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Higher Education News

World & Nation
Federal spending for academic research and development fell in the 2006 fiscal year for the first time in nearly 25 years, the National Science Foundation has reported.

The federal government provided $30.03 billion in the 2006 fiscal year, a decrease of 0.1 percent from 2005 after inflation. The last time federal spending on academic research failed to keep up with inflation was in 1982.

Total expenditures for academic research from all sources, however, rose by 1.2 percent after inflation, to $47.76 billion. Universities helped raise the grand total by upping their own spending to $9.06 billion. Funds from industry rose for the second year in a row, reaching $2.43 billion in 2006.

A series of new reports by the Pew Charitable Trusts show that one-third of Americans born in the late 1960s have moved down the economic ladder and make less than their parents.

Even more alarming is the finding that 45 percent of African Americans born into solidly middle-class families have fallen into the bottom 20 percent of income distribution.

Who has gained the most in the past 30 years? The families already at the top of the income charts are getting richer. The reports can be found at www.pewtrusts.org/.

A survey of top departments in the fields of science (including social sciences) and engineering finds that “few science and engineering departments have more than a single underrepresented minority faculty member.”

“A National Analysis of Minorities in Science and Engineering Faculties at Research Universities” by Donna J. Nelson, a University of Oklahoma chemistry professor, finds minority representation among the faculty ranks at all levels in 2007 varied from 2.2 percent (astronomy) to 13.5 percent (sociology).

In engineering, civil engineering, with 6.1 percent, had the highest representation, and electrical engineering, with 3.3 percent, the lowest. The survey can be found here.

Faculty & Staff
Conservatives are a small minority of the American professoriate, a recent study finds. But the professoriate also isn’t a hotbed of left-wing radicalism, say the study’s authors.

“The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” by Solon J. Simmons, an assistant professor of sociology at George Mason University, and Neil Gross, an assistant professor of sociology at Harvard, finds that the views of most faculty are better characterized as “centrist” or “center-left.”

On questions of abortion and foreign policy, the nation’s faculty leans to the left—75 percent support abortion rights; 80 percent say the President misled the American people on the war in Iraq. On other issues, the professoriate is more conservative—only 50.7 percent favor affirmative action in college admissions; less than half the nation’s faculty agrees that “business corporations make too much profit.” www.wjh.harvard.edu/~ngross/lounsbery_9-25.pdf.

Professional News
A survey by TIAA-CREF finds that 53 percent of the nation’s faculty members are “very satisfied” with their jobs and another 43 percent are “somewhat satisfied.” Only 2 percent were “not at all satisfied.”

By comparison, a recent national survey of Americans in all fields found that only 42 percent reported being “very satisfied,” with another 38 percent “somewhat satisfied.”

A survey of Black, Hispanic, and Native American college students finds that 74 percent believe colleges need to find better ways to bring students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds together to socialize and study.

The survey, reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, found that 68 percent of the college students polled said it was at least somewhat important to them in choosing a college that it “had students from a wide range of racial and ethnic backgrounds.”