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Twenty Years Ago...

The NEA Higher Education Conference returns to Washington, D.C., site of its first conference, to commemorate two decades of analysis of the academy.

The 20th anniversary NEA Higher Education Conference Prologue and Present: Assessing a 20-Year Journey, is scheduled for February 28 to March 2, 2003, at the Omni-Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Today’s faculty and staff would be quite familiar with the issues confronting the academy of 20 years ago as reflected in the first conference agenda in 1983: collective bargaining and academic governance, the growing influence of technology, intellectual property rights, the role of the government in higher education, and affirmative action.

Those same issues remain at the fore of discussions in the academy today.

Former NEA President Mary Hatwood Futrell, now president of Education International and dean of the George Washington Graduate School of Education and Human Development, will be a conference keynote speaker, along with NEA President Reg Weaver.

The conference will also feature a number of faculty development workshops on topics such as Designing Your Courses for More Significant Student Learning, Taking the Guesswork Out of Assessment, and Learning Across the Curriculum.

To find out more about the conference, e-mail HigherEd@nea.org, or for registration information and materials, go to www.nea.org/he/conf2k3/register.html.

Not quite a decade after the advent of dot-com companies formed to deliver college courses to the world, most of the pioneers have either gone out of business or changed their missions, reports the most recent NEA Higher Education Research Center Update: “The Promise and Reality of Distance Education.”

Reasons for the failures: low enrollment, higher costs, and more faculty time than anticipated to create and teach the courses. “Distance learning,” note the Update authors, “has proven to be no cheaper than traditional education, and it is not likely to get any cheaper.”

Copies of the Update can be downloaded at www.nea.org/he/.

NEA, in conjunction with the Center for Women’s Policy Studies, hosted a legislative exchange with Midwestern state legislators November 21 in St. Paul, Minnesota. The forum, “From Poverty to Self-Sufficiency: Preserving Postsecondary Education for Low-Income Women,” discussed implementation of the federal welfare reform law and the importance of states helping low-income women gain access to and remain in postsecondary education.