Man uses drone to rescue dog lost for 10 days in the woods
/#GOODNEWS
ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Small opportunities
/Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises. –Demostenes
Articles of interest about higher ed - Dec 4
/***THE VIRUS
AstraZeneca and Oxford's stories clash on COVID-19 vaccine
The order of COVID-19 symptoms tends to differ from the flu
Here’s how long it takes to catch COVID if you’re in a room with someone who has it
***HIGHER ED & THE VIRUS
U.S. colleges mull new virus protocols for students' return
What role could colleges have in distributing coronavirus vaccines?
SDSU students in uproar after faculty cancels spring break
***HUMANITIES
UVM to eliminate 23 programs in the College of Arts and Sciences
Thousands petition against proposed cuts to humanities at UVM
***LAYOFFS & FURLOUGHS
More than 400 workers temporarily laid off at 3 Pa. colleges
***HIGHER ED
Universities Face Federal Crackdown on Academics With China Ties
National Academies unveils recommendations for colleges ahead of the spring semester
Pricey mini campus promises students maskless, safe spring term
Many Universities Lag on Social Mobility Indicators, Report Finds
University rankings need a rethink
How Minnesota colleges are keeping study abroad programs afloat
Penn professor predicts six trends that will influence higher education decisions in 2021
***CERTIFICATIONS
Embedding Certifications Into Bachelor's Degrees
***HIGHER ED IN COURT
Ohio professor pursues legal battle after rebuke for misgendering student
Lawsuit alleges years of anti-Black discrimination at San Diego area college
University sues former student accused of causing $400K in damage during prank
San Diego State University sued in the death of fraternity pledge
***COLLEGE COVID LAWSUITS
Two students sue Miami University over suspension for violating COVID-related code of conduct
NYU student sues over suspension for violating COVID orders
***LAWSUITS OVER TUITION
Lawsuit against precollege summer program at UW-Madison dismissed
New Lawsuit Takes Aim at Texas Universities’ Out-of-State Tuition
***ONLINE CLASSES
5 Things We've Learned About Virtual School In 2020
The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching
The Problem With Giving Math Tests Online, and How Teachers Are Solving It
Colleges are not giving students pass-fail options this semester-- with some exceptions
The emotional toll of distance learning ($)
***ONLINE CHEATING
Online exam monitoring can invade privacy and erode trust at universities
College Students Are Learning Hard Lessons About Anti-Cheating Software
Students search for shortcuts as virtual schooling expands
An argument for giving kids open-book tests during the pandemic (and after) ($)
***ACADEMIC LIFE
Faculty leaders at Rutgers are challenging spending decisions
University of Chicago Grad Students Call on Faculty to Denounce Videos By Department Member
UC Berkeley instructors discuss struggles amid online learning
Ferris State University professor on leave following controversial COVID-19 comments
Professor finds his third-grade photo online — and realizes he’s been a meme for years
Ex-DeSales University priest’s child porn included torture of young children, feds say
***ADMINISTRATORS
College president faces criticism for how he communicated a professor's death from COVID
Is the Pandemic Pushing a Wave of Presidents Out? Not Yet ($)
Ohio State to launch national search for new provost
***CATHOLIC COLLEGES
Deep cuts at Catholic colleges draw backlash
New alliance of workers and students across Jesuit institutions joins together to protest cuts
***CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS
Bennett College finds a new accreditor after two years
Surf’s up in innovative class at Point Loma Nazarene
***RESEARCH
A scientific search engine that generates one-sentence summaries of research papers
How papers get published, how they get retracted, and what a better system might look like (podcast)
Correcting the scientific record- a broken system?
AI created hypothesis: Machine-learning systems are beginning to generate ideas, not just test them
Journal policies and editors' opinions on peer review
***RETRACTIONS
Science Is Self-Correcting- but the Record Is Not (video)
Stem cell researcher’s retraction count may near two dozen
***STUDENT LOANS
Ed Dept. Analysis Projects $435B in Student Loan Losses
***STUDENT LIFE
Enrollment By International Students In U.S. Colleges Plummets
More than a third of prospective college students are reconsidering higher education
Discrimination from some California college professors? Fresno State student speaks out
‘I’ve never seen the campus’: What it’s like to attend Harvard from your childhood bedroom
Harvard gets its first Black, elected student body president
Students lobby for pass-fail grading
Research integrity awareness among biology students
***FREE SPEECH
Ohio lawmakers require free speech protection at colleges, universities
***STUDENT MEDIA
***CYBERATTACKS
Universities Attacked by Phishing Campaign
A ransomware attack has shut down Baltimore County public schools
***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT
This type of sexual harassment on campus often goes overlooked
University of Michigan hires firm to reform culture around sexual misconduct
Our parents warned us the internet would break our brains. It broke theirs instead.
/So many boomers that warned millennials to be careful on the internet seem to have forgotten all their own warnings. Their brains are broken, and that destruction is threatening to break our relationships, too.
There is so much content on the internet, and so much of it is bad. It is blasting in your face relentlessly. To navigate it well — to discern truth and lies, to parse one's own emotional and reflexive responses, to summon the mental energy to pay attention to credibility and incentives and the small, almost indescribable cues that might indicate whether a piece of content is to be trusted — is very difficult. It is especially difficult for those who have low digital literacy because they did not grow up using the internet.
Our parents' generation, no less than ours, was totally unprepared for the advent of digital technology and mass media … They've been sucked into their screens like the rest of us. They weren't physically abducted, as they feared we could be by a chatroom catfisher in 1999. But it can still feel like the people we know and love are gone.
Bonnie Kristan writing in The Week
Top teacher wins $1m and gives half away
/#GOODNEWS
your friends
/Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.
The seven social sins
/The seven social sins: politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice. -Mahatma Gandhi
Articles of interest about religion - Dec 1
/***THE VIRUS
A COVID-19 Vaccine For Children May Still Be Many Months Away
These are the places you're most likely to catch COVID-19 this winter
Is shopping in stores safe during the pandemic?
***RELIGION & THE VIRUS
"I'm listening to God, not the WHO": Pastor Robert Jeffress rejects holiday restrictions
Fresno bishop warns Catholics against stem cell-based COVID vaccines, including Pfizer’s
Church patriarch dies from Covid-19 after leading open-casket funeral of bishop killed by the virus
Tennessee mayor won’t require COVID masks until Holy Spirit says so
Christian Songwriter Is Fed Up With Believers Who Refuse To Wear Masks
Tequila bar applies to become church amid COVID-19 lockdown rules
Catholics Are Fighting Among Themselves About a COVID Vaccine
***RELIGION AND POLITICS
Georgia Senate runoff dividing state’s Christians
N.C. pastor who led march to polls is charged ($$)
***RELIGION & THE LAW
Supreme Court blocks strict COVID-19 restrictions on New York houses of worship
Supreme Court won't get involved in Louisiana pastor's case
Appellate ruling scraps conversion therapy bans in Miami Beach, cities across Florida
***DENOMINATIONS
Progressive United Methodists announce new denomination: Liberation Methodist Connexion
***MEGACHURCHES
California megachurch associate pastor dies of COVID-19
County deals setback for Willow Creek Wheaton to build megachurch near Cantigny Park
Andy Stanley responds to critics over closed church: We’re doing pretty good
Senior Pastors resign from Charismatic megachurch
Thankful: Megachurch minister’s wife awaits a transplant
***RELIGION IN CHINA
China Targets Muslim Scholars And Writers With Increasingly Harsh Restrictions
***RELIGION & RACIAL ISSUES
Pastors Launch Church-Planting Network for ‘Black and Brown Neighborhoods’
We are fugitives from ourselves
/Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems. We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within. More often than not we don't want to know ourselves, don't want to depend on ourselves, don't want to live with ourselves. By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.
John Gardner, Self-Renewal
Persuasion
/You cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into. -Jonathan Swift (Born Nov. 30, 1667)
Love is God?
/(CS Lewis was born Nov. 29, 1898)
Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god; which of course can be re-stated in the form ‘begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god.’ This balance seems to me an indispensable safeguard. If we ignore it, the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.
Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God himself. It tells us not to count the cost, it demands of us a total commitment, it attempts to over-ride all other claims and insinuates that any action which is sincerely done “for love’s sake” is thereby lawful and even meritorious.
CS Lewis, The Four Loves
The point of modern propaganda
/The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth. -Former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov
Articles of interest about journalism, fakes, social media & more - Nov 27
/***THE VIRUS
Their Teeth Fell Out. Was It Another Covid-19 Consequence? ($)
Evidence Builds That an Early Mutation Made the Pandemic Harder to Stop ($)
Oxford Covid vaccine hit 90% success rate thanks to dosing error
***JOURNALISM
Will journalists be considered front-line workers for COVID-19 vaccines?
Five Things I Learned Writing for a Newspaper
COVID-19 cases are increasing while interest in COVID-19 news drops
Journalists are facing threats, even in metro Phoenix (opinion)
The moral argument for diversity in newsrooms is also a business argument — and you need both
***OAN
YouTube temporarily suspends, demonetizes OANN
OAN Is So Dangerous Because It Looks Like a Real News Channel
An OAN Host Has Been Helping Rudy With Trump’s Legal Efforts
***THE BUSINESS OF JOURNALISM
It’s time to hold editors accountable for harassed news workers
Apple is reducing the cut it takes from most news publishers’ subscriptions
Journalists face volatile media landscape
NYT and WaPo digital subscriptions tripled since 2016
BuzzFeed set to acquire HuffPost
***WRITING & READING
Oxford English Dictionary couldn't pick just one 'word of the year' for 2020
Malcolm X Biography Wins National Book Award
ViacomCBS sells Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House for $2 billion
2020 National Book Awards winners announced
***FAKES & FRAUDS
Our parents warned us the internet would break our brains. It broke theirs instead
Designed to Deceive: Do These People Look Real to You? ($)
How Taiwan is Beating Political Disinformation
Jupyter trojan: Newly discovered malware stealthily steals usernames and passwords
What Happened to the Deepfake Threat to the Election?
Debunking claims of election rigging (video)
China’s ‘paper mills’ are grinding out fake scientific research at an alarming rate
***SOCIAL MEDIA
Parler, the “free speech” Twitter wannabe, explained
Snapchat launches a TikTok-like feed called Spotlight, kick-started by paying creators
Social media companies all starting to look the same
Instagram cautiously considers paying publishers
How social media made us isolated, scared, and tribal
***PRIVACY & SECURITY
Citizens are turning face recognition on unidentified police
‘The cameras are always on’: Student surveillance and privacy protection in the age of e-learning
Citizens are turning face recognition on unidentified police
***LITERATURE
Unseen JRR Tolkien essays on Middle-earth coming in 2021
***POETRY
China Disappeared my professor. It can’t silence his poetry
Happy 100th anniversary to the poem that every writer needs to know
Kwame Alexander Offers New Poems On Race And Hope As 'Psalms And Balms' For The Soul
We are going to have a president who quotes poetry
Abolishing God
/Sometimes a nation abolishes God, but fortunately, God is more tolerant.
The Power of Labels
/Most patients take too much responsibility for the wrong things, and not enough responsibility for those things about which they can do something. Furthermore, on the positive side, the naming (of their condition) helps the patient feel allied with a vast movement which is "science"; and, also, he is not isolated any more since all kinds of other people have the same problem that he has. The naming assures him that he therapist has an interest in him and is willing to act as his guide through purgatory. Naming the problem is tantamount to the therapist's saying, "Your problem can be known, it has causes; you can stand outside and look at it."
But the greatest danger in the therapeutic process lies right here: that the naming for the patient will be used not as a aid for change, but as a substitute for it. He may stand off and get a temporary security by diagnosis, labels, talking about symptoms, and then be relieved of the necessity of using will in action and in loving. This plays into the hands of modern man's central defense, namely intellectualizing- using words as substitutes for feelings and experience. The word skates always on the edge of the danger of covering up the daimonic as well as disclosing it.
Rollo May, Love & Will
The side of desire
/When there’s a muddled message, you don’t err on the side of safety. You err on the side of desire. -Maria Konnikova, quoted in The Atlantic
Articles of interest about higher ed - Nov 23
/***THE VIRUS
Puzzling, often debilitating after-effects plaguing COVID-19 "long-haulers"
COVID Symptoms Usually Appear in This Order, Study Finds
Nurses, doctors use social media to plead for public to take COVID-19 seriously as cases surge
***HIGHER ED & THE VIRUS
Coronavirus cases on college campuses spike, linked to parties
Contact Tracers Are On Front Lines Of Fight Against COVID-19 On Campus
Many colleges are now announcing new shifts to online learning
***THE VIRUS AT SPECIFIC SCHOOLS
University of Alabama considers requiring all staff, students to return to campus in January
Innovative coronavirus testing let Duke keep its doors open
University of Wyoming to move classes online starting Monday
Columbia University bans 70 students for Covid-19 travel violations
As coronavirus cases surge, Cal Poly students head home
***LAYOFFS & FURLOUGHS
Layoffs could continue during second phase of cuts, George Washington University officials say
New Mexico State University delivers update on budgeting and potential employee cuts
Marquette University employees protest potential layoffs amid COVID-19 pandemic
The lowest-paid workers in higher education are suffering the highest job losses ($)
University job losses mirror pain of unequal recession ($)
***COLLEGE FINANCES
College Temporarily Suspends Employee Retirement Contributions
Virginia Tech loses $60 million as pandemic hits budget
Is College Worth It? Decoding New Approaches to Calculating ROI
Top USF faculty question budget cuts. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
***HIGHER ED & POLITICS
What Jill Biden’s Dissertation Reveals About Her Approach to Higher Education
Biden wants to scrap Betsy DeVos' rules on sexual assault in schools. It won't be easy.
Biden’s Education Department Will Move Fast to Reverse Betsy DeVos’s Policies
***HIGHER ED
Many colleges and universities not returning to class after Thanksgiving
University of Arizona plans to acquire Ashford University moves forward
***HUMANITIES
Humanities tell us we were made for times like these
***TEACHING
Homework Is Bad, Research Confirms
***ONLINE CHEATING
Colleges Say They Don’t Need Exam Surveillance Tools to Stop Cheating
How Do I Deal With Cheating in the Age of Zoom? ($)
Students Have To Jump Through Absurd Hoops To Use Exam Monitoring Software
Students rebel over remote test monitoring during the pandemic ($)
Student surveillance and online proctoring
***ACADEMIC LIFE
Academic Senate Votes to Censure Eugenics Professor at California State University, East Bay
Faculty pandemic stress is now chronic
Virginia professor resigns after Facebook post calls Biden supporters 'anti-Christian'
Dear Professor, how honest are you?
***ADMINISTRATORS
Larry Dietz to retire as Illinois State University president in June
Deep Budget and Program Cuts Roil Guilford
State college board announces new president for Jackson State University
TCC Provost Madeline Pumariega named president of Miami
***CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to take up Gordon College discrimination suit
Fewer International Students at Christian Colleges
What Poetry Taught Wheaton’s New Provost About Leadership
Facebook post by Virginia Wesleyan dean asks Biden voters to “unfriend” him, causes an uproar at university
Developer shows plans for Moody Bible property
336 quarantine at Indiana Wesleyan
Following end of federal oversight, a Catholic University will no longer recognize faculty union
Surfing course at Point Loma Nazarene University
***RESEARCH
Biomedical observations are often misrepresented in the scientific literature
The expert crowd review solution
Only 24% of the 266 Carnegie R1 and R2 Universities had publicly available authorship policies
Researcher photoshops his name onto a Nature Communications paper
Journals flag concerns in three dozen papers by nutrition researchers
Pharmaceutical advertising biases media reports on drug safety
Author blames “multitasking dementia” for duplicated cancer paper
***STUDENT LIFE
Report: Student Satisfaction Down, but They Still Plan to Enroll
Harvard graduate students demand a ban on Trump officials, Then the pushback began
Many college students adhere to COVID rules, but some are 'reckless' and 'irresponsible'
College kids are going hungry — states can help
Academics, video game makers team up in rare collaboration
***STUDENTS & THANKSGIVING
College students urged not to travel home for Thanksgiving amid COVID-19
How Can My College Student Come Home Safely for Thanksgiving?
Indiana officials emphasize caution for students headed home
***STUDENT APPLICATIONS
College applicants are down, especially among low-income students, Common App says
Pandemic pushes steep drop in foreign college students
***FREE SPEECH
GOP student group's tweets don't violate university policy, Iowa State says
Why Charges Against Protesters Are Being Dismissed by the Thousand
***SEXUAL HARASSMENT & ASSAULT
LSU mishandled sexual misconduct complaints against students, including top athletes
***RACIAL ISSUES ON CAMPUS
A Maryland college honors the lives of enslaved people
California State University faculty, administrators remain at odds over ethnic studies requirement
Appeals Court Rules Harvard Can Use Race-Based ‘Tips’ During Admissions Process
UC Berkeley removed the names of 'racist' figures from two of its buildings
Alexandria turns Controversy into Opportunity by Teaching the history of Confederate Namesakes
Self-renewal & great conviction
/The self-renewing person is highly motivated. The walls that hem us in as we grow older forms channels of least resistance. If we stay in the channels, all is easy. To get out requires some extra drive, enthusiasm or energy.
Everyone has noted the abundant resources of energy that seem available to those who enjoy what they are doing or find meaning in what they are doing. Self-renewing people know that if they have no great conviction about what they are doing they had better find something that they can have great conviction about. All of us cannot spend all of our time pursuing or deepest convictions. But all of us, either in our careers or as part-time activities, should be doing something about which we care deeply.
John Gardner, Self-Renewal
Never too Late
/It is never too late to be what you might have been. -George Eliot (born Nov. 22, 1819)