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.
A professor says he caught 40 of his 96 online Introduction to Ethics students cheating by posting on Quizlet a copy of his final exam with wrong answers, Daily Nous reported.
Garret Merriam, an associate professor at California State University, Sacramento, told the philosophy website that he found one of his previous final exams on Quizlet.
Quizlet agreed to take it down, but Merriam then “decided to ‘poison the well’ by uploading [to Quizlet] a copy of my final with wrong answers,” he told the Daily Nous.
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“Most of these answers were not just wrong, but obviously wrong to anyone who had paid attention in class,” he told Daily Nous. He then, the website reported, mathematically calculated, and counted as cheaters, those whose wrong answers had “no more than a 1 in 100 chance” of matching his poisoned-well answers by coincidence.
His method has itself sparked an ethical debate, and he’s inviting input, asking, “Am I the unethical one here?”
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.
Two Christian colleges and a group of Christian parents sued Minnesota on Wednesday over a provision in the state budget, The Star Tribunereported.
The provision limits the colleges’ ability to participate in the Postsecondary Enrollment Options, known as the PSEO program. 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.
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.
Sister Candace Introcaso, president of La Roche University, died on Monday.
The provost, Howard J. Ishiyama, who has been named acting president, issued a statement on Twitter: “The La Roche University community is heartbroken. We have lost our leader, our mentor and our friend. We are remembering Sister Candace for her caring nature, her efficient and direct leadership and her love of life. She was an academic scholar who took pride in seeing students succeed. She loved the La Roche community and the Sisters and Associates of the Congregation of Divine Providence. In her personal life, she was happiest cheering for the Pittsburgh Pirates and caring for her two dogs, Jack and PJ. Her spirit will live on at the university.”
The Texas House of Representatives voted Friday to fund community colleges based on how many of their students graduate with a degree or certificate or transfer to a four-year university, The Texas Tribune reported. Currently, community colleges are largely funded based on the number of hours students spend in a classroom.
The Senate has already approved a bill with few differences from the House plan and is expected to agree to the House version of the bill.
Houghton College, in New York, fired two employees who included their pronouns in their emails, The New York Times reported.
The employees, Raegan Zelaya and Shua Wilmot, both said they thought they were doing a good thing by including their emails. They wanted to be supportive of transgender people (although they are not transgender themselves) and they have unusual first names, so many people wouldn’t know how to address them.
Houghton is affiliated with the Wesleyan Church, which teaches that “gender confusion and dysphoria are ultimately the biological, psychological, social and spiritual consequences of the human race’s fallen condition.” It views “adult gender nonconformity as a violation of the sanctity of human life.”
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Michael Blankenship, a university spokesman, said in a statement that Houghton “has never terminated an employment relationship based solely on the use of pronouns in staff email signatures … Over the past years, we’ve required anything extraneous be removed from email signatures, including Scripture quotes.”
However, Zelaya’s termination letter said she was fired “as a result of your refusal to remove pronouns in your email signature” as well as for criticizing an administration decision to the student newspaper.
Community college students remain among the most diverse populations in higher education, and recent mental health trends highlight a growing need for diverse services for nontraditional learners.
A 2021 survey from the American Psychiatric Association found more than 50 percent of community college students nationwide screened positive for symptoms of mental health conditions, but fewer than one in three sought treatment.
Columbus State Community College (CSCC) in central Ohio has taken a layered approach to supporting its students’ mental health, increasing in-person and online service offerings to meet students where they are.
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“We know that if students’ mental health is good, they will perform so much better in the classroom and progress towards degree faster,” says Diana Wisse, executive director of student affairs at CSCC. “The development of the department of student well-being is a result of our need to focus on this.”
State of play: While there is a demonstrated need among students for mental health support resources, many students did not utilize their institutions’ counseling centers during the pandemic.
A March 2022 Student Voice survey from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse with support from Kaplan found around 26 percent of two-year college students (two-year students made up 250 of the 2,002 respondents) utilized college-offered counseling between March 2020 to March 2021. Of students who used resources, the majority used telehealth counseling services.
Few campus counseling centers, at any type of institution, are equipped to handle increased student usage of their facilities or the higher level of care needed in some cases. While some centers are restructuring operations and how they onboard patients, others are supplementing resources with an online counseling provider.
When asked what their institution should prioritize if there was more funding for mental health services, around 27 percent of Student Voice respondents from two-year institutions indicated they’d want an expansion of on-campus counseling staff, and 21 percent wanted new or expanded telehealth services.
CSCC’s student population, like those at many other community colleges in the nation, includes many nontraditional learners from across the region, ranging from high school students to caregivers and retired folks coming back to college.
CSCC learners are also racially and ethnically diverse, something that impacts the kind of counseling care students are looking for, Wisse explains.
Franklin County, Ohio, where CSCC is located, has seven facilities designated with a high mental health professional shortage area (HPSA) score, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration database.
Franklin County also has a high low-income population HPSA score, meaning a shortage of mental health providers for low-income earners in the county.
A virtual reach: During remote instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic, like many institutions, Columbus State Community College leaders looked into online counseling. Now, the college’s partnership with Uwill offers students additional access to mental health resources.
Recently, CSCC added a 24-7 crisis help line to its portfolio as well, making access to resources one step faster for students in crisis and alleviating pressures on its on-site staff.
“We realized that there is a need for on-the-spot counseling,” Wisse explains. “And when our counselors on campus are in session, they need to be able to stay in session with their student.”
Administrators have shown continued interest in virtual counseling because of its flexibility and range of service offerings for students.
Many community colleges only have one on-site counselor, or someone who floats between campuses to support the entire student population, creating a ratio of one to several thousand learners.
CSCC has two full-time counseling staff members and four interns who support students to serve its 40,000 learners, with delays of about one week for intake of on-campus counseling, Wisse says.
Students at Columbus State Community college have a variety of online and in-person resources for their mental health.
Columbus State Community College
Wrapped in wellness: Returning to in-person learning after the COVID-19 pandemic, CSCC expanded the way it delivered mental health services.
Students looking for mental health support on campus can work with a student well-being coach prior to intake with a counselor. This “Swell coaching” addresses students’ nutrition, personal development, physical activity, time management and stress management.
CSCC administrators established a department of student well-being on campus in 2021, housing the counseling services, recreation and wellness, and student advocacy and financial stability offices, with plans to include more resources in the future.
“We are looking at those eight dimensions of wellness,” Wisse explains, whether that’s physical fitness, stress management or housing and food insecurity. “It’s bringing together that hierarchy of needs for students.”
The college will also add a director of counseling to take a campuswide view of mental health services to increase campus focus, Wisse adds. CSCC is growing its on-ground counseling center staff with a pilot program that hires interns from surrounding colleges to provide care for students.
Faculty members, meanwhile, have expressed interest in first aid training in mental health to improve overall campus wellness, Wisse says.
Tracking impact: Many of the changes CSCC has made took place over the past two to three years, meaning their direct impact on retention and persistence have yet to be demonstrated long term, Wisse explains.
Using data from its online counseling partner, CSCC officials found students were typically connecting with virtual counselors at night or over the weekend, times the on-site services would be closed to them.
“Some of our students are working multiple jobs, so they just come to campus for class and get back to whatever they’re doing in life,” Wisse says. “Being able to get home later and access that, or on a Saturday or Sunday, that’s a great resource to students.”
In the meantime, counseling center staff members are collecting usage data both for in-person and online services through Uwill and will survey its learners in the upcoming community college student experience survey to connect to student success outcomes.
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The University of Michigan graduate student workers’ strike may have been a boon to certain students: some department chairs have said they plan to give out A’s.
“Any classes that don’t have grades submitted by noon tomorrow (May 16th) will have to have grades inputted by the department,” Gaurav Desai, chair of the English Language and Literature Department at Ann Arbor, wrote in an email Monday. “We do not have any mechanisms for submitting ‘real’ grades. So any students with outstanding grades will receive an ‘A.’”
Desai wrote, “The provost and the college are requiring departments to post grades in all classes in which grades have not yet been posted. We have no choice in this matter.” He also mentioned “emails and calls from many angry students demanding departmental action on submitting grades.”
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He didn’t respond to requests for comment this week.
“The vast majority of classes in this department had their grades posted on time, but there were still a few outstanding,” said Kim Broekhuizen, a university spokesperson. “Some graduate student instructors who were the sole teachers of certain classes did not turn in any grades. Our understanding is that this email was sent out to offer a final opportunity for those graduate student instructors to post their own grades.”
Multiple instructors of record have signed a letter saying they plan to complain to the university’s accreditor about the institution’s “decision to falsify” grades.
“We urge administration to remedy this by bargaining in good faith with GEO [Graduate Employees’ Organization, the striking union] rather than forcing third parties to undermine academic integrity and professional ethics,” the letter says.
Andreas Gailus, chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Ann Arbor, confirmed sending an email including this to instructors of record:
“As you know, the hope for an agreement between GEO and the administration is fading, and it now seems likely that the strike will continue into the summer and through the fall semester. I think it is not fair to our students to make them wait for their grades until September. In light of this situation, I’ve decided that it is time for me to step in and assign grades. Needless to say that I’m not happy about this solution, but I don’t see a viable alternative, assuming that you don’t want to enter the grades yourself. My plan, at the moment, is to give straight ‘A’s’ to all students in GSI [graduate student instructor]-taught classes.”
Gailus asked recipients to let him know “if you see a better solution to the dilemma.” He declined to tell Inside Higher Ed Thursday whether he actually ended up giving straight A’s, saying, “Grades are legally protected, and I will therefore not discuss them.”
“The dean’s office has been putting a lot of pressure since the end of the semester,” he wrote to the instructors of record. “I’ve talked with other chairs across the humanities, most of whom have already entered grades for GSI-taught classes, and the colleagues in the remaining hold-outs—English and Romance—are planning to do so at the beginning of next week.”
Vincenzo Binetti, chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Ann Arbor, didn’t respond to requests for comment Thursday. An email provided to Inside Higher Ed bearing his name doesn’t specifically mention giving out A’s, but it does include this:
Very regrettably, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures is now required to input the unsubmitted grades for striking GSIs. The dean’s office has informed us that this responsibility ultimately falls on individual departments in LSA [the College of Literature, Science and the Arts]. Consequently, starting on Wednesday, May 17th, RLL [Romance Languages and Literatures] will begin to enter the grades for all GSI-led courses where final grades remain unsubmitted … Since the start of the GEO strike, we have reiterated our position to LSA that it is not appropriate for us to enter grades for striking GSIs. We remain deeply concerned about the submission of grades for political, academic and ethical reasons. However, we find ourselves in a situation where we have no alternative choice. It is crucial for you to be aware that RLL’s engagement in grade entry is the result of a directive made by the provost’s office and the LSA dean’s office.
Anne Curzan—dean of LSA, the university’s largest college—provided no comment, beyond referring Inside Higher Ed to a Wednesday statement from the provost.
Christopher Hill, chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Ann Arbor, is traveling and didn’t respond to requests for comment Thursday. An email provided to Inside Higher Ed bearing his name says he “used an approach specified by LSA, to use instructor-assigned grades for assignments up to the start of the strike, and give full credit for assignments after that.”
The strike began March 29.
“I did not evaluate any student work,” he wrote. “When attendance information up to the start of the strike was available, I used it. In most sections, however, I gave full credit for the attendance and participation part of the grade.”
“Needless to say, providing full credit for assignments after the start of the strike means that some students may have received grades higher than what they would have otherwise received,” he wrote. “The alternatives, to assign grades only on the basis of work up to the start of the strike or to evaluate work submitted after its start—when students had little or no guidance—were not acceptable. In my own view, as the member of the department ultimately responsible for the submission of grades in these courses, waiting until the end of the strike, when striking GSIs have said that they will complete grading, also was not a tenable choice because the slow pace of university-GEO negotiations suggests that the strike will continue for some time.”
Laurie K. McCauley, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, wrote in her statement Wednesday, “As of this afternoon, 95.4 percent of all grades have been submitted. The large majority of classes that are still missing grades are independent study or study abroad classes that, while still vital to record, customarily arrive later than usual.”
It’s unclear what amount of that 95.4 percent was achieved through giving out A’s or other grading approaches that don’t involve the actual instructor providing grades.
“To the best of our knowledge, this practice of grades in this manner has been used in 33 total sections out of more than 4,000 taught last semester (in LSA),” Broekhuizen said. By “in this manner,” she said she meant “the broader concept of others inputting grades in place of graduate students, like if a professor were hospitalized or passed away before grades were submitted.”
“It’s important to remember that we are in this situation because some members of the graduate employees’ union abandoned their classes and their students,” she wrote. “Three weeks after the end of the semester, they still have not turned in grades.”
McCauley, the provost, wrote, “While this progress is encouraging, I want to also acknowledge the inherent discomfort created when a faculty member or department chair must enter a final grade in lieu of an instructor of record who is not available to do so.”
“This is not easy for any of us,” the provost wrote. “However, leaving students without grades indefinitely for a course they have completed is unconscionable. It affects their financial aid, applications for work and graduate school, enrollment in spring and summer classes, and other career plans. The University of Michigan has a duty to help those students by finalizing their grades.”
She wrote that “We are looking into” concerns “raised in recent days about the methods some departments are using to resolve missing grades,” and “asking leaders across our units to do all they can to ensure that grades are as accurate as possible.”
“There has been no blanket mandate regarding how schools, colleges or departments resolve this issue,” she wrote. “On the contrary, I have asked deans to work with department chairs and faculty to ensure all students receive grades as soon as possible.”
David Davison, a striking sixth-year Ph.D. student in the English Language and Literature Department, wrote in an email that he was “very sad” to receive the email from his department chair about giving out A’s.
“Gaurav has been relatively supportive, but like many academics with administrative responsibilities, he feels a great deal of (exploited) obligation to his role: both in terms of supporting his graduate students, by not punishing us (and even by rushing us summer funding to protect us from the loss of strike income), but also in terms of supporting the university,” Davison wrote. “And so while I have appreciated immensely the lack of retribution, he still wrote an email justifying scabbing. Crossing a picket line to scab is one of the most offensive things a worker can do. It undermines labor power and solidarity.
“As a scholar of power and fascism myself, though, I can’t stand when anyone, especially someone with a title next to their name, describes not having a choice,” Davison said. “We all choose whether to comply with power.”
Late last month, History Department faculty members sent a statement to university administrators, saying, “We are deeply troubled by reports that the administration intends to punish faculty, staff and department chairs who refuse to assign grades for work that they have not personally assessed,” and “In light of the administration’s pressure to implicate faculty in breaking GEO’s strike and to perform uncompensated labor, history department faculty have made a collective decision to withhold our grades as a form of protest until May 12. On that day, we will collectively reconsider our stance.”
That date came and went last week.
“The department faculty gathered on May 11th to discuss our next steps,” department chair Angela Dillard said Thursday. “There was a general sense that the strategy to withhold grades was an important way to stand in solidarity with our graduate students, but not successful in encouraging the kind of negotiations necessary to resolve the strike. Given the open-ended nature of the ongoing strike, many felt that our responsibility toward our undergraduates was now more pressing.”
“My colleagues started uploading grades on May 12th, and we are working on the last two lecture courses,” she said. “Fortunately, we have very few classes for which graduate students were the instructor of record, and have not had to face the possibility of assigning blanket A’s. But I will quickly add that the amount of work required to grade essays and exams without the essential labor of our GSIs was substantial, and many of my colleagues feel that this effort has not been fully and appropriately acknowledged by our provost and other members of the upper administration. This remains the source of much discontent.”
Budgeting, banking and other areas of personal finance are a lot less stressful for individuals with jobs that pay a good wage—yet college financial literacy programs tend to focus on working with what you’ve got more than on winning a healthier paycheck.
Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., bundles a salary negotiation workshop with its four-module Financial Literacy Program. The workshop is taught by career planning professionals with training in using the Start Smart curriculum endorsed and provided the American Association of University Women, while officials tap alumnae of the women’s institution to teach the core financial literacy components.
What’s the need: The benefactor of the Scripps program, former Board of Trustees chair Linda Davis Taylor, “believes in the power of financial literacy to transform a person’s life, and also the power of women sharing this information with other women,” says Gretchen Maldonado, interim director of the Laspa Center for Leadership at the college. Center staff developed and manage the core modules, in partnership with Career Planning and Resources.
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Both men and women may hesitate on asking for higher salaries, particularly when right out of college. An early 2023 survey of 900 college seniors found that 52 percent didn’t plan to negotiate their first salary offer, even if it was lower than expected.
The longtime gender wage gap adds to the need for salary negotiation skills. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, women working full-time in wage and salary jobs had median usual weekly earnings of $996 in the first quarter of 2023—84 percent of men’s earnings, $1,186.
“We need to believe in ourselves,” says Maldonado. Sharing financial wisdom with others builds confidence for both the educator and the learner.
“In our college, there’s a strong emphasis on community and connections, and on connecting students with alumnae,” she adds.
How it works: Financial literacy sessions, offered each fall and spring since the program’s launch in spring 2019, are facilitated by Scripps alumnae and open to all currently enrolled students and community members of the Claremont Colleges. Initially taught in person by local alums, the sessions moved to Zoom in 2020. That proved to be a positive, as now alumnae can volunteer regardless of where they live.
While the facilitators—who receive an honorarium of $150 for leading a module or $100 if co-facilitating—are provided with the curriculum, alumnae must be comfortable with the subject matter, says Maldonado. “We don’t just throw it open to anyone.” Many of them work in financial services, but the program allows volunteers working in any field with any type of degree.
The one-hour modules cover:
Basic budgeting (benefits of saving and investing, setting financial goals, etc.)
Paychecks and taxes (net income estimating, employment benefits, federal income taxes, etc.)
Banking, credit and loans (bank account fundamentals, credit history implications, fixed versus variable interest rates, etc.)
Investments (role of personal values in long-term investments, retirement options, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc.)
The salary negotiation workshop, which already existed at the career center, was folded into the financial literacy program at its launch. If students, especially graduating seniors, aren’t thinking about how “their first salary in their first position can dictate the earnings ladder for their career, they’re missing a fundamental piece,” says Maldonado.
Salary negotiation basics: Besides gaining confidence in negotiating, workshop participants learn to identify and articulate their personal values, conduct objective market research and benchmark a target salary and benefits. Students are taught why they’ll need to pass on a role if the salary can’t provide what they need to live on, she adds.
Participants get real-time coaching and feedback on negotiation exercises, including how jobs ads with a salary range can shift the process and how finding solid salary information based on the industry, role and/or company can help.
“A lot of the hesitation we see with young women is ‘I’m afraid to ask, afraid the offer will go away,’” says Maldonado. She has reminded students that if the employer has “gotten to the point of offering you a position, they have invested a lot in you as an applicant. And it will take a lot to torpedo this.”
Students learn to negotiate through discomfort—and gain perspective on defining negotiation success. “Is it a 30 percent pay bump? Or that you made a case for what you think you’re worth, whether you get it or not?” she explains. “And next time you may succeed.” Not to mention, asking professionally and politely, with research clearly having been done—leaves a positive impression.
Helping students establish realistic expectations while ensuring they believe in themselves is the key. Instructors might bring up a recent survey showing how what college grads expect from a first job’s salary may be much higher than actual averages. Students need perspective on “here’s the rumor and here’s the reality behind it,” Maldonado says.
Students seem to embrace the opportunity to learn. “The idea that in 90 minutes we’re going to give them everything they need to know to negotiate is not realistic,” she explains. “Students appreciate knowing what’s going to be on the table, what is a reasonable ask.”
Campus partnership perspective: The workshop is some students’ first exposure to the career center. In that regard, the partnership between the two departments has allowed the career center to expand its reach on programming that already existed. Leadership and career development are “like cousins,” says Maldonado. “It’s about choice and fit, and how and why you want to apply your energy and talents in a particular area.”
Also, she quips, the partnership was an easy one because the departments are next-door neighbors, with the career center director’s office located right behind her own office wall.
Participation and evaluation: With undergraduate enrollment of only about 1,100 or 1,200, Scripps doesn’t tend to have huge participation numbers for anything voluntary. “Eleven is a healthy showing, and 15 people is a stampede,” Maldonado says, noting that the follow-through is there, however. “We’ve never had a no-show.” For reasons unknown, participants are most likely to be first-year students or seniors.
Annually, the program team assesses the program over all, and currently the team is collecting specific content feedback. “We’re looking at this summer as an opportunity to take a step back and see if the modules we have are covering everything we’d like them to,” she says. And are there areas that can be cut back? For example, is the banking module getting too far into the weeds on balancing a checkbook?
Also under consideration, based on facilitator feedback, is building out some advanced segments geared toward alumnae—such as buying a home or the financial implications of having children.
What others should know: For other institutions adding or tweaking financial literacy offerings, Maldonado advises looking to graduates. “Don’t underestimate the expertise that may already exist within the alumni community. Look at it as a win-win for both: more alumni engagement and more student engagement.”
The Middle States Commission on Higher Education has demanded that Paul Smith’s College submit a teach-out plan, The Adirondack Explorer reported.
The accreditor indicated that it could not at this time approve a deal for Paul Smith’s to be purchased by the Fedcap Group, which works to provide job training to low-income students, among other things.
A teach-out plan is put in place when a college closes so its students can be educated elsewhere.
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The college said the reason its accreditor demanded the teach-out plan was not because of any problems with the Fedcap deal, which it said would go through.
“As a result of a recent cyberattack, federal regulations require us to develop a ‘teach-out’ plan as merely a precautionary measure,” said Nicole Feml, the college’s chief of staff. “The teach-out plan has no relevance or relationship to our financial planning, enrollment targets or partnership with Fedcap.”
Faculty at Northland Community and Technical College have overwhelmingly voted no confidence in President Sandy Kiddoo, Minnesota Public Radio reported.
Faculty cited declining enrollment at the Minnesota community college and other issues.
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“We have seen not just an enrollment decline, but a real decline in the climate or the culture at the college. It feels like our hallways are very empty; it doesn’t feel like there’s any vibrancy to the institution,” said Brent Braga, president of the faculty union chapter at the East Grand Forks campus. “This president hasn’t offered any clear direction, any clear vision, in that.”
Kiddoo, who was named president of the college in 2021, said in a statement after the vote that she is committed to “collaborative conversations on how I can improve and work together” with faculty members.
Your recent article, “Research Finds No Gender Bias in Academic Science,” by Katherine Knott, provokes with a title that doesn’t accurately reflect the actual results of the research your article describes. But more importantly, the underlying research itself, because of its “adversarial collaborative” approach, is constrained in what conclusions it was able to reach and, I believe, fails to accurately reflect the current state of the gendered disadvantages women in science face, with concomitant effects of their success. Hence your article’s celebration of these limited results is highly likely to mislead readers about the current state of women’s equality in science.
I am an applied mathematician and woman in academic science, and over a 30-year career have served as chair of my department and as Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in the Faculty of Science at Simon Fraser University. Your title proclaiming “no gender bias in academic science” caught my attention in large part because it does not reflect my own experience, nor does it do justice to the struggles experienced by the many women scientists that I have interacted with in my administrative, advisory, and mentoring capacities.
The title has also caught the attention of various far-right fora. It is deeply unfortunate that in the current political environment, where institutional efforts towards DEI are under attack, Inside Higher Ed chose a sensationalistic title, which does not even accurately reflect the published results. “Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration” by Ceci, Kahn, and Williams (2023), surveyed 6 key domains of historical disparity between men and women in science, and found two of the six to be biased against women.
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Although Wendy Williams, one of the research’s authors and a skeptic of claims of gender bias in academic STEM, suggests that we are “90 percent of the way” to an “equitable landscape,” a more critical reading of the Ceci et al. paper should raise doubts about this triumphalism.
The very nature of the adversarial collaboration means that, in the authors’ own words, they “abandoned irreconcilable points, so that what survived is a consensus document.” One consensus they had to reach was what constitutes bias and what does not. The authors note that there are significant systemic and societal barriers impeding women’s progress. They also note “[r]easonable people differ in their views about such broad societal construals and whether they should be called bias, and such difference exist among the authors of the present article.” Thus, they proceed with a mutually agreed upon and, I would argue, very narrow definition of bias. Essentially, their canonical test for bias is when, given a man and a woman with the same CV, their outcomes (e.g., in hiring, grant awards, or higher salary) diverge based on gender. What this standard neglects are the biases and barriers that women must overcome in order to achieve an “equivalent” CV.
As an applied mathematician, I look at this paper and ask: is what the authors are measuring significant? There are numerous forces working against the full participation of women in STEM which the authors themselves mention but do not include in their measurements of bias. These include sexual harassment, the collision of the tenure clock with the biological one, chilly climate, masculine heteronormativity, early socialization differences, and unequal distribution of family care-taking responsibilities, among others. Additionally, there are many remaining domains of potential bias in academic STEM which were not evaluated by Ceci et al., such as levels of grant funding, tenure and promotion, prestigious awards, etc.
By contrast, what the authors are measuring, while not trivial, strikes me as much less significant than your headline warrants or would justify the article’s acclaim from voices hostile to EDI. Finally, the authors’ desire to provide evidence to best direct “substantial resources […] toward reducing gender bias in academic science … when and where it exists” may be admirable but as the Association for Women in Science point out in their recent statement in response to this study, “the current levels of parity may backslide.” In closing, I would also highlight the devasting effects COVID has had and will continue to have for some time on the careers of women and other underrepresented groups in STEM. This is not the time to change course on institutional efforts towards equity in academic STEM.
–Mary Catherine Kropinski Professor, department of mathematics Simon Fraser University
The University of California, Los Angeles, has this year closed its Bruin Woods summer camp for alumni amid allegations of sexual assault and hazing there, the Los Angeles Timesreported.
The camp is traditionally open in the summer for 10 weeks, with alumni families coming for one-week stays.
“We are aware of allegations of inappropriate activity concerning our Bruin Woods program, and continue to look into the matter,” UCLA spokesperson Margery Grey said in a statement. “We are also making changes in an effort to provide an exceptional experience for everyone.”
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The temporary closure comes months after UCLA students Samea Derrick and Lydia Dixon, who worked at the camp last summer, filed a lawsuit against the University of California Board of Regents.
In the lawsuit, the pair alleged they were sexually assaulted and hazed by returning student counselors, including physical and verbal abuse, sensory deprivation, forced nudity, and coercive drinking games. The lawsuit also alleged that the hazing activities, referred to by counselors as “traditions,” had taken place for decades at the camp, which was established in 1985 for UCLA alumni and their families.
Two cases before the Supreme Court have the potential to restrict long-standing recruitment and admissions practices at colleges and universities. The cases, brought by a special interest group called Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), allege that race-conscious admissions practices are unfair and violate the Constitution.
As liberal arts college presidents, we strongly disagree. Holistic review of applicants is critical to recruiting a well-rounded class, and that includes consideration of the richness of students’ many attributes and interests–including their lived experiences and backgrounds.
While each of our colleges has a unique mission, we all work tirelessly to create the most well-rounded student body possible in a competitive admissions market. This means not only striving for racial and ethnic diversity, but also—to the extent possible— socioeconomic diversity, gender balance, representation from all 50 states and assuring we have athletes for our teams, musicians for our orchestras and students who are interested in a wide variety of academic disciplines. This well-rounded student body helps to create a community of scholars that enhances the learning environment for everyone.
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Nevertheless, we are clear-eyed that, when the decisions are released in June, the court’s majority may very likely prohibit the consideration of race or ethnicity in recruitment, admission, scholarships, affinity groups, housing and other programming. That’s why we already are taking steps to prepare for what seems to be inevitable. Due to the tremendous amount of work that goes into recruitment and review of applications, we could not wait until June to begin.
The changes many of us are making include reducing barriers to admission, such as eliminating application fees and the requirement of submitting standardized test scores. We also are intentionally recruiting applicants at high schools and in communities that may not typically have sent students to our institutions. And we are developing partnerships with college access and success organizations like College Track, College Possible, College Horizons and the Posse Foundation to help us identify and expand our pool of applicants.
Fostering the success of students from historically excluded groups is not just about admissions, however. It’s also about creating an environment in which all students can thrive and, in this area, our institutions are well positioned to respond. This includes programming and services directed at students from historically excluded groups and reducing institutional barriers to their success. Our residential campus environments, small classes, strong support networks, substantial institutional financial aid and mentoring programs contribute to high retention and four-year completion rates among all of our students, much higher than the rates at large public universities.
Yet, even with significant investments to prioritize student diversity, very few of our institutions reflect the true ethnic and racial makeup of our country, or even the communities in which our colleges are located. And we are concerned that the court’s ruling may stall our progress. A new report from the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University predicts that restricting race-conscious admissions practices will result in selective colleges and universities becoming less ethnically and racially diverse.
This would be tragic. To fulfill the promise of economic and social mobility, we need to continue rectifying the systemic barriers that have kept so many talented students of color out of higher education. Getting a college degree is the single most powerful thing a person can do to change their economic status. A diverse student body creates a rich learning environment that prepares students for success in a diverse workforce and is critical for a healthy democracy. For all these reasons, we are deeply committed to expanding access to higher education and increasing diversity within our student bodies, regardless of what the court decides.
We must broaden, not limit, access to American higher education.
The authors are presidents of institutions that belong to LACRELA, the Liberal Arts Colleges Racial Equity Leadership Alliance. LACRELA brings together liberal arts colleges and universities from across the country to promote racial diversity, equity and inclusion on their campuses through shared professional learning opportunities, access to campus climate surveys and support in data-driven decision-making and action planning towards racial equity goals. A full list of LACRELA member institutions can be found here.
Jacquelyn S. Fetrow, Albright College
Helen Drinan, Cabrini University
Alison Byerly, Carleton College
Milton C. Moreland, Centre College
L. Song Richardson, Colorado College
Lori S. White, DePauw University
Thayne M. McCulloh, Gonzaga University
Kent Devereaux, Goucher College
Anne F. Harris, Grinnell College
Wendy E. Raymond, Haverford College
Mary Dana Hinton, Hollins University
Suzanne M. Rivera, Macalester College
Beverly Daniel Tatum, Mount Holyoke College
Kathleen E. Harring, Muhlenberg College
Harry J. Elam Jr., Occidental College
Gabrielle Starr, Pomona College
Sue Ott Rowlands, Randolph College
Jennifer M. Collins, Rhodes College
Cristle Collins Judd, Sarah Lawrence College
Marc Conner, Skidmore College
David Anderson, St. Olaf College
Jonathan D. Green, Susquehanna University
Isiaah Crawford, University of Puget Sound
Scott D. Miller, Virginia Wesleyan University
Bethami A. Dobkin, Westminster College, Utah
Sarah Bolton, Whitman College
Linda S. Oubre, Whittier College
EDITOR’S NOTE: A presidential signature was removed after publication after organizers informed Inside Higher Ed it had been submitted in error, reducing the total number of signatures to 27.
The Alaska Legislature on Tuesday rejected one of Governor Mike Dunleavy’s nominees for the University of Alaska’s Board of Regents.
The Alaska Beacon said that the rejected person was Bethany Marcum, who is the former head of the Alaska Policy Forum, a nonprofit that promotes conservative policies.
Legislators cited Marcum’s support for the governor’s proposal (later withdrawn) to cut the university budget by 41 percent.
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“You’ve got to believe in the basic premise of the institution,” said Representative Andy Josephson.
The head coach of the West Virginia University men’s basketball team used an antigay slur, twice, during a radio interview.
The coach, Bob Huggins, apologized Monday, and the university said it was reviewing the matter.
According to ESPN, the slur came during a discussion of his prior work at the University of Cincinnati. He was criticizing fans of Xavier University of Ohio, a crosstown rival.
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“Any school that can throw rubber penises on the floor and then say they didn’t do it, my God, they can get away with anything,” Huggins said in the interview.
The radio host said, “I think it was ‘transgender night,’ wasn’t it?”
Huggins then said, “What it was, was all those fags, those Catholic fags, I think.”
In a statement released by the university, Huggins said, “Earlier today on a Cincinnati radio program, I was asked about the rivalry between my former employer, the University of Cincinnati, and its crosstown rival, Xavier University. During the conversation, I used a completely insensitive and abhorrent phrase that there is simply no excuse for—and I won’t try to make one here. I deeply apologize to the individuals I have offended, as well as to the Xavier University community, the University of Cincinnati and West Virginia University. As I have shared with my players over my 40 years of coaching, there are consequences for our words and actions, and I will fully accept any coming my way. I am ashamed and embarrassed and heartbroken for those I have hurt. I must do better, and I will.”
West Virginia’s athletics department said, “Coach Huggins’ remarks today on a Cincinnati radio show were insensitive, offensive and do not represent our university values. Coach Huggins has since apologized. West Virginia University does not condone the use of such language and takes such actions very seriously. The situation is under review and will be addressed by the University and its athletics department.”
An ex-student at the University of California, Davis, was arrested Thursday and charged in three recent stabbings that have left many in Davis unsettled, the Los Angeles Timesreported.
Carlos Reales Dominguez, 21, was arrested on two counts of homicide and one count of attempted murder.
The university said in a statement that “Dominguez was in his third year at UC Davis until April 25, 2023, when he was separated for academic reasons.”
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The first stabbing death was two days later.
Two days after that, a second person was stabbed to death: a student at Davis.
Dominguez could not be reached for comment.
Reached by phone by the Los Angeles Times, his father said the family was in shock. The father, who asked not to be named to protect the family’s privacy, said family members had been trying to reach Dominguez for the last three days because they had heard about the stabbings and were worried about his safety. He had not responded, the father said, and they assumed he was busy with his studies.
“This is inexplicable to me,” he said, adding that he was unaware that his son had been separated from UC Davis last week. “He was so excited to go to Davis. I don’t understand how this could happen.”
Faculty members at Stanford University are looking to update the institution’s long-standing honor code to better address academic dishonesty on campus. But undergraduate resistance to one proposed change—the introduction of proctoring on a campus that has disallowed it for over a century—has complicated those plans.
The Undergraduate Senate voted on April 25 against changes to the institution’s honor code proposed last month by a group called the Committee of 12, or C-12, which had been charged with evaluating it and the Student Judicial Charter. The proposal needed to be approved by five governing bodies on campus to be implemented; the Undergraduate Senate was the only one to vote against it.
The sticking point was a new provision to allow the university to conduct a study on the impacts and effectiveness of proctoring tests—a move the Undergraduate Senate strongly opposes for a number of reasons, according to Senator Juan Becerra, a junior.
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First, the senators worry that the introduction of proctoring would transform the campus culture into one that is hostile and distrusting of students.
“It creates this sort of atmosphere or environment that makes students feel like they’re cheaters and they’re not academically honest,” he said. “We don’t want students being shadowed with this looming figure over them, pressuring them.”
Undergraduate senators also worry that unconscious biases might lead proctors to unfairly overmonitor Black and brown students.
But to proponents of the honor code change, those fears are exactly why an in-depth study of proctoring is needed. Among other things, it would help the university better understand the impact that bias has on proctoring and what can be done to circumvent it, they argue. Any decisions made about proctoring after the study would have to be approved by the same bodies that were asked to approve the C-12 proposals.
“The undergraduates brought forth a number of valid concerns about students from underrepresented backgrounds and potential bias when it comes to proctoring,” said Lawrence Berg, a fourth-year chemistry graduate student member of the Graduate Student Council who teaches undergraduates. “I think these are valid things to be concerned about, but they’re not something we can know the answers to right now without the study. I think we realistically need answers to these questions that come from a rigorous academic study.”
Becerra sees it differently.
“I think maybe one can infer that [the study] would obviously lead to the implementation of proctoring,” he said. “And we just didn’t want anything to do with proctoring.”
After the Undergraduate Senate voted against the revised honor code, the Faculty Senate took matters into its own hands. It passed, in a split vote, a resolution brought forth by mathematics professor Richard Taylor that would allow instructors to begin proctoring exams next semester—unless the Undergraduate Senate reverses its decision and approves the revised honor code.
Essentially, the new proposal said students must agree to a study of proctoring or face potential proctoring starting next year.
Dubbed the “nuclear option” by some faculty, the move shocked the Undergraduate Senate as well as some faculty senators, who expressed unease about the body’s apparent abandonment of shared governance. But Faculty Senate members found research showing precedent for faculty amending the honor code without the input of the other governing bodies.
“The Academic Secretary’s Office did extensive historical and legislative research to determine whether the Faculty has the authority to change the Honor Code. Senate staff also conferred with the Office of General Counsel,” Faculty Senate chair Kenneth A. Schultz, a political science professor, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “Based on this, we concluded that the faculty have this authority. In fact, it was the Faculty alone that originally enacted the Honor Code.”
Undergraduate senators expressed a sense of betrayal, questioning why they were asked to approve the proposal in the first place if their vote didn’t matter.
“We thought as representatives of [undergraduate] students, of individuals who are going to be effected by this honor code, we thought we had a say in this,” Becerra said. “We thought that our voices were going to have some weight.”
Re-Evaluating Academic Integrity Policies
In response to the rapidly changing culture of academic dishonesty on campus, in 2019 C-12 was charged with providing recommendations for updating the university’s honor code and student judicial charter, the latter of which was first implemented in 1997.
The ever-increasing availability and variety of technology has forced Stanford and many institutions of higher education to re-evaluate their academic integrity policies. Can students use Google during take-home exams? How much, if at all, can they use ChatGPT when writing essays? Does it make sense to prohibit group work in the classroom when so many workplaces depend on open-source collaboration?
“It’s not just here. All over the country, the difficulties of how to manage learning and academic integrity in the face of artificial intelligence technology is a huge challenge,” said Brian Conrad, a professor of mathematics at Stanford who also served as the honor code subcommittee chair for C-12.
But as one of very few universities where the honor code still requires teachers to exit the room while students take tests, Stanford faces unique challenges. While students have grown accustomed to the freedom that unproctored exams grant them, instructors argue that they’ve taken advantage of that trust; incidents of cheating and failure to report infractions by fellow students, as the honor code dictates, are rampant, they say. Only two of the 720 honor code violations reported at Stanford between 2018 and 2020 came from students, according to the university.
Berg, the chemistry graduate student, favors proctoring precisely because he has witnessed so much cheating in his courses.
“No one respects the honor code in its current form—not graduate students, not faculty, not undergraduates,” he said, adding that cheating has become “part of the fabric of the university.”
The other universities that still ban proctoring are dealing with similar pushes to adapt their honor codes—though not all coming from the faculty side. At Middlebury College, which in 2014 allowed its economics department to begin proctoring exams, the student newspaper this week published an editorial calling for the end of the honor code due to its ineffectiveness; two-thirds of Middlebury students admitted to breaking the code in the college’s annual student survey.
Holly Tatum, a psychology professor at Randolph College in Virginia who has studied honor codes, believes that students may be less motivated than previous generations to follow the traditional rules of academic honesty, such as working alone on individual assignments.
“I believe that there may be some cultural shift going on right now that is changing how students perceive honor and integrity,” she said. “I sometimes think of this generation as the ‘group work’ group of students.”
An Inside Higher Ed Student Voice survey from December 2021 found that students’ views of using technology to help with assignments differed starkly from traditional academic integrity standards. Nearly half of respondents—47 percent—said using a study website to look up answers for homework or a test was fully or partially acceptable. And 53 percent said the same about googling answers to homework assignments. A smaller but not insignificant share, 17 percent, said it was fully or partially acceptable to use forbidden technologies or tools during an online exam.
Seeking Compromise
Faculty and graduate students are eager to reach some sort of agreement with undergraduates that will allow the proctoring study to move forward, rather than automatically introduce proctoring in the fall. But so far, it seems unlikely; according to the minutes of last Tuesday’s Undergraduate Senate meeting, there was no revote on the proposed changes to the honor code; instead, student senators reiterated their view that the Faculty Senate’s resolution violated the principles of shared governance.
The members of C-12 always knew the proposal would be a tough sell. After all, their charge, according to Jamie Fine, a sixth-year graduate student and the student co-chair of the body, was to “broker a compromise between five sometimes very diametrically opposed stakeholder groups.”
The committee’s research—which included outreach to students, instructors and other institutions of higher education—indicated that there was resistance among students to the idea of proctoring, but it wasn’t universal. Just under half the students they spoke to said they were against proctoring, though members stressed they did not conduct a scientific study.
In addition to the Undergraduate Senate’s arguments, students noted that the majority of honor code violations don’t take place during exams, making proctoring a relatively ineffective solution to cheating concerns, according to C-12’s final report, issued last month.
But some students said they favored proctoring, noting that it would be convenient to have a professor or teaching assistant in the room during exams to answer questions. It would also eliminate the responsibility of students to monitor one another during exams and afford students the opportunity to fight accusations of cheating in the moment.
Fine said this feedback, as well as the feedback from instructors, is what led C-12 to suggest a proctoring study.
“A big reason why we have the [study] is exactly because of what we heard from different stakeholder groups, in terms of wanting to see change and wanting to see change that was meaningful” rather than a “knee-jerk” reaction to Stanford’s academic dishonesty problems, she said.
Other changes to the honor code included new text and definitions aimed at clarifying the responsibilities of both students and professors.
The committee also proposed significant changes to the student judicial charter—namely to replace what has been referred to as a “one-size-fits-all” judicial system, in which students must undergo the same process regardless of the suspected violation, with a new, tiered approach based on the seriousness of the violation, past offenses and other factors. The new charter will also center education, rather than punishment, for offenders.
The changes to the judicial charter—which were approved by all five bodies, including President Marc Tessier-Lavigne—are designed in part to ensure that a single dumb mistake, or even a misunderstanding of what constitutes academic dishonesty, does not follow a student forever, Conrad said.
C-12 won’t be involved in whatever comes next for proctoring at Stanford. But Conrad said he hopes the committee’s years of hard work, outreach and research will ultimately have an impact.
“I certainly would hope whatever the final outcomes are of the discussions around the honor code, the part of our work that gave rise to these suggestions can at least be looked at by some university body in whatever form that might take, to improve the culture of academic integrity,” he said.
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