Union-Tribune: College district chief altered own contract
Faculty leaders stepped up their demand yesterday that Chancellor Omero Suarez resign from the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District because he had his contract changed without board approval.
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Posted in Academics
The Guardian: Low IQs are Africa’s curse, says lecturer
The London School of Economics is embroiled in a row over academic freedom after one of its lecturers published a paper alleging that African states were poor and suffered chronic ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries.
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Posted in Academic freedom
Asia Times: China: From steel mills to diploma mills
Life is no walk in the park for many students in China, especially if they flunk entrance exams for the most prestigious universities. For those without connections, a degree from a top university is their only hope in a job market saturated with degree-holders.
Government statisticians reckon this year will see 4.1 million university graduates chasing 1.4 million jobs requiring a tertiary education. That is why scientists and engineers can be had for a song in China, one factor foreign investors find attractive.
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Posted in Corporate University, International
USA Today: Protesters turn Mexican university into stronghold in Oaxaca rebellion
Masked men patrol the gates, armed with bats and gasoline bombs, and barbed wire and booby traps defile the campus lawns. Since protesters took over the state university in Mexico’s besieged Oaxaca City, there have been no classes, only talk of revolution.
The university of 30,000 students has become a stronghold for leftists trying to oust the Oaxaca state governor in a five-month-old conflict that has left at least nine people dead.
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Posted in International, K-12 issues, Protests
The Chronicle: How Student Protesters Toppled a Would-Be President at Gallaudet U.
The protesters were ready to lock down the campus again. Last Sunday, even after three weeks of demonstrations that included arrests, hunger strikes, and two takeovers of campus buildings at Gallaudet University, dozens of students were prepared to continue their rebellion if the university’s Board of Trustees decided to stand firm in its appointment of Jane K. Fernandes as president-designate of the university.
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Posted in Administration, Protests
The Chronicle: Spellings Urges Education Researchers to Support Proposal to Track Individual Students’ Progress
The U.S. secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, called on higher-education researchers on Thursday to champion the Bush administration’s proposal to create a national system, known as a “unit record database,” that would allow the government to track individual students’ progress through college.
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Posted in Accountability
The Chronicle: Magazine Comes Out With Rankings of Canadian Universities, in Spite of Their Resistance
What Maclean’s magazine is billing as its biggest and best university-ranking issue, despite losing the cooperation of 26 universities, is arriving on newsstands this week, and some of the top universities have shuffled positions since last year.
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Posted in Administration
The Boston Globe: MIT decides not to discipline professor
A Nobel laureate behaved inappropriately when he discouraged a young woman from accepting an MIT job offer, but other professors provoked the neuroscientist’s actions to some extent by excluding him from parts of the hiring process, according to an MIT investigation.
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Posted in Faculty
Palm Beach Post: Florida students increasingly choose to attend private, for-profit colleges
Forest Hill High School graduate Elizabeth Aubuchon just assumed she’d go to Palm Beach Community College to study radiography – a two-year program that would allow her to do X-rays and MRIs.
But when Aubuchon learned PBCC classes were full, she turned to the private for-profit Keiser College, which accepted her immediately and eased her decision to go there by walking her through complicated student loan and financial aid applications. Her loans will total thousands when she graduates.
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Posted in Students
Inside Higher Ed: Affirmative Action for White C+ Guys
Towson University, facing a gender gap, starts admissions program for those with high SAT scores and lower grades
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Posted in Equity
Toronto Star: Dean of Baghdad University gunned down
Gunmen killed the Shiite dean of Baghdad University’s school of administration and economics on Thursday, four days after the murder of a prominent Sunni academic.
Jassim al-Asadi had been driving with his family in the northern Baghdad neighbourhood of Azamiyah when the unidentified shooters pulled alongside and opened fire, police Lt. Ahmed Ibrahim said. Al-Asadi’s wife and son were also killed in the attack, Ibrahim said.
The shooting follows the killing on Monday of geologist Essam al-Rawi, head of the University Professor’s Union and a senior member of the hardline Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, which is believed to have links to the anti-Shiite insurgency raging against U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies.
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Posted in Uncategorized
The Olympian: Evergreen faculty forms union
Faculty at The Evergreen State College voted to form a union, it was announced Tuesday.
The three-week-long vote passed with 55 percent of the faculty approving the union, said Laurie Meeker, a professor of film and one of the faculty organizers. About 82 percent of eligible faculty turned in a ballot, she said.
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Posted in Campaigns & Contracts, Unions
The New York Times: Clifford Geertz, Cultural Anthropologist, Is Dead at 80
Clifford Geertz, the eminent cultural anthropologist whose work focused on interpreting the symbols he believed give meaning and order to people’s lives, died on Monday in Philadelphia. He was 80 and lived in Princeton, N.J.
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Posted in Uncategorized
The Chronicle: Faculty Strike Shuts Down 5 of Kenya’s 6 Public Universities
Five of Kenya’s six public universities have been closed indefinitely and their students sent away as a strike by professors and lecturers over a salary dispute enters its second week.
Teaching for about 80,000 students ground to a halt on October 23, when the strike began. The professors, who are represented by the Universities Academic Staff Union, are demanding a 600-percent pay increase, and have rejected government offers of increases of from 9 percent to 25 percent.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
The Chronicle: Southern Illinois U. Should Have Acknowledged Copying in Strategic Plan, Committee Says
A committee investigating alleged plagiarism in the strategic plan at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale says administrators should have made it clear that certain sections of the document had been copied from another university’s plan.
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Posted in Administration, Ethics
The Chronicle: At Gallaudet U., Technology and Influential Blogs Helped Galvanize Protests
Blogs played a significant role in galvanizing resistance to the appointment of Jane K. Fernandes as president of Gallaudet University. They captured the attention of not only students and alumni but many deaf people not affiliated with the university.
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Posted in Protests, Technology
The Independent: Thousands of students ‘join sex trade to fund degrees’
Increasing numbers of young women in France are turning to sex work to help pay the bills while they are at university, according to one of the country’s leading students’ unions.
According to the SUD-Etudiant union, 40,000 students in France – or nearly 2 per cent – fund their studies through the sex trade.
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Posted in International, Students
The Globe and Mail: A revolution from within
From the social sciences to medical school to music to law, women now make up the majority of student enrolment. Even engineering and business faculties are starting to see a shift. As IAN BROWN reports, the impact is profound — and so far, for the better
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Posted in Equity
The Chronicle: Most Scientists at Elite Universities Consider Themselves ‘Spiritual,’ Survey Finds
A survey of scientists at elite universities shows that most consider themselves “spiritual,” and many say that their faith influences their interactions with students and colleagues.
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Posted in Faculty
The Chronicle: Association’s New President Urges Medical Schools to Put Public Good Above Private Gain
The new president of the Association of American Medical Colleges has called on medical schools to elevate the public good above their own self-interest by considering tuition caps, curtailing pork-barrel spending requests, and pursuing socially beneficial research projects even if they are not profitable.
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Posted in Uncategorized
