Agrégateur de flux

Before the coronavirus shuttered universities nationwide, it turned Seattle’s college leaders into early responders. Their decisions shaped a nation’s reaction.

The UK government will tackle foreign interference at British universities by working with Universities UK and by promoting the diversification of international students, according to a document obtained by The PIE News. 

In November 2019, a Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry found ÔÇ£alarming evidenceÔÇØ of Chinese interference on UK campuses, and that the┬áForeign and Commonwealth Office was failing to protect academic freedom in the country.┬á

ÔÇ£The protection of academic freedom and freedom of speech lies at the heart of our HE systemÔÇØ

Entitled ‘A cautious embrace: defending democracy in an age of autocracies’, the FAC inquiry said that the FCOÔÇÖs role in advising universities on the potential threats to academia from autocracies had been ÔÇ£non-existentÔÇØ.┬á

It also claimed that the UK government had not engaged sufficiently with other departments to develop a coordinated response. 

Now the FCO has responded to the inquiry, acknowledging that academic research and innovation could be exploited by state or state-linked actors which do not respect fundamental rights and freedoms or who are hostile to UK interests. 

ÔÇ£The protection of academic freedom and freedom of speech lies at the heart of our higher education system,ÔÇØ the response read.

ÔÇ£The government is clear that any attempts to interfere with these core values will not be tolerated.ÔÇØ

According to FCO, there have been cases of autocratic state actors putting pressure on universities and academics in the UK to avoid certain topics or self-censor their research or course content. 

The department also explained that there have been reports of pressure or influence being exerted on overseas students and autocratic state actors targeting research collaboration. 

UK government departments, including the FCO, the Department for Education and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy are now working together to identify and mitigate these risks.

The FCO has also turned to the HE sector and tasked Universities UK with addressing the full range of risks to institutions. 

ÔÇ£In light of the evolving threat of foreign interference to the higher education sectorÔÇÖs core values, infrastructure and research collaborations, the government has asked UUK to accelerate and expand their effortsÔÇöand the task and finish group they have establishedÔÇöto address the full range of risks,ÔÇØ the FCO response explained.

ÔÇ£Government will continue to support this sector-led approach by providing specialist advice and expertise.

ÔÇ£We consider that this sector-led approach, supported by the government, is the most effective strategy to address this challenge.ÔÇØ

A UUK spokesperson told The PIE that UK universities are global institutions and the value of their education, research and collaborations with global partners is essential.

┬áÔÇ£Academic freedom, freedom of speech and institutional autonomy are critical to the success of the UKÔÇÖs universities,” they noted.

ÔÇ£Protecting these characteristics in a constantly evolving landscape is of the utmost importance.

“Following the governmentÔÇÖs response to the FAC report, Universities UK continues to work with the UK government on a range of initiatives to make sure that decisionmakers at universities have the information, advice and guidance they need to make informed choices.ÔÇØ┬á

The spokesperson said that UUK is set to publish guidelines to support decisionmakers in the autumn.

Countries around the world are keen to cooperate and share best practice to tackle the issue of foreign interference, according to the FCO.

The department explained that it is engaging with international partners including counterparts in the US and Australia, on the threats to academia. 

The FCO is using a network of posts, as well as bilateral and multilateral meetings in London and overseas at senior-official level, to raise the issue of interference in academia with trusted partners. 

The threat of autocracies using financial muscle to leverage influence through the withdrawal of funding was brought up in the FACÔÇÖs initial inquiry.

In response, the FCO has explained that greater student diversity will play a key role in protecting academic freedom. 

ÔÇ£The government is aware that some autocratic states have been known to use the threat of financial leverage to achieve their goals,ÔÇØ the response noted.┬á

ÔÇ£Universities will be well aware of the possible risks associated with dependence on a single source of funding, whether that is from a single organisation or from a single nation.ÔÇØ

The FCO said that the governmentÔÇÖs International Education Strategy, which seeks to increase the number of international students in the UK to 600,000, will help to diversify student recruitment.┬á

ÔÇ£Recruiting international students on a sustainable basis is one way in which universities can protect themselves from these risks,ÔÇØ the FCO said.┬á

ÔÇ£Universities will be well aware of the possible risks associated with dependence on a single source of funding”

During the initial inquiry, the FAC suggested that the UK engage with Commonwealth countries to diversify student recruitment, and this point was acknowledged by the FCO. 

Nick Hillman, director of higher education think tank HEPI, said that some thought had gone into the government’s response but that it is “a little overly defensive and not altogether clear on international students.ÔÇØ

ÔÇ£It warns universities against relying on too few income streams before telling them to recruit international students from a broader range of countries,ÔÇØ he told The PIE.

ÔÇ£This is odd for two reasons. First, recruiting international students is done, in part, precisely to diversify income streams compared to the past.

ÔÇ£Secondly, if universities have been over-reliant on Chinese studentsÔÇÖ fees relative to fees from other students, this is mainly the GovernmentÔÇÖs own responsibility ÔÇô or rather the responsibility of the earlier [David] Cameron and [Theresa] May governments.ÔÇØ

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The Chinese government plans to send chartered planes to help Chinese students in the U.S. return home during the coronavirus pandemic.

The catch? Students will have to pay for the flights, as well as the costs for quarantining for 14 days upon arrival in China, according to the South China Morning Post.

The government has become cautious about bringing students back home who could possibly bring the coronavirus with them.

About 400,000 Chinese students are studying in the United States. A recent online survey found that nearly 60 percent of those students want to return home, according to the Post.

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In response to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, the European Association for International Education has delivered an open letter to the European Commission, applauding it on the steps taken so far and issuing an appeal for continued attention on several fronts.

EAIE president Sabine Pendl wrote that in light of the “extraordinary circumstances currently facing the international higher education community across Europe”, the association congratulated the EC for its fast action to issue essential practical advice on Erasmus+ and mobility.

“The EAIE is convinced that approaches to international education will be significantly altered”

“The challenges to mobility and to the normal operations of higher education institutions presented by the COVID-19 outbreak require flexibility from all of us,” wrote Pendl, adding that the EAIE would like to see all Erasmus National Agencies taking “decisive action” in support of those engaged in Erasmus+.

The letter also called for students receiving Erasmus+ grants to continue to collect financial support in full if they earn the necessary ECTS credits, regardless of how ÔÇ»(online or face-to-face) or ÔÇ»where ÔÇ»they are earned.

“The European Commission is asking higher education institutions to move in this direction so that the academic progress of students is preserved,” the letter added.

The third request was for students facing interruptions in their programs and who need extra time to complete coursework or requirements be given “reasonable flexibility with deadlines, taking into account everything from differing levels of internet access to time zone variables”.

“The EAIE encourages all the international education community to be generous and cooperative to make it possible for students to attain their goals,” wrote Pendl.

The letter also requested for careful attention to be paid to the mental health and emotional well-being of students who have been adversely affected by the crisis, and urged the EC to consider aligning the current plans for flexibility as much as possible.

It listed specific actions that should be taken now to safeguard that next generation of Erasmus+ programs.

“The course of the COVID-19 pandemic is uncertain, but the EAIE is convinced that approaches to international education will be significantly altered,”┬á added Pendl.

“The European Commission and the EAIE can and should be at the forefront of these developments.”

The letter in full can be read here.

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Santander Universities and the IE Foundation have launched the Santander IE Education Aid Fund, which will aim to provide 15,500 digital scholarships to educators, university students and young professionals.

The training intends to develop “essential skills” required to navigate a new global landscape during and following the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We want our teachers to be better prepared to develop their learning skills, in face-to-face as well as digital environments”

A total of 10,000 school teachers and university professors will be eligible for the Santander IE Online Specialisation in Digital Education for Instructors course, aiming to teach tools for successful online course delivery.

A further 5,500 scholarships are available for university students and young professionals from 14 countries.

Students aged 20-35 are able to develop digital and leadership skills through the Santander IE Online Scholarships in Digital Strategy, Technology and Leadership, while 500 candidates will be able to take High Impact Online Programs via the Santander IE High Impact Online Program Learning Scholarships.

Those on the High Impact course will complete a five-week course in English or Spanish covering areas such as new technologies for business, digital marketing, leadership in times of uncertainty or data science and visualisation.

All scholarship recipients will receive training in English and Spanish and will be taught by IE University faculty.

“We do not know what the post-COVID19 education and labour market environment will be like, but what is foreseeable is that digital skills will be more decisive,” said Javier L├│pez, global director of Social Impact at Santander Universities.

“With this initiative we want our teachers to be better prepared to develop their learning skills, in face-to-face as well as digital environments and for young people to take better advantage of online training resources and acquire the necessary skills to successfully face a professional future that will be increasingly digitised.”

For an “institution linked to education”, it is the IE Foundation’s duty to support instructors around the globe, the organisation’s director-general Geoffroy G├®rard said.

“[Instructors] are essential for the continuation of educational activity at this critical time,” he noted.

“Young people are also affected by the health emergency and can strongly benefit from programs that allow them to accelerate their learning curve and enhance their skills in digital transformation.”

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Tenure-clock stoppages came fast and furious last month to faculty members worried about how COVID-19 will throw off their career timelines. Graduate students have similar concerns about how their research has been upended and how that will impact progress toward their degrees. Yet accommodations to their program timelines and funding packages are almost nil.

Graduate students need help “figuring out where they stand,” said Bradley Sommer, president of the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students and a Ph.D. candidate in history at Carnegie Mellon University. “A lot of students right now just need basic information on what to expect.”

Students who were overseas when the public health crisis escalated, doing research or attending conferences, are in some cases stuck there, Sommer said. Stateside, many students in the natural sciences and engineering don’t have access to their labs. Their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences, meanwhile, lack access to libraries, archives and research sites. And students who collect data in K-12 schools have no idea when widespread school shutdowns will end.

Seeking Funding and Degree-Timeline Extensions

Where students’ progress toward their degrees has been significantly disrupted, will graduation dates be pushed back?

“I think that would be a comfort to students,” Sommer said, “knowing how departments plan to address this sudden halt to the normal timeline of their program.”

Another question: Where time-to-degree extensions are granted, will students be able to afford taking advantage of them, without parallel extensions to internal and external funding packages?

Gwen Chodur, director of social justice concerns for the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students and a doctoral candidate in nutritional biology at the University of California, Davis, said that the coronavirus crisis puts an already financially precarious group at greater risk.

Top among graduate students’ needs, Chodur said, is funding. Whether through extended teaching assistantships, external grants or other means, it’s about “making sure that they won’t be penalized for the impact that this has.”

Within the California system, for example, TAships are limited to six years, or 18 quarters for campuses that follow a quarter system. Graduate students on a number of campuses, along with the statewide United Auto Workers-affiliated graduate employee union, are advocating for an additional year.

International students must be covered by any such changes, these groups say, in the form of extended nonresident supplemental tuition waivers and other policies.

The California system -- which was already dealing with a growing graduate employee strike over requested cost-of-living adjustments -- is "committed to doing what it can to best support its graduate scholars as they continue their educational journeys," said Stett Holbrook, university spokesperson. At this time, the university is "not offering a systemwide adjustment to graduate-degree completion timelines because of COVID-19," he said, as degree timelines already vary by campus and program, and the current "level of uncertainty is unprecedented."

Campuses will examine what allowances "might be considered regarding normative time to degree," Holbrook said. Regarding funding support, individual campuses are also "assessing how best to mitigate the financial impact on students."

Departments Want to Help, but Their Options Are Limited

Houri Berberian, professor of history and Meghrouni Family Presidential Chair in Armenian studies at the system’s Irvine campus, said that Irvine’s School of Humanities and the university have announced certain accommodations thus far, including: an application-based emergency relief fund, various fee waivers for the spring and summer terms, and advancement-to-Ph.D.-candidacy deadline extensions through the end of summer for third-year students, without any impact to their stipends.

The department is helping students where it can, though, its ability to respond is limited. Time-to-degree stoppage and funding will need to be addressed further up the chain going forward, Berberian said, “as travel restrictions and other obstacles and insecurities continue to mount.” Students’ international and domestic research “has for the most part halted.”

Ann Waltner, professor of history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, said that gradate students “represent the future of the profession, and it is essential that we find ways of getting them what they need to see them through this crisis.” So far, her department hopes to find summer funding for most graduate students, including by repurposing funds previously set aside for faculty travel. Preliminary oral exams and dissertation defenses are happening remotely, and scheduling is flexible.

Looking past summer, Waltner said that the department hopes to somehow be able to offer additional funding time to graduate students, “not just because of the disruptions of this spring, but because the job market has gone from dismal to dystopian.”

Hundreds of institutions already have reportedly announced some type of hiring freeze for the next six to 18 months. A few, such as the University of Oregon, have specifically included graduate assistants in these freezes.

At Minnesota, an announced hiring freeze does not apply to graduate assistants. The university also has offered supports for graduate students, including an emergency funding program and 80 hours of emergency leave for student instructors.

Absent some bigger intervention, however, the main mechanism the history department has at its disposal to help affected students to admit even smaller, future graduate cohorts than previously planned. Already, Waltner said, the program has agreed not to admit any students on the alternate list for the fall, and a “very small class” for 2021.

Lots of Anxiety, So Many Unknowns

Joseph Dennis, associate professor and director of graduate studies in history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said his department is also looking to fund as many students as possible this summer from various department sources and possible donations. Many students typically pick up off-campus work over the summer, and that has all but dried up, he said.

As for support packages, the department is studying how it can extend them to account for COVID-19-related delays. Graduate students have come home early from research trips that were essential to their dissertations, and "I expect more canceled trips in fall unless there is a major turnaround in virus control."

Dennis and others noted that graduate students -- like faculty members -- suddenly have other types of work to juggle: online course transitions, caregiving, homeschooling children and sourcing materials needed for their studies. To better understand these challenges and needs, the department last week held an online forum for graduate students.

Over all, students are anxious, Dennis said. "So we are trying to do everything we can to reduce anxiety -- working on finances, extending various deadlines, checking in on everyone."

At least part of the reason graduate student accommodations have been slow in coming is that no one has a crystal ball. It’s unclear how long the coronavirus pandemic will last and -- significantly, given that the requested accommodations will be costly -- how university budgets will be affected.

Madison chancellor Rebecca Blank has said, for example, that the university is bracing for a $100 million loss -- if things get back to normal by June. That equates to a 22 percent cut in state funding for a single year, or 3.2 percent of the total budget, according to the Wisconsin State-Journal.

Of course, the research institution model is dependent on graduate assistants to help with research and deliver instruction. But right now much research is halted, and another unanswered question is what fall undergraduate enrollment will look like.

Advocacy From Professional Organizations

Professional organizations are advocating for graduate students, too. The Modern Language Association has called for extensions on graduate student contracts and funding and on time-to-degree limits.

“Graduate students at the end of their contracts will be especially hard hit by this crisis,” reads an MLA statement on academic labor during COVID-19, “as much hiring has come to a screeching halt in both higher education and the many other industries into which Ph.D.s would normally have moved for employment.”

The American Historical Association on Monday released a similar statement urging departments and universities “to be flexible and understanding in accommodating the needs of students whose studies have been interrupted through no fault of their own.”

Institutions should consider extending the duration of funded support to graduate students “as well as offering whatever support possible to graduate students who have suffered serious financial losses relating to the impact of the pandemic,” reads the AHA statement. “Such disruptions might include incurring added expenses for interrupted travel, loss of rent, visa and other fees, and similar situations that cannot always be specified in advance but which are quite real.”

The American Sociological Association also published a statement on academic labor, but focused on professors. Teresa Ciabattari, professor of sociology at Pacific Lutheran University and the association’s director of research, professional development and academic affairs, said that universities should be “flexible, accommodating and humane in how they work with graduate students.” In so many ways, she added, “they are facing the same challenges faculty members are facing, with research being pushed online, being stuck at home, course being pushed online.”

Things graduate students need are flexibility on degree timelines, funding and emergency financial support, and additional help navigating a job market that just got more spare. Specific policies to help graduate students, however, “will really just depend on the institution.”

The Student Caucus of the Sociologists for Women in Society is currently collecting information on departmental and institutional responses to COVID-19 concerning students, to develop a list of best practices. Jax Gonzalez, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder who is involved with the project, said the "best way to support graduate students at this present moment is to help us advocate for protective measures at universities and colleges." 

Questions About External Funding

Emily Miller, associate vice president for policy at the Association of American Universities, said she hasn’t heard of policy shifts toward another year of funding or time-to-degree stoppages just yet.

“I do know there is a lot of anxiety and stress among graduate students at this time, and faculty members are working hard at this time to think of ways to support their research groups and teams and labs.”

The AAU spent many days last month working with institutions and federal agencies to answer the most urgent questions about graduate student funding, namely whether students who are paid from federal research grants (not internal assistantships) may continue to be paid that way -- even if they are not technically working in their labs during the pandemic. The answer, by and large, is yes.

Miller said that’s because graduate students working from home are -- for now -- doing work relevant to their research duties. Think: data analysis, literature reviews and manuscript preparations.

How long that work and, therefore, how long these federal funding directives will last remain to be seen.

“There’s a time horizon for which that work can be sustainable,” Miller said. “If there continues to be a need for social distancing and remote education, and if we can’t be on campus in our labs, then extensions on time clocks would need to be addressed by institutions.”

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When Congress set aside about $14 billion specifically for higher education in the stimulus bill it passed two weeks ago, lawmakers had the well-intentioned goal of most of the money going to colleges and universities that serve larger shares of lower-income students.

But lawmakers also didn’t want to penalize large institutions that don't enroll as many lower-income students.

The way Congress decided to deal with the issue, however, has complicated how billions of dollars of aid will get to colleges, lobbyists representing colleges and universities worry, and it could delay the money as campus leaders are anxiously dealing with a financial hit from the coronavirus epidemic.

“We are deeply worried the institutions' money won't go out, in the best-case scenario, for a month, and in the worst-case scenario for several months,” Terry Hartle, the American Council on Education’s senior vice president for government and public affairs, said during a webinar last week for members of the Education Writers Association.

A Republican Senate committee aide, however, said colleges should stop "whining."

In an interview on Monday, the aide said, “If they were to call me two months from now, that’s one thing. But it’s 10 days [since the measure passed]. It’s whining. For God’s sake, it's 10 days old. Let’s cool it a little.”

Trying to strike a balance between different types of institutions, the stimulus bill set aside 75 percent of the money to be distributed to institutions based on the number of enrolled students who are eligible to receive Pell Grants, the federal student aid program aimed toward those with financial need.

But to help large colleges, Congress allocated the other 25 percent of the money based on enrollment numbers of full-time-equivalent students, Pell recipients or not.

The bill is heavily weighted toward institutions with large numbers of lower-income students, the aide said. "But coronavirus isn’t solely a poverty thing. It has disrupted rich and poor, the low income and the wealthy," the aide said.

The approach, however, has led to some technical questions about how the Education Department will figure out when and how much stimulus funding institutions will get, at a time when many are in urgent need of the money.

Hartle said creating a funding formula that factors in Pell and non-Pell students could delay the distribution of stimulus dollars by months.

The uncertainty arrives as the coronavirus epidemic has forced the closure of campuses, with fears of more to come, as virtually all colleges face steep revenue declines through the summer and possibly in the fall if enrollment drops. College leaders are looking for certainty on how much help is coming from the stimulus bill.

Instead of giving out the money only based on one factor, like enrollments of Pell Grant recipients, the inclusion of full-time-equivalent enrollments in the formula means the Education Department has to combine different databases. And higher education lobbyists said it's unclear if some of the needed information even exists.

And the department isn’t able to say how long the process will take.

“Most of the money will go out through a formula that doesn’t exist. The Department of Education will have to create it, and that will slow them down,” Hartle said during the webinar.

“Because of our colleges’ emphasis on serving low-income students, we initially backed the concept of distributing funds simply on the basis of relative Pell Grant enrollment, but Congress went in another direction,” said David Baime, the American Association of Community Colleges’ senior vice president for government relations and policy analysis. “The Education Department is working as fast as they can, but we haven’t been told” when the money will be available.

The Senate GOP aide, though, said the department hasn’t given congressional staff members any indications that merging the two databases is a problem. But slowed somewhat by working remotely, department officials will need to do round after round of tests to make sure billions of tax dollars are handed out accurately.

In addition, the department still has to issue guidance on questions like how the money -- half of which must be used for emergency grants to students -- can be used, the aide said. The money likely won’t be sent out until late this month or in May, the aide said, acknowledging that the department hasn’t been able to give a date.

Associations representing higher ed institutions wrote U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos last Thursday to ask for the money to be distributed quickly. “I fear this funding will be for naught for many institutions unless the department can act very quickly to make these funds available,” Hartle wrote on behalf of the associations.

The National Governors Association also wrote DeVos on Saturday, asking the department to distribute education funds in the stimulus package within two weeks. (See below graphic from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for estimated education stabilization funds for each state.)

A department spokeswoman said last Thursday that “we understand the necessity to move quickly to get CARES Act relief funds to students and educators. An internal group of experts is working to create the most efficient process for this, and we look forward to sharing more details with the field in the coming days.”

Filling Budget Holes

Whining or not, the uncertainty also is increasing the anxiety of institutions at a difficult time when they’re taking major financial blows.

The University of Wisconsin system, for example, plans to spend $78 million on refunds to students for room and board. And Florida State University estimates it will refund $11.5 million in room and board.

In addition, Hartle said, institutions are facing the loss of revenue from summer adult education and other programs. For example, one president of an institution in a major metropolitan area told him it is losing $4 million a month in parking revenue.

Several college presidents on Monday said they’re concerned about getting emergency grants in the stimulus to students.

Anne M. Kress, president of Northern Virginia Community College, said that even before the pandemic, half of NOVA students surveyed said they were having trouble paying for food and housing.

"Because of the economic impact of the pandemic, many of these same students who were on the financial margins before have now lost their jobs. They are struggling to learn remotely with outdated laptops or even on their phones. A large number are also student parents, working doubly hard to keep their families afloat and their own children learning. Sadly, some have the virus themselves or are caring for family members who do," she said.

“Students at Northern Virginia Community College need those funds today. They cannot wait a few months,” she said in an email.

Cheryl Knauer, a spokeswoman for McDaniel College, which is located in Westminster, Md., said the college doesn’t yet have definite plans for what to do with emergency grants.

But part of the money could be used to help students get technology and online access. “With our recent needed haste to move American education online quickly, the socioeconomic digital divide coupled with the country's vast urban and rural digital deserts present the greatest challenges for students to continue with their studies,” she said.

Problems are compounded for the many two-year college students facing challenges with basic needs, Joe Schaffer, president of Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne, Wyo., said in an email.

"In short, the primary reason for the urgency is to get some type of emergency financial relief in the hands of our students," he said in an email. "We are on a fast train to massive numbers of withdrawals or just disappearance of students whose lives have been impacted by the pandemic. Housing and food security are at the top of their worries and needs, primarily because so many community college students are also working (in many cases, multiple jobs and full-time)."

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How can we help?

That simple question has spurred a flurry of activity among students, faculty, staff and university administrators who have looked for ways to assist health-care workers in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether it’s repurposing university-owned equipment to decontaminate N95 masks, mixing hand sanitizer in chemistry labs for use by hospitals, collecting supplies of personal protective equipment -- of which there is a critical national shortage -- or babysitting health-care workers’ children, professionals in higher education and the students they serve have found all kinds of ways to help.

“We go into this field wanting to help others in one way or another,” said Brianna Engelson, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Minnesota. Engelson and other medical students founded MN COVIDSitters, a group that matches students with health-care professionals in the Twin Cities metropolitan area needing childcare, pet-sitting or general errand running. Engelson said more than 300 student volunteers are helping more than 200 health-care providers and their families. They're still seeking more volunteers to help more than 100 other families who have signed up for assistance.

“It’s tough to be on the sidelines watching your mentors and the people who have been such a critical part of your education giving so much while you’re sitting back at home feeling a little helpless,” said Engelson, who will be starting a residency program in psychiatry at the university in June. “I know I certainly did. Being so close to graduation, I’m so close to being there with them, yet here I am at home doing nothing. That’s part of it -- wanting to be involved, but also really wanting to support our mentors.”

Students and higher education professionals have found all manner of ways to get involved.

Peter Tonge, the chair of the chemistry department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, helped coordinate an effort to mix hand sanitizer after he received a message from the dean of Stony Brook's College of Arts and Sciences, a chemist, about a shortage at the university hospital. Tonge said the chemistry department used the World Health Organization's formulation for hand sanitizer, which is made up of hydrogen peroxide, glycerol and either ethanol or Isopropyl alcohol -- all raw materials that faculty members had in their labs.

“I created a Google spreadsheet and sent it to faculty. In a couple of hours, they filled in a spreadsheet with the location and amount of each of these reagents,” Tonge said. “We got a cart, myself and two other people went through building collecting all the reagents, took it down to our general chemistry lab, and a postdoctoral associate and a research scientist mixed up the reagents.” By 5 p.m. the same day he’d received the email, he said they’d made 17 gallons.

“That basically exhausted all of our supplies in the building, so we placed an order for another 80 gallons of ethanol, and today we made another 80 gallons of hand sanitizer,” Tonge said Friday.

In a similar effort, the Veterinary Diagnostic Lab at Oregon State University manufactured a fluid needed to transport COVID-19 test swabs in a sterile environment with the materials the lab had on hand. The fluid, known as viral transport medium, protects the virus's genetic material until the swab can be tested. Justin Sanders, an assistant professor at Oregon State's Carlson College of Veterinary Medicine, said the lab's scientist initially made three liters of the solution, enough for 1,000 tests, after learning of a shortage from an infectious disease doctor at the Corvallis, Ore.-based Samaritan Health Services. Sanders said the veterinary college has fielded requests for the solution from other hospitals after their efforts were publicized.

Universities, including Oregon State, have also been collecting supplies of personal protective equipment -- including masks, gloves and gowns -- from university labs to donate to hospitals. Oregon State collected 10 pallets of PPE, including an estimated 200,000 pairs of gloves and approximately 8,000 face masks, to donate to county emergency management centers.

“We focused on laboratories, kitchen areas, custodial -- anybody that had personal protective equipment,” said Mike Bamberger, the emergency preparedness manager at Oregon State University. “We collected it up and put in a pile. Then on the main campuses we had people go around and collect it and palletize it and take it over to the local county for distribution.”

San Jacinto College, a community college in Texas, also organized a PPE donation drive, collecting supplies from its various health-science programs.

“We work with all of our sister agencies, Harris County Emergency Management, Harris County Public Health -- we reached out to them and asked what we could do to help, and they gave us their high-need items,” said Ali Shah, the college’s emergency manager. Shah said the college has also collected specimen bags needed by local hospitals and transferred two ventilators owned by its respiratory therapy program to a local hospital. San Jacinto has also partnered with other Houston-area colleges to use 3-D printers to manufacture a component of protective face shields for health-care workers.

Faculty members and students at multiple universities -- including but not limited to Duke University, in North Carolina; Rowan University, in New Jersey; SUNY Stony Brook; and the Universities of Montevallo, in Alabama; and South Carolina -- have mobilized to manufacture masks or face shields using 3-D printers.

Some universities, such as Duke and the University of Nebraska Medical Center, are using different technologies to decontaminate N95 masks, which are in scarce supply.

Michigan State University has repurposed a spiral oven in its Food Processing and Innovation Center -- which is typically used by food companies to test new recipes -- to decontaminate masks using heat. Michigan State has partnered with a local hospital provider, Sparrow Health System, on the effort.

“We think this can have a significant impact for our health-care providers in the Lansing region,” said Jeffrey W. Dwyer, the director of MSU Extension and senior associate dean of outreach and engagement for the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. “We will simultaneously be able to work with others around the state and even the country to share our protocol with them and work with them to adapt it.”

A group of scientific professionals, engineers and clinicians has organized a volunteer consortium, N95DECON, to review and publish scientific information on mask decontamination strategies.

“We came together and did what scientists do best -- read available literature, synthesize information, evaluate data and debate vigorously. Our goal is to better equip hospitals and health-care personnel in these challenging times with concise, organized, data-backed information on this important issue,” said Hana El-Samad, an organizer of the consortium and the Kuo Family Endowed Professor and vice chair of the department of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco.

El-Samad emphasized that decontamination is a substitute for what would be the best solution -- an increased supply of PPE. But she said the need for decontamination among health-care providers is great.

“It is true that many institutions and medical centers are taking a courageous lead in setting up methods and protocols for decontamination,” El-Samad said. "But there are over 6,000 hospitals in the U.S. alone, plus many other settings with professional users of N95 masks in the U.S. and abroad. Only a handful have adopted any decontamination strategies to date, but a growing number are realizing it might be a decision they need to make in the near future.”

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W. J. T. Mitchell is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. But his new book, Mental Traveler: A Father, a Son and a Journey Through Schizophrenia (University of Chicago Press) comes out of a very personal experience. His son, Gabriel, was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 21 and ended his own life 18 years later. Mitchell's memoir tells the story of how his family hoped and coped.

He responded to questions via email.

Q: Can you share the timeline of your son's diagnosis and death?

A: Gabe showed early signs of a thought disorder in the fall of 1991. He was 18 years old and a freshman at New York University. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the fall of 1994, when he was hospitalized after a violent psychotic break and was medicated for the first time. He moved from the hospital to a halfway house for a few weeks while we found a residential facility for him. He moved into Humboldt House, a residence operated by the Thresholds agency, in the winter of 1995, and lived there for about eight years.

In 2004 he found Section 8 subsidized housing in Marina City [in Chicago], where he lived until his death in 2012. In that period he worked with Thresholds in a variety of educational and occupational programs. He took classes in filmmaking at Columbia College, attended film classes at the University of Chicago’s downtown extension program and participated in a variety of ventures in music and theater. He also started writing screenplays and experimenting with drawing, painting, calligraphy and geometric diagrams. From 2002 to 2011 he worked part-time (20 hours per week on average) at the Jewel Food chain in the produce department, starting in the Uptown store and moving later to the flagship store in Chicago’s River North area.

He created his own website, Philmworx.com, wrote three screenplays and a graphic novel, began learning the skills of film editing, and made a number of films, including a feature-length film entitled Philosomentary. He continued taking film classes, taught some classes in screenwriting and in 2006 joined a group of University of Chicago film scholars who were studying Jean-Luc Godard’s nine-hour Histoire(s) du cinema in minute detail. Around 2010 he began to conceive of a long film that would document the “Histoire(s) de la folie,” or history of madness, and started work on a pilot film entitled Crazy Talk. He asked me to serve as the image researcher for the film, tasked with compiling the vast archive of representations of insanity in film, theater, literature and beyond. As a starting point, in the winter of 2011 I organized a University of Chicago seminar entitled Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media and Visual Culture, which I taught along with my colleagues Francoise Meltzer, a comparative literature scholar, and her husband, Bernard Rubin, a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Gabriel attended this seminar, debuting the pilot film for his magnum opus and giving a lecture about it after the screening. He continued to see a talk therapist, a psychiatrist and a social worker during this period and continued to work at the Jewel Food store.

In the fall of 2011, he asked for a leave from work so that he could go back to film school at Columbia College full-time. In the winter of 2012, he struggled to deal with incompletes and had to suspend his enrollment at Columbia. On June 24, 2012, he took his own life by jumping from the 59th floor of Marina City.

Q: Why did you decide to write this book?

A: At first, I had no intention of writing a memoir. I turned the research into the history of madness that I had begun for Gabe’s [film] into a series of essays on various aspects of the challenge he had posed to me. I gathered the essays in a completed book manuscript, entitled Seeing Through Madness that was submitted to University of Chicago Press in 2017, where it was accepted for publication. As I worked on the final manuscript, however, the biographical introduction began to grow out of control, and I came to realize that it needed to be a separate book. I decided to suspend work on Seeing Through Madness and began work on Mental Traveler, which took about three years and numerous rewrites to finish.

Q: What did you know about schizophrenia prior to your son's diagnosis?

A: Very little, really. I knew that it was the scariest form of mental illness defined by psychiatry, that it had an enormous range of symptoms, was thought to be incurable and only partially manageable with medication. I knew that it carried the most damaging stigma of all the mental disorders. After 20 years of living with it and helping Gabe manage it, I continue to wonder whether the label names anything very definite. Gabriel vacillated between accepting the diagnosis and cooperating with his doctors, on the one hand, and denying it on the other, trying to replace it with PTSD and recovered memories of a trauma that no one else could remember. He also became increasingly militant about affirming mental illness as a political identity and a minority status that combines the roles of the disabled with the outsider artist.

Q: You include in the book a number of drawings Gabriel made. What do they show?

A: The drawings provide a window into his mental and social life. The drawings for his music video, “Desolation Row,” portray him as an Dylanesque outsider artist and skateboarder witnessing homelessness, addiction and mental illness in the gang-dominated neighborhood of Humboldt Park, where he lived from 1995 to 2004. In his diagrams, he presents himself as cosmologist, producing a Cartesian “grid theory” (also realized in a short film by that title) that excludes all negative spaces and numbers. Grid theory traces the human impulse to design abstract graphic models from the ancient world to the present. Gabe regarded his grid as a model for everything from the structure of the DNA molecule to the shape of the universe, to the form of a healthy mental life. He began designing a three-dimensional sculptural version of his grid in an “infinite cube,” constructed out of mirrored glass around a wire matrix containing 1,000 omnidirectional LED lights. After his death, this design was realized as a gift by the British sculptor Antony Gormley and now is scheduled to be a permanent public installation at the University of Chicago’s Law School.

Q: How did you and Gabriel navigate medical treatment for him?

A: Navigating the world of mental health was always difficult. He had excellent social workers who helped him get and hold a job and regularize his life, but he never found a talk therapist who could establish a strong relationship with him. Gabe could quickly go from compliance, taking his meds, to going off the medication and self-medicating with alcohol, especially in the first eight years of the illness. In the last 10 years of his life, he managed to stay sober and increased his productivity as an artist and filmmaker. We think that his suicide might have been triggered by his reducing his meds in order to sharpen his creative talents, which were increasingly in demand from fellow artists. In the final months of his life, he made a film about the madness of the '60s, a montage of historical images with the voiceover of Bill Ayers reading from his memoir, Fugitive Days. In his final weeks, he attended a conference of comic artists including Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, R. Crumb and Joe Sacco, where the borders between mental disorders and graphic memoirs seemed very porous indeed.

Q: What is the message you hope your book will have?

A: I find it hard to boil it down to a single message. I’m sure I wrote it as a way of mourning Gabriel and trying to keep him alive. The narrative arc of the book traces a transformation of our relationship and the beginning of a strange role reversal. The longer he survived schizophrenia, the more I came to admire his courage and energy in fighting the illness. At some point, I began to feel not just love and sympathy for my sick son, but wonder at his determination to follow his own creative path while watching his friends move on to marriage and career.

I began to see his “disability” as something he was engaged in conquering and transforming into an ability, and although he saw himself as an outsider artist, he steadfastly shot his films with a firm conviction that he would some day walk the red carpet at the Academy Awards. (Gabe loved to portray himself as a superhero “capable of drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and getting kicked out of prestigious universities at the same time,” and his favorite Marvel superheroes were all mental cases: e.g., Batman: depression; Wolverine: misanthropy; Dark Phoenix: schizophrenia.)

In some strange way that I have still not figured out, I began to think of him as my consigliere, my best friend, and as my caregiver in the not-too-distant future. As for “messages” for other people, there are dozens. I wanted people to see how a family copes with mental illness, how it can drive them apart or pull them together -- sometimes both. The book is not just about the two of us: Gabe’s mother, his sister and a large extended family of close friends are crucial to the story. I wanted to show the complexity of caregiving, the compromises and ingenuity it demands.

One chapter of the book is called “On the Immoral Career of the Care Giver,” an echo of Erving Goffman’s “The Moral Career of the Mental Patient.” It tries to show the double binds that afflict a family that decides to consign one its members to the mental health system, how it may be necessary to lie to a loved one and why they might come to see their caregivers as persecutors and saviors at the same time. I wanted to show how a father can fail his son while trying to do his best, and succeed now and then in spite of himself. I wanted to give mental illness a human face and show how close it is to whatever it is we mean by “normality.” I wanted to show that madness can be quite compatible with wit, humor and intelligence, and that crazy people are not crazy all the time. I increasingly felt drawn into Gabe’s world, and one of the chapters in the Seeing Through Madness sequel to this memoir is entitled “Method, Madness, Montage,” a reflection on the whole crazy attempt to see and show the totality of mental disorders.

I’m firmly convinced that any firm lines between madness and sanity can only be drawn in the shifting sands of culture, social norms, legal institutions and medical knowledge. No one gets through a human life without experiencing some form of madness, directly or indirectly. It is endemic to our species, as philosophers from Plato to Erasmus (The Praise of Folly) to R. D. Laing have shown. Laing regarded so-called schizophrenics as akin to 17th-century seafarers, most of whom never returned to tell about their adventures. Gabe was among the few who came back and tried to tell his story. “On Gifted Schizophrenia” will be one of the chapters of Seeing Through Madness, and it will link Gabe’s story to figures like John Nash, Judge Schreber, Aby Warburg, Elyn Saks and William Blake.

We all go crazy, whether from love, trauma, neglect or brain chemistry. Anyone can be driven insane, and the American prison system is a great engine for the production of mental disorders, while our profit-driven health-care system is at best a mediocre palliative with its emphasis on drugs rather than talk therapy and its tendency to transform diagnostic labels into fatal stigmas. Madness is an essential part of what it means to be human. It is a question of degree of mental suffering and disorder, rather than kind. We experienced some part of this world, up close and personal, and I wanted to convey that as honestly as I could.

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One day down, a million more to go.

Public health officials in some areas of the country are predicting the infection rate for the novel coronavirus won't peak until midsummer. Meanwhile, a tiger at the Bronx Zoo has tested positive for COVID-19, as has the Tiger King himself.

To brighten your day a little, this guy is rating homemade masks on Twitter. There are some … creative solutions.

Need a non-coronavirus-related diversion? Check out this guy, spotted in Boulder, Colo., taking his leashed raccoon out for a walk.

im not sure what’s happening here, but someone in #boulder has leashed up a raccoon and is taking it on a walk because why not

h/t @Matt_Badman pic.twitter.com/N5Pu2K7YUT

— Austin Braun (@AustinOnSocial) April 6, 2020

Now on to the news.

Fitch Ratings predicts the funds from the recently passed coronavirus relief bill won't be enough to offset the pain colleges and universities are feeling. Moody's Investors Services said the same last week.

As this moment in time unfolds, the American Historical Association and its peer organizations are asking institutions that employ historians to be flexible and humane, as historians are crucial to have around in a time of crisis.

University presidents and athletics administrators are starting to take pay cuts as the pandemic rattles the economy. They aren't alone; the chairman of Kaplan Inc., the for-profit corporation educational services provider, is taking a 50 percent cut.

Florida's college savings program is deferring payments into the program for the next few months.

Here’s a quick roundup of our latest stories, in case you’ve fallen a bit behind (we don't blame you):

What are colleges doing to get students to enroll next semester? Easing requirements and running events online, Scott Jaschik reports.

Greta Anderson reports on how the needs of disabled students may be overlooked during this time, according to advocates.

Most colleges have closed down campuses, and now they're scrambling to come up with refund plans, Emma Whitford reports.

Colleges are preparing contingency plans in case faculty members fall ill or die as the global health pandemic continues, writes Lilah Burke.

News from elsewhere

Bloomberg Government wrote about how higher education efforts in prisons are adjusting to the pandemic.

What will happen to college sports? Education Dive looks ahead to football season.

The pandemic has shed light on how some students live in different worlds, The New York Times reports.

Percolating Thoughts

Two higher ed experts lay out four changes to federal student aid policies that could help low-income students, especially as the economic ramifications of the pandemic grow more dire.

Researchers at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research wrote about how the coronavirus relief act leaves out students with private loans.

The owner of a test prep company makes the case to move the SAT and the ACT online.

Have any percolating thoughts or notice any from others? Feel free to send them our way or comment below.

We’ll continue bringing you the news you need during these unsettling times. Keep sending us your questions and story ideas. We’ll get through this together.

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As administrators weigh the unknowns of the pandemic, hiring managers get creative with podcasts and virtual tours.

For teaching experts in some of the nation’s poorest communities, the pandemic has meant 18-hour days and worries about the economic and emotional health of their instructors and students.

Another bond ratings agency is predicting that the recently signed federal stimulus package will not provide enough relief to colleges and universities to offset the combination of revenue being lost and expenses that are increasing because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The higher education sector is experiencing prorated declines in some student fees along with an increase in operating expenses driven in part by the shift to online learning, Fitch Ratings said in a note released today. That puts the most pressure on institutions with relatively less liquidity, low margins and difficulty balancing their budgets, as well as residential colleges that rely heavily on revenue from student fees.

“Many institutions are evaluating expense reduction actions, including support-staff layoffs or furloughs,” Fitch said in its note. “Higher-rated institutions with strong financial cushions should have sufficient resources to cover budget gaps at least through the end of the 2020 fiscal year.”

Fitch also provides estimates on how $14.3 billion that the stimulus package dedicated to colleges and universities could translate on the ground. A tenth of the funding is to be divided between historically black colleges and universities, as well as grants for small institutions that have unmet needs related to the coronavirus. Three-quarters of the remaining 90 percent is to be distributed based on enrollment of full-time students receiving Pell Grants, with leftover money to be distributed based on share of enrollment not receiving Pell Grants.

If the formula is applied uniformly across eligible students using 2018-19 enrollment data, Fitch estimates that institutions would receive about $1,400 per Pell student and $200 per non-Pell student.

Larger institutions, which are likely to have more resources on hand, are likely to receive the most aid, according to the ratings agency. Small private colleges, which have less financial wiggle room, may need more federal assistance.

“Even with funds earmarked specifically for small institutions with unmet coronavirus-related financial needs, the demand for, and method of, disbursement for these funds is yet unknown and may leave some smaller institutions to face heightened financial strain and rating pressure,” Fitch’s note said.

Generally, Fitch anticipates financial margins tightening across the sector.

The findings on coronavirus costs exceeding new revenue in the stimulus are similar to conclusions reached by Moody’s Investors service last week.

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The American Historical Association and several peer organizations in a new statement urge institutions that employ historians to be flexible and humane during COVID-19. The statement calls for clarity regarding any changes to faculty review, reappointment and tenure processes, and for only optional delays to individual personnel actions, such as tenure clocks. Non-tenure-track faculty members should be compensated for previously contracted spring, summer and fall course offerings, and universities should consider "extending the duration of funded support to graduate students as well as offering whatever support possible to graduate students who have suffered serious financial losses relating to the impact of the pandemic." Libraries, museums and archives should similarly be as flexible as possible, according to the AHA.

"Everything has a history and historians are especially well suited to explain social and cultural challenges met in crisis situations, epidemics and pandemics among them," the statement says. "Like our colleagues in related disciplines, historians can also explore the challenges public health authorities, governments and nonprofit institutions face in mediating possible conflicts between individual rights and the good of the greater society."

The document concludes, "When a neighbor asks, 'Is it worth sacrificing the economy for a few hundred thousand lives,' it's time for a humanist to enter the discussion. This important, and difficult, conversation too has a history."

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Parents in Florida who had signed up for prepaid plans to save for college will get some extra time before starting monthly payments.

The Florida Prepaid College Board announced today that it is deferring payments until July to help families through the economic and global health crisis caused by the novel coronavirus, according to a news release.

Prepaid plans let parents start saving for a child's college education while also locking in future costs. Plans start at $44 per month for newborns, which is the lowest minimum amount in five years.

New customers who buy a plan during what's left of the open enrollment period will have the $50 application fee waived. Their payments won't start until July.

Current customers will have their April, May and June payments deferred, unless they choose to continue payments. Payment schedules will be extended by three months.

“As uncertain as these times are, we encourage Florida families to take comfort in knowing that Prepaid College Plans offer certainty and security for your college savings,” Kevin Thompson, executive director of Florida Prepaid, said in the news release. “All Prepaid College Plans are guaranteed by the State of Florida, ensuring families can never lose their investment.”

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The number of language learners travelling from Germany via Association of German Language Schools and Language-Tour Operators (FDSV) members dropped by 15% in 2019, while the length of programs are continuing to shorten, statistics have revealed.

The language school and travel sector has come to a “complete standstill” due to the coronavirus pandemic, the survey noted. In 2019, the FDSV estimated that around 140,000 language student travelled overseas from Germany.

“We know from countless conversations with disappointed customers…that the need for other forms of teaching is enormous”

“One thing is for sure, the need for language training remains high,” FDSV said.

In 2019, English strengthened its position as most popular language choice for clients booking via FDSV, the choice language for 79% of customers overall. In 2018, it represented 76.5%.

In terms of choice destination, the UK increased in popularity and grew 5% ÔÇô being selected by half of FDSV bookings in 2019. Other destinations remained stable or dropped slightly.

However, “trends and views are under the current circumstances hardly possible”, the organisation indicated, adding that providers in Germany are trying to bridge the difficult situation with alternative online language courses.

“We know from countless conversations with disappointed customers who had to cancel their language study trip at Easter that the need for other forms of teaching is enormous,” chair of the FDSV Board of Directors Peter Schuto said.

Should the situation be relaxed by May, a portion of the summer business can still be saved, according to FSDV.

However, all school trips are cancelled until the end of July, when the school year finishes. Educators will have to hope for this to return next year, the organisation said.

“In the adult sector, bookings will most likely pick up again quickly.” The booking behaviour for young learners will depend more on global travel warnings being rescinded.┬á

Young learners made up around 64% of all clients ÔÇô “significantly larger” than the adult sector at 36%.

The costs of courses decreased by almost 5% compared with the previous year ÔÇô with the average price standing at around Ôé¼1,261 and lasting just under 14 days.

Since 2017, the average price of language trips has dropped by around 17%.

Released in conjunction with Hochschule Heilbronn FDSV’s┬ámarket survey results have been released in the middle of the corona crisis.

Despite indications of reductions in numbers study travel students from Germany, the organisation noted that direct comparisons with last year’s survey are difficult due to different companies taking part in the survey.

Beyond the coronavirus crisis, providers will also have to wait to see how Brexit and the USA’s political course affects the number of Germans travelling overseas for language training.

FDSV also added that to its knowledge there are around 95 providers of language travel courses in Germany ÔÇô half of these follow German travel law with the remainder not assuming liability for trips booked.

The post Germany: FDSV members see 15% drop in 2019 appeared first on The PIE News.

University presidents and athletic administrators are among those who have begun taking pay cuts amid the pandemic and recession.

Michael Schill, president of the University of Oregon, on Friday announced a temporary reduction of 12 percent to his pay, The Register-Guard reported. The university's vice presidents and athletic director will have their pay cut by 10 percent. The reductions will be in place for six months but may be extended.

“We are almost certainly all going to have to make sacrifices,” Schill said.

Athletic department coaches and other staff members at Iowa State University collectively will take $3 million in pay reductions, according to the Des Moines Register. The pay cuts are due in part to lost revenue from canceled basketball tournaments, Iowa State said.

The provost and president at Stanford University will take 20 percent pay cuts, according to Palo Alto's The Daily Post. Other senior administrators at Stanford will see their pay slashed by 5 to 10 percent.

Andrew Rosen, the chairman of Kaplan Inc., which partners with Purdue University on the online Purdue University Global, has elected to take a 50 percent pay cut, Kaplan's holding company said in a corporate filing.

Carol Folt, who became the University of Southern California's president last year, will take a 20 percent cut, the Los Angeles Times reported. Just before the pandemic hit, the university closed on its purchase of an $8.6 million presidential residence for Folt in Santa Monica.

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Australia will allow international students access to retirement savings that they have accumulated while working in the country if they are facing financial difficulties due to the coronavirus.

The announcement has been hailed as a “positive step”, and will benefit students who have been unable to access government payments, such as the new JobKeeper funding ÔÇô introduced as a result of the pandemic.

“My message to our international students is: you are our friends, our classmates, our colleagues”

Currently only offered upon leaving Australia, the new legislation will provide international students who have been in the country longer than 12 months with immediate access to accumulated superannuation (pension program) funds.

Applications for the early release of superannuation will be accepted through the government website from 20 April.

Acting minister for Immigration, Alan Tudge, said the changes announced will help temporary visa holders who may have lost work hours as a result of the coronavirus continue to support themselves while in the country.

“In line with changes being made for Australian citizens and permanent residents, most temporary visa holders with work rights will now be able to access their Australian superannuation to help support themselves during this crisis,” he said.

However, echoing sentiments shared by the Australian prime minister on April 3, Tudge added that temporary visa holders unable to support themselves under the arrangement over the coming six months are “strongly encouraged to return home”.

“For these individuals, it’s time to go home, and they should make arrangements as quickly as possible,” he said.

Tudge added that the government will further engage with the international education sector, which is already providing some financial support for students. Some providers are offering fee discounts, he said.

Minister for Education in Australia Dan Tehan added that the government “continues to work with universities and the international education sector to minimise the impact of COVID-19, and that includes finding innovative ways to support international students”.

Those students working in aged care and as nurses will also be permitted to work beyond the 40 hours per fortnight that international students are limited to.

Students employed in major supermarkets also had those hours extended to “help get stock on shelves during the high demand”, ┬ábut that extension will be removed from May 1, the government added.

“I also encourage our international students to take advantage of the mental health support offered by their education provider. My message to our international students is: you are our friends, our classmates, our colleagues and members of our community,” Tehan said.

A message on international students pic.twitter.com/jjqXXDMtar

ÔÇö Dan Tehan (@DanTehanWannon) April 4, 2020

The Queensland International Education and Training Advisory Group has proposed a National Hardship Fund, in an open letter to the prime minister Scott Morrison.

“As part of the COVID-19 response package, we are requesting your government to urgently consider establishing a National Hardship Fund to support the International Education and Training sector,” the letter read.

The industry is “subject to severe stress”, with the country’s 570,000 intentional┬ástudents and its providers at risk.

“Without some support, these students will become a public health and humanitarian risk for the Federal, State and Territory governments,” it continued.

Universities and TAFE face “significant financial challenges”, while private colleges and English language schools are “at imminent risk of closure”.

“We believe that it is imperative to help keep the doors of our education institutions open, and provide support to alleviate the hardship being experienced by these students, many of whom have lost part-time jobs, and are struggling to meet their tuition and accommodation payments while finding money for food and groceries,” the letter noted.

“Given the lack of any political appetite from the major parties to permit international studentsÔÇÖ access to welfare programs currently available to Australian citizens, a National Hardship Fund appears to be our best way forward,” chief executive of the IEAA, Phil Honeywood explained.

“We believe that it is imperative to…provide support to alleviate the hardship being experienced by these students”

Although many ELICOS students will not be able to access Australian superannuation or benefit from relaxed working opportunities, the initiatives are “positive steps towards including measures for international education in national support packages”, Brett Blacker┬áCEO at English Australia said.

“Each week of this pandemic seems to bring a new challenge, but I am confident that our sector can meet these challenges,” Blacker noted.

“The ELICOS sector is full of innovative and passionate people, who are all working together to keep our sector alive and our students supported through the greatest challenge that our sector has┬áever faced,” he added.

“Any country that decides that international education is going to become a major industry… they need to be able to show that it’s a two-way street,” Honeywood told SBS News.

“That in difficult times, there is an acknowledgement that these young people do need help on a case by case hardship basis.”

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Education providers need to develop a “proper solution” for delivering English language programs or risk closing down, an edtech entrepreneur has warned.

Jarrad Merlo, the co-founder of Australia-based E2Language, is urging English language providers to ramp up online provisions. The provider has recently launched its E2 classroom platform.

“We’ve spoken to a number of teachers and they’re starting to burn out with lesson preparation”

Failure to adapt to a new market caused by the coronavirus pandemic will cause staff burnout and slumps in revenue, which could lead to the closure of some schools for good, Merlo suggested.

In an article published online, Merlo laid out short-term workarounds for providers struggling with digital conversion of their courses.

“I’m raising my hand as the co-founder of this platform to say, ‘hey, you know, we can help you out’,” he told The PIE News.

“We’ve spoken to a number of teachers and they’re starting to burn out with lesson preparation ÔÇô the shift to technology is a pretty stressful time for those guys.”

E2Language ÔÇô endorsed by NEAS ÔÇô has been building its E2 classroom platform for the last two years, and it is now reaching out to English language providers on to it.

The provider is currently working with the University of Queensland, Pearson ÔÇô on its PTE academic test ÔÇô and┬áCambridge Boxhill Language Assessment owned┬áOccupational English Test.

E2Language can “get a school up and running on the platform really quickly”, Merlo explained.

“What seems to have happened is that [providers are] so concentrated on the present moment that they are just doing whatever they can,” he said. They’re not looking for a solid proper solution.

“Zoom screen sharing documents from your desktop is not going to fly for longer than a couple of weeks,” Merlo said.

“If you don’t shift to a proper solution in the next two weeks, I think students will leave.”

The post Develop “proper” online solution, ELT providers told appeared first on The PIE News.

"The absenteeism of professors is not a new issue," said Chuck Staben, former president of the University of Idaho and current professor there. "What is a new issue is the scale of what we're potentially facing."

In the face of rising coronavirus cases, the scale of professor absenteeism could be much larger than anything colleges have seen in recent decades.

The devil's arithmetic isn't hard to follow. Some models have predicted over 40 percent of the American public will get COVID-19. Nineteen percent of cases need to be hospitalized, and 6 percent need intensive care. The White House predicts now 100,000 to 240,000 deaths, at best, from the new coronavirus. At least four prominent faculty members already have passed away.

Some academic leaders have begun to ask how to prepare for what seems increasingly inevitable. What happens if professors, on a never-before-seen scale, get too sick to teach? What happens if they die?

Last week Feng Sheng Hu, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sent a memo to faculty members in his college.

"In the coming weeks, it is likely that more cases will emerge in our campus community and our college," Hu said. "For [students'] benefit, it is important that we do everything we can to maintain course continuity now that instruction has moved online for the rest of the semester. With that in mind, we ask you to make contingency plans for how your classes will continue, should you become unavailable to teach for any reason."

Hu suggested arranging for a colleague to step in or planning alternative activities.

After English professor Curtis Perry tweeted about getting the memo, other faculty from institutions in the U.S., Canada and New Zealand chimed in that they had received similar letters, or had sent them out to their teams.

Perry and many others bristled at the requests, both at their euphemistic language along with the idea that professors facing death should be responsible for keeping business running.

"You get an A! And you get an A!" someone joked in the replies.

"I'm dead," another said. "My contract has for sure ended."

Perry clarified that regardless of the tone of the request, he objected to the idea that he could even complete it.

"It is of course reasonable to be concerned about the illness or death of faculty -- I'm just not sure it makes sense to ask faculty themselves to take the lead in setting up contingencies without providing guidelines concerning budgetary support," he said via email. "Am I supposed to ask a grad student to add my class to their portfolio without compensation?"

Even disregarding budgetary concerns, it may be impossible to find instructors who can step in for niche or upper-level courses.

The University of Illinois emphasized that considering the impact of illness is a normal part of business.

"Contingencies for replacement instruction are a standard consideration in our academic operations during a normal semester where face-to-face instruction accounts for the majority of our course delivery," said a university spokesperson via email. "But we realize that some of our standard practices for replacement instruction may not translate when faculty and students are not physically in the same place."

Hu said he was simply asking everyone to do their best in difficult circumstances. "There are various reasons that an instructor may not be able to teach, including an illness and family obligations," he said via email. "We are not telling instructors what specific contingency plans they should make. We want them to do whatever they feel is best for their students and their courses."

Staben, who now teaches biology, cited a few potential options for how to proceed when a professor can't teach, though none are ideal.

There's the substitute model, the class could be frozen or suspended, or students could be given an "instructor incomplete" similar to the incomplete grade they would receive if students were unable to finish a course.

But freezing a course or giving an instructor incomplete may run afoul of current financial aid rules, Staben said. A substitute model could put an incredible burden on a few people in a small department. One other option would be to move a class to asynchronous instruction, but few professors have those resources lined up.

Staben said most institutions are unprepared for a potential crisis, pointing out that while the best continuity of operations plan he's seen, from the University of Washington, asks planners to prepare for staff absenteeism of 25 percent, the college's public academic continuity plan doesn't make the same consideration for faculty.

"If the University of Washington has 10 plumbers and they need to make sure that the plumbing system stays in operation, then the eight plumbers who are left can do that," he said. "But not necessarily in the nuclear physics department."

John Lombardi, former leader at several universities and the author of How Universities Work, said that whether this planning is really necessary still remains to be seen.

"Probably useful to think about this, but probably not useful to construct complicated alternative contingencies covering every imaginable sequence of illness, whether related to the virus or not," he said via email. "Unless we imagine a massive collapse of the university workforce, it's likely best to try and deal with these issues within the context of normal sick leave, normal reallocation of work and similar adjustments."

Higher ed would do well, he said, to spend its time on the problems it's already facing.

Staben said he personally is unprepared for his class to go on without him. Regardless, he feels this is an issue faculty need to grapple with.

"We're responsible for the quality of educational outcomes. We're responsible for the curriculum. We should want to be engaged in ensuring successful completion of that curriculum," he said. "It's not about grades so much as what those students were supposed to learn."

One thing is for certain. At some institutions, the plans are being laid. One can only hope they'll never be needed.

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