University of Alabama receives rest of $1.5 million match for business school
Tuscaloosa News – Dec. 2
The University of Alabama’s business college has received the remaining $500,000 of a pledge by the family of the college’s namesake to match a $1.5 million gift earlier this fall. The Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration and Hugh Culverhouse Jr., the son of the alumnus for which the business college is named, announced the match had been completed Monday. Earlier this fall, Culverhouse and his wife, Eliza, pledged to match a $1.5 million gift to the college by alumni Gary Fayard and his wife, Nancy Fayard. The Fayards’ gift will be used to create the Fayard Endowed Chair in Accounting. The gift is the largest endowment in the history of the Culverhouse School of Accountancy. The Culverhouses have given approximately $3.5 million to the college to help defray student debt.
UA professor helps bring computer science to elementary school classrooms
WAAY-ABC (Huntsville) – Dec. 2
A University of Alabama professor is making a push to bring computer science to elementary school classrooms. Dr. Jeff Gray will lead nine workshops across the state, with the goal of training more than 500 teachers. There will be workshops in Huntsville and Decatur in late January, but the Madison City school system plans to send teachers to a workshop in Pelham next week. According to elementary instruction coordinator Judy Warmath, the school system is already exploring options to bring elementary-level computer science to the classroom.
Before the Fall
Inside Higher Ed – Dec. 3
It was too prolonged for there to be any specific date, or dates, to mark it. But perhaps this is as good a time as any to mark the 25th anniversary of a process that started with the fall of the Berlin Wall in early November 1989 and reached a kind of peak with the events in Romania late that December. The scale and pace of change were hard to process then, and difficult to remember now. Ceausescu had barely recovered from the shock of being heckled before he and his wife faced a firing squad. It was not how anyone expected the Cold War to end; insofar as we ever imagined it could end, the images that came to mind involved mutually assured destruction and nuclear winter … More generally, Innocent Weapons is a reminder of just how much ideological freight can be packed into a few messages rendered familiar through mass media, advertising, and propaganda. Peacock, an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, examines the hopes and fears about youngsters reflected in images from the mid-1940s through the late 1960s.
State-Related Community Colleges
Inside Higher Ed – Dec. 3
State spending on higher education has improved since the depths of the recession. But competition for public funds is intense in most states, where K-12, Medicaid and pensions are the primary budget drivers. The funding outlook for public colleges is particularly dire in Illinois and Maryland, where incoming Republican governors have promised to roll back taxes in coming months. Potential cuts in Illinois would follow more than a decade of slumping support. Many Illinois community colleges, for example, now get roughly 5 percent of their revenue from the state, with larger portions coming from tuition and local government support. For example, state spending at Harper College, in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, fell below a 10 percent share of the budget for the first time in 2005. The $7 million the college will receive from the state this year is 6.4 percent of its total revenue … The money woes in Illinois hit some public colleges harder than others, said Stephen G. Katsinas, director of the Education Policy Center at the University of Alabama. Four-year institutions in the state also face serious budget concerns. But the 48 community colleges typically cannot rely on major tuition hikes or recruiting out-of-state students — who pay much more than in-state rates — for temporary fixes to the bottom line.