Daily Briefing

Welcome to Thursday, March 3. Today, Duke and Cornell Universities are among a growing number of institutions curtailing surveillance testing for the coronavirus. Autherine Lucy Foster, who lived to see her name replace that of a Ku Klux Klan member on a University of Alabama building, has died. And the University of Washington will hold graduation in person for the first time since 2019.

Today’s Briefing was written by Oyin Adedoyin, with contributions from Heidi Landecker, Andrew Mytelka, and Julia Piper. Write us: oyin.adedoyin@chronicle.com.

Some colleges discontinue surveillance testing.

Last spring semester, Duke University regularly ran more than 20,000 — once more than 30,000 — coronavirus tests a week on its students, staff, and faculty. By last week, that number was roughly halved, to a little more than 12,000 tests.

At its peak testing pace, Cornell University was running about 40,000 tests weekly for the on-campus community in Ithaca, said Gary A. Koretzky, an immunologist who is vice provost for academic integration and a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine. Now administrators are running about 6,000 a week.

Both colleges are planning to do even fewer tests in the future. Starting on March 21, Duke will no longer require students who are compliant with its vaccination and booster mandate, and who have no Covid symptoms, to be tested. Cornell stopped mandating surveillance tests for the vaccinated and boosted last month.

The decisions come long after a wave of colleges stopped requiring vaccinated students to participate in surveillance testing in the fall of 2021, in part as an inducement to get the shots. Meanwhile, other colleges, including George Washington and Harvard Universities, are still testing their vaccinated students frequently. Our Francie Diep has the story.

Quick hits.

• Autherine Lucy Foster, the University of Alabama’s first Black student, died on Wednesday at the age of 92. Just last week she was in Tuscaloosa, Ala., to cut the ribbon on the College of Education building that now bears her name. Last month the building’s name sparked controversy when the Alabama system’s Board of Trustees announced that her name would join that of a former Ku Klux Klan member on the building. The board later reversed that decision, renaming the building Autherine Lucy Hall. (AL.com, The Chronicle)
• The University of Washington will hold an in-person graduation for the first time since 2019. The institution was one of the first to close at the start of the pandemic. (KOMO News, The Chronicle)
• President Biden did not mention student-loan debt during Tuesday’s State of the Union address. (Business Insider, The Chronicle)
• After a close faculty vote, San Diego State University will drop a requirement that a land acknowledgment appear in syllabi. The statement — recognizing the Native Americans on whose land the university was built — will now be optional. Critics had said the requirement violated their First Amendment rights. (The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Chronicle)
• Well Ride, a student-run transportation program, wants to help students who seek mental-health services at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The program is teaming up with UNC’s Counseling and Psychological Services and Lyft to offer students free rides to off-campus counseling services. (The Daily Tar Heel)
• Four national surveys of high-school students in 2020 and 2021 by the Educational Credit Management Corporation and VICE Media found that less than half (48 percent) were considering a four-year college. That’s down from 72 percent in May 2020. (The Hill)
  

Colleges are lifting mask mandates, sometimes with exceptions.

Colleges across the country are lifting or changing their mask mandates, based in part on new guidance last week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and on what their states are doing.

At Ithaca College, masks will soon not be required in most places on campus, including classrooms. Exceptions include health-care settings and classes whose faculty members have asked for masks. The change follows the suspension of the mask advisory in Tompkins County, N.Y., where the college is located. The county is in the low-transmission category under CDC guidelines.

At Ohio University, masks are no longer required in most nonclassroom spaces, with exceptions for campuses in high-Covid-rate communities. And California’s Shasta College, which does not require people on campus to be vaccinated, has dropped its mask requirement for the unvaccinated.

Comings and goings.

• LaTonia Collins Smith, interim president since June 2021 of Harris-Stowe State University, has been named to the post permanently. She is the first Black woman to serve as president of the Missouri university.
• John E. Jones III, interim president since June 2021 of Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania, has been named to the post permanently.
• Stuart Benkert, head of the department of performing arts at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, has been named the inaugural dean of undergraduate studies and student success at Colorado State University at Pueblo.
  

Footnote.

Today’s a red-letter day for higher-ed philatelists because it is so rare that the U.S. Postal Service issues a stamp connected to colleges and universities. But today the Post Office is commemorating the 50th anniversary of the enactment of Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, by releasing four new stamps, each showing an unnamed female athlete in a different sport: a runner, a swimmer, a gymnast, and a soccer player.

The law was passed in 1972 as part of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Since then, Title IX has been responsible for a boom in women’s sports across American higher education and the rise of American women in many Olympic and other international competitions as well. In the past decade, Title IX has also forced a reckoning on campuses over sexual harassment and sexual assault, but the Post Office is focusing its commemoration on sports.

The stamps, each marked “Forever” so they will always be valid to send a first-class letter, join a small group of other Post Office issues related to higher education. They include a 3-cent stamp in 1955 that marked the centenary of the first land-grant colleges, Michigan State and Penn State; a 6-cent stamp in 1969 on the sesquicentennial of Daniel Webster’s role in a seminal Supreme Court case involving Dartmouth College; and a 6-cent stamp on the centennial of the first college football game, in 1869 (Rutgers beating Princeton). By contrast, Title IX is comparatively young, but its impact seems destined to match the others.

Correction: We misspelled the name of Weill Cornell Medicine, leaving an “l” off “Weill” and transposing the first two names. The Briefing has been updated to correct that, and your editor, a Cornell grad who has walked by the Weill medical school, in New York City, apologizes.