FLOSS In School - Open Source Software in the Education System

New rules proposed by National Institutes of Health would expand researchers' disclosure of financial entanglements, and heighten demands on universities to analyze and report them.

Angela D. Provart offers tips for search committees and for candidates.

Alexandra W. Logue considers a central question about the governance of public higher education.

The University of California, Berkeley's College of Letters and Science is not yielding to calls for it to drop its plan to ask incoming freshmen and transfers to submit a DNA sample to be analyzed for three genes that have to do with the metabolism of food and drinks. A Tuesday Inside Higher Ed news story opened the floodgates of media coverage by other national and local media outlets. Though Berkeley officials have said the assignment is completely optional and anonymous, the project has been a lightning rod for criticism.

Alix Schwartz, the college's director of undergraduate academic planning, said she and her colleagues are "definitely not canceling the program" in response to the backlash. "Even the negative or ill-informed attention" brought to the plan would "add to the dialogue, and dialogue was what we hoped to generate," she said. Some faculty have voiced concerns about genetic testing "but their response is not hysterical, and we are all talking and listening to one another."

In a letter to Berkeley administrators -- and to Mark Yudof, president of the University of California System -- the Council for Responsible Genetics called the project "woefully naïve." While seemingly harmless, the group's president wrote, the test results have "the risk of increasingly being used out of context in ways that are contrary to the interests of the individual, perhaps even discriminatory, and privacy-invasive." The Center for Genetics and Society, a nonprofit based in Berkeley that has no affiliation with the university, has also asked administrators to cancel the program.

The selection of architects for the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics has renewed controversy over the University of Chicago's planned center to honor the late professor. The university announced last night that Ann Beha Architects has been selected for the project -- just hours after faculty critics issued a press release questioning why architects had been selected with minimal public discussions of the next stages of the project. The controversy isn't about the architects, but the center itself. Many professors have feared that the institute would be so focused on honoring Friedman that it would be associated only with one (right-wing) school of thought. Further, faculty members question the need for a new institute, especially compared with other priorities. "We would hate to think that the university's evident fixation on financial assets and its desire to exploit the Friedman brand name for fund-raising purposes would lead it to neglect its most valuable assets, its students, faculty and staff, while committing itself to a project whose very name reinforces a narrow, retrograde, and now demonstrably failed set of social and economic policies," says a statement announcing a drive to question the next stages in the center.

The architects hired by the university are being asked to renovate a building that has been used by the Chicago Theological Seminary, which is moving to a new facility. The university announcement was fairly routine (except being rushed out after the university was criticized for not having revealed the news). The university has said repeatedly that the Friedman project will be consistent with academic standards, and will not be restricted in any way to scholarship consistent with the late professor's views.

California State University campuses lost 10 percent of their collective teaching force in the last year, according to data released by the system's faculty union, the Los Angeles Times reported. The vast majority of lost jobs were held by adjunct lecturers, not by tenure-track faculty members. California State administrators said that while thousands of sections were eliminated due to budget cuts, the system hopes to restore many of those sections.

A coalition of student, consumer and union groups have written to urge Education Secretary Arne Duncan to take a tough line as the department prepares to propose a set of regulations aimed at better protecting students who receive federal financial aid and ensuring the quality of the institutions they attend. The letter to Duncan, whose signatories included the Project on Student Debt, U.S. PIRG, the United States Student Association and the National Association for College Admission Counseling, calls on Duncan "to propose regulations on incentive compensation and gainful employment that will more effectively protect students from high-pressure and deceptive sales tactics for educational programs of little or no benefit to them, and will ensure that taxpayer dollars do not subsidize such practices and programs." The groups' letter comes amid an intense lobbying campaign by for-profit colleges, which would be most directly affected by the proposed rules. The sector's institutions are engaging in their usual tactics of campaign contributions and direct hiring of some of Washington's best lobbyists, but they are also engaging in what the Project on Student Debt calls "astroturfing" -- faux grass roots advocacy -- in the form of a Web site set up to present student voices but designed and funded by institutional leaders.

Acclaimed historian Jonathan Spence delivers a Jefferson Lecture with an unusually narrow focus.

In strong defense of academic freedom, federal appeals court holds Maricopa Community College District blameless for not punishing professor who offended colleagues with racially charged e-mails.

Study questions whether six New England colleges should have made risky investments and depended on endowment returns for spending.

New Jersey's Senate approved legislation Thursday that would require government workers -- including faculty and staff members at public colleges -- to live in the state, The Star-Ledger of Newark reported. The version of the measure that passed Thursday has been softened considerably from previous iterations, giving workers a full year to move and providing an appeals process. But given the nature of academic (particularly adjunct faculty) jobs, and the geography of New Jersey, which draws workers from nearby major metropolitan areas like New York and Philadelphia, the legislation, if it passes the Assembly and becomes law, could cause major headaches for public colleges in the Garden State.

Christopher Clark has resigned as president of Bryn Athyn College, after less than a year in office, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Clark's major campaign as president has been to increase enrollment from 190. Bryn Athyn is affiliated with the General Church of the New Jerusalem, and he planned to reach out to more students of other faiths, which concerned some college constituencies.

An arbitrator has found that Florida Gulf Coast University had the right to investigate and maybe to punish David Lounsbury, but shouldn't have fired the professor, The Naples Daily News reported. Lounsbury was fired after an inquiry found that he had been collecting checks from students for a course, and using the funds without university oversight. Further, he was dismissed amid allegations that he inappropriately touched a mannequin -- while making jokes -- during a course on medical investigation of deaths. Lounsbury has said that both inquiries were conducted in unfair ways, distorting what happened, and the arbitrator agreed that the mannequin allegations were not correctly investigated. The university plans to appeal the arbitrator's finding.

A student strike has effectively shut down most programs at the University of Puerto Rico, The New York Times reported. Students are protesting deep budget cuts, which university administrators say they have no choice but to impose due to their lack of funds.

C. Peter Magrath -- who won good reviews for his interim presidency at West Virginia University last year -- has been selected as interim president of the State University of New York at Binghamton. At WVU, he came in amid a scandal over inappropriately awarded degrees. At Binghamton he arrives amid campus debate over a basketball program that many faculty members say was out of control, and damaged the university's reputation. Magrath knows Binghamton, having served as president from 1972-1974. From 1992 through 2005, he served as president of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges — now the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities.