July 25, 2008

U. of Colorado Says Proposed Ban on Preferences Could Affect 100 Scholarships

An analysis by the University of Colorado system has determined that some admissions programs and up to about 100 donor-sponsored scholarships would need to be altered if state residents vote this fall to ban public colleges and other state and local agencies from granting affirmative-action preferences.

A statement issued by the system says that its undergraduate and graduate admissions programs now involve two levels of review. Race, ethnicity, and gender are considered “secondary qualifying factors,” but their consideration would be ended if the ballot proposal, known as Amendment 46, passes. (Other “secondary qualifying factors,” such as work or research experience, socioeconomic background, legacy status, and first-generation college status, could still be considered.)

The statement says it remains unclear how the proposed ballot measure would affect about 100 donor-sponsored scholarships, mainly at the system’s Boulder campus, that are awarded based on eligibility criteria that consider gender, race, or ethnicity. Should the measure pass, the statement says, the system and its foundation would work with donors “to preserve the spirit of their financial contributions” while complying with the law.

The statement says that the measure’s passage “would have no effect on outreach programs aimed at recruiting high-school students, or campus services such as academic or career advising, orientation, and tutoring, because these programs are open to all students.”

The system’s statement quotes its president, Bruce D. Benson, as saying that, whether or not the measure passes, the system “will continue to regard diversity in all its forms.”

The Daily Camera, a Boulder-based newspaper, reported on Thursday that the chairman of the system’s Board of Regents had donated $400 to the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative Committee, the campaign group backing the proposed amendment. —Peter Schmidt

Campus Shooting in Phoenix Stemmed From Longstanding Feud

The shooting on Thursday at South Mountain Community College, in Phoenix, resulted from a longstanding feud between the alleged gunman and one of his victims, according to The Arizona Republic. The two other victims were bystanders.

“This was not a random act against the school or a classroom,” Reuben Gonzales, a Phoenix police detective, told the newspaper. A college spokesman said police and campus-security officers responded within a minute of receiving 911 calls about shots being fired in a computer lab, according to the Republic.

The police believe the alleged shooter, Rodney Smith, is a former student at the college, according to the Republic. Mr. Smith, who is 22, was arrested shortly after the shootings yesterday. His intended victim remains in critical condition, while the other two victims were in stable condition today, according to the Associated Press. —Elyse Ashburn

Report Ranks States by How Well Black Males Fare in Their High Schools

A new report by the Schott Foundation for Public Education ranks the states on the graduation rates of black males in their high schools and calls for new efforts to close achievement gaps.

The report lists Michigan as the state with the lowest high-school graduation rate for black males. As of 2006, 33 percent of the black males in its high schools graduated on time, compared with 74 percent of the state’s non-Hispanic white male students. Also on the report’s list of the 10 states with the lowest high-school graduation rates for black males (in order of lowest to highest) were Wisconsin, South Carolina, Louisiana, Florida, New York, Nevada, Illinois, Georgia, and Wyoming.

“The worst problems are concentrated in a few large metropolitan areas,” the report says. “Specifically, New York City, Chicago, Detroit, and Dade County [Miami] fail to graduate the great majority of their black male students with their peers.”

The report blames the performance gaps that it documents mainly on the poor quality of many of the schools where black students are concentrated, arguing that “black students in good schools do well.” In most of the country, it says, black males are a third as likely as white males to have highly effective teachers.

Among other recommendations, the report calls for efforts to monitor the distribution and use of education funds in states where less than half of black males graduate or where the graduation-rate gap between black and white males exceeds 15 percentage points. —Peter Schmidt

Randy Pausch, Computer Scientist Famed for His 'Last Lecture,' Dies

More than a year after he was given six months to live, and after 10 months during which he touched millions over the Internet with his last lecture and helped write a best-selling book about life, illness, and hope, Randy Pausch died today, the Associated Press reported. Mr. Pausch, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, was 47.

In September 2006, Mr. Pausch was told that he had incurable pancreatic cancer. His last lecture, at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007, about achieving childhood dreams, drew international attention and was viewed by millions on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet.

It also spawned the book The Last Lecture, written with Jeffrey Zaslow, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Last month Mr. Zaslow told an audience of college officials at The Chronicle’s Executive Leadership Forum that Mr. Pausch had given him information for the book while riding his bicycle. Mr. Pausch donned a headset and spoke to Mr. Zaslow over a couple of months in sessions that totaled 53 hours. He also revealed that Mr. Pausch’s health had deteriorated sharply in recent months.

Mr. Pausch said he felt awkward about his fame, but he did use his influence to lobby Congress for more federal support for pancreatic-cancer research. He also appeared on Oprah and other TV shows. He even got a small role as an extra in a new Star Trek movie.

In his lecture and book, Mr. Pausch talked a lot about the need to have fun in life. “I mean I don’t know how to not have fun. I’m dying and I’m having fun. And I’m going to keep having fun every day I have left. Because there’s no other way to play it,” he said in his Carnegie Mellon lecture. “You just have to decide if you’re a Tigger or an Eeyore. I think I’m clear where I stand on the great Tigger/Eeyore debate.”

In honor of Mr. Pausch, Carnegie Mellon plans to name a footbridge after him. The bridge will connect the university’s Gates Center for Computer Science with the Purnell Center for the Arts. Hilary Robinson, a university dean, told The Chronicle that the bridge symbolizes Mr. Pausch’s commitment to an interdisciplinary approach to computer-science education.

Today Mr. Pausch’s home page at Carnegie Mellon could not be opened, probably because it was overwhelmed with traffic from all over the Internet. —Josh Fischman

Russian Education Minister Calls for Pruning Vast State Higher-Education System

Moscow — After years of financing a huge number of obscure research institutes and scientific labs at second-tier universities, Russia’s ministry of education threatened this week to cut state spending at many of them, while diverting money to the most competitive.

Russia’s state institutes, many of them relics of the Soviet research model — such as an institute on the flu in St. Petersburg, or an institute on internal combustion in the southern city of Ufa — have been augmented by new private universities that also have sought state support.

The minister of education and science, Andrei Fursenko, said the excess must be pruned for competitive reasons. Mr. Fursenko said that 80 percent of the roughly 1,000 higher-education institutions do not innovate or conduct useful scientific research.

“In Russia today only 15 to 20 percent of universities can be competitive,” he said. “There should be a maximum 50 universities and 150 to 200 institutes of higher education left in the country.” The rest, he said, should become branches of major universities, shift to vocational colleges, or shut down.

Some university directors and professors welcomed the reform. “Unfortunately research activity at universities was weak in both Soviet and post-Soviet times,” Yevgeny Yasin, research director of the Higher School of Economics, and a former minister of the economy, said in an interview. “Russia has very few really progressive research universities.”

The president and owner of the Nizhny Novgorod Institute of Management and Business, Alexander Yegorshin, said that his private college could survive without state subsidies, and that those that cannot should close.

“Since the government let the genie out of the bottle, and let us create private institutes, it will be impossible to pull us back into the system,” he said. “We are capable of financing and developing our scientific research without help from the state budget.” —Anna Nemtsova

U.S. Commerce Department Seeks Comments on 'Deemed Exports'

Washington — The U.S. Department of Commerce is inviting comments through August 18 about how it could improve and modernize its “deemed-export” regulations. They restrict citizens of certain countries, like China and Iran, who are studying at American universities from participating in research projects with military applications.

The existing rules are ineffective and wasteful, concluded an advisory committee made up of academic and industry leaders in a report last December. The department is exploring revisions, including ones that “let universities be universities,” said Mario Mancuso, an under secretary in the department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, which oversees the regulations, in an interview today with The Chronicle.

Officials hope to complete the review and propose concrete changes before President Bush leaves office, in January, Mr. Mancuso said. That is an ambitious timetable, he conceded, because other federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense and State, will also weigh in on changes.

In the May 19 Federal Register, the department invited comment on several issues, including whether it should shorten or modify the list of technologies that fall under the deemed-export rules. Mr. Mancuso said he expected the department would name by mid-August an advisory committee, which will include university representatives, to quickly examine that issue.

The deemed-export rules contain an exemption for “fundamental” research, but some college officials say the Commerce Department has interpreted too many university studies as falling outside the exemption. Mr. Mancuso acknowledged universities’ frustration over the rules and called the exemption “sacrosanct.” He said the department wanted to strike the proper balance between protecting vital secrets and attracting the most-talented scientists to work in American laboratories. That, in turn, he said, benefits America’s national security. —Jeffrey Brainard

Data Don't Support Perceived Gender Gap in Math, Researchers Say

The view that girls are worse than boys at mathematics is unfounded, a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of California at Berkeley reported today in the journal Science. Their conclusion challenges the frequently cited argument that the poorer female performance in math explains the shortage of women in physics, engineering, and related careers.

In their study, the researchers examined extensive performance assessments of more than seven million students carried out by 10 states, as required by the No Child Left Behind law. The researchers found that, in standardized tests, the differences between the average math scores of boys and girls in grades 2 to 11 were statistically insignificant.

The research team also studied if there were gender discrepancies at the highest levels of mathematical ability and how well boys and girls resolved complex problems. Again they found no significant differences.

Finally, the researchers looked at SAT results. Men usually perform better than women on the test, but the researchers attributed that result to poorly done statistics. The sample group of SAT test-takers is not random: Only students who are applying to college take the SAT, and the two groups are different in size — more girls than boys take the test — so they can’t be compared fairly. —Maria José Viñas

July 24, 2008

Gunman Wounds 3 in Shooting at Community College in Phoenix

At least three people were wounded in a shooting incident this afternoon in a computer lab at South Mountain Community College, in Phoenix, and an unidentified gunman has been captured, according to the East Valley Tribune, a local newspaper that is regularly updating its coverage on its Web site.

The shooting followed a loud argument in a room that may have had as many as 50 people in it, eyewitnesses told the newspaper, but it was unclear if the gunman and his victims knew each other, or even if they were students or faculty members. Their names were not immediately disclosed by the police, but two were listed in critical condition.

The 8,000-student college’s Web site said that classes had been canceled and the campus put on “lockdown status” for the rest of today.

This is the third major shooting this year on an American campus. On February 8, a student at Louisiana Technical College at Baton Rouge killed two classmates and then herself. Less than a week later, a gunman at Northern Illinois University killed five people and wounded 16 before taking his own life. So far, at least, the shooting in Phoenix has not resulted in fatalities. —Andrew Mytelka

Another Giuliani Finds His Dream Deferred

Five months after he was kicked off the Duke University golf team, Andrew Giuliani, son of the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, is suing the university for breach of contract, the Associated Press reported today.

The dismissal, it appears, has complicated the younger Giuliani’s hopes of one day reaching the PGA Tour.

In a 198-page lawsuit filed on Wednesday in federal district court in Durham, N.C., the 22-year-old rising senior at Duke says he was unjustly cut from the team after a new coach took over and wanted to cull the roster.

The former mayor and onetime candidate for the Republican presidential nomination had no comment on the lawsuit. But perhaps the elder Giuliani would have advised otherwise. Just last year, while campaigning for the Republican nomination, he promised to carry out tort reform and rein in frivolous lawsuits if elected.

Fore! —Libby Sander

Bible Professor Will Leave Seminary Instead of Facing Hearing

A tenured professor at Westminster Theological Seminary who faced a hearing next month to determine if he would be dismissed is leaving on August 1 under what the Pennsylvania seminary called “mutually agreeable terms,” according to a statement on its Web site. The professor, Peter Enns, who taught the Old Testament at the seminary, wrote a book expressing the view that human beings shaped the Bible. The institution’s Board of Trustees suggested that the idea was contrary to the conservative seminary’s faculty oath. —Beckie Supiano