August 31, 2006Safer with a six-shooter?
Virginia Tech students were told to put their hands up as they exited Squires Student Center Aug. 21 in the midst of a manhunt for a suspected murderer. Wiles argues that the events of Aug. 21 reinforce his views that he should be able to carry his weapon on Virginia Tech's campus. Students, staff and professors at Tech are not allowed to carry guns on campus, even if they are licensed to do so by the state. And the Virginia House of Delegates defeated a measure earlier this year that would prohibit universities from banning weapons on campus. When that happened, we had another commentator (a Tech professor) write about how he felt about students who pack heat on campus. One of the things I found most interesting about Wiles' op-ed was that he quoted a professor who said she would have felt safer if he would have had his gun on him last Monday. I'm curious whether that professor still holds that opinion or if she only said it in the moment. The comment got me wondering about how people generally feel about being in places where people can carry guns. At the risk of being accused of being a member of the liberal media, I'll put it out there that I don't particularly feel safe knowing that people can carry guns around me -- even if those people have licenses to do so. Turns out, I'm in the majority. With a quick Google search, I was able to find this 2001 article by professors at the Harvard School of Public Health. The conclusion of the study is summed up here: "Americans feel less safe rather than more safe as more people in their community begin to carry guns. By margins of at least nine to one, Americans do not believe that 'regular' citizens should be allowed to bring their guns into restaurants, college campuses, sports stadiums, bars, hospitals, or government buildings." August 29, 2006A brave new collegiate world
Now that things are sort of back to normal, I wanted to post a little something on the technology story. In the course of reporting it, I talked to several professors at some local colleges -- Radford University, Roanoke College and Virginia Tech -- who had very different opinions about the effects of technology on their students and on the classroom. Some of them embraced the new ways of reaching students, and some were concerned that the gadgets and Web sites were just a distraction. One of those distractions -- cell phones -- was even the subject of research done by one of the professors I spoke to. Peggy Meszaros, the director of the Center for Information Technology Impacts on Children, Youth, and Families, recently completed a study on college students' use of cell phones. Together with undergraduate students in the Kappa Omicron Nu Honors Society, Meszaros collected surveys from 568 Tech students and reported the following findings:
Meszaros will report more extensive findings on the study, "Cutting the Wireless Cord: Effects of College Student Cell Phone Use and Attachment to Family and Peers," at a November symposium in Minneapolis for the National Council on Family Relations. And as she said a few weeks ago, "The landscape of technology is changing by the minute." August 24, 2006Princeton Review gives high marks for Virginia Tech food
Yes, it's ANOTHER set of college rankings Based on random surveys of students, the rankings are "almost a child's game" and "really not worth anything other than good cocktail conversation," Hincker said in an interview for a story I wrote on college rankings published last week. Well Larry, the latest rankings came out Tuesday. Here's some good cocktail conversation for you. Continue reading "Princeton Review gives high marks for Virginia Tech food" » August 23, 2006The power of Facebook
Photo from "The Homicidal Maniac at Tech Club" Facebook group In addition to the 17 groups I wrote about, another one popped up that brought together a "Snakes on a Plane" reference with the Morva case: "I'm Tired of This Mother#@&$in' Killer on This Mother#@&#ing Campus." On a much more serious note, one student also posted a Facebook group honoring Eric Sutphin and Derrick McFarland, the two slain men. The description of the latter group reads: "This group is dedicated to the service and sacrifice of Eric Sutphin and Derrick McFarland to help protect us here at Virginia Tech. They will be missed." As with most newspaper stories about the Web, we ended up taking out a lot of the profanity that is so rampant online. I wonder if sometimes that doesn't drain some of the color and strong feelings that people have about such emotional issues as an inmate on the loose with two dead and a campus of 25,000 students in lockdown mode. But I'm not sure how we could have handled it differently, given the paper's guidelines about using expletives. Anyway, I wanted to include links to some of the other sites that I was tooling around on for my reporting yesterday, even though they didn't all make a mention in the paper: August 21, 2006Returning to normal? Police arrested William Morva at 3:40 p.m. Monday But I'm curious about how students are feeling now. Do Blacksburg and the campus seem as safe as they did before? Is there something that the community and university could learn from this trying and tragic day? And what about parents out there? Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said he had received calls from parents concerned about their children. I suspect many of those parents were of freshmen who would have attended their first college classes today. Have your fears been assuaged? Let us know what you think. Got their manTwo law officers have been shot to death near the Virginia Tech campus, and the suspect has been captured. Keep up with developments on roanoke.com. We'll continue to update this story as news develops. UPDATE: Virginia Tech has posted a press release on the closing, as well as a podcast by Vice President Kurt Krause. August 17, 2006Keeping up with the college JonesesCheck out Greg's story on college rankings today. I especially like the sidebar, which breaks down how area schools tout their own performance. This textbook brought to you by...
The company, Minnesota-based Freeload Press, says it is responding to the soaring cost of college textbooks. According to Freeload's homepage, students spend an average of $900 per year on textbooks. (The Government Accountability Office released a report in 2005 that said textbook prices nearly tripled from December 1986 to December 2004.) Freeload's mission, therefore, is to "liberate the textbook." Beyond advertising, Freeload is cutting down on costs because the books it offers actually come to students in the form of a downloadable PDF version of the text. Students need only fill out a short survey before downloading and saving the book to their hard drives. Some of the advertisers include FedEx Kinko's, Culver's and Total Recall Learning. The Freeload Web site even gives users a preview of what the ads will look like in the texts. So far, it appears the company is mostly offering business-oriented texts. It will be interesting to see if other authors sign on to this method of distributing their books. What do you all think about ads in college textbooks -- genius idea or just another ploy by the marketing wizards? August 16, 2006More rankings craziness...How obsessed are some people about the U.S. News and World Report college rankings? According to the very unofficial numbers (backed up by blurry cellphone photos of what appears to be the inside of a U.S. News magazine) Virginia schools didn't gain much ground. In the rankings of national universities, UVa dropped from 23 to 24 and William and Mary held steady at 31. Virginia Tech gained one spot, moving from 78 to 77. Among liberal arts colleges, Washington and Lee dropped three spots, from 14th to 17th, unofficially. Look for my story in tomorrow's Roanoke Times on college rankings and what, if anything, they mean. Overcrowded dorm situation getting better at TechI received an email today from Ed Spencer, associate vice president for student affairs at Virginia Tech. He had an update on Virginia Tech's on-campus overcrowding problem. It seems the overflow of 225 students reported at the beginning of August has shrunk to about 121 as students have taken advantage of an offer of Hokie dining dollars if they agreed to move off campus. Sixty-three of the remaining "extra" students will be temporary roomates to resident advisors and 58 will live in converted study lounges. Spencer credited Ken Belcher, associate director for occupancy management, with dealing with the problem and said he expects the number to continue to drop in the coming weeks. August 15, 2006How to avoid move-in mayhem
Move-in day 2004 at Radford University
August 12, 2006No College Student Left Behind Part IIEarlier this week, the U.S. Commission on the Future of Higher Education voted to approve its final report -- a document that calls for a shock to the American college and university system in areas from financial aid policies to standardized testing for more accountability. One member, David Ward of the American Council on Education, of the 19 refused to sign, and several other representatives of colleges and universities said they found the report "chilling," according to the New York Times' account. The president of Hollins University even wrote an op-ed in the pages of the Roanoke Times on Aug. 3 explaining her problems with the commission's work. I blogged about Nancy Oliver Gray's comments, as well as an earlier draft of the commission's report. But what I think is one of the most interesting bits of the commission's final report is one paragraph near the end that discusses international students. August 10, 2006New professors on campusToday is the first day of work for all the new professors at Radford University. It's another bumper crop year for new faculty at RU, as I wrote in a story last week. Forty-three new faculty are coming in, with a majority of them — or 65 percent — in tenure-track positions. That high percentage is becoming a rarity among most faculty hires, stressed Martin Snyder, the external affairs director at the Association of American University Professors and a former president of Molloy College. "The problem with new faculty recently has been that there have not been that many positions," Snyder said. "And most schools have been filling the ranks with part-time faculty." Snyder's comments were borne out in data released by the U.S. Department of Education last week on higher education jobs that looked at the years 1993 to 2003. According to the report, jobs at postsecondary institutions rose more quickly than jobs in the U.S. civilian labor force in that decade. But the higher education workforce was also filled with more part-time positions in 2003 than in 1993. Nowhere was that more pronounced than within the faculty ranks, according to the executive summary: "Except for instruction/research assistants — who are part time by definition — faculty had the highest rates of part-time employment in both years: 40 percent in 1993, increasing to 46 percent in 2003. In contrast, among staff in all other primary occupations, the proportion of part-time staff ranged from 4 (percent) to 22 percent in 1993 and from 3 (percent) to 21 percent in 2003." I hear from faculty about the problems that having many part-time instructors cause at the academy: The people filling those positions usually have to cobble together several positions at different institutions, making it difficult for them to focus on their classes the way full-time faculty can. The lack of focus could end up downgrading the education that students get, partly because students might not be able to have the kind of contact with professors that can help along in their classes. Most of these comments are things I hear from full-time professors. I would love to hear from some part-time profs to see what they think about these issues. Or maybe from students who have had part-time professors and feel strongly one way or the other about this issue. August 7, 2006William and Mary top college in Virginia, according to Washington MonthlyAs I mentioned in a blog last week, the season of college rankings is upon us. One of the non-traditional ranking publications, Washington Monthly, came out with their second annual rankings today. In addition to rankings, the site also has some interesting articles about efforts to measure how well students actually learn along with unflinching criticism for colleges that refuse to release this information and U.S. News and World Report for basing their rankings on what Washington Monthly editors see as faulty criteria. Instead of measuring SAT scores and alumni giving, Washington Monthly based rankings on three criteria: How colleges serve as an engine for social mobility, how they foster scientific and humanistic research and how they promote service to country. So schools that do a lot of research to improve people's lives, schools that enroll a lot of Pell Grant recipients (which translates to low-income students) and schools that send a lot of students to the Peace Corps or the military (VMI, Virginia Tech) are given priority over schools with pristine academic reputations and a wealthy student body (Princeton ranks 43rd on this list). So how did Virginia schools fare? Continue reading "William and Mary top college in Virginia, according to Washington Monthly" » A different way to spend your summer vacation
Tech students John Caldwell and Matt Widders at Blacksburg's Steppin' Out on Aug. 5 A variation on that theme is how two Virginia Tech engineering students spent their summer. Starting in Florence, Ore., the two Pi Kappa Phis joined 13 fraternity brothers from across the nation on a cross-country cycling journey. The team of young men had been chosen for the Journey of Hope's Trans America team for their leadership proclivities and their commitment to community service. Journey of Hope is a project of Push America. "We didn't start out as cyclists," said John Caldwell, an electrical engineering major at Tech from Highlands Ranch, Colo. "I just wanted to do something different this summer." Continue reading "A different way to spend your summer vacation" » August 4, 2006College ranking craziness...
Next year's "Best Colleges" issue is about two weeks away Did you know that this blog was recently named one of the Top-25 college blogs written by more than one but less than four people at newspapers with less than 100,000 circulation in states that end in -ia? Sorry folks, I got a little carried away. It's that time of year again. As students gear up for the beginning of fall semester and high school juniors prepare to take the SAT's, publications across the country are in the process of telling you where you should go to college. Or at least where you should want to go to. U.S. News and World Report comes out with their annual "America's Best Colleges" guide in a couple of weeks. Results go online on Aug. 18 and hit the newstands the following week. The Princeton Review comes out with their own rankings on Aug. 22. While publications such as the Princeton Review, Kiplinger's and Newsweek have done their share of college rankings U.S. News is the grandaddy of them all and foreshadowed the college ranking explosion when it started doing rankings annually in 1987. Now you can find rankings for the most selective schools, best value schools, best research schools and best schools to go to if you're black, Asian, Latino or disabled. Here's a list of rankings sites to get you started. But many people in higher ed circles aren't happy with U.S. News or most of the other rankings. School's out for summer, but you might still have to read a book
Cover of the book Roanoke College freshmen are reading this summer One of the best was the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition at the University of South Carolina. On the site you can find an extensive list of books used by colleges for incoming students and a list of colleges that have the programs. One note of caution: The latter is incomplete, as it depends on other colleges writing in and telling USC about their programs, but it's a good start. I also had a chance to sit in on a discussion by faculty and staff members at Roanoke College about the book the college is using this year. The school's reading committee chose a different sort of offering this year: "Persepolis" by Marjane Satrapi. As I noted in my story, the book is a graphic novel about a girl growing up in Iran during the revolution in the 1970s. A large part of the discussion was about the format of the book itself. Some of the people in the room had never read a graphic novel before, but others mentioned the powerful impact of the wonderful and beautiful Maus by Art Spielgelman. In the discussion, an English professor said he might be interested in forming a course entirely about graphic novels or other media that try to tell stories through comics (such as the film "American Splendor"). It sounded like a great idea to me -- and one that would likely get a lot of interest from students. I wonder if faculty members at other institutions have done something like that before. Continue reading "School's out for summer, but you might still have to read a book" » August 3, 2006Hollins president weighs in on federal commissionA few weeks back, I blogged about the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education's draft reports. In this morning's Roanoke Times, the president of Hollins University wrote an op-ed about her thoughts on one particular recommendation -- to create a national student tracking system in order to boost accountability. Nancy Oliver Gray wrote: "... this proposal is a costly and unnecessary increase in bureaucratic red tape that threatens every students' right to privacy and security of personal information." In her commentary, Gray mentioned the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Most education journalists and academics know about this data source, but it can be a great help to parents and students interested in seeing how their colleges (or prospective colleges) compare with other schools. The wonderful thing about this database is that every college -- whether private or public -- has to provide the same information. It also includes information on campus safety, thanks to the requirement of the Jeanne Clery Act of 1990. (Be warned, though: The security data is always at least a year behind. Right now, the most recent year of data is 2004.) August 2, 2006Chat with Del. Dave NutterDel. Dave Nutter came by The Roanoke Times New River bureau today to answer questions from reporters here. Of course, we told him that everything he said was on the record and he was a good sport about it, giving what sounded like pretty honest answers for a politician during an hour and a half discussion. We talked with Nutter about everything from the overdevelopment of 114 to plans for an intermodal port in Elliston and a slew of higher education issues facing Virginia. Here are a few snippets. Checking out the higher education goods
It was a fun story to write, partly because I got to tag along on two campus tours. The tour guides themselves were very hospitable, but the most entertaining part was overheaing snippets of conversation between parents and students. One father cracked a corny joke about one of the resident hall names at Radford University, and his teenage daughter was mortified. Her mouth dropped open and she said, "Daaad!" How nice to know that things don't change that much, I thought as I chuckled to myself. (I was just the kind of teenager who was stricken with embarrassment whenever my parents opened their mouths. Sorry, mom and dad.) The experience also brought back memories of when I went on campus tours as a high school student. I will never forget when my mom told me that she had reservations about me going to Stanford because she thought our tour guide there was a snob. She preferred me to go to UC Berkeley instead because of the nice, down-to-earth guide we had there. I, of course, did what she didn't want me to do and went to Stanford. She and I haven't regretted that decision once since. But it does go to show how much of an impact the tour guides -- and especially their demeanor -- have on the college decision process. Anybody else out there have interesting campus tour stories to share? Did you ever have a bad tour guide? August 1, 2006Private college week in VirginiaVirginia's private colleges are hosting open house events for prospective college students and their parents this week: July 31 to Aug. 5. The programs will include campus tours, financial aid and admissions workshops and program overviews. The colleges are providing an incentive for families looking for a deal. If you visit at least three of the participating colleges, the application fees for your choice of three private Virginia colleges will be waived. (That amounts to about $100 of savings.) To find out more about the program, the Council of Independent Colleges in Virginia has a Web page with all the details. You can also see a list of all of the private colleges of Virginia, with links to each of their Web sites. Sharing spaceIt's that time of year when soon-to-be college students find out who their freshman roommate(s) will be. As noted in a recent Roanoke Times story, students these days don't have to wait to get on campus to learn more about their future roomies. With Facebook, MySpace and a quick Google search, a curious student can peer at the digital identity of the person who will be sharing their space for the first nine months of college. But college administrators caution that students keep an open mind when viewing the digital footprints of others: "We are actually going to tell them they need to contact their roommate before they use Facebook," Cathy Goldsborough, assistant director of housing at JMU, told Maithili Chitnavis. Goldsborough wants incoming JMU students to understand that someone's online personality may not be the one that comes out in person. On a related note, the New York Times ran a quick note about college roommates in their most recent edition of Education Life. The paper included a short excerpt from a roommate questionnaire that some colleges use to match rooming pairs. (You have to scroll down a bit to get underneath the "Cribs" heading.) If you've recently been checking out your future roommate online, let us know what you think about what you've found. |
About this blog
Rhode Island native and Virginia Tech reporter Greg Esposito posts on everyday college life, trends and issues affecting the 35,000-plus students in the New River Valley and beyond.
Tim Thornton, who is old enough to have children attending college, is still taking classes and is still fascinated by colleges, the students who populate them and the bureaucrats who operate them. His reporting beat is Radford University.
West Virginia native Anna Mallory blogs on student life topics at Virginia Tech, Radford University, New River Valley Community College -- and beyond.
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