University System News:
Albany Herald
Georgia State ranks No. 2 in innovation, undergraduate teaching
From staff reports
Georgia State University is ranked the No. 2 most innovative university in the country and No. 2 for best undergraduate teaching in the 2022 edition of U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges. Georgia State improved its position in the categories, having ranked No. 3 for both innovation and undergraduate teaching in the 2021 survey. It’s the fourth year in a row the university has been ranked by the magazine in the top three among national universities for its “unusually strong commitment to undergraduate teaching.” Georgia State is the top-ranked public university in the category.
WGAU Radio
UGA awards $1,000 prizes as vaccine incentives
More drawings to come
By UGA Today
Fifty fully vaccinated members of the University of Georgia community won $1,000 in the first of three drawings to promote COVID-19 vaccinations on campus. The winners, made up of UGA students, staff and faculty, were drawn from more than 21,000 entries on Sept. 15 and represent the strong commitment being taken by the UGA community to keep one another safe through vaccinations.
Diverse Issues in Higher Education
Combining Education and Anthropology to Reach Students Where They’re At
Jessica Ruf
Having studied Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese and French, Dr. Lauren Johnson, assistant dean of the College of Education at the University of North Georgia (UNG), knows how demoralizing it can feel to struggle for one’s words in a new language. And, having taught abroad in Venezuela, Iraq and China, she also knows the alienating feelings that can come with navigating a foreign culture for the first time. Early on in her career, she saw the effects those cultural and linguistic barriers had on her first classroom of students and their parents. As a teacher for the Columbia Urban Educators program in New York’s Washington Heights, she often worked with first- or second-generation immigrants who were learning English as a second language. …That’s why Johnson has helped build two pipeline programs with a local school district in Georgia to help encourage more students of color to opt for teaching careers. “RISE,” or Realizing Inspiring and Successful Educators, works with Hall County (GA) Schools, to place Hispanic graduates of UNG’s education program in teaching positions in the district. The Aspiring Teachers Program works in partnership with the Gainesville City School System to recruit minority students into the teaching profession and support them along their path to a teaching career.
Albany Herald
UGA, Virginia Tech researchers look into future of farming
By Allison Floyd CAES News
All over the world, farmers are aging and young people are moving to more urban areas for economic opportunities. Leaders wonder what factors push young people to abandon agriculture and whether technology or other tools can make farming a more attractive option for the next generation. Researchers from the University of Georgia and Virginia Tech are set to present early findings from research exploring those questions in Senegal, where a team surveyed more than 1,000 peanut-growing households and used the latest GIS data to map all peanut-growing plots to explore challenges among peanut producers and the main reasons why young people turn away from agriculture.
Henry Herald
New UGA study finds gaps in programs that connect women with their land
By Kristen Morales
It’s a story University of Georgia student Jacqueline Miner hears again and again: Women come to own forestland through a family member but don’t know what to do with it. Selling the land is one option, but they know it might not be the best one—keeping forests as forests is a more sustainable solution. But because women often aren’t included in conversations about forestland management, they don’t know where to turn for resources or guidance when they become landowners. This issue is especially pressing as a growing number of women are owning forestland in Georgia, the top forestry state in the country. …Miner, a master’s student at the UGA Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, interviewed female forest landowners as well as stakeholders from government agencies and nonprofits to understand how they view opportunities and obstacles. As a result, many said education and outreach for women weren’t being addressed.
Media India
How to Identify Heart Disease Risk in Schizophrenia Patients?
by Dr Jayashree
A blood test can be a signal that a person with schizophrenia is heading towards metabolic syndrome, which increases their risk of developing heart disease due to their brain disorder treatment. Schizophrenia is a chronic mental illness characterized by distortions in thinking, perception, emotions, language, sense of self, and behavior that affect 20 million people worldwide. Common experiences include hallucinations (hearing voices or seeing things that are not there) and delusions (fixed, false beliefs). Metabolic syndrome is a collection of risk factors that are associated with inflammation and cardiovascular disease like high blood pressure, high blood glucose, and a larger waist circumference. Whereas stress-induced inflammation is known to play a role in schizophrenia. This more pronounced role is a factor for at least 25% of patients, based on the previous studies that have already measured inflammation markers in the blood of schizophrenia patients. Based on these facts, researchers at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University examined data on 20,000 schizophrenia patients who participated in some 50 clinical trials across the nation to see if there is a clear indicator for these additional risks.
U.S. News & World Report
Kids in Marching Bands Under Threat From Heat Illness
By Steven Reinberg, HealthDay Reporter
It’s not just athletes on the field who suffer when outdoor temperatures get too high. Members of college and high school marching bands are at increased risk of heat-related illness, too, researchers warn.
“They go out there, and they often wear these really heavy wool uniforms,” said lead author Andrew Grundstein of the University of Georgia. “They practice many times for hours and hours outside. Some of them are carrying heavy instruments, and they’re moving around a lot. There are a lot of risk factors that come into play for marching band members that people generally don’t really think about.” For the study, Grundstein’s team reviewed news reports of band members suffering heat-related illnesses between 1990 and 2020. The researchers found that nearly 400 became ill due to heat exposure. About half were treated on site, but 44% were treated in the hospital and released the same day. The others suffered from heat stroke and needed more than one day in the hospital.
Wired
Floods Have Swamped the US. The Next Health Problem: Mold
The goo that grows in soaked buildings can cause infections and allergies—an issue that’s understudied even as climate change leads to more frequent deluges.
The floods swamped roads, toppled trees, crushed houses, and killed close to 100 people—but as the water recedes, authorities are watching for signals of a second, slower-moving harm. Wherever water has invaded buildings, mold and fungi follow. They are deadly to people with damaged immune systems and dangerous even for the apparently healthy. Yet we have not built the surveillance systems that would reveal how serious their effect may be. This is not a new problem. In 2004, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering warned in a major report that the health threats posed by whatever grows in damp indoor spaces were under-researched. …The personal experiences of many of these researchers has underlined for them how insidious a foe mold after flooding can be. Jose Vazquez, a physician and chief of infectious diseases at Augusta University’s Medical College of Georgia, had four feet of water in his house for weeks in the winter of 2015–16, after the Army Corps of Engineers opened a dam on the Savannah River. Despite being completely healthy, “even a normal person like myself can have pretty bad reactions to mold,” he says. Plus, he adds, many people actually are immune-suppressed in ways they might not even think about.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Man arrested, accused of assaulting woman on UGA campus
By Caroline Silva
A man accused of assaulting and robbing a woman Saturday morning near a University of Georgia parking deck was arrested Monday afternoon, campus police said. An arrest warrant for Tritavious Malik Harris, 24, was obtained Monday morning. He was later arrested and charged with robbery, aggravated battery, kidnapping, sexual battery, battery, simple assault and criminal trespass.
Statesboro Herald
As new cases fall, deaths continue to rise
City vaccine clinic gives 87 shots Saturday
Jim Healy/staff
…Georgia Southern
New cases reported at Georgia Southern University have dropped significantly for four consecutive weeks. Confirmed and self-reported cases at Georgia Southern have fallen from 434 across its three campuses the week of Aug. 16–22, to 31 for the most recent week — Sept. 13–19. Of the total number, 24 were on the Statesboro campus, compared to 72 the previous week, 86 the week before that and 389 for Aug. 16–22. Like Georgia Southern, new cases of COVID-19 on most University System of Georgia campuses have been coming down after increasing at the beginning of the fall semester.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Opinion: Regents’ campus policies on COVID don’t stand up to scrutiny
Get Schooled with Maureen Downey
Georgia State professor: Masks and vaccines enhance rather than diminish liberty
In a guest column, Georgia State University professor Peter Lindsay questions the credentials of the Board of Regents — all political appointees in the service of the governor — to manage the state’s 26 public campuses, especially during a pandemic. Lindsay is a professor of political science and philosophy. He received his master’s and doctorate from the University of Toronto and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Before coming to Georgia State, he held positions at the University of Toronto, Harvard University and the University of New Hampshire. His research focuses on matters of economic justice, as well as pedagogy in higher education. He is the author of two books, “Creative Individualism: The Democratic Vision of C. B. Macpherson” and “The Craft of University Teaching.”
Other News:
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Map: Coronavirus deaths and cases in Georgia (updated Sept. 20)
An updated count of coronavirus deaths and cases reported across the state
CONFIRMED CASES: 1,191,105
CONFIRMED DEATHS: 21,426 | This figure does not include additional cases that the DPH reports as suspected COVID-19-related deaths. County is determined by the patient’s residence, when known, not by where they were treated.
Higher Education News:
Inside Higher Ed
Climbing Toward Vaccine Compliance
Among colleges mandating COVID vaccines, many are reporting steady progress toward compliance with the requirements, even as their approaches to stragglers differ.
…Many of the approximately 1,000 colleges that have mandated COVID-19 vaccines are reporting strong compliance with the requirements, even as they differ in the approaches they’re taking toward those lagging students who have not complied by the relevant deadlines. Some have disenrolled students from their fall classes if they do not meet the requirement, while others are extending a grace period for the fall as long as unvaccinated students submit to extra COVID-19 safety protocols such as surveillance testing. …Some colleges with vaccination mandates are reporting they’ve reached more than 90 percent vaccination rates for students and employees. A recent paper by Yale School of Public Health researchers published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that campuses that achieve vaccination rates of more than 90 percent “can insulate themselves against most of the threats that will otherwise prompt widespread or frequent testing and a return to more intensive or disruptive” nonpharmaceutical interventions.
Inside Higher Ed
Survey Finds ‘Openly Jewish’ Students Feel Unsafe on Campus
By Maria Carrasco
A new poll surveying members of the leading predominantly Jewish fraternity and sorority found that more than 65 percent of respondents have felt unsafe on campus due to anti-Semitic attacks, with one in 10 reporting they have feared physical assault because they are openly Jewish. Additionally, nearly 70 percent of the students said they had personally experienced or “were familiar with” an act of anti-Semitism on campus or in a virtual campus setting in the past 120 days. As a result, about 50 percent said they have hidden their Jewish identities, and more than half have avoided expressing their views on Israel.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Shrinking Graduate Cohorts Is a Bad Idea
It won’t fix the jobs crisis, and it could exacerbate the damage.
By Greg Afinogenov
As everyone knows by now, academia, and especially the humanities, is facing a systemic crisis. Tenure-track job postings have cratered, leaving many new Ph.D.s to face the poor working conditions and insecurity of casualized teaching jobs. Tenured faculty have finally begun to reckon with the true scale of the problem. That’s progress compared with a decade ago — when they appeared to be in total denial. But one of the favored solutions that has emerged from this reckoning — drastically reducing graduate cohorts — is not a solution at all. At first glance, the logic behind cutting graduate enrollments seems straightforward. At the root of the problem, proponents argue, is the mismatch between the supply of Ph.D.s and the demand for them on the academic job market. If supply could be reduced, it would eventually match up with demand, and — as one recent argument in The Chronicle suggests — the savings from offering fewer funding packages to graduate students could be used to create new tenure-track jobs. This solution appears attractive because it focuses on what humanities academics can do with the power they have. In the face of problems that appear so large as to be intractable, solving the jobs crisis, one department at a time, has clear appeal.
Inside Higher Ed
GAO Report: Office of Federal Student Aid Is Understaffed
By Alexis Gravely
The Office of Federal Student Aid at the Department of Education is understaffed, as its staffing levels haven’t kept pace with the growing student loan portfolio, according to findings by the Government Accountability Office. From fiscal year 2010 to 2019, FSA’s Direct Loan volume increased 450 percent and the number of borrowers increased 150 percent, but the number of staff increased only 6 percent during that time frame. The understaffing is shown in the office’s inability to complete all its work — a workforce assessment conducted by FSA showed that in fiscal year 2020, staff failed to complete almost 20 percent of its workload, even after employees worked overtime and supervisors picked up extra work.