Should colleges promote favorable rankings?

Not a month goes by without someone e-mailing to tell me about an awesome new college ranking that I must write about, says Jenna Johnson, columnist for the Washington Post. Quite often, I pass. Why? Because many of the rankings out there these days are based on somewhat questionable methodologies. I just wrote an article about the proliferation of college rankings (from hairiest students to hottest dorm dwellers to schools that look most like Hogwarts). Such lists have long been loved and hated, promoted and criticized by college administrators and admissions staffers. Each summer, my inbox fills with press releases from universities touting the Princeton Review’s dozens of rankings, which are based on more than 120,000 online surveys completed by students with school e-mail accounts. These rankings cover a wide range of campus life issues, including quality of the cafeteria food, dorms and party scene…

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Stuttering student told not to speak

Officials at a community college in northern New Jersey declined to say Wednesday whether they disciplined an adjunct professor who asked a stuttering student not to speak, but acknowledged that the professor acted improperly, the Associated Press reports. Administrators at County College of Morris said history professor Elizabeth Snyder was wrong to email 16-year-old Philip Garber Jr. to urge Garber to save his questions for after class “so we do not infringe on other students’ time.”

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Is Goldman Sachs’ CEO afraid of Columbia students?

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has canceled a speech he planned to give at Barnard on Oct. 12, though officials said he plans to reschedule, the Columbia Spectator reports. Barnard’s events website cited travel issues, with a message explaining that Blankfein “must be in Washington D.C. that evening and will be unable to deliver his lecture as planned.” But his absence also allows him to avoid protests that had been planned to coincide with his speech. In response to Blankfein’s invite, Columbia students had organized “School the Squid” week—referring to writer Matt Taibbi calling Goldman Sachs “a great vampire squid”—including a series of discussions and film screenings focused on corporate greed and abuse of power…

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College newspapers react to Steve Jobs’ death

College students have grown up in a world indelibly changed by Steve Jobs. Many of the cultural touchstones they have grown up with and taken for granted (the iPod, the Mac computer, even Toy Story) were invented by him, the Huffington Post reports.

“I’m really sad, he was such a serious innovator,” Meg Brannen, a junior at University of Nebraska told the student newspaper, the Daily Nebraska “It honestly made me upset.”

“RIP Steve Jobs,” another student tweeted. “You won my heart, and a majority of my paychecks.”…Read More

College flash mobs become pep rallies made for YouTube

Three steps to starting college: Meet roommate. Unpack in dorm room. Then, sometime during orientation, hear music, see a student start dancing, watch as more dancers join in, and join the campus flash mob, reports the New York Times. (Or if you miss the actual event, watch it over and over on YouTube, to see how many people you recognize.) Outbursts of seemingly impromptu dance numbers were so common at orientations this year that BostInnovation, a web start-up chronicling Boston life, ran a contest asking readers to watch the YouTube videos and vote for the local campus—Wellesley, Merrimack or Emerson—with the best welcome…

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Gallaudet University adjusts to a culture that includes more hearing students

The quiet campus of Gallaudet University in Northeast Washington was always a place where students could speak the unspoken language of deaf America and be understood, reports the Washington Post. That is no longer so true. For the first time in living memory, significant numbers of freshmen at the nation’s premiere university for the deaf and hard of hearing arrive lacking proficiency in American Sign Language and experience with deaf culture. Rising numbers of Gallaudet students are products of a hearing world…

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Catholic college cancels Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist’s speech because she’s pro-choice

St. Francis University, a Catholic university in central Pennsylvania, has canceled a speech by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman because she supports abortion rights, the Associated Press. Goodman was to lecture on civility in public discourse and told the newspaper for a story Wednesday of her “disappointment at having my plea for civility returned with a pie in the face.”

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Survey: Instant messaging will surpass eMail

Many CIOs predict that real-time communication technologies, such as instant messaging, SharePoint , Chatter and Yammer will overtake classic email in the workplace in the next five years, Computerworld reports. That’s the conclusion of a Robert Half Technology survey of more than 1,400 CIOs at U.S. companies with more than 100 employees. The survey was released last month. More than half (54 percent) of the CIOs polled said real-time workplace communication tools will surpass traditional email in popularity within five years. The prediction was a bit lukewarm, however: 13 percent of the respondents said real-time messages will be “much more popular” than email, while 41 percent said they’ll be “somewhat more popular.”

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When knowledge isn’t written, does it still count?

“MAKING fun of Wikipedia is so 2007,” a French journalist said recently to Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation that runs the Wikipedia project, reports the New York Times. And so Ms. Gardner, in turn, told an auditorium full of Wikipedia contributors and supporters on Thursday in Haifa, Israel, the host city for the seventh annual Wikimania conference, where meetings and presentations focus on the world’s most used, and perhaps least understood, online reference work…

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Colleges sign up for Obama’s interfaith program

More than 250 colleges, universities and seminaries have submitted plans to the White House for yearlong interfaith service projects in response to a campaign launched by the Obama administration, the Huffington Post reports. Joshua DuBois, director of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, said officials had hoped for 100 participants.

“They don’t have to agree about their different beliefs but we feel like they can agree on issues of service and strengthening our communities,” he said Tuesday (Aug. 2). “And so many of them are responding and saying … we want to take you up on this challenge.”

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