University System News:
www.mdjonline.com
UGA Provost named sole finalist for KSU president
Shaddi Abusaid
ATLANTA — Pamela Whitten, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs for the University of Georgia, has been named the sole finalist for Kennesaw State University’s presidency. Whitten was announced as the finalist at Tuesday’s meeting of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. She’ll be in Cobb Friday touring KSU’s Kennesaw and Marietta campuses. Regent Neil Pruitt said Whitten was recommended by the Kennesaw State Presidential Search Committee, which was tasked with finding a replacement for former president Sam Olens, who resigned in February. KSU professor of management Doug Moodie, who chaired the 14-member “search and screen” committee, said academic experience was a must for a candidate. The No. 1 requirement on the job listing was an academic degree, Moodie said, and teaching experience was a must. After vetting candidates from schools across the nation, the search committee submitted a short list of five candidates to a Board of Regents special committee, which made the final decision. One of the five candidates dropped out, narrowing the pool to four before Whitten was selected. …The board will vote whether to formally approve Whitten as KSU’s president at a special called meeting, according to Charlie Sutlive, the USG’s vice chancellor for communications and governmental affairs. A date for that meeting has not been set.
www.myajc.com
Get Schooled with Maureen Downey
University of Georgia official named lone finalist to lead Kennesaw State
The Board of Regents apparently learned something from the Sam Olens debacle at Kennesaw State University and chose someone with an academic background this time around. University of Georgia official Pamela Whitten is the sole finalist for Kennesaw State University presidency, and she brings a strong academic and research background. She is now senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Georgia, a position she has held since 2014. The Regents are expected to cast a final vote on Whitten after a campus visit where she will meet with faculty and staff. Former Attorney General Sam Olens resigned as KSU’s president in February after a tumultuous 16-month tenure. Faculty and staff complained they were not consulted in the hiring of Olens and pushed for a replacement with academic experience and a background in research. Their concerns were heard.
See also:
www.albanyherald.com
UGA’s Whitten Kennesaw State presidential finalist
Regents select Georgia senior vice president for academic affairs/provost for KSU position
www.wabe.org
Board Of Regents Names Finalist In KSU Presidential Search
https://www.wabe.org/board-of-regents-names-finalist-in-ksu-presidential-search/
www.ajc.com
Kennesaw State hires new police chief
By Eric Stirgus
Kennesaw State University has decided it’s acting police chief has performed well enough in the job to give him the job. The university announced Wednesday that Edward Stephens will be its chief. He’s been acting chief since August after Roger Stearns resigned after an internal review surrounding unspecified leadership concerns, KSU officials said at the time. An internal report last year found the turnover rate in KSU’s police department has been as high as 25 percent since 2014, with 23 terminations in 2015. The university said it would conduct a national search to find a replacement, but interim President Ken Harmon decided the best candidate was already on campus.
www.wjcl.com
Ga. Tech-Savannah campus hosting Full STEAM Ahead Summer Camps
http://www.wjcl.com/article/ga-tech-savannah-campus-hosting-full-steam-ahead-summer-camps/21071815
Dave Williams
SAVANNAH, GA —With school out for the summer, it’s time to go camping for many of the students looking for something to keep them occupied. The Georgia Tech-Savannah campus in cooperation with the Atlanta campus is offering a unique experience in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Academics or STEAM. The first of a series of Full STEAM Ahead camps are underway. During the camps, rising first through 8th graders will learn how to produce a robotics zoo from conception to reality as well as creating their own soundtrack for their exhibit. “We are teaching the students how to take an inanimate object and make it animate, ” said Danyelle Sauers, Educational Outreach Coordinator, Ga. Tech-Savannah campus. “So they actually have to work with their I-pad or their computer and they have to tell their computer and they have to tell their drone or their robot to move forward three spaces or move back for spaces, so we’re teaching them the language that computer uses to communicate with each other.”
www.albanyherald.com
ABAC a ‘hub’ for rural education
Tifton college to offer Ag Education program
By Rachel Lord
TIFTON — For nearly 40 years, there has been a shortage of Agricultural Education teachers in Georgia. ABAC’s new bachelor’s program in Agricultural Education and accompanying certificate program could change that. The article “ABAC Helping Solve the Teacher Shortage,” by Frank Flanders, associate professor of Agricultural Education at ABAC, notes that last year “there were 87 AgEd teaching positions open in Georgia and only 20 newly certified teachers available to fill the positions.” The article also states that in the past five years, there was an average of 18 AgEd graduates per year from the only two approved institutions for AgEd with an average number of 60 job openings. Both Marcus Johnson, the Education department head at ABAC, and Mark Kistler, dean of the ABAC School of Agriculture and Natural Resources, say they believe the introduction of the new program will increase enrollment at ABAC.
Higher Education News:
www.chronicle.com
An Update of the Federal Law Governing Higher Ed Appears Dead. Now There’s a Fight Over Who Killed It.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/An-Update-of-the-Federal-Law/243592
By Goldie Blumenstyk
Could it be that the last chance for this Congress to draft a new Higher Education Act just died because two United States senators can’t resolve a middle-school-style disagreement over who owed whom a call back? Sure, there’s more to it than that. Democrats and Republicans fundamentally disagree over the federal government’s role in holding colleges accountable and ensuring that a higher education is affordable and accessible to low-income and minority students. Democrats also distrust the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, over her willingness to protect students from unscrupulous colleges. (In the same vein, Republicans believe the Education Department overstepped its authority under the Obama administration.) But miscommunication between the chairman of the Senate’s education committee and its top minority member is clearly part of the reason renewal of the key law, known as reauthorization, is all but certainly dead until 2019. Last week Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, announced that he didn’t expect the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which he leads, to produce a reauthorization bill this year. He blamed the panel’s Democrats for inaction, saying they’ve been sitting on a complete proposal from Republicans for four months. “They want to wait until next year to see if they’re in better shape politically” before taking on higher-education reform, Alexander told an audience at a forum sponsored by The New York Times. On Monday a spokeswoman for Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the committee, painted a different picture.
www.unews.com
States Should Boost Public Higher Ed Spending
Public universities were created to offer a high-quality education at reasonable cost to students of modest means. Do they succeed?
By Andre Dua, Contributor
Have America’s public universities lost sight of their original mission of increasing social mobility? A growing body of research suggests that sharp cuts in public funding during the Great Recession threaten to undermine state schools’ historic role as socioeconomic ladders for bright, low-income students – but it also shows how to revive this core function. Public universities were intended to offer a high-quality education at a reasonable cost to students from families of modest means. Most began as land-grant schools, created by states from federal land-grant funds to propagate practical knowledge, including agricultural science and engineering, alongside the traditional liberal arts. Their founders believed that making college affordable would yield more productive farmers, factory workers, craftsmen and businessmen, while giving promising working-class students a route to professional careers in medicine, law, and accounting. The legislation signed by President Abraham Lincoln to create land-grant trusts in 1862 stated that the schools are intended for the “liberal and practical education of the industrial classes,” i.e., students from blue-collar backgrounds. For years, public universities performed this core mission with great success, fueling unprecedented social mobility in American society in the 20th century, helping millions of low-income students enter the middle class. And we’re still reaping the benefits, as demonstrated by the fact seven of the top 10 schools for social mobility in 2014 were in the City University of New York (CUNY) system, according to research by Raj Chetty, who has studied long-term trends in income and education. But low-income students from low-income families are still far less likely to go to college than their well-off peers: