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Showing posts from August, 2020

Florida Career College to Close

Florida Career College to Close Doug Lederman Fri, 01/26/2024 - 03:00 AM Byline(s) Doug Lederman from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/avZRfLi

OPINION: How one university can do better by the men and women its namesake enslaved

As America take steps to come to terms with systemic racism, we are seeing Confederate monuments taken down across the South, along with Christopher Columbus statues in the North and Midwest. There are proposals to rename public schools, streets and military bases named for Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, and questions being raised about memorials that honor Founding Fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson . Universities are facing calls for action as well. James Madison University is changing the names of three buildings that previously honored leaders of the Confederacy. Princeton University has renamed what was the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs because of Wilson’s legacy of racism. George Washington University is likely to change the name of its athletic teams, the Colonials. At our own university, George Mason, new president Gregory Washington wrote in an op-ed that he was asked earlier this year, “Should George Mason U

Guest Post: Redirecting Your Ire and Efforts

Blog:  Just Visiting Amidst all of the other COVID-19 related college-reopening news, you probably missed that the University of Iowa is cutting their men’s and women’s NCAA Division I swimming and diving teams, as well as men’s gymnastics and men’s tennis . In a joint statement from the university president and athletic director, they put it as plainly as they could: “UI Athletics now projects lost revenue of approximately $100M and an overall deficit between $60-75M this fiscal year.” You might not know (and I have to admit that I didn’t know any of this until now) that the University of Iowa swimming and diving team is over 100 years old, and also the birthplace of the butterfly stroke . Iowa also now joins Boise State, UConn, Dartmouth, East Carolina, and Western Illinois as institutions that decided to cut their swimming and diving program in light of budgetary pressures due to COVID-19.  The purpose of this piece is not to defend the role of swimming and diving teams s

Three Reasons to Read 'The Deficit Myth'

Blog:  Learning Innovation The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton Published in June of 2020. Before I talk about The Deficit Myth , I want to credit Matt Reed for the motivation to read the book. There is a direct line from Matt’s riffing on The Deficit Myth in his 6/15/20 piece A Productive Mashup to my buying and reading (well, listening) to the book.  I doubt Matt will get a cut of the money I spent buying (downloading) the book, but he should. Will the recommendations of two IHE bloggers inspire you to read The Deficit Myth ? Are you a candidate to engage with the arguments that Stephanie Kelton, professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University and former Chief Economist on the US Senate Budget Committee, makes in The Deficit Myth ? There are three reasons why you might consider taking the time to read this book. First, if you are worried about the federal budget deficit ( $3.7 trill

Transforming Gen Ed

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma When I look at the curricula at various colleges and universities, and compare it to the requirements-free education that I encountered at Oberlin in the early 1970s, I am struck by how detailed and prescriptive general education has become. To take one example: At the University of California at Santa Cruz, the list of general education requirements currently includes the following 15 categories: Cross-Cultural Analysis Ethnicity and Race Interpreting Arts and Media Mathematical and Formal Reasoning Scientific Inquiry Statistical Reasoning Textual Analysis and Interpretation Environmental Awareness Human Behavior Technology and Society Collaborative Endeavor Creative Process Service Learning Composition Disciplinary Communication It would certainly be possible to nit-pick, check for omissions, and call for an even longer list.  After all, there are no required courses in history, a foreign language, or government.  Nor are students

Some HBCUs bristle at being held up as sign of Trump's concern for race

During a Republican National Convention that seemed in part intended to try to convince voters that President Trump is not a racist, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said that impression "could not be more wrong." And like the speaker after speaker who made that point last week, including First Lady Melania Trump, Carson said one piece of evidence of this was the president's support for historically Black colleges and universities. “My husband’s administration has worked to try to effect change when it comes to issues around race and religion in this country,” Melania Trump said last Tuesday night. Then as did Vernon Jones, a Democratic state representative from Georgia, and South Carolina Republican U.S. senator Tim Scott, Black civil rights activist Clarence Henderson, and the president himself in his speech on Thursday, she pointed as evidence of this to a bill Trump signed last year that made permanent one of the main sources of funding for HBCUs

Cabrillo College grapples with nearby wildfire as employees lose homes

The CZU Lightning Complex fire has raged in the Santa Cruz and San Mateo Counties of eastern California for two weeks, displacing more than 75,000 people and spreading thick smoke across nearby cities. Cabrillo College , a small community college in Aptos, Calif., is watching the fire closely. As of Sunday, the fire was 35 percent contained, and it appeared that the Cabrillo campus would likely be spared from any damage. But many of the students and employees who live in the mountains nearby have been displaced, have lost their homes or have otherwise suffered as a result of the fire. Cabrillo had planned for a hybrid instruction model this fall. A majority of courses will be held online, and a handful will still be conducted on campus. The college delayed the start of the fall term until today, a week later than originally planned. Matthew Wetstein, president and superintendent at Cabrillo, worried students, faculty and staff members might still be dealing with fallout from the f

COVID-19 roundup: as cases surge, new restrictions emerge

As the COVID-19 case count rises at Georgia College , so too does student and employee pressure on administrators to take more action to keep them safe. The public liberal arts college in in a rural Georgia town equidistant from Atlanta and Augusta has become one of higher education's hottest coronavirus hot spots , with more than 500 student cases -- about 8 percent of its student body -- as of Friday. Friday morning, the college's employee union, the United Campus Workers of Georgia at GCSU, held a die-in featuring masked and (mostly) physically distanced students and employees carrying signs such as "I can't teach if I'm dead" and "I won't die for the USG," a reference to the University System of Georgia, of which Georgia College is a part. UCWGA-GCSU is demanding online learning options for students and instructors, hazard pay, contact tracing, greater diagnostic testing and security from layoffs. The union has said neither testing nor

Colleges want professors to stay mum on student COVID-19 cases

Numerous institutions are telling professors not to talk about when students in their face-to-face classes contract COVID-19, or saying that professors won’t be notified when their students test positive, or both. In so doing, these institutions generally cite privacy laws. But professors say they’re reading between the lines on that guidance, and they suspect that it’s more about public relations than student privacy concerns. Some faculty members say they have no interest in sharing students’ medical information but believe that they -- and their other students -- have a right to know if someone with whom they’ve shared classroom air is sick. They also say that discussing student health without naming names is covered by academic freedom, since it relates to how well or how poorly campuses are handling outbreaks. “We are very concerned. There’s so much secrecy,” said Michael Innis-JimĂ©nez, professor of American studies at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, which has repeat