The Guardian: Public concern over university privatisation
Increased privatisation in UK universities would lead to falling standards and harm Britain’s international reputation, according to a new poll released today.
The YouGov survey for the University and College Union (UCU) polled more than 2300 people, asking them for their views on the impact of using private companies to provide tuition to university students.
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Posted in Corporate University, International
The Daily Targum: Government research to track online networking
The Department of Homeland Security is paying Rutgers $3 million to oversee development of computing methods that could monitor suspicious social networks and opinions found in news stories, Web blogs and other Web information to identify indicators of potential terrorist activity.
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Posted in Government
The Daily Star (Egypt): Jailed student blogger faces threats as final trial approaches
Facing a prison sentence of up to 11 years for his controversial Internet writings on Islam and President Mubarak, Egyptian student blogger Abdelkarim Soliman Amer, also known as “Kareem Amer’, has reportedly received death threats from strangers as well as member of his own family.
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Posted in International, Students
One female faculty member resigned and four males filed a legal grievance in response to a recent report claiming a hostile work environment exists toward women in UT’s history department.
The report, compiled by the Office of Institutional Diversity and leaked to the press on Thursday, said interviews with females in the department revealed that “these female faculty members feel that they are addressed in a condescending manner, are patronized and simply not respected as scholars.”
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Posted in Equity
The Ave Maria School of Law announced this afternoon that it would move in 2009 from Ann Arbor, Mich., to the new town of Ave Maria, Fla., which is being built in former tomato fields in southwestern Florida between Naples and Immokalee. The law school was established in 1999 by Thomas S. Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza and a supporter of conservative Roman Catholic causes. The town of Ave Maria will also be home to Ave Maria University, also backed by Mr. Monaghan. Both institutions’ missions, like an Ave Maria College campus in Ypsilanti, Mich., that is now closing, are to provide an education in a conservative, Catholic intellectual tradition.
Bernard Dobranski, the law school’s president and dean, said in an interview that its Board of Governors had decided on the move after five years of discussing its options. He said Collier County, Fla., where the school will be located, is one of the nation’s fastest growing metropolitan areas, yet is without a law school. The school’s proximity to the university will create an intellectually stimulating milieu, he added. “Our presence there will be mutually beneficial to them and to us.” He said that although some faculty members have opposed the move, “everyone on the faculty and the staff is invited to come.”
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Posted in Academics
A controversial study that claimed to demonstrate the efficacy of prayer in medicine has suffered yet another blow to its credibility, as one of its authors now stands accused of plagiarism in another published paper.
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Posted in Academics
The Chronicle: Colleges Should Beware of Using Social-Networking Sites to Monitor Their Students, Speakers Say
Lawyers, professors, student-affairs administrators, and others discussed the uses and misuses of social-networking sites, and whether colleges should be monitoring those sites, at a conference in Florida on higher-education law.
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Posted in Uncategorized
ZNet: Neo-Liberal Economic Policies in the United States: The Impact on American Workers
by Kim Scipes
Although most discussions of the impact of neo-liberal economic policies focus on the countries of the Global South, these policies have been implemented in the United States as well. This began in 1982, when the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, launched a vicious attack on inflation in the US money supply—and caused the deepest US recession since the Great Depression of the late 1920s-1930s.
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Posted in Economics
Vancouver Sun: Forced retirement premature for two university professors
University of B.C. law professor Tony Sheppard is just a few months away from what many would consider a comfortable retirement.
The 65-year-old Sheppard, who has taught law at the university since 1969, not only owns his home outright, but will collect a decent pension when he steps down in June.
His children are adults and the world could quite literally be his oyster.
But Sheppard, who feels he still has much to offer as a teacher, doesn’t want to retire. And he resents the fact that university policy mandates he must step down at age 65.
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Posted in Faculty, Salary/Economic Benefits
Digital Chosunilbo: Korea University President Gives Up
Korea University President Lee Pil-sang on Thursday resigned after 56 days in the job under growing pressure over plagiarism allegations. Lee Seung-hwan, chief of the university’s external cooperation affairs, told reporters the university president decided to resign after listening to opinions from various quarters and submitted a resignation letter to Hyun Seung-jong, the director of the schools’ foundation.
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Posted in Administration, International
Deseret News: College security checks backed
Faculty members at Utah universities are not subject to the intense background scrutiny faced by public school teachers, but one legislator wants to find out exactly who is working at the state’s colleges and universities.
Rep. Ronda Rudd Menlove, R-Garland, is pushing a measure this session to require new hires at Utah’s public institutions of higher education to undergo federal background checks much like those required of elementary school teachers.
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Posted in Government
Inside Higher Ed: $500 Fines for Political Profs
Faculty members who speak on controversial topics would pay — literally — under bill approved by Arizona Senate panel
To date, 2007 hasn’t seen much legislative progress for measures inspired by the “Academic Bill of Rights,” the brainchild of David Horowitz that he says promotes diversity of thought on campuses, but that many faculty leaders believe is designed to squelch them. Bills have been introduced in nine states, according to Free Exchange on Campus, which opposes them. But with one exception, those bills haven’t been moving.
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The exception is Arizona, where a Senate committee on Thursday approved a bill that would go much further than the Academic Bill of Rights, and which has infuriated faculty and student leaders. The bill, whose chief sponsor is the Republican majority leader in the Senate, would ban professors at public colleges and universities, while working, from:
* Endorsing, supporting or opposing any candidate for local, state or national office.
* Endorsing, supporting or opposing any pending legislation, regulation or rule under consideration by local, state or federal agencies.
* Endorsing, supporting or opposing any litigation in any court.
* Advocating “one side of a social, political, or cultural issue that is a matter of partisan controversy.”
* Hindering military recruiting on campus or endorsing the activities of those who do.
Under the legislation, the Arizona Board of Regents, which governs the state’s public universities, and the individual boards of community colleges would be responsible for setting guidelines for the law and for requiring all faculty members to participate in three hours of training annually on their responsibilities under the law.
Punishments could come in two forms. The governing boards’ guidelines would need to develop procedures, including suspensions and terminations in some cases, according to the bill. In addition, the state attorney general and county prosecutors could sue violators, and state courts could impose fines of up to $500. The legislation would bar colleges or their insurance policies from paying the fines — money would need to be paid directly by the professors found guilty.
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Posted in Academic freedom, Government
News Sentinel: Netherton leaves Carson-Newman
Carson-Newman College’s embattled president has accepted a position at Mercer University in Macon, Ga.
Mercer University today announced the appointment of Carson-Newman College President James S. Netherton to the position of executive vice president for administration and finance, effective Oct. 1, 2007.
Netherton succeeds Dr. Thomas G. Estes Jr., who will retire as Mercer’s senior vice president for finance and administration on Sept. 30.
Carson-Newman’s board of trustees was to decide Neverton’s tenure by March 23. One of its options: his dismissal.
Don Olive, professor and former chairman of humanities at Carson-Newman, said last week that he saw no alternative. He said: “You can either change the faculty or you can change the president.”
Doubts about Netherton and concerns about his leadership grew until, on Oct. 4, the teaching faculty approved a no-confidence vote 129-71.
Since then, alumni and retired faculty have also voted no confidence.
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Posted in Administration
Twelve days after he stopped eating to keep an earlier vow that he would “die defiantly” if his university did not grant him tenure, James L. Sherley, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, ended his hunger strike on Friday.
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Posted in Tenure & Promotion
The Sunday Express: Are you an American scholar? You aren’t welcome in India
For all the talk about a buzzing, confident India, there couldn’t be a better — or, to be more accurate, worse — showcase of how some things haven’t changed than this: the country, which is on its way towards signing a landmark nuclear deal with the United States, whose engagement with Washington is a centrepiece of its foreign policy, makes US scholars virtually bend and crawl when it comes to their visiting India for research.
The Chronicle: Fulbright Scholars to India Upset Over Lengthy Clearance Delays and Denials
The Indian government has delayed approving the projects of dozens of Fulbright scholars for months, and has rejected some projects without explanation — a move observers believe is an attempt to force the scholars to change their research topics.
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Posted in Academic freedom
San Jose Mercury News: Columbia University war protest evokes anti-Vietnam activism
Students at Columbia University – once a hotbed of anti-Vietnam protests – walked out of classes Thursday to raise their voices against the war in Iraq.
They joined students across the country who planned demonstrations against President Bush just hours after he exhorted NATO nations to send more troops to Afghanistan.
“What do we want?” yelled a Columbia student into a microphone in front of Columbia’s Low Library.
“Stop the war!” responded a few hundred protesters.
“When do we want it?” yelled back the woman at the mike.
“Now!” was the answer.
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Posted in Protests
Houston Chronicle: Remaining TSU cases will be prosecuted
Despite dropping the charge against a Texas Southern University employee indicted with former TSU President Priscilla Slade, prosecutors said Friday that they expect to go forward with cases against Slade and two former senior vice presidents.
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Posted in Legal issues
San Jose Mercury News: Fresno State body approves undercover surveillance of campus
Campus police at the California State University, Fresno, may go undercover during investigations but cannot videotape classrooms or faculty offices, according to a new policy approved by school officials.
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Posted in Administration
Dallas Morning News: SMU history faculty pans Bush’s privacy order
Southern Methodist University’s faculty senate went on record Wednesday as opposing an executive order that could limit access to presidential records – a concern since the George W. Bush Presidential Library is probably headed to SMU.
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Posted in Faculty
The Decline of Public Higher Education
MR Zine: The Decline of Public Higher Education
by Rick Wolff
Over the last quarter century, Americans got used to the idea of their children going on to colleges and universities. In the early 1970s, about 8.5 million Americans attended such institutions; by 2004 the number had doubled. The US population across this time rose by less than 50%. This spectacular growth in our student population reflected the pent-up demand of the mass of Americans for what they had viewed as a luxury as well as a ticket to better jobs and higher incomes. The demand would have far exceeded the supply had not most of the states rapidly increased facilities for public higher education. Today, the vast majority of US college and university students attend public, not private, institutions. Yet therein lies precisely the problem.
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Posted in Commentary