UC San Diego announced this month it raised $3 billion, surpassing its original goal o $2 billion, through a multibillion-dollar, 10-years old campaign concluding on June 30, 2022. "In just over six decades, the University of California San Diego has become an international powerhouse in research, innovation, health care, the arts, and education," said the institution. Over 163,000 people — friends, alumni, foundations, and corporations — have supported the university with gifts and grants of all sizes, providing funding to 453 different areas on campus. Around 100 national leaders and alumni collectively donated $1 billion to the campaign, and 46,500 alumni donated $253 million in gifts. Among other gifts and donations, they are the following: Joan and Irwin Jacobs provided $100 million in support for the landmark Jacobs Medical Center at UC San Diego Health, which opened in late 2016. Ernest and Evelyn Rady committed $100 million in 2015 to help recruit and retain faculty and fund strategic priorities at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego, which they helped establish in 2004 with a $30 million lead gift. Denny Sanford donated $100 million to the creation of the Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center at UC San Diego Health in 2013. With another $100 million commitment, he went on to establish the T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion, which focused on research into the neurological basis of compassion. With a $75 million donation, alumnus Taner Halıcıoğlu '96 donated $75 million in the largest alumni gift the campus has ever received to establish the Halıcıoğlu Institute for Data Science at UC San Diego. The late Franklin Antonio '74 became the first alumnus to have a building named in his honor – Franklin Antonio Hall – after making a $30 million gift to support the Jacobs School of Engineering.
Lawrence S. Bacow announced yesterday that he will step down as Harvard University's president in June 2023. During his tenure, Bacow, a lifelong academic, fought a COVID infection himself, steered the institution through the pandemic, and dealt with an attack on its admission policies, one that will face a Supreme Court test later this year. This spring, Harvard University committed $100 million to make amends for its historical ties to slavery. "Enslaved people worked on our campus supporting our students, faculty, and staff, including several Harvard presidents," he wrote. "There is never a good time to leave a job like this one, but now seems right to me," he said in a statement. "Adele [his wife] and I are looking forward to spending more time with my children and grandchildren." His five-year tenure as Harvard president is brief compared to that of his predecessor, Drew Gilpin Faust, who served 12 years. Bacow spent over fifty years studying, teaching at, and presiding over three major universities in the Boston area, including seven previous years as a member of the Harvard Corporation, the university's governing organization. Before being appointed Harvard’s president, Bacow spent ten years as president of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and 24 years as a faculty member and administrator at MIT. Son of immigrants who escaped Nazi persecution, he attended college at MIT and then earned three degrees from Harvard, including a Ph.D. in public policy. • The news on The Harvard Gazette
U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said yesterday in a hearing on Capitol Hill that those calling for arming teachers in schools are showing a lack of respect for the profession. "I think it's a further reflection of the lack of respect that this profession has, and I would stand against that," he stated. In response to a question from Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, during the Senate Appropriations Committee, Cardona stated: "To think that arming our teachers and now having them be responsible for discharging a firearm in our schools, it's just ludicrous to think about." This comment comes after 19 children and two adults were killed in a mass shooting at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school last month. The attack was one of several shootings recently, including one in Buffalo, Tulsa, and Philadelphia. Some Republicans are calling for school security enhancements by arming teachers and administrators.
George Burnett resigned as President of the University of Phoenix after the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation on his prior job management at another for-profit institution, Westwood College. USA Today broke the news last week. Westwood College, a for-profit college that closed in 2016, faced tension with regulators over deceptive advertising among other concerns. The U.S. Department of Education has already canceled $130 million in student loan debt in connection to claims from students who attended Westwood in Westminster, Colorado. "He has stepped down as president and board member of the university, effective June 1, 2022," confirmed a Phoenix spokeswoman, Andrea Smiley. "Because Mr. Burnett believes this request could take some time to address, and not wanting to distract from the university’s mission of providing career-relevant higher education to working adults," she added. George Burnett was appointed head of the University of Phoenix in February 2022. The department requests included questions about how long Burnett worked at the college and its parent company, Alta Colleges, and his role in the school's advertisements, recruitment strategies, and job placement reports. Chris Lynne, the university's chief financial officer, will serve as interim president. The University of Phoenix is one of the nation’s largest for-profit providers of online college education. It has 75,000 students, and it received about $930 million in federal money meant for student financial aid in the fiscal year 2020-2021.
Clearlake Capital VC-backed Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc. announced that it completed the acquisition of EdCast in May. The former CEO of EdCast, Karl Mehta, was appointed to lead the new EdCast business unit within Cornerstone. Another consequence of the integration is that now, Cornerstone is offering the EdCast platform to its customers through the website. On AWS Marketplace the brand integration is still pending and only EdCast features its platform. The EO Santa Monica, California-based Cornerstone, Himanshu Palsule, said that "combined with the EdCast team, the company is fast-tracking our commitment to platform-agnostic innovation." The company said that "it will roadmap a single-user experience for customers across people growth and development, providing tighter data connectivity, deepened skills intelligence, and a single pane of insight and analytics across the entire Cornerstone portfolio." Organizations will be able to bring their own external LMS, content, performance, recruiting, and HRIS solutions.
