The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Vince Dooley joins UGA, Tech delegation to ring Wall Street closing bell
By Brian O’Shea
The guests at the New York Stock Exchange were invited to mark the start of the 2022 college football season
Football mascots from Georgia Tech and UGA and former Georgia athletic director Vince Dooley helped to ring in the college football season Thursday from an unexpected spot – a balcony above the New York Stock Exchange. The ceremonial event, which also included Dan T. Cathy, chairman of Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A, was planned ahead of the two-game Chick-fil-A Kickoff Classic at Mercedes Benz Stadium. The Georgia Bulldogs play the Oregon Ducks on Saturday. Tech will play Clemson on Monday. The Georgia delegation was invited to ring the closing bell to mark the end of the stock market trading session. Georgia, the defending college football national champion, has a similar tradition, the ringing of the chapel bell on its campus in Athens after football games and other important occasions. The schools’ two costumed mascots, Hairy Dawg and Buzz participated, along with former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, who is now chancellor of the University System of Georgia.
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The Red and Black
Sonny Perdue, UGA President Jere Morehead and Vince Dooley join UGA in closing stock exchange
Athens Banner-Herald
Stock market closes up on a day when Vince Dooley and UGA officials ring closing bell
11Alive
NYSE buzzed with excitement for Georgia college football
GRA Notes
University researchers, USG Chancellor convene at annual
Several dozen prominent university scientists in Georgia convened August 10 for the GRA Academy, an annual gathering held to exchange information and strengthen collegiality. Comprised of GRA Eminent Scholars, Distinguished Investigators and Senior Fellows, the Academy met in Atlanta — its first in-person get-together since January 2020. Four researchers recently recruited to Georgia universities presented overviews of their work in immunology, electronics materials and Alzheimer’s. University System of Georgia Chancellor Sonny Perdue addressed the group, noting that “you all are changing lives for the better in so many ways, and you’ve been good for the Georgia economy.”
Douglas Now
SOUTH GEORGIA STATE COLLEGE RECOGNIZED AT BOARD OF REGENTS CAMPUS SPOTLIGHT
South Georgia State College was recognized as the Campus Spotlight at the Board of Regents monthly meeting on Tuesday, August 9, 2022. The Campus Spotlight is an initiative that allows the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia to learn more about the students, faculty and academic programs at their member institutions. The SGSC presentation entitled “Engaging Community Partners in Students’ Experiential Learning Opportunities” focused on three of its baccalaureate programs, the Bachelor of Science in Elementary and Special Education, the Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences, and the Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering Technology.
Albany Herald
New Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College president meets with her predecessor
By Carlton Fletcher
In the past 16 years and two months, only two individuals have occupied the president’s office at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. Those two people met Monday, Aug. 29, when new ABAC President Tracy Brundage sat down with former ABAC President David Bridges in historic Tift Hall, college officials said in a statement. “It was great,” Brundage said. “Dr. Bridges established quite a legacy at ABAC during his tenure and I think it’s prudent to understand his perspective and learn from his deep-seated knowledge of the institution. We talked about many aspects of the college and how ABAC can build for the future.” Bridges retired July 31 after 16 years and one month as president. He is the longest serving president in the history of ABAC and the only ABAC president to have once been a student at the college (Class of 1978). …On his last day as president, Bridges had simple words of wisdom for the first female president in ABAC’s history. “My primary advice to her is to remain laser-focused on our mission,” Bridges said. “Focus on who we are and who we might realistically become. Don’t get caught up in who people think we ought to be.” Brundage said ABAC is on the move.
Douglas Now
SGSC HOLDS RIBBON CUTTING FOR NEWLY RENOVATED POWELL HALL
South Georgia State College celebrated the completion of the Powell Hall renovation with a ribbon cutting ceremony on August 23, 2022. Powell Hall, one of the college’s three original buildings on the Douglas Campus, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and holds a prominent place in the history of the institution. Built in 1907, this legacy building was named for Josiah W. Powell, the second principal of the 11th District Agricultural and Mechanical School which became South Georgia College. Powell Hall was initially constructed to house the men’s dormitory. Over the years, the use of the 11,624 square feet changed to hold classrooms and office space. The building has undergone multiple renovations, including in 1978. Before the recent renovations began, it housed the Academic Success Center, along with offices for student life, counseling and disability services. Several classrooms were also located in Powell Hall. Recognizing the historical significance of the building, the University System of Georgia Board of Regents approved a state-allocated $3.1 million capital project. Kellerman Construction oversaw the renovation, and with the assistance of architectural firm, Cogdell Mendrala, preserved as much of the original architectural elements as possible to retain the historic integrity of the building.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
[Georgia%20Tech-led%20research%20group%20gets%20$65%20million%20to%20develop%20AI%20tools]Georgia Tech-led research group gets $65 million to develop AI tools
By Eric Stirgus
A coalition led by Georgia Tech’s Research Corporation will receive about $65 million to increase ongoing artificial intelligence efforts across the state’s industrial sectors, federal officials announced Friday. The Georgia AI Manufacturing (GA-AIM) coalition is one of 21 winners of the Biden administration’s $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge, funded by the American Rescue Plan and administered by the U.S. Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration. Federal officials said in a news release that the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on global supply chains has created “renewed urgency” for manufacturing methods, and artificial intelligence “will soon be a ubiquitous feature of any successful manufacturer.” … The money will establish a facility at Georgia Tech for research, testing and training. Coalition members across the state — such as the Technical College System of Georgia, Spelman College and the Georgia Minority Business Development Agency — will execute projects to expand awareness, training and job opportunities to underserved communities and businesses.
Athens CEO
UGA Will Feed More Local Residents This Fall with Campus Kitchen on Wheels
Staff Report
The UGA Campus Kitchen trailer rolled into north Athens earlier this month, bringing food, information about available resources, and a bit of festivity to the Fowler Drive community just as Athens-Clarke County students returned to school. The first event, a neighborhood resources fair, promoted healthy eating and living. Local organizations were on hand to talk to residents about WIC, SNAP and the Athens Area Diaper Bank, programs designed to benefit low-income families. UGA Campus Kitchen student volunteers and staff also served everyone a healthy spaghetti dinner. At the next stop, a back-to-school event at Fowler Drive Elementary, Campus Kitchen provided smoothies and sent everyone home with a meal prepared earlier that day. For some in the neighborhood, it was the first time they had heard of Campus Kitchen, a program out of the Office of Service-Learning, which reports to the UGA vice presidents for instruction and for public service and outreach.
Athens CEO
Terry Researchers Secure $80,000 Grant to Bring Big Data Tools to Social Science
Merritt Melancon
What factors lead to a productive sales team? What kinds of management behaviors lead to higher turnover? Academic researchers have long asked these hypothetical questions over the years, with each author providing distinct analyses and sets of data. “There’s a lot of data out there,” said Rick Watson, a Regents Professor and the J. Rex Fuqua Distinguished Chair for Internet Strategy. But there’s no way for researchers to look at all data collected on a given topic at one time or use modern data analysis to find answers. Watson has partnered with Xia Zhao, an assistant professor in management information systems and Terry student Yuanyuan (April) Song, who is completing a Ph.D. to help make social science research data more accessible and useful. Their team has been awarded an $80,000 grant to find a way to use those methods on the mountains of data in social science research papers.
Athens CEO
UGA Partners with Georgia Cities to Address Workforce Challenges
Margaret Blanchard
Cities across Georgia now have strategies and resources for tackling their workforce challenges thanks to research conducted by experts at the UGA Carl Vinson Institute of Government in partnership with the Georgia Municipal Association (GMA) and its nonprofit, Georgia City Solutions (GCS). The Jobs With Purpose: Georgia Municipal Workforce Development Strategy and Playbook 2022 was presented to the GMA Board of Directors during the association’s annual convention in Savannah this summer.
Atlanta Business Chronicle
3 ways The Georgia WebMBA shapes the next generation of business leaders
By Latisha Catchatoorian – Contributor
Online learning has become an increasingly common practice across the United States, especially for professionals looking to earn a graduate degree like an MBA. According to 2018 data from the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 6.9 million students, or 35.3% of students in the nation, were enrolled in online or distance education courses at degree-granting postsecondary institutions. And in the fall of 2020, roughly 2.2 million (or 71%) post-baccalaureate students enrolled in at least one distance education course. Not only does online learning offer flexibility and personal and educational growth opportunities, in many cases, it provides cost savings to people who wish to earn a graduate degree. The Georgia WebMBA program provides this and more to its students. …“I couldn’t imagine having had a better team. We were all professionals who wanted to do well for ourselves and each other. Even though it was distance learning, I felt connected to my classmates and professors,” said Troy Vollenweider, a business consultant at the University of Georgia Small Business Development Center at the University of West Georgia and a 2018 Georgia WebMBA alumnus.
WFXG
AU students raise awareness of crime statistics with sidewalk demonstration
By Lauren Young
Sociology students at Augusta University spent Wednesday afternoon making their mark and raising awareness. There were 21,570 murders across the United States in 2020, according to the FBI. Today, there are 21,570 tally marks on the sidewalk of Allgood Hall at Augusta University. “If I put that number on the board, it looks like a big number,” Dr. Kim Davies says, “but nobody really knows what that is. If we tick every mark and we say, ‘look, that’s a victim,'” Davies says, the impact of this project means more to her students. For about fifteen years, students in Davies’s class have made this visual demonstration on campus to remember lives lost to homicide. In those fifteen years, Davies has noticed some trends.
The Tifton Gazette
SANR Classic returns to ABAC golf course
The 22nd Annual School of Agriculture and Natural Resources Classic golf tournament at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College will be held on Sept. 30 at ABAC’s Forest Lakes Golf Club. There will be an 8 a.m. flight and a 1 p.m. flight, college officials said in a statement. The tournament is hosted by the ABAC Agriculture and Natural Resources Alumni Council and the School of Agriculture and Natural Resources to generate student scholarship and faculty and staff professional development funds. Vonda Fenn, tournament coordinator, said proceeds from the tournament are raised by sponsorships and player registration fees.
GPB
Savannah State finds far-flung partner in Michigan to expand access, affordability for HBCU students
By: Benjamin Payne
Listen Listening…00:59
LISTEN: Some Savannah State students now have a more affordable path to pursue three master’s programs not offered at Georgia’s oldest public HBCU. GPB’s Benjamin Payne reports.
Hypepotamus
MORE OF SILICON VALLEY LOOKS TO PLUG INTO ATLANTA & SAVANNAH TALENT
by Maija Ehlinger
More of Silicon Valley is moving to Georgia. Plug and Play Tech Center, the world’s largest innovation platform, is “plugging” into the Atlanta and Savannah ecosystems to expand the startup and corporate innovation landscape. Both cities are a natural fit for the Bay Area-based center that is a hybrid corporate innovation consultancy, startup accelerator, and venture capital firm, said Senior Director Nate Hinman. The team is already connected with many of Atlanta’s Fortune 1000 offices, but they will work to bring other corporate players into the city as well. Some of Plug and Play’s current corporate partners are across fintech, insurtech, IoT, transportation and mobility, healthcare, retail, supply chain, travel, and other tech verticals. Currently, Jessica Vargas serves as Director of Corporate Partnerships and is the only representative for Plug and Play in Atlanta. The team will start hiring soon ahead of their Q1 or Q2 2023 Atlanta office launch. Vargas told Hypepotamus that she is focused on “getting her feet wet and learning the ecosystem.”
Plugging In To Georgia
Plug and Play has wasted no time getting involved in the local tech ecosystem. It was a partner for the recent Spark by Go Studio Startup Demo Day, which took place in August in Atlanta. The Demo Day brought together startups working on the ‘future of retail,’ including local ventures like Dorabot, Speedchain, and Ware. Over in Savannah, Plug and Play is making waves in the last-mile delivery and supply chain space. It just announced its first cohort for the accelerator program out of its Savannah office. The program is running with The Savannah Logistics Innovation Center (SLIC), a public-private partnership led by Georgia Southern University and the Savannah Economic Development Authority.
WSAV
10th annual Willow Hill Heritage Festival to be held Labor Day weekend
by: Dajhea Jones
On this upcoming Labor Day weekend, the Willow Hill Heritage and Renaissance Center (WHHRC) will host their 10th annual Willow Hill Heritage Festival. The event will be held at the WHHRC museum, located at 4235 Willow Hill Road in Portal. On September 2 and 3 there will be discussions on Archival Silence: Closing Gaps in African History.
CounterPunch
Under Attack: Tenure and Academic Freedom
By Steven Higgs
Indiana University President Pamela Whitten responded with confusion when asked on a Bloomington, Ind., public media radio show if she was brought to the Big 10 school to eliminate tenure. “Oh my gosh,” she said, with a laugh. “Where did that come from?” IU’s first woman president reacted similarly when the questioner refined his query to focus specifically on her three-year tenure as president at Kennesaw State University in Georgia from 2018-2021. “I truly don’t have the slightest idea,” she said. “I will say there was talk in the legislature in the state of Georgia about that. … So, perhaps they’re conflating the conversation that happened amongst the general assembly in the state of Georgia.” Whitten reassured those concerned about tenure’s fate at IU. “That never was an issue at the University of Georgia or Kennesaw State or Michigan State, the schools I worked at,” she said. “And certainly, it is not an issue here. I will say, publicly, ‘I have no, no intent or interest in pursuing that.’”
Higher Education News:
The Chronicle of Higher Education
A ‘Crisis’ of Student Anxiety?
The challenges to student mental health are real. They are also decades in the making.
By Peter N. Stearns
The data are staggering: Nearly a third of all college students have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, the number of reported cases of student anxiety has increased by 50 percent over the past eight years, and counseling centers are facing unprecedented demand. The sense of crisis is unmistakable. The causes of student anxiety may seem obvious, with pandemic disruptions and social-media pressures heading the list, and this approach frames much current commentary. But that interpretation risks oversimplifying a problem that long predates Covid and Instagram. Student-services personnel were using crisis terminology 20 years ago, which is also when palliatives like importing puppy dogs at exam time began to be introduced. The recent and clearly significant developments are exacerbators, not initiators. The rise of student anxiety largely tracks the rise of anxiety in the U.S. population as a whole, a shift visible in that evolving bible of American psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The manual’s first edition, in 1952, paid limited attention to anxiety, which it characterized primarily as a symptom of “psychoneurotic disorders.” The DSM-III, in 1980, identified “anxiety disorders” as a discrete category, but estimated that only 2 percent to 4 percent of the population would, over the course of a lifetime, ever meet the diagnostic criteria. By the early 21st century, however, surveys put lifetime prevalence at nearly 30 percent, making anxiety disorders the most prevalent class of psychological problem.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
ADVICE – Why Students Are Skipping Class So Often, and How to Bring Them Back
Class attendance went off a cliff last year. A professor surveyed her students about it — and they had a lot to say.
By Carol E. Holstead
Last April, I was a month out from the end of the spring semester when I read in The Chronicle about the “stunning’ level of student disconnection.” At the time, I was teaching three in-person courses, two of them large, and speaking to a lot of empty seats. The story confirmed what I already knew in a vividly depressing way: Students were checked out. In fact, judging by class attendance, they were even more checked out last spring than they’d been in the fall. I started to wonder: What would my students say about why they were skipping class? And what could we as faculty members do to re-engage them? So I put together an online survey of 10 mostly open-ended questions and offered the link to 245 students in two of my courses. I’d hoped 50 would respond, but 175 did. And they wrote a lot. The 73-percent response rate to an online survey that required written answers told me that my students did care about school — even if they were not showing up — and they wanted to be heard. Now, as a new semester gets underway and we think about how to keep students enrolled and engaged, it seems a good time to share some of the findings.
Higher Ed Dive
Here’s how Louisiana now admits students into public colleges without the SAT or ACT
Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, Senior Reporter
Dive Brief:
Applicants to Louisiana’s public colleges who have earned a certain number of college credits or an associate degree no longer need to submit standardized test scores for admission. The Louisiana Board of Regents last week approved the new avenues for admissions. Applicants must complete a high school program and demonstrate proficiency in either mathematics or English. However, they no longer need to provide scores on assessments like the ACT or SAT if they have received an associate degree or college credits. Students can also instead earn a high enough GPA on a number of “core” high school courses to qualify for admissions. The thresholds of the required GPA, number of college credits or test score varies, depending on the institution — the admissions standards for Louisiana State University, the flagship institution, are the most stringent, for instance.
Inside Higher Ed
In Texas, an Independent University Weighs Joining a System
Four of Texas’ seven university systems want Stephen F. Austin University to join their ranks. For the unaffiliated institution, the vetting process has just begun.
By Katherine Knott
Stephen F. Austin State University, one of the last Texas public universities to remain independent, might finally shed its unaffiliated status—a step that highlights the increasing complexities involved with running a college or university. “It’s becoming more difficult to be a stand-alone institution,” interim Stephen F. Austin president Steve Westbrook said. “You’ve got all of the costs of complying with federal and state regulations. You have the unfunded mandates that we’re dealing with. We’ve got all sorts of tuition waivers and exemptions that we’re required to give. And then the increasing cost of deploying technology and all the cybersecurity costs and staffing that comes along with that. Pretty soon those things begin to snowball.” Joining a system could help the university reduce costs by sharing services and resources, he said. Additionally, Texas university systems tend to have more representatives in Austin and at the federal level, which benefit the university.
Higher Ed Dive
What’s next for colleges accredited by ACICS?
Around two dozen colleges will have to navigate heavy restrictions that could make it harder to remain open.
Natalie Schwartz, Editor
Last month, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it was withdrawing recognition of a long-troubled accreditor of for-profit colleges. The action followed years of warnings about the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, including that it had lax standards and oversaw colleges with poor student outcomes. But ACICS is no longer the large-scale agency it used to be. When the Education Department yanked its federal recognition, ACICS only oversaw about two dozen colleges that together had about 5,000 students. That’s compared to more than 230 institutions with some 360,000 students six years ago. “ACICS has basically served as a stain to college accreditation,” said Michael Itzkowitz, senior fellow of higher education at Third Way, a left-leaning think tank. “Its membership has dwindled over the past few years.” Still, the Education Department is now responsible for keeping an eye on those remaining two dozen institutions as they seek new accreditors. They will have 18 months to secure approval from another agency or they will lose access to federal financial aid — potentially a fatal blow against their bottom lines.
Inside Higher Ed
Temple to Rank Off-Campus Housing for Safety
The Philadelphia university is creating a database to rank rental properties near campus based on safety features. The effort, launching next month, is part of a response to crime near campus.
By Josh Moody
Concerned with violence near campus, Temple University has rolled out a variety of safety measures. Its latest effort, set to launch next month, is a database ranking nearby properties that scores rental units on a variety of safety measures. The idea has been in the works since spring and is part of a multipronged approach to public safety for the Philadelphia campus, which has seen a number of violent incidents in nearby neighborhoods—including a student killed in a botched robbery last fall. The idea, university officials say, is to help students identify and choose safe housing facilities, featuring licensed landlords and properties that show a clear commitment to public safety, while excluding unlicensed landlords.