To the cheers of scientists packed inside the White House and watching intently nationwide, President Obama signed orders on Monday reversing an eight-year-old federal restriction on experimentation with human embryonic stem cells and putting in place a science policy "based on facts, not ideology"... (paid subscription required)
President Obama on Monday made good on his campaign promise to lift the restrictions imposed by President George W. Bush on federal support for stem cell research. At the same time, the president issued a strong statement on the importance of protecting science from political interference -- and pledged that his administration's policies would be based on sound scientific advice and would not impose ideological tests on researchers...
President Obama got a lot of applause for declaring in his inaugural address that he would "restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost"...Monday's decision by Obama to lift the Bush administration's restrictions on funding embryonic stem cell research represents the word turned to action. And important action it is...
With soaring oratory, President Obama on Monday removed a substantial practical nuisance that has long made life difficult for stem cell researchers. He freed biomedical researchers using federal money (a vast majority) to work on more than the small number of human embryonic stem cell lines that were established before Aug. 9, 2001. In practical terms, federally financed researchers will now find it easier to do a particular category of stem cell experiments that, though still important, has been somewhat eclipsed by new advances...
Roughly one-fourth of the nation's kindergartners are Hispanic, evidence of an accelerating trend that now will see minority children become the majority by 2023...In colleges, Hispanics made up 12% of full-time undergraduate and graduate students, 2% more than in 2006. Still, that is short of Hispanics' 15% representation in the total U.S. population. "The future of our education system depends on how we can advance Hispanics through the ranks," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "In many cases it's going to be a challenge, because they are the children of immigrants, and their English is not as strong. Many have parents without a high school or college education"...
The number of colleges freezing faculty hiring seems to grow each week. Yet some institutions are going against the grain of the poor economy and appointing new professors. This decision has given those campuses an edge, yielding top-quality candidates who might not have been within reach in a more-competitive job market... (paid subscription required)
...Many campuses are noting a rising demand for mental-health services (The Chronicle, February 29, 2008). Yet centers continue to be understaffed, according to the preliminary results of a survey presented on Monday by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to assist directors in managing counseling centers... (paid subscription required)
...Two weeks after he challenged every American to get at least one year of college and proposed a 2010 budget that would significantly refashion the student loan and Pell Grant programs, the president plans to return to the theme of education as key to the country's economic future and its citizens' personal advancement..."Helping students persist in college" will be a "hallmark of his higher education plan," one senior administration official said in describing the president's planned emphasis on the $2.5 billion grant program his 2010 budget would establish to prod states to develop or expand programs to increase student success and college...
"Double take," Inside Higher Ed, March 10.
The first cut isn’t always the deepest. As endowments continue to lose value and economic outlooks grow ever bleaker, some of the nation’s wealthiest universities are calling for greater sacrifices than they were just a few months ago. In recent weeks, administrators at Stanford, Harvard and Cornell universities have laid out financial assessments that will require budget reductions, layoffs and increased borrowing. These measures go beyond earlier plans to deal with the economic downturn, suggesting the first steps were deemed insufficient to address a problem that has grown in scale...
