Daily Briefing

Good morning, and welcome to Friday, January 12. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

🗓️ The Daily Briefing will not publish on Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We’ll be back on Tuesday.

Prime jobs and prime pay aren’t shared equally

Who holds higher ed’s top jobs? Who’s paid best? The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, or CUPA-HR, recently updated several datasets with survey results from the 2022-23 academic year that help us answer such questions.

The results aren’t pretty. Colleges “still struggle to make meaningful progress” toward equity, CUPA-HR found.

Among administrators: Women are underrepresented in top positions, continuing a stubborn trend over the years. According to the survey data, women were 53.4 percent of all administrators but just 48.2 percent of chief academic officers and 30.3 percent of presidents.

• Women of color are even less well represented among administrators. They were 10.8 percent of all administrators but just 9.2 percent of chief academic officers and 6 percent of presidents.
• The share of racial and ethnic minorities in administrative roles hasn’t kept pace with the demographics of those earning graduate degrees, even as it has risen over time, CUPA-HR noted.
• Pay disparities haven’t improved with any consistency over the years. The median pay ratio for women administrators was lower than that for men in almost all racial and ethnic groups. Only Asian women earned more than white men did. Men of color tended to make more than did white men, however.

Among faculty members: Women and people of color are overrepresented in positions of lower rank and with low pay. Women held a higher share of non-tenure-track faculty positions than tenure-track roles. On the tenure track, women were 52.6 percent of all assistant professors but just 35.9 percent of full professors. People of color were 34.9 percent of assistant professors but 21.7 percent of full professors.

• Pay gaps persist, especially for women of color in non-tenure-track positions. That’s true even as pay gaps for assistant and associate professors shrank over the years.

For professional positions: The share of women employees has increased. Women made up 61 percent of those in professional positions, up from 58 percent in 2017, due in part to gains in women of color. But women of all races and ethnicities received less pay than did men in similar positions.

At the staff level: People of color hold a higher share of staff positions than they do positions in any of the other employee groups. Staff positions pay less than others do. And women staffers are paid less than white men.

That doesn’t mean no progress has been made. The share of administrative jobs held by racial and ethnic minorities increased from 13.7 percent in 2016 to 18.7 percent in the last academic year, for example. And 34.9 percent of assistant professors on the tenure track were people of color, up from 24.6 percent six years ago.

But the data and recent news show a continued uphill climb for work-force equality. It shouldn’t escape notice that all three of the college presidents hauled before a hostile congressional committee last month were women who’d been in their jobs for a relatively short time. All-too-common racist and sexist vitriol can prevent qualified people from taking prominent positions.

• “If I were to advise leaders, who hold marginalized identities, on the presidency,” Jorge Burmicky, an assistant professor of higher-education leadership and policy studies at Howard University, recently told our Eric Kelderman, “I’d say they should consider these positions with a lot of caution.”

The bigger picture: The latest employment data is a reminder that colleges are constantly fighting to uphold ideals like representing diverse communities, offering them career opportunities, and providing equal pay.

Quick hits

• U. of Oregon graduate students plan strike: Teaching and research assistants plan a walkout starting on Wednesday if their union can’t reach an agreement with the university. Pay has emerged as a sticking point after almost a year of bargaining. The university has said campus activities will continue if the workers strike. (Oregon Public Broadcasting)
• Community College of Vermont campus will move: The St. Johnsbury campus is set to relocate to a nearby museum and planetarium that has a new science annex with classrooms. (Vermont Business Magazine)
• Clinton Community College announces relocation: The institution plans to move several miles to the State University of New York at Plattsburgh by 2025-26 as it seeks to adapt to enrollment declines, high maintenance costs, and financial challenges that have drawn a warning from its accreditor. (Press-Republican)
• NCAA to create NIL standards: The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I Council on Wednesday voted to draw up standard terms for contracts governing the use of players’ names, images, and likenesses. The NCAA also plans to build a registry of approved agents and to share NIL data, with supporters arguing the moves are necessary to protect athletes in an opaque and unregulated marketplace. (CBS Sports)
• 6.9 million enrolled in new income-driven repayment plan: The Biden administration said more than twice as many people have enrolled in the Saving on a Valuable Education Plan as were enrolled in the repayment plan it replaced in August. Next month, borrowers can start having their debt forgiven under the plan if they’ve met its requirements for making payments. Originally the plan wasn’t set to offer debt cancellation until July. (U.S. Department of Education)
• Conservatory resolves Title IX complaint: The San Francisco Conservatory of Music agreed to revise its policies, retrain key employees, and provide information about sexual-harassment complaints as part of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Federal officials found that the institution had failed to properly respond after a student reported being sexually assaulted and then stalked in 2022. The resolution agreement says the conservatory will make changes without any admission of violating the law. (U.S. Department of Education)

Weekend reads

• Where Does the College Presidency Go From Here? (The Review)
• Public Universities Seek Innovative Ways to Teach Humanities as Interest Wanes (Stateline)
• Plagiarism-Detection Tools Offer a False Sense of Accuracy (The Markup)
• Readers’ Toughest Questions for University Presidents (The Atlantic)
• At Florida’s Only Public HBCU, Students Are Wary of Political Influence on Race Education (Associated Press)
• How Do You Get a Rural Doc? Launch a Rural Med School. (Project Optimist)
• How a Conservative Christian College Got Mixed Up in the 2020 Election Plot (The New York Times)

Comings and goings

• Lynda Batiste, a former vice president for finance and chief financial officer at LeMoyne-Owen College, in Tennessee, has been named senior vice president for finance and chief operations officer at Saint Augustine’s University, in North Carolina.
• Barbara J. Johnson, executive vice president and provost at Talladega College, in Alabama, has been named dean of Perimeter College at Georgia State University.
• Nick Saban, head football coach at the University of Alabama, will retire after 17 years.

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

Footnote

Last week I shared Lake Superior State University’s newly updated banished-words list. Today I’m pleased to follow up with a set of long-lost words worth bringing back, courtesy of Wayne State University’s Word Warriors program.

At The Chronicle the most controversial term to bring back is “dollop.” Several of us have questioned whether it’s actually fallen out of widespread use. Clearly, we’re enthusiasts of sour-cream advertising.

As for the rest of the entries, I’m sorry to be a blatherskite or a pawky rawgabbit who leaves you with a curglaff by forcing a dollop of unexplained terms upon you. I’d much rather talk over the full lineup of words at a leisurely kaffeeklatsch, perhaps taking refuge from a thunderplump as musicians twankle in the background and we eagerly await the pending petrichor. Please don’t harass me with a pettifogger for this small infraction.

✏️ Readers, what are your favorite forgotten words? Email dailybriefing@chronicle.com, and we’ll run some of your best submissions in future Footnotes.

We received some magnificent suggestions last week after asking what words you’d like to banish. Keep those coming, too, and we’ll publish them soon!