Quick hits.
- Miguel A. Cardona, President Biden’s nominee for education secretary, faced the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Wednesday, in what was a mostly friendly hearing. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has appointed Michelle Asha Cooper as deputy assistant secretary, and acting assistant secretary, in the Office of Postsecondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education. (The Chronicle, Education Department)
- A former Rhode Island School of Design student who was raped while studying abroad in Ireland, in 2016, was awarded $2.5 million by a federal judge. (The Providence Journal)
- Employees of the University of Missouri system can bring guns to campus but may not fire them or bring other weapons, or explosives, to work, the State Court of Appeals for Missouri’s Western District has ruled. (Associated Press)
- Republicans in the Michigan Senate rejected several of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s appointees to the boards of Grand Valley State University, Michigan Technological University, and Northern Michigan University. (Detroit Free Press)
- About 14 percent of College Board employees lost their jobs this week. (Inside Higher Ed)
- A $30-million program will offer free tuition at community colleges and training programs for Michigan residents 25 or older who don’t have a postsecondary degree. Applications for the program, for which an estimated 4.1 million Michiganders are eligible, opened on Tuesday. (The Detroit News)
- Students, faculty, and staff members at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln must undergo a third round of Covid-19 re-entry testing to enter campus buildings. (The Daily Nebraskan)
A scientist who operated an anonymous, racist Twitter account dies.
Bart van Alphen, a postdoctoral fellow in neurobiology at Northwestern University, died on Tuesday after recently admitting to operating an anonymous Twitter account, under the name “Dr Caveman,” that for years had posted a slew of racist, violent, and anti-Semitic material. For months, news of van Alphen’s secret identity had spread among his colleagues at Northwestern, and among others in his field.
Students had complained to the university’s Office of Equity, requesting that it intervene, and some felt frustrated that their concerns hadn’t prompted Northwestern to take action. One anonymous sleuth set up a Twitter account to share examples of Dr Caveman’s dark worldview, and the evidence that he was really van Alphen.
Before he died, van Alphen confessed to others in his field that Dr Caveman’s Twitter account was his, writing that he had tweeted “many offensive statements” and had participated in a subculture that “traffics in dark, cynical humor and deliberate attempts to be as offensive as possible.” Our Emma Pettit tells the story.
Justice Dept. drops racial-discrimination lawsuit against Yale.
The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday dropped a lawsuit against Yale University that had accused it of discriminating against white and Asian American applicants in its admissions process. The case was filed in August, under the Trump administration, after a two-year federal investigation of the university’s admissions practices.
The move on Wednesday sent a clear and unsurprising signal that the Biden administration would abandon its predecessor’s position that race should not be a factor in admissions decisions. Under Trump, the Justice Department not only sued Yale but also intervened on behalf of a plaintiff that had made similar claims against Harvard University. The plaintiff in that lawsuit, the anti-affirmative-action group Students for Fair Admissions, is hoping the case will soon be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Comings and goings.
- Fernando Delgado, executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Minnesota at Duluth, has been named president of the City University of New York’s Herbert H. Lehman College.
- Peter Wilch, vice president for development at the University of San Francisco, has been named senior vice president for university advancement at Loyola Marymount University, in California.
- Fenita Morris-Shepard, interim chief legal counsel at North Carolina Central University since March 2020, has been named to the post permanently.
- Dedriell Taylor, director of philanthropy for West Virginia’s Girl Scouts of Black Diamond Council and an adjunct professor of business at Bluefield College, has been named the first chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer at West Virginia Wesleyan College.
Footnote.
Today, we’d like to thank two researchers at North Carolina State University — Sathvik Prasad, a doctoral student, and Bradley Reaves, an assistant professor — for studying a problem that plagues all of us every day.
We’re talking about robocalls. In an 11-month period, Prasad and Reaves fielded 1.48 million unsolicited phone calls on 66,000 phone lines in their telephone-security lab, the delightfully named Robocall Observatory. Two of their major findings: More than 80 percent of robocalls come from fake numbers, and whether or not you answer them has no bearing on how many more you’ll get (sorry!).
Read Prasad and Reaves’s description of their robocalling-campaign-identification technique, and learn about the science of robocall research, here.
