Harvard wants its students to go away
Nearly twice as many Harvard students are studying abroad this fall compared with two years ago, according to new numbers released by the school. Score one for President Larry Summers, who has been pushing to instill a more global mindset at a school that traditionally frowned upon students leaving campus to study. The number abroad this semester is still small compared with other schools -- 108 out of nearly 6,600 undergrads -- but that number may go up even further. As part of a broad rethinking of its curriculum, Harvard is considering setting what it would call an "expectation" that all students would work or study overseas during college. "The best way to learn about China is to go to China," Summers said last week. "We're making great progress, but we need to do more."
RACE REPORT: It took them a year, but when members of a task force assigned to study the racial climate at the University of Massachusetts at Boston finally issued their report last week, the findings filled only five pages and found no evidence of discrimination. Led by UMass trustee Karl White, the six-member team was assembled last fall by Jack Wilson, then the interim president of the university system, after departures by black and Hispanic professors and administrators. In its report, the task force, which included no faculty members, described the resignations and retirements as "coincidental," and found that former chancellor Jo Ann Gora (who left in August to lead Ball State University) did nothing to weaken the school's urban mission, despite her interest in building dorms and turning the commuter school into a more traditional college campus.
CHUCK ROAST: Departing MIT president Charles Vest won't have a university to run for much longer, but at least he'll have his very own asteroid. Last Saturday, as hundreds of professors, staff, and students honored Vest at the Stata Center, David Briggs, director of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, presented Vest with asteroid number 32222. Now known as "Charlesvest," the asteroid is 11 kilometers wide and located a third of the way between Mars and Jupiter. Briggs also gave Vest a piece of bituminous coal, a reference to the president's roots in West Virginia mining country, saying the gifts were "to remind you of your celestial thoughts while keeping your feet on the ground." Also presented to Vest to mark the end of his 14-year tenure: an official notice of admission to MIT "with the application fee waived," and a symbolic key to his new, smaller office in the Stata Center, where he'll move when new president Susan Hockfield takes the reins. Vest thanked everyone at MIT from Nobel laureates to plumbers. "I told the group that my honeymoon at MIT has lasted 14 years, and that is exactly how I feel," he wrote in an e-mail.
SITE DOWN: The downloading wars hit Brandeis this month when a group of students decided to close down Boogle, a music-sharing website they had been running for a couple of years. At its height, Boogle was a hotly trafficked song-sharing site, but as the recording industry stepped up its pursuit of student music-swappers, most Boogle users removed their files from the system in fear, making it a lot less useful. But could there have been more to it? Nathaniel Budin, a senior involved in Boogle, says the increasing number of complaints to Brandeis by the recording industry could be a result of spies on campus. Because only people on campus could view Boogle, he says, "Someone must've been ratting out their fellow students, either for fun or profit."
WE'LL RAISE YOU: After Governor Mitt Romney refused to approve raises for 400 maintenance and clerical employees on its Boston campus, the University of Massachusetts turned reluctantly to its own coffers to make good on the nine-month-old contract and ease the workers' unrest. A little-noticed provision in the supplemental budget passed this month will allow UMass Boston to bypass the governor and upgrade the pay scale itself. The raises will cost $750,000, according to the union, and should please employees, but the precedent is also worrisome to some who say it could encourage the governor to block more contracts. Meanwhile, the fight goes on for retroactive pay owed to 12,000 state campus employees, including the 400 in Boston, that was vetoed by Romney earlier this month.
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