County College Research Articles

Judge rules against college

Case name: Cairone v. McHenry County College, et al., No. 17‐cv‐4247 (N.D. Ill. 08/09/19).

Judge rules against college

Case name: Cairone v. McHenry County College, et al., No. 17‐cv‐4247 (N.D. Ill. 08/09/19).

A significant portion of college students are not aware of HPV disease and HPV vaccine recommendations

ABSTRACT There is limited data on the HPV immunization status of Latino/Hispanic youth in the USA. In Los Angeles County in 2015, 54,973 (34.3%) college students were of Latino/Hispanic background. We examined Los Angeles County college students’ awareness of HPV and HPV-related disease, HPV vaccine recommendations, and their vaccination status. This study surveyed 212 Los Angeles college students from January to April 2018. In a convenience sampling study, a 31-question, IRB-approved survey was administered face-to-face to college students 18 years and older at California State University settings in Los Angeles County. Almost two-thirds of the male (65%) and half of the female (51.6%) respondents did not know that the HPV vaccine is recommended through 26 years of age, and 47.6% did not know they can get the HPV vaccine at the college student health center or youth-friendly clinics. Ethnicity, family income, and the highest level of education in the family had a significant impact on immunization rates. Self-reported and actual HPV knowledge levels were significantly associated with vaccination status. Educational strategies focusing on the logistics of receiving the HPV vaccine and HPV vaccine catch-up eligibility for college students may be effective in decreasing racial disparities in vaccine receipt.

Court decides college may have discriminated against employee

Case name: Williams v. Tarrant County College District, No. 16‐11804 (5th Cir. 01/18/18).

Bullying Scenario #9: Bacillus County College Case Study (Presentation Slides)

A PowerPointpresentation of a case study highlighting Bullying Scenarios #9: Bacillus County College, excerpted from chapter 9 of Hollis (2016) The Coercive Community College: Bullying and its Costly Impact on the Mission to Serve Underrepresented Populations. The scenario constructs the issues encountered within the college structure and working environment, and its need for expansion through donorship. The presentation of the last of 9 scenarios focuses on a Hispanic American college president's experience with bullying at the hands of a potential college donor. As the scenario develops we are introduced to instances of questionable behavior that has the power to jeopardize professional relations, college expansion, and the president's tenure.

Judge decides student has right to explain himself

Case name: Behne v. Union County College, et al., No. 14‐6929 (D. N.J. 01/26/18).

Court decides college may have discriminated against employee

Case name: Williams v. Tarrant County College District, No. 16‐11804 (5th Cir. 01/18/18).

Breaking New Ground: McHenry County College Developmental Mathematics Approach

ABSTRACTFocusing on the Developmental Mathematics program installed by McHenry County College (MCC), this case study examines an integrative approach to reducing student dependency on developmental math. Facing the challenge of bridging the gap between K-12 and college readiness, MCC established a summer bridge program to help alleviate summer brain drain and help students acclimated themselves to the college classroom environment. College and high school faculty collaborated to create a more fluid transition for students by aligning coursework and targeting specific needs of students. With an articulated mission of preparing students for future success in postsecondary education this program tremendously benefits students by saving time and cost by skipping developmental math courses. Especially for institutions that are experiencing developmental education reform and implementing the completion agenda, this case study provides practical implications to ensure student success and institutional effectiveness.

Judge decides student has right to explain himself

Case name: Behne v. Union County College, et al., No. 14‐6929 (D. N.J. 01/26/18).

Prepare for a successful start to a new presidency

In her first few months as president of Atlantic Cape Community College, Barbara Gaba hasn't experienced any big surprises. That's because she was well‐prepared for the position. “I've been in training for many years,” said Gaba, formerly the provost of the Elizabeth Campus and associate vice president for academic affairs at Union County College and a charter member of Dean & Provost's Advisory Board.

Use rubrics to assess professional and workplace learning

CHICAGO — How do you grant your adult learners credit for the work they may have done in the workforce, while ensuring that your academic standards are met? In a session at the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning annual conference, Jeanine Nagrod, director of the Office for Assessment of Professional and Workplace Learning at Thomas Edison State University; and Regina Riccioni, previous director of that office and current dean of allied sciences at Union County College, shared the assessment guide that TESU created based on these needs, as well as samples of rubrics to construct your own professional and workplace learning credit evaluation system.

Steps Toward Transformation: One College’s Achieving The Dream Story

ABSTRACTTarrant County College’s Achieving the Dream transformation has not only changed the college but all who engaged in the initiative. In four years, through ATD TCC became a college with one purpose, one goal, and one focus—student success through data informed decision making. From TCC Chancellor Dr. Erma Johnson Hadley to campus administrators, faculty, and staff, the college embraced the call for systemic change and fully engaged in the step by step process. Personnel throughout the college reported widespread satisfaction with senior leadership and viewed collaborations with colleagues across the district as beneficial and personally rewarding. Tireless endeavors to wholly engage stakeholders, build a culture of evidence, and employ effective student success interventions through ATD not only transformed TCC but ushered the college onto the national stage with Leader College recognition. The college’s next steps include keeping that momentum going and building on what it has accomplished.

The Development State: Aid, Culture and Civil Society in Tanzania by Maia Green

Reviewed by: The Development State: Aid, Culture and Civil Society in Tanzania by Maia Green James Biedzynski Green, Maia. The Development State: Aid, Culture and Civil Society in Tanzania. Suffolk, UK: Boydall and Brewer, 2014. Development is a controversial topic in African studies. Many African nationalists blame European colonialism for distorting their respective economies and making them dependent on the global market. Others argue that Africa has never had a chance to develop its own economic strategy given the violence and corruption that erupted after independence. Whatever the case, one cannot understand contemporary Africa without looking at development. Maia Green, an anthropologist at the University of Manchester, provides the reader with an interesting, yet jargon-laden, account of how development has unfolded in Tanzania. Tanzania was colonized by Germans at the end of the nineteenth century. Known as German East Africa, it was the jewel of the German colonial empire. After World War I, the United Kingdom took control and ruled it as Tanganyika until 1961. Tanganyika was first a League of Nations Mandate and then a United Nations Trusteeship. Thus, it had more external supervision than many other [End Page 85] African colonies. After World War II, an indigenous nationalist movement pushed for independence, which was achieved in 1961. Following independence, Tanganyika merged with Zanzibar to produce the new state of Tanzania in 1964. Tanzania's first leader, Julius Nyerere, unveiled the Ujamaa path to social and economic development in 1967. The villagization of production, a key component of the Ujamaa plan, essentially collectivized all forms of local productive capacity. For many citizens, who were forced out of their old homes, this new system was as disruptive as some of the pre-1914 German practices. By 1985, it was apparent that the Ujamaa plan was a disaster and had to be abandoned. At that point, Tanzania shifted to a market-oriented economy. Green participated in several development projects in Tanzania over the past twenty years. Her accounts of the process cast doubt on whether development projects truly benefit Tanzania. For one thing, there is a limit to what any project can do. In addition, any project is enmeshed with the state and people seeking secure and well-paying government employment. Green reveals the difficulties involved when government officials get involved in development projects. The biggest winners in any development project are often the local and national bureaucracy. One might wonder if Tanzania would be better off with more privately-controlled development projects or simply letting the market grow the economy. That plan, however, would toss many public sector employees out of work. Tanzania aims to become a middle-income state, yet all of its development projects have failed to achieve that goal. Could it be that development managers and government are the problem? [End Page 86] Do Tanzanians expect too much from these people? An engaging and revealing aspect of Green's book is her treatment of witchcraft, which is rampant across the continent. Many Africans simultaneously believe in witchcraft and fear its powers. A large sector of Tanzania's health care system consists of faith healers and witches. It might be better to work with them rather than against them. British officials urged that approach before World War II. Perhaps it might be wise to revisit that approach. Green's book will leave many readers frustrated with the limits of development in Tanzania and the rest of Africa. One important question posed in the books concerns the level of outside involvement in the development process. Should the developed nations leave Africa to its own devices? Should the developed nations attempt to impose their definition of development on Tanzania? The Development State: Aid, Culture and Civil Society in Tanzania will generate a lively discussion on the confluence of culture and society on development projects in Tanzania. James Biedzynski Middlesex County College Copyright © 2016 Association of Global South Studies, Inc.

Memory and Community in Sixteenth-Century France ed. by David P. LaGuardia, Cathy Yandell

Hardy, Françoise. Avis non autorisés… Paris: Équateurs, 2015. ISBN 978-2-84990396 -4. Pp. 250. 19 a. Since her beginnings as a singer during the early 1960s (Tous les garçons et les filles), Hardy has been a cultural icon in France and other European countries, especially in Germany where she performed free of accent in the language of the country. Slender and long-haired, she also added appearances in movies to her artistic repertoire, particularly in England. In the new millennium she came out with book publications in various literary genres: novel, autobiography, and non-fiction. Her latest book bears an ironic title, as if the author had failed to get authorization to publish her opinion on various controversial subjects. This volume is a collection of opinion pieces on such subjects as medicine, politics, environment, literature, fashion, astrology, and spirituality. One finds bits and pieces of autobiography—always fascinating as the description of facts only the author can verify. It is, therefore, a very subjective book which one can read under various aspects, even as a counterpart to her husband’s flippant self-presentation (Jacques Dutronc’s Pensées et répliques, 2000). The woman whom we learned to know some 50 years ago as the singer of poetic and melancholic chansons presents herself now as a critical observer of government and other institutions . However, it is difficult to identify her as a conservative, despite her criticism of the current French president and her appreciation of his predecessor with whose wife, the singer Carla Bruni, she maintains a friendly relationship. The various subjects the author touches upon also include literature, both English and French. Her interest in modern French classics is selective. Sartre, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir do not mean much to her, but she appreciates Proust, Colette, Céline. The contemporary authors with whom she had personal encounters are Patrick Modiano and Michel Houellebecq. Astrology and spirituality are two subjects which seem to be of special importance to her. The research into these subjects, about which she has published before, indicate the earnestness of this author about the human existence, particularly of aspects which have not yet been sufficiently covered (metaphysics used to be a term for these philosophical activities). It is, however, always interesting that the author also finds time and space to deal with less important issues, such as fashion, television, and Salut les copains. Ocean County College (NJ), emeritus Gert Niers LaGuardia,David P., and CathyYandell,eds.Memory and Community in SixteenthCentury France. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. ISBN 978-1-4724-5527-2. Pp. 267. £65. Through the study of a variety of texts, including personal correspondences, memoirs, legal proceedings, pamphlets and poetry, the fourteen essays in this volume 220 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 221 examine the manner in which the “textual remembering” of public acts and practices served a mnemonic function while reinforcing community identities in Renaissance France. These essays indicate that even the most independent writers of this period situated their identity within a community or social group, rather than as a private or transcendent subjectivity. Additionally, as sixteenth-century writers transcribed and re-wrote the significant events of their era, they often defended the positions of particular communities that were in conflict with one another, especially during the Wars of Religion. This volume is divided into four parts: “The Nature of Memory,” “Re-Viewing the Wars of Religion,”“Remembering People and Places,”and“Memory, Identity,Alterity”. The essays focus their analyses on a variety of perspectives including the material specificities of communication in Renaissance France, sixteenth-century French rhetorical practices, and the remembering of critical sixteenth-century French historical events. LaGuardia’s essay, for example, examines the correspondences between Catherine de Médicis and Jeanne d’Albret to reveal the complicated material conditions in which “faithful” scribes and couriers were often called upon to supplement or alter written information, such that even private correspondences were embedded within collective writing practices.Both Dora Polachek and Marian Rothstein examine the manipulation of memories and willful forgetting to reinforce particular images, specifically, Brantôme’s depiction in Dames illustres of Marguerite de Navarre as a defender of Catholicism (Polachek), and Le Roy’s...

L’indulgence du soleil et de l’automne par by Patrick Besson

Reviews 261 is apparent in the glee both men take in anagrams. To the question,“que devient Estella Ribstone?” (73), the answer is “Bret Easton Ellis” (74). Given this delight, American readers will wonder at the name“Vlad Eisinger,”since for most of us the only Vlad we are familiar with is Vlad the Impaler. This curiosity is only piqued by the novel’s last sentence, an exchange between Dan and Vlad: “tu as des nouvelles de Vlad Eisinger?” (287), demonstrating that at times a good con is an intriguing pleasure. Florida State University William Cloonan Besson, Patrick. L’indulgence du soleil et de l’automne. Paris: Fayard, 2015. ISBN 9782 -213-62965-0. Pp. 112. 13 a. Besson is an author who does not take the logistics of our existence too seriously. Human history serves as a draft that can be deconstructed and reassembled, and that goes also for our everyday life. The result is often funny, at least noteworthy, as can be read in Besson’s new collection of nine short stories. The title of the small volume is a quotation from a letter by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who—as we learn from Besson—had a son with a French woman from Perpignan.Why not? There is nothing wrong with rewriting history as long as this revision provides us with some matière à rire (to quote the title of a book by Raymond Devos). The following seven texts serve as good examples of Besson’s sense of humor: the comical effect is often reached with the help of the bizarre, grotesque, and eerie. However, like in a classical comedy, the stories tend toward a certain moral or a lesson of the human condition. “La traductrice sikh” describes the vanity of a less than mediocre author and his strange metamorphosis.“Jean-Paul et Rihanna” presents a philosophy professor with a famous first name and the singer Rihanna. The story conveys the following idea: when two people have the same dream, the dream becomes reality. The author creates a play with two realities: dream reality and the reality experienced by the mind when one is awake. Dreams can become real—in this case a wishful dream of erotic content dreamt by two people at the same time. Comparable to a professional stand-up comedian, the author is in“La joueuse russe”constantly working to deliver the comic effect, as can be evidenced in the quick, yet solid construction of facts and action, i.e., in his choice of style, play on words, and provocative fantasy including the grotesque. “Tous ses amants s’appelaient Patrick” presents the case of Sarah Wittgenstein (obviously named after another philosopher) and her harsh revenge for an act of rape she suffered many years before. “Singto” is basically a joke about gender identity. “Le voyage des comédiens”makes reference to a historic event which took place in March 1943 when a delegation of French movie stars accepted the invitation of the Nazi regime to come to Berlin.“La nuit de Cancún”is a fascinating work of magical realism about the Mexican death cult Santa Muerte. The last and longest contribution to this collection describes the unusually twisted and complicated identity crisis of a man who eventually finds out who his real parents are and what he had done many years ago to a playmate his age (“Le marché des enfants-rouges”). It seems that the author wanted to outdo himself in the closing story in regard to his presentation of the unusual and unforeseen. Besson’s volume offers a fine collection of reading material, to enjoy not just in the sunshine or in the fall. Ocean County College, NJ (emeritus) Gert Niers Blais, Marie-Claire. Aux jardins des Acacias. Paris: Seuil, 2014. ISBN 978-2-02116642 -2. Pp. 272. 18,50 a. This author astounded the literary world when she won the Médicis at the age of twenty-seven for Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel. Now living in Key West, and in her seventies, she focuses on a story of redemption. In a forty-two page interview at the end of the novel, this French Canadian explains: “Je me...

Research note – network collaboration in economic development: who participates?

Local economic development research assumes that the policy-making process does not happen in a vacuum containing only government officials. The process consists of collaboration between various community actors within a network in pursuit of economic policy goals. However, little empirical work has been done in the past decade to understand which actors have the strongest statistically significant relationships with local officials’ planning of economic development policy. This research note explores the gap by using descriptive statistics and phi coefficient analysis with data from the International City/County Management Association’s 2009 Economic Development Survey-South Region. Findings from the southern United States show that city governments have significant relationships, ranging from weak to moderately strong, with county governments, colleges and universities, and chambers of commerce. Interestingly, cities did not have significant relationships with economic development corporations, state governments, or the federal government in their economic development pursuits.

Under-use of radiotherapy in stage III bronchioaveolar lung cancer and socio-economic disparities in cause specific survival: a population study.

This study used the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) to analyze Surveillance, Epidemiology and End RESULTS (SEER) bronchioaveolar carcinoma data to identify predictive models and potential disparity in outcomes. Socio-economic, staging and treatment factors were assessed. For the risk modeling, each factor was fitted by a Generalized Linear Model to predict cause specific survival. The area under the ROC was computed. Similar strata were combined to construct the most parsimonious models. A random sampling algorithm was used to estimate modeling errors. Risk of cause specific death was computed for the predictors for comparison. There were 7,309 patients included in this study. The mean follow up time (S.D.) was 24.2 (20) months. Female patients outnumbered male ones 3:2. The mean (S.D.) age was 70.1 (10.6) years. Stage was the most predictive factor of outcome (ROC area of 0.76). After optimization, several strata were fused, with a comparable ROC area of 0.75. There was a 4% additional risk of death associated with lower county family income, African American race, rural residency and lower than 25% county college graduate. Radiotherapy had not been used in 2/3 of patients with stage III disease. There are socio-economic disparities in cause specific survival. Under-use of radiotherapy may have contributed to poor outcome. Improving education, access and rates of radiotherapy use may improve outcome.

Adjuncts and the Academic Labor Force

Adjuncts and the Academic Labor Force

Embedded Librarian Program Insights

This article reports on the insights gained from an embedded librarian program at MacKay Library, Union County College (Cranford, NJ) using the Angel Course Management System (CMS). The program began in order to reach out to students in online classes to market library resources and to offer assistance. Students were surveyed at the end of the semester to assess the value of the program and to suggest future revisions. Course assignments were found to play a major role in whether students reach out to the embedded librarian.

The “Mighty Macs”: Women's Basketball in Chester County

In October 2011 the feature film The Mighty Macs opened nationwide to rave reviews. The movie had already won several awards, including Best Feature and Audience Award at the John Paul II International Film Festival and Best Drama at the International Family Film Festival. The Mighty Macs is based on a true story, one recounted in Julie Byrne’s O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs . The Chester County college, founded in 1920, was the smallest college to win a national championship, with only about 400 students enrolled in 1972 (and approximately 3,800 in 2012).