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Image:  The past month has been a roller coaster in Hong Kong higher education, where worries about academic freedom have been on the rise since Beijing imposed the national security law (NSL) a year ago. Government leaders have entered the fray by implying that critical statements could be in violation of the law, leading to a police raid of the city’s oldest student union. Academics have also been testifying at a high-profile trial for the first defendant charged under the NSL, to debate the exact meaning and legality of protest phrases. Experts told Times Higher Education that the city was entering a “new era,” where it could be more difficult to teach, research and debate controversial subjects. This leaves administrators stuck between a local culture that prizes open inquiry and authorities accustomed to higher levels of control. “The NSL has basically brought Hong Kong into line with a situation that mainland [Chinese] academics and students have known for decade...

Image:  Pearson is today launching a student app that will provide tools to use with their Pearson books. The app, according to Pearson, "will fundamentally change the way students access and experience college textbooks" by providing students with a range of tools that will allow them to highlight sections of the textbooks, listen to audio versions, create note cards and take quizzes. The model will also represent a new source of revenue for Pearson. Students will pay what Pearson calls "budget-friendly" sums for access to the app: $9.99 per month for one Pearson ebook $14.99 per month for access to 1,500 Pearson ebooks. Mike Tschudy, senior vice president for user experience at Pearson, said the app was designed to make the product appeal to students. The voice reading the books sounds real, not "robotic," for example. Pearson commissioned art to go on the app "that looks like the students who will be using it." Andy Bird, CEO ...

Image:  Though Democratic lawmakers and higher education advocates have been pushing for Congress to double the maximum Pell Grant in recent months, Republicans on the House Education and Labor Committee didn’t seem as enthusiastic about the idea during a subcommittee hearing on the program held Thursday. Most members of the GOP agreed that Pell Grants -- which provide need-based aid that doesn’t need to be repaid to low- and moderate-income students pursuing two- or four-year postsecondary degrees -- are a necessary part of the federal student aid system. And though the grant doesn’t cover as much of the cost of college as it used to, Republicans were skeptical that doubling the award, as Democrats have proposed, would help make postsecondary education more affordable. “Additional dollars allocated to poor students will wind up captured by these institutions,” said Representative Greg Murphy, a North Carolina Republican and ranking member of the Higher Education and Wo...

Image:  Saint Leo University, a liberal arts institution in Florida, will merge with Marymount California University, a liberal arts institution on the West Coast. The two Roman Catholic universities, more than 2,500 miles apart, sealed the deal Thursday after seven months of negotiations. Leaders at both institutions hope to complete the transaction by January 2023, according to Brian Marcotte, president of Marymount California. Saint Leo will seek approval of the acquisition from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, its accreditor, beginning Sept. 1. Marymount California has sought a buyer for a while. The university started looking for a partner institution two years ago after its leaders expressed concern about the changing and competitive higher education landscape. Marymount’s undergraduate enrollment has declined steadily since it peaked at 1,179 students during the 2014-15 academic year, data from the National Ce...

Image:  The University of Mississippi settled for an undisclosed amount with a former professor who said the university effectively fired him for political reasons, both parties said Thursday. “The university is, and has always been, a political institution,” the professor, Garrett Felber, a prison abolitionist, said in a statement. “The question is not whether our work within the university can ever be political. It is whether our politics within it can ever be just, noble and life-affirming. The answer must be yes.” Rod Guajardo, university spokesperson, said, “We are pleased to have this matter resolved, and are pleased with the resolution.” He said he wished Felber well “as he pursues his future opportunities.” Felber, who served as an assistant professor of history at Ole Miss for four years, was officially let go in 2020 for failing to communicate sufficiently with his department chair while on research leave at Harvard University. Specifically, Felber insisted t...

In the future, CERN might be able to fit on your table. In today's Academic Minute, Goucher College's Rodney Yoder determines how making particle accelerators smaller could lower the cost of technology. Yoder is an associate professor of physics at Goucher. A transcript of this podcast can be found here . Section:  Academic Minute File:  07-30-21 Goucher - Building a Miniature Electron Accelerator Powered by Heat.mp3 Event's date:  Thursday, July 29, 2021 - 5:00pm Insider only:  from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/2WrYihK

Blog:  Confessions of a Community College Dean   I’ve been in touch with my counterparts around the state to discuss responses to the rise of the Delta variant.  Without betraying any confidences, I’ll summarize the consensus thusly:   “Ah, *%#()%&*_%#.”   --   If you haven’t seen Annie Lowrey’s piece in the Atlantic about the “time tax,” it’s worth a read.  It’s about the many instances in which American culture handles conflicted or ambiguous feelings about social programs -- that is, our insistence on distinguishing the “deserving” from the “undeserving” -- by letting programs exist, but making them insanely hard to navigate. Building friction into the process of using them is a way to keep participation, and therefore cost, down.     My only critique is that it isn’t limited to the public sector.  Anyone who has ever tried to cancel a health club membership or a cable subscription knows what I mean.  ...

Category:  Conditionally Accepted Simply hiring a chief diversity officer will never lead to success if we don’t take three key steps to infuse diversity, equity and inclusion efforts into the fabric of our institutions, argues Kendall D. Isaac. Job Tags:  ADMINISTRATIVE JOBS Ad keywords:  administrators diversity Section:  Diversity Topic:  Diversity Editorial Tags:  Career Advice Show on Jobs site:  Image Size:  Thumbnail-horizontal Is this diversity newsletter?:  Is this Career Advice newsletter?:  Disable left side advertisement?:  Trending:  Live Updates:  liveupdates0 Most Popular:  3 In-Article related stories:  12 from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/3ie7yP0

The Department of Education announced it will be adding $3.2 billion in grants to the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund, specifically targeted toward historically underresourced institutions. Most of the funding comes from the American Rescue Plan, signed into law in March. Historically Black colleges and universities will receive $1.6 billion, and tribal colleges and universities will receive $143 million. Another $1.19 billion will be available for other minority-serving institutions, as well as underresourced institutions eligible for the Strengthening Institutions program. “These institutions have a long history of serving our students -- particularly students of color, first-generation college students, and other students who are underrepresented in higher education -- and the Department stands ready to support them so they can expand their vital services,” said Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in a release. More grants from 2020 COVID-19 relief ...

A federal judge largely upheld a controversial 2020 final rule on Title IX promulgated by former secretary of education Betsy DeVos, but he struck down a key provision that prohibits colleges adjudicating sexual misconduct allegations from considering statements not subject to cross-examination. Advocates for sexual assault survivors have argued that the provision prevents previous written or oral statements from police officers, nurses or other witnesses from being considered by an institution in the event that individual is unable to attend a hearing, and also means an accused student’s own statements admitting guilt could not be used if the student chose not to testify at the hearing. Judge William G. Young of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts ruled that the department had failed to adequately consider such outcomes, and the provision was therefore put forward unlawfully, in an arbitrary and capricious manner. “Under a plain reading of the Final Rule’s hearing pr...

Today on the Academic Minute : Rodney Yoder, associate professor of physics at Goucher College, describes how making particle accelerators smaller could lower the cost of technology. Learn more about the Academic Minute here . Is this diversity newsletter?:  Hide by line?:  Disable left side advertisement?:  Is this Career Advice newsletter?:  Trending:  Live Updates:  liveupdates0 from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/3l8lhZH

All 17 national laboratories and a group of scientific journals, publishers and other organizations said this week that they’ll partner to support name-change requests from researchers. The effort is aimed at making it easier -- administratively and personally -- for transgender scientists to claim their past work, which may have been published under another name. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is coordinating the changes, which will allow researchers to make name-change requests of publishers and journals through their institutions instead of on their own. Trans scholars and allies have long argued that it should be much easier to make name-change requests, and that scholars shouldn’t have to out themselves as trans; navigate individual publications’ policies, if they exist at all; or otherwise jump hurdles to continue to be linked to their own work. “We are supporting our colleagues on an important issue that is often taken for granted -- allowing them to take full cre...

In the fall of 2019, I enrolled at Yale Divinity School, planning to audit four first-year courses for a book I was researching on the future of theological education. I completed three of my four courses, but early in spring semester 2020, COVID overwhelmed the world. Yale, like most other American colleges and universities, eventually had to close its doors to in-person classes. As a consequence, faculty members across the institution scrambled to reposition their curricular requirements and pedagogy so as to accommodate online teaching and learning. Because of this period of uncertainty, I had to drop my fourth course, thus prematurely terminating research for my book. I was crestfallen. But then Carolyn Sharp, professor of homiletics, invited me to sit in on her fall 2020 online preaching course as a visiting student. I was euphoric. That meant that I could complete my course of study and eventually finish research for my book. I was also being given an unusual opportunity to w...

Column:  Intellectual Affairs More notorious in its day than the title would ever lead you to suspect, Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees (1714) depicts a hive crowded with millions, like a human city. It is as vibrant and prosperous as beehives proverbially are, although with a hierarchy and division of labor far more diverse than in real life. Mandeville's bees are truly social insects. They have their own doctors, lawyers and pharmacists. There are workers and idle aristocrats as well as "sharpers, parasites, pimps, players, / Pickpockets, coiners, quacks, soothsayers …" Bee morals are not what they could be, but those complaining loudest tend to be as self-serving as anyone. Still, the honey gets made. But the protests reach the ears of Jove, king of the gods, who decides to abolish hypocrisy among the bees. With vice no longer having a disguise, the virtues flourish. The bees all turn honest, modest, thrifty and content with their lot in life....