Sabtu, 02 November 2013

Black and White and in the Red Student Newspapers Scurry to Make Ends Meet


Greg Kahn for The New York Times
At George Mason University, the student newspaper and an online news site combined forces to create Fourth Estate.
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Published: October 31, 2013
WITHIN a month of taking over as editor of The Hatchet, George Washington University’s student newspaper, Cory Weinberg knew that something had to change. Advertising dollars had been steadily declining. Printing costs continued to rise. At the same time, visits to the website were up. The number of students reading articles on their mobile devices had doubled. Traffic from Twitter had increased 300 percent in the last year.

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Cory Weinberg, editor of The G.W. Hatchet, now just a weekly.
In June, he and the general manager outlined a plan for the paper’s board of directors to eliminate one of two weekly editions and invest more heavily in online coverage and ways to reach students through mobile and social media. At first, Mr. Weinberg worried that the board, made up mostly of Hatchet alumni, journalism professionals and professors, would balk.
“There’s been tension elsewhere over cutting editions,” said Mr. Weinberg, a senior majoring in economics and journalism. “And, honestly, I expected some resistance, especially when you are talking about changing an organization that people love. But they got it.” The board’s decision was unanimous.
Becoming a weekly is just one of the efforts to help ensure the future of this 109-year-old newspaper. The Hatchet, which is independent of G.W.U., pays $4,520 in monthly rent to the university. And so an alumni group called Home for The Hatchet bought it a townhouse.
To bolster its $2 million fund-raising drive, the group is offering “naming opportunities.” Donors have pledged $50,000 each for engraved plaques outside the offices of the editor in chief and business manager. The newsroom will be sponsored for $50,000 by Berl Brechner, a longtime television executive and 1967 Hatchet editor in chief, who fondly remembers covering the tumult of the Vietnam protests there.
Naming opportunities are still available for the sports and opinion offices and staff lounge. The entire building can be had for a $750,000 pledge.
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THE HATCHET, like many college newspapers with long traditions, has until recently managed to stave off industry challenges that have forced professional news organizations to make deep budget cuts. When print advertising revenue fell 9 percent for commercial newspapers in 2007, college newspapers enjoyed a 15 percent increase. But the student media landscape has been shaken in the last two years by plummeting revenues and changing reading patterns.
“In the last year in particular, we have seen a contraction in the marketplace,” said Tammy Nelson, vice president for marketing and research for the marketing company re:fuel. “The measures a lot of college newspapers took in recent years, maybe cutting editions from five days a week to four days a week, trimming sections now and then, got them through the downturn. But they are having to look at other ways now to be profitable.”
At the University of Texas, Austin, The Daily Texan has been relying on a reserve fund to help make up a free fall in ad revenue from $2.2 million in 2007 to $1.3 million last year, according to Friends of The Daily Texan, an alumni group organized to help the paper that counted Walter Cronkite and Bill Moyers on its staff.
At the University of California, Berkeley, the 142-year-old Daily Californian is in the midst of an ambitious fund-raising campaign after a single anonymous donor who had been helping fill growing budget gaps pulled out this summer.
Former staff members have helped The Daily Illini, the student-run newspaper at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, begin to pay down its $250,000 debt. Roger Ebert, the late film critic and D.I. editor in chief, had appealed to fellow newspaper alumni in a widely circulated letter on Facebook that helped drive donations. “Many, including myself, would say that they owe their careers at least in part to their experience at Illini Media,” he wrote. “It’s now time to give back.”
The Daily Illini is among several financially independent campus news organizations that have asked students to support small fee increases. Beginning this semester, Illinois students pay a media fee of $1.85, which is expected to cover 9 percent of this year’s budget. A $3 fee was approved last April at the University of California, Irvine. The student body at Western Michigan University initiated and voted for a $10 annual fee to support the newspaper as well as radio and broadcast station. Students at the University of Connecticut balked at a $6 increase for its student newspaper, but noting that voter turnout on the issue was small, the trustees approved the fee for this academic year, putting off the debate for another year.
The University of Georgia’s Red and Black and the University of Virginia’s Cavalier Daily have recently cut back the number of days they publish print editions.
Ms. Nelson warns that college papers that eliminate too many of their print editions do so at their peril. Re:fuel research shows that students still enjoy picking up copies, free and convenient as they are, stacked in the student union and dorm lounges. In 2011, 60 percent of students read their college paper — a testament, if you will, to its importance as an outlet for student concerns, from tuition increases to the quality of food in the cafeteria. Of those readers, 60 percent preferred print, while 16 percent preferred to get their college news online.
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California: Aid for Illegal Immigrant College Students


By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 30, 2013
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Janet Napolitano, the president of the University of California, said Wednesday that $5 million would be devoted to providing special counseling and financial aid for students living in the country illegally, a move aimed at disarming critics who worried she would be hostile to the small but vocal student population. Ms. Napolitano, formerly the secretary of homeland security, announced the initiative in her first public address, in San Francisco, since becoming head of the 10-campus university system a month ago. She also pledged $10 million for recruiting and training graduate students and research fellows.
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As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry


Jim Wilson/The New York Times
At Stanford this month, Jeremy Dean showed graduate students how to use Rap Genius to teach the classics in the digital age.
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Published: October 30, 2013 1073 Comments
STANFORD, Calif. — On Stanford University’s sprawling campus, where a long palm-lined drive leads to manicured quads, humanities professors produce highly regarded scholarship on Renaissance French literature and the philosophy of language.
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Tanya Llewellyn, a graduate student in English at Stanford, at a workshop on a database analysis of 18th-century novels.

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"A university without a philosophy program is no longer a university."
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They have generous compensation, stunning surroundings and access to the latest technology and techniques of scholarship. The only thing they lack is students: Some 45 percent of the faculty members in Stanford’s main undergraduate division are clustered in the humanities — but only 15 percent of the students.
With Stanford’s reputation in technology, it is no wonder that computer science is the university’s most popular major, and that there are no longer any humanities programs among the top five. But with the recession having helped turn college, in the popular view, into largely a tool for job preparation, administrators are concerned.
“We have 11 humanities departments that are quite extraordinary, and we want to provide for that faculty,” said Richard Shaw, Stanford’s dean of admission and financial aid.
The concern that the humanities are being eclipsed by science goes far beyond Stanford.
At some public universities, where funding is eroding, humanities are being pared. In September, for example, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania announced that it was closing its sparsely populated degree programs in German, philosophy, and world languages and culture.
At elite universities, such departments are safe but wary. Harvard had a 20 percent decline in humanities majors over the last decade, a recent report found, and most students who say they intend to major in humanities end up in other fields. So the university is looking to reshape its first-year humanities courses to sustain student interest.
Princeton, in an effort to recruit more humanities students, offers a program for high school students with a strong demonstrated interest in humanities — an idea Stanford, too, adopted last year.
“Both inside the humanities and outside, people feel that the intellectual firepower in the universities is in the sciences, that the important issues that people of all sorts care about, like inequality and climate change, are being addressed not in the English departments,” said Andrew Delbanco, a Columbia University professor who writes about higher education.
The future of the humanities has been a hot topic this year, both in academia and the high-culture media. Some commentators sounded the alarm based on federal data showing that nationally, the percentage of humanities majors hovers around 7 percent — half the 14 percent share in 1970. As others quickly pointed out, that decline occurred between 1970, the high point, and 1985, not in recent years.
Still, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued a report this spring noting the decreased funding for humanities and calling for new initiatives to ensure that they are not neglected amid the growing money and attention devoted to science and technology.
In The New Yorker in August, the writer Adam Gopnik argued for the importance of English majors. The New Republic ran an article, “Science Is Not Your Enemy,” by Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive scientist. A few weeks later came a testy rebuttal, “Crimes Against Humanities” by Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, rejecting Dr. Pinker’s views on the ascendancy of science.
“In the scholarly world, cognitive sciences has everybody’s ear right now, and everybody is thinking about how to relate to it,” said Louis Menand, a Harvard English professor. “How many people do you know who’ve read a book by an English professor in the past year? But everybody’s reading science books.”
Many distinguished humanities professors feel their status deflating. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton history professor who started that university’s humanities recruiting program, said he sometimes feels “like a newspaper comic strip character whose face is getting smaller and smaller.”
At Stanford, the humanists cannot help noticing the primacy of science and technology.
“You look at this university’s extraordinary science and technology achievements, and if you wonder what will happen to the humanities, you can be threatened, or you can be invigorated,” said Franco Moretti, the director of the Stanford Literary Lab. “I’m choosing to be invigorated.”
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Drop in LSAT Takers Shows Legal Field’s Slump


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Published: October 31, 2013
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Once again, fewer candidates are taking the Law School Admission Test, a sign that students recognize the continuing slump in the legal field. The latest figures released this week by the Law School Admissions Council show that nearly 11 percent fewer people took the LSAT in October than the year before. The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog calculated that this October’s 33,673 test takers represent a drop of 45 percent since the test-taking peak in 2009. Daniel M. Filler, a professor at the Earle Mack School of Law at Drexel University, blogged that some schools might see applications decline to the point that they could have to “radically restructure” to make ends meet.
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U.S. Teams Up With Operator of Online Courses to Plan a Global Network


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Published: October 31, 2013 48 Comments
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Coursera, a California-based venture that has enrolled five million students in its free online courses, announced on Thursday a partnership with the United States government to create “learning hubs” around the world where students can go to get Internet access to free courses supplemented by weekly in-person class discussions with local teachers or facilitators.

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The learning hubs represent a new stage in the evolution of “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, and address two issues: the lack of reliable Internet access in some countries, and the growing conviction that students do better if they can discuss course materials, and meet at least occasionally with a teacher or facilitator.
“Our mission is education for everyone, and we’ve seen that when we can bring a community of learners together with a facilitator or teacher who can engage the students, it enhances the learning experience and increases the completion rate,” said Lila Ibrahim, the president of Coursera. “It will vary with the location and the organization we’re working with, but we want to bring in some teacher or facilitator who can be the glue for the class.”
Early this year, using courses from Coursera and other online providers, the State Department ran a pilot program to open space where people could take free online courses in priority fields, including science and technology subjects, Americana and entrepreneurship.
“Some of them took it above and beyond, and decided to host facilitated discussions with the courses,” said Meghann Curtis, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for academic programs. “Over the summer, when we looked at the success stories, we identified facilitated discussions as something that seemed to work.”
Coursera is joining forces with the State Department’s MOOC Camp Initiative, now operating in 40 countries — about half using Coursera courses, and the other half courses from such providers as edX and Open Yale, whose courses are also available free on the Internet. But beyond having its courses used, Coursera is taking an active role in the project.
“We have a list of MOOCs from different providers that we suggest, but Coursera has had a unique interest in working with us to collect the data to understand the learning outcomes from facilitated discussions, and has given us additional materials to give out to the facilitators,” Ms. Curtis said.
The classes are small, some with only 15 students and none with the hundreds or thousands of students who enroll online.
In a pilot program in Bolivia, South Korea and Indonesia, Ms. Ibrahim said, the completion rate for those in classes that met for discussion once a week — and provided access to career services, another part of the pilot — was 40 percent, compared with only 10 percent of those who worked online only.
For the State Department, Ms. Curtis said, the appeal of the MOOCs is that they can be used to reach students anywhere, exposing them to American universities and college-level discussion, and perhaps spurring a desire to study in the United States.
Instruction in the classes is in English, she said, and neither the facilitators nor the MOOC providers are getting paid. Many facilitators are foreign service officers, retired teachers, or those who had a Fulbright or other travel grant.
Both Coursera, the largest MOOC provider, and edX, the nonprofit Harvard-M.I.T. venture that is the second largest, began two years ago by offering wholly online courses, but are now working with universities to offer blended, or hybrid, courses. Both are also working with a growing number of overseas partners. including universities in Australia, Switzerland, China and elsewhere, sometimes with courses offered in languages other than English.
In October edX announced that it would be working with the French higher education minister to offer online courses in France, and that its platform had also been chosen to power China’s new online learning portal, Xuetangx. EdX is also working with the International Monetary Fund to offer training.
Coursera, which now has 100 university partners, has developed a network of translators who are making the materials in some courses available in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Kazakh, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish and Ukrainian.
Increasingly, though, American MOOC providers are facing competition from a growing crop of foreign MOOC providers, such as Germany’s Iversity and Brazil’s Veduca.
Along with the State Department, Coursera’s partners for the learning hubs include the University of Trinidad and Tobago, Overcoming Faith Academy Kenya, Digital October, Bluebells School International and Lady Sriram College, Learning Links Foundation and Tapthetech.org.
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Finding Life After Academia — and Not Feeling Bad About It

The Repurposed Ph.D.


By REBECCA TUHUS-DUBROW
Published: November 1, 2013 4 Comments
ON a recent Sunday afternoon, a monthly meeting convened around a long table in a Whole Foods cafeteria on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As people settled in, the organizer plopped down a bag of potato chips and tackled housekeeping matters, like soliciting contributions. But she did not insist. “I know that some of you are in fragile situations,” she said.
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Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
ADAM CAPITANIO
PH.D. American studies, Michigan State University
JOB Editorial associate, Berghahn Books
Dr. Capitanio spent nine years in grad school between a master’s in cinema studies and a Ph.D. “A little more than halfway through,” he said, “it dawned on me how bad the job market actually was.” On phdsatwork.com, he writes: “I looked everywhere a confused humanities post-academic would look: nonprofits, museums, media companies, I ended up in that refuge of former academics, publishing.”

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KAREN SHANTON
PH.D. Philosophy, Rutgers
JOB Analyst, National Conference of State Legislatures
While working toward her Ph.D., Dr. Shanton realized she was more interested in politics than a faculty position. After completing a series of internships in Washington, she won a fellowship researching issues for state policy makers.

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One attendee recalled scraping by on $9,000 a year. “I was exhausted by years of living in poverty,” she said. Her neighbor chimed in: “Amen, sister.”
An eavesdropper might have been surprised to learn what the group had in common: formidable academic credentials. Sitting at the table were a historian, a sociologist, a linguist and a dozen other scholars. Most held doctorates; a few were either close to completion or had left before finishing. All had toiled for years in graduate school but, by choice or circumstance, almost none had arrived at the promised destination of tenure-track professorships (the one who had was thinking of leaving). Now they found themselves at a gathering of a group called Versatile Ph.D. to support their pursuit of nontraditional careers.
After a round of introductions, the participants broke into clusters to swap stories and tips. A 32-year-old man who had studied ancient religion at Princeton wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of his employer, a finance website; he talked up his job to a physicist who was finalizing her thesis. The historian, a teacher at an elite private school, advised a recent American studies Ph.D. on where to find job postings and how to package himself. That young Ph.D., Adam Capitanio, who completed his degree in 2012, had looked for an academic position for three years, focusing his search on the Northeast and applying for at least 60 jobs. He hadn’t received a single interview. Now he was working as an editorial associate at an academic publisher, trying to devise a long-term plan. “Things were kind of desperate before I had that job,” he said. “This gives me some flexibility to figure out what I actually want to do.”
Dr. Capitanio’s experience is far from unusual. According to a 2011 National Science Foundation survey, 35 percent of doctorate recipients — and 43 percent of those in the humanities — had no commitment for employment at the time of completion. Fewer than half of Ph.D.’s are expected to land tenure-track jobs. And many voluntarily choose another path because they want higher pay or more direct engagement with the world than monographs and tenure committees seem to allow.
Though graduates have faced similar conditions for decades, the past few years have seen a surge in efforts to connect Ph.D.’s with gratifying employment outside academia and even to rethink the purpose of doctoral education. “The issue itself is not a new issue,” said Debra Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. “The response, I would say, is definitely new.”
In addition to New York, Versatile Ph.D. groups have formed in at least seven other cities, including Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles. Abundant online resources help Ph.D.’s turn curricula vitae into résumés and market their skills to nonacademic employers. And former academics can find kindred souls at blogs like “Chronicles of a Recovering Academic,” “Your Barista Has a Ph.D.” and “Dr. Outta Here” (obscenity alert).
The spirit of change has even begun to take root inside the ivory tower. The University of California, Berkeley, held a “Beyond Academia” conference last spring, hosting Ph.D. speakers who have succeeded in other domains, from consulting to biotech. Similar events are planned at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, which established its new Office of Career Planning and Professional Development in February.
The problem is especially urgent in the humanities. For Ph.D.’s in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), industry has long been a viable option. But students who study, say, Russian literature or medieval history have few obvious alternative careers in their fields. They confront questions about their relevance even inside the academy, let alone outside it.
In August, the Scholarly Communication Institute released a report titled “Humanities Unbound: Supporting Careers and Scholarship Beyond the Tenure Track.” In it, Katina Rogers, the lead researcher, discusses the nascent concept of alternative academic, or alt-ac, professions. The term has gained widespread currency (and its own Twitter hashtag) and can refer to jobs within universities but outside the professoriate, like administrator or librarian, as well as nonacademic roles like government-employed historian and museum curator.
Dr. Rogers suggests that alt-ac is less a matter of where you work than how — “with the same intellectual curiosity that fueled the desire to go to graduate school in the first place, and applying the same kinds of skills, such as close reading, historical inquiry or written argumentation, to the tasks at hand.” In an interview, she credited the neologism with infusing “positive energy” into the often gloomy conversations about alternative careers. The alt-ac ethos holds that nonacademic work is not a fallback plan for failures but a win-win: Ph.D.’s can bring their deep expertise and advanced skills to a whole gamut of challenges, rather than remaining cocooned in the ivory tower.
Karen Shanton explored unconscious cognitive processes for her philosophy Ph.D. from Rutgers but works at the National Conference of State Legislatures, which provides legislators with nonpartisan analysis. She won the two-year fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Its Public Fellows program, created in 2011, places Ph.D.’s from the humanities and social sciences in nonprofit and government organizations.
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Welcomed With Kisses, Stanford Freshmen Risk the ‘Kissing Disease’


Zetong Li/The Stanford Daily
A couple kissing after midnight.
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Published: October 31, 2013
STANFORD, Calif. — It is minutes to midnight. A sultry full moon hangs over Stanford’s Memorial Church, bathing the campus’s red roofs and adobe-toned walls.
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Zetong Li/The Stanford Daily
The Tree, the Stanford marching band’s mascot, always gets the most kisses.
In the Quad, thousands of students mill around, some bobbing drunkenly, some giggling nervously, most of them wearing clothes.
Finally, a male senior saunters over to a group of the youngest-looking women and asks: “Hey! You freshmen? Can I kiss you?”
As the Stanford Band plays and a giant screen shows famous movie clutches, the bravest women step forward and receive the traditional welcome to one of the nation’s most prestigious universities: a big wet upperclassman smack.
Days later, another tradition arrives: flu and mononucleosis, the “kissing disease,” sweep the dorms.
Full Moon on the Quad — normally celebrated beneath the academic year’s first full moon but this year held on Oct. 22 because of a conflict with Homecoming Week — is an event unique in American education: an orgy of interclass kissing reluctantly but officially sanctioned by the university.
It is a domestic example of a new field in public health, “mass-gathering medicine.” The best-known example is Saudi Arabia’s multimillion-dollar efforts to keep the annual pilgrimage to Mecca as epidemic-free as possible.
For Stanford, the struggle is: Since officials can’t outlaw it (yes, they have tried), how can they make it safer?
The first step, said Dr. Ira M. Friedman, director of the Vaden Student Health Center, is to make consent paramount. “We try to create an environment in which they don’t feel they must participate in the exchange of oral secretions,” he said.
His center also offers shots against what it can fight: flu and meningococcal meningitis, a rare but sometimes dangerous infection known as “freshman meningitis.”
To make it safer, the evening is overseen by student sobriety monitors and decorated with hand-drawn signs — of the ilk that usually say “Beat Cal” — but bearing slogans like “Consent is Sexy.”
But the most crucial role is played by the “peer health educators” who live in each dorm.
They meet with freshmen before, and ask any with cold symptoms to feel free to watch, but not to kiss anyone.
And they teach safe kissing.
“We tell them, ‘Don’t floss beforehand, don’t brush, don’t do anything that could create microabrasions in your gums for germs to get in,” said Michelle Lee Mederos, a former educator who graduated in 2011. “And we have tables where we offer mints and little Dixie cups of mouthwash.”
Mouthwash is the main line of defense. This year there were two tables dotted with paper cups, along with condoms and other sexual health supplies.
The educators also have square latex dental dams to offer, “but they’re generally made fun of,” said Ms. Mederos, who used them in dorm demonstrations of how to safely perform oral sex on a woman. “In two years of ordering supplies, I had to order them only once — for those demonstrations.”
Although the conventional wisdom is that mononucleosis spikes after the event, the health center has never compiled that data, Dr. Friedman said.
“It’s also flu season,” he said. “But we do think the event is a potentiator.”
The event’s origins are lost in the fog of history; legend holds that it began in the late 1800s with senior men presenting freshman women with roses.
Later, it waxed and waned, reputedly practiced sometimes by some fraternities. Many graduates over age 40 have never heard of it.
In 1988, several student officers made it formal.
“It was folklore,” said Julie Lythcott-Haims, one of those officers. “We took it off the shelf and dusted it off. We had roses, a string quartet, maybe some champagne. A couple of hundred students showed up.”
When she returned a decade later as an administrator (she eventually became the beloved “Freshman Dean Julie”), it had “become a thing,” she said. “Thousands were showing up. It was crazy, it was wild. There were concerns about alcohol and safety.”
Starting in 2002, deans debated outlawing it, rejected that as futile and decided to impose order instead.
Now the Quad is barricaded. Campus police check student IDs. Paramedics stand by. A concert is held so nonkissers have something to do.
It has been canceled only once: in 2009, the “pandemic swine flu” year.
After East Coast schools, which open earlier, reported outbreaks, “we decided we couldn’t live with the risk,” Dr. Friedman said. “So we made a very unpopular decision.”
Francisca Gilmore, a freshman that year, said in an email interview from an internship in Cambodia that she and some classmates braved the odds anyway.
“Unofficially, a bunch of overeager freshmen and intoxicated upperclassmen gathered on the Quad and upheld the tradition,” she wrote.
Dr. Friedman conceded that the ban “didn’t work 100 percent, but I think it made some difference.”
Lots of students got flu, “but we weren’t as high as national or even regional rates,” he said.
Since 2002, new traditions have emerged, leaving yesterday’s roses looking wilted.
One co-op’s contingent attends wearing just body paint. There is a “same-sex kissing” area.
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