The Chronicle’s third annual influence list identifies people who shaped higher education this year, but several from our last two lists continue to make a mark. Here are some notable updates.
Ed O’Bannon, the lead plaintiff in a federal antitrust case challenging the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s limits on player pay, was in the spotlight again this year as a federal appeals court weighed in on his complaint. In September, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that the NCAA had violated antitrust laws by restricting athletes from trading on their images and likenesses. But the court struck down a prior ruling that would have allowed for annual payments of $5,000 to players. Lawyers for Mr. O’Bannon have appealed, asking for the court’s full panel of judges to hear the case. Meanwhile, the ruling could affect other legal challenges to the NCAA, whose wealthiest members have been criticized for paying coaches millions of dollars while some athletes struggle to get by.
Two years ago, as a quarterback at Northwestern University, Kain Colter organized the first players’ union in college sports. He and his teammates scored an early victory last year when a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board ruled that they were employees of the university. But Northwestern appealed the ruling, and in August, the NLRB rejected the players’ efforts to form a union, arguing that giving collective-bargaining rights to students at private universities — and not public colleges, over which the board does not have jurisdiction — would be too disruptive to college sports. The decision could make it harder for players to unionize, but because the board did not rule on whether athletes are employees, it left open the possibility of future bids.
Since taking over as head of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights two years ago, Catherine E. Lhamon has continued to ramp up enforcement of the federal gender-equity law known as Title IX with respect to how colleges respond to campus sexual assault. Not only has the office roughly tripled, to about 150, the number of institutions it is investigating for allegedly mishandling students’ reports of sexual misconduct, it has also toughened its stance, more often determining that colleges violated the law. The harsher findings, Ms. Lhamon says, are all about protecting students’ civil rights.
A year after the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign effectively rescinded its offer of a tenured professorship to Steven G. Salaita over his incendiary criticisms of Israel, he appears solidly back on his feet. The controversy resulted in his book Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom, as well as two lawsuits that netted him a $600,000 settlement from Illinois. The chancellor of the university, Phyllis M. Wise, has resigned, and Mr. Salaita is now a visiting professor at the American University of Beirut.
Two years after mounting a Supreme Court challenge to race-conscious admissions policies in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, Edward J. Blum dragged that institution before the high court again last week. Lawyers for his organization, the Project on Fair Representation, are arguing that the flagship campus — and the lower courts that reviewed its policy — have ignored the Supreme Court’s directive to scrap the policy if it cannot survive strict legal scrutiny. Meanwhile, another group Mr. Blum established, Students for Fair Admissions, is arguing in separate federal lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that courts should ban race-conscious admissions completely.
Gov. William E. Haslam’s “Tennessee Promise” program, which uses state-lottery revenue to pay two years of community-college tuition for any of the state’s high-school graduates, was widely hailed as a success, as the number of students who enrolled, nearly 16,000, far surpassed expectations. The program came in $2 million under budget for its first year, and applications for the second year are reportedly trending even higher. Oregon has followed with a similar program, and Chicago is also offering tuition-free community college, on a limited basis. President Obama proposed in January to make community college “as free and universal in America as high school is today,” and although that plan probably won’t get traction, the concept has sparked debate among policy makers and in the presidential campaign.