University System News:
www.politics.blog.ajc.com
David Ralston on campus carry: ‘This fight will go on’
http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2016/05/05/david-ralston-on-campus-carry-this-fight-will-go-on/
Greg Bluestein
House Speaker David Ralston didn’t shut the door on a legislative effort to overturn Gov. Nathan Deal’s veto of a measure that would legalize firearms at Georgia’s college campuses as he reinforced his message that the “fight will go on” to pass the gun rights expansion. “I don’t know yet. It’s not over, though. I’ve been clear about that,” Ralston said Thursday when asked about a potential override of Deal’s veto. “This was a bill that I think is very important. It’s fully vetted and debated in the committee process. It was passed by both chambers overwhelmingly,” he added. “This fight will go on. The exact form it takes, it’s early to say right now.”
www.savannahnow.com
Editorial: Deal’s veto of campus gun bill a welcome decision
Making it legal to hide a gun and take it nearly everywhere on Georgia’s college campuses was a bad idea to begin with. Gov. Nathan Deal’s veto of the so-called “campus carry” bill this week comes as a relief to those who worry about the expanding list of places where gun owners can take concealed weapons. The General Assembly essentially asked for the veto when it refused to make the bill less dangerous by keeping concealed guns out of especially sensitive places: disciplinary hearings, on-campus day care centers and administrative offices. Deal wanted those exceptions, but lawmakers of his own Republican Party said no. Under the bill the legislature sent to Deal’s desk, a student accused of, say, rape or assault who was not especially happy about it could have legally concealed and carried a handgun into his disciplinary hearing to give full expression to his anger. Consider the consequences of allowing hidden handguns into day care centers where parents take children to be safe, or into offices where staff decides who to admit into school and who to reject, who to hire for a job and who to fire. We’ve taken issue with Deal previously, as when he signed into law a bill making it easier for lawmakers to hide conflicts of interest from the public. But this time he did the right thing, and he did it against the wishes of his natural, conservative constituency. At last, Deal finally drew the line.
USG Institutions:
www.tiftongazette.com
Carry The Load
Veterans lead the way for the third annual Carry The Load Step-Off Rally on Thursday at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. The goal of Carry The Load is to restore the true meaning of Memorial Day by connecting Americans to the sacrifices of the military, law enforcement, firefighters and rescue personnel. Seven ABAC students and four ABAC nurses will be involved in the East Coast leg of Carry The Load from West Point, New York, to Dallas, Texas. Four more ABAC students are already on the West Coast leg which began in Seattle, Washington on Tuesday. They will join members of the East Coast leg in Dallas on Memorial Day.
www.insidehighered.com
Postdoc Now, Think Later
New study argues science Ph.D.s often plan for postdocs without considering whether they’re necessary or beneficial to their career plans. Actual evidence is mixed.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/05/06/study-graduate-students-may-take-unnecessary-postdocs
By Colleen Flaherty
Every postdoctoral fellow has probably heard a “permadoc” joke or two, making light of the increasingly long stints recent Ph.D.s spend in such positions. But has the postdoc become the default for graduates — even for those for whom it doesn’t necessarily make sense? Has it become a holding pattern rather than a bridge to more permanent work? A new study in Science by two business professors suggests that’s the case and calls for increased attention to career planning among students, mentors, graduate schools and those funding postdocs. That’s not just during graduate school, but before one even applies… “Why Pursue the Postdoc Path?” was written by Henry Sauermann, an associate professor of strategic management at Georgia Institute of Technology and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Michael Roach, the J. Thomas and Nancy W. Clark Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at Cornell University. Sauermann said via email that the study wasn’t an argument against Ph.D. education or accepting a postdoc in a challenging academic job market, and that many other structural factors beyond individual career planning — research funding and lab structures, to name a few — are at play. But there’s value in understanding Ph.D.s’ and postdocs’ perspectives, he said, since “individuals are still the ones making certain kinds of decisions that lead them down certain paths.”
www.usnews.com
Georgia Tech’s Gary May: Striving for Racial Parity in STEM
Mentoring and other programs are key to building the ranks of minority and female students in STEM, Georgia Tech’s engineering dean says.
By Alan Neuhauser | Staff Writer
Gary May, the dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering, stood out as an undergrad – and not in the way he wanted. “You go to your class and you’re the only black kid – that’s fairly stark,” he says. It’s been more than three decades since that freshman year, yet May’s experience remains painfully familiar to thousands of other students and new hires. Despite years of investment and even some modest progress, women and people of color still lag far behind white and Asian men in science, technology, engineering and math education and hiring, or STEM, according to the 2015 U.S. News/Raytheon STEM Index… Scheduled to speak at the U.S. News STEM Solutions Conference in Baltimore on May 19, May shared some of his experience with U.S. News this week. Here are excerpts from the interview, which was edited for length and clarity: You’ve made diversifying STEM such a large part of your life’s work. Why? It always concerned me, as I was going through my classes and early in my career, how very few people like me there were – African-Americans, and people of color in general, and also women. You start to wonder, is there something systemic going on? It doesn’t seem random.
www.nature.com
Technology transfer: The leap to industry
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v533/n7601_supp/full/533S13a.html
Jessica Wapner
The process of commercializing the discoveries made in university laboratories has come a long way over the past 30 years or so. “I didn’t even know what that meant when I started out,” says biomedical engineer David Kaplan at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Fifteen years and eight companies after his first patent, for a knee ligament made of silk, Kaplan is now well versed in the ways of technology-transfer offices (administrative infrastructure for ushering innovations out of the lab and into private development)… The trend towards a more “holistic relationship”, as Reinhart puts it, is allowing technology-transfer offices to avoid investing too much time in specific deals. Focusing instead on a long-term relationship between universities and companies enables “a better understanding of mutual needs”, says Reinhart. “That’s what the smart universities are doing these days.” Reinhart cites the Office of Industry Engagement at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, the Office of Innovation and Industry Engagement at Michigan Technological University, and the Office of Technology Commercialization at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, as examples of technology-transfer offices moving towards this approach.
www.economictimes.indiatimes.com
Georgia Tech partners with Bennett University for providing world-class B.Tech Program in India
By ET Bureau
Georgia Tech has entered into an agreement with Bennett University to facilitate collaborative efforts in design and delivery of top-notch, high-end engineering curriculum. The agreement will help promote academic collaboration between the two institutions and support Bennett University in developing technical excellence in engineering studies. As part of the collaboration, Bennett will set up centres of excellence in Embedded Technologies and Cloud Computing, with assistance from visiting Georgia Tech faculty, supported by research engineers.
www.npr.org
After Moore’s Law: Predicting The Future Beyond Silicon Chips
Alina Selyukh
For several decades now, Georgia Tech professor Tom Conte has been studying how to improve computers: “How do we make them faster and more efficient next time around versus what we just made?” And for decades, the principle guiding much of the innovation in computing has been Moore’s law — a prediction, made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, that the number of transistors on a microprocessor chip would double every two years or so. What it’s come to represent is an expectation, as The New York Times puts it, that “engineers would always find a way to make the components on computer chips smaller, faster and cheaper.” Lately, faith in Moore’s Law has been fading. “I guess I see Moore’s Law dying here in the next decade or so, but that’s not surprising,” Moore said in a 2015 interview with a publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Higher Education News:
www.chronicle.com
A Rape Allegation Unsettles 2 Colleges That Share a Close Bond
By Katherine Mangan
An anonymous report of an alleged gang rape of a Spelman College student by four students from neighboring Morehouse College has sparked protests and investigations by both institutions. It’s also prompted an intense debate on social media over pressures some black women say they feel to protect black men from unfair stereotypes by keeping quiet about assaults. When the institutions involved — in this case, two elite, historically black colleges that sit side by side in Atlanta — are viewed as sibling colleges, the sensitivities run deep. That’s evident from the hundreds of tweets being posted this week in discussions unfolding under the hashtags #RapedAtSpelman and #RapedByMorehouse. …The president also provided updates on how the college is dealing with Title IX issues, including expanding the staff and programming and making it clear that “blaming the victim is unacceptable.” Both Spelman and Morehouse are among the 183 colleges being investigated by the Education Department for potential Title IX infractions in their handling of sexual-assault cases. …The debate was joined by students at other colleges, including Shyra Lynch, a sophomore at Georgia Southwestern State University.
www.chronicle.com
Margaret Spellings Is Caught Between Her State and the Federal Government. Now What?
By Beckie Supiano
Since taking the reins as president of the University of North Carolina system, in March, Margaret Spellings has seen her tenure dominated by dealing with House Bill 2, the new state law barring people from using public restrooms that do not correspond to their biological sex. Ms. Spellings has said that the system will comply with the law, which is widely seen as discriminating against transgender people, but that doing so is “in no way an endorsement of this law.” This week the U.S. Department of Justice informed the system that complying with the state law — as memos written by Ms. Spellings indicated it would — put it in violation of federal civil-rights law. In a letter the Justice Department gave Ms. Spellings and other state leaders, including Gov. Pat McCrory, until Monday to take steps to comply.
www.insidehighered.com
As Physician Shortage Approaches, Medical Schools Expand
Since 2002, U.S. medical school enrollment has increased by 25 percent, according to a new report. The country is facing a physician shortage, and 10 years ago the Association of American Medical Colleges called for a 30 percent increase in enrollment by 2015. Now, the AAMC’s new report shows that medical schools are responding: 20 new M.D.-granting medical schools have been established since 2002, and the country should reach the 30 percent benchmark by the 2017-18 academic year.
www.chronicle.com
Free the Public Universities
By Ronald J. Daniels
Over the last decade, the fate of America’s public universities has commanded considerable attention. The principal concern has been the impact that steadily declining levels of state support for higher education has had on tuition levels, enrollment patterns, and program offerings and priorities. Since 2000, public universities have lost 25 percent of their state funding per student. The University of California at Berkeley, one of the leading public research universities in the nation, now receives only about 13 percent of its budget from state appropriations, compared with about 50 percent a few decades ago. This shift from public to private funding support has led many to conclude that we are witnessing nothing less than the privatization of the public research university. But while public universities can be said to be “privatizing,” another equally powerful, but typically overlooked, trend has been moving in the opposite direction — the “publicization” of private research universities, or the accelerated incorporation of public values and mission into the traditional role of these institutions.
www.insidehighered.com
Keeping an Open Mind
New paper suggests researchers who are more open to other disciplines and worldviews produce higher-quality research.
By Colleen Flaherty
Many scientists take a certain pride in the objective nature of their work. The data are the data, no matter who’s conducting the experiment. But growing body of research suggests that’s not necessarily true, and that personalities can influence the science.
A new study builds on that notion, suggesting that one’s “transdisciplinary orientation,” a personal quality predisposing one to engage in cross-disciplinary work, can affect the quality of interdisciplinary research — good or bad.