The Week

Bad Feelings at Duquesne

Lately Duquesne University has been getting a fair amount of publicity, but it’s sure not the kind institutions usually seek.

A few years ago the university came off as heartless after not rehiring a longtime adjunct instructor of French, Margaret Mary Vojtko, who had no health insurance and was struggling to pay her bills as she was being treated for cancer. She died of a heart attack at age 83, not long after learning she would no longer have a job.

Last month the university’s president, Charles J. Dougherty, told the faculty that students choose to live off campus because they want to “flaunt the state liquor laws” and “live a libertine lifestyle that is not allowed” in the Roman Catholic institution’s residence halls. When editors at the campus newspaper objected to being called libertines and said many students just live off campus because it’s cheaper, Mr. Dougherty felt compelled to apologize.

And last week Duquesne was in the news yet again, this time for telling 10 of the 11 adjunct writing instructors in its English department that they would not be rehired for the spring semester. A university spokeswoman said the decision was routine — the department was just reassigning courses because of enrollment fluctuations — and had “absolutely nothing” to do with the adjuncts’ attempts to unionize. The department’s adjuncts have been among the most active proponents of union representation for the university’s adjunct faculty members.

The United Steelworkers, the union by which the adjuncts hope to be represented, responded by filing two complaints against Duquesne with the National Labor Relations Board. One accuses the university of retaliating against the 10 adjuncts for seeking union representation, and the other charges that administrators are dismissing the adjuncts so there won’t be anyone left in the department for a union to represent.

... and Elsewhere

In other labor news, a protest last week in which hundreds of City University of New York faculty members blocked the entrance to the system’s headquarters and demanded a new contract and a salary increase led to multiple arrests. Faculty and staff members in the system — which has 11 colleges, seven community colleges, and graduate and professional schools — have been working without a contract since 2010, and have had no raises during that time. CUNY has proposed a six-year contract with raises amounting to 6 percent, but leaders of the faculty union, called the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, said the university offer would not keep up with inflation.

Meanwhile, faculty members in the 23-campus California State University system voted to authorize leaders of their union to call a strike early next year if contract negotiations with the university administration are not moving forward. The union, the California Faculty Association, has already turned down an offer of a 2-percent raise, and is instead demanding an increase of 5 percent for everyone, and 1.2 percent more for certain faculty members.

Another Pell Experiment

Starting next year, the Education Department will test letting high-school students use Pell Grants to pay for college courses they take for credit. Department officials say they’re setting aside up to $20 million for the experiment, an amount they say will cover college courses for as many as 10,000 low-income, high-school students. The so-called “dual enrollment” courses are “a promising approach to improve academic outcomes for students from low-income backgrounds,” the department said in a news release. The department says some 1.4 million high-school students a year enroll in college classes.

2 Shootings, 4 Stabbings

What’s starting to seem like an endless spiral of violence on and near college campuses continued last week. Two students were shot, one fatally, near dormitories at Winston-Salem State University, and four people were stabbed in an incident at the University of California at Merced that ended with police officers shooting and killing the suspected attacker, who was a student.

The student killed at Winston-Salem State was Anthony White Jr., a 19-year-old sophomore. Police subsequently charged a former student, Jerome Moore, with murder.

At UC Merced, Faisal Mohammad, an 18-year-old freshman, reportedly stabbed a female student in a class early in the morning, and then stabbed a contractor working in the building who attempted to intervene. After fleeing the building, police officers reported, Mr. Mohammad stabbed another student and a female staff member outside before being shot and killed by the campus police. The university said all four of those who had been stabbed were recovering from their wounds.

Meanwhile a Florida appeals court upheld University of Florida rules that prohibit guns in its residence halls. The rules, which had been challenged by a group called Florida Carry, had been backed by a lower court as well.

Florida Carry argued that people have a right to keep guns in their homes, and that students’ homes are the residence halls. But the appeals court noted that a Florida law banning guns in schools and on college campuses does not make an exception for residence halls. The ruling came as state lawmakers are considering whether people who have permits to carry concealed weapons should be allowed to take them onto college campuses.

Peter Ludlow Resigns

Peter Ludlow (left), a high-profile Northwestern University philosophy professor whom two students accused of sexual harassment, resigned last week after the university began the process of trying to fire him.

Mr. Ludlow was the main character in a complex story involving a rape accusation by a graduate student with whom he had a relationship (the university found him responsible for harassment instead), a sexual-assault complaint by an undergraduate, and then a series of complaints over how the university responded to the original accusations. Among the issues was whether it is ever appropriate for a faculty member to have a relationship with a student. The university has since banned such relationships.

1 Percent per Century

Someone may have struck a nerve last month with an anonymous Founders Day poster at Yale University that compared diversity among Yale undergraduates with diversity among faculty members. The poster concluded that the university has had only a “1% average increase in black faculty per century.”

The poster was quickly removed, though university officials said they did not know by whom. And last week Yale became the latest in a line of universities putting big money into efforts to hire minority faculty members.

Yale officials said they would commit more than $50 million to increasing faculty diversity in the next five years. The money will help pay for 10 visiting professors a year, and will also help departments trying to recruit scholars who “would enrich diversity or contribute on another dimension of strategic importance,” the university said in a statement. (Read more here.)

Plus ...

Wittenberg University’s president, Laurie M. Joyner, said last week that she would resign immediately. Her departure follows news that the institution has had to cut its budget by more than 10 percent. … The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is creating a Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education that it says will identify the challenges and opportunities colleges can expect to face over the next 25 years. (Read more here.) … Wilson College, which admitted men as traditional undergraduates for the first time in 2013, is now expanding its Women With Children program, which allows single mothers to bring children with them to live in a college residence hall. The program will now accept single fathers and their children as well.

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.