September 29, 2007
Duke U. President Apologizes for Handling of Rape Accusations
Duke University’s president, Richard H. Brodhead, apologized in a speech Saturday for the university’s failure to offer more support to the four lacrosse-team members accused last year of rape. The accusations turned out to be unsubstantiated.
According to The News & Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh N.C., Mr. Brodhead said that by “not repeating the need for the presumption of innocence equally vigorously at all the key moments,” the univerisity may have “helped create the impression that we did not care about our students.”
“If there’s one lesson the world should take from the Duke lacrosse case,” he said, “it’s the danger of prejudgment and our need to defend against it at every turn.”
It was the first time Mr. Brodhead had apologized in public for the university’s handling of the accusations. —Lawrence Biemiller
Posted on Sat Sep 29, 04:05 PM | Permalink | CommentRetiring Pa. Loan-Agency Official Could Leave With Generous Pension
Richard E. Willey, who announced Wednesday that he would step down as president of the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency at the end of the year, could be paid a pension of up to $370,000 annually, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Mr. Willey, a former state lawmaker, has been a state employee for 32 years. He has been criticized for lavish spending on retreats and other luxuries, and the U.S. Department of Education is now investigating whether his agency overcharged the federal government for subsidy payments on student loans.
The Post-Gazette said that if Mr. Willey were indeed given a pension of $370,000 a year, it “would be enough to pay annual tuition for 35 undergraduates at Penn State University.” —Lawrence Biemiller
Posted on Sat Sep 29, 10:26 AM | Permalink | CommentSeptember 28, 2007
A Pro-Football League Whose Players Must Have Diplomas? Not Just a Pipe Dream
A San Diego entrepreneur who struck it rich in the student-loan business is moving ahead with plans to start a six-team professional-football league for NFL rejects, according to the Sports Business Journal.
His idea: Tap into all the rabid college-football fans who don’t have much else to cheer for in the spring and summer by fielding teams to play in college stadiums that are otherwise dormant at that time of year.
The league, called the All American Football League, is set to debut in April. It has signed stadium leases with the University of Tennessee, the University of Florida, and municipal fields in Detroit and Little Rock, Ark. The colleges could gain as much as $3-million apiece from the lease arrangements.
Startup football leagues have never fared well, but indoor arena football has had success in recent years.
Another catch: Players must have college degrees. Lots of college-football players walk away from the classroom without their diplomas. But if this league flies, maybe more of them will go back to finish. —Brad Wolverton
Posted on Fri Sep 28, 07:16 PM | Permalink | CommentForeign Students Insist They're Not 'Cash Cows' at Canadian University
Students at Montreal’s Concordia University say they have managed to stave off, for now, a 10-percent increase in tuition for international students. As in many countries, foreigners pay substantially more than residents to attend universities in Canada. Concordia’s student government has accused it of treating the foreign students as “cash cows” in imposing the additional fee without the formal approval of the university’s governing board.
The student-government president, Angelica Novoa, a student from Colombia and also a member of the board, organized an 11th-hour protest when she discovered, just hours before the board’s meeting this month, that the tuition increase was on the agenda. She says the protest worked because the board deferred action on the matter, and the fees already collected were returned to foreign students. However, the tuition increase will be on the agenda again at the October meeting. —Karen Birchard
Posted on Fri Sep 28, 07:09 PM | Permalink | CommentBritish Faculty Union Cites Legal Advice in Abandoning Proposed Boycott of Israel
The British faculty union that stoked international controversy this year when delegates to its annual meeting voted to consider whether to boycott Israeli universities and refuse to cooperate with Israeli academics has now told its members that such a move would be illegal and could not be carried out.
The announcement — by the University and College Union, which represents 120,000 members — followed consultation with lawyers, who informed the organization that a boycott would breach antidiscrimination laws.
“It would be beyond the union’s powers and unlawful for the union, directly or indirectly, to call for, or to implement, a boycott by the union and its members of any kind of Israeli universities and other academic institutions; and that the use of union funds directly or indirectly to further such a boycott would also be unlawful,” legal advisers told the union.
The union’s announcement was immediately hailed. Universities UK, the umbrella organization representing the chief executives of all British universities, issued a statement calling the development “good news.” Rick Trainor, principal of King’s College London and president of Universities UK, said in the statement that “speculation about a potential boycott has been damaging to the international reputation of UK higher education. ... The best way forward now is to continue the dialogue and exchanges between universities in the UK and in Israel and the Palestinian territories.”
The International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom, a group based at Bar-Ilan University, in Israel, issued a statement congratulating the union on its decision and echoing those sentiments. —Aisha Labi
Posted on Fri Sep 28, 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comment [3]MIT Makes $65-Million Deal With Swiss Company to Devise Drug-Making Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is getting into the drug business with the help of a 10-year, $65-million research collaboration with Novartis AG, a pharmaceutical giant based in Switzerland.
The partnership, as the university calls it in a joint announcement today with Novartis, will create a new Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing. The center will focus on developing technologies for producing drugs. The money will be used to support seven to 10 MIT faculty members, as well as students, postdocs, and other staff members.
The collaboration may well be one of MIT’s largest industrial partnerships. In 1999 MIT announced a $35-million alliance with DuPont, a deal that was renewed for an additional $25-million in 2005. According to The Boston Globe, MIT and Novartis will share ownership of intellectual property that they develop jointly in the partnership.
Since the mid-1990s, MIT has been among the most active universities in pursuing research collaborations with industry. —Goldie Blumenstyk
Posted on Fri Sep 28, 02:33 PM | Permalink | CommentPetition Seeks Resignation of Southern Illinois U. President Over Alleged Plagiarism
A philosophy professor at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville who has publicly voiced concern about the plagiarism charges leveled against the university’s president, Glenn Poshard, and the Board of Trustees’ handling of the matter is asking faculty members to sign a petition that could further embarrass Mr. Poshard.
The professor, Robert Bruce Ware, began distributing today a petition demanding that Mr. Poshard resign or that a panel unaffiliated with the university investigate the plagiarism accusations. He is circulating the petition on a faculty e-mail list. He says that after a few days of collecting signatures, he will try to publish the petition in various newspapers.
Mr. Ware has criticized university officials for allowing a group of faculty members on the Carbondale campus to look into the plagiarism allegations. He says the panel cannot be impartial because Mr. Poshard has some authority over them. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Fri Sep 28, 02:22 PM | Permalink | Comment [2]New Outpost of Conservative Thought Opens at U. of Illinois
Following a trend on several campuses across the country, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has become the home of a new center to foster conservative thought at the university. According to the Associated Press, the center’s sponsor, an organization called the Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government Fund, has already raised $2-million and is financing its first course — on American democracy and economic policies — this fall.
Also following a trend of faculty responses to those centers, some professors at Illinois feel that the fund was established without enough faculty input. They worry that it may circumvent the usual ways in which curricula are formed. They also accuse the group of being more loyal to conservative ideology than to academic inquiry.
But many of the centers have been founded out of the much-debated perception that the American professoriate is too loyal to its own ideology. Hint: It isn’t conservatism. —John Gravois
Posted on Fri Sep 28, 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comment [9]Private Admissions Consultants Are Popular With the Middle Class, Not Just the Rich
Austin, Tex. — Independent college consultants have become more popular among parents who want to give their high-school students extra help in the college-admissions process. Although it’s commonly assumed that wealthy families are the main clients of admissions consultants, middle-class families actually hire such consultants much more frequently, according to research conducted by Mark Sklarow, executive of the Independent Educational Consultants Association. During a presentation Mr. Sklarow gave here at the National Association for College Admission Counseling conference, or Nacac, he explained why families with annual incomes from $75,000 to $100,000 were flocking to independent counselors.
“It’s not the superrich who are seeking us out, it’s the professional class in the suburbs whose children attend large public high schools,” Mr. Sklarow said. “Those families are concerned because the counselors at their children’s high schools don’t have the resources or time to provide them individual advice and attention.”
Mr. Sklarow also described how the independent consulting field has gained more respect among college-admission professionals — he cited his organization’s recent cobranding partnership with Nacac, and the more welcoming attitude admissions deans take now when communicating with independent counselors.
Despite those positive developments, Mr. Sklarow said consultants still face a major challenge because they are often sought out by helicopter parents, who are often delusional about their children’s prospects for admission at competitive colleges. The educational and child-rearing philosophy that every child is special and should be celebrated has also had some damaging consequences, he said.
“This is all coming back to haunt us as these students look at colleges,” said Mr. Sklarow. “We’ve raised a generation of kids who are afraid to take risks and fear rejection more than ever before. That makes it hard for us to do our job in college advising because there is no guarantee that they will be admitted by every school.” —Elizabeth F. Farrell
More Chronicle coverage of the Nacac meeting:
- At Admissions Conference, Marketing Mixes With Mission
- Frustrations With Standardized Testing Boil at Annual Admissions Conference
- Report Notes Trends in College Admissions
- Common Application Group’s Leader Hears Complaints About Online Version of Form
New Ranking From 'U.S. News' Lists Top Black Colleges
U.S. News & World Report unveiled today a new ranking of historically black colleges and universities. In the ranking, which the magazine’s editor mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Spelman College, Howard University, Hampton University, Morehouse College, and Fisk University are the top five. According to a description of the ranking, the results should largely track those in the magazine’s rankings of American colleges and universities, released last month. And like those overall rankings, this one seems likely to face questions over its methodology and impact on both students and colleges, particularly on the disparate effect on public and private institutions. —Andrew Mytelka
Posted on Fri Sep 28, 09:32 AM | Permalink | Comment [1]
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