Quick hits.
- Brown University is considering changing its admissions-essay questions ahead of the Supreme Court’s anticipated rulings on race-conscious admissions. University administrators said that any new questions would offer applicants opportunities to share information about their identity and experiences of discrimination or hardship. (The Brown Daily Herald)
- Lansing Community College canceled most classes for two days because of a cybersecurity incident. Students and most employees were asked not to log into the college’s systems or go to campus. (Lansing State Journal)
- A Texas Senate committee approved a bill to restrict competition by transgender athletes in collegiate sports, requiring athletes to compete according to their sex assigned at birth. The bill also bars retaliation against anyone who reports a violation. (The Dallas Morning News)
- A 25-year-old Stanford University employee was arrested and charged with a felony after prosecutors said she had lied about being raped twice last year. (Associated Press)
- A longtime professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University was fired from the private Christian institution a month after administrators started investigating a parent’s concern that the professor was “indoctrinating” his students by incorporating lessons about racial justice into his writing composition course. (The Palm Beach Post)
Strategies to improve international students’ academic success.
As the number of international students in the United States soared over the past decade and a half — increasing 75 percent, to almost 1.1 million, just before the pandemic — colleges paid growing attention to the academic performance of that population.
Now, as institutions seek to recover from the double whammy of Covid-19 and nationalist politics hitting international enrollments, foreign-student retention and satisfaction may be more important than ever — particularly as the number of college-aged Americans declines.
Our Karin Fischer looked at how colleges’ programming, aimed at demystifying the American higher-ed experience, is showing promising results in improving international students’ success.
Read her story here.
Required pedagogy courses for graduate students?
Four guest authors writing in The Chronicle‘s Advice section make the case that universities should ensure graduate students develop teaching skills along with their scholarly training. Benjamin Rifkin, Rebecca S. Natow, Nicholas P. Salter, and Shayla Shorter write:
“Complaints about the lack of attention to teaching in Ph.D. programs are legion — mainly about the perceived disconnect between what we are trained to do in graduate school and what we are expected to do in the college classroom. After years of calls for reform, we wondered, is that disconnect still the case?
“Plenty of essays, social-media posts, and books like Jonathan Zimmerman’s The Amateur Hour have tackled the lack of formal training that professors receive on teaching. Still, there isn’t much data on the subject. A 2019 crowdsourced spreadsheet showed that whether (and how) graduate programs require for-credit training in teaching skills varies considerably. That level of inconsistency seems decidedly out of sync with the many teaching-related problems — student disengagement, enrollment drops, grading complaints, worrisome new technologies — dominating our discourse.”
The authors investigated 10 departments in each of three disciplines — history, psychology, and biology — and concluded that the disconnect between scholarly training and pedagogical instruction remains very much a reality in graduate schools.
Read more here.
Comings and goings.
- Kara D. Freeman, senior vice president and chief operating officer of the American Council on Education, has been named president and chief executive of the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
- Gregory T. Busch, president of Mesalands Community College, in New Mexico, has resigned.
- Kristina K. Bethea Odejimi, dean of students at Bowdoin College, has been named dean of students and associate vice president for belonging, engagement, and community at Emory University.
To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com.
Footnote.
The NCAA basketball tournament is here, and everyone’s got an opinion about who’s going to win the Big Dance. Even Joe Biden.
The president shared his March Madness brackets on Twitter Thursday. As it often does, the tournament proved hard to predict, as a major first-round upset on the men’s side quickly ended the run of his championship pick when Arizona was beaten by Princeton. For the women’s championship, he’s rooting for Villanova. “As you know, in this household, Villanova always wins,” he wrote, referring to Jill Biden‘s alma mater, where the first lady collected a master’s degree in English.
What is your prediction? Write to me at marcela@chronicle.com.
