Rethinking a rebuke

On Thursday, Stanford University’s Faculty Senate will revisit the censure of Scott W. Atlas, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution based there, for promoting “a view of Covid-19 that contradicts medical science.”

A group of faculty members at the university has asked the senate to rescind that censure, arguing it was the result of a flawed process that set a “dangerous precedent” for free speech, reports our Stephanie Lee.

At the same time, a Faculty Senate committee has proposed a competing motion: to table the call for a retraction pending further discussion.

The dispute and its dueling claims to free speech raise a complex question: Does a formal condemnation chill speech, or is it just more speech?

John W. Etchemendy, a former Stanford provost, rallied dozens of faculty members to support the motion to rescind the censure of Atlas, who was an adviser to President Trump on the Coronavirus Task Force.

• Quotable: It’s “not about relitigating the 2020 motion but about restoring due process, which everyone recognizes was not given to Atlas,” said Etchemendy, a professor in the philosophy department

David Spiegel, who was on the Faculty Senate in 2020, said the group was expressing its own opinion when it condemned Atlas and took no real action to punish him for his speech.

• Quotable: “It’s appalling to insult the judgment of the Faculty Senate by asking them to rescind what was simply free speech about what Atlas was saying,” said Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

At the time of the censure, Atlas had questioned the efficacy of masks in preventing contagion and advocated for the virus to spread largely unchecked through the population. He also encouraged Michiganders to “rise up” against their governor in response to public-health measures.

Atlas’s comments have now been seized upon by a broader movement that is seeking to defend such statements under the umbrella of academic freedom. He was a featured speaker at a 2022 conference at Stanford billed as an effort to “restore the open debate required for new knowledge to flourish.”

Read Stephanie’s full story here.

Quick hits

• Goddard College to shut down: The small liberal-arts college in Vermont will close after this semester, as its enrollment dwindled to 220 students, leaving it on the brink of financial insolvency. The college declared in January that it would move to online-only education for the 2024-25 academic year. The Board of Trustees has since voted unanimously to close the college, which it called a “heart-wrenching decision” that was “unavoidable.” A scholarship fund will help students transfer to Prescott College, in Arizona, and perhaps other partner institutions. (Goddard College, VTDigger)
• Transgender athletes can’t play in NAIA: The National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, which has 250 member colleges, approved a policy this week that only athletes “whose biological sex is female” and “have not begun any masculinizing hormone therapy” can compete in women’s sports. Coed sports (competitive cheer and dance) and men’s sports in the NAIA will continue to be open to all eligible athletes. (Sportico)
• Texas A&M may bring back bonfire: In 1999 a massive structure of more than 6,000 logs collapsed, killing 11 students and an alum. The bonfire was part of a campus tradition to celebrate its football rivalry with the University of Texas at Austin, and now, 25 years later, the Texas A&M governing board is conferring with victims’ families about whether to restart the tradition. (The Texas Tribune)
• Preparing for protests at graduation: The continuing tensions over the war in Gaza are prompting campus officials to consider how they will react if students or others disrupt commencement activities. As the ceremonies draw near, some institutions are weighing restrictions on “disruptive activity.” (Jewish Insider, MLive, The Chronicle)

Quote of the day

“Help them believe, then show them the road to get there.”

— Mildred García, chancellor of the California State University system, discussing with Chronicle reporters how colleges should handle students’ and parents’ declining confidence in higher education by providing a clear path to and through college, especially for underrepresented minority groups. García added that college officials need to visit with families in their neighborhoods and bring along people who speak the dominant language of that community if it’s not English.

Stat of the day

81 percent

That’s the share of Latino students who work 20 hours or more per week to help pay for college, according to a new report, “Latinos in Higher Education,” from the organization Excelencia in Higher Education, which advocates for policies to accelerate Latino student success.

Comings and goings

• Wendy Cadge, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at Brandeis University, in Massachusetts, has been named president of Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania.
• Monica J. Casper, special assistant to the president on gender-based violence and a professor of sociology at San Diego State University, has been named dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Seattle University.
• Wilbur Lam, a professor of pediatrics at Emory University’s School of Medicine and a professor and chair in Emory and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s joint Wallace H. Coulter department of biomedical engineering, has been named vice provost for entrepreneurship at Emory.
• Kamau Siwatu, a professor of educational psychology and interim associate dean of academic affairs in the College of Education at Texas Tech University, has been named interim dean of the college.

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

Footnote

Campuses across the country were lit with excitement over Monday’s solar eclipse, even parading sun puppets, as our Kate Hidalgo Bellows reported. Daily Briefing readers also sent us photos of what it was like to witness the celestial event. Here is Jeff Miller, an astronomer and the physics laboratory coordinator at St. Lawrence University, in Canton, N.Y., who staffed one of the high-powered telescopes at the campus event there, in the path of totality.

While the eclipse was fully visible through the telescope, we can’t say the same about everyone in the photograph. St. Lawrence could not identify “the student staring into the telescope,” according to a university official, “given their face is largely obscured.”