Outsourcing Language Learning

Posted on January 22, 2010 by | Comments Off on Outsourcing Language Learning

Inside Higher Ed: Outsourcing Language Learning

Almost a decade ago, Drake University stirred up controversy by eliminating its foreign language departments and thereby the jobs of faculty in French, German and Italian, even those with tenure.

Traditional lecture and language lab instruction was replaced with the Drake University Language Acquisition Program (DULAP): small discussion groups led by on-campus native speakers, a weekly session with a scholar of the language, a one-semester course on language acquisition and the use of several Web-based learning technologies.

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Posted in Academics, Corporate University

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Tenure Case Hinges on Collegiality

Posted on January 22, 2010 by | Comments Off on Tenure Case Hinges on Collegiality

Inside Higher Ed: Tenure Case Hinges on Collegiality

Something’s rotten in Ohio.

Depending on whom you believe, a bizarre tenure case that has unfolded over the past year at Ohio University either represents a last-ditch effort to oust a troubled and potentially dangerous professor or a concentrated conspiracy to derail his career before it truly begins. Either way, Bill Reader’s tenure case is headed for some sort of conclusion this month.

A journalism professor since 2002, Reader’s tenure decision went before a departmental committee last January. Despite glowing teaching evaluations and no documented trace of disciplinary action in his past, the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism’s Promotion and Tenure Committee agreed only narrowly to recommend that Reader receive tenure. The 7-5 vote sent a clear message of dissension within the ranks, and served as a precursor for recommendations of tenure denial from the school’s director, the college of communication’s tenure review committee and the dean. In the meantime, a cascade of charges and countercharges have been made, centering on whether Reader is the kind of professor Ohio wants to have around.

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Posted in Tenure & Promotion

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Scandal plagued administrators at N.C. State U rejoin faculty

Posted on January 22, 2010 by | Comments Off on Scandal plagued administrators at N.C. State U rejoin faculty

News & Observer: Oblinger, Nielsen back as professors

Former Chancellor Jim Oblinger and former Provost Larry Nielsen are professors now for N.C. State University, though Oblinger has left the Raleigh campus and moved west.

The pair resigned last year over their roles in the university’s hiring of former state first lady Mary Easley.

Each received a six-month leave to prepare for rejoining the faculty after being away from their areas of scientific expertise for years.

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Posted in Administration

In Education Minister’s ‘Bolt Out of the Blue,’ National U. of Ireland Faces Extinction

Posted on January 21, 2010 by | Comments Off on In Education Minister’s ‘Bolt Out of the Blue,’ National U. of Ireland Faces Extinction

The Chronicle: In Education Minister’s ‘Bolt Out of the Blue,’ National U. of Ireland Faces Extinction

The National University of Ireland, a century-old federal institution that comprises some of the country’s leading universities and colleges, including University College Dublin, is facing dissolution. Ireland’s education minister, Batt O’Keeffe, announced the move on Wednesday, saying that the umbrella institution had outlived its usefulness and that “the need to have a separate body undertaking what is now a limited set of functions” no longer exists.

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U. of Oxford Bans Legal File-Sharing Service

Posted on January 21, 2010 by | Comments Off on U. of Oxford Bans Legal File-Sharing Service

The Chronicle: U. of Oxford Bans Legal File-Sharing Service

Universities have been known to forbid illegal file sharing on their campuses, but the University of Oxford has decided to ban a music-sharing program that’s perfectly legal. Spotify, a popular music-streaming service that uses peer-to-peer technology, is now prohibited on the campus network because it was simply consuming too much bandwidth.

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Posted in Open access

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Issue of space or speech?

Posted on January 20, 2010 by | Comments Off on Issue of space or speech?

Inside Higher Ed: Issue of Space, Not Speech

A group seen to have pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic sympathies could soon be booted from the University of Oregon’s student union building, if not the campus altogether.

Meetings of the Pacifica Forum, a group that on its Web site describes itself as offering “information and perspective on the issues of war and peace, militarism and pacifism, violence and non-violence,” have been held in the Eugene institution’s Erb Memorial Union for years.

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Posted in Free speech

Critical Education inaugural issue

Posted on January 19, 2010 by | Comments Off on Critical Education inaugural issue

Critical Education logo

The Editorial Team of Critical Education is pleased to launch the inaugural issue of the journal.

Click on the current issue link at the top of the home page (or the abstract and article links at the bottom of the page) to read “The Idiocy of Policy: The Anti-Democratic Curriculum of High-stakes Testing” by Wayne Au. Au is assistant professor of education at Cal State University, Fullerton and author of Unequal By Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality (Routledge, 2009).

To recieve notification of new content in Critical Education, sign up as a journal user (reader, reviewer, or author).

Look for the initial installments of the special section edited by Abraham DeLeon titled “The Lure of the Animal: Addressing Nonhuman Animals in Educational Theory and Research” in the coming weeks.

criticaleducation.org

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Posted in Academics

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Paychecks Stagnate for Presidents of Many Public Universities

Posted on January 19, 2010 by | Comments Off on Paychecks Stagnate for Presidents of Many Public Universities

The Chronicle: Paychecks Stagnate for Presidents of Many Public Universities

The bad economy is putting the brakes on pay increases for public-university leaders. Base salaries stopped growing last year for more than one-third of the 185 public-university chief executives included in a new Chronicle survey, while 10 percent of those top leaders experienced a decline in total compensation. Many of the cuts came from voluntary reductions in pay and benefits as the economy whittled away at campus budgets.

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Posted in Administration, Salary/Economic Benefits

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Time Crunch for Female Scientists: They Do More Housework Than Men

Posted on January 19, 2010 by | Comments Off on Time Crunch for Female Scientists: They Do More Housework Than Men

The Chronicle: Time Crunch for Female Scientists: They Do More Housework Than Men

When the biologist Carol W. Greider received a call from Stockholm last fall telling her she had won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, she wasn’t working in her lab at the Johns Hopkins University. The professor of molecular biology and genetics was at home, folding laundry.

Ms. Greider does many of the household chores, but she isn’t alone. A number of her female colleagues also do more around the house than their male partners.

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University of Hawaii, union reach deal: Pay cuts now, paybacks later

Posted on January 19, 2010 by | Comments Off on University of Hawaii, union reach deal: Pay cuts now, paybacks later

Honolulu Advertiser: University of Hawaii, union reach deal
Agreement calls for pay cut for UHPA members now, but paybacks later

A day after its members received their first paychecks reflecting a 6.7 percent pay cut, the University of Hawai’i Professional Assembly announced that a tentative contract agreement had been reached with the University of Hawai’i.

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Posted in Campaigns & Contracts

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Labor College’s Deal Questioned

Posted on January 19, 2010 by | Comments Off on Labor College’s Deal Questioned

Inside Higher Ed: Labor College’s Deal Questioned

At many faculty gatherings these days, one hears quips and complaints about for-profit higher education. Professors who value what they consider essential and eroding traditions — a significant tenure-track faculty and the centrality of the liberal arts, for example — resent the adjunct-heavy, career-education dominant model of higher education that is widely used in for-profit higher ed. As a result, many faculty advocates are skeptical not only about for-profit higher education, but about the growing number of alliances between nonprofit colleges and for-profit colleges. A common criticism of these partnerships is that they shift the focus away from traditional academic programs into areas that are seen as more lucrative (and that generally are more career-oriented).

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Posted in Corporate University

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Historic declines in state support for public higher ed

Posted on January 18, 2010 by | Comments Off on Historic declines in state support for public higher ed

Inside Higher Ed: Historic Declines

By any financial measure, this fiscal year is a terrible one for public higher education. And while that’s no surprise to anyone working at a state college or university, new national data document the extent of the loss of state support.

Total state support for higher education for 2009-10 — including federal stimulus dollars — is $79.4 billion, which is a decline of 1.1 percent from the prior year and 1.7 percent from the year before that. This represents a dramatic shift from the three-year period of 2005 to 2008 when state support grew 24 percent, to $80.7 billion — without federal stimulus dollars in the equation. Without the federal stimulus contribution, which is now over, state support this year would have been down 3.5 percent over one year and 6.8 percent over two years.

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Posted in Budgets & Funding

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Faculties Are Liberal Because Conservatives Don’t Seek Academic Careers, Study Finds

Posted on January 18, 2010 by | Comments Off on Faculties Are Liberal Because Conservatives Don’t Seek Academic Careers, Study Finds

The New York Times: Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left

The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. Now new research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they should ask why so many liberals — and so few conservatives — want to be professors.

Inside Higher Ed:New View of Faculty Liberalism/Why are professors liberal?

That question has led to many heated debates, particularly in recent years, over charges from some on the right that faculty members somehow discriminate against those who don’t share a common political agenda with the left. A new paper attempts to shift the debate in a new direction. This study argues that certain characteristics of professors — related to education and religion, among other factors — explain a significant portion of the liberalism of faculty members relative to the American public at large.

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Posted on January 15, 2010 by | Comments Off on

Inside Higher Ed: A Historic Union?

A month after completing its first foray into online higher education by acquiring the distance education provider Penn Foster, the Princeton Review has set its next goal: to help create the largest online college ever. And it thinks it can do it in five years.

The company announced yesterday that it is entering into a joint venture with the National Labor College — an accredited institution that offers blended-learning programs to 200 students, most of whom are adults — to establish what would be called the College for Working Families. The college would offer courses tailored to the needs of union members and their families, beginning this fall.

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Posted in Corporate University

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Oklahoma: St. Gregory’s University says it will implement hiring freeze, lay off 5% of employees

Posted on January 15, 2010 by | Comments Off on Oklahoma: St. Gregory’s University says it will implement hiring freeze, lay off 5% of employees

SHAWNEE, Okla. (AP) — St. Gregory’s University’s interim president says the private Catholic school in Shawnee will lay off some employees by the end of the week.

University President David Marker made the announcement Wednesday, saying about five percent of the school’s 119 faculty and staff will be affected by the layoffs.

Marker says St. Gregory’s also is implementing a hiring freeze and cutting expenditures. A dozen open positions within the university will not be filled at this time.

He says the measures are necessary to ensure the university’s fiscal stability in the face of declining enrollment and endowment figures. He says other universities are facing similar financial challenges.

St. Gregory’s is Oklahoma’s only Catholic university. It has about 70

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Posted in Budgets & Funding

Federal Court Rules for U. of California, Against Christian Schools’ Course Work

Posted on January 15, 2010 by | Comments Off on Federal Court Rules for U. of California, Against Christian Schools’ Course Work

The Chronicle: Federal Court Rules for U. of California, Against Christian Schools’ Course Work

The University of California admissions policy denying the academic validity of some courses taken at a Christian high school is constitutional, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled this week. This decision upholds that of the U.S. District Court of Los Angeles in a case in which the Association of Christian Schools International argued that the policy discriminated against students who had taken biology, history, English, government, and world-religion courses at Calvary Chapel Christian School.

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Posted in Legal issues

Sandra Day O’Connor Revisits and Revives Affirmative-Action Controversy

Posted on January 15, 2010 by | Comments Off on Sandra Day O’Connor Revisits and Revives Affirmative-Action Controversy

The Chronicle: Sandra Day O’Connor Revisits and Revives Affirmative-Action Controversy

Having held in a landmark 2003 Supreme Court ruling that diverse college enrollments have proven educational benefits but that colleges should not need race-conscious admissions policies 25 years down the road, a retired associate justice — Sandra Day O’Connor — is now singing what some hear as a different tune.

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Posted in Diversity, Legal issues

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When Tenure Means Nothing

Posted on January 14, 2010 by | Comments Off on When Tenure Means Nothing

Inside Higher Ed: When Tenure Means Nothing

Clark Atlanta University violated the rights of 55 faculty members — 20 of them with tenure — when it eliminated their jobs without faculty consultation or due process, and without regard to whether or not they had tenure, according to a report issued Wednesday by the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP called the dismissals — covering a quarter of the faculty — “outrageous” and “especially egregious.”

The historically black university said at the time that it was responding to an “enrollment emergency,” and repeatedly denied that it was facing “financial exigency.” The latter state is one that the AAUP requires for the elimination of the jobs of tenured professors (although even in such cases, the association’s guidelines require faculty participation in the process, which was largely absent at Clark Atlanta). Not only do AAUP guidelines not allow for such job eliminations as a result of enrollment declines, but the report questioned whether the declines were as significant as the university claimed.

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Posted in Tenure & Promotion

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SUNY-Binghamton President Will Retire After Year of Controversy

Posted on January 14, 2010 by | Comments Off on SUNY-Binghamton President Will Retire After Year of Controversy

The Chronicle: SUNY-Binghamton President Will Retire After Year of Controversy

Lois B. DeFleur announced today that she would step down as president of Binghamton University in July, after 20 years in office. Ms. DeFleur cited personal reasons for her retirement, including her coming marriage and her mother’s fragile health. But in the last year, Ms. DeFleur’s presidency and Binghamton have been plagued with controversy. A female fund raiser sued the university last summer, alleging that senior officials in the athletics department had tried to use her as a sexual “plaything” to help solicit contributions from donors. Last fall the university terminated an adjunct who complained she had been pressured to pass basketball players who skipped classes. The university later reinstated her. But at the same time the university dismissed six basketball players, including one who had been arrested for selling crack cocaine, and it reassigned its athletics director. Nancy L. Zimpher, the State University of New York system’s chancellor, also announced that an outside auditor would examine the basketball program.

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Posted in Administration

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AAUP Report Slams Clark Atlanta U. Over Faculty Layoffs

Posted on January 14, 2010 by | Comments Off on AAUP Report Slams Clark Atlanta U. Over Faculty Layoffs

The Chronicle: AAUP Report Slams Clark Atlanta U. Over Faculty Layoffs

The American Association of University Professors issued a report today accusing Clark Atlanta University of numerous violations of faculty rights in connection with its dismissal of about a fourth of its faculty members last year.

The report, by an AAUP investigative committee, concludes that the university’s administration declared a nonexistent “enrollment emergency” last February as a pretext for firing about 55 full-time faculty members without due process.

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Posted in Budgets & Funding

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