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Higher Education News

World & Nation
The head of the National Library of France fears that the vast digital library being built by Google in partnership with American and British institutions, known as Google Scholar, will become a biased force in scholarship, focused too heavily on English-language publications. Jean-Noël Jeanneney, a prominent French historian and president of the national library, foresees a cultural hegemony of sorts, writing in Le Monde that “the libraries that are going to be involved in this enterprise are certainly generously open to the civilization and works of other countries….It does not matter: The criteria of choice will be powerfully marked... by the view of Anglo-Saxons, with its specific coloring with regard to the diversity of civilizations.”

Jeanneney proposes that the European Union earmark funds for European countries to build their own large-scale digital library in response, in what could become an international e-book arms race.

Chinese university students are no longer banned from marrying and having children. The Ministry of Education has announced that it will end the 25-year policy that was put into effect following the Cultural Revolution.

The ban has forced students to make many difficult life decisions, such as abandoning plans to marry, having abortions, or ending their studies prematurely.

A team of climate researchers declared at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that they had the best evidence to date that human beings are warming the globe by polluting the skies with greenhouse gases.

The scientists found that heat has accumulated in the world’s oceans in precisely the pattern that is predicted by complex computer models when they simulate the effects of greenhouse warming.

The new work extends studies done in the past, and the findings are apparently so strong that they should convince many people who have doubted whether global warming is actually occurring.

Faculty & Staff
An Arab Studies professor at Columbia University has been prohibited from participating in a New York City Department of Education training program for secondary school teachers.

Rashid Khalidi was barred from a Columbia-sponsored teacher-development workshop about Middle Eastern culture and politics, after a New York Sun article reported that Columbia professors in the Arab Studies program promote pro-Palestinian views, disparage Israel, and intimidate pro-Israel students.

A recent report sponsored by the American Council on Education and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation recommends changes for the tenure system.

The report suggests giving young professors up to 10 years—instead of six—to earn tenure; allowing faculty members to work part-time for up to five years at a time; and granting multi-year leaves to professors for personal and professional reasons.

Professional News
Forty percent of high school graduates are not prepared for what lies ahead after graduation, according to a survey released by Achieve Inc. The report notes that college instructors felt high school graduates’ greatest shortcomings were in writing and math and that students indicated it was too easy to slide by in high school. Students suggested that more academic counseling and course requirements could help to boost student achievement. The full text of the report is available at www.achieve.org.

Rising dropout rates, declining earnings for dropouts, and reduced public investments in effective second-chance efforts are just some of the problems Education Technology Services (ETS) found as it tracked the decline of high school completion rates throughout the 1990s. The report also found that more students are dropping out earlier—between the 9th and 10th grades. These findings and more can be found at www.ets.org/research/pic/onethird.pdf.

Impact of President Bush's Proposed Budget on Higher Education Programs