Quick hits
- University of Alabama pauses in vitro fertilization: After the state’s Supreme Court ruled last week that human embryos and fertilized eggs have the same legal status as children under a wrongful-death statute, the university announced it would evaluate the legal consequences to patients and health-care providers before continuing any IVF treatments. (AL.com)
- Wisconsin law guarantees admission for top high-school grads: Students in the state who finish in the top 5 percent of their class must be admitted to the University of Wisconsin flagship in Madison under a new state law. The system’s other universities must admit any high-school graduate in the top 10 percent of their class. (Wisconsin State Journal)
- U. of Pennsylvania Faculty Senate recommends suspending law professor: In 2022, the dean of the university’s law school filed a complaint with the Faculty Senate against a professor, Amy Wax, for several comments he considered racist and offensive. The recommendation for a one-year suspension, which Wax is appealing, had not previously been reported. (The Daily Pennsylvanian)
- Virginia lawmakers consider banning firearms at public colleges: Democrats, who control both chambers of the state’s General Assembly, have filed bills in response to the fatal shooting of three students in 2022 at the University of Virginia. The bills would make it a crime to possess a firearm on campus and allow law-enforcement officers to seize the weapon. (The Daily Progress, The Chronicle)
Three questions with a reporter
Texas A&M University’s decision this month to pull the plug on its campus in Qatar is still reverberating through international and domestic higher ed. Our Karin Fischer recently broke down the decision in her Latitudes newsletter on international education. She shares more insight here.
What one thing should everyone know about this story?
At first blush, it would be easy to see this as a story about an overseas branch campus, which not many colleges have. But the forces that led Texas A&M regents to vote to close the flagship university’s outpost in Qatar are far more prevalent. The story is really about the ways that higher ed’s international activities have been caught up in the maelstrom of geopolitics and domestic partisanship.
What two things surprised you when you were reporting?
First, the swiftness of the decision. It was only about a year and a half ago that Texas A&M enacted a sweeping curricular reorganization on the Qatar campus. To go from overhauling instruction to announcing a closure is a pretty abrupt about-face.
It’s not surprising exactly, but it was notable to me that the regents’ vote wasn’t, outwardly at least, the result of a legislative inquiry or any public officials’ calls to pull out of Qatar. That doesn’t mean there weren’t private pressures, of course. But the move may be a sign that in the current political climate, college leaders are now anticipating and trying to head off potential controversies.
What three questions are you still asking?
On a practical level, I wonder what’s next for both Qatar and Texas A&M. Qatar gained a lot of attention over the last couple of decades for Education City, which brought in universities from around the world to set up campuses to jump-start the Middle Eastern country’s educational infrastructure. But when I asked Francisco J. Marmolejo, head of the Qatar Foundation’s higher-ed arm, whether he would recruit another foreign university to replace Texas A&M, he was noncommittal. Is that a sign of shifting interest away from importing a western, or American, model of higher education?
As for Texas A&M, a former employee who was around when the Qatar campus opened told me at the time that it was seen as evidence the university had arrived on the world stage, that it was truly a top university. In announcing the closure, the board’s chairman said A&M’s “core mission” should be in Texas and in the United States. At a time of so much talk about the ROI for higher education, will other colleges feel pressure to be more local, or some would say parochial, in their focus?
Relatedly, what does it mean for a college to be internationally engaged in 2024? America’s campuses are some of the country’s most global institutions — they attract more than 1 million students, and many talented faculty, from abroad; they conduct collaborative research; they have all sorts of foreign partnerships. I don’t think any of that is going to end, but will it be more complicated in the current environment? Will colleges need to develop, in effect, their own foreign policies? It’s a question that underlies a lot of my reporting on the international beat.
Read and sign up to receive Karin’s newsletter, Latitudes, here.
Quote of the day:
“I don’t understand what the beef industry’s worried about, because I don’t know anybody who wants to grill soy burger when they have people over.”
— State Sen. Bill Dotzler, a Democrat, questioned a bill on food labeling that was amended to prohibit Iowa’s public universities from conducting any research on “manufactured protein products.” Dotzler noted that livestock and soybeans are both part of the state’s agricultural production that research can support.
Comings and goings
- Anne B. Kerr, president of Florida Southern College, plans to retire after 20 years.
- Phillip B. Bridgmon, provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Central Missouri, has been named provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of South Carolina at Aiken.
- Jordan Cofer, associate provost at Georgia College & State University, has been named vice chancellor of academic affairs and dean of faculty at the University of Minnesota at Morris.
- Joelle Powers, senior associate dean of the College of Health Sciences at Boise State University, in Idaho, has been named dean of the college.
- Shelbie Witte, a professor of adolescent literacy and English education, and senior director of outreach and teacher education, at Oklahoma State University, has been named dean of the College of Education and Human Development at the University of North Dakota.
To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com.
Footnote
The Daily Briefing’s recent coverage of a university renaming saga missed an important typographical angle. The Chronicle’s Andrew Mytelka picks up the slack.
Anglo-Saxon made a curious appearance last week in the annals of college marketing. The Mississippi University for Women, which started admitting men 42 years ago, has been trying to come up with a new name that both will help recruit male students and will preserve its longstanding nickname, “The W.”
How do you thread that needle? After all, the W-word is “Women,” and it’s hard to highlight your coed status with “Women” in your name.
The solution, the public university said last week, is to reach back more than 1,000 years and use an archaic form of the letter w — a wyn, or ƿ — that looks like a p but isn’t one. Like several other letters in the Anglo-Saxon alphabet, ƿ is now obsolete.
Presto! The institution’s proposed new name is Wynbridge State University of Mississippi. According to a news release, the name “creatively pairs the Old English word for ‘W,’ using it as a ‘bridge’ that connects past, present, and future W graduates.”
If the state Legislature goes along with the proposal, will students at the W appreciate the modern antiquity, the contemporary obsolescence, of their alma mater? Hƿā ƿāt? Who knows?
