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World & Nation

Faculty & Staff

Professional News

World & Nation

In a new poverty study by the United Nations, the United States fared the worst among the 17 industrialized countries ranked.

The UN human poverty index for industrialized countries finds that the U.S. has 16.5 per cent of its residents living in poverty. Sweden came in first in the ranking with 6.8 percent of its residents living in poverty.

Recent data demonstrate that, as a nation, Americans have increasingly embraced the Information Age.

The 1997 nation-wide data from the U.S. Commerce Department show a 36.6 percent penetration rate for personal computers, 26.3 percent for modems, and 18.6 percent for on-line access.

Compared to the 1994 survey results, PC ownership has increased 51.9 percent, modem ownership has grown 139.1 percent and E-mail access has expanded by 397.1 percent.

Although all income groups are now more likely to own a computer, the penetration levels for those at higher incomes have grown more significantly. As a result, the gap in computer ownership levels between higher-income households and lower-income households has expanded.

State spending on higher education grew at a faster clip than expenditures on any other budget category for the coming fiscal year.

The National Conference of State Legislatures found, in a survey based on actions in 46 state legislatures that have completed their budgeting for fiscal 1999, that states' general-fund spending on higher education rose by 6.2 percent over 1998.

Spending on elementary and secondary education, which drew the second-biggest increase, grew by 6.0 percent. States spent 4.9 percent more on prisons.

Faculty & Staff

Seventy part-time Jazz faculty at the New School for Social Research in New York are asking for support in their efforts to secure a first contract.

At issue: a fair wage, pension contributions, job security, and health benefits. You can E-mail the college's president at fanton@newschool.edu and copy: Tdubnau@local802afm.org.

West Virginia's State College System has settled a lawsuit brought by two faculty members who charged a university president with retaliation.

The two faculty members claimed that the president of Glenville State College had denied them full professorships because they had spoken out against him.

Among the faculty members' complaints was his decision to sell to a mining company 733 acres of forested land that had been donated to the college.

Professional News

A textbook wholesaler agreed last week to pay the University of Tennessee $380,000 after an audit found that several of the company's employees had for nearly a decade intentionally underpaid students for their used books.

Follett Campus Resources, one of the country's largest used-book wholesalers, will pay the university for overcharges as well as for damaging the reputation of the campus book store.

The American Sociological Association has released a new book on racial preferences in employment, described as an effort "to diffuse the rhetoric by adding the perspective of empirical study."

Realities of Affirmative Action in Employment, finds affirmative action can help remedy discrimination.

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