Quick hits.
- Hundreds of protesters gathered Tuesday evening outside the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity house at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln after a sexual assault was alleged to have occurred in the house a day earlier. The fraternity house is being closed while an investigation is underway. (Lincoln Journal Star, The Daily Nebraskan, university release)
- The University of Washington will no longer allow students or employees to claim a philosophical exemption in order to avoid Covid-19 vaccinations. (KING 5)
- Six University of Kentucky football players who were charged with burglary are not practicing with the team. (Kentucky Kernel)
College fires staff member who refused to teach unless masks were required.
Cody Mullins Luedtke, a laboratory coordinator at Perimeter College at Georgia State University, was slated to teach two in-person lab courses this fall. But her concerns about Covid safety grew as the start of the semester neared: The Delta variant was ravaging the state. Georgia’s vaccination rate lagged behind the national average, and Gov. Brian Kemp is against Covid-19-related mandates. He has banned colleges from requiring vaccines.
And instructors, Luedtke learned, would not be able to require masks in the classroom. (Instructors at Perimeter are allowed to ask students to wear masks, so long as “you respect their decision and impose no consequences for not doing so.”) All considered, Luedtke thought it was unlikely that there’d be no transmission of the virus in her classrooms; she decided she couldn’t comply. She informed the college that without the ability to require masks, she could not teach in person. Days later, she was fired.
Luedtke’s peers who are teaching face to face in Georgia are being forced to confront similar moral choices. Our Emma Pettit has more.
The five trends that will shake up higher ed.
When Arthur Levine and Scott Van Pelt spoke with college presidents last year, they heard familiar refrains on the need to turn back the clock to a pre-pandemic norm. But for Levine, president emeritus of Columbia University’s Teachers College, and Van Pelt, associate director of the Wharton graduate communication program at the University of Pennsylvania, that desire is misguided.
In The Chronicle Review, Levine and Van Pelt point to the pandemic as an accelerant of a few major trends already underway that will transform the higher-ed sector. They see colleges facing new competition, students demanding more-flexible offerings, a gradual retirement of the credit hour, and other major changes in how colleges do business. In this sense, the pandemic provides a “teaching moment” for forward-thinking leaders to grapple with an uncertain future. Read their essay here.
Comings and goings.
- Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County since 1992, plans to retire at the end of the 2021-22 academic year.
- Mira Lowe, assistant dean of student experiences and director of the Innovation News Center in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida, will become dean of the School of Journalism & Graphic Communication at Florida A&M University on October 22.
- Jo Ann Rooney, president of Loyola University Chicago since 2016, plans to step down next year.
Footnote.
The HBO show The White Lotus was praised for its biting details, like the books the characters read, or the jewelry they wear. The character Shane Patton, the privileged and rude hotel guest whose honeymoon goes from bad to worse, wears a Cornell University baseball cap. When the show was being filmed, the actor Jake Lacy, who plays Patton, asked the director, Mike White, if he could wear an Ivy League baseball cap. White chose Cornell, New York Magazine’s Vulture reports.
In an interview with Bloomberg Quicktake, Martha Pollack, president of Cornell University, said that Shane’s hat was “not the product placement that I would’ve paid for with that character. But it’s just fiction, and we’re just kind of laughing it off.”
Pollack is taking the hat in stride, but sometimes trademark owners, including colleges, reject movies or TV shows set on their campuses. For example, Stanford and the University of Chicago turned down Legally Blonde, so the film’s protagonist ended up at Harvard.
Correction: A previous version of today’s Briefing referred to Cody Mullins Luedtke, as an adjunct. She worked for Georgia State University’s Perimeter College as a full-time laboratory coordinator. We regret the error.
