Tag: Ind

  • Why Ind. Fans Are Excited About First Football National Champs

    Why Ind. Fans Are Excited About First Football National Champs

    The Indiana Hoosiers defeated the Miami Hurricanes 27 to 21 to win the university’s first-ever NCAA Division I college football national championship this week. Any school would be thrilled to clinch this title and take home the trophy that accompanies it. But I will explain in this article why it hits different for IU students, alumni, employees and other supporters. Before doing so, I’ll first disclose how I know.

    Five of the best years of my life were spent in Bloomington. I have a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the extraordinary university that is the heartbeat of that beloved community. IU subsequently bestowed upon me two distinguished alumni awards. The university presented its first Bicentennial Medal to Indiana governor Eric Holcomb in July 2019; that same month, I became the second recipient.

    Since graduating with my doctorate 23 years ago, I have returned to campus to deliver several lectures and keynote speeches, including the 2024 Martin Luther King Jr. Day Address. My favorite trip back was in 2011 to celebrate my fraternity’s centennial. Ten visionary Black male students founded Kappa Alpha Psi there, a brotherhood that now has more than 150,000 members. I am proud to be one of them. These are just a few of countless reasons why I have long been one of IU’s proudest alums.

    Here is what I remember about football games in the late ’90s and early 2000s: Whew, yikes! Tons of people showed up to tailgate outside our stadium on Saturday mornings before home games. I was often one of them. Those gatherings were probably just as fun there as they were at schools that had won Power 4 conference titles and national championships. But there was one embarrassing feature of our pregame tailgates: Few people actually went inside Memorial Stadium for games. When I say “few,” I mean at least two-thirds of stadium seats were empty. I thought it rude and unsupportive of student athletes to eat and drink in the parking lot for hours then skip the game—hence, I opted for the tailgate-only experience no more than four times each season. I was inside cheering all the other times.

    Despite what had long been its shady tailgating culture, IU has amazing fans. I often screamed alongside them at basketball games. During one of my most recent visits to campus, President Pam Whitten generously hosted me for a Big Ten matchup in her fabulous suite inside the iconic Assembly Hall. I was instantly reminded that my beloved alma mater has an electrifying, inspiringly loyal fan base—for basketball. As it turns out, winning five men’s national basketball championships, clinching 22 Big Ten conference titles and making 41 NCAA tournament appearances (advancing to the Final Four eight times) excites people. Suffering so many defeats in football year after year, not so much.

    Throughout the last two seasons, ESPN commentators and other sportscasters have annoyingly repeated that Indiana has long been the losingest major college football team of all time; I will leave it to someone else to fact-check that. Going from being so bad for so long to an 11–2 season and playoff berth last year, followed by a Big Ten Championship, a flawless 16–0 season and a national championship win this year, are just some reasons why IU alumni and others are so excited. Oh, and then there is Fernando Mendoza, our first-ever Heisman Trophy winner, and Curt Cignetti, the inspirational head coach who accelerated our football program to greatness in just two seasons.

    Instantly improving from (reportedly) worst of all time to college football’s undisputed best is indeed exciting. Nevertheless, it is not the only reason why the Indiana faithful are so amped. Our university is beyond extraordinary in numerous domains. Academic programs there are exceptional; many, including the one from which I graduated, are always ranked in the top nationally. The university employs many of the world’s best professors and researchers. Its connection to the Hoosier State is deep, measurable and in many ways transformative. The Bloomington campus, framed by its gorgeous tulip-filled Sample Gates, is a vibrant, exciting place to be a student. It feels like a great university because it has long been, still is and forever will be. It is birthplace of the greatest collegiate fraternity, a fact that requires no verification.

    Finally having a football program that matches all the other great things that IU is and does is why those of us who have experienced the place are so freakin’ excited about our first-ever college football national championship. Greatness deserves greatness. Thanks to Cignetti and his staff, Mendoza and every other student athlete on their team, Indiana University has finally achieved football greatness. They have given others and me one more reason to be incredibly proud of a great American university that excels in academics, public outreach, athletics and so many other domains. I conclude with this: Hoo-Hoo-Hoo-Hoosiers!

    Shaun Harper is University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership. His most recent book is titled Let’s Talk About DEI: Productive Disagreements About America’s Most Polarizing Topics.

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  • Ind. B School to Enforce Grade Distribution for Skill Classes

    Ind. B School to Enforce Grade Distribution for Skill Classes

    Other business schools, including University of Michigan’s Ross Business School and Columbia Business School, also enforce set grade distributions. 

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Ralf Geithe/iStock/Getty Images

    Some faculty members at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business have been instructed to eliminate grade rounding, remove the A-plus grade option and keep average section GPAs between 3.3 and 3.5 for the fall semester.

    The grading changes aim to “address grade inflation and promote rigor across our curriculum,” according to an email sent to faculty in the Communication, Professional and Computer Skills (CPS) department from business writing course coordinator Polly Graham, which was obtained by Inside Higher Ed. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, [CPS] grades elevated, and in recent years, grades have remained high. In recent semesters, some instructors have awarded 100% A’s in standard (i.e., non-honors) sections, and others have awarded extraordinary numbers of A+’s and incompletes,” the email said. 

    The new grading policy was sent to instructors in early August without faculty discussion or approval, according to a faculty member in the CPS department who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. The department, which does not have its own governance or bylaws beyond what governs the business school writ large, is the only one in Kelley that is staffed entirely by lecturers who do not have tenure protections. So far, the new grading policies apply only to courses in the CPS department, the faculty member said.

    Instructors of standard, nonhonors courses must make the GPA of each section average between 3.3 and 3.5, and honors course GPA averages must fall within 0.2 points of the “section’s cumulative student GPA,” the email stated. Faculty members should not round up final grades “even if the student’s grade is very close to a higher letter grade,” and each instructor will complete two check-ins with CPS leadership—one before and one after midterms—after which “formative support will be provided to faculty as requested or needed.” It’s unclear what form the support will take, but the faculty member suspects it could be additional assistance from the chair on lesson plans or grading strategies.

    It’s not unusual for business schools to enforce a set grade distribution. At the University of Michigan’s Ross Business School, for instance, core class instructors must follow a distribution that allows 40 percent or fewer undergraduates to earn an A-minus or higher, 90 percent or fewer undergraduates to earn a B or higher, and at least 10 percent of undergraduates must earn between a B-minus and an F. Emory University’s Goizueta Business School also enforces a grade distribution, as does Columbia Business School.

    The Kelley School will also enforce an attendance policy for CPS classes this fall. Students will be allowed up to three absences without a grade penalty. After the fourth absence, they lose one-third of their final letter grade, and after five absences, they lose a full letter grade. Six absences will result in an automatic “failure due to non-attendance,” the email explained. The school will allow exceptions on a case-by-case basis.

    All Kelley students are required to take courses within the CPS department, including a business presentations class, a business writing course and three “Kelley Compass” classes that teach soft business skills such as team building, interviewing and conflict management. Like the lab time that accompanies physical science classes, CPS courses offer skills-based training that encourages mastery, the CPS faculty member told Inside Higher Ed. Faculty are concerned that the new GPA targets put an artificial limit on students’ success.

    A spokesperson for the Kelley School did not answer Inside Higher Ed’s questions about the grade recalibration and instead provided the following statement: “At Kelley, faculty design courses to be both rigorous and fair, while supporting student development and career preparation. Our longstanding priority is to ensure that grades reflect the quality of each student’s performance and that grade distribution is fair and consistent, including across multiple sections of the same course.”

    The statement language echoes what faculty have been instructed to tell students and parents who ask about the grading changes, according to the CPS faculty member.

    Indiana’s Kelley School has become more popular of late, and administrators appear to be tightening admissions standards in response. The school has fielded some 27,000 applications for approximately 2,000 spots in recent years, the faculty member said, though the Kelley spokesperson did not confirm or refute these numbers.

    In March, Kelley promoted Patrick E. Hopkins, an accounting professor who has worked at the business school since 1995, to dean. Just over two months later, on June 2, incoming Indiana University prebusiness students were notified that the minimum grade for automatic admission to the Kelley School would be raised from a B to a B-plus, starting with their cohort. Christopher Duff, the father of an incoming Indiana prebusiness student who plans to seek admission to Kelley, said the change was a “bait and switch.”

    “To be crystal clear, I have zero issues with the Kelley School of Business changing their admission criteria. I do, however, have a major issue in the timing of this change. We made our decision based on clearly stated information at the time of commitment. We jettisoned all other schools, offers and financial aid to pursue a degree from Indiana-Kelley,” Duff told Inside Higher Ed. “You want to change the criteria? Fine. Do so with the incoming class who will be aware to make an informed decision. We did not get that choice. It was made for us and when we complained—and we all did—we were essentially told to take it or leave it.”

    Duff said he met with Kelley’s undergraduate admissions director, Alex Bruce, in June to discuss the change, and in that meeting Bruce told him the school had overadmitted for the incoming class and received commitments from far more students than they anticipated.

    “I asked [Bruce] if the admission department was telling the academic departments to grade harder, to weed out even more students than prior years,” Duff said. “He assured me that admissions and academics are separate entities and have no control over each other. I do not believe anything he told me that day.”

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