Good morning, and welcome to Monday, April 8. Eric Kelderman wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com. Andrew Mytelka, The Chronicle’s copy-desk chief, wrote the Footnote.

Political fallout from the FAFSA debacle?

The latest twists and turns in the botched rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid are frustrating college officials, who now must choose, in some cases, between getting offers out quickly and ensuring they’re accurate and fair, reports our Eric Hoover.

FAFSA errors just keep coming. It wasn’t until mid-March that colleges finally began receiving the information they needed to determine how much aid students would be eligible for. But then the Education Department revealed that another technical glitch had led to inaccurate aid estimates for some 200,000 applicants. As if that weren’t enough, the department then told colleges that about 20 percent of the 6.6 million forms processed so far included “inconsistent tax information” that had led to “inaccurate calculations of the Student Aid Index,” or SAI, a number used to determine how much federal aid an applicant should get.

The latest Education Department guidance makes this iteration of the troubled rollout a “choose your own adventure” for colleges. The department said it would reprocess some applications to correct the problems, but it also informed colleges that they could use the incorrect data if they didn’t want to wait for the more accurate SAI. That offer has dismayed financial-aid officials, who fear institutions will be on the hook to the government for offering too much aid, or drive away students if they offer too little.

• You can hear the frustration in his voice: “Making sure we are informing current and prospective students of the correct information — that is what we’re supposed to do,” said Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education. “But if that results in them potentially getting less aid, then all of a sudden, we’re the bad guys for doing it.”

Who will pay for those problems? The continuing glitches beg an important accountability question: Will there be consequences for top Education Department officials over a FAFSA rollout that couldn’t have gone much worse and is threatening fall enrollment? The FAFSA fallout could also be at least a minor political problem for President Biden, who has struggled to satisfy the far-left faction of his party, which favors across-the-board student-loan cancellation. If the FAFSA derails the college plans of hundreds of thousands or even millions of students, will they and their parents be less inclined to vote for Biden?

The situation is reminiscent of the troubles that President Barack Obama faced after the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act website, in 2013. Kathleen Sebelius, who was secretary of health and human services at the time, took responsibility for the problems and resigned six months later. In the 2014 midterm election, Democrats acknowledged they had suffered a “shellacking” in part due to the website’s shaky start.

Quick hits

• Northland College declares financial exigency: In March the Board of Trustees of the small liberal-arts college in Wisconsin announced it needed to raise $12 million to remain open for the next academic year. It raised only $1.5 million, but the board last week delayed for two more weeks a decision on whether it would shut down. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
• U. of Michigan plans to demolish historic home for dorms: The World War II hero Raoul Wallenberg once lived in the Ann Arbor house that the university is planning to raze to build several new residence halls to ease a student-housing crunch. Wallenberg, a Michigan alum from Sweden, was a diplomat in Budapest and is credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews from being deported by Nazis. In December the university announced the establishment of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute to combat antisemitism. (Detroit Free Press)
• Ed-tech company 2U in danger of financial collapse: A pioneer of massive open online courses, 2U has racked up more than $900 million in debt, and federal filings indicate “there is ‘substantial doubt’ about 2U’s ability to keep operating if it can’t refinance its debt or raise capital.” Several student-advocacy organizations are urging the U.S. Department of Education to prepare to protect students if the company collapses, since 2U serves as an online program manager for dozens of colleges. Department officials have said they are also concerned about the impact on colleges if the company fails. (Higher Ed Dive)
• Former Calvin U. president sent “flirtatious” and “inappropriate” texts to a woman who was not his wife: The Michigan university’s Board of Trustees has released more details about the resignation of Wiebe Boer, including texts from Boer that were reported to the university’s Title IX office but not formally investigated as a Title IX complaint. The board confronted Boer and determined he had violated the terms of his contract. (The Roys Report)

Quote of the day

“I believe that companies deserve full credit for lying, cheating, and endangering people’s health.”

— David Egilman, a clinical professor of family medicine at Brown University, quoted in a 2019 profile in Science. Egilman recently died, according to a news release from the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.

Egilman made a name for himself as an outspoken advocate for corporate accountability in public health, serving as an expert witness in an estimated 600 legal cases of environmental or occupational disease. His role also led to a backlash, at times, not only from the companies he challenged in court, but also from the university where he worked, reported our Francie Diep in 2020.

Egilman published a peer-reviewed paper in 2017 arguing “that a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, DePuy, had run a poorly designed study and had manipulated data in order to make its hip replacements seem more effective.” In response, Johnson & Johnson demanded a retraction. Brown asked Egilman to remove his university affiliation from the paper and then canceled his course on the corporate misuse of science.

Comings and goings

• Ian Jacobs, deputy chief strategy officer for the U.S. Department of State, has been named university strategy officer at Kansas State University.
• Marion Ross Fedrick, president of Albany State University, has been named executive vice president for administration and chief of staff at Georgia State University.
• Ralph W. Kuncl, president emeritus of the University of Redlands, has been named chief executive of the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra and Annapolis Symphony Academy.
• Renee Wells, assistant vice president of education for equity and inclusion at Middlebury College, has been named assistant vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Queens University of Charlotte.

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

Footnote

As the South and Midwest gear up for the emergence this spring of two separate broods of cicadas — up to a trillion are expected — longtime readers of the Daily Briefing may recall previous Footnotes on the remarkable insects, whose 13- and 17-year life-cycles are as baffling to predators as they are beguiling to us.

This spring’s coincident hatching — of the 17-year Brood XIII, centered on Illinois, and the 13-year Brood XIX, from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia westward to Arkansas, Missouri, and Illinois — has not been seen in 221 years (17 x 13), when Thomas Jefferson was in the White House.

Where the two great broods overlap, in and around Illinois, it will be like the mother of all freshman mixers.

Will the two broods, which represent different species of the genus Magicicada, interbreed? Male cicadas’ songs differ by species, but amid their deafening din, will the females be able to tell them apart? Which brood will their progeny join? The answers to those questions may be known only in 13 or 17 years, when the cicada classes of ’37 and ’41 emerge from the ground for their commencement.