The 2017 Influence List

In a year when heightened political polarization turned college campuses into battlegrounds over free speech and other hot-button issues, a handful of well-known figures had an outsize impact on higher education.

Milo Yiannopoulos stirred debates about firebrand speakers coming to campus — and how well colleges were prepared for them. The downfall of the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein brought renewed attention to sexual harassment in academe. And college presidents often tried to speak out more boldly about controversial issues and promote civil discourse

But for The Chronicle’s 2017 Influence List we sought to spotlight the less obvious players. We chose eight people and one law firm who we believe affected federal policy, campus culture, and the national conversation about education in 2017 — and who are likely to remain influential in the year ahead.

Jalane D. Schmidt | Jessica B. Sandberg | Raj Chetty | Mitch Daniels | Candice Jackson | Elizabeth Kiss | Sterling Beard | Bond, Schoeneck & King | Timothy Piazza

Activist Scholar: Jalane D. Schmidt

In July, weeks before white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Va., Jalane D. Schmidt spoke with a sense of foreboding. “These folks are the Klan. You need to know,” Ms. Schmidt, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, told The Chronicle. “They are walking among us. They live among us. They threaten our neighbors.”

Among a cohort of Virginia professors who embraced the roles of activists this past year, Ms. Schmidt emerged as a particularly clear and forceful voice. At times, she turned her pointed rhetoric against the leaders of her own university, whom Ms. Schmidt criticized for failing to adequately prepare for and respond to a white-nationalist march on campus that ended in violence.

Ms. Schmidt, whose research and teaching focus on African-diaspora religions of the Caribbean and Latin America, has pressed the university to deepen its continuing examination of the institution’s relationship to slavery and race. She was among a group of professors, for example, to call attention to a $1,000 gift that the university may have received nearly a century ago from the Ku Klux Klan.

Subsequently, the university pledged $12,500, the modern-day equivalent of the donation, to people injured in violent clashes with Unite the Right, the white-nationalist group that demonstrated in Charlottesville in August.

Going forward, Ms. Schmidt continues to push the university to reckon with the present-day ripple effects of slavery, calling for all members of the university’s work force to earn a living wage. Next semester, she plans to begin work on a book, which she envisions as an “activist’s account” of a university and a city grappling with its history and struggling against the forces of white supremacy. —Jack Stripling

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Open-Doors Advocate: Jessica B. Sandberg

Like many educators, Jessica B. Sandberg was alarmed by the election of Donald J. Trump, worried that the nationalist, anti-foreigner sentiment that swept him into office could drive away the students she seeks to recruit as director of international admissions at Temple University. She decided she had to speak up to let students know that American colleges remain open and hospitable places.

Adopting the slogan #YouAreWelcomeHere, Ms. Sandberg and her Temple colleagues started an online campaign, posting videos of students, professors, and even local residents urging foreign students to continue to come to the United States and sharing positive messages via social media.

Though a handful of colleges associated with Study Group, a private education provider, were the first to use the hashtag, Ms. Sandberg believed it should be a truly national effort, and she set out to encourage colleges across the country to sign on.

An executive order issued by Mr. Trump, just days into his presidency, barring students and other travelers from a half-dozen predominantly Muslim countries from entering the country gave the effort additional urgency. It’s now gone viral, with some 325 colleges and 60 international-education groups — and counting — participating. The campaign is a sign that international educators will make sure their global views are heard during an “America first” administration. —Karin Fischer

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Social-Mobility Researcher: Raj Chetty

Higher education has long prided itself as a springboard to the middle class: Get a degree, get a job, and climb the economic ladder. But Raj Chetty, a Stanford University professor of economics, and the members of the Equality of Opportunity Project are using big data to ask: How well do colleges really help graduates achieve the American dream?

The group’s Mobility Report Cards, for example, have given colleges a new way to be measured — and scrutinized. Using data from more than 30 million college students, the project examined the extent to which institutions across the nation provide access to low-income students and offer opportunities of upward mobility. While some colleges fared well — the City University of New York and California State colleges showed high rates of mobility — other institutions, not so much. With income inequality a growing concern among lawmakers and the public, the research earned national news-media attention and, in some cases, was presented as a black eye for higher education. “The Myth of American Universities as Inequality-Fighters,” blared a headline in The Atlantic.

Mr. Chetty, who earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University at age 23, is likely to continue challenging popular preconceptions about the value of a college degree with the goal of, as he puts it, “understanding what has led to this erosion of the American dream — and how we can revive it for future generations.” —Katherine Mangan

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Dealmaker: Mitch Daniels

When opportunity knocks, Purdue University’s president, Mitch Daniels, isn’t afraid to open the door.

It’s that attitude that helped Purdue partner with Gallup on a national opinion-polling project that continually measures public perceptions of college, and become a leader in the fledgling movement to offer income-sharing agreements as an alternative to conventional student loans. It’s also what led to the most talked-about business move on the higher-education landscape in 2017 — the university’s still-pending and controversial deal to acquire the for-profit Kaplan University under a complex financial arrangement.

Mr. Daniels, formerly Indiana’s Republican governor, was instrumental in the behind-the-scenes negotiations setting up the transaction, which he views as a chance to jump-start Purdue’s online presence while also expanding the institution’s land-grant mission by serving new pools of students, many of them older and working.

Hailed in some quarters for his audacious stroke, Mr. Daniels has also faced criticism over it from his own faculty senate and some outside critics, who question the secretive negotiations leading up to the arrangement and some of the financial terms tying Purdue with Kaplan.

The deal still requires final approval from the U.S. Department of Education and the Higher Learning Commission, which accredits both institutions. The fate of Kaplan will be closely watched — and will help determine whether Mr. Daniels’s deals go down as examples of bold innovation or misguided presidential ambition. —Goldie Blumenstyk

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Title IX Agitator: Candice Jackson

The election of President Trump brought with it the fear that civil-rights protections for the most vulnerable might be rolled back. Those fears were hardly assuaged when Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced that Candice Jackson, a lightly tested civil-rights lawyer, would be deputy assistant secretary for strategic operation and outreach in the department’s Office for Civil Rights. The position, which does not require confirmation, effectively made Ms. Jackson the top civil-rights official, as the administration had not yet nominated a permanent leader for the office.

In the seven months that Ms. Jackson has occupied the role, the department has rolled back signature Obama-era guidance on Title IX and sexual assault, and announced that the department would subject the rules to a regulatory process known as notice-and-comment to be rewritten. The news angered advocates and Democratic lawmakers, who viewed it as a devastating blow to victims of sexual violence — especially following Ms. Jackson’s comment to The New York Times deriding the legitimacy of most campus rape allegations, which she later admitted was inappropriately “flippant.”

Several Senate Democrats have called for Ms. Jackson to be fired, but Ms. DeVos has stood by the embattled acting assistant secretary. She will soon reassume her original role as deputy following the expected confirmation of Kenneth L. Marcus, a Jewish-rights advocate tapped to lead the office. But she will very likely continue to be a Democratic bogeyman on civil rights in 2018. —Adam Harris

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Small-College Innovator: Elizabeth Kiss

A few years ago, Elizabeth Kiss concluded that Agnes Scott College needed to do something big to distinguish itself from its competitors. As a women’s college and a liberal-arts institution, Agnes Scott had what many people thought of as two strikes against it. Ms. Kiss (her last name is pronounced like “quiche”) had been president since 2006, and nothing the college tried had moved enrollment much beyond 900. Over the long term, she knew, the college needed to reach 1,200 to be financially sustainable.

After a lengthy process, Agnes Scott decided to focus on leadership with global awareness (an idea that seems to have originated with Ms. Kiss). The faculty members set about restructuring their courses, and the college also revamped its advising system and began requiring every student to create a digital portfolio of her accomplishments.

The reinvention project, called “Summit,” was an immediate hit with applicants and parents, and earned the college a 2017 ACE/Fidelity Investments Award for Institutional Transformation. Leaders at other small colleges are following Ms. Kiss’s lead by trying — or at least considering — similar efforts to sharpen their focus. Most aren’t spending as much as Agnes Scott did (the trustees allocated $20 million for the changes), and for most it’s still too early to gauge long-term results. Even Agnes Scott has so far seen only modest enrollment growth (from 882 in the fall of 2014 to 937 in the fall of 2017).

Still, many administrators and faculty members are excited by the chance to do something more than bewail the fate of small colleges, and they’re pitching in enthusiastically in hopes of helping their institutions thrive. Ms. Kiss, meanwhile, plans to step down at the end of the current academic year. —Lawrence Biemiller

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Outrage Amplifier: Sterling Beard

When Fox News throws a harsh light on a professor or a college, it’s a good bet the story started with Sterling Beard and the online news outlet he oversees, Campus Reform.

Mr. Beard, a 2012 graduate of Dartmouth College and alumnus of the conservative Dartmouth Review, is the publication’s editor in chief. Its goal is to churn out content to expose “bias and abuse on the nation’s college campuses,” as its mission statement declares. In practice, that means it has plenty of stories focused on the perceived excesses of the college left, including safe spaces, political correctness, and professors making political statements.

The site, which started in 2011, has long been on the minds of higher-education types, but 2017, a year full of social-media outrage, arguably brought it to a larger audience. As The Chronicle has documented, much of the national conservative news media’s critical coverage of professors starts with a story on Campus Reform. And plenty of professors featured on the site see their lives upturned with the resulting deluge of negative attention.

With college campuses increasingly serving as a battleground for America’s culture wars, and nearly 60 percent of Republicans saying that higher education has a “negative effect” on the United States, undoubtedly the reporting by Mr. Beard and his colleagues will continue to gain attention — and keep many faculty members wary of getting caught up in the frenzy. —Chris Quintana

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Sports Lawyers: Bond, Schoeneck & King

At long last, would the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill face institutional punishment for the worst academic-fraud scandal — the infamous fake classes — in recent memory? The NCAA stood as the last regulatory association with the chance to levy such punishment. As the association’s Committee on Infractions prepared to release its findings, the smart money doubted it would hand down substantive penalties. Even the smart money underestimated Chapel Hill’s lawyers.

In October, the NCAA announced it would not penalize Chapel Hill at all, shocking observers in higher ed and beyond. In short, the committee concluded that it did not have the power to punish member institutions that denied they had violated their own policies — a claim UNC made in its responses to the NCAA. That bit of savvy legal maneuvering appeared to come courtesy of Bond, Schoeneck & King, a Syracuse, N.Y., law firm that says its collegiate-sports division is “the nation’s premier practice group” on NCAA compliance. UNC hired the firm several years ago, and disclosed that as of March, the firm had billed the university for $1.3 million in services.

After the NCAA’s verdict, athletics watchers concluded that other universities who caught the NCAA’s eye would likely take a page out of the Chapel Hill legal playbook. If other big-time programs evade penalties in future years, we might have Bond, Schoeneck & King to thank. (The firm has ample experience; Rick Evrard, a lawyer there, focuses only on NCAA compliance, and he used to work for the association.)

Meanwhile, administrators in Chapel Hill can finally put the scandal behind them. As one sportswriter presciently concluded last year: “Whatever North Carolina is paying lawyer Rick Evrard on its NCAA case, it’s not enough.”—Andy Thomason

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Hazing Victim: Timothy Piazza

Every year, a handful of students die as a result of participating in fraternity activities, and a common chain of events begins. College officials express sorrow about the loss of life and vow to crack down on alcohol abuse and hazing in Greek life; the fraternity chapter gets shut down, at least temporarily; and a discussion ensues about fraternity reform.

But the calls for cultural change in fraternities grew more urgent this year. That’s because security-camera footage exposed in graphic detail what happened in February to Timothy Piazza, a sophomore at Pennsylvania State University. Mr. Piazza died of blunt-force trauma injuries after becoming intoxicated during a hazing ritual at the Beta Theta Pi fraternity and falling down stairs. No one called 911 for 12 hours. Eighteen members of the fraternity were criminally charged, eight of them with manslaughter; the most serious charges were dropped, but a prosecutor refiled them in October.

Since then, many college leaders have become more outspoken about problems in Greek life. Penn State leaders took control of the disciplinary process for fraternities, and Eric J. Barron, the university’s president, went as far as to suggest that the system could be shut down entirely. After fraternity pledges died this fall at Louisiana State, Texas State, and Florida State, officials at each institution suspended Greek life.

Still, cultural change is painfully slow, and it will require cooperation between fraternity members, alumni, and administrators, who often struggle to find common ground. But advocates for change and parents wonder: How many more students will end up like Mr. Piazza in the meantime? —Sarah Brown