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Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma Whatever else academic freedom means, at many colleges and universities, it is the right to teach however one wants without regard to learning outcomes.  Indeed, at the more selective, better resourced institutions, academic freedom and tenure also imply the right to teach whatever one wants, when one wants. Pedagogy, assignments and activities, and assessment methods, all are up to the instructor. I hate to say this, but I think the following generalizations are largely true.  All too many college instructors:  Like to occupy the class’ center stage, whether lecturing or leading discussions. Only to a limited extend do they distribute responsibility to their students.   Teach pretty much like they were taught. Too many have no particular knowledge of or interest in the science of learning.   Define active learning very narrowly.  Too many equate active learning with discussion and debate as opposed to inquiry...

Blog:  Learning Innovation Dr. Sarah R. Fitzgerald , an Assessment and Planning Librarian at U Mass Amherst, reached out to me after reading my piece How Do Academic Libraries Spend Their Money? In her email, Sarah shared some fantastic insights on trends in academic library spending. Sarah also had some interesting things to say about the changing structure of academic library careers. I asked Sarah if she’d be willing to share some of her insights with our IHE community, and she graciously agreed. Q1:  How might one go about figuring out the story of academic library budgets? Are these public and published? Does the answer to the last question differ for private vs public institutions?  Can you point us to any good resources to understand the story of academic library budgeting? The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) collects statistics on academic library budgets annually. Statistics are available through a subscription to ACRL Benchmark....

Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said Tuesday that he would ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the state’s university system. He also said that he would require “civics institutes” at the University of Florida, Florida International University and Florida State University. The institutes would develop courses and curricula “that can be used to educate the next generation on the values of liberty and constitutionalism.” And he said he would change faculty hiring in a way that presidents would be “reestablishing their authority over the hiring process.” The Tampa Bay Times reported that DeSantis’s aides distributed a copy of a flier that said the changes and others would promote “education not indoctrination.” He also proposed changes in standards and course content “to ensure higher education is rooted in the values of liberty and Western tradition.” His plan would require colleges to “prioritize graduating students with degrees that lead to high-wage jo...

A former postdoc at the University of California, Los Angeles who was charged last year with sending an 803-page manifesto in which he threatened a mass shooting at UCLA as well as killing individual faculty members has been found by a judge to not be capable of standing trial, the Los Angeles Times reported. Matthew Harris is “presently suffering from a mental disease or defect rendering him incompetent to proceed,” wrote the judge. The judge ordered that Harris be hospitalized. The judge also requested updates on his condition and whether he might be well enough in the future to stand trial.     Ad keywords:  administrators faculty Editorial Tags:  Live Updates Is this diversity newsletter?:  Hide by line?:  Disable left side advertisement?:  Is this Career Advice newsletter?:  Website Headline:  Man Who Threatened UCLA Is Found Unfit for Trial Trending:  Trending text:...

The next-level artificial intelligence capabilities of ChatGPT, a chat bot released in late November by the research company OpenAI, have inspired many predictions, both drastic and ecstatic, for the end of essay writing, if not education as we know it. While some in higher education view ChatGPT as a learning tool to be leveraged and others consider it a threat to be addressed exclusively through prohibition and plagiarism detection, nearly all agree that the technology’s ability to simulate human thinking and writing is remarkable, if not uncanny, and therefore worthy of our immediate attention. Whether we like it or not, HAL 9000 has transferred to our campus this spring semester. The real question now is definitional: On what terms should educators interact with writing generated from machines? Though it has not received much notice, OpenAI proposes an answer that is usefully old-fashioned and worth pondering in our ongoing deliberations: we should interact as authors. In the ...

Blog:  Higher Ed Policy More than 80% of U.S. colleges and universities do not require applicants to take standardized tests – like the SAT or the ACT . That proportion of institutions with test-optional policies has more than doubled since the spring of 2020 . And for the fall of 2023, some 85 institutions won’t even consider standardized test scores when reviewing applications. That includes the entire University of California system. Currently, only 4% of colleges that use the Common Application system require a standardized test such as the SAT or the ACT for admission. Even before the pandemic, more than 1,000 colleges and universities had either test-optional or so-called “test-blind” policies. But as the pandemic unfolded, more than 600 additional institutions followed suit. At the time, many college officials noted that health concerns and other logistics associated with test-taking made them want to reduce student stress and risk. Concerns about racial e...

Katey Stone, for more than 25 years the head coach of the women's hockey team at Harvard University, has created a "culture of complete fear," and lost 14 recruited players since 2016, including three this season, The Boston Globe reported. The article describes many incidents with Stone, including her interrupting for "an outburst that witnesses described as degrading and dispiriting, Stone accused the players she had recruited of showing her too little respect and devolving into a collection of skaters 'with too many chiefs and not enough Indians.'" She had two Native American women on the team. Stone also is insensitive to mental health issues, the article said. One former team leader said that when her coach learned she was receiving mental health care, she said, “You need to toughen up and not be a burden to your teammates.” Several players also said she downplayed the significance of concussions. Stone and Harvard both declined to comment. ...

Image:  The federal student aid system needs “robust interventions” in order to break the cycle of inequity in higher education finance, the ombudsman for the agency that runs the system concluded in its annual report. “At each stage of the student aid lifecycle, the higher education finance model disproportionately fails families of color,” the ombudsman’s report says. “Collectively, these failures perpetuate disparities in student and borrower outcomes and may ultimately widen the racial wealth gap. If policymakers wish to restore the promise of higher education and the pathway to the middle class for all, they should examine the student loan safety net through an equity lens and consider expanding existing programs to ensure more equitable outcomes for student loan borrowers.” The ombudsman’s annual report is a change in tone from previous iterations, experts said, but one that reflects the administration’s recent focus on shoring up the student loan safety net by ov...

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma Perhaps as an undergraduate you read Oscar Wilde’s mirthful, satiric essay “The Critic as Artist.”  Subtitled “Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything,” it contains some of Wilde’s most memorable quips and witticisms:   An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. When people agree with me, I always feel that I must be wrong. There is no sin except stupidity. Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius. Ironically, it’s the essay’s major source of satire – the primacy of criticism over the art that it interprets and evaluates – that has, to a surprising extent, been realized.  For nearly a century, academic critics of literature – from I.A. Richards and Cleanth Brooks, and Lionel Trilling to Derrida, de Man, Foucault, and Lyotard, to Judith Butler, Stanley Fish, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak today – have been regarded, in large parts of the di...