University System News:
www.walb.com
VSU one step closer to naming new president
http://www.walb.com/story/33642857/vsu-one-step-closer-to-naming-new-president
By Alex Weaver, Reporter
Valdosta State University faculty, staff, and students will welcome four presidential search finalists to campus this week. The finalists are Doctor Kelli Brown, the interim president, Doctor Richard Carvajal, Darton State College’s interim president, Doctor Christopher Maples, past president for Oregon Institute of Technology and Doctor Timothy Caboni, the vice chancellor for public affairs at the University of Kansas. All the candidates will be on campus for the entire week.
www.businessinsavannah.com
BIS in brief: Armstrong State ranks high for veterans
http://businessinsavannah.com/bis/2016-11-05/bis-brief-armstrong-state-ranks-high-veterans#
Business in Savannah
Military Times has ranked Armstrong State University fourth in the nation among four-year schools on its Best for Vets: Colleges 2017 list. This year marks the third consecutive year Armstrong has been included on the prestigious list. In 2016, Armstrong was ranked seventh in the United States. The eighth annual rankings factor in the results of Military Times’ comprehensive school-by-school survey of veteran and military student offerings and rates of academic achievement. Military Times’ annual Best for Vets: Colleges survey asks colleges and universities to document the array of services, special rules, accommodations and financial incentives offered to students with military ties and to describe aspects of veteran culture on a campus. Awarded institutions were evaluated in several categories.
www.savannahnow.com
Savannah State, Peace Corps establish global citizenship certificate
By Will Peebles
Savannah State University is partnering with the Peace Corps on a new certificate program built to make students into more effective global citizens. The Peace Corps Prep Program, which offers students a chance to begin learning skills that make them prime candidates for the Peace Corps. The certificate program encompasses many classes that Savannah State students would be taking anyway, including foreign languages and cultural competence courses.
www.onlineathens.com
After fast growth, UGA engineering college plans to restructure
By Lee Shearer
The University of Georgia’s College of Engineering plans to change its administrative structure after engineering enrollment nearly quintupled in five years. Engineering enrollment was about 400 at UGA in fall 2011, the year before the College of Engineering was formed. Now it’s nearly 2,000 students, according to documents submitted to the UGA University Council in support of the new administrative structure. Under the proposed changes, the college will divide into three schools, each led by a person called a “school chair.” Faculty in the college have picked three of their number to lead the three schools while UGA searches for the first three “founding” chairs.
www.mdjonline.com
Veterinary program honors donor with hospital name change
ATHENS, Ga. (AP) — The University of Georgia is honoring a donor who gave more than $13 million to the school’s College of Veterinary Medicine. School officials say they have changed the name of a college facility to the Cora Nunnally Miller Small Animal Teaching Hospital. Miller gave more than $33 million to various programs at the university during her life. She died in July of 2015.
www.mashable.com
This research could help tackle the world’s biggest water problems
http://mashable.com/2016/11/06/water-awards-breakthrough-technology/#Yaaj_SbsVSqU
BY MARIA GALLUCCI
Satellite data that helps fight cholera. Forecasts that help farmers flee monsoons. Models that predict how shifting rivers can affect drinking water. Scientists worldwide are developing technologies like these to tackle the planet’s biggest water challenges, such as the lack of clean water for 1.2 billion people and the rising threats of deadly downpours, droughts and flooding caused by climate change. This month, a Saudi Arabian nonprofit awarded eight scientists the International Prize for Water for their breakthrough research … Torrential monsoon rainfalls this year have killed hundreds of people in China and displaced 1.2 million people in India. Rural families often don’t receive flood warnings and have little time to prepare for the coming catastrophe. Peter Webster, an earth and atmospheric sciences professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, won the second “creativity” prize for developing a way to predict monsoon rainfalls and give farmers ample heads-up.
Higher Education News:
www.insidehighered.com
Defining Rape Culture
Should colleges include the term and talk about the concept in sexual misconduct policies? Few, if any, actually do so.
By Jake New
An attempt to update an Ontario university’s sexual assault policy has led to a months-long debate between administrators, faculty and students over whether the new policy should acknowledge that a rape culture exists on campus. If Carleton University, the institution at the center of the debate, were to include the reference to rape culture in its policy, it would be one of just a handful of institutions in Canada to do so. In the United States, such policies may be even rarer. While many colleges do define the term in their educational and prevention efforts, a review by Inside Higher Ed of sexual misconduct policies at more than 60 U.S. colleges and universities found no references to rape culture, and researchers and advocates interviewed for this article said they could not recall any colleges defining rape culture in their policies. “The definition needs to be there,” Anna Voremberg, managing director of End Rape On Campus, said. “It helps to have parameters for the conversation you’re having on campus, so defining rape culture is important.” The movement in recent years — in both the United States and Canada — to hold colleges more accountable for how they investigate and adjudicate allegations of sexual assault has led to many changes on campuses.
www.chornicle.com
Stretched to Capacity
What campus counseling centers are doing to meet rising demand
By Kelly Field NOVEMBER 06, 2016 PREMIUM
It’s the day before Samia Chughtai’s first big exam at the Johns Hopkins University, and the recent transfer from Northern Virginia Community College is “very stressed.” She’s come to the top floor of the library for a study break, and a free massage. For the next five minutes, Osiris Mancera, a sophomore, will roll, squeeze, and twist the tension from Ms. Chughtai’s muscles. When it’s over, Ms. Chughtai says she feels calmer than before. “I’ve had back rubs from professionals,” she says, “that were not as nice as this.” Welcome to Mellow Out Mondays, a weekly event in which trained student volunteers offer seated massages to stressed-out classmates through a program known as Stressbusters. The program, which is paid for by Hopkins, tackles stress head-on, aiming to assuage anxiety before it escalates. It’s a small part of a growing effort to ease the strain on campus counseling centers, which have seen an unrelenting — and unsustainable — rise in demand for mental-health services. Over the past six years, the number of students seeking appointments has grown by an average of 30 percent, five times the average rate of enrollment growth, according to the Center for Collegiate Mental Health. This growth is due to several factors:
www.chronicle.com
How Some Colleges Use Teletherapy to Reach More Students
By Kelly Field NOVEMBER 06, 2016 PREMIUM
When wait times for appointments at the University of Florida’s counseling center reached four or five weeks, Sherry Benton knew she had to try something different. “When you’re depressed, four to five weeks is the difference between making it through the semester and tanking academically,” said Ms. Benton, who was director of the counseling center at the time, four years ago. The university, like many of its peers, had been expanding its center for years, and had recently hired four new therapists, bringing its total to 37; but it still wasn’t keeping up with student demand. So Ms. Benton set about creating an online therapy program that would reduce the amount of time counselors spent with some students to as little as 10 to 15 minutes per week, allowing them to see three or four times as many students — via videoconference — as they typically saw in an hour. She named the program Therapist Assisted Online, or TAO, a Chinese word meaning “the path” or “the “way.”
When the University of Florida conducted a pilot of the program, in 2013, it found that students treated using TAO showed more improvement than participants in individual and group-therapy sessions. A year later, Ms. Benton left the university to commercialize the program.