PROGRAM HALTED: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has decided to stop offering its one-year Fellowships in Humanistic Studies, a $5-million program that pays for the first year of study for about 80 graduate students in the humanities each year. The foundation said it would discontinue the prestigious 21-year-old fellowships in the fall of 2006 because the program has become less relevant.
MORE TIME: In an effort to improve the climate for female professors, Princeton University is giving new faculty parents of both sexes automatic one-year extensions on the tenure track. Previously, as at many other colleges, assistant professors had to ask for a one-year extension for each child born or adopted into their families. A Princeton survey found that some women were ambivalent about taking time beyond the standard six years before applying for tenure, fearing that doing so would be taken as a sign of weakness.
ENROLLMENT UP: Graduate programs in science and engineering at American colleges enrolled 474,203 students in the fall of 2003, an all-time high that was an increase of 4 percent over the preceding year, according to data released by the National Science Foundation. But while the increase in the number of students who are United States citizens or permanent residents was the largest in the past two decades, the increase in foreign students was less than 1,300, compared with gains of more than 10,000 in each of the previous three years, according to the data.
UNION YES: The faculty union at public colleges in Florida has scored another victory in its long battle over collective-bargaining rights. The State Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of an appellate-court ruling that the state had no right to discontinue the union contract after disbanding the statewide Board of Regents, in 2001. The union, the United Faculty of Florida, was forced to renegotiate contracts with each of the 11 institutions in the state system, a process that continues.
RESIGNATION: A veteran professor of microbiology at the University of Texas Medical Branch resigned after university officials said that he had made false claims about a skin lotion marketed as a treatment for anthrax exposure. John Heggers, who had worked at the university for 17 years and had tenure, helped promote the lotion, which goes by the name Bio-Germ Protection. After a newspaper reported on the company that makes the lotion, university officials investigated the professor’s role. They found that Mr. Heggers had “committed significant scientific misconduct by making excessive and false claims based on his research.”
PAYBACK?: The University of Vermont did not break any rules when it declined to reappoint a visiting assistant professor who helped organize the university’s first faculty union, the Vermont Supreme Court has ruled. While teaching economics at Vermont from 1995 to 2003, Dawn Saunders played a prominent role in unionizing the university’s faculty. When the university declined to renew her contract in 2004, she had argued that it was payback for her activism.
NO TALKS: New York University has followed through on its plan to cease negotiating a new labor contract with its graduate teaching assistants after the current deal expires, on August 31. The move means that NYU no longer recognizes the students’ union. The university announced the plan as a “proposed decision” in June, 11 months after the National Labor Relations Board reversed a policy that had required private universities, like NYU, to bargain with their TA’s.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 52, Issue 2, Page A16