University System News:
www.ajc.com
Faculty file complaint against Sam Olens becoming KSU president
Eric Stirgus The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Some Kennesaw State University faculty filed a federal complaint Monday against Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens becoming the school’s next president, saying the state Board of Regents’ selection process was discriminatory and unfair. The complaint was filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Atlanta office. The complainants said at least three women submitted applications to become KSU president, but said they never received a response from the state’s university system. Olens was the only candidate interviewed for the position.
www.mdjonline.com
AROUND TOWN: Huckaby defends Olens, Weiner blasts OSD, MRC to see development?
Chancellor Hank Huckaby spoke to the Kiwanis Club of Marietta on Wednesday, where he was asked about the objections to Attorney General Sam Olens being appointed the new president of Kennesaw State University. Among the objections are that Huckaby didn’t do a national search, that Olens is anti-LGBT because of his work on behalf of the state in matters involving gay marriage and which powder room transgender people may use, and that Olens does not have a doctorate or come from the world of academia. Around Town asked Huckaby if he anticipated such objections when he recommended the Board of Regents appoint Olens president and what he thought of them. “Yes, I expected them, and I understand, by and large, there has been a tradition in higher education for filling a position of president and provost to have a national search,” Huckaby said. “But something we’ve seen in the last number of years, and we’ve done this too in other situations … that tradition is changing somewhat. You’re seeing people appointed president … that maybe came out of the business community. They’ve been successful executives in their particular industry, and they’ve done quite well. It doesn’t always work, but neither does the candidates that we select from a national search. Since I’ve been chancellor we’ve hired some outstanding folks, but we’ve also since I’ve been chancellor going through the search process, I’ll take responsibility, we’ve bombed out, and I had to then make changes in that regard. But I understand the faculty’s concern. I just don’t agree with them in this case.”
www.daltondailycitizen.com
Providing opportunities
By Charles Oliver
Margaret Venable is Dalton State College’s newest president, its fifth president, its first woman president and the president who will lead it into its Golden Anniversary in 2017. And on Friday, students, faculty, local elected officials and representatives of the University System of Georgia gathered on the quad as she was officially inaugurated as DSC’s president. “The fate of this community is tied to the success of this college and I take that responsibility very seriously,” she said. “Even as we begin to draw more students from outside this region, this community needs Dalton State College to be successful in its goal of educating more Georgians, and the faculty, staff and I are committed to making that happen.” University System of Georgia Chancellor Hank Huckaby named Venable interim president of DSC in November 2014, following the retirement of president John Schwenn. She formally took office on Jan. 1, 2015. The Board of Regents named her president in September 2015. “I truly believe no one is better suited for this job than Dr. Venable,” Huckaby said Friday.
www.ledger-enquirer.com
“This is an award about serving others”
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/local/article109719732.html
BY ALVA JAMES-JOHNSON
Frank Brown served as president of Columbus State University for 20 years, leading the institution through a period of substantial development. His wife, Jo Ann, is a retired educator known for her child advocacy work in the local, state and national arenas. On Thursday, the couple received the Sue Marie and Bill Turner Leadership Award at a gala sponsored by the Pastoral Institute. The event was held at the Columbus Convention & Trade Center, drawing hundreds of well-wishers. It was the fifth annual Sue Marie and Bill Turner Servant Leadership Gala, featuring keynote speaker former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy, who represented Rhode Island. Kennedy is also the son of late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy. Jay Sparks, athletic director at Brookstone School, and his wife, Cindy, introduced the Browns, describing them as the epitome of servant leadership.
www.amsterdamnews.com
National HBCU Week kicks off
http://amsterdamnews.com/news/2016/oct/23/national-hbcu-week-kicks/
AmNews Staff Reports
President Barack Obama kicks of National Historically Black College and Universities (HBCU) Week going on from October 23 through 29. The week recognizes the important contributions of America’s HBCUs In his proclamation, Obama said HBCUs help ensure that all members of American families have access to higher education and highlighted the contributions graduates of HBCUs have made to the nation. “Embodying the notion that the ability to pursue a higher education should be an opportunity available to all, rather than a privilege for a few, these campuses were built from a determination to widely and profoundly expand the reach of our country’s promise,” he said. …As part of the tour, the Peace Corps will travel across eight states in the Peace Car to join the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and USAID in speaking with students, faculty and graduates about international service at 15 HBCU campuses. During the tour, the Peace Corps will join administrators at Savannah State University on October 31 to officially launch the university’s Peace Corps Prep program. To keep track of its travels at Howard University and Savannah State University, follow the Peace Corps on Snapchat at the username peacecorps.
www.metroatlantaceo.com
KSU Wins $900,000 National Science Foundation STEM Grant
http://metroatlantaceo.com/news/2016/10/ksu-wins-900000-national-science-foundation-stem-grant/
Staff Report From Metro Atlanta CEO
The National Science Foundation has awarded Kennesaw State University two grants totaling $900,000 to improve minority participation and success in undergraduate and graduate science, technology, engineering and mathematics degree programs. Kennesaw State’s share is part of a $4 million grant over the next five years to fund a University of Georgia-directed project, “Peach State LSAMP – Extending the STEM Pipeline in the Peach State: Mentorship, Research and Graduate School.” The NSF grant provides students with mentors, research opportunities and financial aid. Each of Kennesaw State’s campuses will receive $450,000 to implement program activities and initiatives.
www.daltondailycitizen.com
$611,360 grant enhances support for parents and their children
Submitted by Whitfield County Schools
Parents and young children will benefit from a growing project in Whitfield County Schools. Whitfield County Schools is one of two public school districts in the state this year to earn an implementation grant from the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement. The money will be used to expand the district’s Beyond the Classroom project focused on birth to age 8 language and literacy development. This $611,360 implementation grant builds on the successful work that began last year with a $10,000 planning grant. The project’s mission is clear in the grant application’s executive summary. …One of the greatest benefits for families is how so many different agencies are working together to provide support. Partner agencies include: • Dalton State College
www.northwestgeorgianews.com
Georgia Highlands College Charger Food Pantry making sure no student is hungry
by Kristina Wilder
The Charger Food Pantry is making a difference on all of Georgia Highlands College’s campuses, making sure students have what they need to succeed. The pantry — open since March — has distributed more than 200 bags of food with the help of student volunteers and the Student Support Services office staff. Students are allowed to come once a week to pick up bags of food. The pantry also provides toiletry items such as shampoo and toothpaste, along with school supplies such as paper and pens. Student Support Services staff decided to form the pantry after they noticed some students were going hungry.
www.goldenisles.news
Officials encourage students to pursue cyber security jobs at CCGA symposium
By LAUREN MCDONALD
Organizers could not have foreseen it but the College of Coastal Georgia’s Cyber Education Day fell on an appropriate date, a day where a massive cyber attack targeted majors websites Friday across the country. Sites like Twitter, Spotify, Netflix and Amazon were struck by hackers throughout the day, causing woes for millions of web users. News of the attacks served as a reminder of the reality of cyber threats and need for top-tiered online security. It is why the college invited local, state and national leaders to campus to discuss the growing need for cybersecurity professionals and the great threat posed by cyber criminals.
www.myajc.com
UGA to close hazardous waste facility, pay civil penalty to feds
By Will Robinson
After years of significant regulatory violations, The University of Georgia is closing the hazardous waste treatment facility that handles chemicals and material from 2,000 university laboratories. Officials denied the closure was related to environmental violations at the facility, located near the banks of the Oconee River in Athens, but the decision followed two inspections by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that resulted in a settlement with the university and a $99,900 civil penalty. EPA officials notified UGA President Jere Morehead Sept. 30 that the university has 30 days to pay the penalty. Under the terms of the agreement, Morehead agreed not to challenge or appeal the settlement. In a statement issued in response to questions to President Morehead, the university said that it has been working to correct the violations that formed the basis of the settlement agreement, and noted that the EPA “made no finding of any environmental release which would have placed UGA students, faculty or staff in danger.” The statement also said officials were working on “supplemental environmental projects” that it believes will offset the EPA penalties.
www.myajc.com
Are driverless vehicles the future of North Ave?
By Leon Stafford – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Driverless vehicles may soon make their way down one of Atlanta’s busiest streets. The city plans to turn North Avenue into a “smart street” over the next few years and it issued an RFI or “Request for Information” for companies that manufacture or promote autonomous vehicles to help. Leaders want to use a driverless vehicle to test smart applications such as “smart signals,” traffic signals that know what’s on the road, or detection devices that are supposed to warn motorists about a possible collision with a pedestrian or bicyclist. The technology is part of a plan to upgrade North Avenue between Luckie and Dallas streets for the future of driverless vehicles… The city is partnering with the Atlanta Regional Commission, Georgia Tech, MARTA, the state department of transportation and others on the project. DiMassimo hopes to receive answers to the city’s RFI by the holidays.
Higher Education News:
www.chronicle.com
Reinventing the Career Center
Colleges — and companies — are trying to help students design their futures
By Jeffrey R. Young
Most colleges are bad at career services. Yet today’s students expect more help finding a job than ever before. Two campus career-center leaders made that dim assessment in an influential manifesto posted to LinkedIn two years ago, and since then their ideas for a new philosophy of career services seem to be gaining currency. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the ever-rising cost of college, students expect higher education to help launch their careers, not just make them smarter. To do that, career-center leaders argue that they must be seen as part of an institution’s strategic core rather as a small service center that operates on the edge of campus. And they stress the need to help students build professional networks that are highly customized to students’ interests. Meanwhile, several new for-profit companies have stepped into the gap, either working with colleges or offering bridge programs to make up for what colleges aren’t doing on their own.
www.chronicle.com
Colleges Must Reinvent Career Counseling
By Jeffrey J. Selingo
Illustration by Davide Bonazzi for The Chronicle Earlier this year, a study by two noted economists, Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B. Krueger, concluded that all employment growth in the United States since 2005 appeared to have come from what they termed alternative work. While apps for temporary work, such as Uber and TaskRabbit, get most of the attention in today’s gig economy, the two found that the “offline” contract work of freelancers is actually growing the fastest, ballooning by 50 percent over the last decade. The changing nature of work in the 21st century has serious implications for the job-preparation role that colleges play in our economy. Rather than educate students for specific occupations or broad career fields as in the past, institutions now need to groom undergraduates for a more complex, fragmented workplace with many overlapping pathways.
www.chronicle.com
How Colleges Can Do Better at Helping Students Get Jobs
By Peter J. Stokes
In 2006, the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education sparked a national debate about the purpose and promise of a college education, with a focus on jobs. The recession of 2008 added greater urgency to the argument that colleges should do more to prepare students for the workplace. While some in higher education may have hoped that things would return to normal once we recovered from the recession, today the pressure on colleges to link academic and professional preparation seems only to be growing. John Williams, president of Muhlenberg College, recently told me he was having a hard time understanding how his institution could continue to attract top students without delivering greater value. “I can’t cut costs sufficiently to keep tuition flat,” he said. “What do I do when tuition hits $80,000 a year?” He believes one way to deliver value is to focus on supporting his graduates’ personal and professional success — whether they go into business, nonprofit work, the clergy, or graduate school, or take some other path. …Examples from innovative colleges suggest that one key step in improving career prospects is for colleges and employers to collaborate in deeper ways: by jointly developing curricula that prepare students for success in diverse professional fields, by bringing the workplace into the classroom via experiential learning, and by bringing the classroom into the workplace via diverse delivery models, such as degree programs designed to blend online study with short-term residencies and noncredit programs tailored to the needs of particular employers.
www.insidehighered.com
Big Win for Grad Students
Federal regulators indefinitely stay IRS enforcement ruling that subsidized health insurance plans for graduate students violated provisions of Affordable Care Act.
By Andrew Kreighbaum
Federal regulators released guidance on graduate student health insurance subsidies Friday that should provide reassurance to universities considering whether they will still offer the subsidies. The guidance likely will be viewed as great news by many graduate students.An Internal Revenue Service interpretation of the Affordable Care Act barred large employers from subsidizing employees’ purchase of health insurance on the individual market — a view the agency applied even to student health insurance plans negotiated by a university with insurers. That interpretation had left many large public universities scrambling over the last year to identify alternative options to provide affordable insurance to graduate workers. Many advocates for graduate students and leaders of universities said that the IRS interpretation ignored the many ways in which universities subsidizing graduate student health insurance are not typical of the kinds of employers that the health care law sought to regulate.
www.chronicle.com
For Real Academic Disruption, Try Empathy
http://www.chronicle.com/article/For-Real-Academic-Disruption/238110
By Harrison Keller
A few years ago, discussions about the future of online learning reflected a mix of breathless enthusiasm and anxiety. Now, things seem to have settled down. While online enrollments are increasing, the numbers and associated revenue have been growing much more slowly than advocates had hoped for. Predictions about the end of college notwithstanding, the vast majority of online courses and degrees are still being delivered by traditional colleges rather than alternative providers. The percentage of chief academic officers who reported that online education was critical to their institutions’ long-term strategy actually declined last year, according to the Babson Survey Research Group.