleges, having led investors to buy Grand Canyon University, a Christian institution, in 2004.
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Posted in Corporate University
BBC: New move to lift Turkey scarf ban
The governing party in Turkey and a key opposition party have agreed to work together to lift a ban on the Islamic headscarf in universities.
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Posted in International
Birmingham News: Former Alabama two-year chancellor pleading guilty to 15 counts
Former two-year college Chancellor Roy Johnson has agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors in a plea agreement announced this morning. Johnson’s agreement with the government implicates unnamed Alabama legislators who received jobs in the colleges and some state school board members.
Johnson has agreed to plead guilty to 15 counts of bribery, conspiracy, witness tampering and obstruction in a criminal scheme that tapped more than $18 million in taxpayer money, U.S. Attorney Alice Martin said in a news conference this morning. Johnson, 62, faces a maximum sentence of more than a dozen years in prison.
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Posted in Administration
Inside Higher Ed: Harassment vs. Academic Freedom, Round Two
It started as a student accusation of harassment against a long-tenured professor. Now, with the faculty’s backing, the dispute has turned into a showdown over autonomy, academic freedom and governance procedures.
Donald Hindley first learned through twin October 30 letters that he was deemed in violation of Brandeis University’s nondiscrimination policy for allegedly uttering “inappropriate and racially derogatory statements.” The provost, Marty Krauss, informed the professor of politics that a “monitor” would observe his classroom and that he would be required to attend “anti-discrimination training.” The administration’s sanctions were deemed unusual by veteran observers of academic freedom, such as the American Association of University Professors, and the allegations set off a furor among faculty members at the institution, named for the free-expression defender and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.
“Brandeis still refuses to let me or my lawyers know what I am supposed to have said or done that allegedly constituted racial harassment and/or discrimination,” Hindley said in an e-mail.
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Posted in Academic freedom
Inside Higher Ed: Integrating International Faculty
For all the talk about getting visas for foreign scholars to teach at American campuses, there’s relatively little attention to how they fit in once they arrive.
“People on campus generally aren’t talking about international faculty,” said Rebecca Theobald, of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s geography department. She recently completed her dissertation on “Foreign-Born Early-Career Faculty in American Higher Education.”
“Many of the deans and chairs I interviewed said, ‘Why are you doing this?’”
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Posted in Faculty
USA Today: Employers want new way to judge graduates beyond tests, grades
Colleges have been scrambling over the past year to respond to recommendations from a national commission that they be clearer to the public about what students have learned by the time they graduate.
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Posted in Accountability
The New York Times:Revising a Name, but Not a Familiar Slogan
MORE than 35 years after its debut, the slogan for the United Negro College Fund, “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste,” remains one of the most recognized in American advertising history.
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Posted in Diversity
Inside Higher Ed:
Uri Horesh, a lecturer in Arabic at the University of Texas at Austin who went on a hunger strike last week to protest the lack of benefits for the partners of gay employees, has ended his hunger strike — without a change in the university’s policies. In an e-mail message to supporters, he said he had become to weak to work on his dissertation and that while he felt guilty, he needed to end his fast. Horesh said he believed his strike had attracted more attention to the issue, citing extensive press coverage in Texas and elsewhere.
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Posted in Salary/Economic Benefits
Inside Higher Ed: A University President Backs McCain
Institutional neutrality is the much-invoked principle by which colleges and universities rarely take stands on public issues that don’t directly relate to higher education. Presidents — especially at public institutions — tend to invoke the principle in various forms with some regularity, trying not to speak out on causes bound to offend someone when they want as much support as possible on college budgets or other measures.
It’s that background that explains why many long-time followers of higher education and politics were stunned to learn that Bernie Machen, president of the University of Florida, has endorsed Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid. While the endorsement, released by the McCain campaign, included the expected “should in no way be construed as an endorsement by the University of Florida” line at the end of the announcement, the headline was pretty clear: “University of Florida President Bernie Machen Endorses John McCain for President.”
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Posted in Administration
Inside Higher Ed: Can an Investor Buy a Community College?
In the changing environment of higher education, as geographic and other boundaries blur, state institutions have made the transition to private nonprofit ones (see New York’s Regents College becoming Excelsior College, for example). A small but growing number of private nonprofit colleges — many but not all of which were struggling financially — have been transformed into for-profit entities (see the purchase by Bridgepoint Education of what became Ashford University and the recent sale of Touro College’s thriving international arm to private equity firms).
So far, no state college or university has been turned into a for-profit enterprise. But that may be about to change.
A private investor has offered to buy the online operations and students of Rio Salado College — a community college in Arizona where about half of the 60,000 students study only online — for at least $400 million, and officials at the Maricopa County Community College District, of which Rio Salado is a part, are considering the offer.
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Posted in Corporate University
AP: Gannett Discusses Partnership With CSU Paper
Officials with The Coloradoan in Fort Collins met Tuesday with Colorado State University leaders to discuss a “strategic partnership” to run the campus paper, a university spokesman said.
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Posted in Corporate University, Students
St Louis Post Dispatch: Archbishop says Majerus should be disciplined
St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke said this morning that St. Louis University basketball coach Rick Majerus should be disciplined over his public comments supporting abortion rights and stem cell research.
Majerus made his comments at a campaign appearance for Hillary Rodham Clinton on Saturday night during an interview with KMOV (Channel 4).
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Posted in Free speech
AP: Afghan Journalist Sentenced to Death
An Afghan court on Tuesday sentenced a 23-year-old journalism student to death for distributing a paper he printed off the Internet that three judges said violated the tenets of Islam, an official said.
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Posted in International, Students
The Chronicle News Blog: Walden U. Names a College After a Former Secretary of Education
The all-online Walden University is naming its college of education after a former U.S. secretary of education.
The college, which with 15,000 master’s and doctoral students claims to be the largest online school of education in the country, will be called the Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership. Mr. Riley, a former governor of South Carolina, was the education secretary under President Bill Clinton.
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Posted in Corporate University
