An opinion piece published in The New York Times entitled “Are College Lectures Unfair?” provides a clue to the persistent gender and race gaps in computer science [1]. The author, Annie Murphy Paul, poses several provocative questions: “Does the college lecture discriminate? Is it biased against undergraduates who are not white, male, and affluent?” She proceeds to explain how a growing body of research shows that “the lecture is not generic or neutral, but a specific cultural form that favors some people while discriminates against others, including women, minorities, and low-income first generation college students.” Paul then contrasts the lecture with active learning, where students construct knowledge through hands-on problem solving, engaging with the material through group work, collaborative thinking, and where students anchor their learning in knowledge they possess and cultural references with which they are familiar. For educators of computer science, a field that has been largely taught through lecture and direct instruction, research supporting active inquiry-based learning should give everyone pause to reflect and discuss.

The Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI) announces the launch of the CAHSI Summit to be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico on September 10-13, 2015. The CAHSI Summit is an extension of the CAHSI annual meeting that has provided professional development to students and faculty and served as a forum to disseminate undergraduate and graduate research efforts, CAHSI effective practices, and emerging practices that target recruitment, retention, and advancement.

Three years ago in May 2012, as Terry Benzel, Deputy Director, Computer Networks Division, Information Sciences Institute at USC, Hilarie Orman, The Purple Streak (a software security firm), and I, Susan, then a visiting scholar at Harvard, sat at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, we had trouble seeing any other women. As women researchers in security and privacy of a certain age, we were accustomed to that. But we were not accustomed to the original proposal for the program committee for the following year’s program committee: forty men, two women. We looked at each other. There was not “world enough and time” to wait for the situation to change; we needed to take action now.