Quick hits.
- A former researcher at Duke-National University of Singapore pleaded guilty to being a Russian agent. According to court documents, the former cardiology researcher spied on an FBI informant and met at least five times with a Russian intelligence official. (The Chronicle of Duke University)
- Chatham University, in Pennsylvania, will reinstate tenure after professors approved a measure already backed by trustees. More than 75 percent of Chatham’s faculty members voted, and only one voted no. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Chronicle)
- Some 4,000 students from five Chicago high schools — along with many of their parents — will get full-ride college scholarships through the education nonprofit Hope Chicago. (Chalkbeat Chicago)
N.C. State removes “Dixie” from its anthem.
In the past few years, a number of colleges have renamed buildings, removed statues, and taken other measures to distance themselves from historical figures and phrases; a handful of institutions have even gone so far as to rename themselves. Dixie State University, for instance, will become Utah Polytechnic State University on July 1, in order to rid itself of a word connoting the slaveholding South.
On Friday, an institution took a different step in that direction, changing the lyrics in its school song to cut a Confederate reference. North Carolina State University’s Board of Trustees voted to remove “Dixie” from its beginning line, “Where the winds of Dixie softly blow.” The amended lyrics are “Where the Southern winds so softly blow.“ N.C. State’s chancellor said in a letter to the university community that the song was written in 1920 and that “Dixie” had been part of it since 1925. After concerns about the use of “Dixie” arose, a committee convened by the Alumni Association Board of Directors suggested replacing it with a geographical reference as one solution, a suggestion N.C. State trustees unanimously approved.
N.C. State’s decision stands in contrast to one made last year by the University of Texas at Austin, which has opted not to alter “The Eyes of Texas,” its anthem, despite the song’s origins in minstrelsy. The Texas chapter of the NAACP, the group’s UT-Austin chapter, and several anonymous students filed a complaint in September with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, saying that continuing to play the song created a “hostile environment” for Black students, The Texas Tribune reported. Students had protested the song’s use, and some donors had threatened to withhold money from UT-Austin if it were retired. A committee determined in a March 2021 report that the song’s intent was “not overtly racist.”
Harvard anthropologists ask Comaroff to resign.
Fifteen professors in Harvard’s anthropology department signed a letter over the weekend asking their colleague John Comaroff to resign, The Harvard Crimson reports. In January, Comaroff had been placed on unpaid leave for one semester following an investigation into three graduate students’ accusations of sexual harassment and professional misconduct — charges that the professor denied. The students told their story to The Chronicle in 2020. But they felt Harvard handled their complaints poorly. This month, they sued the university, alleging that it had failed to protect them from the professor. Harvard disputes the accusations.
Comings and goings.
- Christopher Alan Bracey, who has served as interim provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at George Washington University since June 2021, has been named to the position permanently.
- Anthony Varona, who was fired as dean of the University of Miami School of Law last year, has been named dean of the Seattle University School of Law.
- Dennis Shields, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Platteville, has been named president of the Southern University System and chancellor of Southern University and A&M College. He will succeed Ray L. Belton, who is retiring in June.
Footnote.
How’s this for a power team? A professor in Marshall University’s department of biological sciences, Philippe Georgel, recently collaborated with a peer with the same name, in the same field, but who works at the University of Strasbourg, for a research project.
The two Georgels — who both hail from France — have followed each other’s work since the 1990s, when Marshall’s Georgel was at Oregon State University. His colleagues there started asking him about publications that had his name on them but that they knew he had not written. That’s when he figured out he had a counterpart abroad.
As neither had a middle initial, Marshall’s Georgel adopted “T.” to distinguish himself from his doppelgänger.
“The odds of two individuals of that same first and last name working in the same field at the same time, also looking for jobs in the same field and at the same time is very, very low,” Marshall’s Georgel told the university’s news service.
When Strasbourg’s Georgel was on sabbatical in New Caledonia, investigating the high frequency of gout in that region of the world, Marshall’s Georgel brought his expertise of diet and epigenetics to a collaborative paper that was published in Frontiers in Immunology this past fall.
If my name twin is out there, I hope we can collaborate on a Footnote.
