Two Mexican universities have halted exchange programs with the University of Arizona because of Arizona's new, more strict immigration law, The Arizona Republic reported May 7. Officials from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosi told The Republic they believe that the law, which allows for increased policing of potential illegal immigrants, would lead to harassment of their students through ethnic or racial profiling. The decision will affect 14 students from the two Mexican universities scheduled to visit Arizona during the summer, according to The Republic. The University of Arizona, which has academic exchange agreements with 31 Mexican universities, does not expect any other universities to cancel their academic-exchange arrangements, The Republic reported.
The National Research Council has announced potential changes to the way it evaluates and ranks doctoral programs, Inside Higher Ed reported Monday. Instead of assigning programs a single ranking, these changes would assign programs a ranking "range" to within a 90 percent confidence level, rather than the previous 50 percent target confidence level last year, Inside Higher Ed reported. Doctoral programs would also be given two separate rankings one based on explicit criteria determined by faculty and the other based on implicit criteria, according to the National Research Council website. The new system relies less on surveys and more on data such as measures of faculty quality, the student experience and student diversity in an attempt to reflect each program's disciplinary values, Inside Higher Ed reported.
Facing privacy concerns, the Library of Congress has further defined its plans to archive all public Twitter posts since the website was established in 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported Friday. The database will not include "private account information and deleted tweets" or "linked information" for pictures and websites, according to the Library of Congress blog. "Qualified researchers" will be allowed to view Twitter posts a minimum of six months after they are posted, according to the website. The Library of Congress is primarily concerned with preserving long-term access to the archive, and will work with academic research communities to further explore "issues related to researcher access," according to the website. The Library of Congress will use the Twitter archive as a case study in the development of policies for research use of digital archives, the website said.
