You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Administration’ category.
Perennial presidential-campaign asterisk Alan Keyes was one of twenty-two anti-choice activists arrested on the Notre Dame campus yesterday. The group, which included Operation Rescue founder/sleazeball Randall Terry, was protesting President Obama’s upcoming commencement address.
The group was arrested for trespassing — Notre Dame policy allows only “student-led protests” on campus, and apparently this group couldn’t (or didn’t care to) find any student supporters.
But that’s not my favorite part of the story. My favorite part of the story is this: When Keyes walked onto campus, he was pushing a blood-spattered doll in a stroller…
A Spongebob Squarepants stroller.
Update: Photo from here. Note that the doll was so small and unobtrusive that the (“pro-life,” but disgusted anyway) blogger who posted it thinks that Keyes was pushing a bloody Spongebob doll in the stroller. Note also that commenter Leslie Hanks actually approves of parading around with bloody Spongebob dolls as an anti-abortion tactic.
Eight Venezuelan police officers have been arrested in connection with the shooting death of student activist Yuban Ortega Urdaneta two weeks ago. The charges against the officers include homicide.
Ortega, a supporter of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and the president of the student association of the University Technical Institute of Ejido, was reportedly shot in the forehead during a campus protest against university corruption on April 28. He died of his wounds three days later.
The shooting of Ortega sparked three days of student riots in the city of Mérida, just north of the Ejido campus. In a television appearance after Ortega’s death, president Chavez said that “the full weight of the law must fall” on whoever was responsible.
It seems like every month or so there’s a big media buzz around another deeply flawed study that claims to confirm negative stereotypes about American college students. In February it was the one that explored students’ supposed “sense of entitlement” in the classroom, in March it was the one that claimed that students spend more time drinking than studying.
In April it was the one from Ohio State University researcher Aryn Karpinski that found that Facebook users have lower grades than students who aren’t on FB. It was only a draft paper, based on a small group of students from one college, but it made a huge splash all over the world.
And now it turns out that it’s pretty much worthless as scholarship.
A new response from three scholars in the field (Josh Pasek, eian more, and Eszter Hargittai) looks closely at the Facebook study, and finds it incredibly weak. In comparing the grades of students who use and don’t use Facebook, for instance, one needs a substantial number in each category, but this study’s sample only included 15 non-FB undergrads. It also found major differences in Facebook adoption across majors, but made no effort to determine whether it was those population differences, rather than an actual tie to Facebook use, that was responsible for grade variation.
At least as important, the response looks at data obtained from three large studies, and found no significant connection between Facebook use and low grades. Indeed, one set of data suggested that Facebook use was, as the authors put it, “slightly more common among individuals with higher grades.”
As for Karpinski, despite the fact that she was quoted as saying that there was a “disconnect between students’ claim that Facebook use doesn’t impact their studies, and our finding showing that they had lower grades,” and despite the fact that she invited administrators “to find ways to limit access [to Facebook] … resulting in better academic performance,” she now says her findings were just “exploratory,” and that she never intended them to be seen as conclusive.
“People, she says, “need to chill out.”
Afternoon update: In the interest of fairness and completeness, here’s a link to Karpinski’s original conference presentation and to her rebuttal to the three scholars’ response to it. (She argues that their study has “serious methodological and statistical flaws” of its own.)
Late afternoon update: And here’s a link to Pasek, more, and Hargittai’s rebuttal to the rebuttal, courtesy of Hargittai.
The New School Free Press has the transcript of the Wednesday night speech in which Bob Kerrey told the New School Board of Trustees that he wouldn’t be seeking a contract extension. As I was reading it over just now, a passage from near the end leaped out at me:
“My term as President will end no later than July 1, 2011.”
No later than. Huh.
Like lots of other people, I reported yesterday that Kerrey had announced he would be leaving the New School at the end of his current contract — but that’s not actually what he said. He said he would be leaving by then, and he was careful to leave the door open for an earlier departure.
Now, to be fair, he did say earlier in the speech that he had “confidence I can continue to lead this university through June 30, 2011 when my current contract ends.” And he has said in the past that if he ever lost the support of the New School’s trustees, he’d resign. But still.
Look what else he said, near the top of the speech: “To understate the case, this has been a challenging semester for the university and my family. There have been moments when I reached the limit of my willingness to continue serving as your president.”
It’s been clear for a long time that Kerrey has been ambivalent about continuing on as president of the New School. It doesn’t look to me like he’s completely put that ambivalence behind him, even now.
Bucknell University’s administration has denied a conservative student group permission to hold an affirmative action bake sale.
Such sales, in which cupcakes and cookies are offered at full price to white male students and cheaper for women and students of color, have become a common attention-grabbing tactic for right-wing campus groups in recent years. Clashes with administrators over the sales have been common too, with sponsors claiming that they’re protected speech and universities noting that they’re — by design — a discriminatory practice.
Wikipedia has a pretty extensive article on affirmative action bake sales, including mention of a nice move by the Graduate and Professional Students of Color student organization at the University of Illinois, which responded to one such sale by holding a white privilege popcorn giveaway in which white white men were given a full bag of popcorn, while women and people of color got a mostly-empty bag.
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments