Citing the state’s severe budget problems, the University of California at Irvine announced that it will cut its men’s and women’s swimming and diving, men’s and women’s rowing, and sailing teams. The institution expects to save nearly $1 million as a result of the cuts. Mike Izzi, Irvine athletics director, said, “I was hoping to avoid discontinuing any of our sports programs, but the athletics department is not immune to the cuts that are occurring in the state and on our campus.”
Higher Education Quick Takes
Quick Takes
July 31, 2009
The head of a committee examining the University of Illinois admissions controversy is expected to call today for all of the university's current trustees to step aside, The Chicago Tribune reported. Abner Mikva, a former federal judge, said he would urge the panel to recommend a mass resignation when the committee meets to draft its report. The former chairman of the Board of Trustees, who is among those who sought special consideration for politically connected applicants to the university, resigned this week and encouraged his colleagues to do the same. (Note: This item has been updated from an earlier version to correct an error.)
July 31, 2009
About 130,000 college students in Illinois won't receive state financial aid grants this year because the state moved up its deadline for applications because of the economy, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. Some students lose out on aid every year, in Illinois and elsewhere, because they miss the deadline for applying, but this year's total is the most in history because the cutoff is months earlier than normal; it was moved up because the state aid budget is about half its normal size. The hardest hit students, the newspaper reported, are returning adult students and applicants from community colleges, another trend likely to be replicated elsewhere.
July 31, 2009
The American Council on Education will delay salary increases for six months, offer "early exit" packages to employees, and cut spending by 10-15 percent for some programs in the 2010 fiscal year, to weather an expected decline in revenues and shift money to key priorities of President Molly Corbett Broad, association officials told employees Thursday. Many higher education groups have, like their member colleges, been buffeted by the economy, with some cutting employees, an Inside Higher Ed survey found this week. Comparatively, ACE, higher education's main lobbying group, is in solid shape; no one will be laid off, and in fact the association expects flat spending or even a modest increase in 2010. But to focus more attention on ACE activities related to veterans, adult education, and GED completion, which Broad is emphasizing, some programs -- as yet unidentified -- will lose some funds, ACE officials said. Two employees have taken advantage of the early departure program. The council's highly visible government relations work will be unaffected by the changes.
July 30, 2009
The closure Monday of an insolvent private vocational college in Australia that caters to foreign students has renewed concerns about the regulation of private educational providers there, The Australian reported. Sterling College, which operates campuses in Sydney and Brisbane, went into "administration" (a bankruptcy equivalent) Monday, leaving hundreds of students from India at risk of losing not only their tuition payments but also their visas, the newspaper reported. A federal agency in Australia is investigating "providers of concern," and authorities are auditing 17 "high risk" private colleges in Victoria, The Australian said.
July 30, 2009
With controversy swirling around swimmers' use of high-tech swimsuits and the stumbling approach of the sport's international governing body in reviewing the swimwear, the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced Wednesday that it would ban athletes from competing in the polyurethane bodysuits. At the FINA World Swimming Championship, swimmers wearing bodysuits known as the Arena X-Glide shattered world records right and left, drawing accusations of unfairness and pleas for FINA to ban them, which it has been slow to do. The NCAA Divisions I, II and III Men’s and Women’s Swimming and Diving Committees showed no such hesitation, endorsing rules for collegiate competition that say that swimsuits must be made from textiles or a woven material. The panel also recommended that suit coverage be limited to between the waist and kneecap for men and the shoulder and kneecap for women.
July 30, 2009
Can a piece of narrative history inspired by a Hollywood screenplay be real history? That's the question raised by a dispute involving dueling accounts of the Civil War secession of a Mississippi county, The New York Times reports. As the Times tells it, the producer and director Gary Ross bought the rights in 2007 to The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), by Victoria Bynum, a history professor at Texas State University San Marcos. Ross then reportedly encouraged a Harvard historian, John Stauffer, and The Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins to write their own, sexier version of the story based on the screenplay for his movie, which Stauffer had helped write. When Doubleday published that book, The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy, this summer, Bynum bashed the book as romanticized in a three-part review on the blog Renegade South and, in an e-mail to colleagues, said she was "appalled at the manner in which these authors have written what is touted as a scholarly work. I am also deeply hurt by the manner in which they have appropriated, then denigrated, my work,” the Times reports. Stauffer and Jenkins responded on the blog Civil War Memory, writing: “Bynum sees scholarship as a form of turf warfare, with only one valid interpretation of the past, which effectively renders history useless.”
July 30, 2009
A key advisory panel for the Centers and Disease Control and Prevention recommended Wednesday that all people aged 24 and under be vaccinated against the H1N1 virus, commonly referred to as the swine flu. The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises center officials on priorities for allocating vaccines when they become available, included young people among five key populations (along with pregnant women, health care employees, caretakers of infants, and adults with chronic health disorders or compromised immune systems). This recommendation, assuming it is upheld by the CDC, is likely to increase the pressure on colleges to vaccinate their students, which is sure to present major procedural and other problems for institutions (especially those inclined to try to vaccinate students against seasonal flu, too).
July 30, 2009
The largest donor in the history of Florida Atlantic University has told the institution that he cannot fulfill a $16 million pledge he made in 2007, and that he will pay $1 million more (on top of $4 million he has already provided) to bring his total gift to $5 million, the Sun-Sentinel reported. The donor, Barry Kaye, who made his fortune in insurance, cited the economic downturn as the reason for reneging on the gift, and asked that his name be taken off the university's business school.
July 30, 2009
The city council in Santa Fe, N.M., voted Wednesday night to raise $30 million to buy the campus of the defunct College of Santa Fe and lease it to Laureate Education for an arts school set to open this fall, The Sante Fe New Mexican reported. State and local officials in New Mexico had contemplated using public money to keep the private College of Santa Fe alive, but under the plan approved Wednesday, Laureate, a for-profit company that operates campuses domestically and internationally, would use the name but create an independent arts school on the campus, with discounts for local students.
