NEIUPI

Last month, faculty members at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College went on strike for a week before going back to work. They did so without a new contract and without any movement in the negotiating position of the administration – the traditional goals of a strike. Also last month, faculty members at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University went on strike for four days before a five-year contract was signed with university officials.

Strikes have also been authorized by unions at Southern Illinois University; there is talk of one at California State University. Last week, faculty members at Rider University [3] voted to authorize a strike. So did those at Lewis and Clark Community College. [4]

The strikes and possible strikes (many authorization votes aren’t followed by strikes) raise the question about whether work stoppages are still a viable option in these changing times.

Administrators and faculty members are guarded in their opinions.

Read more at Inside Higher Ed…

September 30, 2011

Latinos Need More Support to Raise Lagging Graduation Rates, Report Says

By Lacey Johnson

The college graduation rate for Latinos is less than half of the national average and will not improve until they are offered more help as they come up through the education pipeline, according to a report released Friday by the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center.

The study, conducted in 2009, found that only 19.2 percent of Latinos between the ages of 25 and 34 had earned a two- or four-year degree, compared with 41 percent nationally.

To increase Latino college completion, policy makers and educators must, among other steps, improve middle- and high-school counseling, make preschool more available to low-income families, provide additional need-based grant money, and simplify the financial-aid system, the report says.

Read more at the Chronicle…

Interesting article from Washington Monthly forwarded by a colleague

ADMINISTRATORS ATE MY TUITION

Want to get college costs in line?
Start by cutting the overgrown management ranks.

By Benjamin Ginsberg
No statistic about higher education commands more attention—and anxiety—among members of the public than the rising price of admission. Since 1980, inflation- adjusted tuition at public universities has tripled; at private universities it has more than doubled. Compared to all other goods and services in the American economy, including medical care, only “cigarettes and other tobacco products” have seen prices rise faster than the cost of going to college. And for all that, parents who sign away ever-larger tuition checks can be forgiven for doubting whether universities are spending those additional funds in ways that make their kids’ educations better—to say nothing of three times better.

Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.

Read more at The Washington Monthly…

With dueling hypothetical examples, the chief advocate of a proposed e-mail policy for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and critics of the plan are debating whether it should be adopted.

Consider this example from Michael Corn, chief privacy and security officer of the university: A student and faculty member are e-mailing one another, and both end up using their non-university accounts. The potential danger — and the kind of situation the new policy is trying to avoid — is that by storing certain academic information on e-mail systems disconnected from the university, the faculty member may be unwittingly violating the student’s privacy rights under federal law.

Read more at Inside Higher Ed…

Tenure Reconsidered (a Bit)

August 31, 2011

Scholarship was reconsidered. Tenure, not so much.

That’s the conclusion of a new book, The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered: Institutional Integration and Impact (Jossey-Bass), the latest in a series of examinations by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching of the impact (potential and realized) of the late Ernest Boyer’s 1990 work, Scholarship Reconsidered.

The new book is full of examples of the impact of Scholarship Reconsidered — in the work of faculty members at all kinds of institutions. Further, the new book argues that the ideas of Scholarship Reconsidered could dovetail nicely with the assessment movement, given that both focus on student learning outcomes. But the work being released this week finds mixed results when it comes to applying Scholarship Reconsidered to the tenure and promotion process — and acknowledges that this reality may be holding back efforts to institutionalize Boyer’s ideas.

Read more at Inside Higher Ed…