SCUP Links Blog

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 Humor from David Galef in Inside Higher Ed:

When U of All People was founded back in 1970 (briefly losted in the foreclosure of 1987), little thought was given to its surroundings, the sleepy hamlet of Ennyville -- primarily because there was no Ennyville. The university itself emerged on 150 acres of reclaimed swampland, a federal land grant only in the sense that the government wanted to distance itself from a toxic sludge event that at the time was termed “accident at the plant.” But as the university grew from pontoons and quonset huts to potholed paths and faux Gothic halls in dire need of repair, the blind forces of capitalism have seen to the birth and growth of the town.

Ennyville started in 1975 with Sleep Here, a forty-room flea lodge built to accommodate the families of graduating students, campus guests, and sordid trysts. From there, it was a short series of steps to enterprises such as Mart’s Fuel Mart (“We’ll give you gas”) and Main Street Movie Theater (now Main Event, a performance space whose latest show was devoted to foot flogging, linked to the university art department). For obvious reasons, Ennyville has a close relationship to U of All People, or, as biology professor Jen Edix describes it, “the parasitism that exists between a nematode and the human intestine.” Other faculty have been less kind in their assessments. Yet Ennyville is careful to preserve a traditional college town air, if only to attract those at U of All People who consider themselves traditional or collegiate.

In College Planning & Management magazine, William S. Harris uses case studies of MIT's Building 10 and Brown University's Lyman Hall to illustrate how "renovations of iconic campus environments can look great and perform well without breaking the bank."

Both institutions had limited budgets and schedules fixed to the summer recess, since neither institution could operate without these facilities in active use during the school year. The task and challenge of each project was therefore to exercise restraint, prioritize a menu of possible improvements ranging from structure and infrastructure to layout and function, and to implement those within the tight budget and schedule. In addition, being iconic and treasured buildings in an academic environment, there was no shortage of input from administration, faculty, and students.

Despite the challenges and differences in programs, sizes, and budges, each project was approached in a way that balanced their myriad competing priorities and resulted in success. This process can be distilled into the following guiding principles.

If you just happen to be hoping that no one ever brings you into a discussion where your ignorance about "cloud computing" can be ascertained, we've got the resource for you: Cloud Computing Explained. It's the lead article, by Rosalyn Metz, in a themed issue of EDUCAUSE Quarterly that is wholly devoted to cloud computing issues, trends, and challenges. Read it and be ready for any discussion.

Key Takeways listed for this item include:

• The NIST definition of cloud computing is concise and uses industry-standard terms.
• Exploring the five characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models for the cloud in the NIST definition clarifies cloud concepts.
• Examples of cloud-based technologies explained in this article promote a better understanding of the cloud.
• The more informed IT departments are about the cloud, the better their position when making decisions about deploying, developing, and maintaining systems in the cloud.

Where can you find the very latest about academic programming and student learning at the United States' military academies? In the latest issue of Liberal Education, from the Association of American Colleges and Universities:

I wonder whether our military leaders will be the ones to help achieve a breakthrough public agreement that ensuring our nation’s future requires liberal education—and, therefore, that liberal education ought to be the curriculum of choice for everyone.

West Point: "Today’s military operates in contexts where uncertainty and ambiguity are commonplace. Human security challenges, when coupled with U.S. interests, demand an officer corps capable of responding promptly and effectively to a diverse set of issues in environments that require innovation, flexibility, and adaptability. The army needs officers who have benefitted from a liberal education."

Air Force Academy: "Although the academy’s commitment to liberal education has remained the same since the institution’s founding just over fifty years ago, the approach taken to fulfill that commitment has changed markedly. Over time, campus conversations have begun to focus much more on the achievement of agreed-upon outcomes for cadet learning and development."

Naval Academy: "The United States Naval Academy provides a top liberal arts education to all midshipmen, and one of the central elements of that liberal education is an understanding of global and cross-cultural dynamics."

Who knew? Find out what the experience has taught Colorado leaders.

In 2004 Colorado passed legislation enacting the nation's first voucher-based approach to financing higher education, known as the College Opportunity Fund (COF). The work of an unusual coalition that included higher education leaders, generally conservative policymakers, and others, COF completely replaced the traditional approach of subsidizing public higher education through direct appropriations with a combination of vouchers and “procurement contracts” for educational services.

COF's most ardent backers, including many of the neoliberally minded policymakers who controlled much of state government at the time of its adoption, believed the vouchers would boost access to college—especially among poor, minority, and male students—by making the state's investment in them more apparent and by empowering them as “consumers” to pick and choose among colleges. They also expected that COF would make institutions accountable by forcing them to become entrepreneurial and market-driven.

But these were not COF's only goals, or even necessarily its most important ones. Instead, COF's main virtue for many supporters was its potential to relieve the stranglehold the state's constitution had placed on college and university finances. Higher education leaders came to view COF's passage as critical to sustaining quality at their institutions.

Several years later, the higher education community in Colorado tends to heap scorn on the vouchers. Some liken COF to “smoke and mirrors”; others disparage it for having created “bureaucracy out the wazoo.” Within and outside of higher education, few believe that COF has increased access or led to more competition among institutions. But despite its shortcomings, there is wide recognition that the policy has been instrumental in breaking the state's beleaguered higher education institutions free from a fiscal and legal tangle that had seemed an imminent threat to their missions.

What has COF achieved, where has it failed, and what can we learn from it? 

Public Policy is the magazine of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), a frequent collaborator with SCUP.

In Holistic, Positive Retrenchment, Kenneth W. Dobbins, president of Southeast Missouri State University distills some academic program review observations onto a single-page PDF document. He begins:

Most of us are faced with, or will be facing, the daunting task of balancing our budgets with less funding from state government. There are several ways to increase revenue and reduce costs, which seem to be easier than reducing or eliminating academic programs. Examples of these “easier” approaches include: increasing capacity with larger classes; eliminating low enrollment classes; increasing teaching loads; redesigning courses; and adding more temporary or adjunct faculty instead of tenure track. However, the advice in the old saying, “do more or the same with less,” cannot be followed anymore.

With the easier approaches already taken, many of us must critically examine academic programs and ask what are we doing, how are we doing it, and should we be doing it at all. How you do this magic act depends on your campus culture and shared governance expectations, but below are several ideas for your consideration.

A couple of weeks ago we shared a good article on this topic with you. Now we share the existence of the book the article came from, by Harvey Kaiser and Eva Klein, who are well known among SCUPers. APPA describes Strategic Capital Development with these words: 

[It] presents a bold approach for planning capital investments from a strategic and long-range perspective. The authors combine their extensive higher education experience and expertise to improve capital planning and decision-making and to make a case for a new model that seeks to balance idealism with pragmatism. They define stewardship principles necessary to create and sustain a physical plant that is responsive to institutional strategies and functions, that remains attractive to faculty and students, and optimizes available resources.

...

The proposed comprehensive model is presented as a fully integrated set of methodologies to assess needs and develop a prioritized capital projects plan, integrated with a physical master plan. The authors include, and advocate, the concept of a strategic funding framework--a larger view of feasible and desirable capital funding for defined capital needs.

 A group called the Public Knowledge Project says its free online publishing software has allowed more than 5,000 new academic journals to be published. And there are lots of groups and projects like this one. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Peter Schmidt writes:

In a world where subscriptions to some medical journals can cost more than $10,000 a year, and many colleges in developing countries cannot afford more than a handful of scholarly publications, publishing enabled by this kind of tool is plugging many academics into research and discourse as never before.

...

Open-access academic publishing has its limitations and drawbacks. It can be blocked by Internet filters. Its low cost makes the publication of inferior and unreliable journals much easier. And, in rendering scholarship freely available to anyone who can go online, it increases the risk that research in fields such as medicine will fall into the hands of people who might misuse it.

This is an excellent resource for emergency, disaster, mitigation and other planners when they need to project beyond physical campus damage from major catastrophes. Institutions in the New Orleans area are still recovering five years after Katrina. This Chronicle of Higher Education article by Katherine Mangan includes a clickable map showing the location of 8 of the affected campuses, along with enrollment, damage, and recovery statistics. Apparently, on most campuses you can no longer see so much physical damage, but recovery in a financial sense, in a student enrollment sense, and in regaining faculty and staff expertise is slower.