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Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma “Experience,” Oscar Wilde quipped in in 1892 comedy  Lady Windermere's Fan , “is the name every one gives to their mistakes.”  Well, in my administrative roles I’ve made many mistakes and perhaps as a result I did pick up a few bits of hard-earned wisdom. As the City University of New York tries to  create an in-house Online Program Manager , let me offer some lessons that I draw from my own personal experience.  After all, one of the goals of the University of Texas System’s Institute for Transformational Learning that I directed was to leverage the system’s strengths to provide consulting services to the campuses and health science centers, work with their faculty to develop online programs, and create the technological and service infrastructure to support high quality online learning at scale. Online Program Managers are widely criticized for good reasons:  The share of program revenue they extract typically runs upwa...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Wednesday sanctioned Edfinancial Services , a student loan servicer, for making deceptive statements to student loan borrowers and misrepresenting their forgiveness and repayment options to them. Edfinancial “deceived borrowers with Federal Family Education Loan Program loans about their eligibility for Public Service Loan Forgiveness,” the bureau said. The bureau is ordering the company to contact all affected borrowers, provide them with accurate information and pay a $1 million civil penalty. Edfinancial did not respond to a request for comment. Ad keywords:  studentaid 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/owMNKWu

With accreditation under intensified scrutiny from state legislators and other quarters, two national associations have issued a joint statement reminding governing boards of the importance of higher education’s quality assurance system and the role they should play in it. The Joint Advisory Statement on Accreditation & Governing Boards 2022 , from the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, refreshes a 2009 statement the two groups issued at another time when accreditation had taken heat, then from the Bush administration’s Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education. More recently, legislators in Florida have proposed legislation that would require colleges to regularly change accreditors and give them the right to sue accreditors that take regulatory action against them. The Florida measure came in response to an accrediting agency’s inquiry into external influences over governance at two ...

For millennia, the transfer of knowledge (a.k.a. learning) has been a locus for innovation. What we once painted on cave walls and etched into stone we later captured in printed books and then translated into binary code. The expertise of a single teacher, once constrained by disciplinary boundaries and classroom walls, is now accessible to learners across the globe, on demand and at their own pace. Today, we wrestle with questions about what the future of learning could and should look like, such as what roles both human instructors and emerging technologies will play and how we might harness innovation to advance opportunity and equity. To answer these questions, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona should borrow a page from his colleague Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who recently laid out a forward-thinking vision for the changing nature of transportation , and share his vision for what innovation could look like for education. The most profound innovations come...

Column:  Letters to the Editor Matt Reed’s response to my essay on the humanities and general education nicely applies the issue to community colleges.  Before doing that, however, he issues some criticisms that must be answered.  First, he states that he will “leave it to those in Stanford’s orbit” to assess my description of what happened after the school scrapped Western Civ. He repeats the point a paragraph later. This is strange. The links are there for Dr. Reed to check sources, but he prefers to insinuate a suspicion of my truthfulness. The name for that is passive aggression.  Next, he raises the advent of AP and IB as causes of English’s decline, not the reason I gave (that profs lost the conviction and erudition needed to present momentous, sweeping visions of civilization to the young). The problem here is that when humanities enrollments plunged right after Stanford made the change in 1969, IB and AP were barely around. One point of my e...

Blog:  Just Visiting Guest Post: The Narrative About College Students and Covid Is Wrong By Christine Wolff-Eisenberg ( christine.wolff-eisenberg@temple.edu )   Like many who have a vested interest in the success of today’s learners and teachers, I often find myself coming across arguments for why we must get college students back on campus for face-to-face learning. In recent months, many have been spurred by colleges and universities modifying the start of the spring semester in response to the Omicron variant. These perspectives span news media to social media , from those working in colleges and universities to those entirely removed from the sector. And yet they tend to have a basic premise in common: college students are uniformly young and healthy, isolated from at-risk communities, and demanding in-person learning. This premise is deeply flawed.  When we fail to unpack commonly referenced myths about today’s college students, and base judgements ...

Two community colleges received bomb threats Tuesday, causing one of the institutions to cancel classes and close its campuses. Northern Virginia Community College, where First Lady Jill Biden teaches , closed all its campuses at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday after receiving the threat. Remote classes continued, but all in-person classes were canceled, according to a tweet from the college . Lorain County Community College in Ohio also received a morning bomb threat, the third one in less than two weeks, Fox8 reported. Campuses were evacuated, and local police are investigating the matter. The college received two threats via an online chat forum on Thursday and Friday last week, but no explosives were found. These incidents follow a series of bomb threats at historically Black colleges and universities since January. Ad keywords:  communitycolleges Editorial Tags:  Safety Is this diversity newsletter?:  Hide by line?:  Disable left si...

An audit report by the New Jersey state comptroller recently found that Brookdale Community College “improperly” spent about $790,000 by failing to follow federal and state laws and its own policies and procedures related to its spending. The auditor questioned a number of the college’s transactions because the college lacked documentation and receipts or didn’t provide sufficient justification for expenses. The report also found that the college didn’t adhere to clear, consistent processes for keeping track of overtime work and health benefit opt-out waivers for employees, among other issues. “When spending taxpayer funds, colleges have a duty to have and follow clear rules so the funds are protected,” acting state comptroller Kevin D. Walsh said in a press release . “Our audit of Brookdale Community College found inadequate systems that increase the risk of fraud, waste or abuse.” Ad keywords:  communitycolleges Editorial Tags:  Community College Is th...

Today on the Academic Minute , part of Portland State University Week: Elliott Gall, assistant professor of mechanical and materials engineering, examines how best to live with the effects of wildfire smoke. 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/kxwZiKH

In his March 21 opinion piece , Mark Bauerlein reflects on the history of Stanford’s first-year requirements to make an argument about the relation between general education and humanities majors. In the process, he refers to Stanford’s Thinking Matters courses but omits to mention that while Stanford continues to offer these courses in the present academic year, we are phasing them out as we transition to a new first-year program. As the faculty director of that program, I would like both to clarify our requirements and explain how our new program proposes different answers to the concerns that Bauerlein raises. Stanford’s first-year requirement since September 2021 is now Civic, Liberal and Global Education. Called COLLEGE for short, it replaces the Thinking Matters requirement, which had been in place since 2012. Both of these programs occupy the space once filled by the Western Culture (1980–1988) and Western Civilization (1935–1970) requirements, which Bauerlein also dis...

Not a week goes by in which we don’t read an academic dirge that deplores the demise of the humanities in higher education. In one of the recent ones, Mark Bauerlein claims to have identified another cause for the crisis, arguing that the curricular retreat away from canonical works and monumental grand narratives has dampened student interest in the humanities. In order to turn the disastrous enrollment trends around, Bauerlein implores instructors “to make the humanities great again” (yes, really!). He advocates a return to teaching “masterpieces” and “strokes of genius” representative of the “long march of civilization” (think: Western civ!). He calls on humanities instructors to declare, “If you don’t know the story of Dido and Aeneas, the last eight minutes of Götterdämmerung , what happened at Dunkirk, the First Amendment, how Malcolm Little changed in prison … you are a deprived individual.” If humanities instructors can’t declare this with enthusiastic conviction then, ...

Column:  Letters to the Editor To the editor: In today’s fast-moving media environment, it’s easy to see how well-meaning reporters and editors can overlook a detail or assume the validity of a well-traveled claim. This was the case in a March 23 article published at Inside Higher Ed . In an otherwise solid and factual report entitled “ Law Students Shout Down Controversial Speakers ,” reporter Josh Moody detailed the disgraceful scene of Yale Law School students imposing an unseemly heckler’s veto on my colleague at Alliance Defending Freedom, Kristen Waggoner, and her co-panelist, Monica Miller of the American Humanist Association. I won’t belabor the details of this unsettling event, as Mr. Moody does an excellent job in his coverage. But I will point out to readers that Mr. Moody makes one foundational error regarding ADF and the public smear campaign currently waged against us by the thoroughly discredited , internally corrupt , and deeply partisan Southern Povert...