A New Hampshire law prohibiting affirmative action preferences in admissions or hiring at public colleges and universities took effect Jan. 1 after being passed in June 2011, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. The measure prevents public college admissions officers, recruiters and employers from giving preference based on "race, sex, national origin, religion, or sexual orientation," according to The Chronicle The New Hampshire legislature, which is dominated by conservative Republicans, passed the bill last year without significant opposition despite outcry over similar measures in the past, according to The Chronicle. Proponents of the bill cited an effort to facilitate it's quiet passage, The Chronicle reported. Gov. John Lynch, D-N.H., allowed the legislation to pass into law without signing it. Rep. Gary Hopper, D-Hillsborough, a co-sponsor of the bill, said the law was necessary to keep public colleges from manipulating their applicant pools in order to give preference to social minorities, despite statements from New Hampshire public colleges and universities that they will not be changing their hiring or admissions processes, according to the Chronicle.
Circulation materials from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's library have become available for Dartmouth students and faculty through the Borrow Direct Library Partnership, Dartmouth's resource-sharing supervisor Michelle Lee said in a campus-wide email. MIT will contribute two million additional titles to the service, Lee said. Given the new addition, Borrow Direct is a consortium that now includes nine universities, including all of the institutions in the Ivy League. Over 50 million volumes are available for circulation, according to the Dartmouth College Library website. MIT first announced its intention to join the service in January 2011, according to the MIT News Office.
A study conducted at Duke University suggests that black students and legacy students that have been preferentially accepted to Duke as undergraduates are more likely to switch to easier majors from more challenging ones, rebuking earlier claims that these students catch up academically to their peers, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on Tuesday. The study, which was conducted by an economics professor, a graduate student in economics and a sociology professor, has not yet been published, but its authors are among affirmative action critics that aim to bring selective admission to the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court. While black students' grade point averages were shown to improve over the course of their education at Duke, the study attributes the improvement to a higher incidence of major-switching among black students than among white students, The Chronicle reported. Researchers defined "tough majors" as economics, engineering or those in the natural sciences, which have stricter grading measures than majors in the humanities and other social sciences.
