Quick hits
- Chapel Hill leaders want chancellor to stay: After word spread that Kevin M. Guskiewicz, chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had been named the sole finalist for the presidency of Michigan State University — as The Chronicle reported last week — trustees, faculty, donors, and even a state legislator made personal appeals for Guskiewicz to remain in his current post. (The Chronicle)
- New graduate-student deal reached at the U. of Southern California: After more than six months of negotiations, the university and its newly minted graduate-student union agreed to terms Sunday, avoiding an end-of-semester strike. The union’s members count pay raises and increased protections against discrimination and harassment among the contract’s key provisions. (Los Angeles Times)
- Hearing coming up on pro-Palestinian student groups in Florida: Florida’s state-university system last month called on colleges to shut down their campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, after the SJP national organization expressed support for Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. The University of Florida and the University of South Florida’s SJP chapters quickly sued on First Amendment grounds, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, respectively. Now, a federal judge has set a January date for a hearing on whether the University of Florida’s SJP chapter can keep operating while the suit winds its way through the courts. (The Chronicle, Florida Phoenix)
- A professor says Spelman College secretly raised his students’ grades, then fired him: Kendrick Morales, a former assistant professor of economics, says the Atlanta-based college bumped up the grades of upperclassmen who were set to fail two of his courses, even after Morales’s own curving of scores. When Morales complained, he alleges, Spelman fired him without offering a chance for appeal. (Inside Higher Ed)
One campus asks: Can e-scooters be safer?
E-scooters: We’ve all seen them, and perhaps even had a close encounter with one. But complaints about e-scooters being annoying have escalated to legitimate questions about safety, as a University of Michigan student died this past summer after the scooter he was riding collided with an oncoming car.
E-scooters’ presence on campus is nothing new. Micromobility companies like Lime and Spin brought their products to colleges five years ago, seeing a young, tech-savvy student population with limited access to cars as a prime market.
But uptake has been a series of “uphill battles,” as an executive at Spin told our Maggie Hicks. Near-crashes and fire hazards have prompted several campuses to ban the vehicles.
The partnership route wasn’t a resounding success. To try to smooth public perception, Spin deployed about 200 scooters on Virginia Tech’s campus, attaching cameras, accelerometers, and gyroscopes to some to gather more data on how the vehicles were being used. The company then passed its findings to a Virginia Tech working group that’s mulling suggestions for scooter-related policy and infrastructure changes. But nearly six months after the study was published, Virginia Tech hasn’t allowed rental scooters to operate on campus.
Now what? Spin says it’s used the Virginia Tech study to create an opt-in “campus ambassadors” program, through which it pays students to serve as representatives for the company by helping maintain the scooter fleet and encouraging their peers to ride safely. The company is also working on technology that would allow scooters to detect when a rider might be on dangerous terrain, such as gravel or a sidewalk, and direct them to a safer riding location. For their part, one expert says, colleges can offer educational programs, helmets, and physical improvements, like smoothing out bumpy roads.
Quotable: “There is like a nerve that cracks when you get on one. You’re just like, ‘I want to make bad decisions.’” — Livingstone Bond, a recent Virginia Tech grad who required stitches for an e-scooter accident during his freshman year
Read Maggie’s story for more.
Quote of the day
“There is no reason why the fall semester should continue after Thanksgiving. None.”
James R. Jones, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University, offered this take on X about the academic calendar.
While ending the semester at Thanksgiving may seem like a pipe dream, several institutions have in recent years relaxed post-holiday expectations. Classes at Claflin University, for example, are only meeting virtually for the rest of the year, and a student senator at Hampton University recently polled her peers about doing the same. Operating virtually during the holidays, proponents say, would save students and faculty members a trip back to campus and cut down on burnout.
Tell us: Has your institution considered such a move? What do you think about Jones’s opinion? Do you agree? Disagree? Tell us about it at dailybriefing@chronicle.com.
Comings and goings
- Lizette Navarette, executive vice chancellor for the office of institutional supports and success at the California Community Colleges, has been named president of Woodland Community College.
- Janet Woodruff-Borden, interim provost and executive vice president at the University of Oregon, has been named senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com.
Footnote
Daily Briefing readers are surely waking up gently, never frazzled, when this email lands in their inbox (of course you read it first thing), but how are they sleeping? Sometimes higher-ed stress creeps into all of our dreams. Today’s dream is a submission from Michael A. Moir Jr., an English professor at Georgia Southwestern State University.
“When I was a graduate student, I had the usual frequent academic-anxiety dreams — showing up for class without pants, trying to control a classroom full of unruly students who completely ignored my presence, pressing ‘save’ on the final draft of my dissertation only to have my entire hard drive memory-wiped — but as I got closer to completing my Ph.D., I had a recurring nightmare that somewhere along the line I had failed to complete elementary school and so had to repeat my education from kindergarten to sixth grade as a 30-something adult. I could even feel the ‘pinch’ from the tiny desks I was made to sit in, and somehow all of my old elementary-school teachers were still alive — no matter how elderly they had been when I was their student in the 1980s — to both shepherd me through the process and avenge themselves upon me for childhood misbehavior. Once I successfully defended my dissertation, my brain moved on and found other things about which to invent nightmares.”
Does higher education visit you in your sleep, too? Share your dream about academic life, and we might feature it in an upcoming Daily Briefing. Email it to dailybriefing@chronicle.com.
