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(03/27/14 3:57am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The IU debate team will go head to head this weekend with those from Harvard, Northwestern and other universities in the 68th National Debate Tournament.The Hoosier Debate Team organized the event, which will take place at IU, according to a March 26 press release.“These are the best of the best,” IU Debate Coach Brian DeLong and School of Public and Environmental Affairs faculty member said in the release. “We’re proud that our Hoosier debaters will be a part of this tournament, and we’re excited that we have the opportunity to show off our campus and our community.” More than 500 students are coming to IU with more than 200 debate coaches, directors and judges for the event.Each team features two competitors.U.S. schools ranked in the top 80 qualify for the tournament.Many teams have already arrived in Bloomington as IU also played host to the Cross Examination Debate Association last weekend, according to the release.To be a part of collegiate debate, students spend hours researching and polishing their strategies and presentations.Until DeLong was hired as coach four years ago, debate had seemingly disappeared from IU. “To have two major tournaments on back-to-back weekends really signifies that debate has made a comeback at IU and that we’ll be part of the national debate landscape for years to come,” DeLong said in the release.Registration for the tournament begins Thursday and will continue through the weekend. The winners will be announced Monday.Kathrine Schulze
(03/26/14 4:10am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Provost Lauren Robel gave few new insights into the Campus Strategic plan during her State of the Campus address Tuesday.Robel spoke to a room filled mostly with administrators, with only a few staff members and students. Her topic: the future of IU with the implementation of the Strategic Plan.“With the utmost respect for the work that we do in our most immediate neighborhoods, these 167 colleagues have invited us to raise our gaze to who we are collectively and where we can be better together,” she said of the faculty, students and staff who comprised the strategic planning committees. Robel outlined each of the six sections in the Strategic Plan, which will be submitted to IU President Michael McRobbie April 15. “Right before I submit my taxes to the United States government,” Robel said, drawing laughter from the audience.Robel said the central theme of the Undergraduate Life section is a commitment to student engagement and future success.“It stresses that in all renovations of our campus spaces, from residence halls to classrooms to the Union, we will prioritize designs that support this engagement,” she said.This section also builds on some initiatives that are already taking effect, Robel said, citing the launch of the Center of Excellence for Women in Technology as an example. Robel said the center both organizes and increases accessibility of resources for women interested in technology careers.“The campus plan hopes to spark a similar set of conversations and heighten visibility around our programs in science and technology more generally,” she said.Ronda Stogsdill is the executive secretary for Robel and also has a daughter who is a freshman attending IU.“I thought it was a very good plan to bring in diversity and educate our world and make it bigger,” Stogsdill said. Robel said the graduate section not only focused on student success but also the quality and visibility of the graduate programs.Jacqueline Fernett, director of marketing and communications for the Office of Enrollment Management, said she thought the research perspective was interesting.The Research section focused on grand challenges and the importance of collaborating with outside entities, Robel said. A grand challenge would be chosen each year for the next five years for faculty to collaborate on and work on, Robel said.“Faculty who have commented on this part of the draft plan have been broadly supportive, and have already suggested a number of challenge areas, including climate change, food security and aging,” she said.The faculty section was built around faculty support, shared governance, campuswide faculty recruitment and retention and accountability.Grand challenges are ambitious but achievable, multi-disciplinary team-based objectives that will be tackled over the course of the next six years, Robel said in a March 3 meeting.“And it begins with a commitment to family-friendly policies and programs, which enhance one of Bloomington’s strongest assets as a community,” Robel said. Ron McFall is the interim director of the Office of Scholarships. He said he particularly liked Robel’s comments on collaboration on campus.“I think that spoke very well to the ability for all of us to work together and get those initiatives taken care of,” he said. “I was impressed.”International and global initiatives were the focus of two groups, Robel said.“The group focusing on students recommended, centrally, that we assure that our student support services are keeping up with our popularity among international undergraduates,” she said.Robel also mentioned her recent experiences in Seoul, South Korea and Shanghai. “Wherever I went — indeed, wherever I go whether in Indiana or overseas — our alumni are witness to the alchemy that takes place in our classrooms, recital halls and laboratories,” Robel said. “Their lives are a powerful confirmation of the importance of what we do here and of the very human connections that make this residential and research-driven campus so intellectually potent.” Lastly, Robel said the Strategic Plan will continue to build on the initiatives outlined in New Academic Directions. “What will our campus look like in five years if we adopt this plan?” Robel said. “I will leave that to your imaginations. But at the very least, we will surely be a community that understands and values the benefits of working together towards common campus goals.”
(03/14/14 3:19am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Those who want their voices heard have less than a week until the draft of the Strategic Plan is closed for public comment.After March 19, the Strategic Plan will be finalized, and public comment as it is now will no longer be available. “So far, nearly 150 students, staff members, faculty, alumni and community members have sent us their comments using the online form on the Provost’s website,” Catherine Dyar, chief of staff to the Provost, said in an email.Additionally, more than 200 people attended the Town Hall meeting last week, she said.Executive Vice President and Provost Lauren Robel has also met with many individuals and stakeholder groups, including the elected policy committees of the Kelley School of Business and the Dean of Students Advisory Board, Dyer said.“It’s been quite moving to me to see the number of people who have been involved,” Robel said at the Town Hall meeting last week. Thomas Gieryn is the vice provost for faculty and academic affairs and also co-chaired the faculty committee of the Strategic Plan. “The informal response I have heard has been overwhelmingly positive,” Gieryn said in an email. “There is curiosity about the exact nature of the Grand Challenges, but general approval with the method proposed for identifying them.” The provost’s staff usually addresses the comments from the online draft within 24 hours of its receipt, Dyar said.“If a commenter asks a question that falls outside the scope of the plan, e.g., a question about facilities, the staff is forwarding those along to the University offices that might be able to address them,” Dyar said. Robel said at the meeting she has gotten some wonderful comments, and all of them are valuable.“Some suggestions will be incorporated directly into the campus plan,” Dyar said. “Other comments and questions have focused on how the plan will be executed and will be factored into the implementation plans where appropriate.”While the comment period ends next week, relevant comments will be incorporated into the process in different ways, Dyar said.“I encourage all faculty members to take a look at the Srategic Plan as soon as possible, if they have not already done so,” Gieryn said. “The Provost’s plan charts a bold course for the future of the Bloomington campus, and quite literally, once implemented, every corner of IUB will be affected.”
(03/13/14 2:17am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The Strategic Plan’s Undergraduate Life section includes an objective to ensure student success through high-quality and technologically advanced advising.“We will adopt best practices and metrics for academic and career advising across our campus to support student completion, success and life and career goals,” Executive Vice President and Provost Lauren Robel said in the Strategic Plan.Dennis Groth, interim vice provost for undergraduate education, said the advising department will expand their emphasis on best practices, training and professional development activities for its advisers. “This helps us remain coordinated and adapt more seamlessly to new initiatives,” Groth said. At the town hall meeting March 4, an academic adviser for undergraduates expressed the need for educating parents and students about the importance of a liberal arts degree.“We have to provide them with a set of structures and ways into liberal arts education,” Robel said at the meeting.Concern was also expressed for the need of more resources and undergraduate advisers.There are times when the advising staff isn’t enough for all students, Groth said. “One of the challenges always with advising is that it has some times of the year where peak demands outpace available resources, and other parts of the year where the resource demands are less acute,” he said.Groth said concerns about whether additional resources are needed to meet the Strategic Plan’s objectives will be addressed during the implementation stage.The Student Success Collaborative, an analytics program, is already in place and provides a predictive model for advisers to see how students are progressing in a degree, Groth said. The program shows if a student hasn’t taken a required class, taken a class by the recommended time or if they don’t have the grade they need in order to stay on track to graduate, he said.“We have developed, are developing and are adopting new systems to support academic advising and student success,” Groth said.
(03/13/14 2:15am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Students and faculty with IU Soul Revue will spend their spring break helping musically gifted children in Memphis, Tenn., learn more about the art of performing.The IU Soul Revue — a music ensemble that performs R&B, funk, soul and hip-hop — will teach workshops for the Stax Music Academy, Overton High School, LeMoyne-Owen College and the University of Memphis, according to a March 11 IU press release. “It will be a great privilege and a wonderful opportunity for our students to visit and perform in a place where there is so much history,” Tyron Cooper, director of IU Soul Revue and assistant professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies, said in the release. The Soul Revue will also organize mock auditions for Stax Music Academy students and will perform March 21 at LeMoyne-Owen College. The Stax Music Academy organizes after-school and summer programs for students in the Soulsville Charter School area, the release said.Since 2000, the Stax Music Academy has given musically talented students training and direction, while also mentoring the importance of academic success, according to the release. “The curriculum is rigorous and the students are high achievers,” Charles Sykes, executive director of the African American Arts Institute, said in the release.The application process is rigorous as well, Sykes said.“We’d like to see some of these students come to IU, because we think they have the same musical orientation as many of our students,” he said. The IU Alumni Association, Office of Enrollment Management, Office of Admissions and Office of Diversity, Equity and Multicultural Affairs are all involved with the spring break visit.“While the Memphis tour will be an incredible opportunity for the IU Soul Revue to perform and learn about one of the most important cities in the development of soul music, it also will provide an opportunity for us to bring together alumni and to expose potential IU students to the wealth of talent and commitment to diversity here at IU-Bloomington,” James Wimbush, vice president for DEMA, said in the release.The Soul Revue will also visit the National Civil Rights Museum, located on the site of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. The trip will last from March 19-22.“The key for me will be to get our students to understand the historical significance,” Cooper said. “I’m looking forward to observing our students coming into the reality that they are in a mecca of soul music. I want them to know that they are part of that legacy. I hope that their visit to the Lorraine Motel touches them intrinsically.”Kathrine Schulze
(03/12/14 4:23am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The Strategic Plan won’t be anything but a set of goals if there isn’t any money to put its initiatives into action. The plan has a financial pool of various funding resources behind it, most public of which is the Provost Fund. “Historically, the funds have been used for campus-level initiatives and priorities,” Vice Provost M.A. Venkataramanan said.The Provost Fund has existed since the 1990s. It is base funding that is disbursed to the College of Arts and Sciences and other IU schools as a percentage of IU’s annual budget process.“For instance, last year the majority of Provost funding went to the College and schools to support career services and online education initiatives,” Venkataramanan said.The fund is currently worth about $11 million, Executive Vice President and Provost Lauren Robel said in an interview last Monday.The fund hasn’t been used strategically in the past but on a case-by-case basis, Robel said.“I want to put those funds squarely behind this plan,” she said.The Provost Fund will only be a fraction of the money behind this plan, and not all of the objectives will require funding, Venkataramanan said.“Some objectives and action steps will be accomplished through rethinking or reallocating resources at the campus level,” he said. “The Provost has already asked her vice provosts to begin thinking through implementation steps for the objectives and actions steps for which they are responsible.”This will lead the Strategic Plan into the next phase of determining resources, priorities and timeliness, Venkataramanan said.External grants will be another resource for funding, he said. And it’s one of the plan’s “grand challenges” to attract grants from both government and private entities. “The Provost believes strongly that there will be outside support for a significant number of the proposed initiatives,” Venkataramanan said.For larger projects such as funding an Arts and Humanities center, he said, the Provost plans to use existing campus resources and strengths combined with external resources. There isn’t a budget for the plan yet, Venkataramanan said. That will begin after the draft has been finalized, which will be soon after the public comment period ends March 19. “The Provost specifically charged the committees with coming up with visionary ideas,” Venkataramanan said. “She did not want financial considerations or current organizational structures and systems to constrain the vision or the creativity.”
(03/11/14 4:17am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The Kelley Direct online MBA program is at the top of the ranks again.Kelley Direct at the Kelley School of Business was ranked fifth worldwide by The Financial Times, a business publication based in the United Kingdom, according to a March 10 IU press release. This is the third Top-five ranking for the online program in the past two months.The Financial Times is one of the world’s leading business news publications. Idalene Kesner, dean of the Kelley School, said the multiple honors for the program are tributes to its innovative curriculum, international experiences and outstanding faculty. The Financial Times also ranked Kelley Direct No. 1 for research, No. 2 in program delivery, No. 3 in online interaction and No. 5 for career services, according to the press release. This year was the first time the Financial Times ranked online MBA programs, according to the press release. “Our faculty members are engaged with our students online and offline,” Kesner said in the release. “Students can work according to their schedules but also connect with professors in real time. And they work in teams with real companies on real challenges.” “Our online program incorporates these key experiences from our in-residence program, as well as leadership and career training and international trips that provide global experiential learning.”Kelley Direct shares faculty with the business school. The admissions requirements for the online program are the same as for all other Kelley MBA programs.The masters degrees available through the online program are in finance, global supply, chain management, marketing and strategic management.During the past two months, Kelley Direct has also received U.S. News and World Report’s No. 1 overall ranking from more than 200 programs nationwide.Kelley Direct began in 1999 as Kelley’s first online MBA program. Since then, more than 2,000 students have gained MBAs through the program.More than 65 percent of graduates from the 2012-13 class in the online program received a promotion while earning their MBA degree.The class of 2012-13 had an average salary of $107,447. This was a 28-percent increase from the average salary of those who graduated during the early years of the program.Currently, Kelley Direct serves 728 students.Kathrine Schulze
(03/07/14 3:12am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Khala Granville is mixing traditional recruitment with a new brand of outreach to bring more underrepresented minorities to IU.In keeping with its goal to increase the number of underrepresented minorities on IU’s campus, the Office of Enrollment Management has hired a new associate director of admissions to be based in Indianapolis.Granville, who began last week, is the first full-time, Indianapolis-based recruiter for IU.“Coming from a strong community development and engagement background, I get to go into places where IU has not traditionally had access,” Granville said. “For example, religious spaces and community centers. I get to share IU with these audiences in a much more relational way than traditional recruiting.”She previously worked as an undergraduate as a student recruiter and mentor in Diversity Recruitment at the University of Louisville, Granville said. She has also been involved with multiple community organizations in Indianapolis, according to a Feb. 27 press release. Granville said her job is dedicated to recruiting and expanding IU’s messages in Indianapolis.Her job is part recruitment in high schools and college fairs and part widening IU’s brand to underrepresented minorities in the Indianapolis area, Granville said.Vice Provost of Enrollment Management David Johnson said the OEM was able to create Granville’s position when Mary Turner, who worked in admissions, became director of the Groups program at IU.“We were able to re-deploy her position in Indianapolis full-time,” Johnson said.Granville’s position is part of a restructuring of the OEM, and a focus on what Johnson calls the “six C’s.”These include community organization, counselors in high schools, campus, competitions, churches and community colleges.“What we’re looking to do is deepen our engagement and really shore up our commitment to recruiting diverse populations, underrepresented populations of students,” Johnson said. Johnson said Granville has hit the ground running, and has already met with several community organizations in Indianapolis.“We’re putting her to work already,” Johnson said. “When we see significant improvement in the number of underrepresented students on campus, then we know that our strategy was successful.”The OEM is also looking into hiring a senior associate director position, he said. “In society, we give of our time, we give of our money,” Johnson said. “So putting resources — giving money and a person behind something ?— really, I think, will hopefully not just make a strong statement, but help us move forward in our recruitment goals.”Granville said that diversity is one of her core values.“Diversity isn’t just black and white or straight and gay,” she said. “It’s the recognition that everyone is unique and deserves to be seen, heard and valued,” she said.“As it relates to recruitment and higher education, diversity is extremely important because college is one of the few opportunities that allow you to be exposed to new ideologies.“That exposure will not only create rich student experiences that you will carry for the rest of your life, but it will prepare you to be a great leader in the workforce.”
(03/06/14 3:09am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>With a recycle bin in every hallway and low-wattage light bulbs on every store shelf, it might be surprising to discover most Americans use twice the amount of water daily than they think they do. Shahzeen Attari, an assistant professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, surveyed 1,020 Americans nationwide through an online survey about their water use.Her article, “Perceptions of Water Use,” is the end product of her survey and was published March 2 in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”, according to an IU press release.“People tend to underestimate water use in general,” Attari said. “On average, across 17 different activities that I tested, people on average tend to underestimate water use by a factor of two.” She said Americans use a lot of water in their toilets, their washing machines and their showers. Sophomore Hannah Murray said she pays attention to her water usage.“I feel bad about it,” she said.She said she tries to take shorter showers.“When people are asked about the single most effective thing, they usually think about things that are what I call curtailments — which is basically doing the same behavior, but doing less of it, such as taking a shorter shower,” Attari said.For students, she suggests curtailments like washing a full load of laundry, taking less time to shower and flushing the toilet less. “On average, right now, Americans shower for roughly eight minutes,” Attari said. “So, if we could reduce that to five minutes, that would be great.”Not surprisingly, she said, participants also didn’t know how much water went in to the food they eat. Attari noted that water conservation is important now, especially in states such as California and Colorado who are going through a period of drought. “With climate change, we’re going to have more salinization of ground water,” Attari said. “So that means our ground water will become more salty. And we also have more variation of precipitation. What that means is that our rainfall will become more uncertain.”Much of her work consists of finding ways to change people’s perceptions on their water consumption.“Given that supply becomes a little bit more uncertain, we need to figure out how much we can push demand,” she said.Murray said she thinks that conserving water is important. “I think that we shouldn’t waste it,” she said. “That there are a lot of people in the world that don’t have clean water.”
(03/05/14 5:19am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>A lone undergraduate, a handful of graduate students and faculty and staff showed up to the town hall meeting Tuesday to voice their concerns on the strategic plan face-to-face with the provost.The meeting took place in the middle of the public comment period of the draft and was in the IU Auditorium. Of the roughly 50,000 people either enrolled in or employed by IU, only 80 have commented on the online draft, Robel said. Their comments ranged from complaints about salads to broader questions on the plan. The plan isn’t one for addressing specific issues, but broad goals for the campus, Robel said.“It’s not a strategic plan for the College of Arts and Sciences,” she said. “It’s not a strategic plan for the Maurer School of Law. It’s not a strategic plan for the School of Informatics. It’s a plan for the campus.”The provost went through the Strategic Plan by the sections, briefly describing each committee’s intentions and then opening the room up to questions — and there were many.An academic adviser for undergraduate students expressed his concern at IU’s lack of explanation of the value a liberal arts education can have and the absence of resources in the advising department. “I think the University has frankly failed to explain this from the get go,” he said.He earned a smattering of applause when he emphasized that IU wasn’t a vocational college, but a liberal arts college. “We have to be absolutely firm in being able to explain and to justify and to extol the importance of a Liberal Arts education degree,” Robel said. “We have to, because it’s true.” She said, in the last year, the campus has put money into the technological infrastructure of advising that will help students and advisers make the most use of their time.Robel said there haven’t been broad changes on the academic side yet.A staff member in the School of Public Health asked how staff could stay involved with the plan past the public comment period.“As we move into the next several weeks, and I hear more from staff and faculty members of all kinds, there will be some changes,” Robel said. “And those implementation steps will be very transparent and we will absolutely need you.”Maria Bucur-Deckard is associate dean for international programs and part of the “international initiatives: programs and facilities” sub-committee of the strategic plan.She asked Robel, in light of the idea of building new programs of an experiential nature, like overseas studies programs, if there was a discussion about how Responsibility Centered Management units might be incentivized and held accountable to allocate more funds for overseas opportunities.“I think if we knew where we were, and we knew where we wanted to be, we would have a compelling set of programs to put in front of potential donors,” Robel said. “I think we can get a long way by figuring out where we want to go, and which of those ideas are really compelling for external support.”Master’s student Niki Messmore asked Robel how student support services fit into the undergraduate life section of the Strategic Plan.“That is a place where the campus has been reallocating towards additional staff,” Robel said. She said a new assistant dean for gender affairs has been hired to focus on that area.Although Messmore said she probably has follow-up questions on supporting social needs of underrepresented minorities, Messmore said she left the meeting satisfied.“I felt like my questions got answered,” she said. The town hall meeting was meant to run until 2 p.m., but Robel cut questions off at 1:30 p.m. The public comment period of the Strategic Plan ends March 19.
(03/04/14 4:54am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Students from all majors might be able to complete an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in the time it takes most students to graduate with a bachelor’s degree, according to the Strategic Plan draft.The Undergraduate Life section of the Strategic Plan proposes new professional master’s degrees and certificates for every school and the College of Arts and Sciences that would provide students a leg up when entering the workforce. “A lot of people are able to take a wide variety of undergraduate degrees and head in many, many directions with those undergraduate degrees,” said Greg Siering, director for the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning and member of the Undergraduate Life committee.He said development of a variety of professional master’s degrees and certificates could allow students to focus on specific professions that interest them.Some of these degrees are already in place in the Kelley School of Business and School of Public and Environmental Affairs.“I think it’s important that we not only create degree programs that educate students in a general sense, but that notion of ‘create professional master’s degree and certificates’ allows students a more direct focus route into certain professions,” Siering said.This proposed action would allow students to finish their undergraduate degrees in three years and finish a professional master’s degree or certificate in one to two years. The potential degrees, and those already in place, allow students to shift their focus, and for employers to see that shift, Siering said.Dennis Groth is the interim vice provost for undergraduate education and co-chair of the undergraduate life committee for the Strategic Plan. “I think it’s important always for students to have access to options for students in undergraduate education,” Groth said. “We don’t want to limit what students want to achieve.”While students could take classes from multiple schools to complete their master’s degree, the plan isn’t proposing that students create their own programs, Robel said. While a few professional master’s degrees are already in place, Groth said, the action is meant to build on what’s already in place.“What’s interesting about this particular objective is that there already are options in place,” he said. “It could be that students aren’t made aware of them and it could be that we have new ones, but the idea is that every school and college will take a look at this and figure out what the best way that their degree programs at the graduate level can link to an undergraduate degree.”
(02/28/14 5:50am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Student debt might get a little lighter if the initiatives outlined in IU’s Strategic Plan come to pass.The plan, released last week, primarily focused on improving students’ awareness of financial aid information.The initiative in the Undergraduate Life section recommends increasing the visibility of scholarship and financial aid information for students. IU’s goal is to create a comprehensive database of all the scholarships available and applicable to students, M.A. Venkataramanan, vice provost for strategic initiatives, said. One of the concepts behind this initiative is to have a pool of funds, predominantly through philanthropic efforts, to further help students financially, he said.In addition to scholarships, the plan also recommends expanding financial literacy programs in place at IU. “We’re expanding upon it to help the students know that you don’t have to borrow that much money,” Venkataramanan said.In addition to making the scholarships visible, the database would also include all of the criteria needed for each individual scholarship, Venkataramanan said.The Strategic Plan also includes an initiative that proposes to “reduce the burden for every financially disadvantaged student admitted to IU-B.”They would do this through a combination of increasing the amount of financial literacy education, scholarships and fellowships that would cover a percentage of financial need calculated by FAFSA for all undergraduate students.“I think that the provost’s reason in this, is she believes that there is huge philanthropic support base available outside (the University), which we really want college students to experience so they can graduate at less debt as possible,” Venkataramanan said.The Plan also included initiatives to increase financial aid and a potential new scholarship. “When we chatted with students, at times the students felt that there weren’t enough scholarships throughout their four years in addition to when they’re coming in as a freshman,” he said.A potential four-year Provost Scholarship was outlined in the plan. It would be awarded to students who enter IU already having completed 24 credit hours. Students could then enter a pathway program to graduate credentials.The scholarship will be linked to the pathway programs, which are programs for students to attain graduate or undergraduate level certifications or a master’s degree in four years.“What we are finding out in the nation right now, at IU especially, more and more students are coming in with advanced credits,” Venkataramanan said. Various sources of funding are being looked into, he said.“So the Provost’s scholar goal is to take the students from both professional schools and the College of Arts and Sciences to leave this place with additional credentials so they become life-long learners as well as have fulfilling careers,” Venkataramanan said. Kathrine Schulze
(02/28/14 2:21am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>As part of the recently reorganized IUB admissions team, the IU Office of Enrollment Management recently appointed an Indianapolis-based associate director of admissions. Khala Granville was hired to focus on diversity-oriented recruitment and outreach in the Indianapolis area. She graduated from Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis with a Master of Divinity degree and has interned and volunteered with community organizations in Indianapolis, according to a press release. “Khala Granville is a welcome addition to our recruiting team,” David Johnson, vice provost for enrollment management, said in a press release.“She will hit the ground running as she is already located in Indianapolis and has strong relationships with community-based organizations,” he said. “With Khala as part of our diversity recruiting team, we have an even greater opportunity to make personal connections with prospective students, their families and school counselors, helping them to see IU-Bloomington as a place where they will flourish and go on to successful careers.”Granville will lead efforts to assist IU to meet its enrollment goals with a focus on outreach through community organizations, counselors in high school, campus, competitions, churches and community colleges. Granville and four Bloomington staff members make up the IU admissions team that will concentrate its effort on recruiting prospective students for IU from underrepresented minority populations.Larry Gonzalez is leading the team on an interim basis as senior associate director of admissions.Kathrine Schulze
(02/27/14 5:45am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>IU’s reach exceeds its seven campuses, stretching across borders to make its mark in almost every corner of the world.Students might know IU works on this global outreach through study abroad, but the University is using a new platform to further its international stance — gateway facilities.Gateway facilities are IU offices outside the U.S. that focus on research collaborations with faculty in other countries, programming for overseas alumni, fundraising and other related activities, said David Zaret, vice president for international affairs. Each facility has an academic director. “One use of the gateway would be for IU faculty to organize a mini conference or a workshop with their foreign colleagues,” Zaret said. “The goal of this would be to explore shared areas of interests and possible research collaborations in the future.”Part of IU Provost Lauren Robel’s strategic plan’s international initiatives section proposed to utilize and expand these gateway facilities.Already, IU has a gateway facility that opened last year in Gurgaon, India, near New Delhi, and is renovating another facility in Beijing, China. The locations of the facilities are on a list of 32 countries that IU wants to focus on for partnerships. But the list doesn’t mean only 32 countries are of interest to IU.Zaret said IU faculty research in or travel to any country, but the University is focusing on the 32 listed nations.Besides India and China, other countries on the list are Kenya, Spain and Egypt. Currently, IU has partners in both India and China to help with the facilities.India is partner to the American Institute of India Studies, which also sponsors the Dhar India studies program at IU. China’s gateway facility is partner to CERNET. “What I hope to see in the future is not just that people just in India are using the gateway, but that it becomes much more of a part of this international competency which we have for our students,” said Michael Dodson, academic director for the IU gateway in Gugaon.No new facilities will open soon in other countries, Zaret said.“We are mainly concerned with renovating the space in both of these facilities and then beginning to ramp up activities at them,” Zaret said.Basically, the space is being renovated to bring it up to what we might think of as “IU standards,” Dodson said.The facilities include individual offices, an office for group work and a large seminar room with teleconferencing capabilities, Zaret said.Renovations in China will be more extensive because the local custom is to rip out everything from leased space in a building down to the bare walls, bare floors and any existing internal walls, Zaret said. “The gateway facility allows us to foster out partnerships with universities, governments and corporations in their regions,” said M.A. Venkataramanan, vice provost for strategic initiatives in an email last Thursday. “The gateway facility signals our commitments to these regions and enhance our global recognition.”
(02/26/14 5:11am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The word “diversity” was ubiquitous in the Campus Strategic Plan released last Wednesday, playing a part in every section.The Undergraduate Life section, which covered initiatives to recruit and retain undergraduates, focused heavily on diversity and increasing the number of underrepresented minorities on campus. It includes a goal to increase the proportion of minorities in undergraduate programs as well as increasing the number of women and minorities in Science, Technology, Informatics and Math (STIM) programs. Martin McCrory is the vice provost for educational inclusion and diversity and co-chair of diversity recruitment for the strategic plan.“For many of our students, college is the first chance they have to actually interact with someone completely different,” he said. “As the country becomes increasingly multicultural, it behooves us to teach students to relate to people from a wide range of backgrounds. The more diverse our campus, the more it approximates life in the real world.”IU already specifically recruits minorities, David Johnson, vice provost of the Office of Enrollment Management, said, but the plan focuses on how they can do it in a more effective way. “We’re looking to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in each of our beginner cohorts,” Johnson said.IU is campaigning for students through different outlets including media, in-person contact, high school counselors and churches, Johnson said.“IU has been sending admissions personnel into the cities to recruit for quite some time, and some of our individual academic units have been doing it as well,” McCrory said. “What is new is that OEM staff and IUB faculty increasingly are working together as part of a coordinated, energetic recruitment effort.“In fact, many of IUB STIM faculty members have expressed an interest in personally helping to recruit students in the STIM fields.” The OEM will add an associate director of admissions this year who will be responsible for diversity-oriented student recruitment and outreach in Indianapolis and the surrounding areas, McCrory said.“The associate director will work directly with the schools to as part of our broad-based minority recruitment efforts,” he said.The OEM is also looking into recruiting younger students, McCrory said. “In the past we have concentrated on getting high school students interested in college, and we will continue to do so,” McCrory said. “We are also increasing our efforts to reach underrepresented elementary and middle school children. We want students to know that Indiana University is a viable option.”The strategic plan also covers what will happen to minority students once they come to IU. It includes initiatives to better engage international students on campus.Eric Love, director of the Office of Diversity Education, said he is happy with the diversity initiatives in the plan. “I love that the provost was tapping into different areas of the campus to come up with these recommendations,” he said. “It wasn’t just a few experts, that they really did a thorough job.”Love said IU’s stance about diversity is a reflection of the shrinking world. “We live in a global economy,” Love said. “Changing demographics across the nation. You may be in a conference call with people from all over the world, and so we need to have at least some basic multicultural competencies.”Love also said he likes that each of the six sections of the plan included a diversity initiative.“I also like that it’s important enough that there are diversity components to all the individual unit plans,” Love said. “Because I think that diversity is an institutional responsibility.” Follow reporter Kathrine Schulze on Twitter @KathrineSchulze.
(02/21/14 5:48am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Students, faculty and staff might want to pay attention to the draft of IU’s new Strategic Plan. Big changes are on the way, and Provost Lauren Robel is inviting public feedback.The product of a semester’s worth of work on the part of 11 committees, the IU-Bloomington Campus Strategic Plan outlines a plan to expand IU’s global presence, update financial aid and realigns interdisciplinary education. And those are only a few aspects of the six broad initiatives Robel’s attempting to address.Before the Strategic Plan is finalized, however, Robel wants public feedback on the draft released Wednesday. The draft’s release came two weeks in advance of a town hall meeting for public comment, and with an online response form.Meanwhile, it’s time for members of the IU community who want their voice heard to familiarize themselves with the 21-page draft that might affect almost every experience at the University for the next five years.THE FOUNDATIONThe Strategic Plan built on what the plan calls “five successful and ambitious initiatives that challenged us to recreate Indiana’s pre-eminent university for the 21st Century.”These five documents are “New Academic Directions,” “New Directions in Teaching and Learning,” “Indiana University International Strategic Plan,” “Report on the Old Crescent” and “Empowering People: Indiana University’s Strategic Plan for Technology.”All five plans have been released in the past six years. These initiatives target specific areas in IU’s broad reach and served as a jumping-off point for the Strategic Plan.“Sometimes people talk about a strategic plan and they say, ‘If you were to start from scratch, what would you do?’ Well, we’re not starting from scratch,” Robel said during the Bloomington Professional Meeting Wednesday. “We’re starting from almost two full centuries of history,” she said.The 21-page plan is broken down into six main points: undergraduate life, graduate education, research, faculty development, globalization and internationalization and collaborative program initiatives. GRAND CHALLENGESUndergraduate life is by far the largest portion of the plan, and it covers everything from financial needs to the arts to expanding opportunities for international students.The plan explicitly mentions the establishment of Hutton HonorsCollege as a “central hub” for interdisciplinary education; the introduction of a new Center for Excellence in STIM; and the creation of professional master degrees in certificates in every school in the college.Neither Robel nor officials elaborated, and much of the remaining language is even more vague.The draft announces a new focus on growing the number of underrepresented minorities at IU, without mentioning a specific solution.Hints at continued growth for online courses, recruitment efforts abroad and more efficient career advising also appeared in plans for undergraduate development.Standing in the way of those plans, though, are what Robel calls “grand challenges.”“We have a clear need to be able to knock down barriers to interdisciplinary work and to approach what many of the teams call ‘grand challenges,’” Robel said. “Big wicked problems that are important for the world to better, for academic institutions to take on, grapple and try to solve.”“Grand challenges” is a phrase that often comes up throughout the document and is meant to encompass the significant problems that face each individual area of the plan. “IUB already provides an amazingly rich and engaging undergraduate experience. The grand challenge, then, is how do you take something great and make it even greater?” said Dennis Groth, co-chair of the undergraduate life committee. A large part of the undergraduate life section laid out a plan for the different schools within IU to work together, as well as to work globally with other institutions. “Interdisciplinary approaches and globalization are key elements for the plan, and for good reason,” Groth said. “Clearly, the benefits of bringing together diverse skill sets, knowledge frameworks, and perspectives always yields the best solutions to the wicked problems we expect out students to be prepared to solve. What we do, what we create, what we collaborate on, all have global contexts and impacts.”POST-GRAD ON FAST TRACKThe graduate education section of the plan most notably includes expanding financial aid for students in the graduate program and to reducing the time to complete a Ph.D.“I think that we all feel very strongly that it’s frankly a moral issue to assure that our students don’t wander off path or fail to be able to complete their graduate degrees, because they can’t get the funding to do it or they can’t get the support or the guidance,” Robel said. The plan also outlined proposals to recruit more international students and create online graduate programs for every school. TARGETED RESEARCHThe plan envisions IU to advance its reputation for world-class research.The draft proposes that every year for the next five years, deans and faculty will be required to identify emerging areas of importance for research.According to the plan, IU needs to position itself as a preferred collaborator and develop “strategic partnerships” in and outside the government.“One of the things that we have to be able to do in the sciences is really be strategic about where are sciences so expensive, where can we be the best, because that’s where funding will actually go,” Robel said. “One concept that runs through this report is the concept of being a preferred collaborator. What does it take to be a collaborator of choice in the sciences in the global realm?”Robel said it’s a two-part answer: the ability for IU to be really good at something, and that IU can’t have policies that deter partnerships.“It’s a little phrase, but there’s a lot that sits underneath it,” Robel said. CHANGING TENUREAccording to the plan, decisions about family leave will not negatively affect tenure. It’s a move Robel said is part of efforts to make IU more family friendly.It outlined the possibility for child-care opportunities and expanding opportunities for faculty to work elsewhere while teaching.That’s not all for faculty. Their section is the second-largest of the plan, and outlines an initiative to bring in more diverse faculty that is valuable throughout the University.Retaining faculty is another mission for the plan. Faculty might be able to teach in different schools.IU’S GLOBAL REACHThe international initiatives section outlined IU’s goal to become a more globalized campus, most notably through gateway centers in other countries.Gateway centers are IU offices located outside of the U.S. that provide a hub for students to have a home away from home for experiential learning, conducting research and field study, said M.A. Venkataramanan, vice provost and chair of the international initiatives for programs and facilities committee.IU already has a gateway center in India, and another is set to open in China by June 2014.Robel said she expects three or four more centers to open in the next couple of years.RENEWED PROGRAMSThe final section of the plan outlined an initiative to renew programs and outreach. It outlined a plan to expand IU’s arts and humanities programs across campus, making it so every student will have the opportunity to see a theater production or attend an art exhibit during their time at IU.“A goal of that is to really bring together the impact of all of the cultural institutions that we have in Bloomington that are just phenomenal,” Robel said.IU wants to ensure that when students leave this place, Robel said, they leave as passionate advocates for the arts and humanities. “We have the enormous privilege of having students with us from all over the world, but also from all over our state and all over our country,” Robel said. “And many students come from places where they’ve never had the opportunity to engage in the arts and humanities the way they can on this campus.” A downloadable PDF of the Campus Strategic Plan draft can be found online at plan.indiana.edu.Follow reporter Kathrine Schulze on Twitter @KathrineSchulze.
(02/20/14 4:54am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Provost Lauren Robel announced the release of the IU Strategic Plan, answered the council’s questions and noted its concerns during the Bloomington Professional Council meeting Monday.The plan, which outlines campus goals for the next five years as a lead-up to the bicentennial, is now open for public comment. Robel said she wants faculty to focus on a long-term plan that helps every student. “I think that that’s all the way through, in every piece of this plan there will be professional staff will be able to say, ‘If we really think about high-impact practices, for instance, here are the kinds of actual implementation steps we ought to be taking,’” Robel said.Some council members were concerned about their part in the strategic plan. As professionals at IU, they said they didn’t immediately see how the plan affected them.“I think really just branching with professional staff in implementing the plans and bringing ideas to the table in how we can excel in these areas,” said Jennifer Pearl, director of global health partnerships in the School of Public Health.Robel said there were professional staff members on the planning teams because she believes professionals implement new practices.“What will appear in here is pretty meta, pretty macro level,” Robel said. “On the website there will also be a lot of reports of teams. Not all of that implementation is going to go into this plan. “We will put together separate implementation reports for each of the elements of this plan, and someone’s got to own each of these objectives,” she said. “That’s the place where I could use your help a lot — in thinking about the what and the how.”She said career advising in the new School of Global and International Studies and the Media School will be a trial run for the rest of the University.“The way the college is thinking this through right now, if I understand it correctly, is they’re trying to take the new schools ... and build within those two entities a prototype for what career advising should look like across the college, and then do the more specific,” Robel said. “Divide the college up into manageable bites, because it is huge.” The plan includes efforts to expand the presence of arts and humanities on campus, Robel said. “There’s a proposal for a broad, campus-level center for the arts and humanities, and the goal of that is really to bring together the impact of all of the cultural institutions we have in Bloomington that are just phenomenal,” she said.Robel said in many ways, an educator’s job is to ensure the arts and humanities are supported. Tony Walker, a senior electronics engineer in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, said he supported the goals Robel discussed at the meeting.“I think more exposure to diversity, sort of broader education is good, because the truth is that most people will not do the thing that they went to school for when they graduate.”
(02/20/14 4:48am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>After months of planning and preparation for the big day, McDonald’s and Monsanto were married yesterday during a small ceremony in the Indiana Memorial Union. They came out of the IMU not as man and wife, but as one merged company. INPIRG, a student activist organization on campus, organized the mock corporate wedding Wednesday to educate students about the power corporations have in politics. “We think that’s fundamentally wrong and we’re educating students and working long-term to pass resolutions through the IUSA to support the overturning of Citizens United,” said Matthew Gough, campus coordinator for INPIRG. The group married the world’s largest fast food chain and Monsanto, an agricultural biotechnology company. “We’re having a corporate wedding to show people how silly it is to treat corporations like people,” Joshua Coker, junior and member of INPIRG, said.Senior Helena Correa played the part of McDonald’s, while Coker represented Monsanto. Correa said McDonald’s sells genetically modified foods, but also frequently lobbies in the government.McDonald’s spent more than $1 million on campaigning during the 2012 elections, Correa said.Gough said the wedding shows the absurdity of the Citizens United decision.Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is a Supreme Court case from 2010 that prohibits the government from restricting corporate spending in political campaigns.The decision granted many of the same rights to corporations as people were entitled to, declaring corporate personhood. “Corporate personhood is a doctrine that’s developed in our laws where corporations are allowed the rights that are afforded to people under the constitution, and we’re protesting it because corporations aren’t people,” Coker said. “It’s a big part of the corruption of our democratic system.” Bruce Neswick, an associate professor of organ in the Jacobs School of Music, stopped on his way through the IMU to take a photo with McDonald’s and Monsanto and sign their petition.“I’m just thrilled to see you guys involved and concerned, and I’m concerned too,” Neswick said. “I think part of the environmental demise of our planet is because of this food production.”Follow reporter Kathrine Schulze on Twitter @KathrineSchulze.
(02/18/14 4:51am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Ernie Pyle’s legacy has become so engrained in the minds of journalists at IU that many mistake the school’s name for the Ernie Pyle School of Journalism.With the implementation of the new Media School, many in the School of Journalism were afraid Pyle’s legacy would be lost with the addition of other departments. Provost Robel addressed those concerns at the Board of Trustees meeting last Thursday announcing the making of an Ernie Pyle statue.“It was important that the University honor Pyle’s legacy and the profound impact he’s had on generations of journalism scholars,” Ryan Piurek, IU director of news and media, said. “This was always part of the discussion around the new Media School.This sculpture will commemorate, in a tangible, lasting and visible way, his remarkable life and legacy.”The statue is expected to be completed in time for the dedication of Franklin Hall as the Media School in 2015, Piurek said. It will be placed outside of Franklin Hall. Owen Johnson, associate professor and journalism historian in IU’s School of Journalism, is part of the Ernie Pyle legacy committee that recommended a statue be built in Ernie Pyle’s honor.“Ernie Pyle remains, for many journalists, an icon of excellence,” he said. “His superb reporting, his superb writing is still to be emulated today.”The statue is based off of a photo taken of Pyle during World War II. He is sitting on a crate, working with his typewriter on a table, with goggles pushed above his knit cap. Harold “Tuck” Langland is a sculptor and professor emeritus at IU-South Bend, and will sculpt the statue.The crate might be expanded in order for students to sit with Pyle, much like they can with Herman B Wells and Hoagy Carmichael, Robel said. Senior and journalism major, Becca DuPont, said the School of Journalism has taken a lot of pride in what Ernie Pyle did.“For me, it goes back to traditional journalism, and we still hold that to be really important even though we are merging and moving forward with new technology,” she said.Along with the statue, the committee is recommending several other ways of preserving Ernie Pyle’s legacy, including making an annual school competition to determine the best reporter, an annual symposium and even a block or plaza in Ernie Pyle’s name. “We want to emphasize as well the inspiration that he can provide to young journalists in their reporting and writing,” Johnson said. Many of the other goals of the legacy committee will take a while to complete and require some fundraising, Johnson said.“We were lucky that the University found money right away for the statue, I think because the administration recognized how important it was as a symbol,” Johnson said.Follow reporter Kathrine Schulze on Twitter @KatherineSchulze.
(02/18/14 4:45am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The issue of racial disparity in prison systems and the ways to resolve it was the topic of Michael Tonry’s lecture Monday in the Maurer School of Law.Tonry is the McKnight presidential professor of criminal law and policy at the University of Minnesota, and one of the country’s foremost experts on sentencing and criminal justice policy. “The problem is, there are vastly more black people in American prisons, and in every category of American punishment, than can be justified in either black people’s involvement in crime or in terms of population presence,” Tonry said. The only ways to fix this is to roll back the size of the American punished population and radically changing American law, Tonry said. “The causes of racial disparities in sentencing and punishment in the U.S. are the conscious policy choices of American legislators and government officials to adopt particular kinds of sentencing and correctional policies,” Tonry said. Though African Americans comprise 12 percent of the U.S. population, he said, 40 percent of America’s prisoners are black. A black man, he said, is seven or eight times more likely to be in prison than a white man.“The psychologists can tell us the causes of crime at the individual level — things that predict criminality — are the same for men and women, even though women have much lower offending rates than men, and they’re the same for blacks and whites,” Tonry said.Black people are also much more likely to be arrested for drug crimes than whites, Tonry said, adding blacks use drugs less or about the same as whites do.“All the evidence we have is, that as a population matter blacks don’t sell drugs more than whites do,” Tonry said. “They sell them at times and in places that attract police attention, which produce vast disparities in drug arrests.”An example Tonry gave is whites are more likely to buy drugs only from those they know in a home or known place, while blacks are much more likely to buy drugs from a dealer off the street.Tonry said though there are some racial differences in case prosecution level, at the convection level and at the sentencing level, they make little difference in the prison population numbers.“Sentencing laws, though, make a giant difference,” Tonry said.A few years ago, blacks in federal prison systems were serving vastly longer sentences for drug crimes than whites because of a federal law — now called the 18 to 1 law — which punished offenses involving crack with sentences of the same severity involving cocaine in 100 times larger amounts, Tonry said.Five grams of crack elicited the same minimum penalty as 500 grams of powder, he said. “It comes down to policy, and that’s the point that needs to be addressed,” Francisco Guzman, a third year law student who attended the talk, said.Tonry put America’s prison population in perspective by comparing it globally. Since the 1960s, Canada and America have been almost identical in robbery and homicide rates, but America’s prison population is massively higher than Canada’s, Tonry said. He said the difference comes when Canada didn’t enact the harsher laws for offenders that America did, like zero tolerance laws.Additionally, most developed countries don’t have the option of life without parole, Tonry said. “If we can move to the world standard that criminal history only counts a little, we would greatly reduce some of the structural pressure that sends people to prison,” Tonry said. Tonry gave four final solutions to the problem of racial disparity in the prison system: radically reducing the prison population, shifting drug policy to emphasize prevention and treatment, reducing racial profiling and reducing the weight of criminal history in sentencing guidelines. Elisheva Aneke, a first year law student, said mass incarceration is one of her major concerns, because it’s a moral issue, too. She said she thinks there should be more awareness of race-based differences in prisons, and society at large.“Race is an awkward subject, I think for most people, in general,” Aneke said. “No matter what race you are, any talk like this where people are actually getting information, I think, is good.”