A statue fell. A football player died. Women spoke out.

Some of the biggest news stories of 2018 started on college campuses. The fate of the Silent Sam monument, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reflected heightened activism about race and the legacy of slavery on campus. An athlete’s death at the University of Maryland at College Park led the institution to evaluate its priorities as well as its safety measures. At Michigan State University, leaders, students, and community members grappled with how an institution could have allowed sexual abuse to continue for years.

In The Chronicle’s 2018 Influence List, we highlight the people who played a central role, for better or worse, in those stories and others, including the #MeToo movement, power dynamics in scholarship, and the role of race in admissions.

— Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz

Erin Brethauer for The Chronicle

Terry Karl

By Nell Gluckman

For decades, Terry Karl watched the man she had reported for sexual harassment rise through the ranks at Harvard University. Jorge Dominguez, a political scientist, faced minimal penalties after subjecting her to years of abuse. Not only was he able to stay at Harvard — while she left — but he was named director of a prominent center and eventually made a vice president of the university.

Karl went on to have a bright career of her own at Stanford University. She gave talks about sexual harassment but never mentioned Dominguez’s name. Then, last fall, as the #MeToo movement shook higher education, two former students at Harvard contacted Karl. They said they, too, had had similar experiences with Dominguez.

Brittany Greeson, New York Times

All three women believed that there were others who had yet to speak out about him. Karl felt that the most effective way to pressure Harvard to make changes would be to tell their story. She dug up a box filled with hundreds of documents about her case and spent hours sorting through them with reporters. The story was published in February.

Karl was right — there were more women. The reported number was 18. Harvard banned Dominguez from the campus and has begun an investigation. The university’s leaders promised to rethink the procedures and attitudes that allowed his behavior to continue for four decades.

Clarence Tabb Jr. via AP

Michigan State’s Activists

By Jack Stripling

Don’t be fooled by the soothing teal colors; these folks are fierce.

Over the course of the past year at Michigan State University, a coalition mostly of women has adopted teal as a symbol of solidarity for survivors of sexual abuse. They wore the color to contentious board meetings, where activists publicly accused university leaders of turning a blind eye to Larry Nassar, a former university sports doctor, who for decades preyed on young girls and women in his care.

The grass-roots response to Michigan State’s sexual-abuse scandal has distinguished itself as a movement of potency and moral clarity. Included in its ranks are students, professors, staff members, and survivors and their parents. They have led the charge for top-to-bottom accountability at Michigan State, demanding that heads roll and that the university confront what the coalition sees as a culture of secrecy and brand protection that allowed Nassar, who is serving a minimum of 40 years in prison, to escape justice for so long.

Julia Wall, News and Observer

With focused outrage, activists helped to topple Lou Anna K. Simon from the university’s presidency, inspired legislative changes to protect abuse victims, and prompted outside investigations into how Michigan State mishandled the allegations against Nassar. The coalition, some of whose members are affiliated under the name “Reclaim MSU,” has work left to do. They have called for a purging of the Board of Trustees and the firing of John M. Engler, who as interim president has clashed with survivors. They want punishment for Simon, who has been charged with lying to police about the Nassar case.

In May the university reached a $500-million settlement with 332 of Nassar’s victims. Natalie Rogers, a spokeswoman for Reclaim MSU, said the payouts were just a first step. “You can throw money at it,” she said, “but it doesn’t mean much if the people who should be held accountable aren’t.”

Julia Wall, News and Observer

Maya Little

By Sarah Brown

Few campus conversations have been as divisive as the one surrounding Silent Sam, a Confederate monument at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. By 2018, activists had grown tired of talking about the century-old statue of a soldier, which many say honors racism and the oppression of black people. At the start of the fall semester, students and community members, working behind large banners, wrapped ropes around the eight-foot-tall bronze, loosened it from its pedestal, and yanked the statue down.

Gerry Broome, AP ImagesLeading the effort to remove the statue from campus has been Maya Little, a 26-year-old Ph.D. student in history. In the fall of 2017, she joined fellow activists in staging a round-the-clock sit-in at the foot of the statue. In April she doused Silent Sam in a mixture of red ink and her own blood and was arrested. In October she was found guilty of defacing a public monument, but was not punished. The university’s Honor Court, meanwhile, issued her a letter of warning and sentenced her to 18 hours of community service; Little has appealed that decision.

“Adding blood to the statue is adding proper context,” Little told The Chronicle last spring. “Because that’s what the Confederacy was built on. It was built on the blood of black people.”

In December, after university officials proposed a $5.3-million center for history and education that would house Silent Sam, Little helped organize a large campus protest against the plan. She ran into more legal trouble and now faces charges of inciting a riot and assaulting an officer.

Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees has already signed off on the plan for the history-and-education center, but Little called on faculty members and teaching assistants not to submit final grades for exams and assignments until officials agree to keep the statue off campus.

Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

Jeff Sessions

By Chris Quintana

Jeff Sessions is out as the U.S. attorney general, but his legacy of berating the culture of colleges will endure. He was, after all, the Trump administration’s most vociferous critic of higher education.

During his tenure, he repeatedly expressed his disdain for safe spaces and for what he saw as the oversensitivity of today’s college students. In a speech to the conservative organization Turning Point USA, he accused higher education of training students as “sanctimonious, sensitive, supercilious snowflakes.”

His attacks extended beyond words. Under his watch, the Justice Department filed four “statements of interest” in lawsuits involving accusations of censorship on college campuses. Sessions may be gone, but the department’s interest in these cases remains active.

Kholood Eid, The New York Times, REDUX

Andrea Long Chu

By Katherine Mangan

Andrea Long Chu knew she could be kissing her academic career goodbye. The essay she wrote for The Chronicle described the prominent scholar she had recently worked for as psychologically abusive, and the scholar’s colleagues complicit in a system that perpetuated mistreatment of graduate students.

Sebastián FreireHer piece, which quickly went viral, resonated with graduate students who recognized the power imbalance between Avital Ronell, a professor of German and comparative literature at New York University, and Nimrod Reitman, her former advisee. Reitman has sued Ronell, who was suspended for a year without pay for sexually harassing him — a charge she denies.

In all the ink spilled over the Ronell scandal, Chu’s essay stood out for its acerbic takedown of the structural problems that make many graduate students feel that they need to be obedient, even obsequious, to those who seem to control their fates.

Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe

“There’s an enormous hunger among graduate students — so many of us overworked, underpaid, stuck, depressed, navigating hostile, favor-based environments, yet somehow still optimistic about the social value of academic work — to have a conversation about abuse in the academy, about the academy as abuse,” Chu wrote in an email to The Chronicle.

From her own department, she says, there’s been “stony silence.” The essay, Chu now realizes, was “a kind of bitter farewell to the world it was describing, my own Goodbye to All That.”

Liu Jie Xinhua / eyevine/Redux

Edward Blum

By Eric Hoover

Edward J. Blum inspires thunderous opinions. Supporters say he’s bold and brave; critics call him nasty. All because the conservative activist wants to stamp out race-conscious college-admissions policies.

Blum is president of Students for Fair Admissions, a group that’s suing Harvard University. The plaintiffs claim that the institution discriminates against Asian-American applicants. This summer the group filed documents describing the inner workings of the university’s secretive admissions process, a revelation that sent Harvard’s communications office into overdrive.

This fall the two parties squared off during an intense three-week trial, which at times turned emotional. All the while, Blum sat expressionless, watching witness after witness testify in a courtroom drama he had engineered. Regardless of how a federal judge rules, the case is widely expected to end up in the U.S. Supreme Court, which would once again consider the fate of affirmative action.

If nothing else, Blum has arguably succeeded in blackening Harvard’s eye, while sowing public doubts about how colleges evaluate applicants’ race, ethnicity, and personalities in deciding whom to admit. Elite institutions are used to getting their way, but in 2018, Blum forced the nation’s oldest, wealthiest university to explain itself, publicly and in great detail. No, the Harvard case, and Blum, aren’t going away anytime soon.

AP Photo/Elise Amendola

Maura Healey

By Nell Gluckman

One of the most significant effects of the Trump presidency on higher education has been the administration’s attempts to loosen regulations on for-profit colleges. The president is, after all, the former owner of one — Trump University. His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, has weakened Obama-era regulations meant to check the industry. Enter Maura Healey, attorney general of Massachusetts. She has waged a legal battle to push back against DeVos’s efforts to deregulate for-profit colleges. Last year she led a group of 19 Democratic attorneys general in suing DeVos and the Education Department over its attempt to roll back rules that were meant to make it easier for students to get their federal loans forgiven if they believed they had been defrauded by their colleges. This year, Healey won.

Will Newton/Getty Images

In August she led another effort to urge the Education Department to rescind its latest proposed changes in those rules, which would make it harder for students to qualify for loan forgiveness. Those efforts came after she sued DeVos and the department last year, claiming that it had violated federal law in rejecting several thousand applications for debt relief from students who attended a for-profit college called Everest Institute.

While Healey is not the only attorney general suing the education secretary, she has been out in front on this issue.

Barbara Haddock Taylor/Baltimore Sun/TNS

Jordan McNair

By Lindsay Ellis

The death of a 19-year-old football player at the University of Maryland at College Park this year made clear the sharp risks that athletics programs add to the sprawling research university — and to its participants.

AP Photo, Patrick SemanskyMore than 90 minutes passed between when Jordan McNair reported exhaustion during a workout and when an ambulance departed for the hospital. No one had assessed or documented his vital signs in an initial injury report, including his core temperature, or cooled his body down properly after he collapsed, an investigation later found. The rising sophomore would die in June, two weeks after the workout.

Maryland’s leaders, the faculty, and board members considered the role of athletics amid deeper questions of leadership and accountability. Reports that DJ Durkin, the team’s coach, fostered a toxic team culture and that top administrators had previously chosen not to put in place strict accountability measures for athletics trainers kept McNair front of mind for months.

After reports and investigations this fall, the dominos fell one by one. President Wallace D. Loh announced in late October that he would step down. Then, the university fired Durkin. Board Chair James T. Brady resigned in early November. Loh perhaps said it best himself in 2017: “As president, I sit over a number of dormant volcanoes. One of them is an athletic scandal. It blows up, it blows up the university, its reputation. It blows up the president.”

None of these departures, McNair’s parents said, made them miss their son any less.

Mark Abramson for the Chronicle

Kevin Kruse

By Emma Pettit

If you’ve heard of Kevin M. Kruse, it’s probably because you’ve read him on Twitter.

Online, the Princeton University history professor has become famous for his serialized posts, called threads, that lend historical context to breaking news or skewer a version of history spouted by right-wing agitators. Yes, there’s precedent for athletes protesting during the national anthem, he wrote when Colin Kaepernick, former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers,made national news. No, Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t like Trump, he said in another.

Mark Abramson for the ChronicleA well-crafted thread takes Kruse about an hour. That’s because he incorporates primary sources, and he obsesses about his word choice. His attention to detail appears to be paying off. He’s accrued more than 215,000 followers, and that number grows every day, especially when he takes on talking points favored by far-right commentators like Dinesh D’Souza.

In this era of political crisis, historians like Kruse no longer feel they can confine their knowledge to classrooms, journals, and the occasional book. Some are wading into the more rambunctious realm of Twitter, and it takes special skills to land punches and avoid getting chased back to the ivory tower.

Kruse is the best at it, and he’s showing others the way.