Major Systems Unite to Close College Achievement Gap
According to the Education Trust, "Participants in the Access to Success initiative, a project of the National Association of System Heads (NASH), are stepping into the vanguard of higher education by publicly pursuing aggressive goals aimed at improving student outcomes and closing by at least half the gaps in both college-going and degree completion that separate low-income and minority students from others." A significant group of university system heads has agreed to collaborate, publish and share data, and has established a joint time frame.
Here's a link to the official press release and more information from the Education Trust, and here is a link to the Inside Higher Ed article about it by Doug Lederman, which is quoted from, below. A related Chronicle of Higher Education article by Peter Schmidt is here; subscription and registration are required to access it.Kirwan and 18 other leaders of state college and university systems are unveiling a plan today aimed at doing just that. As part of “Access to Success,” a joint effort of the National Association of System Heads and the Education Trust, a nonprofit group that advocates for the “high academic achievement of all students at all levels,” the public college systems all have agreed to cut in half within eight years their own gaps in college-going and college graduation rates for low-income students and those from underrepresented minority groups. The systems, a list of which appears at the bottom of this article, will begin publicly reporting uniform data on the rate at which low-income and minority students and other students in their states enroll in system institutions and the rates at which the low-income and minority students who enter the institutions earn degrees. At least some of that data, particularly the college-going and graduation rates by income level, have not traditionally been reported before. Each university system will craft its own plan to cut its gaps in half by 2015, and officials from the 19 systems – which as a group educate about 2 million students, about 12 percent of the nation’s total and about a third of all low-income and minority undergraduates at four-year colleges — will work together to share ideas about and attack some of the underlying issues that affect all of them: managing costs so that colleges have more funds to spend on things that directly help students succeed, with the help of Jane Wellman and the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs; redesigning and improving introductory and remedial courses that can knock students off the track, aided by the National Center for Academic Transformation; aligning high school and college curriculums so more students are prepared to enter higher education, building on the work of the American Diploma Project; and bolstering need-based financial aid. The collaborative work will be conducted under the aegis of the system heads’ group and Education Trust, with analysis by their staffs, and will be financed by the Lumina and Gates Foundations. The collective nature of the new effort, and the fact that the university systems will be laying out their records and committing to clearcut goals in a set period of time, are what distinguish it from previous ones, leaders of the initiative say.
Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006
 One out of five college students took at least one online course last year. The Sloan Survey of Online Learning, “Making the Grade: Online Education in the United States, 2006” reports amazing growth in online learning. The complete report can be downloaded as a PDF on the Sloan's website.The following is from a New York Times vignette by Joseph Berger, who describes the teaching-from-home style of an online professor: The university classroom of the future is in Janet Duck’s dining room on East Chocolate Avenue here. There is no blackboard and no lectern, and, most glaringly, no students. Dr. Duck teaches her classes in Pennsylvania State University’s master’s program in business administration by sitting for several hours each day in jeans and shag-lined slippers at her dining table, which in soccer mom fashion is cluttered with crayon sketches by her 6-year-old Elijah and shoulder pads for her 9-year-old Olivia’s Halloween costume.
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Those students, mostly 30-ish middle managers and professionals trying to enhance their skills, cannot be with her in a Penn State classroom at a set time. One woman is an Air Force pilot flying missions over Afghanistan; other global travelers filed comments last week from Tokyo, Athens, São Paulo and Copenhagen. Dr. Duck cannot regularly be at Penn State, largely because of her three children. Yet she and other instructors will help the students acquire standard M.B.A.’s next August at a total cost of $52,000, with each side having barely stepped into a traditional classroom.
Campus Heritage Preservation Links
We are in the midst of adding a Campus Heritage Preservation page to the list of resources available from SCUP's home page. We've collected enough links already to be of interest to folks who pay attention to those sorts of things. The list of resources we are sharing on this post, which is far from comprehensive, are all products of The Getty Grant Foundation's Campus Heritage Grants. First, the Council of Independent Colleges Historic Campus Architecture Project is a beautiful and comprehensive database of campus heritage on the CIC's member campuses. As well, the following are project reports or actual plans that are based on grants from The Getty program to individual campuses:
Campus Sustainability Day Report
Buildings & Grounds" - Recent Items in the Chronicle's Blog
We continue to be so grateful that the The Chronicle of Higher Education continues to allow access to the posts of Lawrence Biemiller and Scott Carlson, in its "Buildings & Grounds" blog, without subscription or password protection. (Don't forget that you can add new buildings and major renovation projects into its online database of such, linked in the blog, at any time of the year!) Recent additions include, at the time of this post:
Global Survey Shows 'Green' Construction Costs Dramatically Lower Than BelievedRespondents to a 1400 person global survey estimated the additional cos
From a Building Design + Construction magazine news item: There's still a lot of learning to be done out there!
Respondents to a 1400 person global survey estimated the additional cost of building green at 17 percent above conventional construction, more than triple the true cost difference of about 5 percent. At the same time, survey respondents put greenhouse gas emissions by buildings at 19 percent of world total, while the actual number of 40 percent is double this. The findings are disclosed in a new report titled "Energy Efficiency in Buildings: Business Realities and Opportunities," which summarizes the first phase of the WBCSD's project. The project is co-chaired by Lafarge and United Technologies Corporation. Other participating companies are CEMEX, DuPont, Electricite de France, Gaz de France, Kansai, Philips, Sonae Sierra, and Tepco. The report is available at www.wbcsd.org
Recent Campus Planning News Items
A brief list of some recent news about campus planning: Do you like this kind of listing of topical news items? Let us know: terry.calhoun@scup.org, and feel free to suggest topics about which we can gather some news items for you.
2007 Campus Computing Survey: Focus on Crisis
The Campus Computing Project's Campus Computing Survey has, since its inception in 1994, become an expected part of the academic calendar. Each year, Kenneth C. Green's brainchild illustrates for us the changes in the provision and use of information technology in higher education. In this article, Andy Guess, in Inside Higher Ed, focuses on the 2007 report's findings related to crises and crisis communications. Fewer than half of the reporting institutions have strategic crisis communications plans and only 22.1 percent incorporate cell phone in such plans. Aside from security issues, the report follows up on trends several years in the making, such as the increasingly widespread reach of campus wireless networks (60.1 percent of college classrooms, from 51.2 percent last year and 31.1 percent in 2004). The number is nearly 70 percent for private research universities and almost 45 percent for community colleges. And while advocates for open-source software (which is free and can be adapted and improved without a license) hope that institutions of higher education will embrace the movement wholeheartedly, IT officers continue to see the benefits mainly in the abstract. For example, 57.3 percent of respondents think open source “will play an increasingly important role” in campus information technology, but less than a third think it offers a truly “viable alternative” to commercial solutions. One possible area of growth is the adoption of open-source course management software — a potential threat to Blackboard — such as Moodle. The survey found that the proportion of institutions using the package had nearly doubled to 7.8 percent this year, but among private four-year colleges, it was much higher at 17.2 percent.
Progress Seen in College Sustainability
As Elia Powers reports in Inside Higher Ed, the Sustainable Endowments Institute's second College Sustainability Report Card demonstrates progress in campus sustainability, especially in a variety of operations area. For example, in just one year the number of campuses reporting green building policies rose from 48 to 69 percent: But the report notes that shareholder engagement and endowment transparency are still lagging. The engagement category measures how colleges conduct shareholder proxy voting, noting that about one in eight colleges has an advisory committee or shareholder responsibility committee, and 13 percent have a committee of several stake holders (students, faculty, staff) to inform trustees’ moves on shareholder proxy resolutions. More than half of the institutions received a flunking grade in endowment transparency, which looks at how colleges control information about the investment holdings of their endowments. About one in four colleges makes its list of endowment holdings available to the campus, a modest improvement over the previous report’s findings, Orlowski said.
What Are the Problems to be Solved, Problems That Are Associated with the Issue?
Issues. My, how I distrust that word. Issues are genuinely important matters. However, my distrust arises with people who try to make issues synonymous with problems. Issues are topics for discussion. Quite simply, issues are nothing more than talking points. Issues cannot be solved. Accountability, access, achievement, accreditation-these words identify issues which lie proudly, even arrogantly, on the education platter. Each word is a positive, powerful concept. Each can be slavishly worshiped. Rarely, however, do we subject issues to rigorous analysis. No one asks, "What are the problems to be solved, problems that are associated with the issue?" In University Business, professor emeritus Virginia McBride of Mt. San Antonio College provides her suggestion regarding semantic clarity.
The Continuing Importance of Place in Library Service
Is there a "potential downgrading of the value of place in library service"? Richard McKay, of San Jacinto College thinks so, and shares his perspective on the continuing importance of place in this essay in University Business magazine: Once a trip to the library is no longer a necessity, it is a simple extrapolation in the minds of some to the idea that the library itself may also no longer be necessary, or if it is still necessary, it may have to change what many think of as its traditional service philosophy to retain its value for current, let alone future, users. In fact, this change is already happening, and it affects everyone who uses the library, not just the patrons that have been saved from a library visit by off-site computer access. In order for as many users as possible to experience this change as an improvement in service, planners need to consider the distractions that the change implies, and design inviting study spaces that reduce or even eliminate them. Campus planners will disregard library users' need for quiet space at the risk of impairing an invaluable part of library service.
Has 'Sustainability Taken the Moral High Ground From Preservation'?
At a wonderful Boston Preservation Alliance symposium on campus heritage preservation in an urban environment on October 18, that was the perspective of one of the presenters, Henry Moss, as reported on The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Buildings & Grounds" blog: Mr. Moss said the influential LEED standards for sustainability are “weak on historic structures,” in part because they don’t do a good job of accounting for what’s known as “embodied energy” — energy expended in the past to construct existing buildings. “In fact nobody knows anything about embodied energy,” said Mr. Moss, adding that it was amazing how little research had been done to figure out how much embodied energy is squandered when an existing building is demolished so a new one can be built in its place. LEED is the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program of the United States Green Building Council. It’s also difficult to weigh energy savings against the value of retaining a building’s historic appearance, he said. That’s one of the “second-generation questions” about sustainability that a college faces as it progresses from building a single “trophy” green building toward making its entire campus more sustainable. He also warned that as buildings’ sustainable systems become more complex, they will present additional challenges.
 Several SCUP staff and many SCUP members were in attendance at this one-day event. Pictured at left are SCUP charter members and award winners, Cal Audrain and Richard P. Dober. Audrain and Dober, among the many SCUP leaders who have been prominent in campus heritage preservation, played important roles in SCUP having been recently awarded a campus heritage preservation grant from The Getty.
Strategic Focusing: Market-Oriented Strategies for Public Institutions
This article by Dorothy Leland and John Moore is from Public Purpose (PDF), the magazine of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities: Today's higher-education environment has become increasingly competitive, and many public colleges and universities have begun to adopt market-oriented strategies as a result. This competitive environment is driven by a number of forces . . . . In this environment, conventional strategic planning may not be sufficient to provide colleges and universities with a viable strategy for positioning themselves competitively. . . . Not surprisingly, a growing number of institutions are adopting planning processes that also focus on the aspects of their mission-related work that have the most potential to enable them to stand out from a crowded field of competitors.
How Should the Sustainability Movement Change Campus Planning and Architecture?
This is the trancript of a live chat session on October 18 with SCUPer S. Michael Evans, on The Chronicle of Higher Education website: Going "green" means more than turning down thermostats in unused classrooms and recycling old plastic bottles. As a small but growing cadre of colleges are discovering, it often requires a fundamental rethinking of how campuses are laid out and how new buildings are designed (and existing ones refurbished). Going "green" also requires fresh approaches to issues like parking, transportation, and even how students get and dispose of their dining-hall food. Campus planners and architects, some of whom shared their thoughts on sustainability last year in a roundtable discussion with The Chronicle, are playing an increasingly visible role in guiding those changes.
Universities Profit by Taking the Lead in Knowledge-Based Partnerships
This brief item by Tom Robinson in The Greentree Gazette touches on the growing realization that college and university campuses are major local and regional economic powerhouses . . . and can be even more so if they plan for it: With their reservoirs of knowledge and intellectual capital, colleges and universities can take the lead in preparing the globally competitive workforce and transforming the economies of their respective regions. However, extending the campus contribution beyond the core academic mission as it is currently perceived, requires a campus to shift from being passive, introspective and often cloistered to being active, entrepreneurial and collaborative.
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“It’s critical that universities and colleges play a role in economic development. They have a wealth of knowledge and innovative ideas, and we need to get them out into the business world,” asserts Delaware State Chamber of Commerce CEO James Wolf. “Having a new president at University of Delaware affords us the opportunity to take a fresh look at business-education partnerships and the synergies that can evolve.”
Slideshow: Instant Housing and Designing for Disaster
There's usually at least one interesting and pertinent story in each issue of Wired magazine, and this time a slide show by Jenna Wortham of a variety of designs for very temporary housing takes the cake for us: When disaster strikes, the need for short-term housing is immediate and urgent. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that more than 800,000 people were displaced after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and UNICEF reported 130,000 residents were made homeless by the 2006 earthquake in central Java, Indonesia. State-provided housing is expensive, too temporary and can be potentially harmful to residents. A growing number of architects and designers is exploring humanitarian design for people displaced by a natural disaster or other emergency. This gallery shows some of the most promising quick-fix shelters, from inflatable concrete tents to houses made from recycled wood pallets.
Interviews & Stories: STEM Facilities Planning
Imagining Tomorrow's Future Today
Art St. George and the 2007 EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee write in EDUCAUSE Review about "'imagining the future,' . . . seven technologies and trends of 2007: the Web, Google Apps, Web conferencing, m-learning, 3D printing, virtualization, and information lifecycle management and physical storage technologies for digital preservation." Today, at the end of 2007, there are evident consolidations in wireless, storage, and virtualization, and the path forward seems clearer now than previously. Trends from last year continue strongly, particularly Web 2.0 and the shift to user-driven environments and Internet sites where significant data and video processing is available to those without local resources. Yet forecasting is still as much of an art as a science. Campus IT "seers" will continue to work hard to stay in front of the experienced users who come to campus with high expectations of the academic environment, mirroring or exceeding their expectations of the private sector.
IT has moved to a place where new technologies are not simply replacing older ones but are increasing in complexity and are interweaving themselves with other technologies as well as the social and economic systems that support them. Even a few years ago, who could have imagined that libraries' use of social tagging, accessible by multiple connected technologies, would develop into a significant research tool? And IT will continue to evolve. In imagining tomorrow's future today, those of us in campus IT need to skate to the next new place—while keeping our eyes on the puck in the meantime.
The Place of Information Technology in Planning for Innovation
Michael A. McRobbie, president of Indiana University, writes in EDUCAUSE Review about the evolution of his perspectives on higher education innovation and information technology as he moved from VP for information technology and CIO, to VP for research, then interim provost, and finally president: And in the specific case of IT, as I have progressed from vice president for information technology and chief information officer to vice president for research, to interim provost and vice president for academic affairs, and finally to president of Indiana University, it has become increasingly clear to me that unless one is doing computer science, IT is not an end in itself. Investment in IT at the institutional level is just like investment in any other kind of infrastructure to support research, scholarship, and instruction. This is not a particularly profound observation, but there is nothing like having responsibility for all of the affairs of a great research university to put this truth into stark relief. At the most basic level, investment in IT infrastructure is part of the cost of doing business at a research university. At the very least, an institution must provide basic IT resources and connectivity to faculty, staff, and students. But this is no longer enough to ensure that an institution is even minimally competitive. Why? Because research in nearly all academic areas requires advanced IT infrastructure to a greater or lesser degree, and because an institution's ability to attract and retain research faculty—and increasingly, instructional faculty—now depends, in large part, on its ability to provide and support that infrastructure. Students too expect their IT environments to be contemporary and flexible, ready to change dramatically from one generation of students to the next—a period, on average, of only about five years.
Media Action Plan: Be Ready for Unexpected Good (and Bad) Events
This article, titled "Catching a Curveball" by Anna Jackson is from the October 2007 issue of Business Officer: How did Boise State University leverage a positive Fiesta Bowl story? How the Monroe Park Campus of Virginia Commonwealth University handled a fire? How did the University of California, Davis spin an unexpectedly high freshman enrollment? How did the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill manage the fallout from 2,700 applicants mistakenly being told by email that they had been accepted? 1. Get ahead of the curve. As the story of an erroneous e-mail, indicating students’ admission to UNC months prior to student selection, spread beyond Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina was up front with the media, taking full responsibility for the mistake. Stephen Farmer, director of undergraduate admissions, understands why the story was of interest to media outlets far beyond his state. By and large, he thought that the reporting was fair to the university. “Our position was that we made the mistake,” says Farmer, “so we were not going to complain about the inconvenience it caused to us;” instead, UNC apologized sincerely for the inconvenience it caused to students.” 2. Coordinate your messaging. At Boise State University, administrators soon realized that they were sitting on a big story. After fielding numerous media requests, the communication department drafted a press release with all of the major developments brought about by the institution’s underdog Fiesta Bowl victory. Stacy Pearson, vice president of finance and administration, says that by having a sound communication plan in place, the university was able to capitalize on a rare and exciting opportunity to highlight, before a national audience, the institution’s many achievements beyond its football victory. 3. Use the media to your advantage. At the University of California, Davis, the story that broke in May 2006 was a nearly 26-percent increase in freshmen acceptance for the fall. In intervening months, as the university prepared classrooms, dorms, and course schedules to accommodate the record influx, various media outlets visited the campus on many occasions to cover the enrollment story. Fred Wood, associate vice provost for undergraduate studies, says that the ongoing visits may have been driven in part by expectations that the university would experience difficulty meeting its enrollment commitment. During one interview, recalls Wood, the reporter observed that the university seemed to have everything under control and wondered aloud where the story was in all of this. On each occasion, university leaders were able to show that the institution was well prepared for the influx of new students. The conscious effort by UC Davis to use the media to the university’s advantage resulted in parents and students who were pleased with the process and reassured by the institution’s progress in the months leading up to the fall semester.
Surprise: A New Generation of University of California Students
A new report, A New Generation: Ethnicity, Socioeconomic Status, Immigration and the Undergraduate Experience at the University of California, is out from the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley. In addition to the major demographic findings shared below, the report covers how students spend their time, their engagement with academics, and the students' own assessment of outcomes and satisfaction. The entire report is available for download on line. The major demographic findings: - UC is becoming increasingly racially and ethnically diverse in complex ways that reflect major demographic changes in the state, with Chinese students now representing the second largest identifiable racial group in the UC system, followed by Chicano/Latino and then Korean and Vietnamese students. Most of these students come from immigrant families.
- At most campuses, the majority of students are either themselves foreign born or have at least one foreign-born parent; the exceptions are UC Santa Cruz and UC Santa Barbara, where less than half of students report they or at least one parent is foreign-born. Approximately 95% of Asian and 88% percent of Latino respondents reported that either they or one of their parents or grandparents were born outside of the United States.
- UC students come from diverse socio-economic backgrounds; for example, 24% report annual parental income under $35,000 and 36% report annual parental income of $100,000 or more.
Under the Radar: Branch Campuses Take Off
James W. Fonseca and Charles P. Bird ask the question: "What happened to all the people who thought online learning would drive traditional education out of the market? Just when 'click' is supposed to be replacing 'brick,' branch campuses are proliferating around the country, to the point where the question facing academic administrators these days may well be, 'Where and when are you planning to open your next branch campus?'" Among possible answers is the fact that the vast majority of students are geographically restricted in their choice of college. Statistics tell us that 79 percent of students attend college in their home state, most within a few hours' drive of home. Many of these students are fundamentally place-bound: limited in their opportunities by financial constraints, family responsibilities, personal characteristics, lifestyle choices, or combinations of these factors. These students appear to desire education within a 30-minute commuting range, leading to much of the explosive demand for branches. In fact, one could argue that branches have helped to create much of the explosion in college attendance by nontraditional students as much as one could argue that branches exist because they are a response to that burgeoning enrollment.
College Town Life - Distinctive Destinations and More
Robert Karrow's College Town Life website continues to grow in scope and sophistication, continuing to easily be the very best website about all things "college town." If it's not on your bookmarks, it should be. It's Distinctive Destinations page lists college towns that are on the National Trust for Historic Preservation's "Dozen Distinctive Destinations" Web page, and also lists a number of Great Examples of Specially Created Neighborhoods. Among those neighborhoods are: The Cotton District in Starkville, MS; Doe Mill Neighborhood (New Urbanist) in Chico, CA; and Trinity Heights Faculty and Staff Housing in Durham, NC. If these kinds of things interest you, you should subscribe to the weekly College Town News email digest.
The Mobile International Student
Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed writes about a recent study that takes a broad look at who is getting students from which other countries, and vice versa. The study he reports on is published by The Observatory On Borderless Higher Education and is titled "International Student Mobility: Trends and Patterns," but is only available in its entirety to subscribers. From Jaschik's article: The study examined trends in various countries’ top sources of foreign students over the last 10 years, grouping the countries into various categories, and created a grid of relative advantages. The dominant position of the United States remains clear — it continues to attract more students from other countries than anyplace else does. But the report identifies weaknesses for American colleges, as well as both strengths and weaknesses for some of the competitors to the United States, including some whose raw numbers have attracted attention of American educators.
Dorm Versus Dorm: Video Vignettes from Duke University's Eco-Olympics
The Chronicle's Buildings & Grounds Blog - Mid-October 2007
Transitions Between CEOs: A Survey of CEOs in the League for Innovation in the Community College
In this League for Innovation Leadership Abstract, Jackson N. Sasser and Larry W. Tyree report on an interesting survey of community college presidents. The survey's major finding: It is logical, then, to suggest that community college governing boards contemplate a permissive policy or procedure that would afford an officially sanctioned opportunity in which the departing CEO may counsel the incoming CEO in private. Such an action could provide multiple benefits. Foremost, it could dispel concern about the board’s disapprobation. Second, by removing the possibility of board disfavor, it could encourage the outgoing CEO to overcome his or her innate reticence. Finally, by being permissive, the policy or procedure does not have to be used if the board or either CEO thinks it is not constructive.
The Imperial Tongue: English as Dominating Academic Language
Philip G. Altbach, Monan professor of higher education and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, writes in the journal, International Higher Education, about the current dominance of English as the academic language of the world. We'll specifically note that in the SCUP Links Blog we have links, in addition to Altbach's piece, directly to these articles: " The Global Higher Education Race" by John Aubrey Douglass, " Mass Higher Education and the Super Research University" by David P. Baker, " Professors of Practice and the Entrepreneurial University" by Henry Etzkowitz and James Dzisah; and " Public Money for Private Higher Education" by Daniel C. Levy. Altbach's full abstract is: The English language dominates science, scholarship, and instruction as never before. While it is unlikely that English will achieve the status that Latin had as the sole language of teaching and scholarship at the 13th-century universities in Europe, the Latin analogy has some relevance today. Back then, Latin not only permitted the internationalization of universities but allowed the Roman Catholic Church to dominate intellectual and academic life. It was only the Protestant Reformation led by Martin Luther, combined with a growing sense of national identity, that challenged and then displaced Latin with national languages. As late as the 1930s, German was a widely used international scientific language. Until the mid-20th century, most countries used their national languages for university teaching and for science and scholarship. French, German, Russian, and Spanish were, and to some extent still are, used for academic and scientific publications and have some regional sway. Scholarly communities in Japanese, Chinese, Swedish, and many other languages continue to exist as well. English was the closest thing to an international language, with several major academic systems using it—the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Canada. In addition, the emerging academic systems of the former British Empire—especially India, Pakistan, South Africa, and Nigeria—have traditionally used English as the main teaching and publishing language. But English did not dominate scholarly communication until the 1950s, and national academic communities seemed in general committed to national languages. English now serves unchallenged as the main international academic language. Indeed, national academic systems enthusiastically welcome English as a contributor to internationalizing, competing, and becoming "world class." But the domination by English moves world science toward hegemony led by the main English-speaking academic systems and creates difficulties for scholars and universities that do not use English. Also note that the Boston College Center for International Higher Education, which publishes International Higher Education, has made available a podcast interview with Philip G. Altbach, titled, " U.S. Government Interest in Internationalization and the International Branch Campus Phenomenon."
The Philanthropy That Makes Design Possible: OHSU Women's Health Center
Writing in Healthcare Design magazine, Susie Kasper describes the process that created "A supportive, sensitively designed women's health center" at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) "became reality, thanks to generous donors": "'People are just now coming to the realization that there is a sharp difference between men's and women's health, and in addition to treatment protocols, women respond to an entirely different set of visual and emotional stimuli.” This article has a large number of interesting visual images embedded within it. Until its mid-2006 relocation to a 30,000-square-foot space at the newly built Peter O. Kohler Pavilion (named after the recently-retired President of OHSU) and all its philanthropic donations, the Center had been housed in an aging building called the Physicians Pavilion. “The Center came into being before we had the right space for it,” explains Dr. Cain. “The Kohler building was on the drawing board, and we knew we would relocate eventually, but we had to get our medical services up and going before that space could be realized.” However, OHSU had already received designation as a National Center of Excellence in Women's Health, and the medical and philanthropic communities were eager to frame this landmark concept in an innovative space.
Your Outboard Brain Knows All: The Cyborg Future Is Here
Writing in Wired magazine, Clive Thompson notes a real, more-than-generational change in the kinds of information young people are not bothering to clog up their heads with: This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative's birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up. Also of interest in this issue of Wired, we have links for you to: " Freeing the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments," " Getting Things Done Guru David Allen and His Cult of Hyperefficiency," and " How Mark Zuckerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web's Hottest Platform."
The Higher Education World Has Been Talking About Breaking Down Silos for Years. SCUP-42 Put Integration On Display.
 In the October issue of University Business, Caryn Meyers Fliegler does a superb job of writing about what an enriching experience SCUP-42 was, last summer in Chicago. A SCUP annual, international conference has never been so thoroughly covered in a single article. But we'll do even better next July in Montreal!The Society for College and University Planning's annual conference, held in Chicago in July, offered dozens of such examples of integrated planning, connected departments, multipurpose buildings, linked institutions, and collaborative partnerships. The "Shaping the Academic Landscape: Integrated Solutions" conference highlighted green building, strategies for health, science, and technology centers, and ideas for community colleges. The conference gathered 1,557 attendees (more than any past SCUP conference) as well as 117 exhibitors, all with a focus on academic planning, facilities planning, and resource and budget planning. Note, also, that this issue of University Business is its annual "State of Higher Education" issue and is simply packed with great stuff.
Penn State University Secure, High-Tech Test Center
 Penn State University has been having open house events of its new, secure, high-tech testing center. In the interest of stopping cheating, otherwise known as academic integrity, the new center scans student IDs, provides them printed authorization passes with workstation assignments, their photo, and allowed tools, all while being video-recorded and observed by monitoring staff. The testing center's home page is here. At left is an image of the security station at the entrance, overlooking video monitors and the test-taking area. Here is a Penn State Live article about the center, and here is an informative article about it with observations from experts elsewhere, from The Boston Globe.
Blueprints, Tools, and the Reality Before Us: Improving Doctoral Education in the Humanities
 This article by Joseph Heathcott is from the September/October 207 issue of Change magazine. The editor has chosen it as the article from this issue that is shared with the world at large, without password protection, and you can find it here. Note that SCUP members are entitled to a discounted subscription to Change magazine. Request the discount code by emailing membership@scup.org. In graduate education we work with blueprints too, although we are seldom clear about where they come from, and we are rarely willing to brush them aside. But occasionally we notice that the blueprint fails to conform to the reality in front of us, and we rethink our approach. During the six years that I served on the graduate faculty in the Department of American Studies at Saint Louis University, I worked with my colleagues to redesign our graduate programs, with special attention to the Ph.D. Our modest efforts may contribute to the national conversation about doctoral education in the humanities.
Encouraging Assessment From the Ground Up
In this article, Donna Engelmann, writing in Inside higher ed, follows up on her earlier, related piece:In our experience, there are at least five things that have been helpful in engaging faculty in teaching for and assessing learning outcomes:
1. Draw on the expertise of professors who are already — even without a formal assessment protocol — doing effective work in teaching, and in understanding what helps students learn. . . .
2. Move toward reward structures that encourage and recognize this kind of faculty collaboration. . . .
3. Create communities of practice around teaching and learning issues that faculty themselves see as critical to their work. . . .
4. Emphasize that collaboration to improve the teaching and assessing of student learning need not violate academic freedom or faculty autonomy. . . .
5. In working with institutions everywhere, we have also learned that leadership on behalf of improving learning and assessment – both formal and informal – is critical.
Legendary California university puts courses on YouTube
This article discusses a possible new trend in higher education: Posting video's of lectures on YouTube. "BERKELEY, United States (AFP) — A California university renowned for US history changing free speech and anti-war movements is embracing the Internet revolution by putting free videos of courses on YouTube. More than 300 hours of University of California, Berkeley, classes and events are available online at the web address www.youtube.com/ucberkeley, college officials announced on Wednesday. University offerings at the dedicated YouTube channel include peace and conflict studies, bioengineering courses, and a science class titled "Physics for Future Presidents." "UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life: academics, events and athletics," said vice provost for undergraduate education Christina Maslach. The University plans to continually add videos to the channel, which officially launched Wednesday with about nine full courses consisting of approximately 40 lectures each." Labels: trends, UC Berkeley, YouTube
What’s a Financial Aid Director to Do?
This article by Doug Ledermen featured in Inside Higher Education discusses the Financial Aid problems that many Financial Aid offices have recently come under fire for. Ledermen brings up many pertinent issues on the topic including how many Financial Aid offices have conflicting compliance troubles. "Financial aid and lending officials in New York are far from alone in facing potential uncertainty over which requirements to abide by. More than a dozen state attorneys general have adopted their own codes of conduct, and virtually any student loan provider — and any college that enrolls students from New York — is technically covered by the SLATE law. “If you have 5 or 10 or 15 different standards that institutions are being held to, that enormously complicates their efforts to comply, and results in the possibility of significant confusion,” says Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. “At the end of the day, everybody is further ahead if the standards, rules and procedures are clear and widely understood.” (One university’s recent stab at comparing the differences among the many proposals out there can be found here.)" Labels: DOug Lederman, financial aid, Inside Higher Ed
Tracking the Shape of Things to Come at Harvard
This article in The Boston Globe by Robert Campbell describes a current architectural show at Harvard and discusses the planning for its new Allston campus: It's interesting that "density" is cited as a virtue. This is a word in the process of reversing its connotation. Only a few years ago, "density" was bad. People endlessly recycled ancient lore about laboratory rats being driven crazy from crowding.But with the revival of interest in city life, a movement that goes back at least to the great urbanist Jane Jacobs in the early 1960s, "density" is becoming a plus word. Densely built environments, it is now recognized, need less energy. Manhattan, for example, is, by far, the greenest community in the United States, as measured by the amount of energy used per household or per capita. And dense communities, if they contain a tight enough mix of many uses and activities, are places where you can walk or bike to many things, with no need for a gas-guzzling car. Density needn't require high-rise, either. Low-rise Cambridge and Somerville are among the most densely populated communities in the United States. Low-rise Paris is the densest city in the developed world.
In this article from Inside Higher Ed, Andy Guess interviews Rudolph H. Weingartner, author of the recently published book, A Sixty-Year Ride Through the World of Education. Asked about whether there should be a core curriculum in the liberal arts, Weingertner responds: I want to look at this issue of a core curriculum from three different perspectives and I’ll try to be brief. I benefited immensely — for a lifetime — from having been at Columbia College at the end of the ’40s with all those required “liberal arts” courses — from all of them, if from some more than others.... I then enjoyed teaching Contemporary Civilization for four years (and was good at it), though that was really hard work, especially the first year. I later taught a required humanities (sort of Great Books) course at San Francisco State that was not a happy experience. Many of the students didn’t want to be there and I wasn’t very comfortable teaching the course, in part for an oddball reason: I never figured out how you teach the first X chapters of Don Quixote, say, and then the next batch. And of course you couldn’t assign the whole thing at once. Philosophy really doesn’t present this problem. But finally, let me give you my views from the administrator’s (dean’s) perspective. When I decided to undertake a major reform of undergraduate education in the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, I decided not to push for a core curriculum like Columbia’s, in spite of my favorable attitude toward it. Faculties have become very “professionalized” for a whole set of reasons and the overwhelming majority of them very much resent teaching outside their fields.... Columbia is a powerful university with a long tradition of its special curriculum and they can use their prestige to get people to teach these out-of-field courses. But even they not without difficulty. (After three years of teaching at CC, one colleague — also still short of his Ph.D. — and I were the “senior” members — longest continuous service — of the CC staff then teaching.) Now, by definition required courses are taken by large numbers of students and many who take those required courses do so only because they have to. It is therefore particularly important that required courses are taught well. I did not think that that would happen at Northwestern if, against the odds, the faculty would have gone for a set of specially constructed required courses, on the pattern of CC. The solution, in my view — and one that I could persuade the faculty to adopt — was required courses within the standard fields, but courses that have a certain set of characteristics that make them appropriate to be required.
Exploring Ways to Shorten the Ascent to a Ph.D.
Joseph Berger, writing in The New York Times, explores why it takes more than 8 years to get a Ph.D., and about efforts underway to speed the process up: We even have a name for this sometimes pitied species — the A.B.D. — All But Dissertation. But in academia these days, that person is less a subject of ridicule than of soul-searching about what can done to shorten the time, sometimes much of a lifetime, it takes for so many graduate students to, well, graduate. The Council of Graduate Schools, representing 480 universities in the United States and Canada, is halfway through a seven-year project to explore ways of speeding up the ordeal.
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There are probably few universities that nudge students out the door as rapidly as Princeton, where a humanities student now averages 6.4 years compared with 7.5 in 2003. That is largely because Princeton guarantees financial support for its 330 scholars for five years, including free tuition and stipends that range up to $30,000 a year. That means students need teach no more than two courses during their schooling and can focus on research. Labels: academic planning, doctorate, graduate studies, PhD, Princeton University
Va. Tech Lessons Give Rise to Campus Alert Systems
Singapore Officials Envision "Boston of the East"
This article by Eric Montlake is from The Christian Science Monitor, and describes Singapore's goal to establish itself as an Eastern center of brains and education to rival Boston, Massachusetts: Over the past decade, Singapore has courted foreign universities with subsidies and partnerships, and showered aid on promising overseas students. It aims to create an education hub for students in Asia who want an international degree but may not have the income or the grades to study in the West. It has targeted an enrollment of 150,000 foreign students by 2015, up from about 80,000 currently. These ambitions mirror the rapid growth in global education. The number of students studying abroad rose to 2.7 million in 2005, up from 1.3 million a decade earlier, according to a study released in September by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The most popular destination is the US, followed by Britain and Australia.
But Singapore's program to reverse this flow by outsourcing world-class education to its shores has run into trouble. Labels: Asia, International, Pacific Rim, Singapore, urban
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