Margaret Mary Vojtko was a longtime adjunct professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Earlier this month, she died penniless. She may have an even greater effect in death than in life. Yesterday, Daniel Kovalik, a union official and friend of Vojtko, wrote an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette relating the circumstances of the end of Vojtko’s life. In short: she was afflicted with cancer, and living in poverty, in a crumbling home, in conditions so poor that a neighbor had called Adult Protective Services to help her. As a “proud professional,” she didn’t want help, and asked Kovalik to help get APS off her back. That same day, she fell dead of a heart attack.

Read full article [here].
by Hamilton Nolan, Gawker.

Posted: September 19th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

A meeting between the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents and state legislators last week to find common ground in the wake of recent disputes over cash reserves. But discussions during the meeting about rethinking shared governance had some faculty feeling like they were left holding the bag for administrators’ actions – and that their decision-making authority within the system was under threat… General Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, said governance changes within the system were a matter of “when, not if,” and that university chancellors should be empowered to “truly be the chief executive officers.” Vos added: “Does the role of allowing faculty to make a huge number of decisions help the system or hurt the system?” Some faculty advocates present, including Sara Goldrick-Rab, associate professor of educational policy studies and sociology at the Madison campus, where the meeting took place, called those statements troubling.

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by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed.

Posted: September 9th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Gov. Jerry Brown has not been shy in expressing opinions about higher education over the last year, weighing in on such issues as online classes, graduation rates and tuition. But Brown has been silent about one of his most important powers to affect the UC system: appointing regents to the university’s governing board. Since his January 2011 inauguration, Brown has not named any new UC regents even though there are now five vacant seats, including three that have been empty for at least a year and a half… Last fall, in an interview with The Times when there were three UC openings, Brown said he was not rushing to fill those and expressed some frustration about how resistant to change the university seemed to be. He said he was more aware, compared to his previous governorship, about how little an appointment can affect a sprawling institution like UC. “I also know these boards are not affected by one or two people, so there’s no rush,” he said a year ago. “I am more strategic now since I understand this better, and I’m patiently looking for openings. I know that I don’t just want change for the sake of change, because that’s superficial.”

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by Larry Gordon, The Los Angeles TImes.

Posted: September 3rd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

UC Berkeley announced Tuesday similar findings that ended an investigation by the department’s Office for Civil Rights into complaints by Jewish students. Related probes at UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz also finished with findings that the schools were not at fault, officials said Wednesday. The investigations, while looking at incidents between 2007 and 2012, generally dealt with the contentions that campus protests against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians stepped over the line into such strong anti-Semitism that some Jewish students felt fearful. The federal reports found that the protests and other confrontations may have been offensive but were permissible as free speech or were not harsh enough to threaten Jewish students’ educations and safety.

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by Larry Gordon, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: August 28th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Like nearly all West Coast community colleges, CCSF is accredited by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, a private agency granted powers by the U.S. Department of Education. In a 2012 review of CCSF, the commission issued its strongest possible sanction, subsequently removing the school’s accreditation as of next July unless it can win it back. Yet in the month since that occurred, serious accusations have been leveled against the commission itself, suggesting that it didn’t follow proper procedures leading up to its removal of CCSF’s accreditation. Although the commission denies the allegations, there is definitely something amiss with the agency, and no less than the Department of Education says it is failing to follow several key guidelines. Part of the problem is that the commission is a private, nonprofit organization that insists upon operating in secrecy.

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by The Editorial Board, The San Francisco Examiner.

Posted: August 26th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

When you have a losing argument, change the subject. That’s been the approach of certain City College defenders who want the attack an accreditation commission instead of the serious problems it has identified. Now City Attorney Dennis Herrera has put his imprimatur and legal muscle behind this dubious tack of distraction that is raising the risk of a shutdown.

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by Editor, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: August 22nd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

In 2011, 58 Democrats joined with all but four House Republicans to pass an amendment that would have prevented the Department of Education from using federal funding to enforce its “gainful employment rule,” which cuts off federal aid to for-profit colleges whose students can’t repay their education debts. Maybe the GOP’s visceral animosity towards the ivory tower will convince them to abandon their for-profit friends. But given that the for-profits would almost certainly be one of the biggest losers under Obama’s plan — we’re talking about schools that educate about 11 percent of students, but generate almost half of all student loan defaults — it seems unlikely… any grading system that’s developed will inevitably face a court challenge if it’s ever used to determine federal aid eligibility, just like the court decision that ultimately scuttled the gainful employment rule.

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by Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic.

Posted: August 22nd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

President Obama… wants colleges and universities that depend on federal aid to disclose exactly what their tuition and fees cover, how many low-income students a school admits, graduation rates, how much debt students graduate with and whether they find good-paying jobs after graduation. Based on this information, the U.S. Department of Education would then rate schools. The higher a school’s rating, the more federal aid a student at that school would receive. Students at poorly rated schools would get less… The problem is that many of the things the administration wants to measure are hard to measure… The president says his proposal should appeal to both Democrats and Republicans, but already Republican leaders sound skeptical.

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by Claudio Sanchez, NPR.

Posted: August 22nd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

But will Napolitano’s background in homeland security increase the University’s involvement with the national security and big data industry? It’s certainly something Meister is concerned about, and it could make the University increasingly subject to government security, rather than especially immune to it for academic purposes. “I believe it’s a serious question for Napolitano: to what extent does the University of California want to get in on the data and analytics defense industry and to replicate, in this new age, the kind of federal support that it got from the munitions and weapons industry during the Cold War?” he says. It appears that that interest from the UC is very much a reality.

Read full article [here].
by Joel Hersch, Good Times.

Posted: August 21st, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

State auditors are required to report on colleges’ compliance with federal sexual assault reporting laws every three years, but Rendon asked that state auditors also examine whether schools were encouraging students to report assault or harassment, if campuses’ are providing sufficient counseling and resources to victims, and if school officials are referring cases to law enforcement.

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by Jason Song, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: August 21st, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.