By Léo Charbonneau. An opinion piece we recently published online and in the August-September print edition has garnered much feedback (12 comments online to date, which is a fair amount for us, a specialty higher-education publication in Canada). The article had the innocuous headline, “Internationalizing the curriculum,” but the subhead gave more of a flavour of what it was about: “ESL students and the erosion of higher education.”
The article, by professors Norm Friesen and Patrick Keeney respectively of Thompson Rivers University and Simon Fraser University, recounts their frustration teaching students with poor English-language skills – typically English-as-a-second-language, or ESL, students – or students whose “academic or cultural preparedness is not up to speed.” The presence of these students in the classroom “fundamentally changes teaching and learning, to the detriment,” they write. “Instead of engaging students in disentangling the nuances and subtleties of a particularly important passage from the assigned readings, one begins speaking to the class as one might speak to academically challenged teenagers.” Ouch. More...

By David Smith. A young professor reminisces on the flourishing expat community of scholars that his father helped found in this wealthy Arab state. It was minus 20 outside, a typical winter night in Sudbury, Ontario, when my father, Frank Smith, sat the family around the kitchen table and unveiled his new job plan. After years of teaching chemistry at Laurentian University, including five years as dean of graduate studies, he’d decided to change institutions. “Not a big deal,” he said. “Your mother and I are going to Qatar. It’s about 10,000 kilometers away and one of the hottest, driest and richest countries on earth.”
Dad had signed a contract with the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar (known as WCMC-Q) to teach undergraduate chemistry. But what was intended to be a three-year stint overseas turned into a long-term move and life-changing experience for both my father and mother. Three years became six, then 10. The move also had a positive impact on my life, providing me the opportunity to make many visits to the Persian Gulf region. More...

By Marie Lambert-Chan. Even if they’re not implicated, co-authors may see their careers stalled due to another researcher’s misconduct, Quebec study finds. Diederik Stapel, Eric Poehlman, Woo-Suk Hwang, Yoshitaka Fujii: these are individuals who have gone down in history for cheating the scientific system. They misused public funds, put patients’ lives in jeopardy and abused the public’s trust. They also left in their wake dozens of researchers who had unwittingly collaborated in their deception. What happens to the careers of scientists who co-author articles that are later retracted for misconduct?
This question has weighed on the mind of Vincent Larivière, an assistant professor at Université de Montréal’s École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, and master’s student Philippe Mongeon. They studied the career paths of more than 1,700 biomedical and clinical researchers whose names were associated with an article that was retracted for misconduct between 1996 and 2006, but who were not themselves accused of misconduct. The articles had involved fabricated data, falsified data, or plagiarism. The researchers presented their results at the Third World Conference on Research Integrity, held in Montreal in May. More...

By Norm Friesen and Patrick Keeney. One of the most profound recent changes to Canadian higher education seems to have gone little noticed: namely, the increasing numbers of students on campus whose native tongue is not English. Some of these students may be first-generation Canadian or landed immigrants, while many come from other countries. Most universities now have departments dedicated to the recruitment and retention of international students and are busily criss-crossing the globe in search of new customers. Governments and senior administration in universities have been successful in persuading Canadians that “internationalizing” the campus is a positive development for all concerned. Yet, there is a dark and worrying side to this that is felt most acutely in the teaching of the humanities and critical studies. There is no sugar-coated way to say this: many of those who are welcomed at our universities are simply unprepared for the rigours of the university classroom. More...

By Stephanie Hobbis. Both foreign students – and their teachers – need support if the goals of an international campus are going to be met. The following is in response to the opinion piece "Internationalizing the Canadian campus: ESL students and the erosion of higher education" by Norm Friesen and Patrick Keeney.
When I first read the commentary by Drs. Friesen and Keeney on “ESL students and the erosion of higher education,” I was astounded and in disbelief. As an English-as-a-second-language student, I could not but feel offended. Yet, the more I reflected on their sentiments the more I came to see a much broader issue than xenophobia, linguicism or simple ignorance as suggested in some of the reader comments. Internationalizing the Canadian campus is not simply a matter of recruiting more international students. It is also a matter of providing the facilities that are needed to cater to new needs while not only profiting financially but also academically from an increasingly diverse community of students and faculty alike. I came to Canada after completing my undergraduate and first graduate degrees, in English, in the U.K. and in Japan. I had been raised in German in Germany. My English was good enough to get accepted into an English degree program, but not to inevitably succeed in it. The challenges of higher education were multiplied – not only did I have to learn to think academically, but I had to do so in a foreign language and in a cultural environment that I was barely familiar with. Read more...

By Marilinda Garcia. Remember in the last few months leading up to the 2012 presidential election how everyone breathlessly awaited each jobs report? Any change, even of one tenth of a percentage point, was greeted as a glorious victory or a crushing defeat and extrapolated into a long-term economic forecast. What happened to all that attention? Or was President Obama correct when he suggested that the country should resign itself to the fact that a shabby economy is the “new normal,” at least while he’s in charge? More...

By Emily K. Coleman. Taylor Berge didn’t walk into college planning to graduate early. But going through her four-year plan with her guidance counselor, the Johnsburg High School grad realized it was a possibility.
“I looked at it as I can spread everything out and take four years of school and pay for all of that and have a short-term summer job, which barely gets you everything, or I can cram it all into one and I’ll have the loans, but once I get my actual job, it will be a lot easier to pay it off quicker,” Berge said. “I just prioritized that way instead.”
While the decision means the 21-year-old is missing out on what would have been her senior year – she plans on visiting her friends often – it also means she can start graduate school at Elmhurst College a year sooner to get her master’s degree in psychology. More...

By Tamar Lewin. Next January, the Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a master’s degree in computer science through massive open online courses for a fraction of the on-campus cost, a first for an elite institution. If it even approaches its goal of drawing thousands of students, it could signal a change to the landscape of higher education. From their start two years ago, when a free artificial intelligence course from Stanford enrolled 170,000 students, free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have drawn millions and yielded results like the perfect scores of Battushig, a 15-year-old Mongolian boy, in a tough electronics course offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Read more...

By Jayne Marie Comstock. In recent weeks, I’ve been asked frequently to comment on the cost of higher education. Of course, I try to turn that conversation into a discussion about the value of higher education, rather than the cost. But, before I make the cost-value flip, I take advantage of the opportunity to explain that there is a direct, inverse relationship between the cost of tuition and fees at public colleges within a state and the funding that state provides to its public colleges and universities.
Consider this: Data from the U.S. Department of Education reveal that South Carolina has the 7th highest average annual tuition and fees for public higher education and ranks 48th in percentage of institutional revenue provided by state funding. In contrast, Florida has the lowest average tuition costs and the 8th highest percentage of college revenue that comes from state budgets. Read more...

By Matt Reed. Apparently, this is turning into “begging for ideas” week. Please forgive the dreadful manners. I know juuuuuust enough about IT to be dangerous. I recently heard an IT idea that strikes me as obviously great, but experience has taught me that ideas that look obviously great at first blush can hide great sins among the details. So I’m hoping that some folks who have been through this can shed some light. The idea is “virtualization,” and my bowdlerized understanding of it is as follows. In traditional on-campus computer labs, every computer has its own CPU and performs its own calculations and processes. The computers are networked to each other and to the internet, for obvious reasons, but each is capable of doing some pretty serious internal processing. If you want to run a program on all of the computers in a lab, you have to install it on each computer individually.  Although much of what computers do is online now, we still pay for and maintain all those separate computer brains within each station. Read more...