2012 saw many changes in the politics of ed-tech. The year began with regular Internet users and the titans of Internet technology defeating SOPA and PIPA. As the year progressed, we saw a marked upsurge in lobbying dollars spent by such companies as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. At the state level, ALEC has taken aim at education including advocating the penalization of students who take more than four years to complete college.

Examining these and other happenings in ed and ed-tech, this article from Inside Higher Ed reviews what we've seen in 2012.

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As of January 1, 2013 the AAUP will be restructured into three entities: the AAUP Foundation, The AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress, and the AAUP.

The AAUP Foundation, a 502(c)(3), will conduct fundraising for education and support programs. The AAUP-CBC will function as a labor union advocating for unionization and collective bargaining, while the AAUP, a 501(c)(6) professional organization, will support "advocacy" chapters.

State conferences will remain unchanged with this transition.

Read full announcement...

 

The AAUP released a new policy that argues against the appropriateness of blanket confidentiality agreements for faculty serving on committees engaged in shared governance.

While there has been a trend recently toward requiring faculty to sign confidentiality statements when serving on these committees, the AAUP contends that such blanket agreements hinder faculty's ability to represent the concerns and interests of the colleagues on behalf of whom they are to act.

Read the full article...

The Nevada Faculty Alliance wishes to remind our members and community supporters that the complete NFA PAC endorsements can be found in the fall issue of The Alliance and in the online edition found on our website. 

The following candidates for the U.S.  Senate and Congress have a proven record of excellence when advocating for higher education in Nevada. Each has exhibited a proven commitment to seeking out input from faculty as key stakeholders in quality, public higher education. 

Shelley Berkeley for Senate

Former regent an and longtime support of the NSHE and NFA, Congresswoman Shelley Berkeley has a record of working to keep college affordable – and to support, in particular, veterans seeking to return to college – and merits our endorsement.

Dina Titus for Congress (1)

During her prior term in congress longtime UNLV faculty member and NFA member Dina Titus showed her commitment not only to our issues but to us as constituents, and we enthusiastically back her campaign to return to congress.

John Ocegura for Congress (3)

The former Nevada State Assembly Speaker and former student of no fewer than four NSHE campuses, Ocegura has taken positions in support of the president’s agenda for college affordability and degree completion.

Steven Horsford for Congress (4)

As Nevada Senate Majority Leader, Horsford showed himself to be a passionate and deeply intelligent advocate for students and quality public education.  In 2011 he led the successful campaign to reduce the deep cuts proposed to NSHE. 

Horsford has a proven record of commitment and achievement in keeping higher education more affordable for Nevada families. Not only has he long been a strong voice for keeping costs to students down but he also took the lead in the legislature and accomplished what others tried for years but could not -- he passed a bill to study the system of financing higher education which had remained unchanged for decades. Then he took the lead as chair of the study committee to make higher education in Nevada more efficient and more productive.

This year, he brought clear thinking, careful management and a shrewd eye for detail as chair of the most important state level discussion of higher education policy in a generation, the interim legislative funding formula study committee. Throughout the process, he sought input from faculty across the state, and in his campaign he has made a priority of advocating for college access and affordability.  Even if his opponent had not called for the extreme position of calling for the abolition of the federal Department for Education – and with it all of federal financial aid (which is the case) – Horsford would be the clear choice for Nevada’s new fourth congressional seat.

There has been no legislator more committed to making college more affordable in Nevada and no candidate in this year's election better prepared to take this fight for access and affordability to Washington.

The Maxine S. Jacobs Foundation, the Nevada Department of Employment, Rehabilitation, and Training (DETR), and Truckee Meadows Community College (TMCC) will be announcing a public-private collaboration that will provide scholarships to qualified unemployed Nevadans. Funds will come from the Maxine S. Jacobs Foundation, recipient recruitment will be provided by DETR, and screening and instruction will be supplied by TMCC.

Details on this scholarship program will be presented on October 2 at 10:00am at the V. James Eardley Student Services Center, Red Mountain Building on the TMCC Dandini Campus. Questions may also be directed to Kate Kirkpatrick at 775-673-7206 or kirkpatrick@tmcc.edu.

The NFA Political Action Committee is a state entity, but it can and regularly does make endorsements in federal races when there is a clear choice on higher education issues. This year, the NFA endorses the following candidates.

Barack Obama for President. The Obama administration has made college affordability and national investment in higher education a priority since it entered office. The American Recovery and Revitalization Act of 2009 included hundreds of millions of dollars in federal support for public higher education in Nevada, which helped cushion the blow of the Great Recession on our students and institutions. Then, in March 2010, the president supported and signed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which redirected about $6 billion per year from subsidies to commercial banks to subsidize student loans into direct lending and into Pell Grants, which put students ahead of banks. This bill also included important reforms of student loans, limiting repayment in any given year to 10 percent of personal income, and forgiveness of debt remaining after 20 years of ontime payments (10 years in the case of public service workers). The administration has also been strongly supportive of community college students, with tax credits to offset tuition for retraining.

Perhaps even more importantly, the Obama administration has stressed educational quality by imposing rules that require institutions eligible for student loans and federal aid to document that they prepare their students for "gainful employment" and that a sufficient share of their students are able to repay their student loans – thereby cutting down on the predatory practices of for-profit colleges which have become notorious for recruiting under-qualified students to receive federal loans, but providing no valuable education or job training.

The Obama Department of Education also has strongly supported the college completion agenda, which has guided the System in the development of its new funding formula.

In a second term, President Obama has proposed a new fund to support innovation in higher education, while also proposing to tie federal financial aid to limits on tuition increases. As an organization committed to quality public higher education and the faculty who deliver it, NFA is proud to endorse Barack Obama for re-election.

Shelley Berkeley for Senate. Former regent and longtime supporter of the Nevada System of Higher Education and NFA, Congresswoman Shelley Berkeley has a record of working to keep college affordable and to support, in particular, veterans seeking to return to college merits our endorsement.

CD-1: Dina Titus for Congress. During her prior term in congress, longtime University of Nevada, Las Vegas, faculty member and NFA member Dina Titus showed her commitment not only to our issues but to us as constituents, and we enthusiastically back her campaign to return to congress.

CD-3: John Oceguera for Congress. The former Nevada State Assembly Speaker and a former student of no fewer than four NSHE campuses, Oceguera has taken positions in support of the president's agenda for college affordability and degree completion.

CD-4: Steven Horsford for Congress. As Nevada Senate Majority Leader, Horsford showed himself to be a passionate, articulate and deeply intelligent advocate for students and for quality public higher education. He took the lead in 2011 in the successful campaign to reduce the deep cuts to NSHE that had been proposed by Governor Brian Sandoval. This year, he brought clear thinking, careful management and a shrewd eye for detail as chair of the most important state level discussion of higher education policy in a generation, the interim legislative funding formula study committee. Throughout that process, he repeatedly sought out input from faculty across the state, and in his campaign he has made a priority of advocating for college access and affordability. Even if his opponent had not taken the extreme position of calling for the abolition of the federal Department of Education – and with it all federal financial aid (which is the case) – Steven Horsford would still be the clear choice for Nevada's new fourth congressional seat.

Our Political Action Committee has endorsed candidates in each of the Nevada System of Higher Education Board of Regents' races currently on the ballot. With so many important issues facing NSHE and its faculty, this year more than ever we undertook our considerations with great care, research and consultation with board officers and members. We urge all who support quality, affordable public higher education in Nevada -- and the faculty and staff who deliver it -- to support the following candidates:

District 1: Cedric Crear. Regent Crear earned our endorsement in his first campaign for the board in 2006, and we are pleased and honored to extend our continuing endorsement for his re-election this year. Crear has been a leader on issues important to faculty such as diversity, equal opportunity and transparency, and he has been a consistent voice on the board for the System to pursue vigorously restoring competitive compensation and adequate health benefits for NSHE faculty and staff. He has always been accessible to the NFA and to faculty generally, and we expect he will become an even more significant voice for our concerns in his second term.

District 4: Stavan Corbett. We are pleased to endorse Corbett, currently the president of the state school board and a career advocate for education, particularly for higher ed outreach to the Las Vegas community. He has worked at both the College of Southern Nevada and the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and during the campaign, he has been diligent in his effort to prepare to address the issues currently facing the board, attending board meetings regularly as well as meetings of the legislative funding formula study committee. He has emphasized to us, in his written questionnaire and in his interview, that he would work to support all NSHE institutions and help each institution take on and achieve its specific mission. This is an open seat, the first in NSHE's history to have a majority Latino electorate, and Corbett's election would make the board more representative of the Nevada population.

District 12: Andrea Anderson. We endorsed longtime NFA member Andrea Anderson, who served as an administrator at CSN for many years, in her first campaign in 2010, and we are pleased to extend a continuing endorsement this year, as she campaigns for a full 6-year term. She is very familiar with many of the concerns faculty face, especially issues of compensation and health coverage, and she has been very accessible to faculty leaders and the NFA on a wide range of issues.

District 8: Michon Mackedon. Mackedon is a recently retired faculty member from Western Nevada College and a well-known and widely admired community leader in Carson City and the surrounding region. She would bring a fresh voice to the board, combining a career's worth of commitment to quality, affordable higher education in northern Nevada with an appreciation for our crucial principles of academic freedom and shared governance

The Collective Bargaining Team of  the Truckee Meadows Community College chapter of NFA spent  several weeks in the spring of 2012  in contract negotiations with the TMCC administration. Negotiations with TMCC’s administration were forthright and productive throughout the process. The NFA negotiating team included Scott Huber (former chapter and state NFA president), Bill Newhall (former chapter president), Jim Richardson (NFA state lobbyist) and me.

The main features of the contract were a number of clarifications regarding the roles of department chairs, the composition of faculty search committees, ensuring equitable treatment of faculty teaching “fast-track courses” and a consolidation of all “additional assignments” under one set of guidelines. All of the items negotiated were based on the desire to increase equity, transparency and accountability in the contract on behalf of all faculty at TMCC. At the beginning of July TMCC and NFA signed their newly revised 2012 contract.

One outstanding issue remains to be negotiated in the coming year regarding occupational program coordinators so that their compensation is consistent and more equitably reflects workload. Program coordinators are currently developing a formula proposal that will be comparable to the one that exists in the contract for department chairs. TMCC President Sheehan has agreed to revisit this issue in one year’s time and give it more careful consideration when the Program Coordinators’ proposal is complete.

In May 2012, TMCC elected new officers for two-year terms. Besides me (president), they are Bill Newhall (vice president), Julie Muhle (secretary) and Jamie Campbell (treasurer). In the coming year, our chapter will focus on growing membership numbers, reestablishing several key committees (membership, bylaws, and communications) and working with our colleagues throughout TMCC to rebuild our sense of community at the college.

Like other institutions in the NSHE system, TMCC has suffered losses of faculty and staff over the last several years, with very few new or replacement hires. Such losses have been challenging, not only from the standpoint of teaching effectiveness and increasing workloads, but also as a psychological hardship on the rank and file.

We began our Fall 2012 year with a reception on Aug. 20th  in honor of three recently tenured faculty and eleven newly hired tenure-track faculty. That was followed by a “Teach-in” on the newly revised contract.

Last Wednesday, the legislative Committee to Study the Funding of Higher Education held its final scheduled meeting at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, beginning with public comment at 9 a.m. It reviewed the work of its three subcommittees, which studied, respectively, the Nevada System of Higher Education's proposed alternative formula, the proposed performance pool and the prospect of pursuing local funding for the state's community colleges.

Last Friday, even before the committee completed its work, the Board of Regents held a special meeting to approve NSHE's budget request to the governor for the 2013-2015 biennium. That budget request is based, to some degree, on the Chancellor's base formula proposal, in that it uses the allocation outcomes generated by one of the many simulations that the System has run during the committee's deliberations.

The regents' action seems to have confused several of the local news reporters, who covered the meeting and reported both the projected allocations and the "per-pupil funding" values as if the allocation levels were already adopted and as if enrollment/course completion figures were fixed and stable from year to year.

But the biggest news concerning the NSHE budget request, which none of the printed stories picked up on, is that when one considers the actual request to the governor, no campus is actually projected for anything close to a cut – because the amounts actually requested for all campuses (in columns 2 and 3) include, per the governor's instructions, restoration of the 2.3-percent pay cut for all faculty and staff, the restoration of the 2.5-percent loss of compensation due to the furlough/unpaid leave, and the restoration of a performance-based merit pool equal to 2.5 percent of total payroll on each campus.

We are pleased to note, in passing, that the chancellor's budget proposal treats the money requested to restore and enhance salaries, as we had encouraged in earlier posts, as direct allocations to each campus' base budget, to be allocated over and above the formula-determined allocations.

This is very welcome news for all faculty and staff, who must now prepare to justify and advocate for this potential restoration of compensation in the 2013 legislature.

Friday's action is not a particularly surprising development, as it suggests more or less what many have expected about the 2013 budget request all along: that it would be based upon figures not directly generated by any formula, old or new, and would closely resemble the share of the NSHE budget allocated to each campus in FY '12.

Thus, with the Regents' budget request out of the way, the study committee has a very real opportunity in its final meeting today to look not at the very near-term of the 2013 allocations, but rather at the longer-term principles underlying the formula, and to recommend ways to clarify and resolve the technical issues of discipline weighting, course completion definition, and the implementation of the performance pool. It should do so not with an eye towards the upcoming legislative session but rather to the one after that. 

... And the one after that. And the one after that.

As the legislative committee reviewing the Nevada System of Higher Education's formula for funding its institutions prepares for its final scheduled meeting next Wednesday, some consensus is emerging on the policy principles that new formula should embrace. Work remains, for the committee and eventually the legislature, to put those principles into practice by hammering out the all-important technical details of how the formula actually builds a budget for NSHE institutions.

The three subcommittees of the legislative committee studying the state's funding of higher education have completed their work on the funding formula, the performance funding pool and local funding for community colleges, respectively.

The subcommittees reviewed the latest version of the Nevada System of Higher Education's proposal for an alternative formula, including version 20 of the proposed performance pool and the report and recommendations of the committee's consultant, SRI International. Each subcommittee will report to the full committee at its final meeting next Wednesday, Aug. 29.

The committee's work has generated little press attention, but the Las Vegas Sun did run a story on the most recent round of subcommittee meetings, which offers a good run-down with a headline that advertises, with a bit of sensationalism, "heated debate" over the new formula.

For those observing the process closely, a solid degree of consensus has emerged on most of the major policy questions, and it is important to underscore those principles, as distinct from any projected allocation. After all, the governor and legislature will assuredly tinker with proposed allocation amounts, but sound principles are more likely to be accepted and acted upon as a lasting basis for a more credible, functional and effective formula in the future.

The principles listed below appear, based on the public discussions of the committee to this point, to be the essential principles on which the 2013 legislature is likely to construct a new formula , if not for the 2013-2015 biennial budget than for the future.

After seven months of intensive work by the System, its constituent campuses, the governor's office and the committee, major points of agreement that have emerged dictate that the new formula should...

1. take the politics out of higher education funding as much as possible by replacing the old complicated and opaque formula with something transparent and credible;

2. separate student fees from state allocations, with no offset or sequestration of state support to campuses that enhance student-derived revenue.

This separation of fees and state allocations would end the misnomer of student tuition and fees as "state support" in the NSHE budget – although the legislature would continue to audit how NSHE spends revenue from students. This principle would be a significant step forward, because it would respect student choice and reward academic prominence by allowing programs and campuses that generate more student revenue to devote it to instruction on those campuses.

3. use Nevada dollars to fund only Nevada students, by excluding non-resident students from the formula – and from state allocations.

Campuses would determine on their own, and within their own budgets, whether to offer scholarships or aid to recruit from out of state but could no longer, as is currently the case, offer scholarships to recruit out-of-state students that would increase their own formula allocation.

4. fund instruction and student success rather than building maintenance or other functions.

The new formula should focus on base funding on completed student credit hours rather than, as in the past, enrollment, students services or building maintenance. Those functions are essential but secondary to the primary goal of students completing credits and degrees.

5. produce an outcome that is  equitable across all regions of the state and proportional to institutional mission, as measured in state support per full-time equivalent Nevada student.

6. include a component based on outcomes specific to each campus's or each tier's mission.

This component of the formula appears likely -- based on subcommittee discussions and votes taken to this point -- to be funded by carving out a share of the base NSHE allocation, rather than based on an enhancement allocation of state funds. Specifically, the performance subcommittee voted last week to recommend the introduction of the performance share of the formula in the FY2015 budget (ie the second year of the next biennial budget), when 5% of the NSHE formula funding allocation would be distributed based on performance. (That share would be calculated, presumably, on 2012-2013 data, rather than the 2010-2011 data that has been used in the System's proposal document.) Each year, for the next four years, an additional 5% f the NSHE formula funding would be allocated based on this component, until FY2019 when it would drive  20% of the formula allocation.

The specific weights and measures of the outcome-based, tier-specific formula remain unfinished, and it is unclear if the System or the legislature would set the final weights and measures for the performance pool, or whether the System, the campuses, or the legislature data would collect, verify and report the data.

The "sparring" referred to in the Sun is primarily over a rather technical series of questions that have more to do the process of building a budget than with the educational principles of student attainment and degree completion, or of institutional performance. So on Aug. 29 the committee will have to discuss what if any recommendations to make concerning...

1. how to weight student credit hours completed on each campus and whether those weights should reflect the cost of instruction in a given discipline or the alignment of a given discipline to the state's economic development plan.

The System's proposal is based on the work of an external consultant, the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, which – as explained at the last meeting – used both relative weights across disciplines from other states that study cost (primarily Texas as well as Ohio, Indiana and Florida) and adjusted to promote certain policy priorities, such as enhancing the weight given at some levels of instruction for credit hours completed in certain disciplines, specifically science, technology, engineering and health courses. Several committee members have noted that this list does not include all seven elements of the state's economic development plan, so that list may be expanded to include fields such as logistics, business information systems, hospitality and entertainment, and mining.

An alternative approach, suggested at the subcommittee meeting last week, would be to adopt the weights from another state, such as Texas, that does a cost study of the relative cost of each discipline. At the final committee meeting on the 29th, the consultant, SRI International, will offer a comparison of the weights in the NSHE proposal with those used in Texas and other states that use a cost study to generate their relative weights.

2. how to define the "completed student credit" that is at the heart of the base formula proposal.

The formula funding subcommittee has come to a consensus that students who fail courses by ceasing to participate ought not be counted towards completed student credit hours, and the most basic definition of completion therefore has been attendance past 60 percent of instruction (i.e., Fs count if the student attended 2/3 or more of the semester). However, there is not a standard data set for the entire System to use this measure, and some subcommittee members expressed a desire for a more precise measure of student and institutional effort than merely 60 percent attendance.

3. whether the base formula ought to be based entirely on student credit hours completed or whether some money should be carved out from the formula allocation to be distributed based on factors specific to certain institutions, namely the "small institution factor" for GBC and WNC or the "research factor" for UNR and UNLV. 

Some members of the committee have proposed running the new formula based entirely on the single factor of instruction at disciplinary weights that would be based as directly as possible on cost. Then "factors" for small institutions or research institutions, which, in mathematical terms, mitigate impact of the NCHEMS weights on some campuses, should be considered as temporary components or permanent parts of the base formula.

4. when and to what extent the new formula should be implemented.

The System has proposed, and the committee seems to support, that the new formula should be phased in over a four-year period, with approximately 25% of the formula allocation to be based on the new formula for year 1. (It has not been discussed if the remaining 75% would be based on the old, discredited formula or on the "base" of the FY12 or FY13 allocations (which in turn were determined largely by the old formula). Another approach would be to run the new formula for 100% of the allocation but apply additional, "stop-loss" funding to those campuses which would see a decrease in appropriation, namely the northern community colleges.

In any event, it seems clear that the proposed NSHE budget for 2013-2014 (the first version of which is to be revealed this Friday at the special Board of Regents meeting,  9 a.m. at Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas) is unlikely to represent much of a shift in share of allocation for each campus.

Hopefully, the primary difference from the legislatively approved 2011 budgets will be the restoration of full funding for faculty and staff compensation, which has been cut 4.8 percent for the past four years, and the restoration of a merit pay pool, as proposed by the governor.