But the fact that his “frequent efforts to connect with the full-timers” were a “waste of time” invites a question.
Why are tenured professors, a famously liberal group, complicit in this injustice in their own institutions, where action on their part could make a real difference? The professor described below, although partly made up, illustrates the problem.
His conscience has lately arisen To make him teach people in prison. He still snubs the adjuncts who seek to advance. The wrong kinds of underdogs don’t rate his glance.
–Felicia Nimue Ackerman Professor of Philosophy Brown University
Teaching professor of engineering Justin Shaffer seriously misleads readers with his question, his source, his logic, and his arithmetic in his June 7 essay “How Much Do Students Pay to Attend Your Class?” Over all, he actively trivializes teaching while succumbing to a fallacious context free fall into simplistic economics.
First, the effort itself to calculate the cost of minutes (3 minutes in his introduction) debases teaching and learning themselves.
Second, he seems unaware that U.S. News and World Report is the least reliable of all sources about colleges and universities. All data is self-reported, unchecked by any outside parties. This is why knowledgeable people turn to Times Higher Education, Washington Monthly, and now DegreeChoices for more reliable, comparable data.
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Third, it is also well-known (and publicized in Inside Higher Ed and elsewhere) that all reported “costs” not only vary from institution to institution but include all matters of fees that have no relation to the actual costs for time spent in either in-person, online, or hybrid instruction.
Thus, the exercise is not only misguided but fallacious.
But why, at a time of an incoherent wave of “skepticism” about the “value” of college education, would any educator wish to calculate what amounts to a misleading and in fact counter-productive “cost per minute” of something or other? I do not understand that. Is that the engineering teaching professors understanding of “catalyzing” instructors and students?
Relatedly, in his June 9 “Higher Ed Gamma” blog post, Steven Mintz errs first in referring to lack of knowledge about higher education as “illiteracy” and misunderstanding early American colleges as places for the sons of the wealthy. They were primary vocational schools for future clergy and a much smaller number of administrators. More than a few studies are accurately titled “paupers and scholars.”
–Harvey J. Graff Professor Emeritus of English and History Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies, and Academy Professor Ohio State University
This month’s episode of the Pulse podcast features an interview with Darren Catalano, CEO of HelioCampus, a data analytics provider. In this conversation with Rodney B. Murray, host of The Pulse, Catalano discusses how the company’s tools help institutions make decisions, assess their performance and serve students.
Columbia University is dropping out of the undergraduate rankings of U.S. News & World Report.
The university’s law and medical schools earlier announced that they would not participate, but the undergraduate rankings get more attention.
A statement noted that much of the information conveyed in the rankings may be found in the university’s Common Data Sets, which the university just released for this year.
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“We remain concerned with the role that rankings have assumed in the undergraduate application process, both in the outsized influence they may play with prospective students, and in how they distill a university’s profile into a composite of data categories. Much is lost in this approach. The combined population of our three schools, along with the presence of students from affiliate institutions, in classrooms and across many aspects of student life, is intrinsic to the undergraduate experience at Columbia. We are convinced that synthesizing data into a single U.S. News submission for its Best Colleges rankings does not adequately account for all of the factors that make our undergraduate programs exceptional,” said a letter from Mary C. Boyce, the provost.
The Juilliard School fired a professor after it found “credible evidence” that he had “engaged in conduct which interfered with individuals’ academic work,” according to a letter sent to students and faculty members, The New York Timesreported.
The professor was Robert Beaser, who served as chair of the composition department from 1994 to 2018. The letter said he had behaved in a manner that was “inconsistent with Juilliard’s commitment to provide a safe and supportive learning environment for its students.” Juilliard did not provide details but said the investigation had found evidence of a past “unreported relationship” and that Beaser had “repeatedly misrepresented facts about his actions.”
The concerns involved incidents from the late 1990s and the early 2000s.
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The investigation started after VAN Magazine reported in December that students said he had sexually harassed them.
Richard C. Schoenstein, a lawyer for Beaser, said the relationship in question took place 30 years ago, had been known to Juilliard since then and had been the subject of previous inquiries. He called the school’s findings “unspecific and unattributed” and said that Beaser would “pursue his legal rights in full.”
“Dr. Beaser is shocked and dismayed by Juilliard’s conclusions and actions,” Schoenstein said.
Telecounseling for college students isn’t going anywhere. That’s one takeaway from a new report on critical considerations for partnering with teletherapy vendors from the American Council on Education, says co-author Nance Roy.
“The current landscape suggests that teletherapy is here to stay and can be a useful and effective offering for colleges to consider,” says Roy, chief clinical officer at the Jed Foundation and an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University.
While traditional in-person, group and individual therapy remain “excellent treatment choices,” she adds, teletherapy can provide services and support to those “who may never access in-person counseling or are more comfortable with a digital option.” Offering a variety of treatment options can allow colleges and universities to reach “the largest share of students and best support their mental health.”
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Virtual counseling by on-campus providers became commonplace during the pandemic, as did partnerships with third-party teletherapy vendors. But even as pandemic mitigation efforts have relaxed, campus-based providers continue to offer students telecounseling in some cases. And as the collegiate mental health crisis grows, more institutions are partnering with vendors to boost counseling capacity and offerings.
How do students rate telecounseling options on their campuses, from either campus-based or third-party counselors? New data from the recent Student Voice survey on health and wellness provide insight.
Some background: the survey, conducted by Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse in April and May, asked 3,000 two- and four-year college students at 158 institutions about their own health and wellness and about related campus services.
Of those 3,000 respondents:
1,110 have used any of a series of mental health offerings provided by their institutions.
350 students have used telecounseling provided by their college, with half of those also having used on-campus counseling.
172 have used telecounseling provided by their college but not on-campus counseling.
Among the 172 students who’ve used telecounseling but not on-campus counseling, nearly half approve of the quality of care they received and of appointment availability. About a quarter say that follow-up care went well. Same for “ability to schedule with a counselor I could relate to.”
The survey also asked about what could be better. Not quite half of these students say that quality of care needs improvement. Over three in 10 say that follow-up care, appointment availability and ability to schedule with a counselor they could relate to all need improvement.
For some additional context and comparison, 734 students in the survey have used on-campus counseling. Some 555 of those students haven’t used telecounseling. These 555 students have higher approval rates than the telecounseling-only group for appointment availability (55 percent) and comparable approval rates for quality of care, follow-up care and ability to schedule with a counselor to whom they could relate.
As for what needs work, relatively more telecounseling group students than on-campus counseling group students cite quality of care (43 percent versus 29 percent, respectively). The on-campus counseling group students also are slightly more likely to say that nothing needs improvement.
The data come with some caveats, including that COVID-19 may have inflated the overall share of students in the survey who’ve experienced telecounseling (12 percent) relative to students who’ve experienced on-campus counseling (24 percent). That’s because telecounseling was the main method of campus-based counseling early in the pandemic.
Still, 7 percent of freshman survey respondents say they’ve experienced telecounseling arranged through their institutions, as do 12 percent of sophomores. This means that students who weren’t necessarily enrolled in college at the height of the pandemic approach or match the overall telecounseling rate. (According to the most recent annual report from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Pennsylvania State University, from 2020–21 to 2021–22, the frequency of in-person appointments increased from 2 percent to 37 percent of all engagements, while video appointments declined from 83 percent to 51 percent.)
There is no significant difference in telecounseling use rates between Student Voice survey respondents at public and private institutions or at two-year and four-year institutions. Some 16 percent of LGBTQIA+ students and 10 percent of straight students have accessed telecounseling, but relatively more LGBTQIA+ students have accessed mental health care in general at their institutions.
Marcus Hotaling, director of the Eppler-Wolff Counseling Center at Union College and president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors, says that the association’s own internal data suggest that students increasingly prefer in-person appointments, possibly because students already spend so much of their time on screens.
“When they can have 45 to 50 minutes where the focus is completely on them, they really want that,” he hypothesizes.
“Face-to-face can help the therapeutic relationship,” he adds.
That said, Hotaling—who has written for Inside Higher Ed about how he’s cautiously optimistic about collegiate partnerships with teletherapy companies—says he remains so today.
“There is a lot they can offer, but it has to be a relationship based on both partners being honest about what they need and want.”
Hotaling adds that he approves of ACE’s new recommended considerations for colleges weighing contracts with outside teletherapy companies. These considerations include:
Is the clinician-to-student ratio within a normal range? The International Accreditation of Counseling Services recommends that that college counseling centers have a minimum of one full-time professional for every 1,000 to 1,500 students.
Does the counseling center offer services outside of normal business hours? Student surveys can reveal whether there is demand for after-hours care.
Does the counseling center provide 24-7 on-call services for mental health crises and emergencies? It’s “imperative” that on-campus staff provide this if the outside service does not.
Is the clinical staff diverse by race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation? Comparing student body demographics with those of the counseling center staff is a good place to start.
Does the counseling or health service offer psychiatric evaluations, prescribe psychiatric medications or offer medication management? If yes, what is the wait time for these? If psychiatric services are not available on campus, telepsychiatry can be a viable option for filling that gap.
Hotaling says he’d add just one more consideration to ACE’s list: What is vendor staff turnover like? This is certainly a concern for continuity and quality of care. Anecdotally, however, some institutions report that partnering with teletherapy actually has increased staff retention within their own campus counseling centers.
Nicole Ruzek, director of counseling and psychological serves at the University of Virginia, for instance, says that partnering with a vendor has contributed to center staff retention by relieving some pressure on providers. Ultimately, she says, the arrangement “allowed us to create more access to mental health care.”
Returning to ACE’s recommendations, Sarah Ketchen Lipson, assistant professor of health law policy and management at Boston University and principal investigator of the Healthy Minds Network, says that she’s also interested in whether platforms include providers who can deliver care in languages other than English, and whether providers are trained to support LGBTQIA+ students, particularly trans and nonbinary students.
Lipson, who advocates that institutions promote mental health across campus spaces, says she’d also consider opportunities for integrating the teletherapy vendor into existing institutional resources. To what degree can services be tailored, and is data sharing possible, for example? And what is the crisis response protocol?
Roy, who wrote ACE’s report, “totally” agrees that promoting student mental health is a campuswide responsibility, even though not everyone needs clinical care.
“Everyone on campus has a role to play. Coaches, faculty, students, academic advisers—all staff—need to be educated on how to recognize when a student may be struggling, know how to reach out and offer a warm hand, and know when and where to refer to professional help if or when needed.” The goal “is to create a culture of caring and compassion on campus where there is no wrong door for a student to walk through for support.”
Eric Boynton, provost and dean at Beloit College, in Wisconsin, has been named president there.
Kristie Fisher, president of Iowa Valley Community College, has been appointed president of Kirkwood Community College, also in Iowa.
Nerita Hughes, interim associate vice president of academic affairs and workforce innovation and the dean of the School of Business, Careers, Education and Workforce Innovation at North Hennepin Community College, in Minnesota, has been chosen as president of Bay College, in Michigan.
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Vini Nathan, interim provost and vice president of academic affairs at Auburn University, in Alabama, has been appointed to the job on a permanent basis.
Diane Prusank, provost and vice president of academic affairs at Westfield State University, in Massachusetts, has been named provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.
Chae E. Sweet, dean of liberal studies at the Community College of Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, has been selected as vice president for academic affairs at Montgomery County Community College, also in Pennsylvania.
Ben Vinson III, provost and executive vice president at Case Western Reserve University, in Ohio, has been appointed president of Howard University, in Washington, D.C.
Stacy H. Young, president of Montcalm Community College, in Michigan, has been selected as president of Manchester University, in Indiana.
President Biden on Wednesday vetoed a congressional resolution that would have struck down his loan-forgiveness program. The veto was expected.
The House and Senate passed the measure with overwhelming Republican support and modest Democratic support. There was not enough support for the resolutions to override Biden’s veto.
The Biden plan, currently on hold pending a Supreme Court review, would forgive $10,000 in student debt for borrowers earning up to $125,000 annually, or $250,000 for married couples. Recipients of Pell Grants are eligible for $20,000 in forgiveness.
“The demand for this relief is undeniable,” President Biden said in his veto message. “In less than four weeks—during the period when the student debt relief application was available—26 million people applied or were deemed automatically eligible for relief. At least 16 million of those borrowers could have received debt relief already if it were not for meritless lawsuits waged by opponents of this program.”
He concluded the message by saying, “I remain committed to continuing to make college affordable and providing this critical relief to borrowers as they work to recover from a once-in-a-century pandemic. Therefore, I am vetoing this resolution.”
Chinese universities are instituting tuition increases of as much as 54 percent, Reuters reported.
The universities blame a financial crunch among local governments after three years of disruptive COVID-19 policies and a sluggish economy.
East China University of Science and Technology raised tuition fees by 54 percent, to 7,700 yuan ($1,082) for freshmen majoring in science, engineering and physical education, and by 30 percent in the liberal arts, according to statements issued Sunday.
On Monday, Shanghai Dianji University announced that tuition for science and engineering would increase by 40 percent, while students majoring in management, economics and literature will have to pay 30 percent more compared with a year earlier.
I have been following conversations surrounding AI generation of writing with a wait-and-see attitude since the beginning of the year but recently had cause to reconsider the urgency of the subject following an incident in one of my own classes. I agree with Ali Lincoln’s recent piece “ChatGPT: A Different Kind of Ghostwriting” that the ethics of AI text generation are gray but disagree with her premise that we currently know enough to conclude that it is a valuable tool for editing and writing—I suspect there are more questions that need to be answered first.
This past spring semester a student in one of my literature courses submitted an annotated bibliography project of six journal articles which at first glance looked like a good submission with the exception that all the article citations were missing URLs and none of them were articles I had encountered previously—and I am familiar with the topic the student was researching. After some checking I discovered that every single one of the six sources was invented and did not exist. When confronted, the student confessed to having used an AI service to create the submission. What is particularly noteworthy about this instance of AI plagiarism is that all the citations included in the submission listed the titles of real, high-quality journals that have published articles on similar topics previously and most of the names listed for the authors of these imaginary articles were the names of real literary scholars.
Following this incident, there are two questions which have stayed with me: How much of what is produced by these services is scraped from copyrighted works without acknowledgement or compensation to the authors and publishers? What happens when texts full of invented information and imaginary citations attributed to real authors and journals proliferate across the web?
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The first question is not easy for the average member of the public without AI expertise to elucidate but what I have found has serious implications for intellectual property rights. Furthermore, both questions raise the possibility we are entering a world where ownership of intellectual property rights for authors is diluted to the point of meaninglessness and the reputations of scholars and journals are degraded even further, erasing conceptions of credibility from the mind of the public. Educators who have wholeheartedly embraced AI technology in the classroom—even just for brainstorming and drafting purposes—are asking students to use technology which could possibly be stealing the ideas of others or simply inventing things wholesale.
Conversations around AI in the classroom need to be more explicit about addressing the opaque nature of technologies such as Chat GPT—particularly in the wake of the revelations of the data breach at OpenAI. Most of these AI generation services state in their terms of service that users should provide attribution to the AI for work created through the service but these services themselves do not provide clear attribution for the many sources across the web that are used to generate these texts—nor do they clearly denote invented material. My ask here is that we bring these questions to the forefront as we consider the form that responsible use of AI in college classrooms should take.
–Mary Nestor Senior Lecturer Department of English Clemson University
I think we need to start a new adage: never take teaching advice from an administrator. Whatever expertise they had in teaching has been buried under their administrative goals, and whatever humility they had as faculty about the limitations of their own understanding has disappeared now that they’ve been chosen to lead and therefore must know more than all those of us who haven’t been. Dean Darroch provides an object lesson in this in her piece on student engagement.
Darroch assumed her current position as dean in March 2020, which means she’s been in administration since the beginning of the pandemic, not in the classroom. So it’s not surprising that she doesn’t see COVID to blame for the engagement issues we’re seeing — she doesn’t understand that this isn’t some slow generational shift or the tired “digital native” trope, but rather a dramatic change from fall 2019 to fall 2021. (And it’s utter coincidence that in the intervening period we had the unprecedented social experiment of forcing everyone into online learning, or masked and distance learning, for an extended period…)
Darroch is an expert in something, but it’s not pedagogy or the cognitive science of learning, as she makes clear when she buys into the thoroughly discredited idea of learning styles. So why are we paying attention to her thoughts on teaching? (Well, in part because IHE puts bios at the ends of articles…)
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And she pushes farther than people normally do in pandering to students, going so far as to say that faculty should “Provide clear expectations as to the outcomes you expect of students but let students identify the tasks they believe are required of them to achieve those outcomes.”
This is sheer nonsense. The entire reason we employ faculty is so that they can guide students through the tasks that are required to gain knowledge and skills, because students — and I cannot stress this strongly enough — do not have the expertise to figure this out on their own. If I gave Darroch one of my student learning outcomes (say, “demonstrate understanding of angular momentum in quantum systems”) and asked her what activities would lead to that, I suspect she wouldn’t know where to start. Well, neither do my students (nor did I, as a student). I’m not paid to generate learning outcomes; I’m paid to structure and guide an entire experience that will lead to students satisfying them.
But still Darroch argues that we should “Empower students to create a learner-led, self-organized, independent learning environment.” In a very limited way this can be useful. For example, in my field of physics, there’s been a movement towards inquiry-based labs where students play a role in designing their own experiments. However, this nonetheless requires a lot of structure and guidance from the faculty member, because otherwise the students will just be lost, confused, and frustrated. No student is going to independently discover, over the course of one year, what it took the most brilliant minds in history four centuries to work out. Labs that lean too much toward structure are still somewhat effective, but labs that lean too far towards independence are a disaster.
And guess what? While inquiry-based labs have been demonstrated to be far more effective in teaching students expert attitudes towards experiment in science, students don’t believe they’re learning as much in them. Because students are not great at assessing what activities are most effective for their learning. (Witness the modern student who believes they learn very well from watching videos, regardless of clear demonstrations that they don’t.)
Darroch relies heavily on Peter Drucker, who apparently worked in the 1950s on the topic of knowledge workers. It feels relevant that the science of teaching and learning has advanced by leaps and bounds in the many decades since then, and also that students are not being employed for their knowledge and skills. Rather, they’re employing us, the faculty, to teach them knowledge and skills.
NATIONAL HARBOR, MD—In a sternly worded condemnation that took the 14-year-old to task for violating the rules to obtain an unfair advantage, the 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee winner Dev Shah was disqualified Friday when it was confirmed he had received in advance all 26 letters needed to spell the words. “Unfortunately, after discovering that every single letter used in the competition was leaked to the winner ahead of time, we were forced to strip this year’s winner of his title,” said Corrie Loeffler, executive director of the bee, who in private reportedly expressed concern that the cheating scandal that erupted on her watch would both undermine the integrity of the organization and destroy her career. “We take great pains to keep the letters we will use under lock and key, as it is simply not fair for a contestant to walk onto our stage already knowing that letters such as E, T, and N are likely to be used over the course of the spelling bee. Rest assured, we will be conducting a thorough investigation to determine how this elaborate fraud was perpetrated, especially now that we know Mr. Shah appears to have gone so far as to have learned a little song he used as a mnemonic device to help him remember the 26 letters.” Reached for comment, Shah told reporters he had agreed to return his $50,000 cash prize and said he wished to apologize for his behavior, which he called “probouleutic, chthonic, and completely aegragus.”
Glasgow Caledonian University, which created a New York City campus in 2013 and won the right to award degrees four years later, is selling its campus in New York City, the BBC reported.
The university said the campus had “not reached its potential” and that the university would look to exit New York.
A university statement said, “Following a discussion at the university court in February, it was agreed that the university would actively seek a partnership with another educational organization, with a view to the partner ultimately acquiring GCNYC. Whilst a partnership is our preferred option for the college, in the event a partnership cannot be established, we will initiate a process to exit from New York.”
The university awarded its New York campus $32.5 million in loans and grants.
The Association of American Universities on Thursday announced that it would add six new research universities to its selective membership—institutions with a decided tilt to the West and South.
They are:
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Membership in the AAU, which now numbers 71, has historically been coveted by many public and private research universities as a signal of national and international prominence and excellence. Leaders often strategize about how to shape their institutions to meet the association’s criteria; the University of South Florida, for instance, built its 2012 strategic plan around earning its way into the AAU.
The association’s evolving criteria have resulted in the exclusion of some longtime members, especially, in recent years, some land-grant institutions in the Midwest that favor agricultural research over biomedical and other forms of research.
AAU leaders called out in their announcement that two of the new members, Arizona State and UC Riverside, are Hispanic-serving institutions.
Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy, the top Republican on the Senate education committee, proposed the resolution to block the Biden administration’s plan for student loan forgiveness.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The Senate voted Thursday to block President Biden’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loans for eligible Americans.
The resolution, proposed by Louisiana Republican senator Bill Cassidy, also would restart student loan payments. Biden has said he would veto the measure. The resolution didn’t pass either chamber with enough votes to override a presidential veto.
Two Democratic senators joined with Republicans to support the resolution, which passed with 52 votes. Forty-six senators voted against it.
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“It is unfair to the hundreds of millions of Americans who will bear the burden of paying off hundreds of billions of dollars of someone else’s student debt,” Cassidy said in a statement. “Our resolution prevents average Americans, 87 percent of whom currently have no student loans, from being stuck with a policy that the administration is doing not to be fair to all, but rather to favor the few.”
The resolution is one of several ways congressional Republicans are trying to block one of the president’s signature policies. House Republicans previously voted to block the debt-relief plan and other changes to the student loan program as part of a bill that would raise the country’s borrowing limit and make other spending cuts to the federal budget. The final bill to avert default and raise the debt ceiling requires the administration to resume student loan payments later this summer.
The Supreme Court is set to say this month whether the debt-relief plan is legal.
The Government Accountability Office said in March that the plan meets the definition of a rule under the Congressional Review Act, setting the stage for the resolution. Under the act, a simple majority of lawmakers in the House and Senate can vote to block the administration from carrying out the rule.
Student Borrower Protection Center executive director Mike Pierce said student loan borrowers will not forget which politicians voted for the resolution, which he said would cause “irreparable damage” to the student loan system.
“Today’s vote makes crystal clear exactly who stood up and fought to protect the economic livelihoods of millions of people with student loan debt—and who schemed to keep them drowning in the debt despair of our nation’s student loan crisis,” Pierce said. “The American people are watching and expect President Biden to keep his promise to veto this horrendous bill and deliver on his promise of student loan debt relief once and for all.”
The SBPC and the American Federation of Teachers previously found that the student loans of more than 260,000 public servants would be reinstated under the resolution. Another two million workers would lose progress toward debt relief under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
House Republicans have said the resolution is not retroactive.
The resolution cleared the House with 218 votes—the minimum needed—after two Democrats sided with Republicans.
Washington State representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, one of the Democrats who voted for the resolution, said in a statement that expansions of student debt forgiveness need to be matched dollar for dollar with investments in career and technical education.
“I can’t support the first without the other,” she said. “I’m all for repairing what’s busted but the higher education system is totaled. College costs too much and the credentials produced get unwarranted social status, justifying more cost increases by our country’s elite. They need to snap out of it, and the system needs a total overhaul.”
In the Senate, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, Montana senator Jon Tester and Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema voted for the resolution. Manchin and Tester are Democrats, while Sinema is an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
“Today I voted to repeal the Biden Administration’s student loan cancellation proposal because we simply cannot afford to add another $400 billion to the national debt,” Manchin said in a statement. “There are already more than 50 existing student loan repayment and forgiveness programs aimed at attracting individuals to vital service jobs, such as teachers, health care workers, and public servants. This Biden proposal undermines these programs and forces hard-working taxpayers who already paid off their loans or did not go to college to shoulder the cost.”
Stevens Institute of Technology will give each graduate $250 to make up for a “chaotic experience” during the commencement ceremonies, NJ.com reported.
“While this gesture does not make up for the irreplaceable moments that were missed, we hope that graduates and their families will accept our acknowledgement of our mistakes and our promise to do better,” said Nariman Farvardin, president of Stevens Tech.
New Jersey 101.5 reported that the ceremonies started off normally, with a speech by New Jersey governor Phil Murphy. Then the graduates moved to two other facilities to receive their degrees, and “that’s when things began going downhill.”
There were delays of more than two hours for some of the graduates and their families; some of the ceremonies ended early, without all of the student speakers; and one speaker who did get the chance to speak couldn’t finish because of boos (over the situation, not the speech).
Most Americans support affirmative action in college admissions and do not want the Supreme Court to ban it, according a new poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
However, they do not believe applicants’ race should play a major role in whether they are admitted.
Of those polled, 63 percent said the Supreme Court should not bar all affirmative action in college admissions.
Those polled said high school grades should be the most important factor in admissions decisions, and 68 percent said race and ethnicity should not be a significant factor in admissions decisions.
Police are investigating as a hate crime the vandalization of the home of Dr. Michael Drake, president of the University of California system, with racist graffiti, NBC News reported. Drake is Black.
Vandals also painted racist symbols and profanity on the home.
A spokesman for the university said, “The University of California condemns all hate crimes committed against members of our campus communities. We will continue doing everything possible to create a safe and welcoming university community for all.”
Hartwick College students work as volunteers raising guide dogs for community members.
Humans aren’t the only students on Hartwick College’s campus: a small pack of Labrador retrievers is also learning to sit, stay and assist as they prepare for careers as guide dogs for the visually impaired.
The Guiding Eyes Club at Hartwick has been on campus since 1998, providing around 400 alumni hands-on experience working with guide dog training, education and care.
This year, the club features 10 dogs and 30 students gaining experience, professional development and a deeper appreciation and understanding of the local community.
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Pup-paired and prepared: Hartwick’s club is an offshoot of Guiding Eyes for the Blind, a national organization focused in the Northeastern U.S. that raises and trains guide dogs.
To be eligible as a guide dog caretaker, students undergo extensive vetting, including a written application, mental health evaluation and interviews with Hartwick faculty members, says Serinah Palafox, student volunteer and president of the Guiding Eyes Club.
Once approved, the student is enrolled in a preplacement class and moves through six steps, including online courses, meetings, quizzes, in-person and hands-on activities, which all takes around six to seven hours to complete in total. Students also sign an agreement with Guiding Eyes for the Blind outlining responsibilities, policies and procedures.
After completing training, the student meets with a regional staff member from Guiding Eyes who evaluates the temperament and lifestyle of the student to match them with a dog.
Paws on the ground: Guiding Eyes typically trains Labrador retrievers and German shepherds, and most of Hartwick’s puppies have been yellow or black Labs. The dogs are tested at four and eight weeks old before being given to puppy raisers.
Raisers, or the primary caregiver for the dog, live on the first floor of their residence halls and are responsible for all elements of care, from feeding and grooming to providing medication, crate training and participating in classes and evaluations.
Dogs can accompany students into their classes and other campus locations so long as the dog is wearing their vest and students notify their professors.
Some students serve as sitters or dog walkers, which are less intense roles than the raisers, but provide similar experiential learning capacities for club members and support to the dogs.
The club also offers programming involving the greater campus community, including a Halloween costume party, destressing events and even a dog birthday party.
After being raised by Hartwick students, the dogs take a test to determine if they will become employed guide dogs. If they don’t pass the guide test, the dogs may become breeders for the company or work for a different company, like a detection or police dog group.
Senior Serinah Palafox will graduate from Hartwick College this spring, and puppy Stitch will move on to his formal guide dog training this fall.
Fur-ever changed: Through the process, students build key skills such as time management, patience, communication, how to ask for help and self-confidence, Palafox says. “It teaches members how to engage and rely on a community that will remember them forever.”
Palafox will graduate this May and has raised three puppies during her time at Hartwick. Stitch, her current puppy, will leave Palafox in the fall to enter a more formal training program.
Administrators cite Guiding Eyes as an incentive for students to perform well and as an engagement strategy. “It gives them something to strive for, as there is a GPA requirement to be a sitter or raiser. It also helps them build a community of support, which in turn helps them continue as a successful student at Hartwick,” says Elise Donovan, student success coach and adviser for the Guiding Eyes Club.
Across campus, the Guiding Eyes dogs bring positivity and inspire connection to the Oneonta, N.Y., community.
“When a puppy-raising team is out in the community, it allows students to engage with community members and talk about all the benefits of raising these amazing superheroes,” says Palafox.
If your student success program has a unique feature or twist, we’d like to know about it. Click here to submit.
Two Christian colleges and a group of Christian parents sued the state of Minnesota Wednesday over a provision in the state budget, The Star Tribunereported.
The provision limits the colleges’ ability to participate in the Postsecondary Enrollment Options program, known as PSEO. Through the program, colleges can offer instruction and credit for free to high school students.
The colleges object to a provision in the state budget that bars colleges that require a statement of faith from students to enroll. Some Christian colleges require such statements and others do not.
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The provision illegally discriminates on the basis of religion, the suit says.
The office of Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, did not respond to a request for comment.
The colleges suing over the provision are Crown College and the University of Northwestern.
