University System News:
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Five takeaways on new college enrollment report
By Eric Stirgus
Three Georgia schools – Emory University, Georgia Tech and Spelman College – joined a national effort two years ago to help more students from low-income households get into college and graduate. On Tuesday, the umbrella group for this effort, the American Talent Initiative, gave a progress report for these 108 schools. The lack of students from those backgrounds, the equity gap, has been a much-debate issue in higher education. Colleges and universities must have graduation rates exceeding 70 percent and more than 500 students, among other criteria, to be part of the initiative.
Georgia Newsday
College student recovers after crash on e-scooter
By Staff
A metro Atlanta college student is talking about her near-death experience on an electric scooter. Talyor McCullough suffered serious injuries with doctors telling her family that she was lucky to have survived. Electric scooters have shown up in communities all across Georgia including college towns like Statesboro. That’s where McCullough is a student at Georgia Southern University. A photograph provided to FOX 5 News showed McCullough on Nov. 16, right before a date with her boyfriend. A few hours later an air ambulance flew her from Statesboro to Savannah for life-saving surgery. “It’s kind of a blur. I don’t remember the accident, I do remember that we were trying to cross a street on the Lime Scooter and got hit by the car,” McCullough said. Taylor and her boyfriend Daniel were riding together on a Lime Scooter. According to the family, a car struck the two at more than 50 miles an hour.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Steven Johnson
The University of Minnesota’s Board of Regents on Tuesday appointed Joan T.A. Gabel as the five-campus system’s next president, despite tensions over transparency during the search process. Gabel, provost of the University of South Carolina at Columbia, will be the first woman to hold the job when she takes office, in July, the University of Minnesota announced. The final stages of Minnesota’s search hit a snag just as the regents were preparing to pick finalists. In early December, two of the three leading contenders told the board they would agree to be publicly named as a finalist, as state law requires, only if they were the sole remaining candidate. Only “Candidate A” — Gabel — agreed to be publicly identified in any case. That willingness was one reason regents felt comfortable moving her forward, The Chronicle reported. Last week she was named the only finalist for the job. (Gabel is a UGA alumni)
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Feds still await Georgia request to change name of Runaway Negro Creek
By Maya T. Prabhu
Georgia lawmakers took steps this spring to rid a small body of water in the Savannah area of a name some find offensive. Nearly eight months later, state officials have yet to petition the federal government to change the name of Runaway Negro Creek on Skidaway Island to Freedom Creek.Gov. Nathan Deal in May signed Senate Resolution 685, which instructs the Georgia Archives to inform the U.S. Board on Geographic Names that the state would like to change the name. The board is tasked with maintaining uniform usage of geographic names across the country. As of this week, federal officials said that request had not come. …Representatives from the state archives did not respond to a request for comment. In September, Deputy State Archivist Steven Engerrand said the department was completing research to present to the federal naming board.Local historians say the creek is named after slaves from the Modena Plantation on Skidaway Island who would escape during the Civil War and try to cross the water to Union-occupied coastal islands along the river.
SeedQuest
Tomatoes have been bred to create a wide array of colors, shapes and sizes, but not much commercial work has been done on breeding tomatoes that taste good. That may be because — despite the public’s love of tomatoes — there’s been no commercial demand for a better-tasting fruit and because breeding for taste is harder than it seems, said Manoj Sapkota, a doctoral candidate at the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES) Institute for Plant Breeding, Genetics and Genomics who recently presented a seminar on the genetics of tomato taste. However, all of that may soon change due to an increased interest in better-tasting crops, dedicated scientists and the discerning palates of trained taste testers, Sapkota said. Sapkota and others in UGA horticulture Professor Esther van der Knaap’s lab are working to breed better-tasting tomatoes.
Reuters
More U.S. adults may be trying to lose weight, after all
Lisa Rapaport
Researchers said last year that the proportion of overweight U.S. adults trying to lose weight has been shrinking – but newly reanalyzed data suggest the proportion of adults trying to slim down actually grew slightly. Based on a U.S. survey, researchers had originally reported in JAMA that the proportion of adults who are overweight and obese surged from 53% to 66% over roughly the past three decades. They also said that over the same period, the proportion of overweight and obese adults trying to lose weight dropped from 56% to 49%. But today the authors retracted their paper, noting that they had failed to account for a change in how the survey asked about weight loss efforts starting in 1999. Once researchers accounted for the change in survey questions, they calculated that the proportion of overweight and obese adults actually rose to 58% by the end of the study period. Furthermore, “It looks like the proportion of adults trying to lose weight increased slightly,” said senior study author Jian Zhang, a public health researcher at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, in an email to Reuters Health.
Charlotte Observer
More than 2,000 NC teachers failed a math licensing exam. Now it may be dropped.
BY ANN DOSS HELMS
The math exam that has made it difficult for hundreds of new North Carolina teachers to get their license could be phased out as early as February, based on a recent vote by a panel of state education experts. In August, the state Board of Education learned that almost 2,400 elementary and special education teachers have failed the math portion of the licensing exam. Critics say the test requires middle and high school math skills that teachers of young children may not use, while failing to gauge whether licensing candidates will be effective teachers. Those critics got a boost from a report presented last week to the state’s Professional Educator Preparation and Standards Commission. That report looked at more than 1,100 beginning teachers who have taken licensing exams created by the for-profit Pearson publishing company. It found that teachers who passed the math test on the first try didn’t get significantly better results with their students than those who failed at least once. Nor were higher scores on the math exam significantly linked to better performance evaluations, the study by Kevin Bastian of UNC-Chapel Hill and Kristina Patterson of Georgia Southern University found.
Higher Education News:
Chronicle of Higher Education
Underrated Employees, Tuition Costs, and College Fight Songs: Tough Questions for Campus Leaders
Miles Davis, president, Linfield College; Mark Roosevelt, president, St. John’s College; and Kim A. Wilcox, chancellor, U. of California at Riverside
Three college leaders try to answer the hard questions about higher education, like whether the faculty really understands the top executive’s job, and who is the most underrated employee on campus.