Friday, June 24, 2011
Women in Academics Report Website: Tracking the Progress of Women in Academia
Women have made tremendous progress in all facets of higher education. A half century ago women were only 36 percent of all students enrolled in higher education. In 1979, for the first time, women were a majority of the college-student population. Today women are more than 57 percent of all college students. Today women earn more degrees than men at nearly every level of higher education.
Yet in many respects the glass ceiling remains a formidable obstacle in higher education. Women make up only 40 percent of all full-time instructional faculty in American higher education. Only one of every four full professors at American colleges and universities is a woman. Less than 39 percent of associate professors are women.
In 2008, 54.5 percent of all full-time male faculty members were tenured. For full-time women on college and university faculty, only 40.4 percent had been awarded tenure.
Less than one quarter of all college and university presidents are women.
Pay equity also remains a major issue. The mean salary for a male full professor is 17 percent higher than the average salary of a woman full professor.
Clearly, there is a pressing need to continue to document the progress of women in higher education. By providing statistics and identifying trends, we will hold institutions of higher learning accountable on issues of gender equity. We hope to become an important resource for young women who are deciding where to go to college and for women professionals who are seeking faculty or administrative positions at American colleges and universities.
Women in Academia Report monitors and reports trends concerning women in all areas of higher education, discusses important issues of gender equity, reports instances of gender discrimination, and identifies the leaders and laggards among colleges and universities in creating greater opportunities for women. Special editorial attention will be paid to academic programs and other developments at women’s colleges throughout the United States.
Women in Academia Report announces significant appointments of women to positions of influence in higher education. We report important awards and grants to women scholars. We review and provide a database of books of importance to women in higher education.
We welcome your suggestions. Subscriptions to our weekly e-mail editions are FREE. Sign up today using our online form. Also, please tell your friends and associates about us.
BruCon Publishing Company
PO Box 139
Bartonsville, PA 18321
(570) 871-5329
fax: (570) 424-2027
TLT Group Inc.: Announcing a new session in the TLT Group Members-Only Summer Series!
Using Critical Reflection to Deepen Student Learning
Thursday, June 30, 2011 at 2:00pm ET
with John Zubizarreta, 2011 CASE Professor of the Year; English; Honors & Faculty Development, Columbia College
How can we get students beyond simple acquisition (and then all-too-frequent instant loss) of content knowledge? The TLT Group is delighted to welcome the expertise of John Zubizarreta, 2011 CASE Professor of the Year, to share his method of using critical reflection to deepen student learning. After highlighting some general concepts pertaining to the role of reflection, John will lead participants in an interactive exercise of critical reflection – in this case about the process of learning, focusing on ourselves as learners and learning itself. Through this activity and by John’s modeling, participants can come away with a better understanding of how to employ critical reflection as teacher as well as the impact of reflection as learner.
Free and available to TLT Group Members only.
University Business: Academics Targeted For Men Of Color
The College Board unveiled an initiative at a forum at Harvard University yesterday to improve the academic achievement of young men of color, saying that bolstering their educational success should be a national priority.
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Inside Higher Ed: 18 Sanctioned by Southern Accreditor
June 24, 2011
The Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools has put five colleges on probation, three because of financial instability and two because of questions about their institutional effectiveness, the accrediting agency's top official said Thursday. As has become common in this region, several of the punished institutions are historically black.
The regional accreditor placed or continued another 13 other institutions on warning status at its just-concluded meeting, at least two of them -- including high-profile Miami Dade College -- because they could not document that they had sufficient numbers of full-time faculty members.
Some of the actions seemed predictable given the institutions' well-publicized woes in recent months. Saint Paul's College, which the association had placed on probation last year because of its persistent financial problems, was continued for another 12 months in that status -- the accreditor's most serious short of stripping accreditation -- for falling short of the agency's standards on financial resources, financial stability, institutional effectiveness of administrators and educational support services, and qualified administrative and academic officers, among others, said Belle S. Wheelan, president of the SACS college commission. The college has made a series of steps -- most recently ending its intercollegiate athletics program -- to improve its financial standing.
The other two institutions placed on probation in part for financial instability are, like Saint Paul's, historically black colleges: North Carolina's Bennett College for Women and Tougaloo College, in Mississippi. Bennett has struggled for years with financial (and administrative) difficulties, but it was reaccredited by the Southern association in 2009. But the college ran afoul of the accreditor's standard on financial stability, said Wheelan.
Bennett's president, Julianne Malveaux, said in an e-mailed statement that the college had experienced "unprecedented expansion" in the last several years, and that she was disappointed that "in the midst of this phenomenal progress, SACS has chosen to place us on probation for several one-time occurrences that placed us in a difficult financial position in 2010." Bennett officials, she said, are confident that they will be able to demonstrate to the Southern accreditor that "the 2010 irregularities were just that, irregularities that are not part of our permanent fiscal picture or systemic in any fashion."
SACS placed Tougaloo on warning status in 2009, but reaffirmed its accreditation without sanction last June. But it, too, fell short of the financial stability standard, Wheelan said Thursday. "With a lot of these places, it's an up and down kind of thing," she said.
Beverly W. Hogan, Tougaloo's president, said via e-mail Thursday night that its officials could not "respond appropriately" to the SACS decision until they receive the official letter about the probation.
The other two institutions that the Southern accreditor placed on probation this week were both in Alabama: Shelton State Community College, which like several of the state's two-year institutions has had management troubles flowing from a widespread governance scandal in recent years; and the University of West Alabama. Wheelan said that Shelton State had been placed on probation for 12 months because of questions about its institutional effectiveness and its perceived failure to set college-level competencies for student learning. SACS placed West Alabama on probation for six months, Wheelan said, for falling short of the accreditor's standard on assuring institutional effectiveness in its educational programs.
Officials at those institutions could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Another historically black university that has had high-profile financial difficulties was one of the 13 institutions that received a warning from SACS: Fisk University. The institution has been in the headlines on and off for the last two years because of its protracted legal battle to win the right to sell off its prized collection of modern art, a move that its officials deemed necessary for its financial future.
Wheelan, who has grown accustomed to reporters' questions about the prevalence of historically black institutions on its watch lists, didn't wait for a question this time around. She explained that many of the black colleges in the region became members of the accrediting group at roughly the same time, placing them on a cycle to be reviewed (on SACS' 10-year cycle) early in each decade.
Other Actions
Birmingham-Southern College's much-publicized financial missteps -- the institution acknowledged last spring that it had for years overspent its budget by millions -- brought it a warning from Southern for financial and management concerns.
And two institutions -- Miami Dade and Texas A&M University-Commerce -- drew warnings because SACS questioned whether they had adequate numbers of full-time faculty members. Wheelan said that issues related to the potential overdependence on part-time faculty members are arising "more and more," in many cases driven by institutional efforts to cut spending. She said some cases arise, however, because institutions do not have adequate program-level data to prove that they are mixing part-time and full-time professors appropriately to "carry out their missions." In Miami Dade's case, the warning is imposed only for six months, she said, to give it time to produce such data.
A Miami Dade spokesman, Juan Mendieta, said via e-mail that the college disagrees with the accreditor's judgment and "is preparing a response with its objections."
The other institutions placed on warning status by SACS this week are:
•Barton College, in Georgia
•Bauder College, in Georgia
•Brewton-Parker College
•Florida Christian College
•McDowell Technical Community College, in North Carolina
•Mount Olive College
•Pamlico Community College
•Southern University at Shreveport, in Louisiana
•Virginia Intermont College
The Southern association also removed four colleges from its sanction list. Concordia College, in Alabama, was restored to good standing after having been placed on probation last year for financial problems (reinforcing Wheelan's point about ups and downs).
Three colleges -- Erskine College; Jefferson State Community College, in Alabama; and Randolph Community College, in North Carolina -- were taken off the warning list. Erskine had been placed on the list because of governance turmoil related to questions about the influence of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church over its operations. While SACS's action suggests its peer reviewers' faith that Erskine has worked through those issues, skirmishing continued as recently as last month over the role of the church.
Wheelan said the large number of actions the accreditor took at its June meeting did not suggest tougher enforcement of its standards, but rather just a large group of institutions up for review. The percentage of colleges placed on probation or warning was not bigger than normal, she said.
— Doug Lederman
Gale Expands Three Acclaimed Digital Collections: New Series Added to Slavery and Anti-Slavery, The Making of the Modern World and The Making of Modern Law
June 22, 2011
Farmington Hills, Mich., June 22, 2011 — Gale, part of Cengage Learning and a leading publisher of research and reference resources for libraries, schools and businesses, today announced new series for three Gale Digital Collections – Slavery and Anti-Slavery, The Making of the Modern World and The Making of Modern Law.
“We are excited to publish additional installments of these important collections,” said Jim Draper, vice president and publisher, Gale. “With these new releases, Gale continues to fulfill its mission to create essential resources for scholars and students in fields of high interest.”
Draper added: “Most of the materials in these new installments have never been digitized before or even published in microfilm, making them fresh destinations for performing in-depth research in a variety of disciplines. Now, with substantial new content being added to the collections, students and researchers have the opportunity to create important new scholarship in many areas of study.”
The new series, targeted to academic, special and public libraries, are currently available for purchase and trial and include:
•Slavery and Anti-Slavery, Part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World – Complementing Part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition, which explored the varying debates that surrounded the practice, experience and abolition of slavery in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Part II focuses on the Atlantic Slave Trade and its aftermath through a corpus of historical printed documents and manuscript collections. It documents the slave trade as a key global phenomenon with ramifications for the study of commerce, philosophical and moral issues, literature, empire, law, government and international relations. Sourced from prestigious institutions worldwide, Slavery and Anti-Slavery is considered to be the most important undertaking related to the study of slavery, as nothing comparable currently exists. Future series include Part III: Institution of Slavery and Part IV: Age of Emancipation.
•The Making of the Modern World, Part II: 1851-1914 – Following on the release of Part I: The Goldsmiths’-Kress Collection, 1450-1850, which focused on the expansion of world trade, the Industrial Revolution and the development of modern capitalism, Part II takes the series into the early 20th century. Comprised mainly of monographs, reports, correspondence, speeches, and surveys, this collection includes international coverage of social, economic, and business history, as well as political science, technology, industrialization and the birth of the modern corporation. Cross-searchable with Part I of the series, these collections combined provide access to 450 years of world history.
•The Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources II, 1763-1970 – Adding over 1.6 million pages of content sourced from the Harvard Law School Library, Yale Law Library and the Law Library of Congress, this archive supports far-reaching research in legal and social history. Scholars interested in tracing major legal topics across states and territories will find it valuable. It is comprised of United States codes, constitutional conventions and compilations, and municipal codes, and is cross-searchable with Primary Sources, Part I. Volumes in this collection are, for the most part, not digitally available elsewhere, making the collection particularly unique. The four previous components in the series include: Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926; Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978; Making of Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926; and Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources, 1620-1926.
For more information on any of these Gale Digital Collections, please visit http://gdc.gale.com. For questions or to request a free trial, please contact Kristina Massari at kristina.massari@cengage.com.
About Cengage Learning and Gale
Cengage Learning is a leading provider of innovative teaching, learning and research solutions for the academic, professional and library markets worldwide. Gale, part of Cengage Learning, serves the world’s information and education needs through its vast and dynamic content pools, which are used by students and consumers in their libraries, schools and on the Internet. It is best known for the accuracy, breadth and convenience of its data, addressing all types of information needs – from homework help to health questions to business profiles – in a variety of formats. For more information, visit www.cengage.com or www.gale.cengage.com.
Hampton University News: HU President Donates Additional Gift to Staff
June 23, 2011
Hampton University President Dr. William R. Harvey and Mrs. Norma B. Harvey, have given a $166,000 personal gift to HU to support a wage increase to all full-time permanent HU staff earning less than $8 an hour. Through this donation, 118 full-time, permanent HU staff employees will receive a wage increase equal to $8 an hour. This increase takes effect July 1.
This contribution follows the recent gift of $1 million to HU by the Harveys. In July 2006, President and Mrs. Harvey made a similar donation of $45,000 to the University in support of a five percent increase to staff earning less than $7 an hour. In total, the Harveys have gifted more than $2.2 million to the University over the past ten years.
“Norma and I have made another gift to increase the wages of hourly support staff to $8 an hour. While everyone at Hampton already receives more than the minimum wage, we wanted to show our gratitude to those staff members who serve the campus behind the scenes. These dedicated employees serve our faculty, administration and students and warrant our recognition,” said President Harvey.
Diverse Issues in Higher Education: New College Board Research on Young Men of Color Stirs Demand for Action
June 23, 2011 by Jamaal Abdul-Alim
While a panel discussion held by The College Board on Capitol Hill this week was meant to highlight a new report on the lagging rates of educational attainment among non-White men, some of the panelists questioned the need for more research on the subject.
“How much data do we need?” asked panelist Dr. Roy Jones, executive director for the Eugene T. Moore School of Education's Call Me MISTER Program at Clemson University. (MISTER is an acronym for Mentors Instructing Students Toward Effective Role-models).
His remarks came after a discussion of the new report titled “The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color: A Review of Research, Pathways and Progress,” co-authored by John Michael Lee Jr., a co-panelist and policy director at the College Board’s Advocacy and Policy Center.
Among other things, the report delineates the current landscape and projections of degree attainment among minorities in the United States, making note of the fact that, while minorities will collectively rival Whites in numbers in 2019, degree attainment among minorities, with the exception of Asians, trails significantly behind that of Whites. For instance, while 41.6 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. had attained an associate’s degree or higher as of 2008, the rate was 30.3 and 19.8 percent for African-Americans and Latinos, respectively, versus 49 percent for Whites and 70.7 percent for Asians. The report was released with two companion reports that reflect student voices on the issues as well as the federal legal implications.
“I love John’s stuff,” Jones said of Lee’s report. “But we need to apply some of John’s stuff tomorrow.”
“We know all there is to know,” Jones continued. “It’s really the will to act.”
Lee, a co-panelist, responded with a little verbal one-upmanship regarding the need for action, saying, “We need to ask what we can do today.”
Such scenes were not at all uncommon at the panel discussion, also titled “The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color.”
The event began with a DVD that featured “startling” statistics about how “our young men of color are falling behind in degree attainment,” accompanied by sad violin music and images of the men from the population in question.
But at the outset of the event, U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Illinois) shared his father’s cautionary advice about spending too much time on problems.
“He said problems are like babies,” Davis said. “If you nurse them, they grow.”
The event was rife with awkward and occasionally tense moments where speakers and audience members evoked a wide range of emotional responses—including glares and groans—with impromptu thoughts about why precisely it is that men of color, as they are called in the report, don’t collectively hold the same proportion of college degrees as White men.
For instance, after several speakers sought to impute blame for the problem on racism and what is often described as America’s “school to prison pipeline,” many in the audience groaned when Lee said, if men of color didn’t commit crimes, their incarceration rates would not be what they are.
One of the most evocative statements came from panelist Kadeem Palmer, a young Prince George’s Community College student.
When panel moderator Bob Suzuki, President Emeritus at Cal Poly Pomona, asked panelists to identify the major challenge facing members of their particular ethnic group, Palmer quickly raised his hand and took the first crack at the question.
“The biggest challenge in the classroom, in my area, is the African-American males themselves, which actually keeps us down,” Palmer said, relating a longstanding complaint that too often among African-American men, those who get a college education are seen as “Uncle Toms or betraying ourselves if we try to move on.”
That statement drew an uneasy agreement from Jones, of Clemson.
“I’m always hesitant to blame the victim for some of these issues,” Jones said. “But that’s one of the problems we face.”
Though some of the most tense moments came during discussion of the educational plight of Black males, Tuesday’s discussion included thoughts on issues that confront Latino, Native American and Asian men as well.
Dr. Robert Teranishi, Associate Professor of Higher Education at New York University, said the notion of Asians being a “model minority” overshadows many problems that exist for Asians in higher education, including lagging college completion rates among Southeast Asians.
“The ‘model minority’ is similar to other attempts to pit one minority against another,” Teranishi said, using a term that Suzuki himself popularized in groundbreaking research on the subject in the 1970s. “It’s not only problematic but counterproductive in higher education for our nation as a whole.”
Dr. Victor Saenz, Assistant Professor of Higher Education Administration at the University of Texas at Austin, said, “In short, it has become big business to incarcerate Black and Brown men.”
He said the problem manifests itself early in the educational experience of minority males, “in ways and policies like zero tolerance laws that have seeped into our schools across the country, that have turned an otherwise innocuous incident into something that can escalate for our Black and Brown young men to a (juvenile hall) and later to the prison system.”
LeManuel Bistoi, program director at Minority Action Plan within the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, said Native Americans continue to struggle to take control of their educational destinies within the framework of Western education.
“A lot of this history is a history of mistrust with the federal government, experiencing change, empowering Native communities to take ownership for education systems to bring about change,” Bistoi said. He said an ongoing challenge is for Native Americans to “look at what they can do within Western education so that it complements cultural education,” particularly as it relates to Native American practices and customs in medicine and artisanship.
One of the most humorous yet serious moments came when Suzuki asked panelists what they’d change to enhance degree attainment among minority males.
“I wouldn’t have to pay for college,” Kadeem Palmer said, evoking laughter. “It’d be free.”
He elaborated: “It’s finances. It’s one of the main reasons people can’t go to college. A lot of people can’t pursue their dreams because they can’t afford it.”
Raymund Paredes, Commissioner of Higher Education at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, said it’s important to help young people to even have dreams.
“The kids who have big dreams typically don’t get into trouble,” Paredes said. “It’s young people that don’t have dreams who get into trouble.”
Paredes lauded various model programs highlighted in The College Board’s report that show that the issues that lead to lagging rates of educational attainment among men of color are not insurmountable.
He also blasted universities that produce large numbers of teachers without ensuring that the teachers are culturally competent when they step into a classroom.
“Most teachers come from universities with Latino, African-American and Native American studies departments,” Paredes said. “But talk to the deans of the schools that produce teachers that are not culturally sensitive: ‘Do you work with these centers?’ The answer is typically ‘No.’
“That’s something that’s easy to fix,” he added.
While several speakers questioned the need for more data on the subject of educational attainment among men of color, Paredes said a need exists for more data that show what kind of progress institutions are making in this regard. He suggested easing the transition from two- to four-year colleges and such policy changes as tying higher education funding to graduation rates.
“We need to demand data where breaks are in the educational pipeline,” Paredes said. “We don’t know how well institutions do. We have a lot of colleges, four-year institutions and universities in this country that have dropout rates of 40, 50, 60, 70 percent. We need to make sure we have data and hold these institutions accountable.”
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