Daily Briefing

Welcome to Friday, June 3. Today, our Emma Pettit examines lawmakers’ efforts to take aim at public colleges in Florida. Harvard University asks a federal judge to dismiss a Title IX lawsuit against it. And we look at new research about where students in different states go to college.

Today’s Briefing was written by Megan Zahneis, with contributions from Sara Lipka, Emma Pettit, and Julia Piper. Write to us: megan.zahneis@chronicle.com.

Reporter’s Notebook: Extreme higher-ed “overhaul” in Florida.

From our Emma Pettit: Florida is now basically synonymous with partisanship in higher ed. This past legislative session, conservative lawmakers required the state’s public colleges to seek new accreditors and allowed the State University System’s Board of Governors to call for post-tenure reviews every five years. Florida’s Republican-led Legislature also passed what was championed as the “Stop WOKE Act,” which restricts how racism, oppression, and other subjects can be taught. Any university that violated the law would be ineligible to receive certain funds in the next fiscal year, according to language that was shoehorned into an education-budget bill that’s been sent to the governor.

Supporters branded those legislative efforts as common-sense reforms. Their critics decried them as thinly veiled political hackery. As it turns out, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida had something even more extreme in mind.

Jason Garcia, an investigative journalist, recently revealed in his reported newsletter Seeking Rents that DeSantis’s office had developed, as Garcia puts it, a “sweeping plan to overhaul higher-education oversight in Florida.” The proposal would have “centralized more power in boards run by the governor’s political appointees, made colleges and universities more dependent on money controlled by politicians in Tallahassee, and imposed more restrictions on what schools can teach.”

According to Garcia, those ideas appeared this year in legislation that was drafted at the request of DeSantis’s office. Garcia reports some jaw-dropping details. DeSantis’s proposal, for example, “would have given the Board of Governors more authority to initiate investigations of university presidents, veto school budgets, and fire university employees.”

The language in the budget bill that would punish universities for violating the Stop WOKE Act? It came from DeSantis, at the request of Wilton Simpson, the Senate president, Garcia reports. DeSantis’s legislative-affairs director wrote in an email to Simpson’s chief of staff: “Kathy, Per the Senate President’s request, please find our suggested budget language to prevent the ‘socialism factories’ from pushing woke course requirements.” A few days later, the Legislature approved the governor’s language practically verbatim, Garcia writes.

Though only “a few fragments ultimately made it into bills that were passed into law,” Garcia writes, DeSantis “could resurrect any of them in the future — whether through executive edict or, if he is re-elected this fall, in future legislative sessions.” DeSantis is also a rumored Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential election. If nothing else, Garcia’s reporting sheds light on how one of the country’s most powerful Republicans views his state’s higher-education system and how he’d love to remodel it completely. Read Garcia’s full story here.

Quick hits.

• Harvard University is asking a federal judge to dismiss nine of 10 counts in a lawsuit that accuses the institution of ignoring years of sexual harassment by John L. Comaroff, an anthropology professor. The complaint, brought by three former graduate students, contains claims the students first shared with The Chronicle in 2020. (The Harvard Crimson, The Chronicle)
• Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, is supposed to protect students who allege sexual assault, but some colleges are forcing them to waive their rights by signing what look like nondisclosure agreements before the colleges will open investigations, according to lawyers for the students. The colleges say they’re trying to protect people’s privacy. (USA Today)
• A federal appeals court on Thursday ruled that a former assistant professor of physics at Cornell University can sue the institution for gender discrimination over his claim that it disciplined him after a “skewed” investigation into a female graduate student’s sexual-harassment accusation against him. One judge on the appeals-court panel said the case was part of a “disturbing trend” of threats to due process for faculty members accused of misconduct. (Reuters)
• A University of California faculty committee has backtracked on a proposal, prepared by faculty members, to require criteria for ethnic-studies courses at high schools in the state. (EdSource)
• Alumni of Stanford University’s Theta Delta Chi fraternity are suing the institution, saying it violated their due-process rights by suspending the chapter for five years after the death of a pledge in 2020. (The Stanford Daily)
• Police officers in riot gear in Greece fired tear gas during a protest against government plans to introduce policing on university campuses. (The Washington Post)
  

In-state or out? New research examines where students go to college.

Where students decide to go to college — and how to influence that decision — is a huge issue on American campuses. Students’ choices, complicated by such factors as cost, location, programming, and facilities, are equally difficult to fathom. But a new study from researchers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, drawing on federal data from the last decade, tries to provide some answers, on a state-by-state basis.

Their analysis, focusing on four-year institutions, found that, on average, 54 percent of college-bound students attend an in-state public college, while 15 percent attend an in-state private college. Students in some states, such as Louisiana, Michigan, and Texas, are more likely to go to college in their home state. Students in other states, including Alaska and New Jersey, are more likely to migrate to another state for a college degree.

The findings have implications for public colleges’ capacity to educate residents of their states — and the colleges’ perceived desirability to those residents, both pre- and post-pandemic. Our Isha Trivedi has more.

Come talk student disengagement.

Join us on Monday for a subscriber-only virtual discussion about reaching disengaged students. Along with teaching and mental-health experts, our senior writer Beth McMurtrie will delve into why last semester felt so hard, explore how faculty members and colleges can support and motivate students, and answer your questions. Sign up here to attend live, or watch later, on demand. We hope to see you there!

Comings and goings.

• Vanessa Beasley, vice provost for academic affairs, dean of residential faculty, and an associate professor of communication studies at Vanderbilt University, has been named president of Trinity University, in Texas.
• Jesse Peters, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Fort Lewis College, in Colorado, has been named president of Western Oregon University.
• Keren Yarhi-Milo, a professor of war and peace studies and director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, has been named dean of the university’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Footnote.

Funding is in short supply across higher ed. So some professors at Delta State University, in Cleveland, Miss., turned to an unusual source to try to score some money for their departments: bar trivia.

As Open Campus reports, the bar Hey Joe’s, just down the street from Delta State’s campus, has hosted since 2009 an annual Department Trivia tournament. Representatives from across campus show up in teams at the bar every last Wednesday of the month, from January through May, to try to rack up the most total points. The winners claim a $1,000 check for their department, a trophy, and, of course, bragging rights.

Over the years, the tournament has accumulated its fair share of lore, including accusations of cheating with cellphones and the meteoric — and, some say, suspicious — rise of the athletic department, which walked away with this year’s prize. (“For $1,000, we could buy some new equipment, we’d make a lot of use of it,” said one rival. “But some departments don’t need it, like the athletic department.”)

The athletic department, for its part, disavowed any notion of cheating and said the team’s success was attributable to its size and diversity. Team members are considering putting the trophy in a display case on campus.