An assistant biology professor at Virginia Highlands Community College has been named Virginia Professor of the Year by the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

The State Board for Community Colleges today approved a midyear tuition increase to offset state budget cuts.

The recession and resulting loss of jobs and business activity present state leaders with a unique set of challenges to attract and retain top industries and generate new high-paying jobs for our citizens. In a period of diminished resources it is important to nourish those activities that will have lasting impact on the economic future of the state’s citizens. The commonwealth’s future will be shaped by our willingness to transform Virginia into one of the most highly educated states in the nation.

Having had the honor to serve on the State Council for Higher Education of Virginia (SCHEV) for the past four years, and having completed a two-year term as its chair, it is abundantly clear to me that the commonwealth stands at a critical, if not historic, crossroads as a partner with our public institutions of higher learning.

Higher education has slipped as a national priority even though it is key to both the country’s economic recovery and its standing as a world leader, four former governors said yesterday. “I think that higher education is at risk, and that message is not being communicated clearly and sufficiently enough,“ former Virginia Gov. Gerald L. Baliles told a coalition of business and education leaders at a daylong conference at the Greater Richmond Convention Center.

Virginia’s gubernatorial candidates are on the agenda today at the Virginia Summit on Competitiveness and Higher Education.

The state will seek a waiver from the federal government that would allow Virginia to move forward stimulus funding to help offset more than $196 million in budget cuts to higher education this year. Secretary of Finance Richard D. Brown told the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia yesterday that it appears the state will qualify for the federal waiver that is required to use $91.5 million in stimulus money this fiscal year instead of next.

Some of the nation’s biggest for-profit colleges and vocational schools are boosting enrollment in tough times by making more loans directly to cash-strapped students, knowing full well that many of them probably won’t be able to repay what they borrowed. The schools still make money because the practice boosts their enrollment and brings in tuition dollars subsidized by the government.

Classes start later this month at a reinvented University of the District of Columbia.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. River views, granite countertops, stainless-steel appliances, 9-foot ceilings. This is student housing? When classes start this fall—if all goes as planned—about 300 students at Johnson & Wales University will be living in Capitol Cove, an upscale condominium project that had been languishing on the market. “It’s a great Band-Aid,“ said Irving Schneider, president of Johnson & Wales’s Providence campus, which just signed a three-year lease for the Capitol Cove development. “This arrangement was good for the developer as well as Johnson & Wales.“

James P. Bennett Jr. has been appointed chairman of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Neurology and will be the founding director of the VCU Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders Multidisciplinary Research and Clinical Center. Bennett, a University of Virginia professor and director of a center for Parkinson’s disease research there, will assume his new duties July 1.

The National Association of Scholars is to higher education what an evolutionist is to a tent revival: a distinct and unwelcome minority. The organization consists of conservative academics who enjoy challenging the dominant leftist ideology that pervades the modern university. It particularly relishes confronting political correctness. When last heard from in the Old Dominion, the NAS was castigating Virginia Tech for a proposed diversity policy in the college of arts and sciences that amounted to an ideological litmus test for professional advancement.

National Center for Higher Education Management Systems Virginia’s population ranks eighth in the United States for percentage of residents with college degrees. But the U.S. lags behind nearly every developed nation in the percentage of degrees held by its younger generation. The sobering news was delivered yesterday during a meeting at the state Capitol in Richmond of the Council on Virginia’s Future.

Bob McDonnell, the presumptive Republican nominee for governor, says Virginia’s tax-supported colleges and universities can hold down tuition by cutting expenses. But McDonnell, rolling out his higher-education plan yesterday, also wants the state to produce another 100,000 graduates at two-year community colleges and four-year institutions over the next 15 years.

The $71.5 million Molecular Medicine Research Building represents the renaissance of biomedical research at VCU, one official says.