Free Choice or Mandated Healthy Choices?

The University of New Hampshire instituted and revoked an on-campus ban on the sale of so-called energy drinks in the same day this week. Apparently the Dining Services administrator (although the exact individual or governing body initiating this policy wasn’t clearly identified in the Inside Higher Ed article) made the decision to ban the sale of all energy drinks on campus in an attempt to further its self-stated mission to turn UNH into the “healthiest campus in the US” by 2020. That same day, the university’s President quashed the ban indefinitely due to conflicting evidence regarding the health effects of those products. While weighing in on the topic, student leaders noted that students could simply walk across the street to get their fix of energy drinks, so a campus ban would be nothing more than an inconvenience. The bigger question that this ban elucidated was “Who is responsible for the health of students when it comes to lifestyle choices such as food/drink intake and by extension, alcohol, drug, and tobacco use?”

The University of Colorado weighed in on this topic in 2008 by conducting an optional survey of the University community (faculty, staff and students) regarding the total ban of tobacco product use on all of its campuses (which include a medical campus, a commuter campus, and two residential campuses). According to a Boulder Faculty Assembly Resolution of Support for Restricting Smoking on the Boulder Campus, the survey results indicated a “strong majority of persons supporting a total ban of smoking on University property, with strong majorities supporting the ban at UCD [which includes a commuter campus and a separate medical campus], and near majorities at UCB and UCCS [the two residential campuses]” (bold added). In other words, those who worked on the medical campus, or attended classes at a commuter campus strongly supported the ban, and those who actually live on their campuses full time did not support the ban. The use of the word “near majority” is a political way of saying that a simple majority of the constituents on the residential campuses did NOT support the ban. (In my opinion, that is somewhat like saying that Al Gore won the 2004 election by a near majority because he earned lots of votes in the states where he did gain a majority.)

Although I do not like being in the vicinity of smokers, and hate having to walk through a cloud of smoke every time I enter or exit the building where I work, I do not believe that it is within the purview of a university to dictate whether or not students, faculty, and staff engage in the use of a legal substance whether that be tobacco products, Pepsi Max, or a Snickers bar. On the other hand, I absolutely support the full ban of tobacco use inside a workplace. Second-hand smoke does not discriminate as it pervades the interior of a building, so if my office-mate or the occupant of a nearby office smoked, so would I whether I liked it or not. In the end, the University of Colorado did not ban the use of all tobacco products on all of its campuses. The medical campus (which houses the medical school, several hospitals and outpatient medical facilities) implemented a tobacco use ban on April 6, 2009. During the first six months of policy implementation, employees were provided with a “smoking shack” located away from the entrance of a building, and during that time, employees were encouraged to participate in smoking cessation session. After six months the policy was fully enforced. The most interesting question on the university’s Smoking Ban FAQ website was “Can I smoke in my car?” The answer stated that if you car is parked on campus then it would be a violation of the campus policy. It will be interesting to see if the other campuses decide to implement a similar policy in the future.

College Students, Homeless?? Not So Unbelieveable

A "FaceBook friend" of mine posted this link earlier today regarding homelessness and hunger at college campuses across the country. While the story was published on NPR in July 2010, which may or may not be "current", I still find it very relevant today. The article is about the the growing number of college students who find themselves homeless and/or hungry at some point in time during their college career. One student featured in the article got through a portion of his academic year by sleeping on the sofas in the library and showering at the campus recreation center. UCLA created an Economic Crisis Response Team after beginning to hear similar stories in 2008.

Some may find this to be "unbelievable", particularly those who either see college as a safe haven that is often immune to societal ills or those who assume that college is an ivory tower, for people who do not experience personal life trauma. For those of us in a student affairs type position, we know differently. We know that there are a number of students who were living in a homeless and hungry situation when they were recruited to college. We hear the stories after students have begun school as they desperately try to figure out how to pay the bill that up until now seemed so far away. We see stories of college graduates who are so far in debt they must move back in with parent or friends to avoid homelessness while working a low paying job and attempting to pay off student loans accrued in college. yes, homelessness is a very current issue for college students.

The National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth has worked to establish policy which would help identify students in the college application and financial aid process. These students, identified as Unaccompanied Youth or Independent Youth, are provided with assistance in completing documents such as the FAFSA. Anyone who has ever completed their FAFSA knows how much information is required. Some students have no way of knowing certain pieces related to their parents tax information...they may not have parents, or parents may not have an income to report. Some of the NAEHCY policies help students figure out how to classify themselves to answer those questions.

Making this a much more "current issue" for me, I received a call from a distraught parent today asking what to do if she could not pay her sons bill. it was his first semester, and as she stated "the bills keep coming". The family was desperate for help and begging me to do something. In doing research, i learned that they had taken advantage of financial aid awarded- a parent loan and an unsubsidized student load. They were not a family that was "Pell Eligible", but they did qualify for these loans. They learned the loans did not cover it. She indicated the entire family was working to pay his tuition, including the student himself and a teen aged sister. While this family did not indicate homelessness or hunger, the desperation in her voice reminded me of this article I had just read.

Then there are the students who are graduating every year in debt. I recently saw this YouTube clip, where a recent grad discusses being $80,000 in debt at 24 years old. She is using her degree, working in her chosen field, but not making much money. She has the choice of being homeless or moving in with her parents. Thankfully living with her parents is an option, but I cant help but think that at this stage in her life, she is feeling like she should be able to survive on her own.

As I reflect upon the conversation I had late in the day, the article I read first thing this morning, and my experience working with the special populations of UNC's Independent Youth, I cant help but think that higher education has taken a major turn is purpose...the 11th Generation if you will :) Today's college campus may just be a place where one can find safety and security that has never been felt before. One may initially think that sleeping on a sofa in a library and showering at the rec center is terrible and sad. But to the student, it is better than sleeping in their car and taking a bath in a gas station sink. For some students living in a residence hall could be the most secure place they have ever lived.

Religious Institutions Free from Antidiscrimination Laws?

I cannot imagine working for an organization that allows disability discrimination towards an employee and then retaliates against the employee when they threaten to go through the legal system. That is exactly what happened when Cheryl Perich told the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran School that she was going to pursue legal action. Ms. Perich had to take several months of leave due to a narcolepsy disability. Once her doctor released Ms. Perich back to work, her employer, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran School, told her that they did not feel she was fit to come back to work and instead wanted the temporary teacher (hired to replace Ms. Perich) to stay on permanently. Ms. Perich refused to sign any sort of resignation letter and as a result, the school stated she was being insubordinate and acting in a manner that was a direct violation of the church's teachings about resolving issues within the institution rather than going through the legal system. Ms. Perich was fired the following month.

This may seem like an open and shut case of disability discrimination and retaliation under the Americans with Disabilities Act. However, in this case Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran School is protected from their actions by something called ministerial exception. For the last 40 years, ministerial exception allows religious institutions exemption from employment protections laws. Ministerial exemption is a rule that prohibits courts from ruling on employment disputes involving ministers. Courts dismiss cases involving ministerial employment issues based because the First Amendment does not allow them invade upon religion. The ministerial exemption has been the reason that several cases in the past have been dismissed and not heard by the courts. Such cases have included a lawsuit in 2004 by a woman stating she was being pressured to resign due to gender discrimination (which included her attempt to report the president’s actions in covering up sexual offenses) and in another case were an elementary teacher, Madeline Weishuhn, working at St. Mary Catholic School, was fired because she went to police instead of the president about student allegations of sexual abuse.

For many, the hope is that the current case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School vs. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is scheduled to be heard on October 5, 2011, will finally get the attention of the Supreme Court and perhaps change the interpretation of the First Amendment in regards to protecting religious freedom and employment laws. Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School is claiming that Ms. Perich was serving the school as a commissioned minister, which many argue is a stretch since her primary role at the school was as a school teacher. The Obama administration has provided a brief siding with Ms. Perich, the ACLU has also provided arguments on behalf of Ms. Perich, and so has a group of 60 plus professors of law and religion. The professors are not only siding with MS. Perich, they are also arguing that the Supreme Court should do away with ministerial exception (attempted several times already in cases of gender discrimination) because they do not believe that the laws protecting religious organizations require such exemption from neutral laws like the disabilities act and other employment laws. Those who side with Hosanna-Tabor argue that religious institutions, under the First Amendment (religious freedom), should be exempt from federal, state, and local laws and that ministerial exemption was put into place to provide such exemptions.

I believe that ministerial exemption allows religious institutions more freedom than any organization should be allowed. As Wendy Kaminer points out points out in the Atlantic, most of these religious institutions are receiving public funds and tax dollars to help support their institutions. How can they receive these funds, yet be exempt from discrimination and other employment laws (including protections under ADA)? The ministerial exemption allows religious institutions to create a lawless zone that essentially exempts employees, including teachers, any protection from their employer. Perhaps if religious institutions were actually acting in the best interest of their employees, like not firing them for reporting allegations of sexual abuse, then there would be no issue to argue. If they were actually acting in manner that upheld the teachings of the church, there would be no need for a reevaluation of the ministerial exemption. However, that is not the case. I hope the current case does make changes to the ministerial exemption. Religious institutions should be accountable for their actions and should not be allowed to discriminate against their employees.

Universities continue to waste money

How much would you be willing to pay to make sure you hired the right candidate for the job? Let us be clear, I am not referring to how much you would be willing to pay someone to do the job, but how much you would be willing to pay just to find someone to do the job. Does $20,000 seem insane? If so, you and Louisiana State University do not share a similar opinion. In fact, your opinions are not even close. LSU has recently stated that they are willing to pay Greenwood/Asher & Associates Inc. as much as $1.5million to find the university a new Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost. The full article can be found here. I sincerely hope that the university does not spend this much on every hire, as the man being replaced, Jack Hamilton, has only worked for LSU since June, 2010.

The fact that an institution would even consider spending this much on a job search is sickening. In an age when everyone associated with higher education is wondering where the money will come from to continue their programs, and where hiring freezes due to lack of funds are the norm, it is curious that LSU would make this decision so blatantly public. Of course, it is hard to hide these types of decisions when it comes to being a public institution like LSU. In fact, a simple Google search can lead you quickly to salary information for every employee at the university or a revenue and expenditure spreadsheet. Therefore, it would be tough to hide this sort of expenditure from public eyes to begin with.

I have to wonder how many student programs, clubs, organizations, and services could be supported with a chunk of the $1.5 million dollars in question. Or, perhaps someone at the university could make the decision to help out the student body and lower fees. I realize that in the grand scheme of a university’s budget, especially at an institution the size of LSU, $1.5 million is not really that much money. But, if that much can be wasted to pay for a job search, there is probably money being wasted elsewhere as well. If you allow yourself to get creative, you can think of many ways that money could be put to better use.

I am all for making sure the right candidate is chosen to do a job. However, somewhere along the line there has to be ethical or moral implications when a decision like this is made, especially if other areas of the university are suffering. The daily news is filled with stories about the financial crisis in higher education. University officials report on decreasing budgets and the need to increase tuition and fees semester after semester. Yet at the same time entire departments are purchasing new IPADs for every single employee, brand new recreation centers are being built to resemble private resorts and spas, dining halls are serving foods that even upper-middle-class families cannot afford, and athletic coaches are signing multi-million dollar contracts to produce losing season after losing season. Somewhere along the way, an adjustment of priorities may be in line.

Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman present readers with ten myths about higher education in their article “Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about Higher Ed Finance.” One of the conventional wisdoms that they challenge is the statement that higher education is overfunded and reallocating resources could solve some of the problems. I tend to have to disagree with the authors and agree more with the conventional wisdom. When I look around and see the president of a university driving a brand new Mercedes and $1.5 million being spent on a job search, while programs and services are being cut, it becomes obvious that at least some of the money that has gone missing from higher education budgets is not missing at all, it is just hiding in all of the wrong places.

Bake sale stirs up more than one controversy

With cupcakes in hand, members of the College Student Republicans at the University of California Berkley are making more than one political statement, and taking on more than one topic, with their bake sale.

By selling baked food items for differing prices based on the race or ethnicity of the purchasers, the student group is showing opposition to the state of California’s Senate Bill (SB) 185.

The idea behind the bill is to raise the academic standards while representing the diverse population of the entire state.

SB 185 authorizes the two largest public universities in California, University of California and California State University, to consider race, gender, ethnicity and national origin during undergraduate admissions selection. The bill also requires these institutions to report to the state Legislature and Governor the information collected about these admitted students, in comparison to the prior two years of student admissions. This list again includes race, gender, ethnicity, national origin as well as geographic origin and their annual household income.

The bill was proposed in February by Senator Ed Hernandez, who believes this will bring equity to highereducation in California.

Initially, the bake sale was a means for the College Student Republicans to protest the signing of SB 185 by California Governor Jerry Brown. They believed the bill was racist in nature because it of the criteria set for student admissions and institutional reporting. Their original point was, once the questioning begins, where will the list end? At what point do students need to tell us they are homosexual or Catholic or afraid of the dark in order to gain admittance to college? And why should that matter? Shouldn’t everyone be eligible for higher education?

Now, however, the discussion has turned more towards whether or not the bake sale is racist in nature. 

Some students are complaining that the bake sale goes beyond the basic political statement about a proposed bill to being bigoted in general.  In fact, hundreds of students associated with anotheractivist group protested today by silently blocking the bake sale. 

As a Liberal, I usually find the more conservative members of the Republicans, not only the College Student members, annoying. In this case, however, I feel they had a good point and started a thoughtful conversation but got lost along the way. They started with concern for  their original topic, affirmative action in admissions, but ended up debating diversity and about student First Amendment rights. My first thought upon hearing this news story was not directed towards SB 185 but to the other types of First Amendment discussions happening today on campuses across the nation, particularly regarding free speech and social media.

As classmates Meloni and Dana have pointed out in their respective blogs, there is much confusion surrounding the First Amendment and free speech on campus.

What if the bake sale was hosted by a sociology class researching the ramifications and reactions to the race based prices? What if it was hosted by the Black Student Association to make a point about historically under represented social groups? Any student groups could take the same event and make it their own.

Unfortunately, the UC CollegeRepublican students may well face more negative reaction to the disruption their sale causes to classes at Berkley than the outcome from SB 185.  Their means of information dissemination might distract everyone’s attention from their initial point of contention and hurt their argument in the long run.

Commission Based Admissions

Really, no really this is unbelievable. As I reviewing this mornings daily email updates in higher education I was literally amazed to see an article on commission based admissions. Until this morning it never occurred to me that public institutions would even consider paying its employees based on how many students they bring in. Specifically, this article refers to the recruitment of international students since commission based practices are not permitted for domestic students. 

The article was in Inside Higher Ed and discussed how the National Assocaiton for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) released a draft policy in May that would not allow for admission offices to use commission based recruiters to recruit international students. Now, the NACAC has both for- and non- profit institutions in its association (a new trend according to the article) and some institutions (both for- and non- profit) use commission based admissions recruiters. A statement was released with the draft policy suggesting that having commission based admissions was unethical and could lead to admissions recruiters ignoring the needs or wants of the student. 

Interesting enough after the draft policy was announced a few months later it was put on hold for two years. Why? The article cites administrators and policy makers but I am unsure. This topic came up before the US Senate in August of 2010 and was in an article in the Chronicle in August of 2010. During this time investigators had evidence of commission based admissions recruiters misleading students and providing questionable information. So again, my question is why? Why has a leading admissions association where other admissions offices probably get their best practices from decide to draft a policy a year after appearing before the Senate and then put it on hold for two years while knowing that unethical practices are going on and being questioned by the Senate? 

While the NACAC has a statement saying that they are looking to there ethical guidelines they state in the same breath that international recruiting is an emerging market for schools in the midst of decline in budgets. What concerns me here is that we are starting or continuing to look at international students as revenue and not as students. If we look at higher education as a maturing market and that we need to find new ways to market ourselves to gain to consumers, what window of unethical practices are opened when we combine a mature market with commission based recruiters for international students. 

What I also found interesting in the Inside Higher Ed article was a statement that read "Critics tend to say that there is something inherently unethical about students being advised by people who are paid in part on how many student they produce - a practice that US law bars for the recruitment of domestic students and that the ethics code...also bars." Now how can we bar a practice for our domestic students but allow it for international students? What does that say about our profession? What does it say about how we perceive the value of international students on our campuses? Are we embracing diversity or tuition dollars? 

To me it seems it may be harder to reverse established policies and with the possibility of more institutions moving to commission based recruitment the NACAC may have difficulty enforcing a ban after waiting two years. Additionally, during these two years the NACAC will not take action on complaints that are filed. To borrow words from Renee Orlick, Director of Admissions Operations at Colorado State University, who was interviewed for the article, "I'm concerned that if we do nothing for two years, we wont be able to protect the student."