6/29/2009 The Weekly Briefing from The Chronicle of Higher Education

[Ron Krate]

Dear Members,

FYI 

Regards,
Europe Postgraduate Student Volunteers

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 8:00 AM, The Chronicle <to...@chronicle.com> wrote:

From The Chronicle of Higher Education Monday, June 29, 2009
As Fiscal Year Ends, Big Questions Loom for Colleges' Financial Futures With the fiscal year closing June 30 for many colleges, administrators are fretting over how bad their balance sheets will look after all the numbers have been added up. The end-of-fiscal-year value of a college's net assets is just one indicator of the institution's overall health, but financially it's an important one for bondholders, credit-rating agencies, and accreditors. Compensation in the Spotlight For the Obama administration's plan to increase oversight of for-profit colleges, the rubber will hit the road in September, when negotiations begin on new regulations for the institutions. A key issue will be the rules governing compensation for recruiters, who bring students to the colleges — along with "safe harbors," as exemptions from those rules are known. IN OTHER NEWS: 70 Professors Arrested in Iran After Meeting With Moussavi Education Dept. Plan Would Make It Easier to Apply for Student Aid Advertisement Kaplan U.'s Catchy Ad Provokes a Question: Do Colleges Serve Today's Students? Kaplan University — which enrolls 58,000 students, most of them online — created a splash by airing an ad in which a professor apologizes to students for "an educational system steeped in tradition and old ideas." Is it, as the ad says, time for colleges to adapt to their students' lifestyles, rather than forcing students to adapt to lectures and campus living? "There is huge value in being able to target narrow areas — to see how well you're doing in optimal electronics, for example. You can't just pick five journals and get it right."  — Diana M. Hicks, who often writes about university ranking systems, discussing a soon-to-be-unveiled service that will analyze citation patterns for roughly two million individual articles in the archive of the scholarly-publishing giant Elsevier. The company will then report on universities' strengths and weaknesses in approximately 80,000 "distinctive research competencies." 'The Plants Speak to Us' More than a dozen students took an unusual 10-day course in traditional herbal medicine in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The University of New Mexico course, taught in Spanish, took students from the state's colonial capital to remote, impoverished mountain villages and then down to the tropical coast. Traditional healer Rosario Gaspar Lopez (right) from the town of Santiago Laxopa, Oaxaca performs a 'limpia' or spiritual cleansing. A 2-Year-College System Streamlines Student Aid so Campuses Can Focus on Counseling The 12-campus Connecticut Community Colleges system found that creating a centralized office to handle student-aid paperwork freed up aid counselors on the system's campuses to work with more students and encourage them to apply for aid they're eligible for. Since the system made the change, the number of students seeking aid has more than doubled, although enrollment has grown only about 25 percent. For Provost Who Fled Lebanon, U. of Dayton's Campus Is His 'Village' In 1976, soon after he finished high school, Joseph Saliba's father persuaded him to flee strife-torn Lebanon. He ended up in Dayton, Ohio, where he enrolled at the University of Dayton even though he spoke almost no English. Now, after serving for six years as dean of the School of Engineering, he has been named the institution's provost. Push for Greener Buildings Gains Advocates, but When Is Green Really Green? More and more colleges are contemplating net-zero buildings — buildings that would generate all the energy their users consume. That's an ambitious goal, at least with existing technology. But last year Ohlone College, a community college in the San Francisco Bay Area, opened a 135,000-square-foot health-sciences building that is essentially off the grid about half of the year. ALSO THIS WEEK: After 35 Years, an Outspoken Enrollment Manager Steps Aside Change or Die: Scholarly E-Mail Lists, Once Vibrant, Fight for Relevance CREDITS: Albertson photo by Fred Mertz; Rosario photo by Keith Dannemiller; McMillan photos from Getty Images.	Subscribe to this newsletter Subscribe to The Chronicle   CAREERS Planet of the Professors Why do doctoral students and their advisers have such different views about the graduate-research experience? MULTIMEDIA What's Next for Google Book Search? Google has scanned millions of books and made snippets available online through its ambitious Book Search program. The project has taken heat from authors and publishers. But Adam Smith, Google's director of product management, counters that point in a Chronicle podcast and says it's a good thing for academe. Tech Therapy: Building Teams — and Trust In higher education, collaboration is often held up as an ideal. But in reality, working as a team can be awfully difficult. Warren Arbogast and Scott Carlson discuss how to get different personalities to mesh — and what that has to do with Star Trek.   THE CHRONICLE REVIEW Today's Reverberations From the 60s It remains to be seen whether Barack Obama will help the United States finally transcend the divisive culture wars that have beleaguered the country since the 1960s.   COMMENTARY Trade In the Stick — for Carrots If you offered your students a $5,000 prize for the essay with the most interesting introduction, what would happen? They'd turn in papers that were far better written than those you get now. Ethics and 'Gentlemen's Clubs' Business-school students at Stetson University got a lesson in ethics when one suggested that a student-run investment program put money into a string of "gentlemen's clubs."   FORUMS Excuses, Excuses What's the lamest excuse you've heard from a student for not turning in an assignment on time?   Thanks for reading this newsletter. Please don't hesitate to e-mail me with comments, questions, or suggestions. Jasti Simmons Web Producer   NEW! The Wired Campus meets the small screen: Watch The Chronicle's latest video reports on technology on Wired Campus TV — with coverage of gadgets, classroom technology, and IT issues now showing. Information about advertising in this newsletter, or with The Chronicle online or in print is available online.
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Kind regards,
Ron Krate
Founding Head
International Professors Project
www.internationalprofs.org
www.environmentalstewardship.org