This morning, I'm at the monthly meeting of the City Colleges of Chicago trustees.
Today, the hot topic is a request for trustees to sign off on spending more than $100,000 to maintain the steel plates that are boarding up the old Kennedy-King campus that straddles Wentworth Avenue in Englewood.
That number – originally $207,000 for the next year -- perked up several board members at today's meeting, who wondered why the district was ready to write such a big check when demolition is set to begin by December.
The short answer: just in case, says Diane Minor, who is...more
Here's a followup to my earlier post. Jim Tyree, the chairman of the City Colleges' Board of Trustees, called me back yesterday afternoon and chatted about the process for picking a new chancellor.
Students and faculty will soon have a chance to take part, he says.
“I promised everybody input, and we’ll talk about how that’s going to happen,” Tyree says. More details will come at Thursday’s board meeting, he added.
While he wouldn’t go into specifics, Tyree said there would be at least “a couple” of town hall-style meetings. The locations, dates and times haven’t been decided yet....more
The agenda for this month’s City Colleges of Chicago board meeting is out. Most notable is what’s missing from it.
At the July meeting, when the board named Deidra Lewis as the district’s interim chcancellor for six months, Chairman Jim Tyree pledged that the district would work quickly to convene a search committee to pick a permanent replacement. That special committee would comprise the Board of Trustees and would meet with students, faculty, staff and anyone else who had thoughts on who should be the next chancellor, Tyree said.
Then, silence.
There has been no public mention of the committee....more
Twittertastic news
Your hapless higher ed reporter hasn’t quite mastered Twitter yet, but everyone else has. Eight Loyola freshman are tweeting their experiences in the first weeks of classes (desire to sleep in versus getting money’s worth out of tuition by showing up to class is a common refrain). Loyola was one of the first colleges in Chicago last year to deal with H1N1 and that has the school taking extra steps early. The university’s Wellness Center has a Twitter feed and a blog with regular updates. In unrelated Twitter news, former Daily...more
I had a very long moment of déjà vu when I saw the front page of yesterday’s Trib with a giant article (including giant photo) about a new West Side campus for Chicago State University.
Then I remembered that I wrote about that more than two months ago. And again six weeks ago.
Memo to the Trib: Splashing a two-month-old clip job on the front page under a “Tribune Watchdog” hammer is a less than compelling advertisement of your investigative chops.
Save for a hop and skip through meeting minutes from 18 months ago (kudos for finding those on CSU’s site, by...more
