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The science and engineering sorority Phi Sigma Rho announced Thursday that it will now admit members with nonbinary gender identities. In April, the National Panhellenic Conference -- the governing organization for 26 national and international sororities -- delayed a vote on whether its sororities would admit nonbinary members. Phi Sigma Rho is not a member of the conference. 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/3vU9th1

Today on the Academic Minute : Christina Kilby, assistant professor of religion at James Madison University, examines how Buddhism can inform the modern world. 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/3pOTeAU

The Department of Education has deferred its decision on whether to continue recognizing the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges, as it announced Thursday the recognition status of nine accrediting agencies. A decision will be made on the renewal of recognition for ACCSC -- an agency that predominantly accredits for-profit career institutions and has come under fire for approving institutions with poor student outcomes -- once it submits further information about its monitoring, evaluation and actions related to high-risk institutions, according to the department. ACCSC was at the center of the debate among members of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity during its July meeting, at which the advisory committee broke from the department in recommending that a senior department official renew ACCSC’s federal recognition for three years. The department also notified three other agencies -- the Accreditation Commission for Acupunct...

A federal appeals court panel upheld an amended settlement reached last year between Brown University and female former athletes who sued back in the 1990s when the university cut several sports teams, including women’s gymnastics and volleyball, The Providence Journal reported . The ruling put an end to a two-decade dispute that became a landmark case for ensuring gender equity in college sports under Title IX. The original settlement, reached in 1998, required Brown to comply with Title IX legislation in maintaining equivalent varsity sports programs for women. Last year, when Brown moved to cut more teams, the ACLU and the legal advocacy group Public Justice asked the federal court to leverage the 1998 agreement to force the university to preserve the women’s sports programs. Through mediation, the parties reached a settlement in which Brown agreed to reinstate two women’s teams -- equestrian and fencing -- in exchange for ending the 1998 agreement. Last month, 12 f...

Column:  Intellectual Affairs Ten years before the wave of trials and executions that convulsed Salem, Mass., for most of 1692, three poor, old women were put to death by hanging in the British port town of Bideford. They were charged with using their powers to murder other townspeople and wreck a number of ships at sea, plus interfering with livestock. (The cows of one of the witch hunters gave blood instead of milk.) I refer to the three of them as “poor, old women” because that is what they shared: a place at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, surviving -- just barely -- on crumbs from those above them. Town records contain the precious few details known about their lives before the accusations started flying. A good bit more documentation exists on the Bideford residents supposedly tormented by the witches, as well as those in responsible positions who managed the whole religious and legal spectacle. John Callow’s The Last Witches of England: A Tragedy of Sorc...

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma Sometimes our attention is so fixated on certain developments that we ignore other equally important trends. Thus, the focus on the fall of eastern European Communism in the late 1980s had the effect of obscuring another shift occurring in plain sight: The rise of groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the Middle and Near East and of domestic terrorist groups at home. Psychologists call this tendency perceptual or inattentional blindness: The failure to see something right in front of our faces.  Blindness, in cases like these, is in our minds, not our eyes. A somewhat similar phenomenon may well be occurring in higher education. Today, our attention tends to focus on three serious challenges: A demographic challenge:   How best to respond to a decline in the traditional college-aged population, especially in the number of students who do not require financial aid. A completion challenge:  How to raise graduate rates and reduce...

Blog:  Learning Innovation My job requires that I be a student of higher education. Knowing what to do next is impossible without knowing what came before and what others are doing. One way to learn about higher education - to get better at "doing" higher education - is to read books about higher education. When you read books about higher education? In those rare moments during "normal" work hours when you are not on a Zoom meeting, do you tear yourself away from your screens and sit down with a book? Are we working if we are not in a meeting, not on e-mail, and not teaching - but are instead sitting and reading a book? For me, the answer is no. I do not read books about higher education during the "normal" business hours I work in higher education. And I'm wondering if that should change? Should we collectively shift our academic working norms so that sitting and reading a book counts as work? Might we find a way to disconnect from ou...

Blog:  Tackling Transfer Transfer has been given considerable focus over the past year as the pandemic exacerbated systemic inequities and caused many learners to retreat from higher education.  We hope to recapture those students in a post-pandemic environment as we refocus on building better pathways and strengthen our transfer advising.  But here’s the problem. When we talk about transfer, we are generally talking about the narrow example of students transferring from one higher education institution to another--either upward from a two-year or laterally between four-year institutions. But based on data from the National Student Clearinghouse , we know that nearly 40% of learners enrolled in higher education have credit from at least one another institution; half of those learners have credit from more than one. Based on 2019 data from National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) there were just over 19 million post-secondary students in the US ; yet, the ...

Image:  Russell Swagger, president of Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College in Wisconsin, knew the institution needed a better way to provide mental health services to students and employees when it started to become apparent that the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic were hurting students emotionally. Students and faculty at tribal colleges like his were under a lot of strain . Many had to juggle academic responsibilities while caring for children no longer attending school or daycare or taking care of relatives sick with the coronavirus. Some students lost jobs, and others had to get jobs or work more hours to help support parents or siblings who were laid off. Many families lost loved ones to the virus. On and off campus, the tribal community was struggling, and college administrators knew they had to help. “With COVID, we’ve seen an uptick in overdoses, domestic violence situations, suicide attempts and completions,” Swagger said. “All of these things ...

Image:  Academics have said that Taiwan’s overseas Mandarin-language centers, which are being rolled out after the shuttering of many Chinese-led Confucius Institutes, are in a strong position to thrive -- provided they steer clear of politics. According to Taiwan’s government, its growing network in the West “will offer overseas learners a free and democratic alternative to learning Mandarin,” with an emphasis on “Taiwanese characteristics.” So far, the program includes 15 outposts in the U.S., with three European locations, in London, Paris and Hamburg, Germany, and more centers hoped for “in the near future” -- something Taipei says will meet an “unmet demand” for Mandarin courses abroad. The program can also tap in to its connections with more than 1,000 schools and colleges internationally. Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at SOAS University of London, said that Taiwan’s traditional Chinese culture -- inherited from the mainland before it came under Com...

32% of students identify not wanting or not needing a mentor as a reason for not having one Image:  The path from the University of Kentucky to Oxford University for one Rhodes scholar went through a university program to cultivate extraordinary academic achievement that included a mentoring component. The student, however, wasn’t exactly someone who seemed destined for great success. “She was not all that good a high school student, but she did amazing work at the university and had the right faculty teaching her in her first year,” says Philipp Kraemer, chair of the Chellgren Center for Undergraduate Excellence at Kentucky, which runs the program. “She blossomed early on.” It’s an example of how mentors can guide students in reaching their full potential. Yet many students never get that experience. A Student Voice survey of 2,003 undergrads (sophomores, juniors and seniors) from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse, with support from Kaplan, found that nearly hal...

Image:  Student workers at Harvard University went on strike for the second time in as many years Wednesday, the first day of a planned three-day work stoppage in pursuit of a new union contract. Key issues for the United Auto Workers-affiliated union are pay, a union security clause requiring that student workers be union members and contractual protections against harassment and discrimination. Ninety-two percent of some 2,000 union members voted to authorize the strike and were expected to participate in Wednesday’s strike, including campus picket lines. The event was timed to coincide with the upcoming parents’ weekend at Harvard. “We have consistently been proposing creative solutions to reach a fair agreement,” Maya Anjur-Dietrich, a Ph.D. candidate in applied physics and a member of the union bargaining committee, said in a statement. “We are at the table, ready to make meaningful improvements to the lives of student workers, and we’re waiting for the a...