You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Administration’ category.
There’s a great article up at the MediaShift blog about student newspapers and online publishing.
According to one recent study, more than a third of college papers are still print-only. The MediaShift post looks at why that is, what the barriers to publishing online are, and why it’s so important to make the effort.
The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few excerpts:
Make no mistake, college news is a messy business. Students are learning, and their mistakes all too often show up in print. An online presence will broadcast those mistakes to the world, so the theory goes. Also, a college that supports student press freedoms when distributed to 2,000 people on campus might not be so keen to distribute “bad news” about the campus when the whole world is watching.
[But] staying offline is a disservice to student journalists who cannot use the online tools now widespread in the industry. A student who can’t put material online can’t really understand the impact of social networks like Twitter or Facebook to spread news. They can’t really understand what it is to create a personal brand. And they can’t really understand the challenges of multimedia production.
A college that will not allow their student journalists to practice online journalism in a “real world” setting is abandoning its commitment to education in order to save face. And that is a tragedy not only for the college, but for the students who look to higher education to prepare them for the future.
Good stuff. And I’d add that a paper-only student newspaper is going to lose on-campus readership, particularly at a commuter campus, sequester itself from broader regional and national debates, and cut itself and its readership off from its own history.
Keeping a student paper offline isn’t just a disservice to the students who work on the paper, it’s a disservice to students who are doing organizing and activism on the campus as well.
Update: Butch Oxendine makes some excellent points in comments. An excerpt:
[Student newspapers] will maintain their relevance by specifically writing about campus-based issues, problems, and news that no one else is covering and reporting on. They will maintain their relevance by pulling the plug on the use of “wire” service reports from the Associated Press, etc.
Student newspapers must evolve. They’re not doing it well now. In tight economic times, more of them every year are being shut down. If they don’t have a web presence, they won’t be ready for this transition.
A Mississippi student is suing her high school after a cheerleading coach demanded her Facebook password, then used it to access and disseminate private email.
According to the lawsuit the coach, Tommie Hill, told the Pearl High School cheerleading squad that they would all have to give her their Facebook passwords. Several squad members responded by deleting their accounts from their cell phones, but sophomore Mandi Jackson complied with the request.
The suit claims that Hill accessed Jackson’s account later that day, and forwarded Jackson’s private Facebook messages to at least four other school officials. The officials then “publicly reprimanded … and humiliated” Jackson, suspended her from cheerleader training, and banned her from other school events.
Jackson’s attorney, Rita Nahlik Silin, told the Student Press Law Center that Hill’s actions were “a blatant violation of her right to privacy, her right to free speech, her right to free association and her right to due process. It’s egregious to me,” she said, “that a 14-year-old girl is essentially told you can’t speak your mind, can’t publish anything, can’t be honest or have an open discussion with someone without someone else essentially eavesdropping.”
As Lee Baker of the Citizen Media Law Project notes, this incident reflects a not-uncommon belief on the part of authority figures that “they have the right to invade others’ privacy and eavesdrop on private or semi-private conversations merely because these conversations take place online.” In Baker’s words, “asking for a student’s Facebook password in order to read private messages is akin to asking the student’s permission to install a wiretap on his or her phone.”
More than a quarter of American colleges are now charging processing fees to students who pay their tuition with credit cards, and the practice is becoming more common.
Colleges typically pay credit card companies a 2% fee to handle such transactions, and with budgets shrinking, they are increasingly passing those fees — along with a surcharge, in some cases — on to students.
Virginia’s George Mason University, where half of all students pay by credit card, is imposing a new 2.75% fee for credit card use. The university’s controller expects that the change will produce revenue of $1.5 million a year.
July 14 update: Now comes word (from @globecampus on Twitter) that some Canadian students are banning such transactions entirely. As of September, Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia will prohibit the use of credit cards for tuition payments, in a move that may generate as much as $1 million in annual savings.
An Arkansas teenager and her mother are suing a private Christian high school over the treatment the daughter received when school officials learned she was pregnant.
According to the lawsuit, officials at Trinity Christian School badgered the teen into admitting her pregnancy, then expelled her on the spot with only eleven days remaining in the school year. After telling the student (who is not named in public court documents) that she was being expelled, school officials escorted her to a Christian pregnancy crisis center, where she was administered a pregnancy test and given counseling. Staff at the crisis center then shared information about the student with the school.
At no point during their questioning of the student or the trip to the crisis center did school officials contact the student’s mother.
The lawsuit charges race and gender discrimination as well as false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The suit claims that other students who were known by the school to have engaged in sexual activity were not expelled.
A group of alumni plan to purchase and reopen Antioch College, a 150-year-old private Ohio college with a radical history.
Antioch, the flagship of the six-campus Antioch University system, closed two years ago, but now the alumni group has struck a deal with AU’s board of trustees to buy the campus, its endowment, and the rights to its name for $6 million.
The deal, which has to be approved by Ohio state officials, would allow the college to reopen as an independent institution. The alumni group plans to start small, with an annual budget of $4.5 million and an enrollment of just seventy students in the first year of operations, and they hope to admit their first new students in the fall of 2011.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments