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Smith College announced Monday that its three-week January term would be mostly online. “Interterm courses will be held as scheduled. We strongly encourage instructors to move to remote instruction, whenever possible. We expect most interterm classes will meet remotely most of the time,” said a letter to students and faculty members from Kathleen McCartney, the president, and others. “Students whose interterm classes will meet remotely are strongly encouraged to remain home rather than return to campus for interterm.” The college also announced that employees who can do their jobs remotely would be encouraged to do so during the first three weeks of January. The letter closed, “We want to acknowledge that the COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant uncertainty in our lives, both personally and professionally. We have all been asked to adjust our plans and behavior repeatedly in response to changing risks and guidelines—and we understand how frustrating this has been for everyon...

Image:  The academic year started out triumphant, as colleges returned to in-person learning after the COVID-19 pandemic prompted most campuses to go remote last year. Students, largely vaccinated and often masked, resumed activities, sports and social events. Things felt almost normal again. The sudden arrival of the Omicron variant spurred some campuses to close early and creates uncertainty for the coming semester, but the season’s annual crop of holiday videos mainly focuses on the excitement of being reunited and hopes for a better next year. Celebrating another year of resilience, Brown University honors members of its community, including the women’s volleyball team, the Indigenous Narragansett tribe and EmpowerU, an ed-tech start-up. The University of Alabama’s video shows mascot Big Al decorating the campus with an assist from President Stuart Bell. In Danville Area Community College’s offering, mascot Mick Jaguar spreads holiday cheer and helps students dec...

Image:  COVID-19 is leading some colleges to alter their plans for the next semester, even as it continues to impact the semester that is finishing up. The concern is the Omicron variant of the virus, which transmits much more quickly than other versions and appears to infect some people who are vaccinated. In most cases thus far, the Omicron variant does not cause vaccinated individuals to experience anything but mild symptoms, according to public health experts. But college officials are still worried. Stanford University announced that it will start the winter quarter online, from Jan. 3 until Jan. 18 . “We’ve all been watching in recent days as COVID-19 cases have increased in some parts of the country, and as other universities have seen surges on their campuses,” said a letter from Persis Drell, the provost, and Russell Furr, associate vice provost for environmental health and safety, that was posted on the university website Thursday. “While there conti...

Image:  Thirteen tenure-track or tenured professors are finishing up their last semester at William Paterson University in New Jersey, having been laid off this year due to budget problems exacerbated by COVID-19. Now professors who thought their jobs were safe—and who agreed to a number of concessions in order to save as many colleagues’ jobs as possible in the first round of cuts —are facing another, bigger round of layoffs: citing ongoing declining enrollment and a $30 million structural deficit, William Paterson proposed cutting 150 more professors over three years, or about 40 percent of the full-time faculty. That number has since been reduced to 100 over three years, with the faculty union agreeing to even more concessions. It’s also possible that a few more professors will opt for special retirement packages by a January deadline. But the prospect of losing anything close to 100 professors, out of about 340 total, has the faculty at William Paterson wor...

How do we help students with disabilities fulfill their career goals? In today's Academic Minute, Virginia Commonwealth University's Susan McKelvey looks into this question. McKelvey is a research assistant professor at VCU. A transcript of this podcast can be found here . Section:  Academic Minute File:  12-20-21 VCU - Giving Students with Disabilities a Chance to Fulfill their Career Goals.mp3 Event's date:  Sunday, December 19, 2021 - 11:30am Insider only:  from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/3sjEvPu

Blog:  Confessions of a Community College Dean   With the omicron variant wreaking havoc, I don’t know that a break has ever quite as well-timed as this one.  We had planned for the January intersession to be entirely virtual anyway, so I’m hoping things will be somewhat less frantic by the time spring classes start.  If not, well, we know what to do.   In the meantime, though, thank you to my wise and worldly readers for making this effort worthwhile.  You give me hope that the public discourse around higher education doesn’t have to be vitriolic, reductive, or confined to sports.  It’s still possible to communicate thoughtfully and with good will.  I’ve seen that over and over again, and it’s worth mentioning.  Thank you for keeping me honest in the nicest possible ways.   Have a great break!  See you again in January.   Show on Jobs site:  Disable left side advertisement?:  Is this d...

You can apply the abilities and attributes you’ve strengthened through service not only as you seek your first job but as you move into other positions, writes Keira Wilson. Editorial Tags:  Career Advice Show on Jobs site:  Image Source:  Glopphy/istock/getty images plus Image Size:  Thumbnail-vertical Is this diversity newsletter?:  Is this Career Advice newsletter?:  Disable left side advertisement?:  Trending:  Live Updates:  liveupdates0 Most Popular:  3 Ad slot:  6 In-Article related stories:  9 from Inside Higher Ed https://ift.tt/3GVcHoL

Purdue University president Mitch Daniels sent a universitywide message last week threatening disciplinary actions against students who allegedly threatened a student from China for speech viewed unfavorably by the Chinese government. Daniels’s comments came in response to a recent ProPublica article reporting that a Purdue graduate student from China, Zhiaho Kong, was subject to intimidation and harassment after he posted an open letter praising the heroism of students killed during the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Kong told ProPublica that after he posted the letter, his parents in China received a visit from officers of the Ministry of State Security, China’s spy agency, warning him about his U.S.-based activism. Kong also said that other Chinese students at Purdue began harassing him, calling him a Central Intelligence Agency officer and threatening to report him to the Chinese Embassy and to the state security agency. Daniels said the university was unaware at the time...

Congress finalized legislation Wednesday that allows student veterans taking remote classes to continue receiving full GI Bill housing benefits through summer 2022, Military Times reported. Student veterans enrolled in online courses typically get half the amount in monthly housing stipends as students taking in-person courses under the post-9/11 GI Bill. Stipend amounts depend on where students live, so the difference in financial support can vary from several hundred dollars to $2,000. When the pandemic forced students to move their studies online, Congress allowed the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to continue paying full housing stipends to online students to avoid tens of thousands of veterans losing part of their benefits, a policy that was set to expire Dec. 21. “While we’ve made a lot of progress in getting this virus under control, many veterans continue to take classes online due to the pandemic and need the protections in this legislation in order to...

The U.S. Senate passed legislation last week that would amend language in a veterans’ education act banning the use of commission-based international student recruitment by institutions that receive GI Bill funding. The REMOTE Act was already approved by the House of Representatives and will now go to President Biden for his signature. Higher education groups had lobbied for changes to the veterans’ education law to allow for continued use of agent-based international student recruitment models. Although the use of agents paid on commission in international recruitment has been controversial over the years, it is an increasingly established and common practice. A recent joint survey conducted by the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the American International Recruitment Council found that almost half (49 percent) of the 294 colleges that responded used commissioned agents to recruit international undergraduate students. NAFSA: Association of I...

Texas A&M University announced plans last week for a committee charged with reviewing a controversial proposal to reorganize the arts and sciences programs at the Qatar campus and relegate arts and science faculty to second-class status relative to engineering faculty. Faculty had raised alarms that the proposal—which had a proposed effective date of Jan. 1—had been developed without faculty input, in violation of the university’s policies. Timothy P. Scott, Texas A&M’s interim provost, said during a Faculty Senate meeting last week that administrators “tapped on the brakes and said nothing is going forward in January” and would set up a committee to review the proposal. In a subsequent message to Texas A&M Qatar faculty members, Scott said the committee would include a mix of faculty and administrators, including six Texas A&M at Qatar faculty representatives—one each from the liberal arts, science and engineering programs chosen from nominees voted on by the...

The investor and philanthropist William H. Miller III has made a gift of $50 million to the physics and astronomy program at Johns Hopkins University. The gift will fund endowed professorships, postdoctoral fellowships and graduate research. In 2018, he made a $75 million gift to Johns Hopkins’s philosophy department, believed to be by far the largest gift ever to a university philosophy program. Ad keywords:  faculty institutionalfinance 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/3FgJzYx

A machine learning–assisted study of one million dissertations published between 1980 and 2010 found that scholars who wrote about topics or used methodologies associated with women were less likely than other scholars to go on to become senior faculty members. The study’s authors, who are all affiliated with Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, attribute this finding to bias against “feminized” research—such as work that mentions parenting, children or relationships—relative to “masculinized” research that mentions such topics as algorithms, efficiency or war. This pattern was consistent over the 30-year period studied. At the same time, scholars who mentioned women explicitly were slightly more likely to become senior faculty members than those who wrote just about men. Lead author Lanu Kim, who was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford at the time of the study and is now an assistant professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, told Stanfo...

Stephen Oross, an associate professor of psychology at Kutztown University who was denied a remote teaching accommodation following his recent heart transplant , is suing Kutztown and was just awarded a temporary restraining order reinstating him to “full active duty” with remote accommodations. The order also prevents the university from cutting off his medical benefits for the time being. Oross, “who alleges he is a heart transplant recipient who needs daily expensive anti-rejection medication to stay alive, would suffer irreparable harm if his medical benefits were terminated on Dec. 29, including having to personally pay for such medication,” says the restraining order from Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. “The irreparable injury the plaintiff faces outweighs any injury that the defendants will sustain as the result of the temporary restraining order.” Oross, who remains immunosuppressed and says he was forced t...

Today on the Academic Minute : Susan McKelvey, research assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, explores how to help students with disabilities fulfill their career goals. 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/3e9XDHu

A federal appeals court reinstated a Biden administration rule requiring employees of large businesses to get vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit to weekly COVID testing starting in early January, The New York Times reported . The split decision from a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati overturned a lower court’s injunction blocking enforcement of the rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which applies to employers with 100 or more employees and affects an estimated 84 million workers. “The record establishes that Covid-19 has continued to spread, mutate, kill and block the safe return of American workers to their jobs,” Judge Jane B. Stranch wrote. “To protect workers, OSHA can and must be able to respond to dangers as they evolve.” Republican-controlled states and some businesses have filed multiple suits to block the OSHA rule, and several challengers said in response to the appellate court ruling tha...

Kenyon Wilson, a professor of performing arts at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, decided to test students on something very basic this year: reading the syllabus. “Free to the first who claims; locker one hundred forty-seven; combination fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five,” read the passage in the syllabus. But as he told The New York Times , when the semester ended on Dec. 8, the cash was unclaimed. “Teaching in a pandemic, I’m trying to do creative things and, you know, make it interesting,” he said. “The syllabus is a really dry document. I mean, it’s not supposed to be exciting to read, but I thought if my students are going through and reading it, I might as well reward them.” Ad keywords:  faculty studentsuccess Is this diversity newsletter?:  Hide by line?:  Disable left side advertisement?:  Is this Career Advice newsletter?:  Trending:  Live Updates:  liveupdates0 from Inside...

For almost two years, colleges and universities have struggled to cope with COVID-19. Now, at the end of the fall term, the terrain is once again shifting. On Dec. 10, following a substantial spike in coronavirus cases, Middlebury College shifted to remote instruction and sent students home early. The following week, after over 900 students tested positive, many with the Omicron variant, Cornell University moved finals online and canceled all in-person gatherings . In the face of rising cases , New York University also canceled all “non-essential” gatherings, Princeton University moved its final exams online and DePaul University and Southern New Hampshire University both announced they would temporarily shift to remote instruction in January. It’s time for colleges and universities to rethink their plans for the spring semester. What they do might well be a model for other institutions, organizations and businesses. While much remains uncertain, early reports suggest Omic...

Blog:  Learning Innovation ‘The Amateur Hour’ and the History and Future of Teaching and Learning : Will things be different after the pandemic? The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America  by Jonathan Zimmerman, Published in October 2020     Scott Galloway’s ‘Post-Corona’ Vision for Higher Ed : Provocative, passionate, smart, and wrong. Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity  by Scott Galloway, Published in November 2020     Reading Thelin’s ‘A History of American Higher Education’ as an Amateur Futurist : Why those of us who think about the future of the university don’t know enough about its past. A History of American Higher Education  by John R. Thelin, Published in April 2019 (third edition)     Reading ‘Beginners’ With College Teaching and Learning Ears : Why Tom Vanderbilt’s terrific new book is an educator development resource in disguise. Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifel...