Category: Higher Education/System

The UW Board of Regents should end its debate over whether to turn tuition into a Robin Hood scheme aiding lower-income families at the expense of middle- and upper-income families.

Colleges and universities are anxiously taking steps to address a projected drop in the number of high school graduates in much of the nation starting next year and a dramatic change in the racial and ethnic makeup of the student population, a phenomenon expected to transform the country’s higher education landscape, educators and analysts said.

The drinking has already begun. You might be reading this first thing Friday, but somewhere on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus, students are pounding beers. Theyâ??ve been up since dawn on this â??Unofficial St. Patrickâ??s Day,â? ready to hit the bars before noon and keep it going throughout the weekend.

Independent learners are reaping a harvest of new, free opportunities either to brush up on skills or pursue an education that had always been out of reach. Through what’s known as “open courseware,” anyone with Internet access can freely tap materials from about 5,000 courses at more than 150 colleges and universities around the world.

DeKALB, Ill. â?? Under a hard, gray sleet, students at Northern Illinois University trudged back to class on Monday for the first time since a gunman burst into a lecture hall on Feb. 14 and killed five students and himself.

Some students said they felt relieved to return to their routine of classes, calculus homework and television soap operas at the student center. Others said they felt newly shaken, on edge as they sat in big lecture halls and newly watchful of everyone around them, especially anyone who arrived in class after it had begun.

The tragic killings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University have focused unprecedented attention on campus crime. But a special report issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics last week â?? updating data more than a decade old â?? found long-term declines in campus crime rates at four-year institutions, and also substantial evidence for the professionalization of campus security forces.

The fatal shootings at Northern Illinois University last week were shocking yet familiar. For the second time in 10 months, a student with a record of mental-health problems went on a killing rampage at a large public university.

Ever since a disturbed student murdered 32 students and professors at Virginia Tech last April, college administrators nationwide have been pumping more money and resources into efforts to prevent a similar tragedy on their campuses. But they cannot keep up with the rising demand for mental-health services. And disagreements over exactly how to handle at-risk students have stymied college’s efforts to allocate their limited resources.

Major commercial education companies are scrambling to ensure a steady stream of college-level students despite the credit squeeze, with some preparing to offer student loans themselves.

Security cameras and security guards alone probably are not enough to keep a campus safe in these times, one local college official said Friday, the day after a shooting at Northern Illinois University left five students and the gunman dead.

â??What it takes is to identify threats early on,â? said Mike Pieper, vice president of finance and operations at Western Technical College.

MADISON, Wis. — Before Thursday’s shooting at Northern Illinois University, leaders at University of Wisconsin-Madison continued to add security measures on campus.

The latest security measure is a campus-wide text messaging system that officials said will be launched this spring. University officials said they are making sure the system will work before allowing more than 60,000 students, faculty and staff to sign up for it.

University officials also met Friday with both law enforcement and campus groups to help make sure tragedies like the one a NIU and other campuses don’t happen at UW-Madison.

A proposed requirement that colleges warn students and employees of emergencies within 30 minutes has yet to become law. But the prospect that it might prompted sharp rebuke from campus police chiefs and other administrators here over the weekend, at a conference on higher-education law sponsored by Stetson University.

Walter L. Czerniak, associate vice president for information-technology services at Northern Illinois University, was out of town when a gunman killed five students in a classroom last week.

At even the best-prepared universities, there is no playbook for handling the crush of tough decisions that comes after a mass shooting rocks an otherwise quiet campus.

The police tape eventually comes down. But the decisions remain, often with few guideposts.

There are many students from our area who go to school at NIU.

Anywhere you go around Janesville, someone either knows a student at Northern Illinois or has a friend who does.

Former Brodhead standout Kevin Skatrud is on the Northern Illinois football team.

As a parent, Jay Spradling feels the same fear that campus shootings stir up in parents everywhere.

But as the assistant chief of police at Arizona State University, he also knows firsthand the frustration of university officials who say they can improve security, but cannot turn campuses into armed fortresses to prevent assaults like the shootings that killed five students at Northern Illinois University.

DeKALB, Ill. â?? Steve Kazmierczak, the man who walked silently into a classroom here on Thursday and opened fire, was not seen as struggling in college. He was not an outcast. And until recently, at least, he was not brooding.

DEKALB, Ill. (AP) — Steven Kazmierczak’s quiet, dependable and fun-loving exterior masked troubling details from his past that emerged as a stunned community struggled to understand what caused the 27-year-old to open fire on a class at Northern Illinois University, leaving six people dead.

A former employee at a Chicago psychiatric treatment center said Kazmierczak was placed there after high school by his parents. She said he used to cut himself, and had resisted taking his medications.

A former student dressed in black opened fire with a shotgun and two handguns from the stage of a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University on Thursday, killing six students and injuring 15 others before committing suicide, authorities said.

Even before a gunman killed six people and injured more than a dozen others in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, a small but growing movement had been underway at universities and state legislatures to allow students, faculty and staff to carry guns on campus.

Twelve states are considering bills that would allow people with concealed-weapons permits to carry guns at public universities. The efforts were sparked by the Virginia Tech massacre last April.

DE KALB, Ill (CBS) â?? A gunman opened fire on a geology class at Northern Illinois University Thursday afternoon, killing six people before taking his own life on stage as panicked students ran and ducked for cover.

NIU President John Peters said a total of 22 people were shot, including the gunman. Four people, including the gunman, died at the scene; three others died later at area hospitals.

A gunman opened fire on a large lecture class at Northern Illinois University on Thursday, killing five people and wounding 16 before taking his own life.

The university’s president, John G. Peters, described the incident as a “very brief, rapid-fire assault,” and said the campus would be shut down until further notice. He and other officials briefed reporters on the incident at two news conferences on Thursday evening.

DeKALB, Ill. â?? With minutes left in a class in ocean sciences at Northern Illinois University on Thursday afternoon, a tall skinny man dressed all in black stepped out from behind a curtain on the stage of the lecture hall, said nothing, and opened fire with a shotgun, the authorities and witnesses said.

Harvard Universityâ??s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy this evening that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online.

Peter Suber, an open-access activist with Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group in Washington, said on his blog that the new policy makes Harvard the first university in the United States to mandate open access to its faculty membersâ?? research publications.

WASHINGTON â?? The risks of a terrorist attack on a nuclear reactor on a college campus, and the potential consequences, have been underestimated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Congressional auditors say in a report.

Nearly 10 months after the Virginia Tech shootings prompted colleges nationwide to take steps to improve safety, campus leaders continue to struggle with how to prepare for unknown threats and determine when and how to inform their campuses of incidents.

That was the message delivered on Monday by the director of public safety at Princeton University and two university presidentsâ??including Charles W. Steger of Virginia Techâ??who spoke on a panel at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting here.

Ben Berg rattles off the schools he has applied to in rapid-fire succession.

There are East Coast liberal arts schools Vassar, Swarthmore and Bowdoin. There are bigger Eastern schools — Boston University, American, Cornell and George Washington. The Midwest is represented by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Carleton and the University of Chicago. The University of California, Berkeley and Santa Cruz, make up the West Coast options for the 17-year-old Edina High School senior.

Physicians and biologists speak of “systems biology” and engineers of “systems engineering.” The idea is integration. If you manipulate a patient’s potassium level, you had better worry about the impact on other organs and bodily functions. If you want a more powerful heater in your car, you should think about the whole electrical system.

In higher education, the term obfuscates as much as it enlightens. There are many different types of college and university systems in our country â?? sometimes even within the same state.

The House approved legislation Thursday aimed at curtailing rising college costs and limiting student debt.

The bill, which passed 354-58, calls on the Education Department to create a website that students and their families can use to compare the cost of attending different schools. Colleges are to be grouped according to how expensive they are and how quickly their costs have been going up.

Dear Editor: Have American universities become the new Inquisition? Is the academic establishment so afraid some of their number might deviate from the “accepted” norms of discussion and investigation that they must attack their suspect colleagues at every opportunity to keep them in line?

Professor Ann Althouse’s remarks about Kevin Barrett are not only cruel and uncalled for, they are unethical! Isn’t it the responsibility of an academic to challenge conventional wisdom when they feel it is warranted, as a growing number of academics are doing worldwide in the case of the 9/11 attacks?

The enrollment of first-time foreign students in graduate science and engineering programs increased significantly in 2006, according to the results of a National Science Foundation survey released this week. The number of students in all years of those programs grew over all by 1.7 percent in 2006.

It took the Wisconsin Legislature four months longer than scheduled to set a new biennial budget in 2007. But it gave Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat serving his second term, plenty to boast about when he called on the Star Tribune editorial board on Jan. 9 while in town to promote renewable energy with Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Excerpts of Doyle’s remarks:

Two key members of the Senate Finance Committee, which is responsible for setting U.S. tax policy, today wrote to 136 colleges with endowments of $500 million or more, pressing for additional details on their finances and signaling an interest in legislation that would require colleges to use more of their endowments to keep costs to families manageable.

Becoming one of the world’s top three public research universities – it’s alluded to in speeches and scattered throughout the media – is on the minds of administrators and right now, it may be the University’s credo.

The Board of Regents approved University President Bob Bruininks and Provost Tom Sullivan’s strategic positioning plan in June 2005, endorsing a plan to turn the University into one of the world’s leading public research universities.