Quick hits.
- Reports of sexual assault have led to condemnation of Greek societies at Northwestern University and the University of Maryland. (The Daily Northwestern, The Diamondback)
- Former players on the University of Florida women’s basketball team have come forward with stories of abuse under the team’s head coach, who resigned in July. (The Independent Florida Alligator)
- The longtime coach of the University of Southern California’s Song Girls spirit-and-dance team was found to have body-shamed, harassed, and retaliated against several team members from 2016 to 2020, when she resigned. USC’s Title IX office found Lori Nelson had violated university policies. (Los Angeles Times)
- First-year and some second-year M.B.A. students at Harvard will take classes remotely this week to help curb a spike in Covid-19 cases. (The Boston Globe)
- One student leader at Rhodes College, in Memphis, is calling for the institution to respond more directly to racist and anti-Semitic incidents reported on campus. (The Commercial Appeal)
A racist email at UMass Amherst.
Members of Black student organizations at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst received a disturbing email last week. Addressed to “Black Students of our campus” and signed by “the UMass Coalition for a better society,” the email said, among other racist statements, that Black students on the campus “did not get here on merit.” The message, which was sent in several rounds, was condemned by one senior administrator as “vile, blatantly racist, and violently offensive.”
That administrator, Nefertiti A. Walker, vice chancellor and chief diversity officer, said in an announcement that there had been “an increase in anti-Black racist incidents happening on our campus,” including messages sent though the online “Contact Us” forms of student organizations and an incident in which someone in a car yelled a racist epithet at a group of Black students.
On Monday, Marty Meehan, president of UMass Amherst, joined Walker in denouncing the emails and other racist acts, adding that university officials are working to “identify the individuals and/or organizations responsible for these hate-ridden messages, and hold them accountable wherever they are.”
The UMass Black Student Union posted on Instagram that it and the UMass Black Mass Communication Project would hold a safe space for Black students on campus on Thursday. “We are angry. We are hurt. We are tired,” the organization’s post read. “And although we are disappointed, we are certainly not surprised.”
Parenting on the tenure track.
Maggie Doherty’s recent article about the challenges of parenting while on the tenure track resonated with many readers. So we asked for your stories, and over a hundred of you responded. What’s been your experience with parenting in academe? Did you feel supported by your institution? What is your university doing right — and what can it do better? Read this for a sampling of the answers: what’s bad, what’s good, who’s doing it right, and who could be doing a whole lot better.
Quote of the day.
“I have made it clear to the administration that I am willing to be terminated for my actions. Of course, I would immediately sue the university and the Board of Regents if that were to come to pass.”
— Steve L. O’Kane Jr., a biology professor at the University of Northern Iowa, to The Gazette. O’Kane is requiring his students to mask up, lowering laboratory grades if they refuse.
Comings and goings.
- Paul Trible, president of Christopher Newport University since 1996, plans to retire at the end of the 2021-22 academic year.
- Ericke S. Cage, vice president and chief of staff at West Virginia State University, has been named interim president. He replaces Nicole Pride, who resigned at the end of July.
- Allison D. Garrett, president of Emporia State University, has been named chancellor and chief executive officer of the Oklahoma State System of Higher Education.
Footnote.
A Toronto college will be offering a course next semester on two of the Ontario capital’s most celebrated singer-songwriters.
A course at the Creative School at Ryerson University will explore the music and lives of Drake and The Weeknd, both born in Toronto. “Deconstructing Drake & The Weeknd” starts in January and will be taught by Dalton Higgins, a music-professor-in-residence at Ryerson.
According to CNN, the class will be a flagship course for the Creative School’s professional-music B.A. program — Canada’s “first transdisciplinary professional-music undergraduate program.” Higgins told CNN one of the purposes of the course is to examine the lyricism of both artists.
Higgins, a public-relations strategist and publicist, has written six books about Black music and hip-hop, including a biography of Drake.
