Posts filed under 'Higher Education'
Paper reports record enrollment at U-M Flint
By Kelly Fraser, written on Sep. 3, 2008
A preliminary head count yesterday at the University of Michigan-Flint shows a dramatic increase in the size of this year’s freshman class, The Flint Journal reported.
According to an internal e-mail sent to U-M Flint employees obtained by the Journal, 890 first-time freshmen are enrolled this year, compared to 626 students last year.
Mel Serow, a spokesman for the campus, declined to comment about the enrollment figures. The University will not release enrollment data until the official 10-day count on Sept. 10 is completed, he said. The school has planned a press conference for Sept. 11, he added.
One factor attracting new students may be the campus’ new dormitories, which opened this fall.
EMU tuition increase bigger than University’s
By Charles Gregg-Geist, written on Aug. 1, 2008
Students at the University were upset when the University Board of Regents announced that next year’s tuition will be 5.6% higher. So you can imagine what Eastern Michigan University students are thinking after seeing a 7.7% increase in their tuition and fees.
The Eastern Michigan University Board of Regents approved the new rate Wednesday, along with a more than 5% increase in dining and housing costs. It also approved a 10.3% financial aid increase.
The hike translates to $579 a year more for in-state undergraduate students at Eastern, for a total of $8,069. The increase is less than in-state lower-level students in the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts will shoulder (an extra $590), meaning Eastern will remain about $3,000 a year cheaper than the University. Tuition for freshmen and sophomores in LSA will be $11,037 next year.
The increase was approved at a special meeting of EMU’s Regents with no discussion, the Ann Arbor News reported.
McCain’s opposition puts affirmative action in spotlight
By Charles Gregg-Geist, written on Jul. 29, 2008
Though race has been a central issue in this year’s Presidential race, affirmative action has seen little discussion. John McCain’s support for a ballot initiative that would ban race- and gender-based affirmative action in Arizona is putting the issue back on the national stage.
McCain has not supported moves to end affirmative action in the past, saying they were too “divisive” since 1998. But he came out in support of the ballot proposal in his home state Sunday, marking a concrete difference between himself and Barack Obama, who supports affirmative action.
Ward Connerly, whose American Civil Rights Initiative is behind the proposal in Arizona and several other states, has been pushing for McCain to support the ban in part because it would provide that contrast with Obama.
Democrats have said in recent days that McCain switched his position specifically to appeal to the conservative Republican party base, which generally opposes affirmative action. McCain has tried to paint his support of the measure as an outgrowth of his long-held opposition to quota systems.
Obama, who also opposes quotas, said McCain “flipped his position.” Ballot proposals like the one in Arizona were really “designed to drive a wedge between people,” Obama told a gathering of minority journalists, the AP reported.
Affirmative action ban might affect 100 scholarships at University of Colorado
By Charles Gregg-Geist, written on Jul. 27, 2008
As Ward Connerly’s American Civil Rights Institute pushes affirmative action bans like the one in Michigan onto the ballot in more states around the country, universities are trying to figure out what the passage of such a ban would mean for them. The University of Colorado completed its assessment of the effects last week. An affirmative action ban will be on the ballot in Colorado this November.
Affirmative action is one component of the secondary part of CU’s two-part admissions process. The primary part examines things like GPA, test scores, extracurricular activities and letters of recommendation. The second considers work and research experience as well as criteria that might qualify students for affirmative action based on race, gender, legacy and socio-economic status.
The proposed ban would eliminate the considerations for race, gender and ethnicity, but have no other effects on the admissions process, the CU report concluded. The report also said the university’s outreach programs wouldn’t be affected, but didn’t come to a clear conclusion regarding scholarships with specific provisions based on race or gender. The scholarships with such provisions were established by donors who set the criteria, which CU said made their status under the ban uncertain. There are about 100 with such provisions at the school.
In Michigan, public universities cannot consider race or gender in awarding scholarships, but private institutions may, and many do.
Wait! A university president turned down a six-figure bonus?!
By Andy Kroll, written on Jul. 16, 2008
Asking “to be treated just like everybody else” at his university, James Ramsey, president of the University of Louisville, recently turned down a six-figure bonus offered to him by the school’s trustees.
Ramsey instead accepted a $700 raise, which is the same percentage all UL full-time faculty and staff will receive as a result of this year’s 1 percent salary pool increase, Inside Higher Ed reported.
“This was a tough budget year for us,” Ramsey told Inside Higher Ed. “I don’t want the attention to be focused on me.”
The decision to turn down the $113,857 bonus–or 25 percent of Ramsey’s base salary–was mostly symbolic, as the money would have come from a private foundation and not from university funds. Still, the move resonated with the faculty at UL.
“We think symbolism is very important,” said Beth Boehm, chair of the University of Louisville Faculty Senate. “It’s a gesture that means something. It’s a show that we are one as a university.”
With Kentucky’s state budget strapped for cash and state funding for higher education declining (sounds familiar…), Ramsey isn’t the only university president turning down the extra cash. Inside Higher Ed also reported that University of Kentucky president Lee Todd will only receive a portion of the bonus he is set to receive this year, per his own request.
Although Todd was eligible to receive a $145,500 bonus because of his high performance rating as president, he chose to only receive $95,500 of the bonus and will give the the remaining $50,000 to various programs at the university.
Other possible uses for the Athletic Department’s $2.5 million check to West Virginia University
By Andy Kroll, written on Jul. 10, 2008
The Rich Rodriguez-WVU-He-said-She-said saga ended today with Rodriguez, his lawyers and the University of Michigan agreeing to pay the $4 million buyout clause in Rodriguez’s contract with WVU.
According to reports, Rodriguez will pay $1.5 million of the clause in three annual payments of $500,000 beginning in January 2010. The remaining $2.5 million—along with Rodriguez’s attorney fees—will be paid by the University’s Athletic Department in a single payment made by the end of July.
Below are a few examples of what $2.5 million could’ve paid for had the Athletic Department (whose funds, remember, are independent of the University’s general fund) not covered Rodriguez’s fees and over half of the buyout clause…
The Athletic Department prides itself on the fact that it often gives money out of its own coffers to the University’s general fund, which provides financial aid to University students, among other things.
Had the Athletic Department saw fit to invest that $2.5 million in the futures of University students and not in the ugly past of its football coach, it would’ve covered (according to figures from the University’s Office of Financial Aid) tuition and fees, room and board, books and personal expenses for 113 undergraduate in-state students.
That same $2.5 million would’ve covered those same costs for 58 undergraduate out-of-state students.
Not that there aren’t uses for $2.5 million within the Athletic Department.
That money could’ve lowered football season tickets for students—or anyone buying football tickets for that matter. That money could’ve gone to help fund any number of facilities upgrade projects, like the much needed renovations at Crisler Arena. It could’ve been seed money to help endow the successful men’s lacrosse team. It could’ve endowed individual athletics scholarships for any number of Michigan teams. It might have even helped do away with the loathed preferred seating program at the Big House in which some football season ticket holders have to make an annual donation each year on top of the cost of their tickets just to keep their seats.
And so on and so forth. You get the point. The possibilities that spring to mind for how $2.5 million could’ve been better spent are endless. These are only a few. Do you have any of your own?
Affirmative action will be on ballot in Arizona, Nebraska
By Charles Gregg-Geist, written on Jul. 4, 2008
The American Civil Rights Institute has obtained enough signatures to put anti-affirmative action measures on the ballot in both Arizona and Nebraska come November, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. The ACRI, led by Ward Connerly, was the organization responsible for the constitutional amendment that banned affirmative action in Michigan in 2006, in California in 1996 and Washington in 1998.
In March, the ACRI submitted signatures for a similar ballot initiatives in Colorado. The group had planned to put measures on the ballot in Oklahoma and Missouri, as well.
Representatives for the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary, better known as BAMN, said it would file complaints and lawsuits arguing that the signatures were gathered fraudulently in Arizona.
Are campuses becoming more moderate as the ’60s-bred profs peace out?
By Andy Kroll, written on Jul. 3, 2008
An interesting article in The New York Times reports that colleges across the country are becoming more moderate as professors whose formative political, ideological and cultural years were the radical and turbulent 1960s near the end of their teaching careers.
Times writer Patricia Cohen narrows in on two professors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (why not Ann Arbor?!) — Michael Olneck, a former 1960s protester-activist-”pink-diaper baby”-turned-senior professor and Sara Goldrick-Rab, a 1980s-raised assistant professor who plainly states that her generation “is not so ideologically driven” — to illustrate the generational gap between the 1960s-bred profs and their younger replacements that is causing this ideological shift on campuses.
Cohen writes that this generational shift could also be a result of the increasing economic pressures in higher education.
“Changes in institutions of higher education themselves are reinforcing the generational shuffle. Health sciences, computer science, engineering and business — fields that have tended to attract a somewhat greater proportion of moderates and conservatives — have grown in importance and size compared with the more liberal social sciences and humanities, where many of the bitterest fights over curriculum and theory occurred.”
She adds that “At the same time, shrinking public resources overall and fewer tenure-track jobs in the humanities have pushed younger professors in those fields to concentrate more single-mindedly on their careers. Academia, once somewhat insulated from market pressures, is today treated like a business. This switch is a ‘major ideological and philosophical shift in how society views higher education,’ write Jack H. Schuster, and Martin J. Finkelstein in The American Faculty.”
Olneck and other profs from his generation consider the increasing “careerism” seen in their younger colleagues to be a result of these economic pressures.
Cohen cites Jackson Lears, 62, a historian at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who told her, “I don’t think that necessarily means a move to the right, but a less overt stance of political engagement.”
Goldrick-Rab, on the other hand, says her generation, unlike that of Olneck, tends to focus more on data-based academic study rather than the value-based studies and beliefs of their older colleagues. She told Cohen, “Senior people evaluate us for tenure and the standards they use and what we think is important are different.”
Either way, it’s an interesting examination of the seismic changes taking place in higher education today, and an article well worth reading.
Ditch the politics and stick to teaching, says NY Times columnist Fish in new book
By Andy Kroll, written on Jul. 1, 2008
To be perfectly honest, while I enjoy reading Frank Rich’s or Gail Collins’s or David Brooks’s columns each week in the Times (or Kristol if I’m in the mood for a laugh), many of my favorite columns in fact never make it into print–and that’s because they’re the work of Stanley Fish.
Fish, a former professor and dean at Duke and then University of Illinois-Chicago, now pens online columns for the Times on a relatively frequent basis–many of them debating issues related to academia, critical theory (though I can’t for the life of me understand his attraction to the school of New Criticism) and the influences of liberalism and conservatism in the Ivory Towers.
It shouldn’t, then, come as a surprise that Fish–who now has the cushy position of Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University–has a new book out this month with Oxford University Press titled Save the World on Your Own Time, which compiles many of the ideas he espouses in his columns, chiefly among them that professors should stick to teaching and leave their personal politics at the door.
In an wonderful interview with Inside Higher Ed, Fish said that professors should focus on only two things: “(1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills — of argument, statistical modeling, laboratory procedure — that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is over.”
Or put more simply: “Do your job, don’t try to do someone else’s job and don’t let anyone else do your job. And I think that if we as instructors … would adhere to that mantra, we would be more responsible in the prosecution of our task and less vulnerable to the criticisms of those who would want to either undermine or control us.”
Fish cites former academics like Ward Churchill and former Harvard president Larry Summers as two examples of academics who let politics or personal stances and beliefs sneak their way into the lecture hall or classroom.
As for Fish, pointing out his personal beliefs and trying to figure what sort of ideology inspired the writing of his book is like trying to nail jello to a wall. He spent most of his life in academia, which leads one to believe he might lean to the left. However, Inside Higher Ed mentions that Fish’s editor described him as a “curmudgeonly semiconservative guy.” And there’s always the New Criticism thing as well.
Anyway, I’d recommend Fish’s Times columns to anyone interested in an intellectual debate on the most touchy issues in academe. (The comments almost always number in the hundreds, and are almost as enjoyable to read as well.) I’ll see if I can track down a copy of the book and report back.
More commuter colleges are adding residence halls, including the University of Michigan at Flint
By Julie Rowe, written on Jun. 29, 2008
Georgia State University, once populated solely by commuter students, built dorms on campus to increase enrollment. It worked. The school built luxury residence halls, added to their athletic programs and increased student activities.
”Students say it makes it a ‘real university,”’ Georgia State President Carl Patton told the Associate Press while sitting in the campus’ airy student center. ”What they mean is, ‘You have sports, you have an honors program, you have fraternities and sororities, you have freshman housing, you have places to eat on campus and you have a theater to go to.”’
University of Michigan administrators hope the first residence hall on the Flint campus, approved last year and scheduled to open this fall, will have similar effects. Administrators want to increase enrollment in Flint from 6,500 to 8,000 students by 2010.
“This beautiful, state-of-the-art housing for students will enhance the campus, while helping U-M-Flint achieve its goal of increasing enrollment,” University President Mary Sue Coleman said in a press release.
Increasing enrollment would add revenue to the University’s purse and could have a positive effect on the poor economy of Flint, which is still suffering the loss of automotive manufacturing jobs.
As GSU transitioned to a more traditional campus, restaurants and other businesses followed. When Temple University in North Philadelphia more than doubled the number of enrolled students because of the addition of residence halls, an $80 million complex with student housing, a movie theater and a shopping center was built in what was once a “decaying neighborhood” according to the Associated Press report.
“University housing in downtown Flint will be a part of the vitality of downtown and beyond,” said Regent Olivia Maynard, who lives in Flint, in a press release.