Higher Education

From the article:

A study of law review membership indicates that gender and racial diversity on law school faculties may translate into more opportunities for female students. 

From the article:

The combination of disordered eating and heavy alcohol consumption known as drunkorexia is common among U.S. college students, researchers say.

Victoria Osborne, assistant professor of social work and public health at the University of Missouri, examined the relationship between alcohol misuse and disordered eating, including calorie restriction and purging.

The study found 16 percent of those surveyed reported restricting calories to "save them" for drinking, and of the respondents, about three times as many women as men reported engaging in the behavior.

Motivations for drunkorexia include preventing weight gain, getting intoxicated faster and saving money that would be spent on food to buy alcohol, the study found.

Drunkorexia could have dangerous cognitive, behavioral and physical consequences, as well as put people at risk for developing more serious eating disorders or addiction problems, Osborne said.

"Apart from each other, depriving the brain of adequate nutrition and consuming large amounts of alcohol can be dangerous," Osborne said in a statement. "Together, they can cause short- and long-term cognitive problems including difficulty concentrating, studying and making decisions."

People who participate in disordered eating combined with binge drinking are at an elevated risk for violence, risky sexual behavior, alcohol poisoning, substance abuse and chronic diseases later in life, Osborne said.

The findings were presented at the American Psychopathological Association and the Research Society on Alcoholism.

About the report:

Raising the education level of the overall U.S. population requires closing the educational gaps among racial/ethnic groups and by gender. Although the members of the younger generation of some racial/ethnic groups are more likely to attain college degrees than their predecessors, that is not the case across all groups. Other findings include: the high school completion rate for young people has not improved much, and college enrollment gaps have widened among racial/ethnic groups during the past two decades.

The Minorities in Higher Education series, which began in 1984, is designed to help gauge the progress in our quest for educational excellence and equity for all races/ethnicities and for both men and women in American higher education. The full status report is produced biennially in even-numbered years, while updates on selected information are provided as a supplement in the intervening years.

Note: access to article requires a subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

From the article:

William B. Harvey was the first person ever appointed to the position of vice president for diversity and equity at the University of Virginia, a job he held from 2005 to 2009. A recognized expert on diversity issues in higher education, Mr. Harvey is also founding president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education.

With more than three decades of higher-education experience, he recently joined North Carolina A&T University, where he serves as dean of the School of Education. In a conversation with The Chronicle, Mr. Harvey spoke about the barriers that still remain, what a chief diversity officer needs to succeed, and who should step up to make a difference.

By Sara Hebel

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Certain colleges may have cultures that nudge female students into stereotypically female fields and men into stereotypically male ones, suggests a study whose findings are slated to be presented here on Tuesday at the annual conference of the American Sociological Association.

Colleges that have relatively few women among their tenured faculty members and exceptionally small numbers of men among their undergraduates generally have higher levels of gender segregation by major than do other institutions, the study found. So do colleges with football teams in Division III of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, suggesting that those with athletic programs that emphasize male-dominated sports are less likely to encourage the gender integration of various academic fields, according to a paper summarizing the study's results.

Colleges that promote study in the liberal arts, by contrast, tend to have more students go into fields traditionally associated with members of the opposite sex, the paper says.

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The paper's authors are Jayne Baker, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Toronto, and Ann L. Mullen, an associate professor of sociology there. They based their analysis on federal data on nearly 1.3 million students who earned bachelor's degrees from one of about 1,400 colleges in the United States during the 2004-5 academic year. The data were collected by the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics as part of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

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