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Holy Names University , a 154-year-old institution in Oakland, Calif., announced on Monday that it will close after the spring semester. The university “has struggled to remain open as it faced rising operational costs, declining enrollment, and an increased need for institutional aid. Both COVID-19 and an economic downturn disproportionately impacted HNU students,” the university said in a statement. In the fall of 2022, the university enrolled 520 undergraduates and 423 graduate students. This number for spring 2023 has significantly declined “as students struggle to make tuition payments or are uncertain about the university’s future,” the statement said. Currently 449 students total are registered for the spring 2023 semester. An agreement with Dominican University of California will allow students to transfer credits after the spring term. Holy Names faces $49 million in debt on its property. Cazenovia College announced Dec. 7 that it would close at the end of t...

Image:  Congress is planning to increase the maximum Pell Grant award to $7,395—a $500 increase—and put more money toward several student success grant programs as part of a $1.7 trillion spending package for fiscal year 2023. The 4,155-page draft spending plan, unveiled early Tuesday morning, will be voted on this week as lawmakers in the Senate and House of Representatives plan to work quickly to avoid a government shutdown. The resolution currently funding the government expires Dec. 23. Lawmakers are expected to pass the bill after appropriators on both sides of the aisle worked over the last several weeks to reach an agreement on the plan. The bill boosts funding levels for a range of federal higher education programs, including $137 million more for historically underresourced institutions. However, the Biden administration, advocates and interest groups had hoped to see higher increases across the board. “This is not a budget in which they were ...

Blog:  Confessions of a Community College Dean   I recently got to reunite with some former colleagues all at once.  They were a great group when we worked together, but I hadn’t seen them (and vice versa) in a while.   We caught up for probably about 45 minutes, of which at least 44 were devoted entirely to personal matters – spouses, kids, vacations, random observations of the universe.  (True example: “Shouldn’t Space Force camouflage be black?  There’s no foliage in space.”)  Almost none of it was about reminiscing, either.  It was just people who cared about each other as human beings talking to each other as human beings.   There’s something reassuring in that.   Part of the role of leaders – in my mind, a badly underrated part of the role – is setting a climate.  Positive workplace climates don’t just happen.  They’re cumulative results of paying attention to the right things over time.  For leaders,...

Holy Names University , a 154-year-old institution in Oakland, Calif., announced on Monday that it will close after the spring semester. The university “has struggled to remain open as it faced rising operational costs, declining enrollment, and an increased need for institutional aid. Both COVID-19 and an economic downturn disproportionately impacted HNU students,” the university said in a statement. In the fall of 2022, the university enrolled 520 undergraduates and 423 graduate students. This number for spring 2023 has significantly declined “as students struggle to make tuition payments or are uncertain about the university’s future,” the statement said. Currently 449 students total are registered for the spring 2023 semester. An agreement with Dominican University of California will allow students to transfer credits after the spring term. Holy Names faces $49 million in debt on its property. Cazenovia College announced Dec. 7 that it would close at the end of th...

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma The early scenes in the Baz Lurhmann’s  Elvis  – that show the future king of rock ‘n’ roll entering a Black gospel revival or interacting with B.B. King and Little Richard -- might come as a surprise to many undergraduates.   After all, rock today is an overwhelmingly white (and male) genre, separate and apart from Black music.  That reality stands in stark contrast to rock ‘n’ roll’s roots, when many of the sound’s forebears and originators were Black, like Ellie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and Chuck Berry.   No one goes to a biopic expecting a history lecture, but the Elvis Presley story raises a host of issues that have garnered a great deal of serious scholarly attention, involving race relations and gender and sexuality during the 1950s, cultural appropriation, Southern white working-class culture, and greed and exploitation in the music industry. Film critics tended to focus on the film’s Lurhmannesque flamb...

Nick Swayne didn't say anything when the board of North Idaho College recently placed him on leave as president. The move came after questioned board actions at a recent meeting. During that meeting, the president raised concerns that trustees had violated open meeting and procurement laws by introducing unannounced resolutions and abruptly hiring a new college attorney without a formal interview or application process. Swayne is now suing the college and asking to be reinstated, The Coeur d'Alene/Post Falls Press reported. The lawsuit, filed late Friday, contends that the Board of Trustees did not have the power to place Swayne on leave. Swayne's contract, the suit said, says the president may terminate his contract without cause, after providing a 60-day notice. The board may place the president on administrative leave during part or all of that period. The agreement does not include a term to otherwise place Swayne on administrative leave. “Because Dr. Swayne has...

Column:  Intellectual Affairs Bibliomania is such a judgmental word, and imprecise to boot: a label applied to such distinct phenomena as the constant reader's stockpiling of provisions, the specialized collector's drive to completeness, and a completely indiscriminate piling-up of volumes without interest in their contents or provenance. Behavior of the first two varieties would be better classed as bibliophilia, with -mania reserved for the more obsessive-compulsive sort of accumulation. But the distinction does not always hold—and anyway, insisting on it too much comes off as defensive. A number of the book-besotted figures Denise Gigante portrays in Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America ( Yale University Press ) were fine with being called bibliomaniacs, though few were hoarders. They were, in effect, nodes in a network of ardent readers in the 19th century United States who shared a fascination with "association copies": books from the ...

Blog:  Learning Innovation The 'World for Sale' and the Ethics of Campus Energy Use : How a book about commodities trading made me reconsider how we power our campuses. ‘The Next Supper,’ the Future of Restaurants and the Post-Pandemic University : What needs to change? ‘Out of Office’ and the Future of Higher Ed Work : Distributed, flexible and blended.     Malcolm Gladwell, Paul Simon and ‘Miracle and Wonder ’: Are audiobooks evolving more rapidly than digital learning?   Smil’s ‘Grand Transitions’ and Higher Ed in 2050 : How the future university will be made.     ‘The Long Game’ and the Nontraditional Academic Career: Thinking about making a change?     Higher Education and ‘The Generation Myth’ : Avoid jumping to easy conclusions.     ‘The Super Age’ and Our Aging Higher Ed Workforce : A book for the three in 10 academic staff who are now actively thinking about retirement, and for those of us who want to f...

Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma I, like you, have no doubt asked ChatGPT, the open AI-powered text generator, to respond to some questions and been dazzled by the results. I asked ChatGPT to draft syllabi for two of my upcoming courses to see how its recommendations differ from my own course outlines.  I found the results thought-provoking.  The application suggested topics as well as books and articles that I hadn’t thought of.  It really will make my courses – one on the history of childhood, the other on museums, past, present, and future -- better. I also asked the program to predict what a college education would look like a decade from now. Here’s what the application wrote without delay: “It’s difficult to predict exactly what a college education will look like in 10 years, as it depends on many factors such as technological advances and changes in the job market.  However, it’s likely that there will be a continued trend toward online and distance le...

A student was arrested in a class at Winston-Salem State University after a conflict with a faculty member. The arrest, which was videotaped and shared on social media, has prompted much criticism of the university. The Winston-Salem Journal said Chancellor Elwood Robinson issued a statement in which he said he understands the situation “has caused a great deal of trauma to those involved and our campus community at large.” He added that he knows that the “weaponization of police is a prevalent problem in our community,” but added “that is not what happened in this incident.” Leilla Hamoud, a student at Winston-Salem State, was arrested by campus police around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday and charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct. On a deleted video on Instagram, the Journal said Hamoud said she and her professor, Cynthia Villagomez, got into an argument over an essay she had written for a group assignment, and that Villagomez yelled at her. Hamoud said she yelled back at Villago...

I was pleased to wake up one morning last week to find Steven Mintz’s blog post for Inside Higher Ed “ The F Word ” awaiting me in my inbox. The piece argues forcefully for the need to place faculty at the forefront of the student success movement. Given that faculty are in charge of instruction, curriculum design and mentoring, it’s hard to imagine how we can accomplish anything like the transformation in higher education that the current focus on student success will require without faculty playing a leading role. It would be weird for me to argue with his thesis: my entire job is to engage my faculty colleagues in activities related to student success and educational equity. I do this work at a public research university not too different from the one where Mintz teaches. I’ve also been surprised by how slowly the conversation around student success has filtered into the faculty ranks. At many institutions, as he points out, the conversation has been directed at professional s...