Higher Education Quick Takes

In today's Academic Minute, Jennie Brand, associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles, takes a look at the effects of job loss on single mothers. Learn more about the Academic Minute here.

College of DuPage's full-time faculty union has voted "no confidence" in college President Robert L. Breuder, 189 to 53. Glenn Hansen, president of the National Education Association-affiliated union and a DuPage photography instructor, said Breuder has contributed to an atmosphere of "distrust" on campus. He cited a recent controversy in which the president was revealed, via a leaked email, to have planned to ask the state of Illinois for $20 million in pre-appropriated funding for a building that already had been built using college money. Breuder planned to say the money would go toward another new, $50 million teaching and learning center, even though the estimated cost of construction was only $30 million. Breuder said he was being creative about how to obtain once-promised funds, and the college says that if it ever receives that $20 million, it will be used to "scale" the center plan. (Note: This sentence has been updated from an earlier version, to clarify that the college would use the funds for the center.) But critics said the president was being greedy at the expense of taxpayers.

Joseph Moore, college spokesman, in an email attributed faculty tensions to union contract negotiations going back to 2011, and said that the recent vote was limited to full-time faculty only (the college says it has more than four times as many adjuncts as full-time faculty members, 1303 compared to 305, respectively). He continued: "Overall, the campus climate, as measured in 2014 by a nationally normed employee satisfaction survey administered by an outside agency, is excellent, with scores for 'healthy campus climate' now tying our all-time recorded high.”    

Clemson University has suspended an online Title IX training program after the university "learned of concerns about some anonymous questions in the module for undergraduate students," the university announced Thursday. The program, which undergraduates were required to take, included anonymous survey questions asking students about their involvement in athletics and Greek life, their drinking habits, and their sex lives. “The questions are a part of the training so that you may get a sense of the behaviors and experiences of other Clemson students,” said an email from the university, obtained by Campus Reform. “Often, students have an exaggerated perception of the behaviors of their peers, so these questions are in hopes of clarifying those misconceptions.”

The university said that individual responses to the questions were anonymous and could not be seen by Clemson or the program's vendor CampusClarity. "We have suspended the training until the content is further reviewed and revised to ensure that it meets our goal of making Clemson a safer campus for all students, faculty and staff, while also respecting individual privacy," Shannon Finning, dean of students at Clemson, said in a statement.

Ice cream maker Ben and Jerry's is mulling whether to change the name of one of its flavors after anti-hazing activists said the flavor made light of dangerous hazing incidents on college campuses. "Hazed & Confused," a blend of hazelnut and chocolate ice cream that was released in February, is not a reference to hazing, a company spokesman told Bloomberg, but instead refers to the popular 1993 Richard Linklater film Dazed and Confused and the ice cream's featured ingredient. But when Lianne and Brian Kowiak saw an ad for the flavor six months after its release, they said they were "shocked" and "dismayed." The couple's son died during a hazing ritual in 2008 at Lenoir-Rhyne University.

Hank Nuwer, an anti-hazing activist, told readers of stophazing.org to contact the ice cream company with their complaints. Ben and Jerry's told Bloomberg that it only received three emails, but it will consider a name-change anyway. “You hear about things like institutional racism and people will say, ‘You can’t see it because you are living in it, you were raised in it, you were born in it,’” a spokesman said. “This in no way was in reference to hazing at Ben & Jerry’s, but were we doing something that we should have been more aware of?”