Former Cardinal Dr. George Mehaffy returns to Beaumont on Friday, April 20 to talk about the future of higher education. He will be speaking at 10:30 AM and 1:30 PM in the Landes Auditorium of the Galloway Building. His talk, Transformation in Perilous Times: Navigating our Way through the 21st Century, is timely given the current state of higher education. Mehaffy currently serves as the Vice President for Academic Leadership and Change for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. One of his most high profile projects was coordination of the Red Balloon Project that set out to re-envision higher education. He reflects on the project in a terrific article in Change magazine and notes "we have been struck by the challenge of change in higher education, especially at the institutional level. Substantive forces are at work to maintain the status quo, including extra-institutional expectations of states and accreditation agencies; institutional aspirations to achieve a different status; intransigent concepts of faculty work, especially regarding the nature of scholarship and service; frequently changing leadership; entrenched policies and procedures; and the array of issues competing for institutional attention." Registration for Mehaffy's two sessions, which be identical in content, continues for all LU faculty, staff, and students. As we draw near the close of another semester, you will be contacted by the Office of Assessment about completing the annual ACES survey. This instrument allows us to capture data related to our SACS accreditation and Quality Enhancement Plan or QEP. If you would like to discuss your results or would like to implement more active learning experiences in your course, do not hesitate to contact a member of the CT+LE staff. Tom Bartlett has an interesting article in CHE about the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from three journals in 2008 including Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. He writes, "For decades, literally, there has been talk about whether what makes it into the pages of psychology journals—or the journals of other disciplines, for that matter—is actually, you know, true. Researchers anxious for novel, significant, career-making findings have an incentive to publish their successes while neglecting to mention their failures. It’s what the psychologist Robert Rosenthal named “the file drawer effect.” So if an experiment is run ten times but pans out only once you trumpet the exception rather than the rule. Or perhaps a researcher is unconsciously biasing a study somehow. Or maybe he or she is flat-out faking results, which is not unheard of." CT+LE has recently donated three terrific books to the Mary and John Gray Library, or MJGL, that can help you improve student learning and they include Enhancing Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning by Maryellen Weimer, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before by Jean M. Twenge, and Assessing General Education Programs by Mary J. Allen. All three are available to circulate and can be found on the recommended reading bookshelves at the CT+LE suite on the 6th floor of MJGL.