Quick hits.
- A dean at Virginia Wesleyan University has resigned after writing on Facebook that people who voted for Joe Biden for president were “ignorant, anti-American and anti-Christian.” He apologized, but his post drew support from President Trump on Twitter.
- The University of California system has reached a proposed $73-million settlement with seven women who accused a former gynecologist at UCLA of sexual abuse. In the class-action lawsuit, more than 6,600 patients could share in the payout. (Associated Press)
- An investigation is underway at the University of South Carolina after a student was found dead in a dormitory on the campus. Foul play is not suspected. (The State)
- A former fencing coach at Harvard University has been arrested and charged with conspiracy, along with a Maryland businessman, in an attempt to get the latter’s two sons into Harvard. The alleged $1.5 million-plus in bribes are among the biggest in the Operation Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal. (Bloomberg)
- Thirteen Black former football players at the University of Iowa claim in a lawsuit that Kirk Ferentz, the head coach, enabled a racist culture in the program. (Hawk Central)
- The faculty union at Salem State University, in Massachusetts, is filing an unfair-labor-practices complaint to protest furloughs unilaterally imposed by the institution. (The Salem News)
- A former athletic director at Ferrum College, in Virginia, filed a federal lawsuit claiming that it had violated the ADA Amendments Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and had retaliated against him in violation of Title IX. (The Roanoke Times)
- Eight staff members in the University of Tennessee’s football program rejected pay cuts that were proposed by the athletic department to ease the financial strain caused by Covid-19. Only the wide-receivers coach and the running-backs coach accepted the cuts. (Knoxville News Sentinel)
- Saint Leo University, in Florida, unrecognized its faculty union after a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board ended oversight of faith-based universities. (WMNF)
Jill Biden’s dissertation has advice for retaining community-college students.
What a Biden administration will mean for community colleges, battered by enrollment declines during the pandemic, remains unclear. But the sector knows it will have a strong advocate in the White House: Jill Biden has been a community-college instructor since 1993. One of her passions is the retention of community-college students, the subject of her 2006 doctoral dissertation, “Student Retention in the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs.” Recommendations she made in her dissertation have since become widely embraced as the sector tries to meet the needs of the most vulnerable students. Our Vimal Patel shares four takeaways from a close reading.
Covid-19 and college communities.
In the past week, two drugmakers, Pfizer and Moderna, have announced that their respective Covid-19 vaccines have proved more than 90-percent effective in advanced clinical tests. While a rollout is still months away, the news allows college leaders to start thinking about the possibility of an inoculated campus. If all goes well, experts say, students may be able to receive vaccinations before the summer.
The vaccines may be approved as early as December. Although students in their late teens or early 20s would generally be among those far back in the line to receive such shots, a professor of public health at Harvard University said students could get vaccinated by the summer of 2021.
In the meantime, the city of Philadelphia is banning in-person instruction at colleges until the end of 2020. Many institutions in that area — including Drexel, La Salle, and Temple Universities and the University of Pennsylvania — are already operating primarily online. But the stringent new restrictions underscore the grim outlook for the public-health situation across the country as Thanksgiving approaches. Read more at our Coronavirus Live Tracker.
Want to learn more about race relations on college campuses? Sign up for our new newsletter.
This year laid bare our country’s stark racial inequalities. Almost everyone in higher education — and at your institution — feels the impact of race, but they feel it from different vantage points. That’s why The Chronicle is starting a new newsletter: Race on Campus. Each week Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz and a team of reporters will try to make sense of how the national reckoning on race is unfolding at colleges across the country. We’ll help you understand different perspectives, efforts toward change, and what colleges can do to become more equitable and inclusive places. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Quote of the day.
“There is no consideration for us, no consideration for what we face. Why are they treating us as if we’re not human beings?”
— Laura, a custodial worker at the University of Arizona, on her employer’s treatment of vulnerable workers during the pandemic
Comings and goings.
- Linda Strong-Leek, provost at Haverford College, has been named interim chief diversity officer.
- Camellia Okpodu, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Xavier University of Louisiana, will become dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Wyoming on June 30.
Footnote.
The creators of an ambitious documentary series at Indiana University at Bloomington couldn’t have anticipated the ending of their project.
In 2016, a production team first trained cameras on 12 incoming freshmen at Indiana, with the goal of following them throughout their college years — which wound up being punctuated this spring by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The series, “IU 2020,” was inspired by the acclaimed 2014 film Boyhood, which filmed the same cast over 12 years. The Indiana work involved about 20 student filmmakers over four years — including the two directors, who began working on the project as interns. The project comprises 20-minute films devoted to each student. You can watch a trailer here.
Consider the bar raised significantly for your college’s promotional material.
