Welcome to Wednesday, January 25. Today’s Briefing was written by Kate Hidalgo Bellows, with contributions from Julia Piper. Write to us: kate.hidalgobellows@chronicle.com.

Improving education for women in prison.

It took Alexa Garza the better part of her 20-year prison sentence to complete a bachelor’s degree in business administration. Had she been in a men’s prison, she says, she would have finished a lot sooner, had more courses to choose from, and not had to shuttle between prisons, shackled and repeatedly strip-searched when a course she needed was no longer offered in her facility.

Released in 2018 and hired in 2020 as a justice fellow with the Education Trust, Garza is working to educate others about the challenges of earning degrees in prison, especially for women.

A report Garza helped write for the nonprofit found that incarcerated men in Texas had access to more than three times as many college programs as did women in the state’s prisons. In 2018, according to the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, women could pursue only associate degrees and certifications in office administration and culinary arts/hospitality. Men could get associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees, as well as certifications in 21 occupations, including high-demand fields like welding, computer technology, and truck-driving. Prison-reform legislation passed by Texas lawmakers in 2019 expanded the choices for women, but they still fall far short of those offered to men.

Despite being the fastest-growing segment of the state’s prison population, women, Garza contends, “are a correctional afterthought.”

Read our Katherine Mangan’s story here.

Quick hits.

• A growing number of colleges are working with tribal nations to help Native students find new connections to their heritage and, as some Native-language experts call it, awaken “sleeping” tongues. (The Chronicle)
• More medical schools have joined Harvard Medical School in withdrawing from the U.S. News & World Report rankings. The schools at Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania have all announced they will no longer participate. (The Wall Street Journal)
• Faculty members at Hamline University voted 71 to 12 in favor of a statement calling on the president, Faynese Miller, to resign. The vote follows Miller’s dismissal of an adjunct professor who showed an illustration of the Prophet Muhammad in an art-history classroom. (The Nation, The Chronicle)
• Stanford University’s Graduate Student Council and Undergraduate Senate passed a joint resolution last week aimed at the university’s responses to sexual violence by faculty. The resolution proposes creating a faculty-specific Title IX reporting process that would prohibit faculty members from working with students while under investigation for sexual violence. (The Stanford Daily)
• A North Dakota state senator has proposed a bill to ban the instruction of “divisive concepts” at colleges. A similar bill was signed into law in South Dakota last year. (Grand Forks Herald, The Chronicle)
• Joan Gabel, president of the University of Minnesota, has resigned her seat on the Securian Financial board of directors following a month of criticism over potential conflicts of interest. Gabel accepted the position at the company, which holds $1.3 billion in university employee-retirement-plan assets, last month. (Pioneer Press)
• The American Society for Human Genetics has apologized for the role some of its first leaders played in legitimizing the eugenics movement. (The Washington Post)

Stat of the day.

48 percent.

Mental health and dropping out.

A new report from Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Collegiate Mental Health finds that first-year college students who experienced increased academic distress and had a history of psychiatric hospitalization when they started treatment at an on-campus counseling center were 48 percent more likely to withdraw from college, compared to the average student who sought counseling.

Read more from our Kate Marijolovic here.

Comings and goings.

• Don C. Sawyer III, vice president for equity, inclusion, and leadership development at Quinnipiac University, has been named vice president for diversity, inclusion, and belonging at Fairfield University.
• Elliott Visconsi, associate provost and chief academic digital officer at the University of Notre Dame, has been named provost and dean of the college at the College of the Holy Cross.
• Corey Campbell, vice president for student engagement and retention at Jefferson Community College, in New York, has been named vice president for academic affairs at Cleveland State Community College, in Tennessee.
• Leslie Brunelli, senior vice chancellor for business and financial affairs at the University of Denver, has been named executive vice president for finance and administration and chief financial officer at Washington State University.

To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com.

Footnote.

On Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock, which I had not heard of and would have been perfectly happy never knowing about, 10 seconds closer to midnight. It’s now set at 90 seconds to midnight, the theoretical point of global catastrophe.

Happy Wednesday, readers.