Friday, August 27, 2010
Microsoft at Home: 4 power tools for students!
•Microsoft PowerPoint 2010
•Microsoft OneNote 2010
•Microsoft Office.com images
Faculty Focus Alert Whitepaper: Effective Retention Strategies for the College Classroom
A 47-page white paper • $169
Many faculty members believe that, when it comes to retention, it is the students’ responsibility to “retain” themselves by doing the work that is assigned in a course and achieving passing marks on tests. This is certainly the traditional view, and there is much validity to it.
Some faculty members fear that focusing on retention means that academic standards will have to be lowered. However, the growing focus on student success and retention involves an increased awareness of the processes of education, rather than merely on assessing learning outcomes.
Increasingly, colleges and universities are expected to document the efforts that they are expending to help students make it from admission through to graduation—whether this information is collected by accrediting agencies, potential donors, or by governmental authorities. Faculty members are instrumental to this effort.
This white paper explains 12 specific things faculty can do to improve retention, while also covering:
• Why retention matters
• Why faculty members are central to campus retention efforts
• How to improve retention without sacrificing standards
• The relationship between meaningful coursework and retention
• Effective retention interventions to use in the classroom
• Strategies for getting to know all the students in your classes
• Advice on retaining today’s Millennial students
• Ways to “frontload” assistance in a semester
• How to make retention efforts more “intrusive”
• The connection between student retention and job security
• How retention efforts can improve student evaluations
• Creating an “endowed chair” in your department to support retention
If you have been asked to become a part of a retention effort on your campus, you’re not alone. This 47-page white paper provides the guidance you need.
Inside Higher ED: A Recovery at Risk: Delgado Community College - New Orleans, LA
A Recovery at Risk
August 27, 2010
Five years after Hurricane Katrina left Delgado Community College underwater and in shambles, the largest institution of higher education in New Orleans is beginning to look like its old self again. Student enrollment and the number of full-time faculty members are now greater than they were before the storm. Demolition of the last few damaged buildings and their reconstruction on the college’s main City Park Campus are imminent.
Many Delgado administrators and instructors are hesitant to talk about the storm and their rebuilding efforts these days, either because they still get emotional about the subject or they are simply tired of being asked about it all the time. As bad as the natural disaster was, some now see a financial disaster looming that could undercut their post-Katrina progress.
Ron Wright, Delgado's chancellor, is one of those who don't like to talk about Katrina much. And with good reason: he was not the institution’s leader when the hurricane hit. He took the job of chancellor two years ago, coming from Cincinnati State Technical & Community College. And though many might have shied away from such a role, especially at a time when the college was struggling to win back students and faculty, Wright said he reveled in the opportunity.
“I’m a community college graduate,” Wright explained. “I graduated from a two-year school and ended up with an Ivy League education. I understand the heart and soul of the community college movement. This was just the greatest opportunity I had ever considered. The idea of coming and helping a college reestablish itself as a leader in the community college movement and as a vehicle helping people after the storm recover and regain life skills was powerful. If it weren’t for these challenges, what would be the fun of waking up every day?”
In the past two years, Wright has overseen most of Delgado’s repopulation. In fall 2004, Delgado served nearly 16,700 credit-seeking students. The year after the storm, in fall 2006, the college’s overall enrollment dropped to about 11,900. This year, its enrollment is at an all-time high, around 18,600.
“We made the pitch for students more than usual,” Wright remembered. “I went on several radio stations, cable access shows and community news shows. I went to churches, essentially preaching the gospel of getting an education. I think we did a good job of getting people to hear the story of Delgado and how we can help them.”
Numbers of faculty have experienced similar growth. In fall 2006, a year after the storm, there were 334 permanent full-time faculty and 248 adjuncts. Now, there are an estimated 348 permanent full-time faculty and 483 adjuncts. Though also evidencing a recovery of professors, some of the growth in faculty, especially adjuncts, can be attributed to Delgado’s recent absorption of a local branch of Louisiana Technical College.
Another challenge, beyond attracting both students and instructors back to the college, was giving them a place for teaching and learning to happen. Delgado suffered an estimated $58.9 million in physical damage and received nearly $62.6 million in federal funds for its losses. Last year, though, Delgado had to turn away students for the first time in its history — about 1,500 of them — because around 42 percent of its main City Park Campus was still unusable, four years after the hurricane.
This year, however, all comers were welcome at Delgado. Its student services building, student life center and a major instructional building finally reopened this spring and summer. At present, three more storm-damaged buildings on the City Park Campus are awaiting demolition, and four others are in stages of construction.
“It’s not nearly as bad as it used to be,” Wright said of the main campus. “When I arrived here two years ago, it used to be a war zone. There were buildings still in collapse, buildings that you could still look in and see the devastation and what needed to be repaired or replaced.”
Though certainly pleased with how far the college has come, Wright much prefers to talk about where it is going. Now that Delgado has Katrina mostly behind it, Wright has already identified another oncoming storm, a metaphorical one this time — severe state budget cuts.
“A 38 percent cut to our budget will cause much more devastation than what Katrina did,” said Wright, referring to a potential figure that some state officials have peddled as Louisiana hopes to fill a major budget deficit. “We’re about to cut the heart and soul out of what we do. We’re going to have to stop some of the forward progress we’ve been making since Katrina. … Now we’re in the same boat as every other community college in the country. It’s just that we happen to have been through a natural disaster.”
Wright said he was unsure whether having not been around for the storm will have a positive or negative impact on his ability to lead Delgado into the near future, given the prospect of having to cut back on programs the college just recently brought back to their pre-Katrina health.
“I can be more cold and calculating with what we have to do with these budget cuts than people who went through the emotional story of having to recover after Katrina,” Wright said. “So many people have emotional ties to things that I guess I can make a more detached business decision. I think that’s a good thing, but it’s not always seen that way by the people I work with and my leadership team.”
Deborah Lea, Delgado’s vice chancellor of learning and student development, has a different take on life at the college after the storm. She has been at Delgado for 32 years and noted that her Katrina experience will always influence her decisions at the institution.
“It’s so surreal that unless you experienced it, you don’t know what it’s like,” Lea said. “I wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t for Katrina. We are who we are now, and it’s because of Katrina. We’re stronger than we ever were before. You can’t go through what this college, this community has gone through and not let it affect you. For instance, I never would have been vice chancellor.”
Before Katrina, Lea was director of curriculum and program development and a professor of radiologic technology. When the storm hit, due in part to a mass shuffling of administrators and faculty, she was thrust into her current position, helping instructors and students continue taking courses online despite the severe damage on the college’s campuses.
“I’m an x-ray tech,” Lea explained. “I never thought I’d be in the administration at a community college. The storm was a very empowering experience. I made decisions. I learned how to make decisions. That’s what it helped me to do. Before, I would work and take a long time to come to a decision. … Now, I’m so empowered. I can always close my eyes and hear [our former chancellor] say, ‘Debbie, make the right decisions for the right reasons and you’ll never be wrong.’ I embrace that.”
Lea argues that moving forward in the face of severe state budget cuts, with the hindsight of having lived through Katrina, gives her both a sense of duty and perspective.
“Education always gets the hit in Louisiana,” said Lea, noting that it and health care are two of the major state spending items not protected by its constitution. “I don’t think it’s the right thing to do. But, when faced with the decisions that have to be made, hopefully we’ll endure. I feel supported by what we have gone through by saying we’ve survived.”
Joan Hodge, professor at Delgado’s Charity School of Nursing, recognized a certain twist of fate in her college’s state five years after Katrina.
“We were so worried if we could survive at all,” Hodge said. “Now, we’ve survived the flood. We’ve increased enrollment, and now there’s a different problem with the potential cutting of our budget. It’s a double-edged sword. We’re glad that we lived to see this and that we’re surviving, but it’s just one of those things. This too will pass, and we’ll see a better day. We’ll be stronger and live through these budget cuts. I mean, you’re always adjusting to adapt to get by the next crisis.”
— David Moltz
Inside Higher Ed: In Katrina’s Shadow: Five years after storm, New Orleans colleges work to rebuild enrollment, faculty and – in some cases – trust
August 27, 2010
These are not the sorts of road trips college kids like Darryl Phillips dream about.
Forced from his home in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Southern University at New Orleans student fled the city to enroll at Texas Southern University. For the next two years, Phillips would return to New Orleans about three days a week to help his father repair their damaged home, and he still remembers the darkened streets and the stench of something he still can’t quite describe.
“At nighttime, you’d hold your hand in front of you, and you can’t see your hand in front of [you],” he recalls. “The smell was horrible … I don’t even know a word to explain it to you.”
But Phillips, like thousands of others, has returned to New Orleans to finish what he started at Southern University, or SUNO, a historically black campus that many thought might not still be operating today. There are new faces now, and Southern feels different too. Five years after the worst natural disaster in the country’s history upended Phillips’s life, he still attends some classes in makeshift trailers that have taken on a haunting permanence.
And he feels lucky to be alive.
“I just have to take it day by day. That’s life,” says Phillips, 25. “Sometimes you get dealt a deck of cards that’s a good hand, and sometimes you get a bad hand – just have to know how to work it.”
“We have to keep in mind and remember the ones who have passed [away] and went before us,” he adds, “and we have to continue to keep pushing.”
***Photo: Southern University at New Orleans Southern University at New Orleans took a beating during Hurricane Katrina, and some still fear for the university's continued survival.***
Stories of inspiration aren’t hard to come by in New Orleans, where locals have used the improvisational skills of jazz giants to reconstruct a city and its system of higher education. But there are still plenty of sour notes to be heard. That’s in large part because it wasn’t just buildings that were damaged or destroyed in Katrina’s wrath; in some cases, trust was a casualty, too.
That frayed trust is still pronounced at Southern University, where many felt early on that policymakers would use the crisis to bring about the closure of an institution often criticized for low graduation rates and subpar outcomes.
“It is very difficult to rebuild trust,” says Victor Ukpolo, Southern’s chancellor. “Credibility is something we have to use to rebuild trust. If you ask me what’s my greatest challenge now, it’s the rebuilding of trust between the state and the campus community, moving us to be able to get where we need to.”
Even now, however, there’s talk of whether Southern University can remain an independent entity. This spring, a draft plan for greater collaboration among Southern and Delgado Community College was widely interpreted as a pathway toward a merger between the two-year and four-year institutions.
“We don’t believe that anyone is going to succeed in closing this institution,” Ukpolo says. “Since [the university’s] inception there has been talk about 'Do we need it?' But we’re still here.”
Buoyed by the construction of new dormitories, Ukpolo envisions a renaissance at Southern, which he sees transitioning from a commuter campus into a residential one with greater services aimed at improving student retention. Others, however, aren’t so sure. Indeed, faculty recently voted “no confidence” in Ukpolo and his administration, citing a lack of progress in rebuilding the campus or restoring 22 programs that were “unnecessarily and unreasonably terminated” after the storm.
George Amedee, president of the university’s faculty senate, views the merger talks and the introduction of more stringent – although still low – admissions standards as part of the “slow death” of the university.
“Everyone is happy about dressing up the campus and the dormitories, but the question is who are the dormitories being prepared for? If they are being prepared for folk from the two-year college and not the students we serve, there are some questions there,” says Amedee, a political science professor.
If Southern University faculty are concerned about the direction of their campus, they have something in common with professors at the University of New Orleans, which is part of the Louisiana State University System. As the Louisiana State campus works to rebuild from disaster, it has been undercut by a series of budget cuts that are seemingly without end. Having already endured cuts of 25 percent in the past several years, the university – along with other public institutions, including Southern – is drafting plans to cut as much as 35 percent more in the next fiscal year.
“Students are not getting the classes they want. Class sizes are increasing, and now they are not getting the programs they want either,” says Neal Maroney, faculty senate president and an associate professor of economics and finance. “What I thought was a big hump to get over [after the hurricane] is nothing compared to what is coming up. I thought Katrina was a challenge, but this budget situation is horrible.”
So horrible, in fact, that budget-cutting proposals led to something of a showdown between Maroney’s former dean and Timothy Ryan, the university’s chancellor. James Logan, who was removed as dean earlier this month, says his ouster resulted in part from differences of opinion he had with Ryan on how best to cut the College of Business’s budget. Logan says he argued for preserving popular majors like finance and marketing, rather than moving toward the chancellor’s favored idea of a more general business degree with various specializations.
“I thought what we had done was to give him an alternative that was better,” Logan says. “He basically told everybody else that he knew more than everybody else. I think the people who are going to pay the price [are students], and they are not going to be able to get jobs.”
Ryan was not made available for comment, and university officials said he would not discuss “personnel matters.”
“All [budget reduction] plans went through a very specific process of creation and review that was adopted by the University Senate, and we have a high level of confidence that the plans best serve our students well in the face of continued constraints,” Mike Rivault, a university spokesman, wrote in an e-mail to Inside Higher Ed Thursday.
For Logan, the post-Katrina era has been heart wrenching. While some faculty left for good after the storm, those who stayed truly believed in serving an urban area with a large population of African American and first generation students, he says. Now that mission is imperiled, Logan says.
“We really thought we were building something that was worthwhile,” Logan says with a tone of resignation.
There were tensions at the University of New Orleans before the flood waters had even dried. Citing financial exigency, the university placed employees on lengthy furloughs that some professors interpreted as tantamount to termination or forced retirement. Among them was Joe Murphy, a physics professor who – displaced by the storm – moved to live with family in Slidell, La., where he now has his own home.
“The way it was handled in a way hurt me more than anything else,” recalls Murphy, who was a faculty member at New Orleans for 37 years.
Like many who would be forced to take one-year furloughs, Murphy found out he was on the list through an e-mail that – without naming professors – provided the salaries and departments of those who’d be targeted.
“When I looked at the salaries, I knew immediately who the people were, including myself,” says Murphy, who retired rather than take a furlough.
Murphy had already made it known before the storm that he planned to retire within a few years, but he says he felt shabbily treated and insulted by the way his final months transpired. Not long after, he received a congratulatory letter on his “retirement.”
“I felt like somebody was rubbing salt in my wounds,” he says. “You’re congratulating me on my retirement, but you’ve forced me to retire.”
Those wounds are still open on some campuses. The American Association of University Professors censured the University of New Orleans and three others for violating faculty rights in Katrina’s aftermath. While Tulane University and Southern University have since been removed from the censure list for taking corrective action, the University of New Orleans and Loyola University New Orleans remain censured.
Robert O’Neil, who co-authored a report for the AAUP on the treatment of faculty after Katrina, says the censures demonstrated that the academic community – while sympathetic – would not sit back and allow tenure and due process rights to be violated, even under extreme circumstances.
“Censure is a very serious sanction, and it is not taken lightly by any of the people I’ve known who have been subject to it, and the hope is for redemption through removal,” says O’Neil, a former president of the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin System, who also directs the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression and serves as general counsel to the AAUP.
The censured institutions have denied wrongdoing.
Rebuilding Loyola
And if there was a city, who would want to come to it? Indeed, images of devastation, stories of criminality run amok and allegations of police brutality are not the kind of selling points a Jesuit institution like Loyola includes in its promotional materials.
“These are very vulnerable students between 18 and 22 years of age,” Kvet says. “Would parents allow them to come back into the city with all the graphic images [on TV]?”
To a significant extent, the students have come back. Loyola projects an enrollment of 5,100 students this fall. While that’s down from the pre-Katrina enrollment of nearly 5,750, the university is bringing in ever larger freshman classes to bolster its numbers. And while Loyola took criticism for laying off faculty in the storm’s wake, the university has hired aggressively and now has more full-time professors than it did in the year before Katrina hit.
The Rev. Kevin Wildes, Loyola’s president, says the hurricane forced the university to think seriously about what its mission was. That contemplation led to some painful choices and program eliminations, including those in elementary education and computer science. At the same time, however, the storm inspired university officials to increase Loyola’s emphasis on service learning opportunities and led to the launch of an interdisciplinary minor on the study of New Orleans.
“It’s not exactly the presidency I had in mind,” Father Wildes says. “But anyhow.”
Marvalene Hughes, who took over as president of Dillard University just before Katrina, was similarly surprised by the trajectory her presidency took. Indeed, evacuating students from campus was among her first duties. Retelling the story of those tense days, Hughes says, "It's a time that I hope I never fully relive again, because it was frightening."Since that time, Hughes says she has seen the campus bouncing back. Demolished buildings and flooded grounds have given way to new construction, including the development of a long-awaited student union, complete with a theater and bowling alley. "It certainly feels like a different day," she says.
Private, tuition-driven universities like Loyola have faced their own peculiar challenges in Katrina’s aftermath. Ed Kvet, the university’s provost, recalls the complete uncertainty Loyola officials had in the weeks and months following the storm.
Iza Wojciechowska contributed to this report.
Katrina By the Numbers
http://www.slideshare.net/ccharles/inside-higher-ed-katrina-by-the-numbers-chart
SOURCE: Individual Colleges
*Due to incomplete data, 2006 numbers were provided.
**Includes funds for lost revenues, physical damages.
— Jack Stripling
Alumni of Historically Black Colleges and Universities invited to audition for the HBCU Alumni Choir
August 24th, 2010
By Patrick McCoy, Kennedy Center Examiner
WASHINGTON, D. C.-In addition to the Third Annual 105 Voices of History Concert on September 19, 2010 at The Kennedy Center featuring our nation's most talented students from the 105 Historically Black Colleges and Universities, alumni from these institutions are invited to audition for a HBCU Alumni Choir! This choir will render music for The Annual Celebration Service of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Legislative Conference. The celebration will be held on Sunday, September 19, 2010 at Metropolitan A. M. E. Church at 9:00 A. M.
Distinguished conductor, pianist and composer Roland M. Carter will be the direct the HBCU Alumni Choir. Dr. Carl Haywood of Norfolk State University, Professor Damon Dandridge, Former Conductor, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania and Professor Edryn Coleman, Lincoln University of Pennsylvania will serve as the HBCU choir coordinators. Will your university have a voice in the choir? Do you know a graduate of a HBCU in the Washington, D. C. or surrounding area?- Howard, Hampton, Virginia State, (Go State!) Lincoln, Cheyney, Morgan State, etc. Check out the information and represent your school with your voice!
Audition Date: September 10, 2010 6:00 - 8:30 (10 minute slots)
Rehearsal One: September 11, 2010 / 9:30-noon
Rehearsal Two: September 16, 2010 / 6:30 -9:00 PM w/ Roland Carter
Rehearsal Three: September 18, 2010 / 9:00 - 11:30 AM
Celebration Service: September 19, 2010, 9 AM
Metropolitan A. M. E. Church "The National Cathedral of African Methodism"
1518 M Street, NW-Washington, DC 20005
The HBCU Alumni Choir directed by Roland M. Carter, distinguished composer, pianist and educator
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