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U. of Puerto Rico Is Closed as Hurricane Maria Wreaks Destruction

The University of Puerto Rico’s 11 campuses and central office are closed in the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria.

“The whole island is without power right now, and the destruction has been catastrophic,” Joseph Martinez Huarneck, the university’s director of communications, told The Chronicle in an email on Thursday. “The communications infrastructure has practically collapsed. Cellphone and internet service are unstable. TV and radio stations, except three or four, are unab…

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Howard U. Students Protest During James Comey’s Convocation Speech

James Comey, the former FBI director, was met with songs and protest chants at Howard University on Friday as he gave the convocation address, a video on the Politico site shows.

In the video, student protesters can be heard singing “We Shall Not Be Moved” in the back of the auditorium. In an interview, Jaquatte Williams, a freshman majoring in broadcast journalism, said that Mr. Comey could not be heard over the sound of the protesters and that he waited at the podium for the students to stop.

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Education Dept. Replaces Obama-Era Title IX Directives With New Interim Guidance

The U.S. Department of Education has rescinded two pieces of Obama-era guidance that told colleges how they should handle issues related to campus sexual assault, and has replaced them with new interim guidance, the department announced on Friday.

In a speech this month, the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, announced that the department would begin a process for replacing the Obama-era guidance. The department’s action on Friday withdrew two key documents: a 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, which …

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Western Governors U. Might Have to Repay $700 Million in Student Aid

After an audit of Western Governors University, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General has concluded the university was ineligible to award financial aid to its students and should return more than $700 million to the government.

For more, see this Chronicle article.

As part of its decision, the office is recommending that the Department of Education require the nonprofit university to return $712,670,616 in federal Title IV financial-aid funds distributed to Western Gove…

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2 More Speakers Drop From Yiannopoulos’s ‘Free Speech Week’ at Berkeley

The speaker lineup for a multiday series organized by the controversial Milo Yiannopoulos remains in flux, as one person says he was listed to speak without his knowledge and another has withdrawn.

On Wednesday, Lucian B. Wintrich, a journalist with the Gateway Pundit, said he would not attend the event, at the University of California at Berkeley, despite having initially agreed to do so.

“I have decided to withdraw my name from Berkeley Free Speech Week’s schedule on the seemingly likely c…

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David Boren Will Retire as U. of Oklahoma’s President

David L. Boren, president since 1994 of the University of Oklahoma, announced on Wednesday that he planned to retire on June 30, 2018, unless his successor had not been named by that date.

Mr. Boren, a centrist Democrat, has engaged in public service for more than 50 years, including terms in the Oklahoma Legislature, as governor of Oklahoma, and as a U.S. senator from his home state before he became the university’s president.

His years as president were noted for the creation of 30 academic pr…

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Laura Kipnis Says She Faced Another Title IX Investigation, This Time for Her Book

Laura Kipnis, the Northwestern University professor whose Chronicle article titled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” sparked a chain of events that led to a Title IX investigation of her, faced another inquiry, The New Yorker reports. That one was prompted by the publication of her book Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, she said.

In her initial essay in The Chronicle, Ms. Kipnis argued that a culture of protection rather than empowerment around sexual issues on campuses was wro…

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Community-College Chief Will Step Down After Report Cites ‘Hostility, Intimidation, and Retaliation’

The president of Nashville State Community College has announced plans to retire in December, according to The Tennessean.

George Van Allen and other senior administrators were the subject of a “blistering” report earlier this year in which faculty members described a “climate of fear and oppressiveness” where university administrators used “hostility, intimidation, and retaliation” to control the faculty, the newspaper reported.

Mr. Van Allen has said the findings of the report were based on th…

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15 Members of ‘Third World Quarterly’ Editorial Board Resign

Fifteen scholars on the editorial board of Third World Quarterly have resigned over the publication of a controversial essay, according to the their resignation letter. Their departures leave the journal, which publishes essays from the field of international studies, short nearly half of its editorial board.

The essay is by Bruce Gilley, a political scientist at Portland State University, and is titled “The Case for Colonialism.” It argues that the idea that Western colonialism harmed colonized…

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Purdue’s Purchase of Kaplan Gets Go-Ahead From Education Dept.

The second of three approvals necessary for Purdue University to complete its acquisition of the for-profit Kaplan University has grown likelier now that the U.S. Education Department “preliminarily concluded” that it had no objections to the deal.

The department noted that final approval requires more information from the parties involved, and that conditions would be imposed. But Purdue announced confidently on Tuesday that the agency’s pre-acquisition review means that it “will give its appro…

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