Quick hits.
- Judy K. Sakaki, president of Sonoma State University, said on Monday she would resign, effective on July 31, after six years in office. The announcement followed months of criticism of alleged sexual harassment by her husband, and accusations that she had retaliated against the university’s provost, who had relayed the allegations to the California State University system office. The controversy, which drew criticism from faculty members and state lawmakers, has played out as Cal State deals with the aftermath of the resignation in February of its chancellor, who had also been accused of protecting an alleged sexual harasser. (Sonoma State news release, The Chronicle)
- Ilya Shapiro, the Georgetown University administrator who was reinstated last week after an investigation into his controversial tweet that President Biden would nominate a “lesser Black woman” to the U.S. Supreme Court, has resigned. (The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle)
- A sit-in at Seattle Pacific University over a policy that discriminates against hiring LGBTQ+ people, has lasted nearly two weeks. (The Seattle Times)
- The designers of the much-maligned Munger Hall, a dorm planned for the University of California at Santa Barbara, are now offering in-person walk-throughs of a full-scale model and virtual tours. Dubbed “Dormzilla,” the megadorm is designed with no windows in living quarters. (Archinect, The Chronicle)
- This is 2022. The University of Notre Dame is updating its fight song to mention women as well as men. (Inside Higher Ed)
Editor’s Notebook: Guns and money.
From our Heidi Landecker: I grew up in Upstate New York, and I don’t mean Poughkeepsie, but farther north, in the Adirondack foothills, dairy-farm country. Hunting was a common pastime, mostly among men and boys, who shot deer. Families hunted not just for recreation but to keep meat in the freezer. Every few years we’d hear of a hunting accident in which someone had died. Once, my teenage girlfriends and I met some guys from another school at a local “field day,” or town fair, and my friend and one of the boys stayed in touch, in whatever way we did so back in 1970, by land line, I guess. I don’t think they dated, but they were friends. Late that fall we heard he had died from a gunshot wound in a hunting accident. Years later, I visited another friend, now with my sons, then about 7 and 5. She had four sons, and her husband was a state trooper, and what my boys liked best was the hunting rifle hanging on the wall in the living room, as we might display a painting.
New York State just passed some of the toughest gun laws in the country, and research has shown that states with stronger firearm-restrictions laws have fewer gun-related deaths. In The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb wrote about research by Emma Fridel, an assistant professor at Florida State University, who found that states with permissive concealed-carry laws have 11 percent more homicides by gun violence and are 53 percent more likely to see mass shootings. “Where more households have guns, the overall homicide rate goes up,” Jens Ludwig, a professor in the public-policy school at the University of Chicago, told The Chronicle in 2011.
For 20 years, the gun industry persuaded the U.S. government to squelch research about gun violence; most money for it came from the Joyce Foundation. After the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, President Obama loosened those restrictions, but even then studies focused on guns’ toll, not on banning them. By 2016, the flow of federal money to such research was still relatively small, The Chronicle reported.
This area of research is starting to rebuild. There will be more studies, such as at the new Gun Violence Prevention Research Center started by Kathleen Carlson, an epidemiologist and gun-injury researcher at the Oregon Health & Science University.
But how much more gun research does the United States need? In Britain, it took one school shooting — at Dunblane Primary School, in Scotland, in 1996 — to ban almost all private gun ownership and establish mandatory registration to own a shotgun.
Stat of the day.
$75 million
That’s the amount the advocacy group formerly known as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education wants to spend on a new project to promote free speech in workplaces and in culture, not just on campuses. The group, now called the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has raised more than $28 million toward that goal. According to Politico, FIRE’s expansion may challenge the American Civil Liberties Union.
Comings and goings.
- Kumble Subbaswamy, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst since 2012, plans to retire at the end of June 2023.
- Michael A. Elliott, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Emory University, has been named president of Amherst College.
Footnote.
Commencement season is a time for a plethora of heart-warming stories about unusual graduates — the parent and child who get their degrees together, the octogenarian who receives a diploma decades after starting and dropping out, the triplets who graduate simultaneously. This year brought a fresh twist on the theme, with a University of Texas at Austin senior receiving her degree alongside her cat, who she said had faithfully attended every Zoom class during her pandemic-dominated undergraduate career.
According to Fox 7, a television station in Austin, Francesca Bourdier was joined at commencement by Suki, her 18-month-old ginger cat. “Whenever I would have my Zoom lecture on, it’s like she almost wanted to listen in on it, and she would always just sit by my laptop,” she told Fox 7. To mark Suki’s accomplishments, Bourdier bought the cat a feline-size cap and gown that, she said, matched her own graduation regalia.
Bourdier, a fashion designer, didn’t specify what courses Suki particularly enjoyed, although we’d speculate that she was prone to sleeping in class. Still, it’s worth noting that even if Suki didn’t earn a degree, at least she graduated without student-loan debt.
