University System News:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Kemp warns college football is ‘tall task’ if Georgians don’t don masks
By Greg Bluestein
Wear a mask or risk no college football this year. That’s the message Gov. Brian Kemp, a die-hard Georgia fan, delivered Wednesday as he launched a statewide “Wear A Mask” tour. “If people, especially our young people, don’t start wearing a mask when they’re going out in public and our numbers keep rising, that’s going to be a tall task,” he said of the prospect of a college football season. “But if we all hunker down right now, and dig in the next two or three weeks, we can get this turned in the right direction.”
Marietta Daily Journal
University system Board of Regents puts stamp on fiscal ’21 budget
By Dave Williams Capitol Beat News Service
The University System of Georgia Board of Regents signed off Wednesday on a fiscal 2021 budget that includes $2.3 billion in state funds. The regents got their marching orders last week when the General Assembly adopted a $25.9 billion state budget that cuts spending across the board by 10%. For the university system, that represents a reduction of $278 million from last year’s spending plan. The damage could have been worse. When the coronavirus pandemic hit Georgia in March, prompting shelter-in-place orders that forced businesses to close and lay off employees, Gov. Brian Kemp and legislative leaders told state agency heads to prepare to cut their budgets by 14%. But that was revised downward subsequently to 11% and then 10% when reports from the Georgia Department of Revenue showed the downturn in the economy was not affecting state tax revenues as much as had been anticipated.
Griffin Daily News
Gordon State sees enrollment jump for summer
Gordon State College experienced an enrollment jump for the summer 2020 semester as 1,016 students enrolled for classes, which reflects a 13 percent increase from the Summer 2019 term when GSC had 892 students enrolled in classes. “We are so pleased to see the increase in students taking courses this summer,” said Dr. John Head, Vice President for Enrollment Management and Student Affairs. “Given the shift to online courses in March and the challenges we are all facing right now, our students are showing great determination and perseverance by using this time to keep making progress towards their college degrees. Our faculty have to be given credit, they have done an amazing job adapting their pedagogy to meet the needs of students in the online environment.”
WSAV
Georgia Southern awarded millions in grant money to diversify health professions
by: Alex Bozarjian
Across the country city and state leaders are taking a critical look at what contributes to systemic racism. Georgia Southern University knows healthcare is part of it, which is why they’re using grant money to make a change. Faculty from both the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health and the Water’s College of Health Profession were each awarded a $3.25 million dollar grant from the U.S Department of Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA). The grant funds the Scholarships for Disadvantaged Students program, designed to diversify health professions and the nursing workforce. The award is specifically for institutions that provide scholarships to students from economically, educationally, or environmentally disadvantaged backgrounds.
WGAU
With campus reopening, UGA resumes research
University in Phase One of return to campus
By Michael Terrazas
When the University of Georgia began its Phase 1 reopening of campus, that marked the end of three anxious months for researchers across the university who had to suspend their work as the country grappled with the coronavirus pandemic. Still, while many laboratories and other research spaces have been ramping activity back up, life for UGA researchers post-COVID-19 will—at least initially—look quite different.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia professors press for flexibility to teach remotely
By Eric Stirgus
Professors at some public colleges and universities in Georgia are pressuring administrators to provide greater latitude to faculty who want to teach off-campus this fall semester to protect themselves, their families and others from COVID-19. The schools are offering waivers to work remotely if the instructor has a health risk that would prevent that person from teaching on campus. Schools are asking faculty to fill out forms that include medical documentation explaining why they cannot be in the classroom. The most persistent complaints to such forms are coming from Georgia Tech faculty. Some said they were previously granted accommodations not to teach on campus, but learned just last week a form was required by July 6 and the accommodations would have to be reapproved through a formal human resources process for employees in “higher risk” categories.
SaportaReport
Mental health, isolation: Explorations with an academic, choreographer, student leader
David Pendered
Mental health – a survey new in June shows 50 percent of American adults say they feel isolated, and happiness is at a 50-year low. Three leaders met in a virtual town hall to share thoughts on these issues and more – Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera, renowned choreographer Bill T. Jones, and Tech student leader – and artist – Mykala Sinclair. The trio covered a wide swath in a 52-minute conversation that took as its starting point a performance Jones is to bring to Tech Oct. 29, pandemic permitting. Jones created What Problem before the pandemic. It explores topics that recent events have made more relevant: Isolation, divisiveness, and the role of community.
Athens Banner-Herald
Furloughs for UGA employees? None planned in 2020-21 budget
By Lee Shearer
University of Georgia employees won’t face mandatory furloughs under the state’s 2020-21 public higher education budget approved by the Board of Regents on Wednesday. The board approved University System of Georgia Chancellor Steve Wrigley’s furlough proposal in May as the university system and other state agencies prepared to absorb budget cuts of 14 percent, based on projected state tax revenue shortfalls in the 2020-21 fiscal year, which began Wednesday. State fiscal planners later revised the predicted revenue shortfall, and Gov. Brian Kemp on Tuesday signed a state budget of $25.9 billion — a 10 percent reduction from last year. “I know this pandemic created a particularly difficult set of financial issues for crafting a state budget,” UGA President Jere Morehead said in a statement, “and I am thankful that our lawmakers protected our hardworking and dedicated faculty and staff from furloughs.” Morehead’s message to the campus community did not say whether the university would go through with layoffs proposed earlier this year.
The Atlantic
College Leaders Have the Wrong Incentives
If we want university presidents to safeguard the well-being of their communities, we need to change the way they’re evaluated.
Ian Bogost
Contributing writer at The Atlantic and Distinguished Chair at Georgia Tech.
Janet Frick, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, isn’t happy about her institution’s plans for the fall term. As confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus swell to record highs in the state, which reopened most businesses in May, its public institutions of higher education are pressing forward with aggressive return-to-campus plans. In particular, Frick is shocked that the University System of Georgia (USG), the body that oversees the state’s 26 public institutions, appears to have pressured its member institutions into not requiring masks in buildings and classrooms, despite the fact that they are high-risk environments for transmission, and that masks can reduce that transmission substantially. She’s not alone. …The incentives that motivate collegiate leaders, and the ways in which their performance is evaluated, clash with the needs of campuses and their constituents. The urgency that has erupted around the coronavirus and antiblack racism this year should inaugurate a new era in evaluating college success, one in which schools are measured not based on their wealth, but on the virtues they embody in their operations, and on the justice they achieve within their communities.
Cobb County Courier
KSU Campus Workers Union Petitions Whitten For A No-Layoff Pledge
Posted By: Arielle Robinson
Kennesaw State University’s chapter of the United Campus Workers of Georgia delivered a petition to KSU President Dr. Pamela Whitten’s office Tuesday afternoon calling on her to not fire any workers. Union members and KSU professors Dr. Heather Pincock and Dr. Sara Giordano delivered a print out of the petition to Whitten’s mailbox near her office inside Kennesaw Hall since Whitten was not there. Members also laid signs on the KSU sign on the Campus Green, asking Whitten to promise to not lay off campus workers. Union members had hoped Whitten would be in her office to deliver the petition in-person.
Metal Architecture
Rethinking conventional design elements to maximize sustainability puts the Kendeda Building in the vanguard and earns it the Grand Award
By Paul Deffenbaugh
The 2020 Metal Architecture Design Awards had more than 170 entries, and among all of them the judges selected the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, as the Grand Award winner. In the natural tension between high-concept design and sophisticated sustainable technologies, the Kendeda Building pushes sustainable to high concept.
Other News:
Fox5
Georgia sets record with 3,000 new COVID-19 cases in last 24 hours
Georgia has set another single-day record for an increase in confirmed coronavirus cases in the state. Nearly 3,000 new cases were added Wednesday as Georgia’s governor continues to urge residents to mask up. As of 3 p.m. Wednesday, 84,237 COVID-19 cases have been confirmed, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health. That’s an increase of 2,946 cases within the last 24-hours. Hospitalizations have also seen a significant increase. According to the GDPH, 11,275 people were hospitalized with the virus with 2,357 of those taking up an ICU bed, the GDPH reports.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia sees testing system strained with rise in COVID-19 cases
By J. Scott Trubey
Amid Georgia’s new surge in coronavirus cases, the increased demand for testing is straining the state’s infrastructure, leading to longer waits in some places and complaints from residents of delayed results. Georgia officials stress the state has the capacity to accommodate testing for all who want it, a far cry from the early weeks of the pandemic when tests were rationed. Generally, public health officials say, residents can get an appointment within a day or so and results are available within a few days to a week. But a half-dozen patients who spoke to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said they had to wait upward of a week to book appointments in some areas, and patients and doctors told the AJC that lab results sometimes take a week or longer, leaving undiagnosed people in limbo.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Map: Coronavirus deaths and cases in Georgia (updated July 1, 3 p.m.)
An updated count of coronavirus deaths and cases reported across the state
DEATHS: 2,827 | Deaths confirmed in 140 counties. For 2 deaths, the county is unknown, and for 48 deaths, the residence was determined to be out-of-state. CONFIRMED CASES: 84,237 | A case’s county is determined by the patient’s residence, when known, not by where they were treated. Cases have been confirmed in every county. For 2,395 cases, the county is unknown. For 4,648 cases, the residence was determined to be out-of-state.
Higher Education News:
Inside Higher Ed
The Role of Learning in Colleges’ Decisions About Fall
Presidents give their colleges and universities mixed grades on the remote learning they offered last spring. How is that influencing their decisions about reopening campuses this fall?
By Doug Lederman
On Monday Inside Higher Ed published the latest iteration in our series of surveys of college presidents about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the recession, offering a snapshot at various points since March into campus leaders’ views on how their institutions, employees and students have handled the upheaval wrought by the unprecedented events of this spring. The surveys cover a wide range of issues, including their sense of how effectively their campuses continued to educate students during the emergency pivot to remote learning. We explored some of those subjects in our article about the survey’s results on Monday. But I want to dig a bit more deeply into that topic in today’s “Transforming Teaching and Learning” column, and to offer some thoughts about how colleges may be factoring those views into their plans for the fall.
Inside Higher Ed
Mounting Faculty Concerns About the Fall Semester
Professors across institutions are increasingly waving red flags about the private and public health implications of default face-to-face instruction come fall, along with a lack of shared decision making in staffing and teaching decisions.
By Colleen Flaherty
Purdue University president Mitch Daniels, an early advocate of reopening campuses for the fall, has become a de facto spokesperson for the movement. The role comes with attendant criticism, including from within his institution. During an interview on CNN, for example, Daniels was asked about a previous comment Alice Pawley, associate professor of engineering education and president of the main Purdue campus’s American Association of University Professors chapter, made to Inside Higher Ed: “I don’t want to think about face-to-face teaching the hordes of students I usually teach until there is a vaccine.” Daniels told CNN that Pawley represented a “very tiny minority” of the Purdue faculty and that she was “frankly, not from the most scientifically credible corner of our very STEM-based campus.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Working While Parenting Is a Reality of Covid-19. One University Tried to Forbid It.
By Katherine Mangan
During a chaotic spring semester, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced parents and kids to work and study from home, it wasn’t uncommon for a child to pop up on a parent’s Zoom screen needing help with homework, or someone to mediate a sibling fight. But next month, Florida State University staff members were told, they could lose their right to work from home if they’re simultaneously caring for children. Outrage exploded on social media following the announcement last week, and remained unabated when the university amended it on Monday. The policy caught the attention of college employees nationally, who took to social media to object, with a smattering of dark humor. How would the institution enforce the rule? By swooping in if an employee rats on a colleague whose toddler saunters in to a Zoom session?
The Chronicle of Higher Education
How University Finances Work in a Crisis
Mistrust and misconceptions abound, but here’s the playbook colleges are actually putting into practice.
By Dean O. Smith
Covid-19 has destabilized university finances, something particularly stressful for faculty members, who often find themselves left out when budgets are rationalized. Professors seek explanations about the administration’s response, and sometimes those administrative explanations lack transparency, spreading mistrust and misconceptions. Administrative responses to lost income during a financial crisis follow a fairly standard protocol. The first response is to slash discretionary expenditures: stop unnecessary travel, defer routine maintenance, freeze hiring, etc. This modest short-term step slows cash outflow, but for severe crises, such as the one we now face, it seldom solves the problem. Large nondiscretionary expenditures continue unabated: salaries, pension-fund contributions, health insurance, loan repayments, building leases, and so forth. This first response simply buys time.