THOSE who think only the small fry are targeted, have another think coming. A quick scan of incidents all around shows that even the high and big, the sturdy and long-standing are no exemption.
A resurgence in scams is targeting university faculty and staff of Carnegie Mellon University. Hackers send them email about their salary increase information, yet there’s none when they open their mail. Instead, they’re asked for their personal information.
Many US universities continue to see a decline in enrollment for English majors. This is true as well for schools here in the Philippines. At the University of Maryland, the decline has reached 40 percent in three years.
The decline is true for other humanities majors. One reason advanced is that students and their families perceive that employment prospects for humanities majors are not as encouraging as in other fields.
Rather, students are moving in a “careerist direction,” causing enrolment increases in such “pre-professional” programs like global studies and criminology.
The debate over whether or not a student’s unacceptable behavior can disqualify him from receiving his degree was resolved in the courts of law in Cleveland.
Medical student Amir Al-Dabagh was a chronic tardy, asked a faculty member not to mark him late even if he was, groped and propositioned female students at a dance, jumped out of a moving taxi to avoid paying, was kicked out of a room by a patient’s family, and was convicted in another state for driving while intoxicated.
The federal judge said these were not academic matters, thus ruling that the School of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University should Al-Dabagh should get his degree.
A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals, however, disagreed, saying that professionalism issues were central to medical education and thus, deserved judicial deference.
The appeals court ruled that in medical education, professionalism is part of what students must learn and practice. "Anyone who has ever been to a doctor’s office knows the value of a good bedside manner. That is why Case Western does more than just teach its students facts about the human body.”
Citing the school’s student handbook, it continued, “(the) curriculum identifies nine 'core competencies.' First on the list is professionalism. Medical knowledge does not make an appearance until the fifth slot."
It used to be that teachers would remember only five kinds of students --- the brilliant, the slow, the loud and flashy, the popular, and the “bad boys/girls or bullies.”
That oversimplification has been long gone, simply because today’s college population is quite diverse, according to an article “Who Are Our Students?” by Steven Mintz.
There are the part-timers, full-timers, transferees, veterans, and commuters, nerds, geeks, grinds, jocks, activists, whiners, and know-it-alls. “Bullies” are no longer just physical; they can also be those dominating class discussions. They vary according to status, race, ethnicity, gender and even sexual orientation.
There is no single student profile, Mintz says. Thus, tenaciously prescribing a standardized curriculum is “out of step with the times, and with student demographics.”
(lelani.echaves@gmail.com)