Quick hits.
- Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in Massachusetts, has a new tenure policy that opens the door to teaching professors. (The Business Journals)
- Coppin State University, a historically Black institution in Baltimore, is using federal relief funds to give students a $1,200 credit toward tuition. It’s also wiping away $1 million in student-loan debt. (University Business)
- The University of California’s Board of Regents on Thursday approved the annual tuition increases we described in Wednesday’s Briefing. The university said financial-aid increases would help preserve socioeconomic diversity among students. (Associated Press)
- Most members of West Virginia State University’s senior cabinet have sent a letter to the HBCU’s board expressing no confidence in the president, Nicole Pride, and asking it to remove her from office in order “to allow for an investigation.” Pride has been president less than a year. (Charleston Gazette-Mail)
- Starting next year, public schools serving seventh through 12th graders and public and private colleges in South Carolina will be required to provide the number of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and an additional crisis resource on all student ID cards. The new law had its ceremonial signing yesterday. Read our recent story about how colleges are trying to stop suicides on campus. (sc.gov, The Chronicle)
- A report from the advocacy group Education Reform Now says Virginia is funding its colleges unjustly by not giving enough money to students in need. The report comes as the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia is reviewing how colleges are funded and whether they’re receiving fair amounts. (Education Reform Now, Richmond Times-Dispatch)
This Howard professor angered a white lawmaker about how we interpret American history — more than 80 years ago.
In the late 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project gave work to writers and historians. Carole Emberton, an associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo, writes in The Washington Post that one historian who benefited was Sterling Brown, a Howard University professor who, like Nikole Hannah-Jones with her “1619 Project,” kindled a debate over what history should and shouldn’t reveal.
One of the cultural programs of the FWP was the writing of travel guides for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Brown edited the guide for D.C., and in an essay for it, he wrote that George Washington Parke Custis, the step-grandson of George Washington, had given to his “Black daughter, Mary Syphax,” 17 acres of land.
That a travel guide asserted that a respected near relative of the first president would have a Black daughter incensed Rep. Frank Keefe, Republican of Wisconsin. He repeatedly asked Brown for proof, requests Brown ignored, saying it was well known that Custis had children with a woman he’d enslaved; the Custis family had never disputed it. Brown’s boss at the FWP protected him, and Brown eventually retired from Howard, though not before being accused of Communist sympathies and facing an FBI investigation.
Representative Keefe lives on in the spirit of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican who says critical race theory should be outlawed, Emberton writes. Brown also recorded interviews with thousands of formerly enslaved people in the 1930s, contributing to a history slowly being revealed, whether lawmakers in Congress want it to be or not, by writers like Nikole Hannah-Jones.
A former college leader calls on presidents to require vaccinations.
H. Holden Thorp, editor in chief of Science Journals, a former provost of Washington University in St. Louis, and a former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is urging colleges to require Covid-19 vaccines. In an essay in Science, he cites the well-known phenomenon of students’ partying as one way the coronavirus will spread to the “immunologically naïve.” He says that college officials were quick to blame students last year, but that the officials themselves should know better than to expect students not to gather.
He also cites the example of the North Carolina State baseball team’s run toward the College World Series last month, cut short because of pandemic protocols. Members of the team caught Covid, and they were unvaccinated. “I don’t try to indoctrinate my kids with my values or my opinions,” just teach them baseball, said the coach, Eliot Avent.
Thorp says that he wrote to several college leaders about their views on vaccines. Most feel they should be required but aren’t willing to say so because they fear Republican lawmakers’ power.
“Officials at universities and in government need to take a stand regardless of the political consequences for the institutions,” Thorp concludes. “Lives are at stake.”
Weekend reads.
Spend your weekend reading these Chronicle staff-recommended articles:
- After being diagnosed with cancer and learning he may have only months to live, a veteran journalist decides to do what comes naturally — write. “Editing the final details of one’s life is like editing a story for the final time. It’s the last shot an editor has at making corrections, the last rewrite before the roll of the presses,” Jack Thomas writes in The Boston Globe.
- Tove K. Danovich examines the enduring appeal of the Guinness World Records: “The Guinness series is a love letter to the superlative nature of humans. It stretches people’s imaginations of what’s possible, for individuals and society alike.” (The Ringer)
- The pet-adoption market is getting cutthroat, Allie Conti writes for New York magazine’s “The Cut.” Better dust off that old CV — you might need it to adopt Fido in today’s competitive rescue market.
Comings and goings.
- Mindy Benson, vice president for alumni and community relations at Southern Utah University, has been named interim president. She will succeed Scott L. Wyatt, who will leave to become senior executive director of statewide online education in Utah’s Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education.
- John Richman, president of North Dakota State College of Science since 2007, plans to retire in December.
- Nicholas Scibetta, vice president for marketing and communications at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York, will become vice president for university communications and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pennsylvania, on August 16.
Footnote.
Our American Cousin, a three-act farce that premiered in 1858, has the misfortune of being primarily remembered as the play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated. The satire, a spoof of boorish American bumpkins and harebrained English aristocrats, also essayed a new comedic form — the Dundrearyism, named for a dunderheaded noble in the play, a man fond of tangled maxims like “birds of a feather gather no moss.”
The Dundrearyism was a variation on the malapropism, named for a character in Richard Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals (“She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile”), but also seen in earlier humor, such as the dim-witted Mistress Quickly, the vainglorious weaver Bottom, the bumbling constable Dogberry, and other low-brow personages in Shakespeare. But Dundrearyisms were just one of a few comedic forms based on people’s names that the 19th century gave us.
Spoonerisms, in which transposed letters impart unexpected meanings, were named for a University of Oxford scholar, William A. Spooner, who was supposedly known for this absent-minded type of humor. “You have hissed all my mystery lectures,” he reportedly once said, “and were caught fighting a liar in the quad.” But according to his obituary, only one Spoonerism can be definitely attributed to Spooner; the rest appear to have been made up, probably by his students.
Bunburying isn’t, strictly speaking, a new comedic form but a concise word for how people concoct excuses to avoid social duties. In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, the character Algernon Moncrieff says he must visit his dear disabled (and nonexistent) friend Bunbury any time he wishes to escape for libertine assignations. His friend Jack Worthing does the same, except he hasn’t come up with such a good name for it. But the notion has staying power. While Dundrearyisms and Spoonerisms may have gone out of style with the bustle, we’re all still Bunburyists.
Correction: One of today’s recommended Weekend Reads, about pet adoptions, was partly rendered in quotation marks by mistake. Our text was not drawn from the article, and the item has been corrected.
