Higher Education News

World & Nation
Faculty and staff from colleges and universities across the nation are lobbying TIAA-CREF to modify its Social Choice Account to not just avoid certain companies, but to seek out companies that are strong on social concern criteria.

This effort would support such companies, provide a secure retirement, and bring the account more in line with current state-of-the-art socially responsible funds.

According to the New York Times, TIAA-CREF has agreed to start a new fund encompassing some of what is sought, under the condition that TIAA-CREF participants commit some current assets and future contributions to the fund. For more, visit www.manchester.edu/academic/programs/departments/peace_studies/fund/.

Minority students have exhibited a declining interest in undergraduate business programs in the 1990s, says a report by the Diversity Pipeline Alliance, a coalition of business and education groups working to increase minority representation in business and management education.

In 1998, notes the report, about 21 percent of the bachelors degrees earned by Black students were in business, down from 26 percent in 1989. During the same period, the proportion earned by Hispanics dropped from 23 percent to 19 percent and by Native Americans from 21 percent to 16 percent.

American research universities have made significant improvements in the emphasis they put on undergraduate teaching, according to the most recent findings of the Boyer Commission.

Chastised in the commission's 1998 report for ignoring undergraduate education, universities, the commission finds, have made "considerable headway" in achieving many of its recommendations.

Reinventing Undergraduate Education: Three Years After the Boyer Report finds that there are more undergrad research opportunities and more undergraduate seminars.

For a copy of the New Boyer Commission Report, send an E-mail request to Mary Leming at mleming@notes.cc.sunysb.edu.

Faculty & Staff
Union organizing efforts by faculty at private colleges and universities has suffered a serious setback in the wake of two recent legal decisions.

In one decision, a National Labor Relations Board director, invoking the 1980 Yeshiva decision, ruled that faculty at the University of St. Francis in Illinois were managers and exempt from federal labor law.

In the other case, a federal appeals court overruled the NLRB, which had ruled that professors at the University of Great Falls could unionize. The court said the Board lacked jurisdiction over religious institutions.

Resident assistants at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst have formed the first union of undergraduate employees in the nation's history.

The resident assistants, who act as counselors in dorms, are seeking better pay and improved working conditions. Notes one resident assistant leader, "Forming a union will get us respect."

Professional News
Women who have children early in their academic careers may be hurting their chances of achieving tenure, notes a recent report. Do Babies Matter: The Effect of Family Formation on the Life Long Careers of Women finds that women with children were 24 percent less likely in the sciences and 20 percent less likely in the humanities to achieve tenure, compared with men who became fathers during the same period.

According to the report, the problems facing women with children affect all disciplines and types of institutions. In addition, while women who waited to have children were more likely to get tenure than those who didn't, men with children were actually more likely to achieve tenure, in comparison to men without children.

The authors call on colleges to do more to help students with families. Their suggestions include, providing mentors, creating faculty support groups, stopping the tenure clock for childbirth and childcare, and providing for a "part-time tenure track."

The American Freshman 2001:
Interracial Socializing, By Sex

Source: University of California Los Angeles, Higher Education Research Institute