University System of New Hampshire Chancellor Edward MacKay will step down from ...]]> Yale University President Richard C. Levin announced he will step down at the end of the current academic year, after 20 years of service—a longer tenure than any other president in the Ivy League or the 61-member Association of American Universities.

University System of New Hampshire Chancellor Edward MacKay will step down from the post in March after 36 years with the system and three-plus as chancellor.

Sacred Heart University appointed John Chalykoff as the new dean of the John F. Welch College of Business. Chalykoff had served in various capacities at Boston University since 1999.

The University of Rhode Island appointed Naomi R. Thompson, an attorney and Northeastern University diversity administrator, to the position of associate vice president of Community, Equity and Diversity, effective Aug. 27. She will act as liaison for the president with commissions, the Bias Incident Response Team, and diversity committees throughout the university. Her office includes the Office of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity, Multicultural Center, Women’s Center and the LGBTQ Center.

The New England Conservatory appointed Kairyn Rainer, a pianist and manager with the Brown Rudnick law firm, to be conservatory's chief of staff, effective Aug. 27.

Wheelock College named Linda Davis to be dean of its Center for International Programs and Partnerships.

Yale University could offer a firsthand curriculum on the fickle nature of philanthropy.

First, there's the lesson on dirty money. Last week, the Yale Daily News reported that the university agreed to pay $1 million to Industrial Enterprises of America, to settle the company’s complaint that its former CEO, a Yale alumn named John Mazzuto, made ...]]>

Yale University could offer a firsthand curriculum on the fickle nature of philanthropy.

First, there's the lesson on dirty money. Last week, the Yale Daily News reported that the university agreed to pay $1 million to Industrial Enterprises of America, to settle the company’s complaint that its former CEO, a Yale alumn named John Mazzuto, made a $1.7 million donation to Yale in shares of stock that he may have obtained illegally through an option plan meant for company employees. Yale used the gift to build a baseball facility.

Several years ago, Yale taught a different lesson in philanthropy, when it returned a $20 million gift from alumn Lee Bass that would have funded an intensive course in Western civilization. Only catch: Bass had insisted on the right to approve professors. Not to worry, as the Yale Herald, another campus newspaper, assured readers, Lee is "only one of four billionaire Basses who have given millions to Yale in the past."

Meanwhile, Yale boasts America's second-largest university endowment. Ranking behind only Harvard's the Bulldogs' kitty was worth more than $16 billion, even after the crash of 2008.

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, Anya Kamenetz, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vt., 2010

Anya Kamenetz, a 2002 graduate of Yale and staff writer for Fast Company, could be an academic's worst nightmare. Articulate, forceful and skilled—her writing lobs volleys of criticisms that are hard to refute and harder ...]]>

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, Anya Kamenetz, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vt., 2010

Anya Kamenetz, a 2002 graduate of Yale and staff writer for Fast Company, could be an academic's worst nightmare. Articulate, forceful and skilled—her writing lobs volleys of criticisms that are hard to refute and harder still to ignore. In her last book, Generation Debt, she savaged the higher education world for its ever-rising costs, which in her view are crushing graduates under a mountain of debt.

DIY U aims more broadly—demolishing the pretensions of the most prestigious schools and mainstream institutions with equal ferocity. Higher education, in her view “is the closest thing we have to a world religion.” Its status as a scarce good that everyone wants is part of the reason that tuition costs have continued to outpace inflation year after year. The end result, though, is a good that is too expensive for most people to afford and perhaps not even worth the price.

Still, despite the provocative title and cover, this book is better at reiterating the failures of our current system of higher ed than it is in explaining the revolution it forecasts. Her historical survey—500 years of education in a few dozen pages—hits the key points but distills them into a rather cynical synopsis with few if any heroes. The standout figures that do emerge often have a dubious or elitist purpose; Clark Kerr’s efforts to classify institutions and funnel funds toward some rather than others, being a case in point. “Education is an essentially conservative enterprise,” notes Kamenetz. “If we didn’t believe that one generation had something important to transmit to the next, we wouldn’t need education. So, changing education makes people really, really nervous.”

Another chapter, labeled Sociology, dissects the who-gets-what subject even further. It is neither a pretty nor an equitable picture. According to Kamenetz, although higher ed may get kudos for generating knowledge or even making better citizens, it has been much less effective in terms of what she argues has been its wider role—at least since World War II—as society’s uplifter, bringing more people into the middle class and/or enhancing the nation’s economy.  Here, Kamenetz asserts that the earnings premium for college grads is insubstantial when compared to the cost—to the individual student and to society. In many cases (she cites the example of an Ohioan seeking to become a fire fighter), even the requirement for college course work may be contrived and over stated in many fields. Once again, there’s nothing particularly new in the observations, though Kamenetz writes with precision and a degree of passion that makes each paragraph hard to ignore.

But the meat of Kamenetz’s book is in Part II—How We Get There—in which she outlines the ways in which technology and new approaches to education can deliver something that is high-quality, accessible, affordable and relevant. Early on, she outlines the principles that lurk within her analysis:

• The 80-20 rule—the importance of the 80% of institution that are non-selective as well as the growing number of for-profit colleges;

• The Great Unbundling—the notion that colleges will be less inclined to try to “do it all” and may begin to specialize on research, instruction or assessment, for example rather than all three;

• Techno-hybridization—Kamenetz predicts that more and more instruction will be delivered using a mix of online/remote technologies and traditional classroom approaches. It won’t be an either/or world;

• Personal Learning and Pathways—Here, Kamenetz, foresees rapid growth in people choosing to develop (and institutions learning to support), highly individualized education strategies—emphasizing personal goals, assessment of non-traditional learning and delivery through both traditional and nontraditional means. This will implicitly threaten the economic gatekeeper role that higher ed has assumed—determining who will and won’t get access to higher education and, thus, who will succeed or fail economically.

Change is here and most likely accelerating. Certainly, the technological tools already available have the ability or at least the potential to deliver more and better information and to support learning more cost-effectively than ever before. Nor is this only something for learners. Educators, too, can gain insights into learners and into the effectiveness of their didactic approaches, while potentially magnifying their ability to teach effectively and to teach more people. As an example, she cites the work of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, where all kinds of new instruction methods are being pioneered and tested with educators and learners. “When compared to students in traditional lecture-section-paper classes, OLI students learn more, learn faster, and enjoy it a little bit more, too,” she writes. In one case, a grueling statistics course was run through the OLI process and emerged with half as many classes each week and half the number of weeks—yet student results that matched those of the traditional program.

So far steps like these have been mostly tentative. As Kamenetz observes, “Over its long history, and because of the weight of that history, higher education has been uncommonly resistant to innovation in teaching practices.” But change is probably unavoidable, especially when for-profits are lusting after a piece of the $300 billion higher education business. And for the “80%” of learners who aren’t going to go through the doors of the nation’s highly selective colleges, only results matter.

Kamenetz closes out the book with a “Resource Guide,” which takes DIY U from the realm of social criticism into that of self-help. Kamenetz is free with advice for readers seeking to develop a personal learning path and offers pages chock full of web sites, book titles and others connection points—all of which are probably valuable. Still, the departure of the critic’s voice makes one feel as if freshly arrived at some Land of Oz, where one is full of wonderment but also not quite sure whether this was the destination one sought when first opening the book.

Still, Kamenetz has produced a useful piece of work for learners and a valuable reference for those working to keep education relevant and useful in the 21^st century.

Reviewed by Alan R. Earls, a Boston-area writer.

The College Sustainability Report Card 2011 is out today, revealing the profiles of 322 schools and their sustainability policies. The fifth edition of the report by the Sustainable Endowments Institute assesses 52 indicators, ranging from green initiatives to recycling programs, and uses an A to F letter-grading system to evaluate different colleges and universities nationwide.

Some ...]]>

The College Sustainability Report Card 2011 is out today, revealing the profiles of 322 schools and their sustainability policies. The fifth edition of the report by the Sustainable Endowments Institute assesses 52 indicators, ranging from green initiatives to recycling programs, and uses an A to F letter-grading system to evaluate different colleges and universities nationwide.

Some New England campuses made honor roll with A- grades, including Amherst College, Brown University, College of the Atlantic, Middlebury College, Smith College, University of New Hampshire, University of Vermont, Wesleyan University, Williams College, Yale University and Harvard University.

Others followed close behind with B+ grades, including Clark University, Colby College, Dartmouth College, MIT, Northeastern University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

For more information, visit GreenReportCard.org.