Dartmouth was ranked at the top of the list of "Tech's 29 Most Powerful Colleges" as the school with the undergraduates most likely to become leaders in technology, The Daily Beast reported Monday. The publication surveyed the alma maters of the leaders of more than 100 companies in the high-tech industry, adjusting for the size of the undergraduate student body of each school, The Beast reported. Although tech companies do not exclude applicants based on where they went to college, potential employers take into account that some colleges produce graduates with better decision-making skills, according to Geoffrey Champion, chairman and chief executive officer of ChampionScott Partners, a firm that helps with searches to fill senior positions at companies. Most of the top executives at high-tech companies majored in electrical engineering or computer science, while other popular majors included economics, business and mechanical engineering. The ranking included Enrique Salem '87, the CEO of Symantec, and Trustee John Donahoe '82, the CEO of EBay, in its list of notable Dartmouth alumni.
Historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Annette Gordon-Reed '81 will join the faculty of Harvard University in July, the Harvard Law School website announced last week. Gordon-Reed, who won the 2009 Pulitzer Price in history for her book, "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," will hold professorial positions at Harvard Law School, the history department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, according to the website. Gordon-Reed, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1984, said she chose to accept the positions at Harvard partly because of the school's role in her own education, The Harvard Crimson reported. Gordon-Reed currently holds a teaching position at the New York University Law School.
The negative effect of using adjunct professors in community colleges may not hurt student performance as much as previously suggested, according to a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association on Sunday, Inside Higher Ed reported. Adjunct professors, who only teach part time and do not hold permanent faculty positions, typically teach fewer classes than tenure-track professors. Appalachian State University professor of education Les Bolt and Blue Ridge Community College interim vice president of instruction Hara Charlier, who conducted the study, found no correlation between adjunct instruction and negative student performance, Inside Higher Ed reported. The study, which tracked the academic performance of 1,424 first-year students at Virginia's Blue Ridge Community College over the course of three years, originated when administrators at Blue Ridge received complaints from full-time faculty members about the negative effect of hiring adjunct instructors on student learning.
