Hotels World

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma When I was a junior faculty member, I considered the word  professiona l one of those value-laden terms that could be invoked to disparage anyone who didn’t fit in. To criticize someone as unprofessional struck me as a much too easy way to attack colleagues on the basis of their ideas, demeanor, or even their appearance.  As I’ve grown older, my position has changed.  I’ve grown more sensitive to the ways that faculty can abuse their professional status: not only to bully, harass, and intimidate, but to justify virtually anything they might say or do. I now believe there is a right to expect professionalism among our colleagues – even though that concept’s meaning isn’t crystal clear or self-evident. I much enjoyed Jonathan Zimmerman’s recent  Inside Higher Ed essay  entitled “ My Amy Wax Problem ,” which I consider among the most insightful, thoughtful, and balanced arguments I’ve read on the limits to free speech in the academy.   His argument --

Blog:  Learning Innovation Ten inconsistent ways that I’m thinking about academic work: 1 - I want everyone to be around on campus for casual chats and unscheduled run-ins, yet I’m flexibly working from home sometimes with no set schedule. 2 - When colleagues are on campus, I want to be able to come to their offices for unscheduled conversations. At the same time, much of my on-campus time is spent with my door closed and on Zoom meetings. 3 - At the end of each day, I find myself exhausted from Zoom meetings and missing the energy you get from being with smart people in a room. And yet, most of the meetings that I schedule are on Zoom. 4 - I firmly believe that talent is widely geographically distributed and that we can get the best people to work at our institutions if we are pro remote work. At the same time, I’m not sure what a critical mass of remote colleagues does to the culture of our residential campuses, and I worry about fully integrating and retaining remot

Blog:  University of Venus Higher education is a culture laden with deeply rooted values - knowledge, lifelong learning, discovery, social and technological contribution, and excellence. But it can also be a culture of overwork, competition, toxic productivity, and exploitation, especially in the case of contingent labor.  Values matter, even though we might not think about them consciously very much. For me pre-burnout, I had fully bought into the less attractive higher ed values - the competition, productivity, expectation escalation - and they ran my life, not just my work. The work I did to come out of burnout helped me realign my priorities and begin to rebuild my life and work around the values of purpose, compassion, connection, and balance.  I regularly talk about values with my guests on my podcast, the agile academic . Something about the act of voicing your values brings a sense of clarity to whether or not your actions and goals align with those values - or if th

Multiple higher education institutions in Mississippi and Alabama received bomb threats this week. Hinds Community College Nursing and Allied Health Center in Jackson, Miss., received a threat Thursday morning, WAPT news reported. Mississippi State University, William Carey University, Meridian Community College and three Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College campuses all received threats yesterday as well, WLOX news reported. A news release from Mississippi State University also mentioned that Alcorn State University, a historically Black land-grant institution, and Itawamba Community College also received threats Thursday. All the campuses have reportedly issued all-clear messages, and no bombs were found. These incidents follow at least 13 threats to colleges and universities in Alabama on Wednesday, including the University of Alabama at Huntsville, the University of South Alabama, Wallace Community College, Calhoun Community College, Auburn University, Reid State Techn

Eastern Gateway Community College is not permitted to disburse Pell Grants to new students accepted for enrollment in its free online program for union members this fall, according to a U.S. Education Department spokesperson. This news comes days after Eastern Gateway reported that it could enroll students and just over one week after the Education Department told the institution to stop enrolling students. At the heart of the matter is a July 18 letter the Education Department sent to Eastern Gateway indicating that the college had violated federal financial aid rules by using some students’ Pell Grant funds to essentially subsidize the enrollment of other students who do not qualify for federal aid. Eastern Gateway said in a  press release  on its website that it would adhere to the latest suspension. “After thorough discussion with college legal counsel and the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, the college has concluded that it is in the best interest of EGCC to move forward o

Starting July 16, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline became more easily reachable—simply by dialing 988 . With mental health crises burdening so many, this is a welcome step. Robust and effective suicide prevention starts with early intervention through timely and easy access to mental health care. For college students burdened and struggling, including nontraditional students who commute to campus and in many cases have work and parenting responsibilities, what’s readily available on campus is critical. Crafting the minds of tomorrow is job No. 1 for our colleges and universities. But we are expecting today’s college students to succeed academically while ignoring their critical mental and emotional health needs. Last year, Congress increased funding for mental health support for youth through the Garrett Lee Smith (GLS) Memorial Act Youth Suicide Prevention Program but kept the funding for higher education within the GLS Campus Grants at $6.488 million, the same amount allo

With so many depressing news stories these days about an apparently unrelenting cancel culture in American higher education, it is important to take note of the occasional win. To wit: the University of Michigan Medical School just took a bold stand for academic freedom and speech. Dr. Kristin Collier is an assistant professor of medicine at Michigan, where she directs the Program in Health, Spirituality and Religion. A productive and innovative scholar and popular instructor, Dr. Collier was selected by the medical school’s Gold Humanism Honor Society to give the keynote address at this year’s annual White Coat Ceremony on July 24 for incoming medical students. It was a feather in Dr. Collier’s cap bestowed by medical school honor society students through a democratic process of nomination and voting, and she was happy to accept. Alas, it wasn’t long before the mob formed, demanding Dr. Collier’s cancellation for her pro-life views. Not even medical schools are immune from can

Most business officers are upbeat about their colleges’ financial future. Why is that so, and are they right to be so optimistic? This week's episode of The Key features a discussion about Inside Higher Ed’ s 2022 Survey of College and University Business Officers , which generally found college chief financial officers feeling pretty good about how their institutions are faring and how they’re positioned for the future. The episode explores the survey’s results, but also digs into whether financial and other leaders in higher education think their institutions need to make meaningful changes in how they operate to be financially sustainable and stable down the road – and whether their pretty rosy view might make them less inclined to see the need for significant changes on their campuses. The conversation features three business officers: Diane Snyder, vice chancellor of finance and administration at the Alamo Colleges District in Texas; Cynthia Vizcaino Villa, senior vice

California State University San Marcos kept secret the finding that two professors had engaged in “egregious sexual harassment and misconduct,” according to the Los Angeles Times . In one incident, a professor kissed a student after he “insinuated” that he was turned on. In the other a professor “pinned a female student’s arms to her side, lowered his hands to her back and pressed his groin against her hips,” the student said. Instead of pursuing disciplinary action, the university accepted “voluntary resignations, paid administrative leave and, in one case, expunging records of disciplinary action from his personnel file,” according to university reports obtained by the Times that detail the investigations and settlements. The university agreed to only inform potential employers of the professors’ dates of employment and job titles. Both men currently work at other universities. A San Marcos spokeswoman said, “The university’s priority was protecting its student and employee c

Today on the Academic Minute : Tallie Z. Baram, distinguished professor of neurological sciences at the University of California, Irvine, examines how adversity early in life can have a long-term impact. 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/9V8JR4K

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has upheld a district court’s ruling against a suit by the College of the Ozarks because the college “lacked standing to establish a case or controversy.” The college sought an injunction to preserve its right to require students to abide by the belief that students’ biological sex is “God-given, objective gender, whether or not it differs from their internal sense of ‘gender identity.’” The college also says that “sexual relations are for the purpose of the procreation of human life and the uniting and strengthening of the marital bond in self-giving love, purposes that are to be achieved solely through heterosexual relationships in marriage.” The college also requires that male and female students on campus not mix in dormitories. The injunction would have been against the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which issued a memorandum on the enforcement of various laws. “This theory of injury fails because it is based on

A new report from the United Negro College Fund, which represents private historically Black colleges and universities, calls on Congress to increase funding to HBCUs. The report argues that the $6.5 billion received by 101 HBCUs from the federal government since the pandemic began still isn’t enough to make up for long-term underfunding. The report, released Tuesday, shared results from a survey of administrators at 31 UNCF member institutions conducted by the Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute, the organization’s research arm, in January and February. “The goal was to better understand each responding institution’s ability to gain access to federal funds and increased philanthropic donations during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Nadrea Njoku, director of the institute, said in a press release. Most institutions reported using federal COVID-19 relief dollars on technology to enable remote learning, compensation for lost revenue and expenses already incurred. Most of the campuse

I was the first in my family to go to college. The oldest child of an immigrant family, I worked since I was 11. I was 17 when I started at the University of Maryland, where I was a commuter student. I relied on a caring adviser and friends whose siblings and parents had been to college to help show me things like how to apply, how to register for classes and where The Dairy was to get ice cream in the afternoon. I benefited from the knowledge of my friends, a good high school that prepared me well and having an extroverted personality. But like so many first-generation college students, I struggled because there were things I didn’t know. I was unaware of how scholarships and grants worked and what college fees meant other than I had to pay them. I bought all my textbooks brand-new, believing, as Rodney Dangerfield said, that it was better not to buy something that had already been read. I am nearly finished paying off my student loans, which I wear as a badge of honor and witho

Blog:  Just Visiting Regular readers will know that I am not often a font of optimism when it comes to the state of higher education, but I have been digging into the  recently released “Varying Degrees 2022” report  from the education shop at New America, and I’m seeing  some heartening data . There is far too much in the report to do it justice in a single blog post, but I want to acknowledge the breadth and depth of what’s there for examination, and thank New America for both putting together an accessible overview, and providing all of the underlying data for others to make use of.  There’s a lot of different ways to slice the data if you’re looking for evidence of positive or negative public sentiments towards higher education, but the once and ( Who knows?) future market researcher and communications strategist in me is particularly interested in a pair of questions.  Q: Overall, do you think colleges and universities are having a positive or negative effect on the wa