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Blog:  Learning Innovation The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt While backpacking with my future wife around Europe after our second year of graduate school, I took her on a tour of the Musée des égouts de Paris . Otherwise known as the Paris Sewer Museum.  We also spent part of our honeymoon at the (now closed) Baltimore Public Works Museum .  Romantic, right? My happiest memory of a family trip to Disney World was when I ditched my family and spent the day touring the underground structures and behind-the-scenes areas in Disney's Keys to the Kingdom Tour . (Now suspended due to COVID). The 99% Invisible City is the perfect book for all of us infrastructure nerds. If you are the type to get curious about why manhole covers are round? And then what's below that manhole? Then this is the book for you. The book is an outgrowth of the popular 99% Invisible podcast . Sometimes, I think I...

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma In his classic history of the  Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment   – during which, from 1932 to 1972, government scientists studied untreated syphilis in impoverished Black sharecroppers -- the eminent historian of medicine James H. Jones explained how such an ethically indefensible, scientifically useless, study could take place over a 40 year span. Racism alone, Professor Jones shows, is not a sufficient answer. After all, many of the experiment’s architects were widely regarded as racial liberals. A key figure responsible for implementing the study, Nurse Enice Rivers, was herself Black as were several participating physicians. Nor was the study simply a product of class bias. Rather, as Professor Jones persuasively argues, the explanation lies in the self-validating nature of science. Again and again, the study’s defenders justified their research on the grounds that it contributed to the advancement of scientific know...

The set of programs, policies and pathways by which learners move between colleges and universities is complex and often incoherent. Many students enter the transfer maze and never get through it, costing them time and money. That’s especially problematic because the students who seek to transfer are disproportionately those whom higher education has historically served least well – students from low-income backgrounds, members of underrepresented minority groups, working learners. This week’s episode of The Key discusses the work of the Tackling Transfer Policy Advisory Board. The group of national experts convened to try to “fix” transfer, but its new report, out this week, concludes instead that this moment really demands a broader “reset.” Marty J. Alvarado , executive vice chancellor for educational services at the California Community Colleges chancellor’s office and a leader of the advisory board, discusses the effort and the transfer landscape. Hosted by Inside Higher E...

Blog:  Tackling Transfer Countless students would agree: transfer does not work. Despite sustained efforts to “fix” transfer over the past several decades, the current system continues to produce dismal, inequitable outcomes and unnecessary roadblocks that thwart students’ educational goals. As members of the Tackling Transfer Policy Advisory Board, we are excited to releas e a set of recommendations for systems change, with an emphasis on state, system and federal policies, designed to challenge the status quo, dismantle inequitable transfer policies, and build a new approach. Our goal is to center students and the recognition of their learning as they transfer across institutions and move through their varied lived, work and learning experiences beyond high school. We feel great urgency. Contrary to popular perception, today’s students—more than one-third of whom are 25 or older and 40 percent of whom attend part-time—juggle their studies with work, caregiving and ot...

Image:  Lots of uncertainty is ahead for student borrowers, with loan repayments scheduled to restart in October and two loan servicers announcing their federal contracts will be over at the end of the year. That means now is the perfect time to wipe the slate clean and start over, say those frustrated with the administration of the student loan system. The need to take advantage of the “rare opportunity for a fresh start” was a common theme of the comments made by lawmakers and witnesses during a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs subcommittee hearing held Tuesday on protecting student borrowers. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who is chair of the economic policy subcommittee, said in her opening remarks that with the student loan program at a crossroads, it must be rebuilt to work in the best interests of borrowers. “This is our best chance in years to build strong guardrails into student loan servicing contracts and to hold student loan serv...

Image:  Public colleges and universities do more than just educate students: Northern Michigan University created a wireless LTE network that brings affordable, high-speed internet service to Michigan’s sparsely populated Upper Peninsula. The University of North Carolina at Pembroke used CARES Act dollars to vaccinate members of the Lumbee Tribe against COVID-19. Research from the University of Michigan at Flint helped the city of Flint respond to a major lead contamination of its drinking water. These are just some examples of the value of regional public institutions to the communities where they are located, a new report from the Brookings Institution argues. The report, released today, suggests that the federal government should invest millions in regional and rural public colleges and universities to help them -- and surrounding communities -- recover from the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Providing federal assistance to communities is essential to th...

Santanu Bandyopadhyay , interim president of Modesto Junior College, in California, has been named to the job on a permanent basis. Ray DiPasquale , president of Clinton Community College, in New York, has been selected as president of Massasoit Community College, in Massachusetts. David S. Janzen , professor and software engineering coordinator in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, has been appointed president of Tabor College, in Kansas. Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval , interim president of California State University, Fresno, has been named to the job on a permanent basis. Terri Goss Kinzy , vice president for research and innovation at Western Michigan University, has been chosen as president of Illinois State University. Sean Parnell , former governor of Alaska, has been selected as chancellor of the University of Alaska at Anchorage. Glena Temple , president of Viterbo University, in Wisconsi...

Image:  Faculty influence in institution-level decision making declined in recent decades while faculty say in “local” decisions, such as those involving program curricula and personnel, increased. These are the top-line findings of a new national survey on shared governance by the American Association of University Professors, the group’s first such report in two decades. ‘A Mixed Bag’ About two-thirds (63 percent) of four-year institutions have no faculty involvement in budget decisions, for instance, signaling a reversal of progress on this front since the AAUP’s two earlier shared governance surveys, published in 1971 and 2001, respectively. For reference, 43 percent of institutions had no faculty involvement in budget matters in 1971 and just 13 percent had no faculty involvement in 2001. By contrast, faculty authority for things such as individual grade assignments is today a “faculty prerogative” at 99 percent of institutions. Program curricu...

Image:  The surge in coronavirus cases fueled by the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant and low vaccination rates is leading some colleges to expand vaccine mandates or reinstate face-masking requirements, even as public colleges in a number of Republican-controlled states continue to be constrained by executive order or law from taking such steps. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidance Tuesday recommending that all individuals regardless of vaccination status wear a mask while in public indoors if they are in an area of substantial or high transmission -- a characterization that currently applies to broad swaths of the U.S., including much of the South and Midwest. The change reflects a reversal from earlier CDC guidance in May that said individuals vaccinated against COVID-19 did not need to wear masks in most indoor and outdoor settings. In response to the guidance, the University of Memphis announced it would require that masks...

Virtual reality is here, but does it work for everyone? In today's Academic Minute, NYU Abu Dhabi's Bas Rokers examines the science behind the tech. Rokers is an associate professor of psychology at New York University's Abu Dhabi campus. A transcript of this podcast can be found here . Section:  Academic Minute File:  07-29-21 NYU Abu Dhabi - Your Brain on Virtual Reality.mp3 Event's date:  Wednesday, July 28, 2021 - 5:30pm Insider only:  from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/3iamA8x

Blog:  Confessions of a Community College Dean   A few months ago, someone who graduated years ago showed up in my office hoping to get some grades changed.  She had gone on to a bachelor’s program at a selective university and was in the process of applying to law school.  Apparently, some grades she had earned in dual enrollment classes in high school dragged her gpa beneath the magic threshold to be considered by some top-tier law schools.   It was the latest version of a tension I’ve worked with, through, and around for a long time.   On one side, I believe that education involves exploration and therefore risk.  Someone who has never struggled in a class has missed an important life lesson.  Nobody is great at everything, and if you were, how would you choose what to do?  Students who venture outside their comfort zones may take some hits to their gpa’s, but they will emerge having learned things they otherwise wouldn’t hav...

Language about “returning to normal” or “returning to pre-COVID conditions” ignores the reality that, for many of us, such returns are simply not possible, write Brandy L. Simula and Kate Willink. Job Tags:  Academic administration Editorial Tags:  Career Advice Show on Jobs site:  Image Source:  kraphix/istock/getty images plus Image Size:  Thumbnail-horizontal Multiple Authors:  Brandy L. Simula Kate Willink 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/2Wm1RpF

For the first time ever, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has an M.B.A. class that is more than half female. That represents a 10 percent increase over female enrollment in the current class. The class also has a 733 score on the GMAT, the highest ever. And 7 percent of the class identifies as LGBTQ+, another record. Ad keywords:  admissions diversity 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/3zLiERn

Duke University will require face masks to be worn in all buildings -- except dormitories -- regardless of vaccination status, it announced Wednesday. "In the last month, the Delta variant -- which is markedly more transmissible than earlier strains of the virus -- has become increasingly prevalent nationally, across North Carolina, and in our local community. During that time, we have seen a steady rise in the number of cases on campus among unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals. However, the greatest threat for severe disease is to those in our community who are not yet vaccinated. On Monday, about 1,000 people in the state were hospitalized due to COVID, more than twice the number just two weeks ago," the university said. "While we know this is a disappointing turn, we make this move now based on the latest recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Duke’s own infectious disease experts in hopes of containing potential outbreaks th...