Higher Education Quick Takes

United Students Against Sweatshops has achieved its largest victory to date with the news that Russell Athletic will rehire 1,200 workers in Honduras who will regain jobs they lost after their factory unionized, The New York Times reported. Using pledges made by various universities to demand that companies that produce clothing with their logos meet basic standards for respecting worker rights, the student group had been able to get many of those institutions to suspend or end licensing deals with Russell.

Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican who is a leading critic of conflicts of interest in biomedical research, is focusing on the issue of journal ghostwriting. The New York Times reported that he has written to 10 medical schools, asking about whether they have policies that deal with issues raised by pharmaceutical companies ghostwriting articles that appear under the names of university researchers.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is joining Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison in announcing that it will not make the Kindle available to students until the device has improvements to be better enable blind people to use it. "Quite apart from our legal obligations, we at Illinois believe that our technology choices should be shaped by our institutional values and aspirations. We will not embrace technologies that undercut our commitment to accessibility. We will instead apply our ingenuity to technologies that enable everyone to participate more fully in society," said a statement from the university. "Like our colleagues at Wisconsin and Syracuse, we recognize the groundbreaking potential that read-aloud features have for making textbooks accessible to students with disabilities. Sadly, that potential can’t be realized until vendors of e-book readers, like the Kindle, add accessible read-aloud menus and basic navigation to their products."

Although more than half of the athletes in the Football Bowl Subdivision of the National Collegiate Athletic Association are black, leadership positions are overwhelmingly held by white men, according to a new report by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. Among the 120 universities in the subdivision, in the 2009 season there are seven African-American coaches, one Latino coach and one Asian coach -- a net increase of one minority coach since 2008. The report also notes that institutional leaders at these universities are overwhelmingly white in the bowl subdivision. White people make up 100 percent of the conference commissioners, 93.3 percent of presidents, 86.7 percent of athletics directors, 92.6 percent of faculty athletics representatives, 92.5 percent of head football coaches, and 82.9 percent of the faculty, the study found.