Pitzer College Sure is Cutting Back!

Via The New York Times, we learn that Pitzer College "is power washing its sidewalks and windows once a year instead of twice."

Wow. They are really cutting back hard. For other examples of weird, yet oldly cool cutbacks, see the article and my Forum pieces.

Notes from the FIRE Conference: KC Johnson

Tonight I attended FIRE's second conference on free speech and academia.

The first talk of the night was by KC Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College. Professor Johnson wrote a book titled Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Case that I read early last summer.

KC Johnson had a lot to say about the Duke Lacrosse case, but I was more struck by his observation of how so much of the information -- the syllabi, emails, etc. -- was publicly available and how a lot of that data became less available as the issues related to the case went to trial. He predicted that a lot of that university provided information would dry up. He may be right, but I think that the self-promotion of academics will encourage them to put more and more information online. After all, as KC Johnson notes, academics are often hired away by other colleges. Why would they voluntarily restrict that information?

Professor Johnson also predicted that as technology gets smaller, more students will record their professors being abusive or moronic. Cameras and audio recorders are going to be in the classroom and once that information gets leaked out, trustees and parents can see what things are really happening in the classroom. In that vein, I can imagine technology that records and distributes the content throughout the internet so that it cannot be bottlenecked at YouTube.

Claremont McKenna's Creditworthiness is Downgraded

It's obviously not a crisis, but it's something that the college should keep an eye on. Inside Higher Education has more.

S&P and Moody’s Investors Service, two major rating agencies for higher education, have both been reassessing the financial stability of colleges and universities. In the last three months of 2008, Moody’s downgraded nine colleges, and upgraded only one, Danville Area Community College District in Danville, Ill. The trend grew starker in the first quarter of this year, when Moody’s downgraded 12 colleges and upgraded none. As for S&P, the agency downgraded 10 colleges and universities in the first three quarters of the 2009 fiscal year.

Among the colleges downgraded by Moody’s was Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., which dropped from Aa1 to Aa2, a category that is still deemed a low credit risk by the rating agency. Given the fact that Claremont didn’t fall into another investment category altogether, officials say they’re not terribly worried about the shift. Richard Rodner, spokesman for the college, said the rating change likely raised the interest rates on newly issued bonds by less than 1 percentage point.

“We do not have plans for further borrowing in the near future,” he said in an e-mail to Inside Higher Ed. “So, I guess I would say that we do not see a significant impact for CMC.”