Good morning, and welcome to Friday, September 1. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: rick.seltzer@chronicle.com.

A quick scheduling note: The Daily Briefing won’t publish Monday in observance of Labor Day. We’ll be back Tuesday.

Requiem for #AcademicTwitter

A particular brand of academic discourse thrived on Twitter in its heyday. But the social-media platform and how users interact with it have changed since the billionaire Elon Musk bought the company, rebranding the platform as X. Our Zachary Schermele took stock of the conflicting legacies Twitter leaves for higher ed.

Twitter became a “21st-century virtual faculty lounge” that helped professors connect with each other, Zach writes. Many found new intellectual bridges between campuses and disciplines.

• Tweeting also vaulted some professors to national prominence as subject-matter experts. Sharing research and reacting to news became two hallmarks of what became known as #AcademicTwitter.
• Scholars from historically marginalized backgrounds found the connections particularly useful. Twitter provided a pathway that circumvented traditional academic power structures.
• Twitter enabled higher-ed leaders to get off campus and in front of the public. It showed professors as people. Even college presidents caught on, with Gordon Gee, now president of West Virginia University, once describing Twitter as a way to demystify the presidency.

The vibe has changed on the service now called X. Scholars who grew prominent on the platform are deserting it. Verification rules that lent credibility to experts have been shredded. Complaints say that it’s promoting more right-wing content — a turnaround under Musk after years of accusations that social-media sites censored conservative speech.

#AcademicTwitter was never an unalloyed good.

• Toxic interactions bloomed as the service hosted varying levels of harassment and hate speech over the years.
• Academic soap operas played out publicly as scholars made offensive comments, crossed lines while posting about politics, and aired dirty laundry.
• Hot takes could be valued more than taking time to think. Critics argued Twitter was a shallow venue, making it antithetical to academic values.

Perverse incentives were always lurking. A “blend of politics, scandal, and alleged hypocrisy” tended to help professors go viral, Zach notes. The dynamic favored “signal boosting and mutual griping.”

• Quotable: “There’s no way that the scale of my career, and the trajectory of it, would have happened without Twitter,” said Tressie McMillan Cottom, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has almost 240,000 followers. But she also said the service has been “brutal and horrible” to her.

No clear successor has risen. Twitter’s brand of academic discourse was important in part because it had reached critical mass. Reassembling such a collection of voices won’t be easy for platforms like Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky that are vying to replace it.

It’s also not clear whether some academics will be able to stay away. Some admit that they’re still at least somewhat active on Twitter, or now X, despite objecting to recent changes.

The big question: Twitter ended up reflecting some of the echo chambers it supposedly broke down on campus, fueling outrage machines and tribalism. Were those bugs of this service, or are they features of academic life destined to replicate themselves anywhere scholars gather?

Read Zach’s full story here.

Quick hits

• State monitor will oversee New Jersey City University: Henry J. Amoroso, a lawyer and associate professor at Seton Hall University, was named by the state to create a fiscal plan to stabilize the troubled institution’s finances. The appointment follows deep cuts and allegations about mismanagement at the 6,000-student university. (New Jersey Monitor)
• Door Dash blocks alcohol delivery to Massachusetts campuses: The delivery service said on Thursday that it won’t allow deliveries to college campuses and “similar high-risk areas” as it seeks to make sure alcohol is only delivered to those 21 or older. (Door Dash)
• Four-year prison sentence for student-loan scheme: A federal judge sentenced Randolph Stanley, 44, of Maryland, to four years in prison and three years of supervised release, as well as restitution on outstanding federal student-loan balances of at least $5.6 million, for conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Prosecutors said Stanley led an effort that recruited more than 60 people to enroll in post-graduate programs at more than eight different institutions. Stanley offered to complete coursework for students for a fee, which resulted in fraudulent degrees and federal student loans being improperly disbursed, prosecutors said. (U.S. Attorney’s Office)

Quote of the day

“As an employer, I can give people hard skills, and in the digital world they change every three to five years. It doesn’t matter that much. I really need them to understand how to work, how to think, how to problem solve.”

—Ginni Rometty, former chief executive of IBM, explaining why she thinks the digital era could prompt higher ed to focus more on critical-thinking skills

Rometty spoke during Day 3 of this year’s Chronicle Festival, which examined leadership for the future.

Stat of the day

92,003

That’s how many people attended a women’s volleyball event on Wednesday headlined by a match between the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The crowd topped the previous record for a women’s sporting event, 91,648, set by a 2022 soccer match in Spain. It also set an attendance record for Memorial Stadium, where the flagship university’s football team plays.

Weekend reads

• I Secretly Let ChatGPT Take My Final Exam (Slate)
• College Professor Harassed Students to Quench ‘Clown Fetish,’ Offering Extra Credit, Cash (USA Today)
• College Students Are Still Struggling With Basic Math. Professors Blame the Pandemic. (Associated Press)
• Can Liberalism Save Itself? (The New York Times)
• Pay $300 an Hour to Have Your College Mascot Attend Your Wedding (The Wall Street Journal)

Let’s talk politics in the classroom

Join us on Thursday, September 14 at noon EDT, as our Emma Pettit and a panel of experts discuss why state lawmakers seem more interested than ever in determining what’s taught on college campuses — and what the impact has been.

This event is open to everyone. Click here to sign up to attend.

Comings and goings

• Peter Salovey, president of Yale University since 2013, plans to step down in June 2024.
• Joe Gow, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse since 2007, will step down at the end of the year.
• Christopher Macdonald-Dennis, senior advisor for institutional equity and belonging at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, has been named vice president for diversity and inclusion at Salem State University.
• Lori Ann Summers, vice president for institutional advancement at Newberry College and president of the Newberry College Foundation, has been named vice president for advancement at Queens University of Charlotte.

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

Footnote

I asked for photos of students moving into dorms, readers’ top move-in tales, and your best — or worst — college-roommate stories. Let’s pack in one more contribution.

University of New England in Maine

Student volunteers helped the University of New England’s Class of 2027 move in on Aug. 27. The nonprofit institution in Maine has over 700 new enrollees this year, 190 of them first-generation college students. It reports marine sciences, medical biology, business, and education are among the most popular majors.

Also of note, the University of New England has a collection of rare-colored lobsters for research and education. One recent addition is a bright orange, one-clawed lobster. The odds of catching such a crustacean are said to be one in 30 million. That makes it much rarer than blue lobsters at one in 2 million. But it tails split-colored lobsters, which are one in 50 million finds.