Universities Weblog

Instead, it took administrators more than two hours to get out an e-mail warning students and staff to be cautious. The shooter had time to leave the dormitory where the first two victims were killed, mail a letter, and then enter a classroom building, chain the doors shut and kill 31 more people, including himself.

Even before the killings, the university had failed to properly care for the mentally troubled student gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, the panel found.

One victim's mother on Thursday urged Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to "show some leadership" and fire the university's president and campus police chief for their lack of action during the April 16 attack.

Kaine, however, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the school's officials had suffered enough without losing their jobs.

"This is not something where the university officials, faculty, administrators have just been very blithe," Kaine said. "There has been deep grieving about this and it's Torn the campus up."

"I want to fix this problem so I can reduce the chance of anything like this ever happening again," he said. "If I thought firings would be the way to do that, then that would be what I would focus on."

An eight-member panel appointed by Kaine spent four months investigating the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history and issued its report late Wednesday.

"Warning the students, faculty and staff might have made a difference," the panel. "So the earlier and clearer the warning, the more chance an individual had of surviving."

The first victims were shot shortly after 7 a.m. It wasn't until 9:26 a.m. that the school sent an e-mail to students and faculty warning: "Shooting on campus. The university community is urged to be cautious and are asked to contact Virginia Tech Police if you observe anything suspicious or with information on the case." Cho opened fire inside Norris Hall about 20 minutes later.

"Certainly, we're seeing a lot more separation anxiety, the kind that used to be at the doorstep of nursery school, not college," said Bill Conley, dean of enrollment and academic services at Johns Hopkins University.

Parents have been so involved in their children's lives through high school that it's difficult for them to just cut off that connection, said James Boyle, president of College Parents of America, an advocacy group based in Arlington County.

Leaving a freshman at college has traditionally been a milestone for families. But now, some school officials say, it's a symbol of a cultural and generational change. Many of the same people who rebelled against their parents have spent the past 18 years volunteering at their children's schools and making it to every lacrosse game. And in recent years, technology has made it easier to stay in near-constant touch.

"The drop-off has kind of evolved like weddings have," Boyle said. Now there are seminars and activities for parents on campus, and they often book hotel rooms nearby during the orientation process. "It's a weekend-long event."

Part of this is pure snobbery. Many of those who create and cover the mainstream college guides attended prestigious four-year schools-which helps to explain the annual preoccupation with whether Harvard or Princeton made the top of the list.

Part of it is also economics. The commercial guides don't have a market incentive to delve into the differences between hundreds of community colleges, because most students don't shop for a community college-they simply attend the one nearest their home. Similarly, there's not a lot of demand for articles about how best to play the applications game for such schools, because nearly any high school graduate can get into one.

Still, while there may not be a profit motive to scrutinize community colleges closely, there are several profound public reasons to do so. For one, community colleges now represent a huge slice of the higher education pie: 43 percent of college freshmen begin their education at two-year institutions.

Secondly, community colleges have taken on the toughest job in higher education: teaching lower-income students. In 1980, just 38 percent of recipients of a Pell Grant (the main federal need-based financial aid program) attended community colleges or other non-four-year institutions. By 2004, that percentage had leapt to 54 percent.

Thirdly, for a student of modest means hobbled by an inadequate high school education, or with a family to care for and a job to keep, the difference between good teaching and bad teaching can mean almost everything. Research shows that the brightest kids succeed regardless of whether they're taught poorly or well (one reason that many elite four-year schools succeed by doing little more than staying out of their students' way). Students with the lowest levels of academic preparation, however, are most sensitive to the quality of the learning environment.

Unfortunately, the learning environment at these colleges is far from the best it could be. Only 18 percent of community college freshmen earn a degree or certificate within three years.

The fourth reason to keep a close eye on community colleges is that our economic future depends on how well they serve their students. Twenty years ago, community colleges were places for less academically inclined students to gain the credentials they needed for a decent job, or for workers driven out of manufacturing positions to retrain for emerging sectors like IT. Today, many of those sectors are experiencing brutal competition from abroad. For these workers to get ahead, and to be useful to American companies, merely training them in new skills is no longer enough. They need to be able to learn continuously, to think critically, to adapt to a changing economy. In other words, we now need community colleges to impart the same kinds of sophisticated learning and thinking skills that have traditionally been the province of four-year colleges.

But for all the complaints that the rankings warp college admissions and distract colleges from educating students, U.S. News still has the upper hand. Colleges are having a hard time quitting the magazine's annual beauty contest.

Sixty-two colleges have enlisted in an anti-rankings campaign led by education activist Lloyd Thacker. But a quick Web search shows even some of those schools haven't fulfilled a pledge to stop using their rankings to advertise themselves. And none of the highest-ranked schools have formally signed on.

Interviews by The Associated Press with top officials at about a dozen elite colleges confirm a fault line in the rankings debate that's more than coincidence: It irks educators everywhere to see colleges ranked like basketball teams. But it irks educators at the top-ranked colleges a lot less.

"The list isn't perfect but it isn't totally evil either," said David Oxtoby, the president of Pomona College in California, the No. 7 liberal arts college on last year's list. The popular rankings are a way for students and parents to get information, he said, and most know better than to take a college's specific placement too seriously.

The debate has been raging since the magazine began ranking colleges in the 1980s. But the focus this year is on Thacker, a longtime admissions counselor who has made it his mission to restore educational values to what he calls an over-commercialized college selection process. Thacker has been circulating a letter calling on colleges to boycott a portion of the rankings, to swear off using them for self-promotion, and to develop an alternative - something he also is pursuing.

These higher ed leaders are well prepared to contribute in meaningful ways to national and international conversations. Colleges and universities with distinctive missions and educational philosophies-including women's colleges, historically black colleges, "great books" colleges, and colleges affiliated with religious denominations-continue to exist at least partly because their presidents speak out with courage and conviction about the value of a diverse array of educational choices.

Presidential leadership is often a matter of making discrete decisions that anticipate a future in which the institution will thrive. Sometimes that means offering a spirited defense of the college's historic values, and sometimes it means pursuing entirely new directions.

Officials at Hillsdale College (Mich.), for example, believe so deeply that the government should not meddle in higher education that they have not accepted federal funds for many years. More recently, several dozen college presidents have come to believe so strongly that U.S. News & World Report measures the wrong things that they have decided not to participate in the annual "reputational" rankings.

A president who takes a stand that resonates with the college's distinctive traditions while the surrounding culture moves in another direction, it is assumed, shows courage, while a president who departs from the institution's traditions demonstrates even more courage. It is believed that a president who takes a stand on an issue that has implications beyond the campus itself exemplifies the boldest leadership of all.

But it is not that simple. Consider, for example, the president who vigorously defends the American role in Iraq. Is he courageous in speaking out in support of an unpopular war even though the campus is near a large military base and many of its students are from military families?

The answer, of course, is yes. We do have our busy seasons, at least in my experience. Two, to be exact. One is December, when folks scurry to make year-end gifts in order to realize tax benefits the following April. Christmas has concluded, and the credit-card bills haven't yet come home to roost. I call that sudden realization of tax strategy "emergency philanthropy."

Our second busy time occurs at the end of the fiscal year. At most colleges, that is June 30. I don't know exactly why the higher-ed gods chose that date when drawing up the master plan, but someone got the bright idea that it made eminent sense to kick off fiscal festivities on July 1, and it stuck. So June 30 signifies our year end. Naturally, that confuses folks whose calendars conclude with December. I can instantly recognize the quizzical look when I remind someone in September that he's yet to make a gift "this year," even though he wrote his last check in April.

Come May, my fund-raising staff kicks into overdrive with an 11th-hour direct-mail and phone blitz. I call board members who haven't given since July and encourage them to accommodate our fiscal time frame instead of theirs. Most comply. By the time late June rolls around, we get rather frantic.

A few alumni and friends have grown accustomed to our June stampede and routinely drop in on the 30th or thereabouts. Others ask us to drive across town and pick up checks or to rendezvous in some convenient location. I'm always happy to oblige, even when the donation will hardly cover lunch, let alone a hot-oil Pedicure.

Some students say they take a gap year to escape stress accumulated from Advanced Placement courses and competition over grades and class rank.

"I grew really tired of everything in school. I just didn't like the atmosphere, especially at Whitman, where if you're not an overachiever, then you're just . . . I don't know," [Billy] Neville said. "So, I was hoping, in my year off, I'll find out what really interests me."

Neville asked for his deferral in a letter to the admissions office. "And they came right back, saying, 'Sure,'" said his mother, Clare Neville.

Ann Larson, a senior associate director of admissions at Miami of Ohio, said the university grants deferrals for medical issues, military service, study abroad and other reasons on a case-by-case basis.

"We really have no problem with students taking gap years," Larson said. "It's very positive what they bring back to the university. It's a maturing experience."

College admissions officers said they want gap-year students to improve upon an area of expertise or perform some kind of public service. John Blackburn, dean of admissions at University of Virginia, said students often seek deferrals for missionary work or public service jobs through such nonprofit organizations as Operation Smile, which performs free reconstructive surgery on children born with facial deformities in developing countries. Admissions officials at Georgetown University estimated that 25 to 30 students admitted each year in a class of almost 1,600 ask for a deferral, requesting trips abroad to learn a foreign language, intern at a foreign embassy, or even work at a foreign or domestic magazine.

"This is really the key: We grow up in Kentucky being told we're not very good, we can't compete," he said at the lunch. "And that's not true."

"My point is that Kentucky needs to have big ideas," he added.

Few ideas are bigger than the one that Dr. Todd, 61, began promoting when he became president in 2001: getting Kentucky into the top 20 among public research universities by 2020.

It took 18 months to develop a plan, with the aid of consultants, to enhance the academic reputation of a university best known for its basketball teams, which have won seven national championships.

The first step for Dr. Todd and his team was to devise their own system for rating state universities. It involves measuring indicators like graduation rates; the academic quality of entering students; the number of Ph.D.'s being produced; the scholarly citations and awards amassed by the faculty members; and the dollar value of federal research grants awarded to the faculty members. Then, they designated benchmarks by which the university's progress could be measured over the years.