U. of Delaware Abandons Sessions on Diversity

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The Chronicle: U. of Delaware Abandons Sessions on Diversity

Effort to teach tolerance in dormitories attacked as ‘thought reform’
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The University of Delaware spent years refining its residence-life education program. One week of public criticism unraveled it.

Late last month, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech group, accused the university of promoting specific views on race, sexuality, and morality in a series of discussions held in dormitories. The program was designed to build understanding among diverse students, but some participants complained that it told them how to think and pried into their beliefs with questions like “When did you discover your sexual identity?”

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Posted in Diversity

ORU Scandal: Roberts Receives ‘No Confidence’ Vote

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AP: Roberts Receives ‘No Confidence’ Vote

Embattled Oral Roberts University president Richard Roberts, facing accusations he misspent university funds to support a lavish lifestyle, has received a vote of “no confidence” by the tenured faculty at the evangelical university.

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Posted in Administration

Berkeley tree sitter injured after fall from oak

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Mercury-News: Berkeley tree sitter injured after fall from oak

A tree sitter who was using a suspended traverse line to leave the oak grove near Memorial Stadium Sunday night fell at least 30 feet to the ground, breaking an arm and a leg, a tree-sit supporter said Monday morning.

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Posted in Protests

20% of Canadian Faculty Members Are Stressed Out, Survey Finds

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The Chronicle News Blog: 20% of Canadian Faculty Members Are Stressed Out, Survey Finds

More than 20 percent of Canadian professors say their jobs are making them sick, according to a national survey commissioned by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which says it shows very clearly that high levels of stress are a major problem with serious consequences for faculties. About 10 percent of those surveyed were classified as clinically distressed, which would qualify them for long-term disability.

A 42-page report on the survey lays out the variety of faculty stressors, including workload, scheduling, role conflicts, and problems with senior administrators. Professors who tend to be the most stressed are women on the tenure track who are trying to balance work and family.

The survey covered 1,470 people who were randomly selected at 56 universities. The response rate was 27 percent. Over all, 65 percent said they were satisfied with their jobs. —Karen Birchard

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Posted in Faculty

Striking students

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Inside Higher Ed: Striking Students

A hunger strike at Columbia University is nearing the end of its first week, while some students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst are planning to attend Thursday and Friday teach-ins about issues such as college cost instead of attending class. In both cases, it’s unclear if and when negotiations or meetings would provide a quick end to the actions.

Five students — two from Barnard College and three from Columbia — began fasting on Wednesday in protest of the university’s response to recent hate incidents and the university’s plans to expand into neighboring Manhattanville, among other issues. One Barnard student was hospitalized over the weekend and ended her hunger strike, but a Barnard political science professor has told his class that he would begin to fast, according to Jamie Chen, a student who is helping support the effort.

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Posted in Protests, Students

When and Why Professors Retire

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Inside Higher Ed: When and Why Professors Retire

Joan Lorden said she noticed something unsettling a few years ago: When she went to events honoring professors for teaching awards, there was too much overlap in those being honored with those whose retirements were being announced at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she is provost. She worried about losing “the backbone of departments,” she said.

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Posted in Faculty

Doors of learning reopen at Baghdad University

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AFP: Doors of learning reopen at Baghdad University

BAGHDAD, (AFP) — One month into the new academic year and education at the sprawling University of Baghdad is as near to normal as it has been for years — the grisly killings of two professors and two students aside.

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Posted in International

California: Tree sitters remain perched at UCSC

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Santa Cruz Sentinel: Tree sitters remain perched at UCSC

About five tree sitters spent their third day nested in redwood trees above the UC Santa Cruz parking lot where a protest had turned violent earlier in the week but on Friday was teeming with students, art and food.

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Posted in Protests

Checking Up on Your Past

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Inside Higher Ed: Checking Up on Your Past

It probably shouldn’t be surprising in the year of the Virginia Tech murders and the scandal over the Massachusetts Institute of Technology admissions dean who didn’t have the degrees she claimed. More colleges are starting or considering policies to require background checks on potential employees.

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Posted in Employment rights

Accountability System Launched

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Inside Higher Ed: Accountability System Launched

A new way for students and their families to compare colleges — and for legislators and others to evaluate them — was unveiled Sunday with the start of a campaign to get institutions to sign up to use it.

“College Portrait,” as the effort is called, is a template for information that public, four-year institutions will provide online in an easily comparable way. Some of the information — statistics on the student body, figures on college costs — is fairly commonly found (if not always in comparable ways) on colleges’ Web sites today. But the program also includes a new method for measuring graduation and retention rates and, controversially, a requirement that institutions that choose to participate conduct and release results from standardized tests as a means of measuring the learning that goes on at their institutions. Those tests would be administered to small, representative cohorts of students — possibly 100 or fewer freshmen and a similar group of seniors — and would not be generally offered or required of all students.

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Posted in Accountability

Pennsylvania: President Resigns After Only 4 Months on the Job

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The Chronicle News Blog: President Resigns After Only 4 Months on the Job

Jill L. Sherman, president of Cedar Crest College since July, resigned suddenly on Wednesday for “personal reasons,” according to a news release issued by the Pennsylvania college.

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Posted in Administration

Faculty-Productivity Index Offers Surprises

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The Chronicle: Faculty-Productivity Index Offers Surprises

Third annual ranking gives high marks to some lesser-known programs

Intellectual heft may seem like a tricky thing to measure, but Academic Analytics says it can be done.

The for-profit company, owned in part by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, recently compiled its third annual Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index — a ranking of graduate programs at research universities based on what purports to be the first objective measurement of per-capita scholarly accomplishment. The measurement this year considers several new factors, causing some surprising fluctuations in the rankings.

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Posted in Faculty

Many College Presidents Lack Written Employment Contracts

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The Chronicle: Many College Presidents Lack Written Employment Contracts

All college presidents technically hold employment contracts. But whether the terms of those contracts are spelled out clearly is a different story. One-third of public university chiefs do not have formal written agreements, The Chronicle found in a survey of 165 public universities where such documents are considered public information.

Some of the collected agreements (which are posted on The Chronicle’s Web site) are extensive legal documents. For example, Lester A. Lefton, president of Kent State University, holds a 12-page contract with an eight-page attachment detailing his deferred compensation.

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Posted in Campaigns & Contracts

Presidential Pay Is Increasing Fastest At the Largest Institutions

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The Chronicle: Presidential Pay Is Increasing Fastest At the Largest Institutions

At the top echelon of higher education, boards have to pay to play when hiring a president.

The Chronicle’s latest survey of executive compensation shows what might be described as the minimum pay now required at the top institutions.

At public research universities, the minimum compensation among the big players is roughly $450,000. In the 2006-7 fiscal year, 56 of the 182 public institutions in the survey paid their president at least that amount. Almost all of the largest and best-known research institutions topped it, but there were exceptions, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the University of California system.

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Posted in Administration, Salary/Economic Benefits

A Class Traitor in Academe

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The Chronicle: A Class Traitor in Academe

By Thomas H. Benton
An Academic in America

“Thomas H. Benton,” an associate professor of English, offers his take on academic work and life.

It’s easy to find books on race and gender in academic life, but only a handful focus on social class.

I know of four. They are all essay collections that came to me like life preservers when I was drowning in graduate school: Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class (1984), edited by Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey; Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (1993), edited by Michelle M. Tokarczyk and Elizabeth A. Fay; This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class (1995), edited by C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law; and Teaching Working Class (1999), edited by Sherry Lee Linkon.

All four books include female and minority writers, and, as such, they underline how the ties of solidarity that come from class awareness are often stronger than the divisions that generally preoccupy academe.

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Posted in Academics

California: Federal Court Strikes Down University’s Civility Policy as Basis for Discipline

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The Chronicle News Blog: Federal Court Strikes Down University’s Civility Policy as Basis for Discipline

California State University cannot use its civility policy to investigate or discipline students, a federal magistrate ruled last week.

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Posted in Legal issues, Students

Few Women Reach the Top in Japan’s Universities

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The Chronicle: Few Women Reach the Top in Japan’s Universities

At 68 and after a lifetime of academic work, Mitiko Go is at the top of her profession: president of Tokyo’s Ochanomizu University. That might not seem like that unusual an accomplishment, but she is the only female president among Japan’s 87 national universities.

“Obviously this is not good enough,” she laments. “We have to do better.”

Japan’s higher-education system is the second largest in the world, after the United States, but it fares much worse than the United States when it comes to gender equity. Just 7 percent of Japan’s 750-odd colleges and universities are run by women, compared with 23 percent of those in the United States. And while four out of the eight members of the Ivy League now boast female presidents, none of Japan’s top academic institutions has ever allowed a woman to rise to the top.

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Posted in International

Sending in the Class Monitor

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Inside Higher Ed: Sending in the Class Monitor

A professor’s alleged remarks in September set off an investigation at Brandeis University that has left some faculty members skeptical, students divided and the class itself monitored — for the time being — by an administrator.

The incident recalls one this year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where a law professor was accused of making anti-Hmong comments, and the details he later provided placed those comments in a very different context, one contested by some who brought the complaints in the first place. At Brandeis, a university named for a defender of freedom of expression, the episode took place in a class on Latin American politics, and the statements in question centered around a single word whose connotations have historically caused pain to Mexican Americans.

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Posted in Academic freedom, Free speech

Ohio: Racial tensions–Denison students take over ‘timeout’

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The Columbus Dispatch: Denison students take over ‘timeout’

Angry Denison University students blasted the school’s administration for trying to limit student speech yesterday during a forum about race and discrimination issues on campus.

Nearly 1,800 students had gathered in the Mitchell Center for a campuswide “timeout” sponsored by student groups and the faculty to talk about issues spurred by several recent incidents. When Denison President Dale Knobel tried to limit discussion so that classes could resume, the students refused to leave and lined up at the microphone to object.

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Posted in Students

Pomona College immigration debate ends prematurely

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Inland Valley Daily Bulletin: Pomona College immigration debate ends prematurely

CLAREMONT – An immigration debate at Pomona College ended prematurely Thursday night when a group of students critical of the event began chanting protest slogans, drowning out the two speakers and fueling shouting matches between audience members.

Anti-immigration activist Marvin Stewart debated Jacob Hornberger, an open-borders advocate, for about an hour, often eliciting strong responses from the audience of nearly 600.

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Posted in Protests, Students