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Education analysts Quaracelli Symonds released the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2020 at the start of March, revealing the UK capital London is home to more top 50 programs than any other university city.

Having also been named the top city for students in 2018 and 2019, London had 115 programs from 19 HEIs achieve a top 50 position for their subject. They were followed by Boston (69), New York (65), Beijing (59), Seoul (50), Tokyo (46), LA (43) and Paris (43).

The Royal College of Art was ranked the best globally for studying art and design while UCLÔÇÖs Institute for Education came in top for education (for the fifth consecutive year) and KingÔÇÖs College London rose from second place to grab the top spot for dentistry.

ÔÇ£This yearÔÇÖs edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject serves to underline LondonÔÇÖs status as a uniquely successful higher education ecosystem,ÔÇØ said Jack Moran, QS spokesperson.

ÔÇ£No city possesses the same diversity or concentration of educational excellence, shared among so many institutions.ÔÇØ

The rankings are compiled based on academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per paper and h-index (which measures the productivity of research faculty). The weighting varies from discipline to discipline, with research performance for example being more important in medicine as opposed to more vocational subjects such as performance arts.

Overall, Massachusetts Institute of Technology listed 12 programs ranked top globally – the highest for an individual institution – followed by Harvard with 11 and Oxford with eight. However the US itself saw a drop in the number of courses in the top 50, falling from┬á806 in 2018 to 769 in 2020.

ETH Zurich in Switzerland was also pleased with the results. In terms of number of the courses in the top ten in their field the institution came seventh, with the other six all being English-taught courses in the UK and US.

“The ranking reflects a great team effort from the entire ETH community”

ÔÇ£The ranking reflects a great team effort from the entire ETH community,” said the university’s president Lino Guzzella.

“A community that dedicates their talents to outstanding teaching and research supported by a highly motivated administrative and technical staff. As a public university, for ETH such a result also reflects the support and commitment of the Swiss society.ÔÇØ

In Asia, China had 100 programs in the top 50 by category for the first time – although QS director of research Ben Sowter noted a “slowdown in Chinese progress” – while 26 Indian departments entered the top 100 for their subjects.

Several Hong Kong universities saw themselves slide. At Hong Kong University 21 out of 39 subjects dropped down the rankings, which QS says wasnÔÇÖt caused by the protests as the data was collected earlier in 2019.

Colombia came out top with the highest-ranked programs in Latin America. All six of Africa’s leading departments which made it into the top 50 were in South Africa, although programs from seven countries were featured in the rankings.

The post London HEIs top uni rankings by subject – QS appeared first on The PIE News.

FROM THE rooftop of an office block in Mexico City, Sonia Barroeta tells of a lifetime of small abuses. If she wears a skirt, men ÔÇ£wonÔÇÖt leave me in peaceÔÇØ, she says. She has been wearing black trousers for 30 years. She counts six occasions on which she used pepper spray on aggressive men. Now nearing 60, she plans to take part in a demonstration for the first time, a protest to be held on March 8th, International WomenÔÇÖs Day.

On the next day she will join a ÔÇ£national womenÔÇÖs strikeÔÇØ. In her case that will mean staying home from work, along with the other 40 female staff and students of the Asteca Aviation School, which trains (mostly male) pilots and (mainly female) flight attendants. Women suffer not just on the street, but also the office, the home and everywhere in between, says Ms Barroeta. ÔÇ£As a woman, you are worth less from the day you are born.ÔÇØ

Feminist groups called the march and the strike after two brutal murders in February. Ingrid Escamilla, 25, was killed and skinned by her husband. F├ítima, a seven-year-old, was abducted, sexually abused and murdered. The WomenÔÇÖs Day march is expected to be the biggest feminist mobilisation in MexicoÔÇÖs history. This fight against violence is the first big social movement to form during the presidency of Andr├®s Manuel L├│pez Obrador, a left-wing populist who took office...

GABRIEL MEDINA (pictured), arguably the best surfer in the world, grew up in Maresias, a coastal town in Brazil known for its white sand and rolling waves. As a child in the early 2000s, he watched his fellow Brazilians compete in the world surf championships in Hawaii. They were known as ÔÇ£small-wave surfersÔÇØ: scrappy but second-rate. Australians and Americans took home all the trophies. 

That changed in 2014, when Mr MedinaÔÇÖs daring aerials and cut-throat competitiveness led him to victory. His generation, called ÔÇ£the Brazilian stormÔÇØ, professionalised the sport. ÔÇ£Fifteen years ago,ÔÇØ says his trainer, Allan Menache, ÔÇ£you got out of the water and drank a beer.ÔÇØ Adriano de Souza, a Brazilian surfer who went pro before Mr Medina, introduced unprecedented discipline. Cross-training (eg, swimming and yoga) gave him and his compatriots an edge. English lessons helped them secure sponsorships. Last year, Brazil clinched its fourth win in six years. 

The World Surf League (WSL) recently opened an office in S├úo Paulo. Globo, BrazilÔÇÖs largest television network, expanded its coverage of the sport in 2015 and made Mr MedinaÔÇÖs rags-to-riches tale into an on-demand film. More man about town than beach bum, the 26-year-old arrived at its premiere in January wearing a sleek blue suit, trailed by an entourage.

Surfing...

ÔÇ£THE BOLIVIAN people wonÔÇÖt accept seeing those who have the privilege of directing our collective destiny using their power and the resources of state institutions...to change the rules of democracy and benefit themselves.ÔÇØ So wrote Samuel Doria Medina, a businessman and politician, in a newspaper column on January 26th. He was referring to Jeanine ├ü├▒ez, a previously obscure opposition senator who in November became BoliviaÔÇÖs caretaker president. Evo Morales, a leftist strongman, was overthrown that month by protests over electoral fraud. To the dismay of many outsiders, Ms ├ü├▒ez decided to stand herself in the re-run election, to be held on May 3rd. Her attempt ÔÇ£should be bannedÔÇØ, wrote Mr Doria.

A few days later Mr Doria became Ms ├ü├▒ezÔÇÖs running-mate. The priority, he said, was unity to prevent the return of Mr MoralesÔÇÖs Movement to Socialism (MAS) and Ms ├ü├▒ez was the candidate best placed to achieve that. This shows that pragmatism is trumping principle among Mr MoralesÔÇÖs opponents. But if Ms ├ü├▒ez triumphs, it may provide additional ammunition to those who claim that Mr Morales was the victim of a coup. And that may presage further instability in Bolivia.

Mr Morales, who was the first elected president of indigenous descent, used natural-gas revenues to build schools, roads and clinics in poor areas. He spoke up for...

LIDIA FLORENCIO GUERRERO keeps a candlelit shrine to her daughter, Diana, who in 2017 was raped and murdered in Chimalhuac├ín, a Mexican town. She has a file documenting how police bungled the investigation. They failed to cordon off the crime scene or wear gloves while handling DianaÔÇÖs body. Her clothes went missing. Photos of the corpse were sloppily taken, says DianaÔÇÖs sister, Laura. Ms Guerrero cannot look. She uses the word ÔÇ£femicideÔÇØ to describe her daughterÔÇÖs death.

The word is centuries old but has recently taken on a particular meaning: the murder of a female because of her sex. In Latin America femicide has a legal meaning, too. Since 2007 15 countries have recognised it as a distinct category of killing. The proportion of murders of women that are recognised as femicide varies widely. In Mexico, where the criteria include ÔÇ£degradingÔÇØ injuries or sexual violence inflicted on the victim and a ÔÇ£sentimental relationshipÔÇØ between her and the killer, the share is about a quarter. Countries in other regions, such as France, are debating whether to adopt femicide laws.

The concept of femicide raises public awareness of violence against women, says Martha Cecilia Reyes, head of the womenÔÇÖs institute of Nuevo Le├│n, a state in northern Mexico. It is supposed to help bring perpetrators to justice. In many countries jail...

Blended exchange programs are helping Japanese and US students prepare for the workforce complete with┬á“global perspectives”,┬áaccording to academics running such programs in Japan.

Students have benefitted from two initiatives that seek to enhance initial online exchanges with direct student-to-student interactions.

“It is difficult to envisage so many students taking part in standard exchange programs”

Kansai University’s Collaborative Online International Learning┬áPlus and ÔÇÿMultilateral COILÔÇÖ initiatives are designed to increase┬ástudent global learning experiences and also nurture students to prepare for the global workforce of the 21st century.

Run by the Institute for Innovative Global Education┬áand funded by JapanÔÇÖs Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT),┬áthe programs provide a “cost-efficient way” to boost international experiences.

Since its launch four years ago, around 1,000 students have participated in the COIL program across Japan, Keiko Ikeda, vice-director of the Center of International Education at Kansai University said.

“COIL is a cost-efficient way for many students to work on international projects and the approach overcomes differences in term times and curricula between universities in Japan and overseas,” she said.

“It is difficult to envisage so many students taking part in standard exchange programs.”

As well as encouraging students to pursue collaborative projects to instil skills including┬áteam management and cross-cultural communication, one of COIL’s strength is that it opens up opportunities to students who may have had “financial or educational program constraints to interact with their peers around the globe”.

The COIL Plus initiative consists of two phases, Ikeda explained.

“In the first ÔÇÿvirtualÔÇÖ phase, students interact online using modern communication tools such as video conferencing.

“In the subsequent “Plus” phase, students actually travel to each otherÔÇÖs home institutions and work together on pre-planned tasks, thereby enhancing their learning experience; this is referred to as ÔÇÿhigh impact learningÔÇÖ.”

The COIL Plus initiative is run in partnership with 11 US universities, including Northern Arizona University, UC Berkeley Extension, James Madison University and Michigan State University.

In 2019, IIGE also launched a ÔÇÿMultilateral COILÔÇÖ joint honours program with┬áUniversity Mobility in Asia and the Pacific┬áand the Peace Boat East Asia Voyage.

The eight-week UMAP-COIL Joint Honors Program saw 16 students complete a three-week pre-mobility COIL, followed by a one-week onshore seminar orientation at Kansai University, and finally a three-week cruise around Japan with stops in Russia and South Korea on the Peace Boat.

IIGE is also supported by the American Council of Education and the US Embassy in Tokyo.

MEXT has selected 13 universities in Japan to disseminate COIL educational methods, which is led by Kansai University.

In 2018-19, 948 Japanese and 557 US students participated the COIL Partnerships.

The post COIL opens opportunities in US, Japan appeared first on The PIE News.

Finland-based K12 innovator HundrED has partnered with mobile game development company Supercell on a project highlighting the importance of visual literacy in young learners.

The┬áSpotlight on Visual Arts aims to bring visual communication skills on par with┬áliteracy and numeracy, and will showcase leading innovations that “encourage self-expression and cultivate the creative thinking skills needed for 21st-century life and work”.

“Many times art is thought of as a hobby and itÔÇÖs not necessarily encouraged as a career path”

The project is seeking input from across the visual arts education sector and is aiming to find the best examples of innovation.

“The ability to understand and reflect visual artistic expression is critically important to thriving in todayÔÇÖs digital and visual world,” said┬áDanny Gilliland, head of Impact & Growth at HundrED.

“Visual arts not only cultivates the ability to reflect, understand and communicate important information but fosters creativity and joy in our daily lives.”

Visual literacy must be recognised as a fundamental skill in K12 education considering the “ever-expanding” digital platforms with visual content in lives and work, he added.

The value and importance of art education in schools is often sidelined due to the increased emphasis on STEM education to prepare students for the modern workforce, the partners said.

“Many times art is thought of as a hobby and itÔÇÖs not necessarily encouraged as a career path,”┬áMaria Facal from the Corporate Social Responsibility team at Supercell explained.

“We were inspired by the artists in Supercell to work together with HundrED to promote art as a key element in education.”

Innovators, educators and organisations working in visual arts education are welcome to submit innovations by May 15, 2020.

Selected solutions will be released at the end of 2020 “to kick-start a movement that supports the integration of visual art education in our classrooms globally”, the partners added.

The post HundrED & Supercell launch visual arts project appeared first on The PIE News.

Unlike most of its peer institutions, Johns Hopkins University doesn’t have a universitywide promotion and tenure committee to review dossiers. Instead, faculty members at the famously decentralized institution deliberate cases at the school or multischool level and then pass their recommendations on to the president.

That’s about to change: starting in the fall, a group of senior professors from across Johns Hopkins’s campuses also will weigh in on tenure cases adjudicated by those other faculty committees. This new layer of oversight, called the Tenure Advisory Committee, or TAC, was designed to help the president better understand each dossier and to align Johns Hopkins policy with that of other “Ivy plus” institutions.

Unifying the institution -- to familiarize professors at the massive medical school with, say, the goings-on at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences -- was another goal. Indeed, longtime President Ronald J. Daniels has made becoming “One University” a cornerstone of his “Ten by Twenty” presidential vision, a list of goals to work toward by 2020.

But instead of unifying the university, the new process has proved divisive thus far. Many faculty members say that the change will weaken shared governance, not strengthen it.

“I don’t see how this does anything except disrupt the models of shared governance that are already in place,” said Derek Schilling, a professor of French and member of the executive committee of the Johns Hopkins chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “I think something like this committee can make sense if its primary function is procedural oversight -- that’s a meaningful function. But the way that the FACT committee report defines the TAC in fact opens up avenues for reviewing the facts of each file.”

By FACT committee report, Schilling meant the final report from Daniels’s Faculty Advisory Committee on Tenure. Issued in December and approved by the university’s governing board in January, the report recommends the establishment of a committee “chaired by the provost and composed of senior faculty from across the university.”

Such a committee would advise the president “on all recommendations to grant tenure or its equivalent” emanating from school-level tenure-review bodies. “The president would then take into account TAC’s assessment in deciding whether or not to forward tenure recommendations to the Board of Trustees or to seek additional evidence or assessments bearing on that recommendation.”

Seven appointed deans and professors, including one from Krieger, drafted the report, following an April charge from Daniels. Al Sommer, dean emeritus and professor of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and professor of ophthalmology in the School of Medicine, led the process. With a universitywide tenure committee, he said recently, “people get a better understanding of how things work in disciplines outside their own divisions and schools. And the president would have advice provided from people across the university about how they feel as to the appropriateness of each recommendation.”

The report refers to this as a “virtuous circle whereby lessons learned at each stage of tenure review organically inform best practices for tenure across the institution.”

Sommer said his group spoke with faculty members and administrators at about 15 outside institutions and found that Johns Hopkins was the “outlier” in not having a university tenure committee. In general, he said, the outside sources said that such committees on their campuses were “useful” in getting varied perspectives on tenure cases and in exposing professors to the work being done in other units.

“We unanimously elected to recommend such a committee,” Sommer said, and to reserve slots at that table for professors who have previously served on lower-level tenure committees.

François Furstenberg, a professor of history, sits on the Homewood Academic Council, which reviews tenure cases in the arts and sciences and the Whiting School of Engineering. Furstenberg said it was unfortunate that Sommer’s committee looked to outside institutions for guidance but not to the council itself to gain members’ perspectives about how current processes are working.

Furstenberg explained that the university president has always had a seat on the council and that previous presidents did sit in on tenure deliberations. If Daniels, who does not sit in on this process, feels that he is making tenure decisions in the dark, then he is welcome to rejoin the council, Furstenberg said.

“Paradoxically and, I have to say, disingenuously,” Daniels will hold more power in tenure cases than he does now, as the new council is merely advisory to him. Moreover, Furstenberg said, Daniels will have more power than the presidents of most peer institutions, as their processes tend to empower the provost, if any administrator, and not the president.

Indeed, it is highly unusual presidents to get involved in tenure cases. Furstenberg said that Daniels has overturned one tenure case, "just before launching this process."

"I think this committee doesn’t just make it easier for him to weigh in," Furstenberg added. "It empowers him with the ability to overturn any case he wishes based on his own reading of the file and absent any deliberation with faculty."

Sarah Woodson, the T. C. Jenkins Professor of Biophysics in Krieger and a former member of the Homewood council, said her main concern is that the new committee shifts “responsibility for the quality of the scholarship farther away from the faculty who are carrying out the scholarship.”

While serving on a universitywide tenure committee might open one’s eyes to the work being done elsewhere at Johns Hopkins, it also makes that work harder to judge. There is a big difference between the inquiry-driven scholarship at Krieger, for instance, and much of the mission-driven work being done at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Woodson, Schilling and others have expressed concerns internally that this distance will cause the universitywide committee to privilege easy-to-digest metrics on citations and so-called impact over innovation and research potential.

Other professors, and junior scholars in particular, have shared additional concerns, such as how this new process will impact Johns Hopkins’s simultaneous push for a more diverse faculty.

The university referred comments about the process to Sommer.

Underscoring the recommendation in his committee’s report, Sommer said that the process will be essentially piloted for three years and then rigorously evaluated.

A group of students studying and training in health-care disciplines at the Lake Washington Institute of Technology, a public institution in Kirkland, Wash., which has been hard hit by the coronavirus, has been self-quarantined at home for 14 days after possible exposure to the virus in health-care settings. Four students at Los Rios Community College District, in California, were directed by public health authorities to self-quarantine after being exposed to the virus in the course of their professional medical duties.

As the virus continues to spread to other parts of the country, public health officials and college administrators in allied health departments are urging special precautions for students studying for careers in the health professions and working along with or training under those on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak.

After widespread news reports that 17 nursing students, one student studying to be a physical therapy assistant and four professors at the Lake Washington Institute might have been exposed to the virus -- the college said a group had visited a long-term nursing facility where seven residents have died of COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus) -- leaders in nursing education said it’s now more important than ever to emphasize preventative precautions and infection-control protocols in the classroom and in clinical settings.

“From the very first course our nursing students take, which is usually health assessment, we reinforce preventive precautions so that they protect themselves from exposure,” said Ann H. Cary, chair of the Board of Directors for the American Association of Colleges of Nursing and dean of the Marieb College of Health and Human Services at Florida Gulf Coast University. “We are emphasizing that now more than ever that you can’t have a lapse in the way that you approach patients. The hand-washing techniques are critically important not only in classes but especially when they go into the clinical areas. We’re working with clinical partners in each of our areas to determine what are additional protocols that will be in place at those institutions and ensuring that our students are oriented toward the additional protocols.”

Tener Goodwin Veenema, a professor of nursing and public health at Johns Hopkins University whose research focuses on disaster medicine and emergency preparedness, said one of the big challenges for nursing schools nationwide is that the trend toward accelerated, shorter-duration programs limits what gets taught in the curriculum.

“There are a limited number of hours and topics that can be covered,” she said. “We have nursing students who are probably getting probably less than one hour, maybe an hour and a half in their entire curriculum on how you go about responding to a public health emergency. What we as nurse educators need to do is ensure that all nursing students have the knowledge, the skills and the abilities that they will need either on a clinical rotation or when they enter the workforce to keep themselves safe and to keep patient safe.”

Goodwin Veenema said nurses need knowledge and skills in infection-containment strategies, surveillance and detection of illness, protocols for quarantining and isolating patients, and how to select appropriate levels of protective gear and take it on and off without contamination.

“We’ve seen it with Ebola, and we’ve seen it with SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome], where health-care professionals are disproportionately impacted by this virus because they are exposed to it more frequently and in all probability end up having a higher biological load,” she said. “There really is a lot for nurses to know because the nursing profession will be the front-line responders and will be receiving patients in the emergency department and screening patients and their families in private offices and community health centers.”

Donna Meyer, chief executive officer for the Organization for Associate Degree Nursing, said via email that “nursing students learn proper handwashing techniques, and other elements such as isolation techniques, the use of masks, gowns, gloves, and ventilation that prevent or slow the spread of infectious diseases from the moment they enter a nursing program of study. This is reinforced throughout a nursing program and techniques are applied in all clinical settings, such as hospitals, long-term care, and community settings.”

Meyer added that nursing programs build their curricula around topics covered on the licensing exam.

“Safety and infection control is a part of the licensing exam focusing on how the nurse protects clients and health care personnel from health and environmental hazards,” she said. “Nursing curriculums adapt and present any current issues as needed (such as Covid-19),” following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. “Additionally, Nursing Deans/Directors collaborate with their local clinical partners to assess the current status of public health issues in the communities. Nursing students follow the best practices of the clinical setting they are in and are expected to learn and follow the protocol of the setting [where] they are practicing.”

In addition to preparing students for the new challenges they may face in clinical settings, nursing program administrators are also thinking about what might happen if their students’ clinical education gets disrupted by the coronavirus -- if students are asked not to report to hospitals or other health-care settings as an infection-control measure. Cary, of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, said programs are exploring the idea of having students practice their skills in simulation labs.

“If that’s not going to be enough, we have to think about how to focus concentrated learning experiences for students at another time,” she said.

Cary also stressed that these concerns are similar to those of other medical and health-care programs. For example, she said, if a college has a clinical lab program, “they have to take extraordinary precautions as well, as those students are actually conducting testing on clinical lab samples. Physical therapy, occupational therapy, even our health-care administrator students as they walk into clinical facilities -- everybody is responsible for implementing the protocols.”

As for medical schools, John Prescott, the chief academic officer for the Association of American Medical Colleges, said the association "is working closely with our member medical schools and teaching hospitals who are actively preparing for and responding to the coronavirus and is gathering information on how they are involving learners in patient care."

"We know that medical schools have appropriate plans and policies already in place to safeguard the well-being of their students and communities, to ensure the continuity of their education and research missions, and are following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention," Prescott said.

The Trump administration has proposed cutting a Department of Defense program that funds unclassified, university-based social science research relating to topics of national security.

Supporters of the Minerva Research Initiative say the program plays a critical role not only in funding important, policy-relevant research but also in building connections between social scientists and the military. Critics of the program raise concerns about the role Pentagon funding has played in shaping U.S. social science work in certain areas.

President Trump’s budget, released last month, proposes that the Pentagon’s Basic Research Office, which manages the Minerva program, discontinue funding for it and notify grant recipients involved with 23 ongoing projects that their awards will be terminated early. The funding from the Basic Research OfficÔÇïe amounted to about $11.4 million in 2020 and has historically been the main source of financial support for the program, which also receives funding directly from the Air Force and Navy.

The Trump budget said that new awards for the Minerva program will not be made, except with funds earmarked by Congress or directly from the military service branches.

Pentagon officials “conducted a rigorous prioritization review of its research, development, test and evaluation activities and identified where funds could be reinvested in lethality and readiness,” a DoD spokesman said. “The question was not ‘Is this a good effort?’ but, rather, ‘Is a dollar spent on this effort more important to our military capability’” than dollars spent in other priority areas, he said. “We are making these tough choices in order to properly support and resource the war fighter.”

The Consortium of Social Science Organizations noted that Minerva is far easier for the Trump administration to cut than most other programs.

“Because the Minerva Initiative does not receive a direct Congressional appropriation, the Department has the authority to terminate it unless Congress affirmatively acts to prevent it (unlike the majority of the changes proposed in the President’s budget request),” the group said in a Feb. 18 article in its newsletter. “Should Congressional appropriators wish to maintain the MRI, they would need to include specific language in their FY 2021 appropriations bill stipulating that funding for the program continue.”

The proposed cuts to the Minerva program, which was launched in 2008 by then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, threatens a sizable source of money for political scientists and international relations scholars in particular. The program -- which, according to a National Academies report issued last year, has typically received $20 to $22 million in annual funding from the Pentagon and the various service branches combined -- awarded grants in recent years averaging $1.5 million over three or four years. Funded projects have addressed issues related to climate change, cyberconflict, political violence, power alliances and terrorist organizations; recent awards have gone to projects focused on Russian disinformation and propaganda campaigns, analyses of burden sharing in international alliances and defense cooperation agreements, and the implications of Africa’s youth bulge for national security, to name a few topics.

About half of Minerva recipients are political scientists, and scholars from economics, mathematics and computer science, and psychology are also well represented among grantees. The National Academies report found that Minerva-supported research "has been published in top journals and tends to have strong citation records. The research has also resulted in books and produced policy-relevant statistical models, databases, and mapping tools, reflecting the value placed by the program on innovative outputs beyond publications and conference presentations."

"The Minerva Initiative has provided funding for valuable political science research and supported interdisciplinary collaborations within and beyond the social sciences since its launch in 2008," said Steven Rathgeb Smith, the executive director of the American Political Science Association. "Now more than ever, the federal government should increase its investment in scientific research that provides deeper insight into the way political processes, movements, conflicts and institutions shape our lives and impact our national security. As technology and the rate of change increases, the data and research political scientists are producing is critical to help determine how we approach challenges we face as a society."

Brandon Valeriano, the Bren Chair of Military Innovation at the Marine Corps University and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, has some problems with the way Minerva has been structured and the processes for evaluating and awarding grant proposals (a detailed discussion of the grant selection and awarding processes is included in the National Academies report). But he thinks the program should be improved, not cut.

“It’s critical to have social science and humanities involved in national security,” he said. “There’s a lot of research being done in the United States by strong scholars who can contribute to the national defense. To mobilize these scholars for the benefit of the nation is an important process.”

“It has really expanded the amount of money that’s available for social scientists who are doing security-related research,” said Sara Mitchell, the F. Wendell Miller Professor at the University of Iowa. Mitchell, a political scientist, received a Minerva grant to support her work on political conflicts between countries that have shared ethnic groups.

“My work is more on the human side of political violence, and how governments design political, social and economic interventions, so I think that would be a real loss if DoD decided only to fund the more science-technology side,” Mitchell said. “They’re going to lose what social science brings to the table, which is an understanding of the political and policy environment within which these technologies are used.”

“I think the most important thing the program has done is it has helped support the creation of a research community that is addressing social science questions that are of greater interest to the defense community than to other aspects of the academy,” said Jacob N. Shapiro, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University who has been a principal investigator or co-PI on three Minerva grants. “It’s pushed research in slightly different directions than it would have otherwise gone, and I think for the most part increased the total volume of work. There’s more social science research being done now on conflict and violence and ways to address those phenomena than there would have been absent the program.”

But Zackariah Mampilly, the Marxe Chair of International Affairs at the City University of New York, raised concerns about the degree to which Pentagon priorities have shaped what social science research gets done.

"Way too many US political scientists are reliant on Defense funding in ways that directly compromise the integrity & objectivity of their research," he said on Twitter. "I think if the general public were aware of how much Defense & Intelligence funding shaped US social science work on social movements, political violence & even topics like climate change, they would be shocked. As a research community, we should have canceled Minerva ourselves."

Mampilly said in an interview that he understands why "many academics have turned to the relatively easy funding offered by Minerva. But my fear, particularly with relation to the subject of political violence, where much of the money has flowed, is it has systematically shaped the topics and approaches, which I view as a bad thing … Even if the topic itself is worthy of research funding, for example, climate change -- of course I believe we should have more government research for funding research on climate change -- but I'm not sure that money should be coming from the U.S. military, because that has the effect of reducing climate change to its significance for U.S. military interests."

The American Anthropological Association noted concerns from its members when Minerva was launched that only research that suited the Pentagon's agenda would be funded. It also called for the program to be administered through research agencies such as the National Science Foundation. The initial round of Minerva grants was funded in collaboration with the NSF, but the National Academies report notes that the collaboration ended after the first year "because the two agencies’ differing approaches to awarding and managing grants proved too challenging to combine into one program."

Hugh Gusterson, a professor of anthropology at George Washington University, said the Pentagon funding skews the pool of grant applicants, both by limiting it to scholars who have no objection to taking money from the military, and by limiting the kinds of methodologies that can be used. He argued that for anthropologists, who have to build trust with their sources in the field, taking U.S. military funding is vexed in a way it wouldn't be for a scholar who was doing a project based on government data sets.

He suggested the program might look very different if the Pentagon had taken the pot of money for Minerva and given it to the Social Science Research Council with the same broad mandate.

“I think they would have gotten a broader disciplinary mix of applicants, and they might have gotten different results,” he said. “If your question is why are people becoming insurgents, you can imagine a range of answers to that, and some of them would be things that the Pentagon might not want to hear, but they should hear. And people who might produce well-documented arguments that might have to do with bad things the Pentagon is doing with the Middle East are not going to apply to the Pentagon to do that work, but they might apply to the Social Science Research Council.

“It’s the same as you don’t want tobacco companies funding research on the health effects of tobacco; you don’t want the sugar industry funding research on Coca-Cola,” Gusterson added. “It’s the same basic principle: you want neutral funding agencies who don’t have a stake in what you fund.”

More than three-quarters (76 percent) of U.S. colleges said that outreach and recruitment of students from China has been affected by the new coronavirus, according to a survey from the Institute of International Education.

A total of 234 colleges and universities responded to the survey, which focused on student mobility to and from China, where the new coronavirus originated. The survey found that a substantial number of colleges have not made alternative recruitment plans in response to restrictions on travel to and from China. This is significant, as China is the biggest source of international students for U.S. colleges and many colleges depend on Chinese student enrollments to help balance their budgets.

“While some institutions have very robust efforts in place to conduct electronic communications with students as well as virtual webinars and yield events, or to work with local partners and agents, about 20 percent of respondents indicated they do not have current plans in place for alternative recruitment,” Mirka Martel, IIE’s head of research, evaluation and learning, said in a call with members of the media.

Martel said that most institutions are hoping to travel to China after the restrictions are lifted, “although they are aware it will affect enrollment for the 2020-21 academic year.”

Most colleges have seen limited effects on their current Chinese student enrollments. Martel said 87 colleges responding to the survey collectively reported a total of 831 Chinese students enrolled at their institutions this spring who had been affected by travel restrictions related to COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus. This number represents less than 0.4 percent of the total population of Chinese students at responding institutions.

“According to the institutions, the vast majority of enrolled students from China were already on their campuses. Either they had not left for the winter holidays or they had already returned to campus when the travel restrictions went into effect,” Martel said. (One university that had a late start to its spring semester, the University of Delaware, told Inside Higher Ed in February that it had 226 students from China who were unable to return in time for the spring semester.)

For those colleges that did have students from China affected by travel restrictions, the survey found that 46 percent offered options for remote or independent study, 41 percent offered leaves of absence or deferment of enrollment, 38 percent offered online or distance education classes, 9 percent issued refunds, and 8 percent offered the option to study elsewhere.

Most colleges also said they had been offering support for Chinese students on campus, including by providing counseling services and targeted communications, supporting Chinese student groups, and offering a hotline where Chinese students can report any acts of discrimination.

“We maintain close communication daily with our onÔÇÉcampus Chinese cohort, all of whom returned to our campus prior to the virus outbreak and subsequent restrictions,” one respondent said. “Our goal is to be supportive, concerned and engaged partners during this rough spot for all of us.”

The survey, which was administered Feb. 13 to Feb. 26, also asked about study abroad travel to China. Fifty responding institutions reported they had a total of 405 students studying abroad in China at the time the outbreak started, and 70 percent said they were evacuating students. However, the report on the survey results notes that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention upgraded its advisory on travel to China to its highest level on Feb. 22, four days before the survey closed, so the proportion of colleges that evacuated students from China may be higher. The vast majority of responding institutions -- 94 percent -- said their spring study abroad programs to China have been canceled or postponed.

The situation regarding academic travel has evolved rapidly over the last week as the virus has spread in new areas. Last week, colleges began closing study abroad programs in Italy -- the second-most-popular destination for Americans studying abroad -- and evacuating their students. Italy’s government announced Wednesday that it is closing the nation’s schools and universities through March 15, according to CNBC.

On Monday the CDC issued new guidance telling colleges to "consider" canceling upcoming exchange programs and to "consider" asking current program participants to return to their home countries. A number of colleges have cited the CDC guidance in canceling all study abroad scheduled for spring break and, in some cases, for summer. Colleges that have announced broad cancellations of study abroad programs scheduled for spring break include:

• Pennsylvania State University
• Rutgers University
• Seton Hall University
• Towson University
• University of Maryland
• University of Virginia

College athletics officials are considering the impact of COVID-19, or the coronavirus, on upcoming intercollegiate conference and tournament play, with some colleges even canceling scheduled basketball games on the West Coast.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced it had convened a panel of health experts on March 3 to advise the association’s decision making during a week when the virus led to the cancellation of large national meetings and events. Conference tournaments for men’s and women’s basketball teams loom in the next two weeks. And the NCAA’s March Madness Tournament, which will involve competition between 68 Division I men’s basketball teams from across the country at arenas in 12 different states, begins March 17. The women's tournament begins March 20 and will involve 64 Division I teams competing first at various campuses, then at arenas in five states.

The tournament will be the largest scheduled U.S. sporting event since federal officials declared the coronavirus a public health emergency at the end of January, ESPN reported. The NCAA is considering “all circumstances” in its contingency planning for the virus, including the possibility of holding the March tournament without spectators, said Donald Remy, chief operating officer of the NCAA, in an interview with Bloomberg. The association will “first and foremost” prioritize the health and safety of athletes, fans and administrators, Remy said in a statement.

“The NCAA is committed to conducting its championships and events in a safe and responsible manner,” Remy said. “Today we are planning to conduct our championships as planned, however, we are evaluating the COVID-19 situation daily and will make decisions accordingly.”

The March tournament brings in more than 80 percent of the NCAA’s annual revenue, which totaled more than $1 billion in 2018. But Remy said a business interruption insurance policy would partially cover potential losses if changes had to be made, Bloomberg reported. The National College Players Association, which represents the interests of athletes, said in a statement that the NCAA and colleges should take precautions to reduce the risk of athletes contracting the virus.

“In regard to the NCAA's March Madness Tournament and other athletic events, there should be a serious discussion about holding competitions without an audience present,” the statement said. “The NCAA and its colleges must act now, there is no time to waste.”

Chicago State University on March 3 announced it was canceling scheduled basketball games over coronavirus concerns, in what ESPN reported was the first cancellation of a major U.S. sporting event due to the virus. Both Chicago State and the University of Missouri at Kansas City dropped men’s basketball games at Seattle University that had been scheduled for this week, Seattle said in a statement.

“We respect Chicago State and Kansas City's decisions and understand their concerns,” the statement said. “Seattle University is actively monitoring and responding to this rapidly evolving situation and continuing to follow the guidance of public health agencies and make decisions based on the most up-to-date information available. There has been no recommendation to suspend campus operations, including athletic contests, or restrict travel in the United States at this time.”

Chicago State also canceled a men’s basketball trip to Utah Valley University and the university women’s team’s home games against Utah Valley and Seattle, Sabrina Land, a university spokeswoman, said in a statement. None of the canceled games will be rescheduled.

The NCAA advises its member colleges to discuss travel and sports participation with their local health officials, said Christopher Radford, associate director of communications for the association.

“After reviewing publicly available information, the university has made the decision to restrict all travel for university-approved student and faculty study abroad, as well as scheduled games for university sporting events on the West Coast, including Washington State and Utah,” Land said.

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