Advocate Online
Higher Education News
World & Nation
The American Council on Education (ACE) and the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) have created a Web site www.campusrelief.org as an information clearinghouse for faculty and staff and students affected by Hurricane Katrina.
The Web site provides a list of institutions offering temporary employment opportunities and services or resources to faculty and staff, as well as a list of institutions offering temporary enrollment for displaced students. The site also allows for colleges and universities interested in helping to fill out a form and register their institutions.
Students entering college whose parents were not educated past high school take fewer college math, science, and humanities courses and are less likely to earn a bachelor's degree than their peers whose parents did attend college, according to a Department of Education study. First-generation students are also more likely to take remedial courses, especially in math, and to have lower grades. The full report is at http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2005171.
"Science Under Siege," a report from the American Civil Liberties Union, criticizes the Bush administration for using security concerns "to impose growing restrictions on the free flow of scientific information." The report also criticizes the Bush administration for "monitoring of and restrictions on foreign university students."
"Hamstringing the free exchange of scientific ideas and information will do little if anything to prevent terrorist attacks," the report notes, while acknowledging that some information should be protected and some terrorists should be barred from the country.
TIAA-CREF has announced the hiring of a director of social investing to oversee its Social Choice Account and promote other kinds of socially conscious investing. The pension fund was responding to its members who wanted more corporate responsiblity in investment choices.
Faculty & Staff
Teaching and graduate assistants at California State University campuses have approved their first-ever collective bargaining agreement. The contract between the 6,000 graduate employees and the CSU provides for a 3.5 percent salary increase or an $8 an hour minimum effective October 1 and a $54 signing bonus by the first paycheck. Look for details of the agreement at www.uaw4123.org.
A state court has ordered City University of New York to negotiate with the Professional Staff Congress, the 20,000-member union representing faculty and staff at CUNY, on policies governing intellectual property rights that the university had unilaterally implemented.
Union leaders called the decision that the university is obligated to negotiate intellectual property rights a big win. Experts expect intellectual property rights to continue to be important in faculty contract negotiations as educational technology expands.
Professional News
The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, Joe Barton (TX-R), began an investigation this summer of three research professors who have done work on global warming and greenhouse gases.
The Congressman demanded information from the scholars about what he claimed were "methodological flaws and data errors" in their work. The researchers had authored a controversial study that reported a sharp rise in global temperatures during the 20th century. The study was an important source for a U.N. report on climate change that argued the 1990s had been the hottest decade in 1,000 years.
Barton sent letters to Raymond Bradley, a professor of Geo-Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and two other scientists demanding detailed information about the financing of their studies, the data archives for the information they used in their studies and similarly detailed information in a number of other categories.
Percentage Increase in College Tuition and Fees and Textbook Prices, 1986-2004
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
|
