College news roundup - VTech consequences issue
Sound the alarm public alert system! After the Virginia Tech massacre and the communication debacle that followed, more than a dozen colleges have installed sirens or announced plans to do so in the past year, citing the flaws in a text message or phone alert system. The systems cost more than $100,000 to purchase and set up.
U.S. proposes to update student privacy laws: After Virginia Tech’s fatal shootings last year, the Family Education Rights Privacy Act (Ferpa) is due for an update. Lawmakers hope to give administrators “more latitude in sharing information about a student.” Expect more letters home, kids.
Obama, Ron Paul to visit Penn State: Lucky Bastards. Obama will speak this Sunday, and Ron Paul’s scheduled to visit April 11th. Ron Paul has campus libertarians practically peeing themselves with joy, and Barry O’s visit is a direct result of students at Penn registering more than 7,000 students to vote in the Pennsylvania primaries. Well, I guess they deserve it.
Howard University suspends student newspaper from publishing: Says the Hilltop is in debt. Editors’ (meager) salaries will continued to get paid, and it will publish online.
University techie finds widespread porn use: After alerting administrators to the fact that over 300 university employees at the University of Texas Health Science Center were surfing porn sites, she was pressured to leave her job. Only 10 people caught surfing porn received any punishment. That’s justice for you. No more porn at work, profs!
Higher-ed in China “not delivering results”: Only 16 percent of Chinese students say they’re satisfied with their educational experience, and have received a quality education that prepares them for the workplace. Administrators blame an exam-based system.
No one likes a gossip site: New Jersey is subpoenaing the site, Juicycampus.com, student councils are crafting resolutions (this is huge lame) and students vilified on the site are protesting.
And now for something completely different: The NYT says running can get you high. Throw out those drugs, and go for a jog, kids.
Odds & Ends: I found our new president, IC!
Prez of William & Mary resigns. Board of Trustees, alum, state legislators (everyone, apparently) angry after he removed a cross from campus chapel and allowed a performance by “porn actors and strippers” on campus last week. That guy is awesome. We want him here when Peggy leaves.
College applications can be “too good,” article says. If you see the words “juxtaposition,” “endemic,” or “parochial” in an essay, chances are that daddy punched up Junior’s prose.
Wheaton College sued over study abroad costs. Lawyer dad sues over $4 grand tuition discrepancy, calls school “predatory,” is mostly just pissed because his daughter came home from S. Africa with a tattoo and a bad attitude, we think.
Union University rebuilding after tornado hit. It’s the third time the school has been damaged by twisters. This time, the bill is $47 million. Capital Campaign, anyone?
American student molested on Indian campus. “A drug crazed youth” who had stabbed a policeman last year “pounced on her.” Jail time for these people, maybe?
Cuban student denies being arrested for opposing commies. In video on government web site, says he wasn’t arrested, media is just making a big deal out of it. Sure. They got to him.
Colleges offer churches finance classes. After sneaky priests rob coffers, buy fancy cars, faithful decide to learn accounting. Some churchgoers reportedly still angry that churches considered businesses. Shut up and enjoy your tax-exempt status while it lasts.
(P.S. This is a new format College Ave. will be trying out for awhile. And yes, we shamelessly copied the style of this awesome web site. The Internet tubes are all about incomplete sentences. Get used to it. )
Odds & Ends: cult edition!
Join our club cult: Student members of a Korean sect of Christianity that worship a man named Ahnsahnghong as the embodiment of Christ have started using aggressive recruiting techniques at the University of Pennsylvania, even going so far as to follow some students to their classes. Religion prof at the school insists they are a cult. Creepy, regardless.
Cornell playing catch-up: The “hottest “Ivy has just followed the lead of other elite, wealthy schools like Harvard and Yale in announcing vast changes to their financial aid programs intended to help middle class families afford college. After two years, “the program will take full effect by eliminating need-based loans for students from families with incomes up to $75,000, and capping annual loans at $3,000 for students from families with incomes between $75,000 and $120,000,” according to The Ithaca Journal. If only some of these aid packages were retroactive, and applied to Ithaca College. Damnit.
Democracy Now Later! Students at Washington University in St. Louis are pissed after their school recently prohibited presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama from speaking. The administration’s reasoning? A visit by a candidate would disrupt academics and open the door for other candidates to visit the campus. How is this democracy thing disruptive? The campus paper ironically notes that although the school feared losing its tax-exempt status if it only allowed one candidate to speak, “Brown University, Wellesley College and Boston University have hosted presidential candidates and have not lost their tax-exempt status.” Owned.
Kevin Bacon plays “Six Degrees” of beer pong: After giving a talk at Dartmouth College and receiving the Dartmouth Film Award, actor Kevin Bacon got down with his college self and played some pong with students in a dimly lit basement. Follow the link for pictures of the celebrity beer pong goodness.
Getting naked … for the environment? Students in an environmental group at Northern Michigan University graphically protested a nickel and copper mine near their school by printing a black-and-white calendar of nude group members posing at the site of the proposed mine. The calendar will be sold to “raise funds” for the group. Sure.
Roundup: Under Fire Edition
Presidents not doing so hot: Lee C. Bollinger and Richard Roberts, of Columbia University and Oral Roberts University, respectively, are not doing well by the eyes of the faculty they lead. For Bollinger, more than 100 faculty members signed a statement of concern raising issues with the way he’s running the school and that Iranian visit from September. Roberts had the faculty raise a vote of no-confidence ? especially troubling since he went on leave last month and is being accused of using the school’s money for political gain and gifts for his family. There’s also a dean at Washington University in St. Louis who the faculty is looking to remove.
More about presidents and their money: The Chronicle’s annual report on presidential salaries (”Executive Compensation”) is out, and it shows increases are bigger for the larger institutions. The median salary is above $500,000 for those at large, research institutions, and troublingly low sums for community college presidents. Again you may get rebuffed by the pay wall, but it’s worth it to make comparisons between different colleges.
As for Ithaca? Peggy R. Williams makes $254,040, and benefits raise the total compensation near $300K ($291,195). In comparison, the top earner, Boca Raton, Fla. Lynn University president Donald E. Ross makes more than $5.5 million, and Williams is nestled between presidents from Manhattanville College and Molloy College. Fun fact: Molloy College is running their own capital campaign! Their goal is much more modest, only between $7 and $10 million.
Trolling elsewhere? Treasure Troll, the former Ithaca OTR blogger is out. It was his decision to go after the mess I started, and it appears a lot of what I linked to is now dust in the wind. I hope he’s moving over to Buzzsaw’s blog, which covers an interesting array of topics but has been MIA for a while.
Dean Lynch Part Tres
Good news! The traditional media-o-sphere (doesn’t quite roll off the tongue the same way) has finally blown up over this Berkeley thing. The San Fransisco Chronicle started today with a buried story about her on B3, and then the Merc picked it up a few hours ago. Now Poynter’s got it, and the San Fransisco Press Club’s blog got a little ditty too!
It’s too bad we broke the story four days ago. I’ve thought it before and I’ll say it now: We’re really starting to get on top of this breaking news stuff. Who knew we would cover our administrators?
Update (6:30 p.m.): The East Bay blog is also reporting that Berkeley students had the chance to ask questions about this at a meeting last night, but says that, according to notes taken by John Peabody, there were more questions raised in the answers. He speculates that faculty scrutiny of Lynch may have played in the decision, and many are still wondering about her exact reasons ? even though I think family and stability are fine ones. Hopefully we’ll get to report something again about that.
I’m guessing that this meeting may have been the spark that caused the bigger papers to catch onto it, although someone told me I should have notified Romenesko before he linked to the big boys.
More thoughts about Lynch
I thought I’d get the jump on this because we just broke the story (and of course the Intercom announcement) about Dean Lynch staying in Ithaca. Of course Munzer beat me, but I still have some thoughts about the matter, even if it’s a little Park-centric.
It’s quite a turn from her back-and-forth this summer ? “All but official,” “Not so fast,” from this very blog, “I’m ba-a-a-a-a-ck (and staying),” “Something new to report…” ? about this gig before the official announcement in July. My fellow blogger’s comments about this in March are still true today: “Good call.” Of course that tongue-sticking-out might be a little much.
I have a couple of theories about this, but I’ll get to those a little later. What’s really exciting for me (and I felt was always kind of necessary) is that she’s going to be at the college longer than me. One of the things I always worried about was that she would leave before a full class of students, losing a lot of the the “organizational memory” (to use a term from my major) would be lost with a new dean. Put another way, the new initiatives she’s been establishing ? the Center for Independent Media, the gaming degree that we’ve been hearing about off and on for a couple of years ? would have serious question marks.
My theory is that she realized how much work she still has to do with this school. She’s in the middle of her first semester teaching a course: digital journalism, with the help of Ari Kissiloff, Adam Peruta and Michael Serino. From my end as online editor of The Ithacan, I see these stories and know that our journalism students are only beginning to really consider new media in a thoughtful way. From her experience at ONA, she has a lot to offer students in terms of teaching and helping really bring up our profile. The journalism department is still distraught, and there’s still no official chair, so there’s much to be done.
I am both surprised and excited by this. Lynch has been great for the school, and I think in a lot of ways she’s helped make necessary changes. In the same breath, I think she’s going to get a lot more criticism because if she really is staying, she’s really got to plant her feet. The Center for Independent Media is one place, and this Digital Journalism class, if she continues to teach it, is another. But everybody will be all eyes, no matter what she does.
Dean Lynch to UC Berkeley: Gotcha!
Yup, that’s right: it was announced today that she’ll be turning down the position of dean at the University of California at Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism and continuing in her position as the dean of the Park School of communications.
She hasn’t said anything about it personally (press releases don’t count) but expect something about it on her blog later - she’s good about that.
How long this will last, no one’s really sure, because it seems like she’s a hot commodity on the radar of probably every journalism program in the nation.
Now, I don’t have any idea why she changed her mind (again) but I think her continued leadership of our school can only be considered more of a good thing. She has lots of great plans for the school and it would have been a shame to see them fall to the wayside if she left.
UC Berkeley: I think I speak for most of the Park School when I stick out my tongue in your general direction (west, I believe) and gleefully exclaim, “We won!” Well played, Dean Lynch, well played.
It makes me very happy as a senior who will eventually be an alumni to see her willing to stick with a place we all love, even if it does have its faults. **cough the journalism program fix that first please cough**
UPDATE 10/2: In an e-mail, Dean Lynch explained to me that she’s not “wacko” for changing her mind twice (her words):
“I know I look pretty wacko — I’m not, honestly, really — but I am following my heart, and at the end of the day, that’s always the right thing to do.”
And in case you were wondering how long she’ll be staying?
“I plan on being on this team for a long time to come….it’s a winner! “
Plus, Ithaca is gorges and all that. And I’m sure those tree-loving hippie protest monkeys at Berkeley had something to do with her decision to stay here. I personally wouldn’t want a colony of drum circle-prone weirdos living in the trees outside of my office.
Oh yeah, those administrator searches
Things have been relatively quiet on the search front in the past couple of weeks. We got our presidential search committee in the beginning of the month, including an “excited” student representative, senior Monica Marcenko, who’s (in her own words) “always looking for feedback and input.” In the interest of student involvement and information freedom, go ahead and give her a buzz. The committee met before break, but it very well may have been overshadowed by that guy who visited the same week.
They posted the ad copy today for the presidential search (it’s going to be in the Chronicle of Higher Education!) and it’s a doozy. We’re looking for “a dynamic, visionary leader to serve as [our] eighth president.” I haven’t seen the Chronicle to see the ad running in the paper, but I suppose it’ll look similar to the other wall-of-type ads like this sweet one for Cal Lutheran.
It makes a reference to an under construction position profile and says we will conclude the capital campaign successfully next year (they must know something the rest of us don’t). We also encourage “[m]embers of underrepresented groups” to apply, which would be good ? a minority president might raise our student numbers north of 10 percent. It’d also continue the tradition of firsts Peggy started by being the first woman president of the college.
Something tells me access to this search will be limited at best for us; with the candidate review starting the day after the last day of classes (good timing since we publish our last issue of the semester Dec. 13), coverage will be online for us over the break if we get anything at all. (That’s what I want to worry about over winter break.)
In other search news, there is no new search news? Nothing from the music dean search, even though we still don’t have a student representative on that search committee, and since the Park dean search is being delayed, we only have to focus on three major searches right now. Oh, nothing more from H&S after the committee announcement. (There’s also that AES director search, and the Park School’s Center for Independent Media search, et cetera et cetera… but let’s keep this simple.)
Semi-related to the president search and our capital campaign comes this post from the Chronicle: The president at Furman University in South Carolina is donating $1 million to their $400 million fundraising campaign, Because Furman Matters. President David E. Shi (also a 1973 graduate of the university) pledged it at their announcement last Friday, and so far they’ve raised more than half their goal. I’ll have more at some point about all the fundraising craziness in the coming weeks, since Munzer has already started that one.
Things a college president should never do: This.
Here’s a disclaimer, before I tear into the latest news out of the world of college social networking: I post stupid pictures on Facebook, and I write dumb, possibly offensive captions for them. But I’m an undergraduate, not a college president.
In the latest Facebook photo scandal, it wasn’t a student who was punished for uploading a photo of underage drinking, or something banally college like that. Oh no, it’s far more surreal than that.
After a recent vacation to Mexico, Salisbury University President Janet Dudley-Eshbach uploaded a picture of herself from the trip pretending to hit a Mexican man who was embracing her daughter. Worse, Dudley-Eshbach, a professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, captioned the photo:
?I had to beat off Mexicans because they were constantly flirting with my daughter.?
I’m going to speak right to you, Janet: didn’t you hear the alarm klaxons screaming in your ears as you typed that doozy of a sentence? Did it ever occur to you that posting a racially insensitive caption like this, as a college president - even in a theoretically private photo album - might be a Bad Idea?
The album apparently wasn’t so private, and reporters at WBOC, a local TV station, found the pictures last week and started asking questions. Although she promptly removed the photos, they had already posted a number of them to their web site, including another photo in the album of a male tapir’s genitalia with a caption about its considerable girth. Now, I’m all for commenting on the penis size of exotic animals, but again, I’M NOT A COLLEGE PRESIDENT.
She’s in hot water for it now, but apparently she’s learned her lesson:
“I’m 54 years old, and here I thought I was trying to be up with the latest technology. I guess a little bit of knowledge could be a dangerous thing.”
So, in conclusion: lady, keep your weirdo tapir obsessions and passive-aggressive racism away from the public eye. It’s really not that hard. I’m sure you’re not really a bad person, but sometimes you have to find out the hard way that as a top administrator, you shouldn’t post incriminating pictures of yourself on Facebook/label them inappropriately. Actually, you probably shouldn’t even have an account, because then things like this wouldn’t happen.
So here’s my challenge to you, faithful readers: $5 - no, make it $10 - to the first IC student to find an incriminating picture of one of our administrators on Facebook. Seriously, I’m good for the money.
(Much love to College Ave Tipster MattyQ for the link.)
Some quick bits
I’ve been AWOL for a while, so I’ve missed any chance I had of talking about the Dalai Lama’s talk Wednesday. I’ll sum it up succinctly ? it was a real learning experience for me, and I’m definitely glad I went. If you haven’t already, check out Tricia’s article and the video we have up from his talk at the State Theater.
Not to continue on this Dalai thing, but he’s due to get a Congressional Gold Medal at the U.S. Capitol, which I’ve hear is a pretty big deal (”[Congress'] highest expression of national appreciation”). Unfortunately, China’s pissed. The NYT hedline of the AP story says China’s “warning” against it, the BBC says they’re “condeming” it, and CNN’s AP hed says they are “protesting” it. Very interesting: The BBC says this is “the first time a sitting president will appear in public” with the Dalai Lama.
I could understand China’s stance if this Dalai Lama hadn’t spent so much time in the West. The fact that he’s so well known outside of China and Tibet undermines their idea of this being the “internal affairs of China,” as Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said. But now I’m stepping on The Spectrum’s toes.
The other thing I was going to talk about before I get back to the books (and then a few days unplugged) is our local racism issue that’s going on. The Ithaca Journal published an article today about differing accounts of an Oct. 10 meeting that discussed the matters of punishment related to two students (one black, one white) at Ithaca High School. ISH principal said it wasn’t true that a white student admitted to different treatment at that meeting. I don’t think The Ithacan had anybody there to report, so at this point it appears to be a he-said she-said, of course with one party being the leader of IHS.
The Journal also has an editorial telling us what we pretty much already know: the Ithaca City School District has to get back to learning, and everybody needs to help. It reminds those who are protesting that their views have been heard, and we need to let the process work. Maybe I’m a little skeptical of the process, and though the Journal advocates for the Community Dispute Resolution Center to step in, I’m not sure what can be truly done in the meantime for the Board besides acquiesce to some of their critics. Truce isn’t the right word here.
Hopefully fellow blogger Aaron Munzer can step in with some of his own commentary on this subject. He’s been following this topic a little more closely than I have, so he can probably lay it out a bit better than I can.
Back to the books, and I’ll catch you on the other side of fall break.
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