More Shootings
It’s a measure of how accustomed we’ve become to gun violence in our schools and on our campuses that when a single Friday brings shooting deaths at colleges in two states, we barely notice — because, hey, only one person died in each incident. Nowadays if a death toll doesn’t at least approach double digits, most of us aren’t likely to divert our attention for more than a few moments from Donald Trump or the baseball playoffs or the spectacle Congress is making of itself.
Ironically — as if there were room for irony on a calendar so cluttered with killings — the latest shootings took place the same day President Obama flew to Oregon to meet the families of nine people shot to death a week earlier at Umpqua Community College. And now two more young people are dead — Colin Brough, a 20-year-old Northern Arizona University student, and Brent Randall, a freshman at Texas Southern University. A first-year Northern Arizona student, Steven Jones, has been charged with killing Mr. Brough and wounding three others after a fight at a fraternity. No arrests have been made in the shooting at Texas Southern, which also left another person hospitalized.
A number of colleges have responded to the spate of shootings by circulating memos reminding students and faculty members how to respond to “active shooter” situations, and California’s governor, Jerry Brown, signed into a law a measure banning people with concealed-weapons permits from taking their guns onto college campuses. At the same time, however, public-college administrators in Texas are making plans for next year, when a new state law will require them to let people with concealed-carry licenses bring guns into campus buildings, including residence halls. (Read more here.)
With politicians and the public so bitterly divided over the subject of guns, it accomplishes little to note that the deaths of Mr. Brough and Mr. Randall are utterly senseless. History and literature have taught us not to expect the world to make much sense. But neither should the tragedies go unmarked — not if we have any hope at all of remaining a civilized people.
Student-Aid Experiment
Last week the Education Department announced a small pilot program that takes risks on two interesting fronts. For the first time, it will make some computer-coding “boot camps,” MOOCs, and other educational offerings from “noninstitutional providers” eligible for federal student aid. The providers must partner with colleges, but the colleges don’t have to supply the majority of the course content. And the offerings will be vetted not by traditional accrediting organizations but by third-party “quality-assurance entities” (although the colleges will also have to get the blessing of their regular accreditors).
The department says its goal is to make the tech offerings more accessible, particularly for low-income students. It also wants to try gauging programs’ success by students’ learning achievements and subsequent employment rather than by accreditors’ traditional measures. “Quality-assurance entities,” the department said, could be “employer associations, new entities created for this specific purpose, existing accreditors … accounting firms, or others.”
So-called boot camps have become popular in recent years, both among students eager to acquire skills quickly and among politicians hoping to stock the work force with productive employees. But the lack of federal student aid has been a problem, since the average tuition for the immersive programs, according to one recent study, is about $11,000.
Astronomy’s Open Secret
Geoff Marcy, a high-profile expert on planets orbiting distant stars, resigned from the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley last week after BuzzFeed reported on a university investigation into charges that he sexually harassed female students repeatedly between 2001 and 2010. The investigation, which confirmed the allegations, had prompted administrators to warn Mr. Marcy that he could be dismissed if he continued harassing women. The warning, the administrators said, was as harsh a penalty as university policies permitted unless the institution undertook a “lengthy and uncertain” dismissal process.
A number of people, however, found the university’s response inadequate. Michael Eisen, a Berkeley professor of genetics, genomics, and development, asked on Twitter why the university bothered having a sexual-harassment policy “if the response to violations is, ‘You have to follow policy’?” The case attracted plenty of attention elsewhere, too, included a Forbes post that cited one of Mr. Marcy’s former graduate students as saying that “Geoff’s inappropriate actions toward and around women in astronomy is one of the biggest ‘open secrets’” at astronomy gatherings. The former graduate student went on to say that “networks of women pass information about Geoff to junior scientists in an attempt to keep them safe. Sometimes it works. Other times it hasn’t.”
While Mr. Marcy said he disputed some of the particular charges in the investigation, he also posted a letter of apology online. But last week 24 faculty members in the astronomy department signed a letter to university administrators saying they did not believe he could continue to “perform the functions of a faculty member.” Two days later he resigned. The university’s chancellor and provost posted a statement saying Mr. Marcy’s behavior had been “contemptible and inexcusable,” adding that they would work to “reform the university’s disciplinary processes, criteria, and standards so that in the future we have different and better options for discipline of faculty.” (Read more here.)
Plus All This ...
A new report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says complaints from people who have taken out private student loans rose by nearly 20 percent in the past year. The report also says only about 5 percent of private-student-loan borrowers enroll in income-based repayment programs that could cap their monthly payments. … The University of Texas mascot, a longhorn steer referred to as Bevo XIV (right), has cancer and will retire, the university said last week. … A Wisconsin jury found that Apple had violated a patent for improving computer-chip efficiency that is owned by the University of Wisconsin’s licensing arm, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Damages are still to be determined but could reach $862 million.
Hidden History Lesson
A two-year renovation of the University of Virginia’s famous Rotunda has revealed a surprise: an early hearth designed for chemistry experiments. The hearth, in a semicircular niche of a ground-floor room, was apparently walled over in the 1850s, when new chemistry labs were built in an annex behind the Rotunda. The wall protected the niche during an 1895 fire that gutted the Rotunda, and the hearth remained hidden until the current renovation began, although fireboxes for different levels of heat — one burning wood and the other coal — were discovered in the 1970s.
“This may be the oldest intact example of early chemical education in this country,” said Brian Hogg, the university’s senior historic preservation planner. The first chemistry classes at UVa were taught by John P. Emmet, who also helped Thomas Jefferson design the chemistry facilities.
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
