What You Need to Know About the Past 7 Days

A New Baylor Resignation

Baylor University found itself back in the news last week when its Title IX coordinator, Patty Crawford, resigned and went on CBS This Morning to accuse leaders of the Baptist institution of caring more about “protecting the brand” than protecting students from sexual assault. The university has been the target of a series of complaints from women who say they were assaulted by Baylor athletes.

“I never had the authority, the resources, or the independence to do the job appropriately,” Ms. Crawford said during the broadcast. “I continued to work hard and the harder I worked, the more resistance I received from senior leadership.” Ms. Crawford, who has filed a complaint against Baylor with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, was accompanied on the broadcast by her lawyer, who defended her demand for $1 million and book and movie rights to her story.

In May, you’ll recall, a scathing report prepared by a law firm, Pepper Hamilton, at the request of Baylor’s Board of Regents said that even after Baylor was aware of “a potential pattern of sexual violence,” administrators and coaches “failed to take prompt and effective action to protect campus safety and protect future victims from harm.” The report noted “institutional failures at every level” and prompted the resignations of the head football coach, Art Briles; the athletic director, Ian McCaw; and the university’s high-profile president, Kenneth W. Starr.

Ms. Crawford’s resignation last week came a day after two more former students joined a lawsuit accusing Baylor of failing to properly investigate their assault complaints, with one woman pinning blame on Ms. Crawford’s office.

No Help From the Court

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court said it wouldn’t take up a case challenging NCAA rules that prevent college athletes from receiving compensation beyond full-ride scholarships. As usual, the justices declined to say why they wouldn’t hear the case. But their decision means that for the time being there will be no change to the current — and somewhat confused — situation, in which athletes continue to seek a cut of the revenue colleges earn from their work and the NCAA continues to insist that the players remain “amateurs.”

The case the justices declined to hear stems from a lawsuit filed by Edward C. O’Bannon Jr., a former UCLA basketball player who several years ago recognized himself in a video game involving the 1995 Bruins team, of which he was a member. The trial-court judge ruled in 2014 that athletes could be allowed to receive up to $5,000 a year for the use of their names and likenesses, but last year an appeals court called that amount arbitrary and said paying athletes anything would threaten the existing amateur-student-athlete model. However, the appeals court also said that some of the NCAA’s restrictions violated antitrust laws.

The Rich Are Different

After seeing the value of its endowment drop by nearly $2 billion — yup, that’s billion with a “b” — Harvard University has picked a new endowment chief: N.P. Narvekar, who has been overseeing Columbia University’s endowment. His new title will be president and chief executive of the Harvard Management Company.

The move came after Harvard announced that its endowment was worth $35.7 billion on June 30 — down from $37.6 billion a year earlier. That works out to a loss of 5.1 percent over the period, thanks in part to payouts for various projects and in part to a negative return on investments of 2 percent. Meanwhile, as Harvard Magazine noted, Yale University’s investments enjoyed a positive 3.4-percent return, while Stanford’s declined by 0.4 percent. Harvard also announced that, after adjusting for inflation, the value of the endowment in the 2015 fiscal year remained about $5 billion below the 2008 value, even though the university’s budget is $1 billion higher now than it was then.

What’s behind the poor showing? In part, it’s Harvard’s choice years ago to manage its investments in-house, rather than through an outside firm. That worked well from 1990 to 2005, but then Jack Meyer, who had headed up a remarkably successful investment team, left the university to go out on his own. The endowment-management company does not appear to have found its footing since: The most recent boss, Stephen Blyth, left after a year and a half for what the university said were medical reasons.

Meanwhile, Harvard’s dining-hall employees went on strike last week after months of negotiations with the university had failed to produce a new contract. Both wages and health benefits are points of contention.

“At this, the richest university in the world, no worker that is here and that is ready work should be making less than $35,000 a year,” said Michael Kramer, a negotiator for the union. A spokeswoman for the university, Tania deLuzuriaga, told the Harvard Crimson that the institution had “proposed creative solutions to issues presented by the union, and hoped union representatives would contribute to finding creative, workable solutions at the negotiation table.” The union, she said, has been “more interested in planning a strike than working on a solution.”

The university, which had stocked up on frozen food, kept students fed by relying on dining-service managers and student employees.

Incident Reports

Perhaps you, too, are wondering how the heck students can be smart enough to get accepted into colleges and yet so clueless that they will post videos of themselves not just in blackface but making racist remarks? No doubt Albright College administrators asked themselves that after two white students used Snapchat to post a video in which one of them, in blackface makeup, calls herself “Carlisha” and disparages the Black Lives Matter movement.

Albright’s president, Lex O. McMillan III, said in a statement that the college unequivocally condemned the video, which he said involved “multiple students of multiple races.” Two students were suspended amid an investigation.

• Also last week, Prairie View A&M University was investigating a Snapchat photo in which a white student at the historically black institution appears in blackface with a caption saying “When you just tryna fit in at your hbcu.”
• And the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa suspended a white student after he apparently threatened a black student and called him by a racial slur in a Facebook group.

Plus All This ...

A onetime Corinthian Colleges student is suing the U.S. Education Department to prevent it from collecting on loans to former students of the defunct for-profit chain. Sen. Elizabeth A. Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a letter to the department that it had promised to forgive loans of 80,000 former Corinthian students, but that only 4,000 of the loans had been forgiven so far, while thousands of other former students were still being “hounded by the department’s debt collectors.” … Regency Beauty Institute has closed all 79 of its campuses, blaming, in part, “a negative characterization of for-profit education by regulators and politicians.” … The rapper Drake donned a Drake University jersey and jacket during a concert in Des Moines, the university’s home, and then stopped by the campus and snapped a picture. The visit followed a yearlong campaign by students and the university’s PR office, but it came unannounced, after 2 a.m., so only one student is believed to have talked with the rapper.

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