Jerusalem Post: Student strike talks end with no result
The student strike entered its 36th day on Monday morning, after late night negotiations between student leaders and protesters prevented the former from voting on a Prime Minister’s Office proposal that could end the strike.
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Posted in International, Strikes & Labor Disputes, Students
Jerusalem Post: Group: Palestinians ‘academically boycotted’
Academics and university presidents should protest the government’s restrictions on Palestinian university students while Israel fights against a proposed academic boycott by British universities, a human rights organization said Sunday.
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Posted in International
The Chronicle: Student Protests Over Pension-Cost Dispute Shut Down Most of Colombia’s Public Universities
A dispute over who will pay for the pensions of university employees has led to student protests and suspension of classes at many of Colombia’s public universities.
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Posted in Protests
Los Angeles Times: Protest disrupts UC board meeting
Hunger strikers and their backers protest the university’s involvement in the development of nuclear weapons. Thirteen are arrested.
SAN FRANCISCO — A group of student hunger strikers and their supporters disrupted a meeting of the University of California Board of Regents on Thursday to protest UC’s participation in the development of nuclear weapons.
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Posted in Protests
The Boston Globe: UMass shake-up draws cheers, disappointment
A shake-up in leadership at the University of Massachusetts brought both disappointment and jubilation yesterday to campuses across the system. It also sparked a trustee’s resignation and faculty criticism for shutting them out of the decision.
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Posted in Administration
The Chronicle: Dismissal of Islamist Professors in Jordan Alarms Government Opponents
A Jordanian university dismissed 14 Islamist professors last week, many of them affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group that has harshly criticized the Jordanian government.
The institution, Al-Zarqa Private University, one of the top private universities in the country, declined to renew the scholars’ contracts at the end of the academic year. Many faculty members at the university, which is located in Az Zarqa, an industrial city northeast of Amman, the capital, operate under such contracts.
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Posted in International
National Review: Profs show hostility toward evangelicals
Gary Tobin, president of the IJCR, spoke to NRO editor Kathryn Lopez Monday night about the study, “The Religious Identity and Behavior of College Faculty.”
Fifty-three percent of “non-evangelical university faculty say they hold cool or unfavorable views of Evangelical Christians,” according to a two-year study released today by the Institute for Jewish & Community Research. According to the study, one-third of all faculty surveyed also admitted to holding unfavorable views of Mormons.
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Posted in Faculty
Dallas Morning News: It’s time to stop racial preferences
Schools are helping no one, least of all the minorities in need, says LINDA CHAVEZ
We’re at the beginning of the end of the racial spoils system that has come to symbolize affirmative action in higher education, state contracting and employment.
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Posted in Commentary
Haaretz.com: Israeli, U.K. academics meet to discuss proposed academic boycott
Two very different groups of academics met at the University of Brighton on Wednesday. On one side of the table were five local representatives of Britain’s University and College Union, the sponsors of a resolution proposing an academic boycott of Israel. On the other were four Israeli academics who came to Britain to fight the proposal. They only managed to agree on one issue: Their argument should be conducted politely.
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Posted in International, Protests
Contra Costa Times: Required ethics course draws ire
Fewer than half of UC Berkeley faculty members and other employees have completed a required ethics course that some professors say is irrelevant.
All 160,000 University of California employees were told last year to complete the online course after the institution was stung by newspaper accounts of a series of administrative missteps. Most managers, deans and other administrators statewide completed the training by January, but most UC Berkeley professors and other employees have not.
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Posted in Ethics
The Guardian: Academic Pay Goes Further Down Under
Academics working in UK have the highest pay scales compared to colleagues in other Commonwealth countries, according to the results of a new survey published today.
But British academics drop to third place when a cost of living factor is applied to income, and their place at the top is taken by Australian academics, the Association of Commonwealth Universities 2006-07 academic staff salary survey revealed.
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Posted in Salary/Economic Benefits
eSchoolNews Online: Pearson buys eCollege in $538M deal
In a $538 million deal, educational publishing giant Pearson PLC has announced that its Pearson Education unit is purchasing eCollege.com, a purveyor of eLearning systems for both K-12 and higher-education institutions.
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Posted in Corporate University
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
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Posted in Government
The Boston Globe: Harvard has $1m loan for ex-chief
The former Harvard University president, Lawrence H. Summers, received a severance package that could be worth up to $2 million or more, including a $1 million home loan, according to the university’s annual Internal Revenue Service filing.
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Posted in Administration, Salary/Economic Benefits
The Arizona Republic: New college coming to Goodyear
Franklin Pierce College would lease city-owned land for $1 a year near Estrella Parkway and Yuma Road under an agreement with Goodyear. The City Council signed a letter of intent at Monday’s meeting, paving the way for the New Hampshire-based college to develop a campus.
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Posted in Corporate University
Denver Post: Churchill’s lawyer: Panel advises suspension
The attorney for University of Colorado ethnic-studies professor Ward Churchill said Tuesday that the committee reviewing his academic misconduct case has recommended a one-year suspension rather than dismissal.
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Posted in Academic freedom, Faculty
Inside Higher Ed: File Sharing Shut Down
Ohio University announced Tuesday that unauthorized file sharing on its network has “virtually stopped” after two weeks of monitoring for unauthorized file sharing. Notices from the Recording Industry Association of America about illegal file sharing dropped from nearly 10 to 50 per day down to almost zero, the university’s chief information officer said. Ohio’s original plan to block all peer-to-peer file sharing other than for students and faculty members who requested exemptions was controversial for potentially limiting valid uses of the technology. But since then, Ohio has upgraded its system to filter out illegal file sharing while leaving most legal file sharing untouched.
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Posted in Open access
McLeans: Vancouver University Worldwide ordered to stop granting degrees
Raises questions about monitoring online universities
Last week’s B.C. Supreme Court ruling that ordered Vancouver University Worldwide to stop granting degrees in B.C. brings up an interesting question: where exactly is your university located? With the rise of distance education made possible by the Internet, you can take an array of classes from just about anywhere, from Nunavut to the Queen Charlotte Islands. While correspondence courses can be very convenient, the lack of physical campuses of some institutions is making it difficult to pin down just what jurisdiction a university is located in, and what laws apply.
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Posted in Academics, Government
The Chronicle News Blog: Leading Advocate of Intelligent Design Is Denied Tenure at Iowa State U.
Iowa State University has denied tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy who has been a prominent supporter of the idea of intelligent design. Mr. Gonzalez is appealing the university’s decision, according to an unusual news release issued by the university to explain its action. The release states that every level of review, from the departmental committee to the provost, determined that Mr. Gonzalez should not be awarded tenure.
In August 2005, 120 faculty members at Iowa State issued a statement denouncing intelligent design, in part as a reaction to Mr. Gonzalez’s work in the area. Intelligent-design advocates believe that some biological systems are so complex that they could have arisen only through the action of an intelligent force and not simply through Darwinian evolution, the theory of life that has overwhelming support from scientists.
The Discovery Institute, a leading backer of the intelligent-design movement, issued a news release on Monday that denounced the decision, saying that Mr. Gonzalez had written 68 peer-reviewed publications, far more than his department requires for tenure. But some comments on science blogs have questioned the worth of many of those publications and of Mr. Gonzalez’s scholarship in general. —Richard Monastersky
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Posted in Academics, Tenure & Promotion
Redeeming Columbia
Redeeming Columbia
New York Sun Editorial
May 18, 2007
Of all the graduates receiving their diplomas this season, the one we salute this morning is Bret Woellner. He is the Columbia University graduate student who was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army yesterday in the first joint commissioning ceremony ever held at the White House for graduates of the Reserve Officer Training Corps. All of the ROTC graduates are men and women who made extraordinary sacrifices as students. But Mr. Woellner was among a select group who made a double sacrifice, because Columbia, like several other universities who had graduates at the White House yesterday, bans ROTC from campus. So Mr. Woellner had to travel to Fordham to do his military studies.
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Posted in Commentary