Daily Briefing

Welcome to Tuesday, July 6. Today, Boise State’s president tries to find middle ground between budget-ax-wielding right-wing lawmakers and the demands of student activists. The University of Pennsylvania’s president may be nominated as U.S. ambassador to Germany. And a writer recounts a peer-review mishap at Harvard Theological Review.

Today’s Briefing was written by Megan Zahneis, with contributions from Kate Hidalgo Bellows, Julia Piper, and David Wescott. Write us: megan.zahneis@chronicle.com.

Marlene Tromp’s balancing act in Idaho.

Since taking over as president of Boise State University in July 2019, Marlene Tromp has had a tough row to hoe. As Republican legislators keen to prove their conservative bona fides sought to take action against equity and inclusion programs and the teaching of critical race theory — this spring, they tried to wrest millions of dollars from the state’s colleges explicitly as punishment for the institutions’ social-justice programming — student activists became more vocal about injustices they saw on campus. Tromp tried to avoid angering both groups, even as their demands increasingly left little room for compromise.

Tromp’s supporters see a collaborative leader in an increasingly untenable situation, trying to protect the university from the budget ax. Her critics, on both ends of the ideological spectrum, see a president who has put politics above principle. And while Tromp is in an especially tight spot given the mood in Idaho, the national mood is such that college leaders elsewhere may soon find themselves in a similar bind. Our Vimal Patel has the story.

Quick hits.

• The finally-tenured Nikole Hannah-Jones is expected to teach at UNC at Chapel Hill in the fall, but some are wondering whether she’ll come. She released a statement last week saying she needed time to think about the “best way forward.” Dean Susan King said she had a “positive conversation” with the journalist last Wednesday. Hannah-Jones is scheduled to appear this morning on CBS This Morning. (The News & Observer)
• President Biden says he will nominate Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, as ambassador to Germany. (The White House, Chris Quintana of USA Today via Twitter)
• Phylicia Rashad, incoming dean of the College of Fine Arts at Howard University, apologized via Twitter for her support on social media for the comedian Bill Cosby’s release, which reignited criticism of how the institution handles sexual assault. (Twitter, The Chronicle of Higher Education)
• Delaware State University has completed its acquisition of Wesley College, in Dover, becoming the first historically Black institution to acquire a non-HBCU on its own. The college will become the Wesley College of Health and Behavioral Sciences, offering nursing, social-work, and other health-care programs. (WHYY)

How not to do peer review.

“What should a journal do after publishing a blockbuster paper marred by fraudulent evidence, failed peer review, and undisclosed conflicts of interest?” So begins Ariel Sabar’s article for The Chronicle Review on the strange afterlife of “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” a 2014 Harvard Theological Review paper by the Harvard Divinity School professor Karen L. King.

The apparent incredible find featured in King’s paper — a fragment of papyrus in which Jesus referred to having a wife — was found by Sabar to be the work of an internet pornographer who had dropped out of an Egyptology program where he’d struggled with Coptic. And yet, the journal has still not retracted the article, which raises the question: Can a Harvard journal edited by Harvard professors dispassionately assess a Harvard paper? Read the full article here.

Comings and goings.

• Adrianna Kezar, director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California, has been named executive editor of Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning.
• Constance Brooks, vice president for public affairs and diversity for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and vice president for regional government affairs for MGM Resorts International, will become vice chancellor for public affairs and advancement at the Nevada System of Higher Education on July 29.
• Susan Margulies, chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, has been selected to lead the National Science Foundation’s Directorate of Engineering.

Footnote.

Is punctuation dead?

It might be, but only in text messages. Using not one, but two periods, in a headline this week, The New York Times declared, “No More Periods When Texting. Period.”

According to Max Harrison-Caldwell, author of the story under the headline, “To younger generations, using proper punctuation in a casual context like texting can give an impression of formality that borders on rudeness, as if the texter is not comfortable enough with the texting partner to relax.”

It goes on: “Simply put, the inclusion of a formality in casual communication is unnerving.”

Ouch. Not a lot of wiggle room for the humble period or question mark there. But don’t clutch your pearls just yet — Harrison-Caldwell notes that the midtext period is still acceptable, just not the end-of-message sentence-stopper. And periods are still crucial in formal contexts such as academic journals and news articles, he writes.

According to the Times, the reason it can seem so significant to many texters is that it is unnecessary. “It is clear that a message has ended regardless of punctuation, because each message is in its own bubble,” Harrison-Caldwell writes.

That’s why, when I text my friends, they usually receive 15 blue bubbles in a row instead of a long block of punctuated text.

Happy texting.