Education

Colleges Column

November 03, 1982 5 min read
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Carnegie-Mellon University and Clarkson College of Technology are making plans to equip all their students with personal computers.

Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon has signed an agreement with the International Business Machines Corporation to cooperate over a 10-year period on the development of a campuswide computer network that by 1991 could number about 7,500 interconnected personal computers--enough to supply one to every student and faculty member at the institution. Under the agreement, ibm personnel will help develop and staff an “information-technology” center, and the company and university will establish a consortium of other institutions that can make use of aspects of the computer network.

At Clarkson in upstate New York, next fall’s freshmen will each be issued a Zenith Z-100 desktop computer, for which each will pay $200 per semester plus a one-time maintenance fee of $200. At the end of eight semesters, graduating students will be able to take away their personal computers, for a total cost to each student of $1,800. The costs of the program will be subsidized by grants, according to college officials; the retail value of the computers, they say, exceeds $4,000.

Earlier this year, the Stevens Institute of Technology announced that starting this fall, it will require students majoring in science or systems planning to have their own personal computers.

Yale University has signed a $3-million agreement with the Bristol-Myers Company permitting the pharmaceutical firm to license and sell any anti-cancer drugs developed by a 10-member research team at the university. Under the terms of the five-year arrangement, the company will pay Yale $600,000 annually for access to the team’s research findings, and the university can offer to other companies any drugs Bristol-Myers declines to use.

The agreement is the second such arrangement for the Ivy League school. Earlier this year, it signed a $1.1-million three-year compact with the Celanese Corporation, giving the firm exclusive rights to university research into the structure and functions of enzymes.

A picture of the administration building has replaced the image of a graduating senior clutching an unopened bottle of champagne on the cover of latest issue of the University of New Hampshire’s alumni magazine.

Officials decided to have the 55,000-copy publication completely reprinted because they felt it was “entirely inappropriate to portray alcohol in our publications in a manner that would appear to endorse or encourage its use,” according to an assistant to the president. The spokesman said the institution has been enforcing campus rules on alcohol consumption strictly and has established an alcohol-education program for staff and students.

It cost the school $10,700 to reprint the magazine.

Pennsylvania’s 13 state-owned colleges and its one university--Penn State--will soon be removed from the aegis of the state’s department of education and placed under the direction of a new chancellor and board of regents. Legislation reorganizing the system and granting the state colleges university status has been passed by the legislature and is expected to be signed soon by Gov. Richard Thornburgh. The Governor will appoint the regents and chancellor.

A task force looking at the attributes of medical education in America suggests that it may “have the effect of dehumanizing the physician-to-be” by focusing on endless scientific details and emphasizing medical technology rather than human concerns and skills.

Eighty American medical schools, 34 undergraduate institutions, and several Canadian institutions are participating in the three-year study by the Association of American Medical Colleges. According to its chairman, Steven Muller, president of The Johns Hopkins University and Hospital, the task force plans to recommend ways in which medical education can improve the personal qualities and values of physicians, in addition to their knowledge and skills.

Graduate programs are continuing to shrink, according to a preliminary survey by the Council of Graduate Schools of the United States. With 48 of its 376 member schools reporting, the council said, enrollment appeared to be down from last year by 1.2 percent at private universities and by 0.3 percent at public institutions.

Among institutions where the master’s degree is the highest granted, enrollments were up 1.7 percent in private colleges and down 4.3 percent in public ones. Among doctoral programs, private-sector enrollments were down 3.1 percent and public-sector enrollments rose 1 percent.

The growth of graduate enrollments peaked in the early 1970’s, but then began to slow--and finally to go into reverse--at the end of the decade, as the need for college faculty members and teachers began to diminish and jobs in industry lured science and engineering students away from graduate study on the campus.

At least nine prominent graduate schools of business have lost, or are about to lose, their deans, The Wall Street Journal reports. Among the institutions cited are Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Berkeley, Texas, Rochester, Dartmouth, Indiana, and Carnegie-Mellon. According to one departing dean, scrambling for scarce faculty members and funds, and sometimes pressure to admit more students than can be handled, are aspects of the job that take their toll on deans.

The National Institute of Education apparently has intervened to save, for one year at least, the life of American Open University, the concept for a national adult-education program developed by a consortium of Midwestern colleges and universities after the model of Britain’s Open University.

nie had refused to extend the $2-million grant to the project past the end of the government’s fiscal year Sept. 30. But open university officials, headed by the former radio personality Donald R. McNeil, have reconstituted their organization as an independent nonprofit group headquartered in Washington, and nie has given them a new one-year contract that allows them to use up the funds unexpended under their previous grant. The group hopes to raise other funds to keep the project, which would use telecommunications to link adult learners across the nation, developing.

A version of this article appeared in the November 03, 1982 edition of Education Week as Colleges Column

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