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First Gen Latina navigating higher education & beating the odds [ Estrella Serrato, TEDxLakeBalboa ]

A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell, by Vincent Lloyd

The flava:

On the sunny first day of seminar, I sat at the end of a pair of picnic tables with nervous, excited 17-year-olds. Twelve high-school students had been chosen by the Telluride Association through a rigorous application process—the acceptance rate is reportedly around 3 percent—to spend six weeks together taking a college-level course, all expenses paid.

The group reminded me of the heroes of the Mysterious Benedict Society books I was reading to my daughter: Each teenager, brought together for a common project, had some extraordinary ability and some quirk. One girl from California spoke and thought at machine-gun speed and started collecting pet snails during the pandemic; now she had more than 100. A girl from a provincial school in China had never traveled to the United States but had mastered un-accented English and was in love with E.M. Forster. In addition to the seminar, the students practiced democratic self-governance: They lived together and set their own rules. Those first few days, the students were exactly what you would expect, at turns bubbly and reserved, all of them curious, playful, figuring out how to relate to each other and to the seminar texts.

Four weeks later, I again sat in front of the gathered students. Now, their faces were cold, their eyes down. Since the first week, I had not spotted one smile. Their number was reduced by two: The previous week, they had voted two classmates out of the house. And I was next. . . .

The article:

https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell

The author:

https://www1.villanova.edu/villanova/artsci/africana/facstaff/biodetail.html?mail=vincent.lloyd@villanova.edu&xsl=bio_long

How these HBCU presidents fixed their colleges’ financial futures [ CSMonitor.com ]

The flava:

Post-pandemic, colleges nationwide are facing an imperative: Change trajectory. Enrollment is down and falling, and Pew’s 2023 Parenting in America survey found that only 41% of parents say it’s important for their children to have a college degree – down from 94% in 2012. Even before COVID-19, smaller colleges from Green Mountain to Mount Ida already were closing or being bought out by larger institutions that wanted campus real estate but not their professors or students.

But for the 101 accredited Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the United States, this moment is particularly portentous. Undergrad enrollment is up 2.5%, compared with a decline of 4.2% for colleges overall – one of the only bright spots noted in the 2022 National Student Clearinghouse. While the pandemic dealt blows to some colleges that have never recovered, HBCUs say they were able to make use of the shared relief to do everything from covering lost wages to forgive their students’ debt. . . .

The article:

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2023/0222/How-these-HBCU-presidents-fixed-their-colleges-financial-futures

This professor asked his students to use ChatGPT. The results were surprising. [ zdnet.com ]

The flava:

One of people's biggest concerns about ChatGPT and AI chatbots is how they will affect the education system. Will the chatbots' technical proficiency make learning certain skills for humans obsolete? To mitigate this issue, some schools are blocking student and teacher access to ChatGPT on their networks entirely. One professor has taken an entirely different approach. 

Ethan Mollick, professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has embraced ChatGPT and AI use in all of his classes. His policy sets an expectation that students must use AI for class -- and learn how to use it well. 

The article:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-professor-asked-his-students-to-use-chatgpt-the-results-were-surprising/

DeSantis’s Latest Target: A Small College of ‘Free Thinkers’ [ New York Times ]

The flava:

A plan by Gov. Ron DeSantis to transform New College, which is known as progressive and describes
itself as “a community of free thinkers,” into a beacon of conservatism has left students, parents and faculty members at the tight-knit school reeling over what they see as a political assault on their academic freedom. Mr. DeSantis’s education commissioner has expressed a desire to remake the school in the image of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in Michigan that has been active in conservative politics.

Over 25 tumultuous days last month, the Republican governor removed six of the college’s 13 trustees, replacing them with allies holding strongly conservative views. The new board then forced out the college’s president, a career educator, and named Mr. DeSantis’s former education commissioner, a career politician, as her replacement. On Monday, the board signed off on paying its pick a salary of $699,000 a year, more than double what his predecessor earned.

The article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/us/ron-desantis-new-college-florida.html

To Sir, With Love