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City College of San Francisco Seeks Donors to Sponsor Courses

The City College of San Francisco will face a cut of 800 courses this year — unless it finds donors to sponsor them.

For ,000, sponsors can save one of the classes, which each meet three times a week for a 17.5-week semester, for about 30 students. If the sponsor designates the money for a specific course, its title would be changed to include the donor’s name.

The list of canceled classes spans disciplines, from elementary French and introductory accounting, to beginning piano and advanced kung fu.

California lawmakers announced they will cut about 0-million from the entire California Community College system — the largest community-college system in the country — over the next two years. For the San Francisco community college, that means drastically reducing its 9,800 course offerings, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The budget cuts also mean hundreds of students may be blocked from enrolling because of reduced class space and need-based subsidies, which help many students pay for the books, travel, and food necessary to attend college.

“These cuts will really hurt the mission of the college,” Chancellor Don Griffin told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Our goal has been to try to keep the access.” —Erica R. Hendry

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French Student Protesters Disrupt Paris’s Academic Core and Seize Presidents’ Offices Elsewhere

On the eve of the two-week Easter holiday, French university students and academic staff members staged another mass demonstration in Paris today, blocking a major boulevard in the Latin Quarter, the historic core of academic life in the city, and shouting slogans evoking the mass protests that convulsed the country in May 1968, the news agency Reuters reported. Elsewhere in France, protesters this week appeared to step up their tactics, occupying administrative offices at two universities and “sequestering” their presidents.

Operations at universities across France have been disrupted for the past 10 weeks by protests and demonstrations sparked by government moves to reform the higher-education system. France’s education minister, Valérie Pécresse, said today that it was still possible to salvage the semester if there are no further disruptions after classes resume after the holiday. “There is still time to catch up on lectures and hold exams,” Ms. Pécresse told the Parisien newspaper, according to Reuters.

In targeting the heads of universities, protesters appeared to be borrowing a page from the manual of disgruntled French workers who have recently taken their bosses hostage at a handful of factories. On Monday the president of the University of Rennes 2 was reportedly held by student and faculty protesters. On Tuesday the president of the University of Orléans was held by demonstrators who occupied the university’s main administration building. Gwendal Ropars, a second-year student who participated in the action, insisted today that the rector was free to depart at any time and that, although he remained in the building until 9 p.m., he did so of his own volition.

Annliese Nef, a lecturer in medieval Islamic history at the Sorbonne who participated in the demonstration in Paris today, said that action would be the last major event on the protest calendar before the Easter holiday, but that mass demonstrations would resume after the break. In the meanwhile, actions such as the ronde des obstinés — a uniquely Gallic protest in which, according to The Guardian, protesters have walked in circles for two weeks, 24 hours a day, seven days a week — are set to continue over the holiday. —Aisha Labi

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Higher-Education Associations Announce U.S.-South African Partnership

Washington — Two major U.S. higher-education associations have formed an international partnership to strengthen curriculum and expand work-force-development programs at a dozen colleges in South Africa.

The American Council on Education and the American Association of Community Colleges have been awarded a three-year, .7-million grant by the the U.S. Agency for International Development to start the project, called the U.S.-South Africa Partnership for Skills Development. The project, which builds on past efforts by the U.S. and South African governments, will help expand institutional capacity for student-services and faculty-development programs at South African further-education and training colleges and will better prepare the colleges to train and provide employment opportunities for underemployed South African workers.

Partner institutions in the United States include Bronx Community College, the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, Springfield Technical Community College, as well as the National Center on Education and the Economy, and YouthBuild International, a nonprofit organization.

The announcement comes as American universities, foundations, and donor groups have increased their focus on sub-Saharan Africa as a means to further economic-development there. the U.S. Agency for International Development is expected to soon announce the recipients of 20 planning grants of ,000 apiece meant to kickstart collaborations between African and American universities. —Karin Fischer

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Maryland Lawmakers Will Require Colleges to Submit Written Porn Policies

The Maryland General Assembly today put an end to a weeklong standoff with University of Maryland students over the screening of a pornographic film on the campus. Lawmakers agreed that all public universities would need to submit written policies regulating when explicit films can be shown in on-campus public facilities, but they rejected a stricter amendment from the state senator who started the showdown.

Sen. Andrew P. Harris, a Republican who represents Baltimore and Harford counties, this morning proposed an amendment to the capital budget that would deny funds to any college that did not submit its pornography policy by July 1, the start of the new fiscal year. Senate President Thomas V. (Mike) Miller, a Democrat who represents parts of Prince George’s and Calvert Counties, called the move out of order, and the Senate voted almost 3 to 1 against Mr. Harris’s amendment.

The requirement to submit a written policy was added to the state’s operating budget, which needs to be passed by the time the legislative session ends Monday. Mr. Harris originally proposed that the University of Maryland’s allocations in the operating budget be cut if administrators allowed a XXX-rated porn film, Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, to be shown in an on-campus movie theater last Saturday. The university canceled the event, but students claimed their First Amendment rights were being violated.

A student group scheduled an event Monday in which several speakers, including university faculty members and an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, discussed the free-speech issue, and a portion of the film was played.

If the amendment is passed as written, Maryland’s public colleges would have until September to report back to the General Assembly. Mr. Miller and other leaders said the amendment would probably pass because no one wants to be seen as voting for porn. —Megan Eckstein

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Professor Loses Discrimination Case Against Montana State U.

A jury ruled against a Montana State University professor who said her male peers were paid thousands of dollars more than she was, according to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

In her lawsuit, Aleksandra M. Vinogradov, a tenured professor in the department of mechanical and industrial engineering, accused Montana State of discrimination based on gender and retaliation for complaining about her salary, the newspaper said. Her lawyer told the jury that the university did not have policy guidelines on salary increases but gave lump sums to departments to distribute. The university’s lawyer disputed that, saying pay raises were merit-based.

The case was decided late last week after a 10-day trial. —Audrey Williams June

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U. of Miami Offers to Take More Students From Devastated Italian Campus

The University of Miami, one of two American universities with study-abroad programs at the University of L’Aquila, plans to open its doors to more students from the Italian university, which was badly damaged in an earthquake this week.

Miami will encourage L’Aquila to send more students to study on its Florida campus during the 2009-10 academic year, said Elyse M. Resnick, assistant director of international education programs and exchanges. Miami typically accepts five L’Aquila students each year through an exchange program.

Ferdinando di Orio, L’Aquila’s rector, had appealed for help in finding places for the university’s 27,000 students after the campus was “practically destroyed” in the earthquake. At least four students were killed when a dormitory collapsed, Time reports.

No Miami students were studying at the Italian university this semester, Ms. Resnick said. Miami, which has had an exchange program with L’Aquila since 2002, will see how rebuilding goes before deciding whether to send students next spring.

Meanwhile, Georgetown University officials said they did not yet know how the earthquake would affect its summer study-abroad program at L’Aquila. The Hoya, Georgetown’s student newspaper, reports that 10 students at a time typically study abroad there. —Karin Fischer

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Swedish Technology Institute Conducts Math Exam Worthy of Kafka

The customary presumption that problems on a test can be solved proved the undoing of some students in an advanced mathematics course recently at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology. The episode turned an optimization-theory examination into an exercise in existential angst when several of the questions turned out to be insoluble, according to The Local, an online newspaper.

“One thinks as a student that it is you that is wrong and the exam that is correct,” The Local quoted one student, Emelie Baedecke Yllner, as saying. “I was counting away like a madman, but it just wouldn’t work,” she said.

Anders Lindquist, chairman of the institute’s math department, acknowledged today that typographical mistakes — a plus instead of a minus sign in one case, the number 1 instead of the number 2 in another — had rendered three of the examination problems impossible to solve.

He pointed out that the approximately 120 students who took the exam were informed of the errors midway through the five-hour test. But more important, he noted, even in the realm of hard numbers, trying to solve insoluble problems can be worthwhile.

“When you go out in the world, you find lots of problems that don’t have solutions, so even with errors like this, you can still find out what a student knows,” he said. “In fact, I don’t think it is so serious. Students should be able to detect if a problem has a solution. You’re still testing the students.”

Mr. Lindquist, who holds the institute’s chair of optimization theory, hastened to add that “I didn’t write the test and I certainly didn’t read it. It is not my job to check typing errors.”

Students who demonstrated their grasp of the material were credited accordingly when the exam was graded. Those who still failed to make the grade will have an opportunity to take another exam in June. With luck the preparation of the test will this time be fully optimized. —Aisha Labi

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Student Aid Contributes to Ballooning Tuition, Report Says

Increased federal student aid, especially to middle-class families, is contributing to the rising cost of higher education, a report by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity says.

The report concludes that federally backed loans should be offered to only low-income families, not expanded to help more middle-class families, and that “the expanded tuition tax credits in the 2009 stimulus bill are probably a step backward.”

The reason, says Andrew Gillen, the report’s author and the center’s research director, is that colleges are engaged in an “arms race” to outspend one another, and any extra money that comes in from federal student aid only encourages them to spend more. Right now, colleges have access to students’ financial information from Free Application for Federal Student Aid forms, so they know how much each student can afford to pay and can therefore charge each student the highest amount possible without causing that student to have to drop out.

Colleges do this, Mr. Gillen says, because higher spending often helps them raise their prestige through rankings such as U. S. News & World Report ratings that are in part based on spending per student.

Mr. Gillen makes several suggestions. First, he writes, the government needs to determine student need in a simpler way than it does now and without telling colleges what it finds. It then should determine the cost of educating a student — the Delta Project recently concluded it costs about ,000 at a community college and ,000 at a four-year college — and the student should be given a “super Pell” grant that makes up the difference.

Colleges would then have an incentive to keep costs closer to the ,000-per-year range, leading to more students’ being able to afford college without federal aid. —Megan Eckstein

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Federal Agency Urges Researchers to Tread Carefully With New Genetics Law

Washington — When scholars ask people to donate genetic samples for scientific research, they should be sure that the donors understand the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, a federal law that was enacted last year.

That, in a nutshell, is the message of a new guidance document from the federal Office for Human Research Protections. The document, which was announced today in the Federal Register, urges scholars — and the human-subjects committees that oversee their research — to make sure that potential genetic donors understand the limited protections offered by the new law.

The act generally prohibits health insurers and employers with more than 15 employees from using genetic information to make decisions about health coverage, insurance premiums, or employment. The employment provision will take effect in November 2009, and the health-insurance provisions will take effect between May 2009 and May 2010. Once the provisions take effect, employers and health insurers will be forbidden to ask about (or make decisions based upon) any genetic data, no matter how long ago the data were collected.

But the law does not prohibit genetic discrimination by small employers or by issuers of life insurance, disability insurance, and long-term-care insurance. Because of the risk of discrimination in those contexts, the new guidance reminds scholars of their obligations to protect subjects’ privacy and to maintain the confidentiality of data. If research participants request information about their personal genetic data, they should be aware that after the data come into their hands, life-insurance companies and small employers might have the right to ask them about the information.

In The Chronicle Review in January, Christopher Shea wrote about sociologists’ rising interest in genetic data. In 2007 the National Institutes of Health published ground rules for the use of the central federal repository of human genetic data. —David Glenn

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Brigham Young U.’s Student Newspaper Is Pulled After Embarrassing Typo

The student-newspaper staff at Brigham Young University removed some 18,500 copies of the paper from the campus yesterday, and reprinted nearly the entire press run, because an embarrassing typo in a front-page photo caption appeared to offend key leaders in the Mormon hierarchy, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.

The caption described a photograph illustrating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ General Conference, and it referred to the group’s “Quorum of Twelve Apostates” rather than “Apostles.”

Rich Evans, editorial manager of The Daily Universe, the student paper, told the Tribune it was “the worst possible mistake.” BYU is owned and run by the church, as the Mormon Church is formally known.

The error was an accident: A student had misspelled the word “apostle,” and the article’s editor chose the wrong word from among the options offered by spell-checking software.

The newspaper was reprinted with a correction, and its staff issued an apology to the apostles of the Mormon Church. —Beckie Supiano

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