Quick hits.
- Glenn Youngkin and Jason Miyares, who will take office this week as the governor and attorney general of Virginia, said on Friday they would join other Republican-run states in challenging the Biden administration’s vaccination mandates. Also on Friday, the University of Virginia announced that it had moved the deadline for students, faculty, and staff to get booster shots to January 14, the day before the Youngkin administration takes office. (The Washington Post, The Daily Progress)
- The Republican-controlled Wisconsin Senate has kept nearly a dozen nominations for seats on the boards of the University of Wisconsin and the state’s technical-college system in limbo. The move could allow the party to more quickly seize control of the boards if a Republican is elected governor in November. (Wisconsin Examiner)
- The vice chancellor for facilities at the San Mateo Community College District, in California, has pleaded no contest to two charges of using district resources for political purposes. Jose Nuñez admitted to using the resources for the election of a district board member and for a bond measure for district projects, as part of a plea deal in which prosecutors dropped 13 other felony charges, including for embezzlement and perjury. (Bay City News Service)
- Yale University is asking students not to dine at restaurants, even outdoors, in an effort to slow rising numbers of Covid-19 cases. In-person classes are scheduled to resume on February 7 after two weeks of online instruction. (NBC News, Yale Daily News on Twitter)
- Dartmouth College’s winter term started in person last week, and the college intends to keep it that way, although dining halls are offering grab-and-go meals and college-sponsored gatherings are limited. (The Dartmouth)
- Alex Shchegol, the president and founder of ASA College, a for-profit institution in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Florida, has resigned for the second time. After stepping down in 2018 over sexual-misconduct allegations, he is said to have reinstated himself last fall by replacing the college’s board with his allies. (New York Daily News)
Student workers at Columbia vote to end their strike.
Ten weeks after they went on strike for higher wages, more robust health coverage, and the right to third-party arbitration of harassment and discrimination complaints, Columbia University student workers voted on Friday to return to work. Union organizers struck a tentative four-year agreement a day earlier with university administrators, and the union’s members will vote on the deal this month.
The strike, which one expert said was the longest higher ed had seen in more than a decade, enjoyed broad support from political figures and the public. The result, he said, could be a “lodestar” for union organizers elsewhere in higher ed. Read our Megan Zahneis’s story for the details.
Comings and goings.
- Frank D. Sanchez, president of Rhode Island College since 2016, plans to step down on June 30.
- Kyle Cavanaugh, vice president for administration at Duke University, plans to retire on September 30.
- J. Carlos Hernandez, chief financial officer and senior vice president for operations at Sam Houston State University, will retire in May, at the end of the academic year.
- M. Daniele Fallin, chair of the department of mental health in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and director of the Wendy Klag Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities at the Johns Hopkins University, has been named dean of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.
Footnote.
The Word of the Year for 2021 is “insurrection.”
The American Dialect Society has been choosing the word that reflects the zeitgeist of the previous year ever since 1990. Allan Metcalf, then executive secretary of the ADL, came up with the idea, based on Time magazine’s Person of the Year. ADL joins the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, and the gathering that chooses WOTY is open to all attendees, and the public, usually in a crowded hotel ballroom of hundreds of people.
No one wants to be with hundreds of people right now, so, like last year, the WOTY 2021 meeting was virtual. More than 320 people Zoomed in on Friday night, and the language columnist Ben Zimmer emceed. Sparring over the Pandemic-Related Word of the Year got a little heated: “‘Breakthrough’ defines last year and will continue to define the pandemic,” said a linguistics professor from Oregon. But, via onscreen voting, “boosted/boostered,” a more positive word, won.
Some winners weren’t surprising. “The Great Resignation” lost to “supply chain” for Financial/Economic Word of the Year. “Hard pants,” for the ones you’ve abandoned as you WFH, won Most Useful.
When it’s time for the actual Word of the Year, the lexical item with the most-eloquent supporters often wins. “December 7, September 11, January 6,” said a copy editor from Georgia, echoing Kamala Harris and speaking in favor of “insurrection.” A Ph.D. student in linguistics, from Michigan, raised her virtual hand: “I’m shaking as I say this,” she said, and you could hear the tremor in her voice. For “insurrection” to be on the list “speaks to what has happened in American politics this year,” she said, noting that much of the media refuses to call the attack on the Capitol a year ago an insurrection. “It wasn’t just a riot, it wasn’t just a terrorist attack. It was the sitting president of our country asking his supporters to take over American democracy,” said the grad student. After that, “insurrection” beat out “vax,” 169 to 152.
The evening wasn’t all about bad memories, however, and a certain vaccination, which, after all, arrived in 2021, held the spotlight in an earlier vote. With a narrow 51 percent, “Fauci ouchie” beat “chin diaper” (a mask worn improperly) to become Most Creative Word of the Year.
