Cornell University senior Brian Lo died in a fire on May 6 that may have been partially caused by improper fire safety precautions and that alcohol consumption may have been involved, Ithaca's Deputy Fire Chief Tom Parsons said, The Cornell Daily Sun reported. The fire, which occurred in an off-campus house, started close to midnight and continued to burn for three hours. Lo died in the fire, while six or seven other residents safely escaped the building, according to The Daily Sun. Although Parsons said he did not have the results of the autopsy, he said he was suspicious of the role of alcohol because other people who lived in the house had been partying that evening. Parsons said Lo should have been able to escape the fire due to the fact that the house's smoke alarms were working, while other city officials blamed the lack of sprinklers as a factor in Lo's death, according to The Daily Sun.
Higher education institution presidents showed an overall lack of satisfaction with current measures for assessing the quality of education at universities, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. The new Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability enlisted 76 presidents to publicly promise to strive to enhance academics at their colleges. While the public often looks to numbers concerning the average salaries and unemployment rates of people from specific schools, Barbara Couture, president of New Mexico State University warned that such statistics might be misleading, as students might be first-generation students or from low-income backgrounds. Pomona College President David Oxtoby said he rejects the idea of a singular way to assess quality at a college because there are many different ways to gauge progress and success, according to The Chronicle.
Leaders of private four-year institutions prefer long-term or annual contracts for their professors rather than tenure, according to findings from a Pew Research Center survey, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. Leaders of public colleges, however, tended to favor tenure, with 50 percent opting for tenured professors and 36 percent preferring professors on long-term contracts, according to The Chronicle. College leaders may avoid binding tenure contracts when faced with budget cuts, Cathy Trower, an advocate of tenure alternatives and a research director at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, said in an interview with The Chronicle. Tenure supporters said they believe tenure is an essential practice that protects "academic freedom," while their opponents argue that tenure makes it difficult to ensure competency among faculty members, according to The Chronicle.
