Academia

As I read in the Wiki, "Researchers have criticized Elsevier for its high profit margins and copyright practices. The company had a reported profit before tax of £2.295 billion with an adjusted operating margin of 33.1% in 2023. Much of the research that Elsevier publishes is publicly funded; its high costs have led to accusations of rent-seeking, boycotts against them, and the rise of alternate avenues for publication and access, such as preprint servers and shadow libraries."

Are there other high-score but more ethical publishers? Is Springer Nature better in this sense? I mean the subscription publishing options, not a paid open-access.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6498593

To summarize:

• Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
• Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
• Social Sciences by 50–70%
• History by 60%
• Biology by 75%
• The German department will lose all PhD seats
• Sociology from six PhD students to zero

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6322801

Tens of thousands of students walked out of classrooms in cities and towns across Spain on Thursday to protest Israel’s ongoing US-backed genocide in Gaza and abduction of Global Sumud Flotilla members, dozens of whom are Spanish.

The National Students’ Union organized Thursday’s protests under the slogan “stop the genocide against the Palestinian people.” Demonstrations, which took part in at least 39 cities and towns, varied in size from small groups to thousands who turned out in Barcelona and the capital Madrid, where students held banners with messages like “Stop Everything to Stop the Genocide,” “All Eyes on the Global Sumud Flotilla,” and “Free Palestine!”

“We’re not going to look the other way,” the union said in a statement. “The Palestinian cause is the cause of the youth and the millions who stand for human rights and social justice. That is why... we called the general student strike to empty the classrooms and fill the streets with dignity.”

Full article

The ending in particular:

The task of the university in our digitally mediated world is more vast than collecting, commenting, and editing, and there are many other ways to conduct data analysis or learn how to navigate information online. But reading and writing are now unremitting. In earlier generations, small groups of people wrote letters, constantly. This is, in fact, a topic of study among humanities scholars. In our time, everyone is constantly reading and writing—through email, Facebook, TikTok, X, Instagram, and so on. We are caught up in a semiotic exchange. Media literacy is a learning outcome in many schools. Universities have a unique responsibility and capacity for teaching the kinds of thinking that will deepen and transform widely accessible information.

One of the new tasks for the humanities, specifically, is to revise and recast our traditions of scholarship for this new context. If you’ll forgive the pun, we should take a page from the humanists. We need to design new protocols to engage our students’ insatiable desire to read and write in these new environments so they will learn how to reflect and search for new knowledge. The challenge is speed. The current reading pace is fast—even though the time it takes a person to read a whole text might be quite long because they’re constantly jumping to other windows, following chains of connection away from the original text.

The kind of reading and thinking and writing that scholars pursue takes time. Perhaps, in part, what university education needs to do is slow reading and writing down. We now have rapid access to sources—which means we have more time for thinking and questioning. But having more time for reflection, rereading, revising, and rewriting is in tension with current views on efficiency and productivity. Going slowly might yield greater long-term benefits. Fostering habits of reflection, exploration, and discernment that lead to more valuable comments—this is a task for the university.

Academia.edu now owns your data

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http://academia.edu/terms

@academia

Authors:

Megan Ames
Associate Professor, Psychology, University of Victoria

Carly McMorris
Associate Professor of Education, University of Calgary

Excerpt:

With the prevalence of autism increasing in recent years, more autistic people are attending college and university. (There are different ways to identify in the autistic community, with some people prefering to call themselves “autistic” rather than “a person with autism;” we’re taking the former approach).

Recent data suggest one in 50 Canadian children and adolescents are diagnosed with autism.

Autistic students bring many strengths, such as creativity, focus and original thought to academic settings, but research shows they’re underrepresented on post-secondary campuses and face diverse barriers and challenges to success.

They also tend to have lower graduation rates than their non-autistic peers. This may be, in part, because autistic students face unique and systemic barriers in the academic setting, including a lack of access to autism-specific supports, sensory challenges and mental health difficulties.

In this analysis, we offer recommendations to best support autistic students on post-secondary campuses, based on our own and others’ research on autism in higher education, and with input from two autistic students.

Katherine (she/her) is a fourth-year undergraduate student completing her honours degree with research interests in autism, psychology and anthropology. Kai (any/all) is a recent graduate who completed their honours degree in psychology and who continues to engage in autism-related research, including as a co-author of our recent review of the research on autism in higher education.

Katherine and Kai were invited to collaborate on this article given their involvement in the lab of Megan Ames (the first author of this story) at the University of Victoria.

The lab pursues youth and community engaged research practices, including around autism in higher education. We interviewed each for approximately half hour with questions related to their experiences in post-secondary and their advice for new students. Both agreed to have their first names included here and have reviewed the article prior to publication.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6076376

A conservative mainland group whose lawsuit against Harvard University ended affirmative action in college admissions is now building support in Hawaiʻi to take on Kamehameha Schools’ policies that give preference to Native Hawaiian students.

Students for Fair Admissions, based in Virginia, recently launched the website KamehamehaNotFair.org. It says that the admission preference “is so strong that it is essentially impossible for a non-Native Hawaiian student to be admitted to Kamehameha.”

Kamehameha’s Board of Trustees and CEO Jack Wong said in a written statement that the school expected the policy would be challenged. The institution — a private school established through the estate of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop to educate Hawaiians — successfully defended its admission policy in a series of lawsuits in the early 2000s. The trustees and Wong promised to do so again.

“We are confident that our policy aligns with established law, and we will prevail,” the statement said.

The campaign also drew criticism from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, established in the late 1970s for the betterment of Native Hawaiians. OHA’s Board of Trustees called it an “attack on the right of Native Hawaiians to care for our own, on our own terms.”

Full Article