Center for Studies in Higher Education proudly presents the 2016 Spring Colloquium Series, a program of stimulating lectures and discussions on national and international issues shaping higher education today. Hear viewpoints from Bay Area senators, university presidents, and leading scholars on topics ranging from access, affirmative action, and affordability to university rankings and the emergence of new doctoral degrees. All lectures take place on the University of California, Berkeley campus and are free of charge. Undergraduates, faculty, staff, and members of the general public are welcome to attend. Watch for upcoming announcements and join the debate!
Missed a Seminar? Check out the recorded sessions
1)The Public University & The Legislative Process
Speakers: Senator Carol Liu, California State Senator, 25th District & Senator Loni Hancock, California State Senator, 9th District
Date: POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE (For more information email cshe@berkeley.edu)Time: 1:00 pm- 2:30 pm
Location: 8th Floor Barrows Hall, Social Science Matrix
Description: Experienced legislators with close ties to Berkeley, State Senators Loni Hancock and Carol Liu will discuss the future of California higher education and the legislative process. How does the legislature advance its priorities in regard to higher education? What should be its policy objectives? Senator Loni Hancock, chair of the Senate Committee on Public Safety and a 14-year veteran of the legislature as well as former mayor of Berkeley, represents Disrict 9 in the East Bay. Senator Carol Liu, chair of the Senate Committee on Education and also a 14-year veteran of the legislature, and a Berkeley native, represents the 25th district in southern California.Co-Sponsorship: Social Science Matrix, UC Berkeley
2) The New Flagship University
Location: 8th Floor Barrows Hall, Social Science Matrix Description: In his new book,The New Flagship University: Changing the Paradigm from Global Ranking to National Relevancy (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), CSHE senior research fellow John Aubrey Douglass argues that this is a narrow and detrimental window for the understanding the value, breadth of activities, and societal impact of the best and most influential universities.
Co-Sponsorship: Social Science Matrix, UC Berkeley
Books will be sold at the end of our program.
Watch: https://youtu.be/6rqkDVygE9Y
3) The One-University Idea and its Futures
Speaker: Patricia A. Pelfrey, Senior Research Associate, CSHE, UC Berkeley
Date: Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Time: 12pm to 1:30pm, Lunch will be served
Location: 8th Floor of Barrows Hall, Social Science Matrix
Description: The University of California is unique among American multicampus systems in that its governance rests on an organizing principle known as the one-university idea. Its premise is simple: that a large and decentralized system of ten campuses, differing in size, resources, aspirations, and stage of development, can nevertheless be governed as a single university. CSHE Senior Research Associate Patricia A. Pelfrey discusses the one-university principle in the context of UC’s history, its contemporary relevance to the governance of the UC system, and the drive for institutional redesign in American universities.
Co-Sponsorship: Social Science Matrix, UC Berkeley
Watch: https://youtu.be/Idk_QId1DH8
4) Race, Class, and Affirmative Action
Speaker: Sigal Alon, Associate Professor, Sociology & Anthropology, Tel-Aviv University & Author of “Race, Class & Affirmative Action”
Date: Tuesday, April 5th, 2016
Time:12:00 pm to 1:30 pm
Location: 8th Floor Barrows Hall, Social Science Matrix
Description: No issue in American higher education is more contentious than that of race-based affirmative action. In light of the ongoing debate around the topic and recent Supreme Court rulings, affirmative action policy may be facing further changes. As an alternative to race-based affirmative action, some analysts suggest affirmative action policies based on class. In Race, Class, and Affirmative Action, sociologist Sigal Alon studies the race-based affirmative action policies in the United States.
Books will be sold at the end of our program.
Co-Sponsorship: Social Science Matrix, UC Berkeley
Watch: https://youtu.be/Idk_QId1DH8
5) Teaching Evaluations: Biased Beyond Measure
Speaker: Philip Stark, Professor of Statistics and Associate Dean at the University of California, Berkeley
Date: Monday, April 11th, 2016Time: 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm , Reception to follow
Location: 8th Floor Barrows Hall, Social Science Matrix
Description: Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are widely used in academic personnel decisions as a measure of teaching effectiveness. Joint work with Anne Boring (SciencesPo) and Kellie Ottoboni (UC Berkeley) shows: that SET are biased against female instructors by an amount that is large and statistically significant. This bias affects how students rate even putatively objective aspects of teaching, such as how promptly assignments are graded. The bias varies by discipline and by student gender, among other things and it is not possible to adjust for the bias, because it depends on so many factors. Research showed that SET are more sensitive to students' gender bias and grade expectations than they are to teaching effectiveness, Furthermore, gender biases can be large enough to cause more effective instructors to get lower SET than less effective instructors. These findings are based on two datasets, 23,001 SET of 379 instructors by 4,423 students in six mandatory first-year courses in a five-year natural experiment at a French university, and 43 SET for four sections of an online course in a randomized, controlled, blind experiment at a US university.
Co-Sponsorship: Social Science Matrix, UC Berkeley
Watch: https://youtu.be/yhxUxBk-6GE
6)If Clothes Make the (Wo)man, Does a Doctorate Make the Professional?
Image from Al Jazeera . Real Money with Alivelshi, 2014. Web. 1 March 2016
Speaker: Ami Zusman, Research Associate, CSHE, UC Berkeley
Date: Thursday, April 14th, 2016Time: 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm, Reception to follow
Location: 8th Floor Barrows Hall, Social Science Matrix
Description: Do you need a doctorate to become a professional? In a growing number of fields, especially in health areas, the answer is yes. For example, new U.S. audiologists and physical therapists who until recently just needed master’s degrees now must have doctorates to enter professional practice, and several other fields appear to be moving in this direction. As a result, doctoral enrollments in these areas have skyrocketed since 2000.This presentation, an expansion of Ami Zusman’s earlier work on professional doctorates, will discuss who and what are driving the creation and expansion of these new degrees, how they compare to older doctoral degrees, and their outcomes and implications – for access to professions, quality of client care, future doctoral requirements, and the meaning of a doctorate.Co-Sponsorship: Social Science Matrix, UC Berkeley
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI4EK8blkHY
7) College Outsourced? The Family-University Partnership and Its Costs
Speaker: Laura Hamilton, Associate Professor of Sociology at University of California, Merced
Date: Monday, April 18th, 2016
Time: 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm Lunch will be served
Location: 8th Floor Barrows Hall, Social Science Matrix
Description: Involved college parents—frequently referred to as “helicopters”—are often derided as pesky interlopers who micromanage their children’s lives and make excessive demands on school decision makers. An entire generation of supposedly coddled and entitled youth is considered the byproduct of this problematic behavior. Do involved college parents damage their children and burden universities? To answer this question, Professor Hamilton followed the families of 41 young women as they moved through a public flagship. She interviewed the women every year for five years, asking about parental relationships and support, and interviewed both their mothers and fathers as women neared graduation. She found that intensive parenting is a logical response to the harsh risks facing young people during college and early adulthood; however, not all parents are able to offer assistance. Moreover, involved college parents are also highly desired by universities, as they solve institutional problems posed, in part, by the privatization process. As public funds dwindle and accountability pressures mount, institutions are looking elsewhere for support. Parents are drawn into the labor of producing successful students—assisting with recruitment, advising, psychological support, career development, and even student safety. This form of cooperation between public schools and wealthy families has important hidden costs, as it exacerbates both gender and class inequality.
Co-Sponsorship: Social Science Matrix, UC Berkeley
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFaa5KeSu0o
8)The Crisis of Higher Education in India: How Can Public Policy & Governance Reforms Help?
Speaker: Dr. C. Raj Kumar, Vice Chancellor, O.P. Jindal Global University
Date: Tuesday, April 19th, 2016Time: 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm, Lunch will be served
Location: Bechtel 240
Description: The Indian higher education system is facing a crisis that is affecting its ability to build world class higher education institutions. Issues relating to quality, access and equity are some of the significant challenges of the higher education system in India. The historic context of the evolution of higher education system in India had focused on expansion and access with a view to providing opportunities for higher education to large number of aspiring students. This has led to a situation where quality and excellence have been given lesser importance. Since the Indian independence in 1947, there has been a significant expansion of higher education in both the public and private sectors with a stronger impetus since 1980s in private higher education. In recent times, the debate surrounding the need for the Indian higher education institutions to offer world class education has fo- cused on higher education policy, regulation, and the governance of universities. It has also brought to a sharper focus issues relating to internationalization, global rankings, accreditation, assessment and the bench- marking of institutions. The talk will critically examine these issues with a view to understanding as to how public policy, regulatory and governance reforms in higher education can help India build, nurture and develop insti- tutions of global excellence.
Co-Sponsorship: Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley
Watch: https://youtu.be/DcoWk9PG6Gw
9) The Urban Struggle for Economic, Environmental & Social Justice
Speaker: Malo Hutson, Assistant Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley & Associate Director, The Institute of Urban and Regional Planning (IURD)the University of California at Berkeley.
Date: Thursday, April 21st, 2016
Time: 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm Lunch will be served
Location: 300 Wheeler Hall
Description: Malo Hutson will give an artist book talk on his new book,Urban Struggle for Economic, Environmental and Social Justice(Routledge 2016). Hutson shows how residents of once neglected urban communities are standing up to city economic development agencies, influential real estate developers, universities, and others to remain in their neighborhoods, protect their interests, and transform their communities into sustainable, healthy communities. These communities are deploying new strategies that build off of past struggles over urban renewal book and provides a wide ranging account of the alliances that have made possible some constraints on unrestrained gentrification. Based on seven years of research, this book draws on a wealth of material to conduct a case study analysis of eight low income/ mixed income communities in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.
Co-Sponsorship: Residential Education’s Resident Faculty Program, UC Berkeley
10) Cheated
Speaker: Mary Willingham, Founder of Paper Classic Inc & Co-Author of Cheated
Time: 3:00pm- 4:30pm
Date: Tuesday, April 26th, 2016
Location: Bechtel 240
Description: Cheated exposes the fraudulent inner workings of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. For decades these internal systems have allowed woefully underprepared basketball and football players to take fake courses and earn devalued degrees from one of the nation's top universities while faculty and administrators looked the other way. Cheated recounts the academic fraud in UNC' athletics department, even as university leaders focused on minimizing the damage in order to keep the billion-dollar college sports revenue machine function-ing. Willingham discusses what she believes will eventually dismantle the NCAA machine - that the "student-athletes" in these programs are being cheated out of what, after all, is promised them in a scholarship agree-ment/contract : a college education.
11) Maintaining Access to Public Higher Education in California
Speaker: President Leroy Morishita, President, California State University, East Bay
Date: Postponed until Fall Colloquium Series
Location: 8th Floor Barrows Hall, Social Science Matrix
Description: President Leroy Morishita will be talking about how he understands access to public higher education.He will plan to discuss its landscape--its challenges and opportunities for collaboration.
Co-Sponsorship: Social Science Matrix, UC Berkeley
12) Homo- Prestigious? University Status & The Academic Career
Speaker: Stephanie Beyer, Visiting Scholar from Germany and resident at Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley
Date: Wednesday, May 4th, 2016
Time: 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm Lunch will be served
Location: 8th Floor Barrows Hall, Social Science Matrix
Description: Stephanie Beyer’s talk will focus on her dissertation centered on “Homo-Prestigious? University Status and the Academic Career”. Rankings have a long tradition in the US-academic system that has been described as a caste system in which faculty is recruited from the most elite universities. Prestigious divisions not only shape the institution itself but also the visions of academics. Stephanie Beyer analyzes how departmental prestige affects the perception of professors and PhD students. She investigates how distinctions among institutions shape different career trajectories and academic perceptions: their views on autonomy, rankings, and competition for funding. Beyer applies a mixed methods approach using geometrical data analysis and interviews conducted with faculty and PhD-candidates from different prestigious departments. Join the conversation as we discuss university status and the academic career.
Co-Sponsorship: Social Science Matrix, UC Berkeley
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ8pwAUiCK0
Speaker: Grace Taneri, Visiting Scholar from Cyprus at CSHE, UC Berkeley
Date: Tuesday, May 10th, 2016
Time: 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm Lunch will be served
Location: 8th Floor Barrows Hall, Social Science Matrix
Description: Grace Taneri’s talk will focus on her paper centering on on-going debates on academic freedom in Asia and the Middle East, and value protection in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) of the West (Northern America, Canada, and Western Europe). These debates appear to be fostered by higher education reforms in the world and globalization ventures of the HEIs of the West. Some Western universities are concerned about risks to their reputation should they engage in joint projects with universities and governments in these regions. Yet, many have proceeded with various globalization efforts, such as launching new universities, Liberal Arts Colleges (LACs), branch campuses, alliances, or research and teaching partnerships. Join us for questions for debate, lessons to be taken away, and the possibility of making the globalization efforts success stories.
Co-Sponsorship: Social Science Matrix, UC Berkeley
14) Swimming Against the Tide: Managing an International University in the Age of Nationalism
Speaker: John Shattuck, President of Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
Date: Thursday, June 2nd, 2016
Time: 12:00pm to 1:00pm, Lunch will be Served
Location: Library Evans Hall, Room 768
Description: John Shattuck, President of the Central European University will discuss “Swimming Against the Tide: Managing an International University in the Age of Nationalism”. There is a growing wave of nationalism in Europe and increasing strains on the European Union caused by fears of terrorism, disagreements over refugees, increasing economic disorder and stagnation, and the rise of populist anti-democratic leaders. Managing an international university in this environment presents new challenges and opportunities, particularly in light of recent trends in higher education. Central European University, a U.S. accredited University in Budapest presents a case study of how an international university develops its mission and manages its development in this environment. Join us, as we explore shifting higher education themes and ways to incorporate them into international and domestic institutions.
15) Does Measurement of Performance Erode Collegiality?
Speaker: Samuel Sponem, Professeur agrégé, HEC Montréal
Date: Tuesday, June 7th, 2016
Time: 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm, Lunch will be served
Location: Library Evans Hall, Room 768
Description: Samuel Sponem’s talk will focus on his paper entitled “Does Measurement of Performance Erode Collegiality?”. In the past decades, universities worldwide have experienced an increasingly pervasive “audit culture” (Power 1999). The proliferation of university rankings, the extensive use of bibliometrics in the evaluation of research, the definition of performance indicators by states and universities… offer ample evidence of this movement of quantification in higher education. The expansion of those metrics has paralleled and in turn sustained the transformation of universities into “complete” organizations (Krücken and Meier 2006). Sponem will analyze the extent to which the use of performance measurement instruments within our contemporary universities are transforming the collegial nature of the latter. Based on a quantitative study of universities governance in France, it aims at discussing the common view found in the literature that managerialism is contrasted in a binary way with collegiality (Yokoyama 2006).
16) Are Students Engaged or Adrift? Student Engagement at a Brazilian Research University
Speaker: Ana Maria Carneiro, Visiting Scholar, Brazil, Center For Studies in Higher Education
Date: Tuesday, June 21st
Time: 12:00pm to 1:00pm,Lunch to Follow
Location: Library Evans Hall, Room 768
Description: Ana Maria Carneiro, Visiting Scholar, Brazil, University of California, Berkeley will discuss her research on student engagement at the University of Campinas, Unicamp in Brazil. Unicamp is a top tier public research university. Founded in 1966, Unicamp is responsible for 10% doctorate degrees and 8% academic research in Brazil. In 2012, Unicamp had 18,820 students in 67 academic programs, 35% of them being offered at night time. Carneiro partnered with the SERU International Consortium, a collection of 15 leading research universities to conduct research at her home institution. Over 3,400 Undergraduate students replied to the “Student Experience on Research Universities” (SERU) Survey in 2012. Strategic questions that were analyzed were: Are undergraduate students at the University of Campinas engaged or adrift? What are their main modes of engagement? How do both the extent and patterns of engagement vary based on student background, level of study, field of study, among other items?