Quick hits.
- South Carolina lawmakers on Monday debated budget amendments that proposed to curtail colleges’ funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. The amendments did not pass but showed the tactics that legislators are using to attack such programs. (The Chronicle)
- In case the professoriate was looking for something else to be anxious about, OpenAI has released a new GPT model — GPT-4 — which was said to exhibit “human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks.” The new model passed a simulated bar exam with flying colors, while its predecessor scored in the bottom 10 percent. It also got a better AP Environmental Science score than I did in high school, which I am going to pretend not to care about. (OpenAI)
- The U.S. Education Department announced plans to monitor colleges’ potential misuse of student aid using “secret shoppers” — fake students who will identify potentially deceptive or predatory means of recruiting and enrolling. (Department statement)
- The defunct Education Corporation of America — the for-profit company that operated Brightwood College, Brightwood Career Institute, and Virginia College — has agreed to a $28-million settlement to end a lawsuit alleging that it left thousands of students with no way to complete their degrees. (Higher Ed Dive)
In The Review: the lost art of academic conversation.
In an essay for The Review, Paula Marantz Cohen, a professor of English and dean of the honors college at Drexel University, bemoans the disappearing art of collegial talk.
Cohen opens her piece with a scene she says is becoming increasingly uncommon on campus: a seminar in which students and their professor converse freely on an academic topic. The class in this case is a poetry survey, from Cohen’s undergraduate days.
“There were 12 of us sitting around a table in that course, and the conversation, under the guidance of this gifted teacher, was exhilarating,” she writes. “I knew then that I wanted to talk like this for the rest of my life.”
Similar conversations, over meals and in dorm rooms, were “central to the college experience as I understood it.” Cohen writes that she has tried to re-create these discussions in her classes, but that over the past decade, students have seemed inhibited from engaging in such talk. Their schedules and social environs may be to blame for this inability, Cohen argues, as well as inexperience in the “art of conversation.”
She’s seeing those conversation muscles atrophy in faculty members, too. There used to be time to converse with peers over long lunches, but now, not so much. Cohen says several culprits can be blamed, including the need to work harder to make it in a tough industry; an environment that makes it difficult to speak with nuance; and, of course, our phones. Faculty members just do not have the time, she writes, “to indulge in the free play of mind that used to characterize academic life.”
An academy that champions “talking authentically” is worth saving, Cohen argues.
“If faculty do not practice conversation of the best sort among themselves,” she writes, “it is unlikely that they can bring these skills to bear in the classroom.”
Cohen’s essay is adapted from her book, Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation. You can read the excerpt here.
Comings and goings.
- James Moore has been named president of West Virginia Wesleyan College after serving as interim president since February 2022.
- John Karl Scholz, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has been named president of the University of Oregon.
- Brittany Schaffer, head of artist and label partnerships in Nashville for Spotify, has been named the first female dean of the Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business at Belmont University, in Tennessee.
- Roderick Perry, director of athletics at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, will step down.
To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com.
Footnote.
Wait a second — that’s not John Karl Scholz!
The Corvallis Gazette-Times mistakenly placed an image of Jade Carey, an Olympic gymnast and Oregon State University athlete, on an article about the University of Oregon’s new president, Scholz. (See today’s Comings and Goings, above.)
Jon Boeckenstedt, Oregon State’s vice president for enrollment management, caught the error and tweeted: “Congratulations to @OregonState gymnast and Olympic Gold Medal Winner Jade Carey on her selection as the next president of UO. Really stuck that landing.”
Imagine, for a second, that Carey, at a ripe 22, had indeed been chosen to lead the flagship — the rival of her dear Oregon State! That would be pretty impressive. As for Scholz, an economist and provost of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, best of luck on the balance beam.
