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Subject: Your Daily Briefing: The Role of College Rankings
Welcome to Monday, September 13. Today, we examine the influence of U.S. News rankings on some colleges. A former University of Tennessee professor who was falsely accused of spying for China and charged with fraud has been acquitted. And our Jack Stripling highlights the growing tensions in Florida as county officials push universities to require masks.
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Welcome to Monday, September 13. Today, we examine the influence of U.S. News rankings on some colleges. A former University of Tennessee professor who was falsely accused of spying for China and charged with fraud has been acquitted. And our Jack Stripling highlights the growing tensions in Florida as county officials push universities to require masks.
The U.S. News & World Report college rankings are out this morning, with familiar faces at the top (Princeton occupies the pinnacle).
Despite persistent criticism of the rankings as fueling inequality, the U.S. News list and others it inspired are as hegemonic as ever. To demonstrate, our Francie Diep and Nell Gluckman took a look at the strategic plans of the top 100 four-year public universities by undergraduate enrollment. They found that about a quarter explicitly cited high national rankings as an aspiration or sign of success.
For instance: Florida International University is ranked as a top-50 university in three lists. By 2025, it wants to hit that level on 10 lists. At the University of Houston, a top milestone listed in the plan is that the institution “will rank among the top 75 and then among the top 50 public universities in the nation in the U.S. News & World Report ranking.”
After years of student demands, Harvard University is dropping its investments in fossil-fuel companies, its president, Lawrence S. Bacow, announced on Thursday. Bacow said that as of June the endowment — at $42 billion, the largest among institutions of higher education in the country — has no direct holdings in companies that look for oil and gas reserves or develop them, and will not make such investments in the future. (MarketWatch)
The Taliban said women may study at universities, but only in gender-segregated classrooms, and Islamic dress code is required. (Reuters)
Covid-19:
Colleges across the country, many of whose health-care facilities are already taxed by the pandemic, are now seeing students with symptoms of long-haul Covid, which include trouble breathing, shortness of breath, fatigue, heart palpitations, and difficulty concentrating or “brain fog.” (NBC News)
As of last Wednesday, Liberty University had hit nearly 1,000 coronavirus cases this semester, putting it on a fast track to exceed its fall-2020 total of 1,092 positive cases. After an outbreak at the start of classes, the evangelical college in Virginia went online temporarily, a period that ended on Friday. Liberty announced on Sunday that classes will resume in person today, with an online option for students for a time. Vaccines and masks are not required but encouraged. (WDBJ, The Hill, university website)
West Virginia University is requiring masks indoors, regardless of Covid-vaccination status, its administration announced on Friday. (The Daily Athenaeum)
Faculty members at the University of Delaware were asked not to reveal the identity of students’ classmates who test positive for Covid-19. Students were also warned that the institution is running out of spaces to quarantine and that they should do so at home. (WDEL)
A 20-year-old sophomore at Texas A&M University died last week of complications from Covid-19. (The Eagle)
Former Tennessee professor is acquitted of fraud charges in spy case.
Anming Hu, a former professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville whom federal agents falsely accused of spying for the Chinese military, was acquitted of fraud charges on Thursday by a federal judge.
According to the Knoxville News Sentinel, the U.S. Justice Department had twice attempted to prosecute the professor, a naturalized Canadian citizen and nanotechnology researcher, as part of former President Donald J. Trump’s “China initiative,” which had sought to expose alleged Chinese spies working at American colleges.
The FBI had accused Hu of attempting to defraud NASA by hiding part-time work he did for the Beijing University of Technology, but he had actually openly disclosed the relationship in writing. After he refused to spy for the U.S. government, federal agents harassed him for two years, the News Sentinel reported.
Hu was indicted on three counts of wire fraud and three counts of making false statements in February 2020. This summer, a jury deadlocked on the charges, leading to a mistrial, and Hu’s lawyer asked for an acquittal. Judge Thomas A. Varlan of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee wrote that no reasonable jury could have determined that Hu’s work at the Beijing University of Technology prevented him from participating in NASA-funded research, the News Sentinel reported.
An assistant U.S. attorney filed a notice in August stating that the Justice Department planned to try Hu again, but the department under President Biden has recently dropped similar cases.
Reporter’s Notebook: We’re all masking up; somebody tell the neighbors.
From our Jack Stripling: Here’s a pandemic development I didn’t see coming: major public research universities, the sort that are always promoting their scientific breakthroughs, being the lone neighborhood holdouts when it comes to mandating masks indoors to stall the spread of Covid-19. But that’s what’s happening at the University of Florida, whose president says he cannot go along with a mask mandate issued by Alachua County, where Florida’s main campus is located.
W. Kent Fuchs, the president, says he is bound by the state-university system’s Board of Governors, whose policy is to encourage rather than to mandate masks. On Thursday, by way of a formal letter, county leaders argued that Fuchs isn’t as boxed in as he says he is, pressing the president to take a tougher stand in the interest of public safety. (Unmoved, Fuchs maintains he has no such authority.)
By going against their own experts’ advice on Covid-mitigation strategies, research universities risk undermining brands they’ve spent decades trying to build.
University experts and local leaders are in lockstep on how to protect public safety, but university leaders can’t or won’t go along. That’s a rare disconnect with big implications for how towns and colleges work together to confront Covid.
Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, has made it clear he doesn’t want masks or vaccinations mandated at public schools or colleges. No doubt, that is a key driver for how Fuchs and Florida’s other public-college presidents are navigating the situation. What a luxury it must be, in contrast, to run a private college right now, without so many political constraints.
As this debate ratcheted up in Florida last week, I couldn’t help but notice how comparatively calm and upbeat a group of private-college presidents sounded on a Zoom call with national reporters on Thursday. The Presidents Dinner, hosted virtually by Bucknell University, featured a dozen private-college leaders, all of whom are mandating masks and vaccinations. They sounded confident about a residential-college experience that doesn’t end with people very sick or dead. They’re following the science, they said.
Comings and goings.
Mark S. Wrighton, the former chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, has been named interim president of George Washington University.
Scott Vignos, assistant vice president for strategic diversity initiatives in the Office of Institutional Diversity at Oregon State University, has been named the university’s interim vice president and chief diversity officer.
Andrea A. Hayes, a professor of pediatric surgery and surgical oncology and surgeon in chief and division chief of pediatric surgery at the University of North Carolina Children’s Hospital, has been named professor and chair of the department of surgery in the Howard University College of Medicine and Howard University Hospital. She is the first woman to serve as chair of surgery.
Footnote.
We got a kick out of this three-tier visitors’ policy that a professor at the University of Oslo noticed on his office neighbor’s door. Hugo Reinert, an associate professor in the department of culture studies and Oriental languages, posted a photo of the policy in a tweet, calling it “very sensible.”
“In order to protect my concentration and sanity I have decided to implement a door policy,” the policy begins, adding that without it the occupant will “talk to you until the end of time instead of writing my dissertation.” It then lays out etiquette based on whether the door is open (come in and chat!) or closed (come in only if you have “urgent business”). And then there’s the golden rule — knock first. Always.
In short order, the unnamed author of the door policy lists situations that qualify as “urgent business”: Building or person on fire. Coffee. Revolution. Dog.
We must ask: Would a coffee-fueled revolution led by a dog motivate the author to suspend the knock-first policy?
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