CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) — The American Medical Association is warning girls not to go wild during spring break.
All but confirming what goes on in those “Girls Gone Wild” videos, 83 percent of college women and graduates surveyed by the AMA said spring break involves heavier-than-usual drinking, and 74 percent said the break results in increased sexual activity.
The success of the latest phase of the college antisweatshop movement hinges, in part, on whether college officials can be assured that supporting it will not get their institutions into legal trouble.
At least eight institutions have publicly endorsed the principles behind a proposal that calls for colleges to require that apparel bearing their logos be made only at factories that pay employees a living wage and that have legitimate unions. But those colleges have stopped short of backing the proposal to the letter.
A growing number of college students are running their own businesses, educators say.
Faced with rising tuition and a fiercely competitive job market, students are eager to find ways to make their own money. Having been raised on the Internet, they’re well-equipped to build virtual storefronts. Cell phone and e-mail allow them to operate a business on the run.
About 4,000 students who took the SAT last October received test scores that were lower than they should have been ââ?¬â? some by as much as 100 points ââ?¬â? because of technical problems in the scoring process, the College Board said yesterday.
Purdue University has opened an investigation into “extremely serious” concerns regarding the research of a professor who said he had produced nuclear fusion in a tabletop experiment, the university announced yesterday.
About 4,000 students who took the main SAT college entrance exam in October received incorrectly low scores because of problems with the scanning of their answer sheets.
There may be some truth to the image of spring break as an orgy of wet T-shirt contests, booze parties and sex on the beach. But a survey finds most women (65%) don’t think such activity is essential to college life. And nearly all (91%) agree that what people see in typical TV portrayals of spring break, Girls Gone Wild videos and similar programs perpetuate a negative stereotype of women.
Daniel Vilione was frantically at work.
Vilione runs coffeehouse.com, a Web site that sells specialty coffee. On a recent afternoon, he was sorting through thousands of brochures that needed to be mailed.
The company president had to hurry. He had class in two hours.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against colleges in a case involving their right to bar military recruiters was not surprising, given that the court usually defers to the Pentagon’s assessment of its needs, legal analysts said on Monday. But one expert said he was astonished that the court would hold that Congress can make recruiter access mandatory, not just a condition of receiving federal funds.
WASHINGTON, March 6 ââ?¬â? The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a law that cuts federal financing for universities if they do not give military recruiters the same access to students that other potential employers receive. The court ruled that the law does not violate the free-speech rights of universities that object to the military’s exclusion of gay men and lesbians who are open about their sexual orientation.
It’s a big legal victory for the U.S. military.
Monday, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that colleges and universities who accept federal money must allow military recruiters on campus, or risk losing funding.
University of Wisconsin officials say they anticipate seeing expression against the ruling on campus.
In the months leading up to December�s U.S. Supreme Court oral argument in a case involving military recruiters� access to college campuses, and in the days that followed the hearing, legal experts increasingly predicted a lopsided ruling in favor of the government. They were wrong, but only in understating just how lopsided it would be.
The U.S. government can withhold funds from universities that protest the Pentagon’s ban on gay men and lesbians by denying military recruiters access to campuses and students, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that colleges that accept federal money must allow military recruiters on campus, despite university objections to the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays.
Justices rejected a free-speech challenge from law schools and their professors who claimed they should not be forced to associate with military recruiters or promote their campus appearances.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the court, said that the campus visits are an effective military recruiting tool.
A Christian group active on campuses and a student representative of religious workers in Madison responded positively last week to news that the University of Wisconsin System proposes to give dormitory advisers the same rights as fellow students.
One victim of library retooling at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been journal subscriptions.
The libraries have canceled 510 research journal subscriptions, at a savings of $374,865, since September, said Ed Van Gemert, associate director.
There was a time not too long ago when bringing food or drink into the library would have gotten a visitor thrown out.
Today, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College Library, there is actually a cafe on the main floor. Want to carry a coffee and muffin to a study room? No problem.
….The cafe is one of several changes UW-Madison library officials have taken in recent years to keep the libraries relevant, enticing and cost-effective.
Eight highly selective colleges and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation have agreed to spend nearly $27-million to improve access to a four-year education for community-college students from low- and moderate-income families.
To help propel Minnesota into the biotech big leagues, the University of Minnesota announced Thursday it wants $366 million to build five new research facilities over the next decade.
WAUKESHA – David Simpson receives what he said is an inordinate amount of e-mails from his students.
The Carroll College professor of psychology said he once received an e-mail from a student who planned to miss class to attend something like a Beach Boys concert.
But he leaves himself open to this type of informal e-mail, he said, as he wants students to know he is a student-friendly professor.
Wisconsin’s four major college athletic departments received passing grades under a new NCAA initiative that threatens to take scholarships away from teams that don’t perform up to academic standards.
The NCAA recognized 16 teams at the University of Wisconsin, Marquette, UW-Milwaukee and UW-Green Bay for high scores during the 2004-05 academic year.
However, scores for two high-profile teams, the UW’s football team and Marquette men’s basketball team, came in below NCAA requirements.
Technology is transforming how colleges communicate with high school students they are trying to woo.
The NCAA announced Wednesday that 99 teams at 65 Division I schools will be subject to scholarship reductions because of poor academic performance.
Report after report has warned that high school seniors aren’t ready for college. Some blame poorly trained teachers; others criticize students for taking easy courses. Usually, the complaints involve math and science. On Wednesday, the spotlight turned to reading.
The N.C.A.A.’s effort toward academic overhaul has resulted in penalties for the first time, but fewer than 2 percent of its teams and only a few high-profile colleges and universities were cited yesterday for failing to maintain the N.C.A.A.’s more rigorous standards.
The national effort to raise educational standards ââ?¬â? especially for the inner-city poor ââ?¬â? is besieged by advocates of mediocrity and the bad old status quo. A vivid example of that can be found in the growing number of dubious “prep schools” where barely literate athletes earn bogus grades, often by taking no real courses to speak of. The athletes can then move on to universities that care nothing about them and value winning teams above all else. This deception exploits the athletes, who will probably end up back on the streets without degrees. It also encourages young people everywhere to ignore their studies in the belief that they will one day be rich professional athletes.
Praying, shouting and waving signs, about 200 Muslims and their supporters converged on the UC Irvine campus Tuesday evening to protest a forum on Islamic extremism that included the unveiling of cartoons lampooning Muhammad.
The caricatures, first printed in European newspapers, incited riots worldwide that led to dozens of deaths last month.
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Chancellor Doug Hastad is leaving to become president of Carroll College in Waukesha.
Hastad becomes the first chancellor to announce this year that he would leave. Chancellorships turned over at five of the 15 UW institutions last year.
University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly is promising a review of all 40 felons on the universities’ payroll as of last November.
The Legislative Audit Bureau on Tuesday released a report that was requested by Republican lawmakers that detailed the felons who worked at the university and its campuses. Four of the felons were on the academic staff as of this fall.
It took just a few paragraphs in a budget bill for Congress to open a new frontier in education: Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid.
An ACT report released Tuesday found that 51% of the nearly 1.2 million high school graduates last year who took the ACT college entrance exam demonstrated the reading skills needed to succeed either in college or in job training programs. That’s the lowest in a decade, down from a high of 55% in 1999.
Whew. College applications are in and hopefuls can refocus. If you’re like me, you submitted the FAFSA (Free Application For Federal Student Aid) form in January. It’s as easy as one, two ââ?¬â? 43.
Robert Myers teaches cultural anthropology at Alfred University in New York.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) – The University of Wisconsin System, under fire for its employment practices, employs 40 felons as of this fall, four of them on the academic staff, according to an audit released Tuesday.
The nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau reviewed the system’s employment rolls after concerns were raised last year following media reports on three professors who kept their jobs despite felony convictions.
….The audit noted state statutes prohibit job discrimination based on an employee’s arrest or conviction record unless the conviction is substantially related to the person’s job.
Theo Davis, a 6-foot-10 power forward from Toronto who is one of the top frontcourt recruits in Division I college basketball, went to Lutheran Christian Academy in Philadelphia last year to get what his summer coach called “a quick fix.”
But that easy route to qualification for a college basketball scholarship appears to be in jeopardy. Myles Brand, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, said yesterday that emergency legislation would be proposed in April to give his organization the power to do on-site visits at schools suspected of lacking sufficient academic rigor. Brand’s announcement came in response to an investigation by The New York Times into Lutheran Christian and other schools built around basketball teams.
Carroll College is reaching into the University of Wisconsin System for its next top administrator.
Douglas Hastad, chancellor of UW-La Crosse, was named Monday as the new president of Waukesha’s private, four-year college.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Indiana University is joining a national effort to improve conditions at so-called “sweatshop” factories overseas that make college apparel.
IU President Adam Herbert said the school agrees “in principle” with the campaign by the Worker Rights Consortium, a group that monitors workplace conditions in developing nations.
March Madness isn’t just for basketball fans anymore.
Turns out it might be good for damage control for colleges, too.
During next month’s NCAA tournament, a series of ads touting the benefits of higher education for individuals and society will be aired by a national alliance of colleges. It will be a first-of-its-kind campaign aimed at turning around negative feelings about the high cost of college and other problems identified in a recent national public survey.
These children don’t look like college students – yet.
They’re busy finishing homework, listening to a story, playing games and talking to tutors in their after-school program at the Packer Community Learning Center.
By the time these grade-schoolers finish high school, their tutors hope, they’ll be ready for college – academically and personally.
They represent the expansion of UW-Madison’s PEOPLE program to younger children as part of its effort to get more minority and poor children in the pipeline for college.
Wisconsin residents think the University of Wisconsin System is overpriced, overstaffed and out of step with ordinary people, according to a survey by a Madison firm that is the first of its kind in nearly a decade.
More than 70% of those polled said they thought “UW campuses spend too much money on things they don’t need instead of… educating students.”
Wood Communications Group conducted the survey quietly last fall as a first step toward building support for the UW System in the business community. The firm has used the results to rally university and business leaders ever since, saying that more needs to be done to improve the system’s public image. But in recent weeks, the survey might have backfired. Word of it has spread to critics of the UW System, who view it as justification for attacks.
A survey about the University of Wisconsin System reveals that the people of Wisconsin simultaneously love the UW and also feel deep frustration about it.
The report, which was conducted last fall by the Madison-based Wood Communications Group, became public and was immediately politicized by legislative critics and Republican office-seekers Thursday.
It began as attempt to gauge UW’s support among the public and to find ways to improve the university’s standing with the business community.
With college costs continuing to rise, many students can’t avoid loans. But there are steps you can take to reduce the size of your debt.
Tom Dillon, 19, a pre-pharmacy major at the University of Connecticut, is carrying $52,000 in student loans. And he’s just getting started. When he gets his pharmacy doctorate in four years, he expects his debt to exceed $150,000.
The more Patrick Boyle read about the explosive violence erupting in the Middle East and Europe, ignited by Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed, the angrier he became.
The Educational Testing Service, the maker of the Graduate Record Exam, is delaying its rollout of a revamped test until the fall of 2007. The revised exam was supposed to go into effect in October.
Lawrence H. Summers resigned yesterday as president of Harvard University after a relatively brief and turbulent tenure of five years, nudged by Harvard’s governing corporation and facing a vote of no confidence from the influential Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, who has been embroiled in one controversy or another throughout his nearly five years in the office, announced Tuesday that he will step down in June. Summers’ resignation came a week before Harvard faculty were expected to vote on a motion of ââ?¬Å?no confidenceââ?¬Â in his leadership, the second such vote in less than a year.
Some issues commanding the NCAA’s attention short term and long term:
Say this for the 100-year-old National Collegiate Athletic Association: It’s not content to move quietly into a second century. The oft-controversial governing body breaks ground in the next two weeks when it subjects football, basketball and other teams to penalties related to players’ academic efforts.
Institutions of higher education should do a better job teaching students, making sure that they graduate with rigorous intellectual skills. But the federal government, with its dubious track record in management and efficiency, particularly in education, should be prevented from making matters worse.
Pity the poor high schooler shopping for colleges. Even the U.S. secretary of Education had trouble making a smart choice. Margaret Spellings went college shopping last year with her daughter. She discovered what parents have despaired over for years: Information on dining plans and intramural sports is everywhere, but data about graduation rates or instructional quality are hard to come by.
….The recent decision of UW-Madison student journalists to reprint a cartoon that depicted the Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban with a lit fuse pitted the right of free speech against reasonable restraint. When Muslim students on the UW campus expressed outrage, calling it a racist act, The Capital Times sided with the Badger Herald’s editors.
Like The Capital Times, I, too, do not believe the publication of the controversial cartoon was necessarily a racist act, but I also do not believe printing it served the common good.
Controversy has beset the Badger Herald campus newspaper for publishing an editorial accompanied by a cartoon of Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb. Critics have hurled several accusations at the Herald, including questions about the timing of the free speech act, the motivations of the editorial board, and the claim that the board could have achieved its purpose by describing the image rather than publishing it.
….We must resist the idea that the expression of a political idea, or a statement of criticism, or satire, should be subject to sanction or prohibited simply because one group or another finds that idea, criticism or satire offensive.
The effort to add out-of-state students at the University of Wisconsin is part of an effort to add students overall, university officials said this morning.
Regent President David Walsh and Executive Senior Vice President Donald Mash were at the Capitol this morning to speak before a Legislative panel on the university’s controversial plan to give tuition discounts to out-of-state students. The plan, they said, would increase the number of those students, who pay much more than in-state students, thus increasing the university’s overall pot of money.
One student skipped class and then sent the professor an e-mail message asking for copies of her teaching notes. Another did not like her grade, and wrote a petulant message to the professor. Another explained that she was late for a Monday class because she was recovering from drinking too much at a wild weekend party.
Jennifer Schultens, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis, received this e-mail message last September from a student in her calculus course: “Should I buy a binder or a subject notebook? Since I’m a freshman, I’m not sure how to shop for school supplies. Would you let me know your recommendations? Thank you!”
Families make a lot of sacrifices to send their children to college. They drive old cars, give up premium cable and skip their annual Las Vegas vacation. Yet, millions of families leave money on the table every year by overlooking valuable education tax breaks.
A gay film festival opened at the University of Notre Dame last week with a sold-out showing of “Brokeback Mountain.” On Valentine’s Day, Notre Dame students staged a production of “The Vagina Monologues.”
Though the events have been held for the past few years, it may have been their last time on campus. In speeches and interviews recently, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, Notre Dame’s new president, has said that staging the events on campus implies an endorsement of values that conflict with Roman Catholicism.
Two politicians believe university administrators should respond to a ââ?¬Å?higher callingââ?¬Â rather than a higher paycheck in serving the University. State Reps. Robin Vos, R-Caledonia, and Stephen Nass, R-Whitewater, have introduced two separate bills that suggest capping state-funded administrative salaries.
Yet, public education administrators already responded to a higher calling: leadership in higher education. For this civil service, top administrators deserve competitive compensation supplied by the state, not private donors.
Last Thursday, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents� Business, Finance and Audit Committee assembled to discuss lowering nonresident student tuition and adjusting UW executive salaries. The committee voted and concluded 5-1 that the tuition decrease will take effect at every UW campus except UW-Madison for the 2006-07 school year and made a unanimous decision to raise pay ranges for top administrative positions that will take be effective July 1, 2006. On Monday, Rep. Stephen Nass, R-Whitewater, announced plans to introduce a bill that would limit the arranged salary increases proposed by the Board.
The two issues here reflect very different subjects. The resolution on tuition will benefit UW schools in more ways than one. First off, the draw to UW schools will increase for out-of-state students while not decreasing the number of in-state students.
Universities should be careful when it comes to removing professors from their positions. Just because an academic is convicted of violating a law does not mean that he or she should be fired.
For instance, if a professor participates in a peaceful protest and gets arrested as many have it would be wrong to suggest that removal is warranted. Similarly, there are minor violations of the law that, while troubling, ought not end an academic’s career so long as those violations are in areas other than the professor’s fields of instruction and research.
But when a faculty member engages in serious misconduct of the sort that University of Wisconsin Medical School Professor Roberto Coronado has been convicted of committing, the UW Regents have no choice but to act swiftly and decisively.
The decision of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents to cut tuition for out-of-state students by $2,000 per year was more than just misguided.
At a time when top graduates of Wisconsin high schools are having a harder and harder time getting into the UW, and finding it difficult to meet rising tuition costs once they have been admitted, the regents should not be coming up with ways to make it easier for students from outside the state to get a quality education.
