Sustainability Summit of University and Business Leaders Tackles Questions, Raises More

SCUP and The New York Times Knowledge Network assisted in the production which made streaming video of this symposium available to all, for free. This item by Scott Carlson provides his impression of the event:

“For us to continue to make progress economically, for us to continue to evolve, we have to do things in a different way,” Mr. Crow said in his opening remarks. “Most people are looking for new ideas, looking for leadership. … Hopefully we are the last era of the Stone Age leaders before a new generation can be transformed through our effort.”

Given the business-oriented lineup, the discussions that day centered on new products, better fuels, and smarter technologies. Mr. Ford spent time talking about the need to move to cars that burn hydrogen. (Sorry, that model is still under development.) Little to no time was spent on, say, redesigning our lives, buildings, and cities to reduce or eliminate the need for cars and new power sources. Amid all the talk of alternative fuels and the difficulty developing them, no one mentioned designing cities and neighborhoods to be walkable. (A perfectly competent designer — William McDonough, green architect and co-author of Cradle to Cradle — was reportedly somewhere in the audience and could have spoken to this.)

Guest Blogger: Cars—and Parking

An earlier post by SCUPer David McIntyre:

My personal and professional life collided recently. By an admittedly rough estimate, some five million cars have returned to campuses throughout the country in the past few weeks, and a couple of them were mine.

While their student users are in class, cars collectively occupy some 60 square miles of campus space, most of this being land allocated for parking. Back them up end to end (a common occurrence on many campuses these days) and these cars would stretch over halfway around the globe, or from Boston to Berkeley and back again—twice. Arrange them side by side (a common occurrence on the roads leading to campuses) and they would cover metropolitan Washington.

Guest Blogger: Cars, Parking, and Costs

One of the guest bloggers this month on the Chronicle's Buildings & Grounds blog is yet another SCUPer—David McIntyre of Vanasse Hangen Brustlin Inc.

Last week I sat through interviews to select a master-plan consultant for a mid-size university. The university has grown steadily the last 10 years, and is seeking to update its master plan. We are advising the university (and its selection committee) on transportation, infrastructure, and stormwater issues.

Each of the firms was highly qualified and gave a very good presentation. There were common threads: All sought to be sustainable in their approach; all focused on place-making and on spaces for socializing and exchanging ideas; all were visionary and supported the mission of the university. The planning process was to be participatory and inclusive. The presentation materials were seductive. One firm presented sepia-toned plans supported by gauzy watercolor vignettes representing a vision of what the campus could be in the future. Remarkably, the vision was car-free.

Got An Idea to Help the World? Here's $10 Million!

We bet plenty of SCUPers have ideas that would do well in what is essentially a design contest:

Got an idea that could change the world, or at least help a lot of people? Google wants to hear from you -- and it will pay as much as $10 million to make your idea a reality.

Google Inc. will award $10 million to solicit ideas it believes could benefit the world.

To help celebrate its 10th birthday, the ambitious Internet giant is launching an initiative to solicit, and bankroll, fresh ideas that it believes could have broad and beneficial impact on people's lives.

Called Project 10^100 (pronounced "10 to the 100th"), Google's initiative will seek input from the public and a panel of judges in choosing up to five winning ideas, to be announced in February.

Google announced the project live on CNN on Wednesday morning.

"These ideas can be big or small, technology-driven or brilliantly simple -- but they need to have impact," Google said in a news release. "We know there are countless brilliant ideas that need funding and support to come to fruition."

Those are ideas such as the Hippo Water Roller, which Google cited as the kind of concept the company would be interested in rewarding. Developed in Africa, where it is most used, the Hippo Water Roller is a barrel-shaped container, attached to a handle, that holds 24 gallons of water and can be rolled with little effort like a wheelbarrow, making it easier for villagers on foot to transport critically needed fresh water to their homes.

Preparing for Climate Disruption

Yes, the new term is "climate disruption," which is intended to bring home more forcefully the things we most fear from "climate change" or "global warning," which is the negative effects on humans and human civilizations. This article (PDF) is by Richard Moss, one of the panelists on the supporting webcast from SCUP of the sixth annual Campus Sustainability Day, coming on October 22. We hope you are doing something about it on your campus! Moss is actually planning to cope with climate change:

Identifying vulnerabilities and encouraging adaptation will require a more thorough
process of assessment. This process should engage stakeholders who will be affected and draw on the many resources for research, monitoring, and other forms of information gathering that exist within Maryland. This study lays a foundation for such a process by

(1) highlighting some resources and activities “at risk” from climate and other
environmental changes, (2) identifying some of the major monitoring and research
resources that will provide information for future decision making, and (3) suggesting relationships between climate change adaptation and current policies for economic development and protection of natural resources and the environment. It will also outline how an open process for identifying vulnerabilities and adaptation options might be structured with the involvement of stakeholders in various sectors (e.g., businesses, natural resource managers, researchers, and the general public) and emphasize the opportunities presented for interagency coordination to develop integrated, innovative paths forward.

Lousiana Storm Losses at $46B

Hurricans Gustav and Ike were far less damaging to Louisiana campuses that Katrina; to the tune of something like only 1/4 of the dollar loss. This article has a list of preliminary damages to specific buildings and sites from a number of affected campuses:

Rich Griswold, association commissioner for facilities for the Board of Regents, said Wednesday that initial inspections show about $46 million damage but insurance estimators have not completed assessments.

"It's significant," Griswold told the Facilities and Property Committee, "but our damages are nowhere near what they were in Katrina, when there was more than $350 million in damage."

Maximizing Financial Aid for Veterans

Subtitled, "What administrators can do to help veterans take advantage of education benefits," this article by Haley Chitty is worth sharing widely around campus.

Because of the variety of sources that provide veteran education aid, many veterans don’t take advantage of all possible benefits. Many aren’t aware that specific types of aid are available, and many more have inaccurate assumptions about benefit programs. For example, some veterans don’t apply for federal student aid because they assume that their military educational benefits make them ineligible for federal student aid.

To help veterans navigate the complicated financial aid process, institutions should work to provide a one-stop shop to give veteran students information about all the possible benefits in one location. Providing a one-stop shop requires various offices on campus to work closely together to provide all relevant information in one location. Ideally, the veteran affairs, financial aid, admissions and various academic departments would collaborate to provide aid, admission, academic and living support to veterans to ensure full access and success at the institution.

When Worlds Collide

A good one, if brief, from Richard Katz:

The emergence of virtual worlds, synthetic worlds, and immersive worlds is a social and technical movement of great importance. Although personally I have yet to be moved to construct a virtual mini-me, I recognize that these environments will become incredibly rich and nuanced—nearly real, in fact. And I realize that the eventual near-reality of these environments has profound implications for higher education.

Colleges and universities are carbon creatures. If we ask donors to endow ideas, they tell us that they’ll endow buildings. We boast about how many assignable square feet of space we are constructing or where we can place the next building designed by the latest famous architect. Institutional leaders write their legacies in bricks and mortar. And our carbon footprint can be magnificent!

***

The time is now to build and to experiment and to learn what it may mean to perform campus master planning when the master plan includes virtual spaces. We need to learn what it means to regulate access to institutional resources when those resources reside in virtual spaces. We need to understand the nature and limits of institutional authority inside the virtual classrooms and the virtual social spaces that bear the institution’s name.

Virtual spaces—like the Internet and the web—will change society profoundly. They will change institutions profoundly. The emergence of virtual, synthetic, and immersive worlds is a revolution, and it will likely arrive sooner than we can assimilate it. Like all revolutions, the emergence of virtual worlds will present opportunities for some and threats for others.

Don’t wait for worlds to collide. Plan, experiment, plan, experiment. Now.

Looking to the Future: Higher Education in the Metaverse

Force yourself to read this one.

It sounds like, and starts like science fiction, but it shines a light on stuff you need to know:The term metaverse was coined by Neal Stephenson, in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, to describe a persistent, immersive 3D virtual environment in which everything from business to entertainment could be engaged in by any user, anywhere in the world, with access to a terminal. In Stephenson’s novel, the creation of the metaverse allowed much of our day-to-day human interaction to move into the virtual world, and this in turn profoundly changed human societies and culture in the real world. Though the current state of the emerging metaverse is far from the seamlessly integrated world that Stephenson imagined, his novel not only shaped the way the technology has developed but also influenced the imaginations of its users.

In its current context, the metaverse is a complex concept. For the purposes of this article, the definition in the Metaverse Roadmap will suffice: “In recent years, the term has grown beyond Stephenson’s 1992 vision of an immersive 3D virtual world, to include aspects of the physical world objects, actors, interfaces, and networks that construct and interact with virtual environments. . . . The Metaverse is the convergence of 1) virtually-enhanced physical reality and 2) physically persistent virtual space. It is a fusion of both, while allowing users to experience it as either.”2 In short, we can imagine multiple and myriad digital mirrors of the real world existing alongside multiple and myriad digital worlds that do not represent the real world, all used for a variety of purposes, tied into a variety of communication methods, and populated by any user with Internet access, as well as a steady stream of data originating from objects and devices in the real world.

If we accept as a given that, over time, the barriers to adoption and the technical impediments will be addressed and that, at some point, broad adoption of virtual worlds will become commonplace, then a number of possibilities open up, not only for education but for other sectors as well.

Four Day Work Weeks: Headed Your Way?

This brief article also provides links to interviews with three campus-based administrators who have been involved with the implementation of work day changes on their campuses:

Is it going to be the rage—or just a short-term fad? Birmingham, Alabama started doing it in July. The state of Utah started doing it in August. The state of Washington began this month.

Colleges and universities are trying it out in significant numbers. Count Delaware Valley College, Palo Alto College, Rose State College, Florida International University and dozens others among the experimenters.

I’m talking about the four-day work week.

Change?

Are you someone who thinks the words "change" and "transformation" have been overused?

Higher education, on the other hand, seems very much to enjoy snookering itself. Academic reformers have been making lofty appeals to change (and its souped-up partner, “transformation”) for years now, rarely stopping to ask what, if anything, such terms mean or whether anybody could deliver on them.

A quick search of scholarly publications turns up literally hundreds of titles such as “10 bellwether principles for transforming American higher education,” “Organizing adjuncts to change higher education,” “Transformation of the community colleges for the 21st century,” “Virtual transformation: Web-based technology and pedagogical change,” “Transformation of higher education: The transdisciplinary approach in engineering,” and “Transforming library and higher education support services.”

The Veterans Are Coming, the Veterans Are Coming

The new GI Bill, if the Veteran's Administration can ever figure out how to run it or outsource it in a way that actually makes it happen, figures to be a somewhat transformative factor in many campuses over the next 2 or 3 years, or longer. We're watching its implementation and the related issues closely and enjoyed the advice (mostly for administrators) in this piece from Inside Higher Ed by Edward F. Palm:

Finally, expect veterans to do well. Just as the expectation that someone will behave badly can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, greeting someone with the expectation that he or she will excel can achieve the desired result. That same undergraduate adviser who puzzled me with his patronizing comment about supporting the first G.I. Bill more than redeemed himself later by soliciting my comments in class when we were discussing a story set in a World War II training camp, Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith.” I was able to clarify some of the military practices and customs on which the story turns, and my professor stoked my self-confidence by telling the class that “he speaks from an interesting perspective; he was in the military himself.”

College Students' Mental Health a Growing Concern

Read this and other items, including full reference citations, in SCUP's Trends in Higher Education (PDF; August 2008)

Observation

The mental health of students attending college is increasingly becoming a cause for concern, in both the US and Canada.
• Campus shootings appear to be simply the most visible sign of a population that is reporting more depression, anxiety, and major psychological disorders. The rate of students reporting ever being diagnosed with depression has increased from 10 percent in spring of 2000 to 16 percent in spring of 2005.
• Over 90 percent of campus counseling center directors report that the recent trend toward greater numbers of students with severe psychological problems continues to be true on their campuses with 8.5 percent of enrolled students seeking counseling in 2007.

Our Thoughts

The number of students who seek and need mental health services is only likely to rise. Increased awareness and decreased stigmatization for treatment contribute to this trend, but don’t explain it all. How can campuses provide appropriate help?
• The ratio of counselors to students is 1 to 1,969. While smaller schools have better ratios, there are clearly not enough counselors to address the needs of students.
• Ironically, the passage of the new GI bill is only likely to exacerbate the problem as veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan return to college with an increased likelihood of stress related disorders and physical disabilities

What are your thoughts? Please comment.

Ten Reasons Why Colleges and Universities Undertake Campus Master Planning (And How to Align Your Campus Planning Effort to Best Address Them)

Ten Reasons Why Colleges and Universities Undertake Campus Master Planning (And How to Align Your Campus Planning Effort to Best Address Them)
by Michael S. Rudden

Abstract: Aligning the campus master planning effort to address specific questions of why you are planning in the first place will ensure that your planning effort is successful by the terms that you define.

Common shortcomings were found among the reviewed RFPs. These included over- prescribing the expected planning process instead of the desired planning outcomes, lack of clarity as to the expected level of involvement in campus and community outreach and approval efforts, and an implied need for sophisticated space and facilities assessment tools that the institution may not be committed to maintaining. Too often, insufficient information was provided to determine if special expertise should be included on the planning team, such as a traffic engineer, real estate advisor, academic planner, facilities assessment specialist, or economic development planner. Incomplete descriptions of existing institutional data, studies, and facilities documentation required assumptions that, if misinterpreted, could be expensive to overcome once planning started. However, the most common shortfall was a requested scope of planning that was not aligned with the institution’s likely resources.

Citation: Michael S. Rudden. 2008. Ten Reasons Why Colleges and Universities Undertake Campus Master Planning (And How to Align Your Campus Planning Effort to Best Address Them). Planning for Higher Education. 36(4): 33–41.

Click here for the full text of Ten Reasons Why Colleges and Universities Undertake Campus Master Planning (And How to Align Your Campus Planning Effort to Best Address Them)

News Analysis: The 'Green Era' Should Propagate Smarter Buildings

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, Scott Carlson writes about a desirable world (this special link for SCUP constituents is not password-protected) in which designers and architects have enough time to work out the details on green, smart, living buildings:

The new star architecture would strive for "living building" status, a grail for the architecture profession. It would be made of recycled, nontoxic, and renewable materials. It would produce more energy than it uses. It would recycle rainwater and waste in a closed loop. It might even provide microhabitats for animal and plant life. In short, it would contribute to, rather than take from, the resources around us.

Moreover, it would be a building that teaches about natural systems, building systems, and a groundbreaking style of design—lessons that should be part of every college curriculum these days. Oberlin College's Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies was an early attempt at this kind of building. (It just so happens that Adam Joseph Lewis, a major donor to Oberlin's building, is a son of Peter B. Lewis, the insurance mogul who supported Gehry's Lewis Library at Princeton.)

***

If the best colleges and universities want to be in the vanguard of design and research, they might start by setting examples with their buildings—making the way they work as sexy as they look.

The Evolution of the College Dorm

This annotated slide show is Time magazine's story of the move from libraries surrounded by walls to modern campus residence life: "From the monastic rooms of world's first campuses to today's luxury residence halls, Time examines the ever-changing ways that students live." Interviews and captions by M.J. Stephey. This is slide number 8 of 15:

Old Meets New

The cinder-block dorms of the 1950s were ill-equipped to handle the computer revolution of the 1980s. Re-wiring buildings became an expensive and drawn-out task, as did equipping their residents. Of today's college students, writer Nicholas Carr says, "Facebook is the dorm; Wikipedia is the library; and Craigslist is the mall." Here, a freshman at Drexel University shows off a gift from her alma mater; in 1985, the school issued each incoming student a new Macintosh computer. In 2004, Duke University spent half a million to greet its freshmen with iPods. Many schools now require students to purchase computers or laptops before the school year begins.

Who's Going to Administer the New GI Bill?

Will one of the last gasps of an administration known for outsourcing whatever it can of government be to successfully or unsuccessfully outsource the otherwise promising new GI Bill?

In a phone interview, Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, said there are legitimate concerns about the new benefits system being ready by August, given the extreme complexity of the VA’s task. And he said that the agency’s choice of contractor — and that contractor’s ability to deliver — will be a critical factor in whether the VA completes the task and does so on time.

“It’s fundamentally a new program. The VA has not provided payments directly to colleges and universities since World War II,” said Hartle. He added that the switch to making payments directly to colleges is complicated by the fact that a substantial number of vocationally oriented institutions that participate in the GI Bill don’t participate in the federal financial aid program — so it’s not just a matter of adapting current federal systems.

In addition to paying colleges, the VA will continue to make payments directly to veterans for their housing and book stipends. Different payment levels will be calculated for students attending different institutions (the law covers up to the cost of in-state tuition at the most expensive public college in a veteran’s state). And a Yellow Ribbon program for students attending private colleges adds a whole other dimension.

“Colleges and universities are acutely aware that this is a very big, complex program and that the Department of Veterans Affairs is basically starting from scratch in putting it in place,” said Hartle. “I think the VA is doing as much as they can.”

At the same time, he said, “If you weren’t worried about their ability [to put it in place by next August], you wouldn’t be paying attention.”

Risk Management in Higher Education

This Chronicle blog post by Eric Kelderman briefly describes some of the concurrent session content from the University Rick Management and Insurance Association's (URMIA) annual conference.

Colleges are increasingly using sophisticated accounting procedures to measure risks on campus, from football games to foreign travel by students and faculty.

But Pennsylvania State University took a decidedly low-tech approach to deciding what the greatest threats to its campus were, said Gary W. Langsdale, the Nittany Lions’ director of risk management. A team of administrators, drawn from various business and academic departments, identified 109 top concerns, wrote them on sticky notes, considered each of them for 60 seconds and then placed them on a big sheet of butcher paper where an ad hoc Cartesian graph represented the probability and severity of the risks.

Using Assessment to Bring About Cultural Change: The Value of Asessing Learning Spaces

This recent article is from Assessment UPdate: Progress, Trends, and Practices in Higher Education. Assessment UPdate is a commercial publication from Wiley Interscience but you may find that your institution has a subscription, in which case the website will recognize your IP address and permit you to have access. This article is in the May/une 2008 issue #3 of Volume 20:

In considering the issue of transforming higher education, people tend to think of the university in the abstract: the idea of providing education and what that means in these changing times. The authors suggest that the physical university should also be considered. At Ferris State University, educators have made a comprehensive effort to transform the university by creating a learning-centered culture focused on three central elements: (1) classrooms; (2) learning spaces outside the classroom; and (3) professional development. They undertook a multistage project to renovate learning spaces in a systematic fashion, combining the renovations with professional development efforts for faculty and administrators. They transformed the academic milieu both physically and intellectually with the primary purpose made of fostering a more learning-centered culture and environment. In this article, the author discusses the multistage renovation project and the role of assessment in creating a learner-centered environment.

Squeeze Play: How Parents and the Public Look at Higher Education Today

This new report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education (in collaboration with Limina) is essential reading for those scanning higher education's external environment. Ouch, in a section titled "the Bloom Is Off the Rose," this report says:

Although the public still has positive feelings about higher education, with 51% giving four-year colleges a grade of good or excellent (as compared to only 37% who give secondary schools similar grades), there are some signs of fractures in the public’s long love affair with colleges and universities.
In focus groups conducted for this project, we heard, for the first time, a number of people saying that colleges and universities are “just like a business” —more concerned with money than with education

As Universities Age, Billions-Worth of Projects on Table

This is about Ohio, but we all know that Ohio is far from alone in this.

Students often complain about the sticker shock of tuition costs. But it is Ohio’s aging public universities and colleges that are facing a multibillion dollar backlog of construction needs.

The Ohio Board of Regents has estimated that 37.2 million square feet of education-related space requires rehabbing or rebuilding at the whopping cost of $3.9 billion to $5 billion. And while university presidents, officials and policymakers are scrambling to come up with all that money, a higher education building boom could provide a windfall for Ohio’s construction industry.

The Worst Academic Profession Career Structures: Our Suggestions for Ranking

Philip G. Altbach must be one of the more prolific authors in all of higher education. Here's another piece, with Christine Musselin, about poorly designed or badly implemented academic career structures and the harm they can do:

A few examples will illustrate how poorly designed or badly implemented academic career structures can have a severely negative impact on the profession—and ultimately on the future of higher education. Many look to the United States as the world's leading university system and to the American professoriate as highly productive. The US "up-or-out" tenure system is seen as a rigorous but effective way of ensuring careful selection while at the same time providing a clear career path. While the system has been criticized for downplaying teaching and sometimes imposing unrealistic time constraints on junior staff, it is widely seen as effective. The problem is that fewer than half of new academic appointments in the United States are made on the traditional "tenure stream"; most new appointments are either part-time or full-time contracts. While the situation is somewhat better at the top institutions, this new arrangement makes an academic career impossible for participants of this new system. While this policy may save money and increase flexibility in the short run, it will have a highly negative impact on the American academic profession. The first increasing difficulty involves attracting the most qualified individuals to academe and constrains young researchers while autonomy should be provided at an age when creativity and innovation are usually at the highest levels.

A Synthetic Tree Grows at Cornell & Solar Trees Grow at UC San Diego

Very interesting new research from Cornell University, duplicating transpiration—the way a tree moves water up through its system without using any biological energy. One of the researchers was just brainstorming: "It would be nice if you could, in a building, put these passive elements that carry heat around very effectively from a solar collector on the roof, to deliver heat all the way down through the building," said study co-author Abraham Stroock in a press release. Then you could "recycle that fluid back up to the roof the same way trees do it -- pulling it back up.

Also, at the University of California, San Diego, "Solar Trees" on the roofs of two parking structures create shade and generate electricity.

60-Second Science: A Listener Anticipates Your Word Choice During Presentation

Not only do SCUPers enjoy learning more about how people think and learn, many of us often have to give presentations to small and large groups. It's just part of the job. So, you may enjoy this very brief podcast from Scientific American.

Language comes flying at you at up to five syllables per second. So it was thought that listeners keep pace by anticipating a small subset of all words that the listener is familiar with. Think of how a Google search anticipates words based on the first few letters you type in. But now scientists have used functional magnetic resonance imaging to actually watch the brain consider different words. They report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that you narrow the choices by considering words that begin with the same sound. So if I say, “I tasted the sweetest can…your brain might already be priming itself to hear candy. Or maybe cantaloupe. But not candle. Who needs the Game Show Network? You’re always playing Match Game in your head.

Making the Transition to Collaborative Service-Learning

From Planning for Higher Education: Making the Transition to Collaborative Service-Learning
by Angela Lewellyn Jones, Jeff Stein, and Pamela Kiser. Abstract: "Elon University is presented as an exemplar of how administrative, student services, and faculty support are needed for the appropriate planning and implementation of collaborative service-learning. Citation: Angela Lewellyn Jones, Jeff Stein, and Pamela Kiser. 2008. Making the Transition to Collaborative Service-Learning. Planning for Higher Education. 36(4): 17–22.

Academic service-learning is based on the value of university-community partnerships. But what about campus partnerships? Who on campus best understands and most effectively administers academic service-learning programs? Locating service-learning programs solely in academic affairs or student affairs departments certainly simplifies the process. But the traditional approach of assigning all things academic to faculty and all things cocurricular to student affairs neglects two fundamental academic service-learning principles: (1) the interconnected nature of psychosocial and cognitive development in transformative education, and (2) the democratic and collaborative underpinnings of academic service-learning pedagogy.

At Columbia, Students Mix Studies With Volunteer Work, for Credits

Columbia University is conducting what this New York Times article calls an "unusually aggressive push of the popular 'service learning' concept. The organization Campus Compact is the best place to go for additional information on service learning. SCUPers who are employed in the corporate sector may wish to learn more about that organization's Consulting Corps.

In an unusually aggressive push of the popular “service learning” concept, 500 engineering students will earn academic credit this year participating in projects around Harlem: designing swings for people in wheelchairs, building an environmentally sustainable greenhouse at a local high school and creating a trash can that can be used by the severely disabled, and others.

For the past six years, such service learning has been a graduation requirement for all of Columbia’s engineering majors, in what experts say is one of just a handful of programs nationwide to make mandatory what used to be known as volunteerism.

“We obviously want to create engineers and applied scientists who are technically adept, but also effective in this global society,” said Jack McGourty, the associate dean of Columbia’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “We want to create students who are socially aware.”

APPA's Facilities Performance Indicators Survey

The time is now for facilities managers to participate in this year's survey. Previous surveys are available for purchase on the APPA website and summary reports for 2005-06 and 2006-07 are available at no charge. Access is also available to a series of webinars about the FPI report and dashboards.

APPA's Facilities Performance Indicators Survey is an annual collection and reporting of data related to educational facilities and an integrated research information database. Developed and produced by APPA's Information and Research Committee, the Facilities Performance Indicators Survey takes a comprehensive look at facilities operating costs, staffing levels and expenses, building and space costs and usage, strategic financial measures, and much more.

Research Abstracts From the California Community College System

The California Community Colleges System has, in our opinion, really got its act together. We've been following and reading, via email from Willard Hom, a number of the "abstracts" that this system shares within itself. We have long wanted to share them here, but only just now realized that they are available to all on this website. Within the category "Strategic Planning" there are sub-categories for Accountability, Planning and Management, and Social Trends. The abstracts resource is explained by the system in these words:

In order to help researchers and staff in the community colleges, we (the Research & Planning Unit in the Technology, Research, & Information Services Division of the System Office) produce abstracts from a periodic review of publications (both electronic and paper media). These abstracts try to distill essential information from these publications that tend to be lengthy and esoteric in nature. To create broad and unfettered access to these abstracts, we have "deposited" them in the BiblioTrek information bank so that field staff and the public may "withdraw" them at no cost.

ACE's "Solutions for Our Health"

The American Council on Education (ACE) has created a new Web resource of note:

Colleges and universities have had a hand in nearly every major medical breakthrough, a record of innovation that has had real, positive implications for the health of our nation. As the baby boomer generation ages and Americans live longer than ever, our institutions of higher education are training the health professionals who will care for us, seeking cures for debilitating diseases and creating cutting-edge medical technology.

I encourage you to visit our newest Solutions for Our Future web site, Solutions for Our Health (www.solutionsforourhealth.org). There, you’ll be able to learn about the work being done at colleges and universities across the country to improve and advance health care.

Universities UK - the Umbrella Organization for Vice Chancellors in Great Britain

Alerted by a Chronicle blog post, we went right to this organization's site and found a number of potentially useful and interesting (and free for download, at least we were able to) PDF reports:

• Policy commentary: Private universities and public funding: models and business plans
• Policy briefing: Admissions: the higher education sector’s plans for change
• Research report: The future size and shape of the HE sector in the UK: threats and opportunities
• Research report: Variable tuition fees in England: assessing their impact on students and HEIs - 3

We hate to admit we that hadn't looked through this site before, but it's true. There seems to be lots of additional good stuff, which we will look at and share later.

Collegiate Gothic: the Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Campus Architecture?

An interesting question asked by Chronicle reporter Lawrence Biemiller:

A couple of weeks ago I made an unplanned visit to a college that it’s probably best to leave unnamed. It’s an institution whose campus I hadn’t seen in 20 years or so, and time didn’t seem to have done it many favors. I drove past one clunky, knockoff-Gothic building after another, until finally I was forced to confront what may be one of the central questions of campus planning in America today: Is Collegiate Gothic the single worst thing that ever happened to campus architecture in America?

Guest Blogger: An Imaginary Letter About Design and Sustainability

From the Chronicle's "Buildings & Grounds" blog from Gretchen Schneider:

Thank you for turning your campuses into classrooms, for including students in your decision making and discussing with them what, why, and how you are building. Even more important than all the landscape and architecture students on your rosters are those economics and sociology and political-science and journalism majors (to name only a few). These students will go on to decide the future of our buildings and neighborhoods; they’re the ones who will set the agendas; they will someday hire architects — and they’re the ones most likely not paying attention to this stuff right now. By teaching them that their decisions do affect the built world they live in, and by demonstrating to them that the built world of the future can be better than the one they come from, you will change the shape of our country.

Corporate Investments in College Readiness and Access

Another essential from IHEP: This report, Corporate Investments in College Readiness and Access, examines major corporations’ philanthropic support for “college readiness and access initiatives,” defined as efforts to increase the likelihood that students will graduate from high school fully prepared to enroll and succeed in college. The report supplements substantial research that highlights the importance of higher education to ensuring a U.S. workforce prepared to compete in a global economy.

Learning Accountability from Bologna: A Higher Education Policy Primer

If this is in your area of interest, it is a "must-have":

The report, Learning Accountability from Bologna: a Higher Education Policy Primer, examines the reconstruction of those 46 European higher education systems—known as the “Bologna Process”—in terms of addressing challenges that lie at the core of current debates in the United States about documenting student learning. Written by higher education researcher Clifford Adelman, the study explores the core features of change in Europe that have been created jointly by higher education administrators, faculty, students, and national ministries of education.

Building and Sustaining a Multiuniversity and Multicampus Program or School of Public Health

This quite academic paper contains useful thoughts and lessons:

Drawing from New Jersey's successful efforts and from other less successful efforts, we offer lessons learned for those who will consider a multiuniversity and multicampus program or school of public health. These lessons include building a faculty collaboration, senior administrative support, and external constituencies and developing a set of documents that institutionalize processes, logistics, and other operations. In our experience, building and sustaining faculty support is the greatest challenge, followed by protecting existing resources and securing additional resources when administrators in the host universities change. (Am J Public Health. 2008;98:1556-1558. doi:10.2105/ AJPH.2008. 136705)

After briefly describing the development of the former New Jersey graduate program that evolved into a graduate school of public health, we describe the lessons that we learned for building and sustaining a school of public health through a multiuniversity partnership. We provide examples of some efforts that failed- without giving the names of the institutions, however, and with the caveat that we participated as outsiders in these efforts and therefore cannot be entirely certain that our expressed reasons for why they failed are accurate.

Most Trees in UC Berkeley Grove Down, Now

What a difficult time it's been for everyone involved at Berkeley:

Four men sharing a single liter of water, high in a lone redwood, were the last holdout tree sitters in the grove near UC Berkeley's Memorial Stadium on Saturday, as contractors hired by the university cut down and began removing dozens of trees nearby.

The university launched the cutting Friday, taking a decisive step after nearly two years of conflict over what the grove protestors say was a Native American burial ground, a war memorial and a vital ecosystem — and where the school plans to build a new athletic facility. . . .

"They're these huge, 100-, 150-year-old trees. You hear them crack and creak and fall over, and it makes you sick, rips apart your stomach," said UC Berkeley student Rene Carranza, 25. "And this is all so people can do sit-ups in air-conditioning."

'New Synergies' is Strategic Plan at Purdue

You can get to New Synergies here. Next, the colleges and schools are beginning their own planning, intended to be aligned and integrated with the overall plan.

Richard Cosier, dean of the Krannert School of Management, said the college and school plans are likely to be quite intensive, involving everything from a review of student support programs to changes in curriculum.

"I really like the student experience focus in the New Synergies plan, and we'll take a careful look to see how we can affect the student experience," Cosier said. "It has the ability to impact people."

Purdue colleges and schools will work on their plans this semester with the goal of putting them in place sometime next year.

Library Case Studies from 'Learning Spaces'

Because we have a great webcast coming up soon about libraries (See The Engaged Library
Strategies for Building Vibrant Learning Communities, Friday, September 12.) we thought we'd bring you - courtesy of the bibliographies at the National Clearinghouse for Education Facilities (NCEF) - a nice set of links to some comprehensive case studies and other related information that are originally from Learning Spaces by Diana Oblinger:

• Center for Integrated Learning and Information Technology, Michigan Technological University (PDF). Profiles this linked library addition and computer science hall that together provide an integrated learning environment, group study rooms, wireless networking, high-tech instructional spaces, and flexible labs. The chapter also describes how these spaces are used, what makes them successful, how technology is used, design principles, and what is unique about the project.

• Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia (PDF). Profiles this blend of new and refurbished space that serves at a library addition for the University. The building houses collection, meeting, and social spaces, including a lecture hall, classrooms, seminar rooms, cafe. These spaces host programs for the faculty, staff, and general public. The chapter describes the spaces and how they are used, what makes them successful, how technology is used, design principles, and what is unique about them.

• Perkins Library, Duke University (PDF). Profiles the expansion and conversion of this outdated, but ideally located library. The concept of the building's transformation from a "gatekeeper" to a "gateway" function that now serves as an "information commons" for the institution. The chapter also describes what makes the project successful, how technology is used, design principles, what is unique about the project, and includes one reference.

• Peter H. Armacost Library, Eckerd College (PDF). Profiles this new library that features 72 carrels wired with power and data connections, eight of which have multimedia stations. Several open lounges and a screened patio serve as casual settings for individual or group study, a 28-seat meeting room permits users to connect with remote sites worldwide, and a 30-person multimedia instruction lab provides multimedia training to augment instruction, research, and writing. The chapter also describes what makes the project successful, how technology is used, design principles, what is unique about the project, and includes one reference.

US Regional Accreditation Abroad: Lessons Learned

Jean Avnet Morse, President of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, writes in International Higher Education about piloting its accreditation for non-US-style institutions incorporated abroad. One conclusion was "If profit for MSCHE were the motive, we would have been very disappointed." Others include:

There is no perfect solution for establishing international standards that address the issues of countries with different educational systems. US accreditors cannot achieve this goal alone. It may be useful for US regional accreditors to accredit institutions abroad in certain situations—especially for institutions that do not raise the types of difficult issues discussed earlier. US regional accreditors can also help to establish quality standards abroad by assuring that US-affiliated institutions abroad meet the same standards as domestic locations.

Accreditors might invest their time in projects with broader reach, such as ongoing international efforts by UNESCO, the World Bank, and others to create local quality-assurance systems that suit the needs of each country or region, while still operating within flexible international guidelines. Encouraging local review can produce systems that are accepted locally and that can also offer the quality assurance needed by institutions and students in other countries.

The MSCHE pilot project has been successful in identifying likely areas of similarity and differences among higher education institutions in various countries, and additional information will be gathered as the pilot project progresses. This important first step can serve as the foundation for international cooperation among quality-assurance agencies, and it can provide the agenda for addressing the most significant areas of difference.

What’s Wrong With Boasting About CLA Scores?

Kevin Carey asks an interesting question to enliven an ongoing debate: If we can brag about football team scores, why not student learning outcomes scores? (The observations by commenters are definitely worth the read!)

I’ve been preparing to obsessively follow the highly-ranked Buckeyes football team from the pre-season all the way to the traditional blowout loss in the National Championship game on January 8th. But this year my loyalties are divided. I have a new favorite team: the aptly-named Mavericks of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, which recently had the temerity to issue a press release announcing that it may be doing a particularly good job of helping its students learn.

Oh, the controversy! By citing its unusually high scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, UNO was either giving in to satanic temptation or paving the way for totalitarian dictatorship, depending on who you asked. “Shame,” said one anonymous commenter here at Inside Higher Ed. “Lies,” said another. “Gamesmanship,” said an official at the State University of New York at Binghamton, lamenting that his faculty’s hard work in developing local assessments would be undone. . . .

Apparently, it’s perfectly OK to boast about your performance on a measure that’s highly correlated with, and partially based on, how well your students did on a standardized test they took when they were juniors in high school. But a test of how much they learned after enrolling? Gamesmanship!

In 'Hot, Flat, and Crowded', Thomas Friedman Calls for a Green Energy Revolution

Many SCUPers enjoy Friedman's insights. Here is a brief review of his latest book, from Wired magazine:

Thomas Friedman is about to dive into the green-tech fray. In his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, the multi-Pulitzer-winning journalist says everyone needs to accept that oil will never be cheap again and that wasteful, polluting technologies cannot be tolerated. The last big innovation in energy production, he observes, was nuclear power half a century ago; since then the field has stagnated. "Do you know any industry in this country whose last major breakthrough was in 1955?" Friedman asks. According to the book, US pet food companies spent more on R&D last year than US utilities did. "The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stone," he says. Likewise, the climate-destroying fossil-fuel age will end only if we invent our way out of it. . . . Coming out months before the presidential election, Crowded is sure to bigfoot its way into the campaign. "McCain and Obama come from the right side of this debate," Friedman says. "They have the right instincts, but neither is quite there yet. They haven't yet thought it through fully." The battle over "green," he believes, will define the early 21st century just as the battle over "red" (Communism) defined the last half of the 20th.

Web 2+, Students, and Learning

This is one of the items in the AUGUST 2008 edition of Trends in Higher Education (PDF), a bi-annual publication of SCUP; the category is "Technology":

Observation

There is no question that a large percentage of students engage in what can be loosely called online social networking activities. Initial results of an EDUCAUSE survey found that 89 percent of students have a presence on Facebook (Bytes From Lev, June 10, 2008,
• A study of university admissions departments conducted by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth found that 33 percent said they blogged for recruitment purposes and 29 percent had a presence in Facebook or MySpace (The San Diego Union Tribune, August 19, 2008).
• Sending emails is the least popular form of daily social communication, only 14 percent of 12-17 year-olds use emails, compared with 28 percent who send instant messages, 27 percent who use text messaging, and 21 percent who send messages via social networking sites (Pew Internet & American Life Project, December 19, 2007, “Teens and Social Media”).
• Half of the students in the EDUCAUSE survey used their preferred social networking site for communicating about course-related activities (Bytes From Lev, June 10, 2008).

Our Thoughts

Higher education needs to find ways to leverage learning within the boundaries of students’ engagement with social networking. Students are willing to use course management systems to keep up on grades and assignments, but they do their collaborative learning on Facebook (Campus Technology, May 28, 2008, ; Bytes From Lev, June 10, 2008).
• Multiplayer online games appear to have the capacity to encourage scientific thinking. A study of discussion posts on World of Warcraft found that 86 percent of them focused on sharing knowledge to solve problems and 58 percent used systematic and evaluative processes (eSchool News, August 19, 2008).
• A study of 16- to 18-year-old students who used social networking sites (77 percent) revealed that the respondents view technical skills as the top lesson they learn from using such sites. Following technical skills, students cited learning creativity, becoming open to diverse views, and communication skills as what they were taking away from their interactions (University of Minnesota News, June 24, 2008).
• The opportunity to help students understand the skills they are learning and practicing on social networking sites may be as important as using them directly for coursework or discussion (University of Minnesota News, June 24, 2008).

Art College's New Dormitory Turns a Challenging Site to Advantage

This Chronicle Buildings & Grounds blog post contains many nice images of this distinctive residence:

The result is a building that in ways both subtle and clever balances the college’s needs nicely against the community’s. Openings in the building’s main drum allow passersby to glimpse the interior and frame the best views for the students inside, so that the building feels open to the city around it—as indeed it is, since the cafe and gallery will welcome the public. At the same time, the building downplays the site’s less appealing views and cuts down traffic noise, and a carefully-sited guard desk offers security without seeming heavy-handed.

When IM Is the Best Way to Stay on Top

We like this, the SCUP office uses AIM a lot:

It’s tough to keep up on your workload, whether you’re a faculty member responsible for several classes or a student juggling a full schedule. The logistical dance becomes even more daunting for those learning remotely — from computers hundreds of miles away, or another campus in the same college system.

Yet those are everyday problems for students and instructors at large, sprawling community college systems, especially those that offer a significant portion of their courses online. The country’s largest singly accredited system, Ivy Tech Community College, in Indiana, thinks the solution is already staring many of its students in the face: instant messaging, hardwired into every teenager since the heyday of America Online.

The community college system, which serves more than 115,000 students a year on 23 separate campuses across the state, adopted an instant messaging platform called Pronto, from the collaborative learning software company Wimba. Like a turbocharged AOL Instant Messenger or Google Talk, it lets students chat online with their professors in text, audio or video form, for virtual office hours or impromptu question-and-answer sessions.