Good morning, and welcome to Wednesday, April 17. Laura Krantz wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Another president on the Hill

The leader of Columbia University heads to Capitol Hill today to face questions from the same Republican-controlled House committee that four months ago grilled the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, leaving only the MIT president with a job.

Minouche Shafik, who took office last summer, is expected to field similar inquiries from lawmakers about Columbia’s response to antisemitism amid campus clashes nationally over the Israel-Hamas war that have only escalated since the last congressional showdown.

The testimony is set for 10:15 a.m. ET. You can watch it here. Our Maggie Hicks has a preview of today’s hearing.

Why another hearing? Shafik didn’t appear in December because she was traveling. Instead she spoke about the impact of climate change on women at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Today she is set to be joined by Columbia’s two board co-chairs, in what could be an important signal of solidarity. Also scheduled to appear is David Schizer, dean emeritus and a professor of law and economics at the Columbia Law School.

The committee is expected to again probe how the university protects Jewish students. The committee’s Republican chairwoman, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, said last month that some of the “worst cases of antisemitic assaults, harassment, and vandalism on campus have occurred at Columbia University.” She also claimed that its administration had failed to enforce its own policies to protect Jewish students.

But since the last hearing, college leaders have grown far more careful about how they balance free speech and student safety. Columbia in particular has had a tumultuous few months. Shafik has released a number of statements and started several efforts to “foster a community where debates and disagreements are rooted in academic rigor and civil discourse.” Also:

• Last month she publicly released the first report from her new task force on antisemitism.
• Columbia introduced a controversial new Interim University Policy for Safe Demonstrations, which the task force endorsed.
• She recently condemned a protest at the law school that she said had left Jewish students feeling “uncomfortable and unwelcome.”
• She denounced as “an abhorrent breach of our values” an event that took place in a dorm after being barred twice from campus. “I did not become a university president to punish students,” she said. “At the same time, actions like this on our campus must have consequences.”

As tensions rise on campuses nationwide, some say administrations have gone too far. In one incident last weekend, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in Geneva, N.Y., drew an outcry after it temporarily removed a tenured politics professor, Jody Dean, because of a pro-Palestine blog post she had written.

Some Jewish faculty members at Columbia are backing Shafik — sort of. Last week a group of Jewish professors at Columbia and Barnard College, an affiliated institution, released a public letter criticizing the congressional committee’s attempted “weaponization of antisemitism” to undermine higher education as a whole. But the professors also accused the university of limiting academic freedom and adopting new policies that censor faculty members.

The big picture: In some ways, Shafik knows what to expect from lawmakers, so she should be better prepared. But Columbia has seen some of the most divisive campus clashes over the Middle East war and ensuing debates over more-restrictive speech policies, so she will have lots to field.

And while the hearings are technically about antisemitism and campus protests, they’re more broadly symbolic of the antagonistic relationship between Republican lawmakers at all levels and higher education. No matter how well rehearsed her public remarks may be, persuading skeptics that colleges are meeting the moment will be a tall task.

Quick hits

• Columbia College Chicago’s staff protests layoffs: A petition is circulating to urge the administration to halt scheduled cuts and explore other options. The college’s staff has shrunk from 762 employees in 2015 to 275 this year. The struggling institution’s bond rating was recently downgraded to BBB-. (Chicago Crusader, Bloomberg)
• Howard U. student succumbs to injuries from car crash: Mohamed Samura, 18, a first-year student from Virginia studying computer-information systems died on Monday after being hit by a car last week outside a residence hall. A faculty member was allegedly driving the car in the accident. (The Hilltop)
• Grad-worker strike, no-confidence vote at Indiana U.: A three-day work stoppage is set to begin today in Bloomington and follows a 2022 strike that prompted the university to raise graduate workers’ annual minimum salary to $22,000 from $15,000. On Tuesday afternoon, faculty members voted no confidence in the president, Pamela Whitten, and the provost, Rahul Shrivastav. (Fox 59, Indiana Daily Student)
• U. of Louisiana investigates student suicide: The campus police on the Lafayette campus will look into the April 7 death of Basil Brown at a parking garage. The university faces criticism from students who say it has not shared enough information about what happened. (KLFY)

Setting the bar for athletes

In the fight over whether college athletes should be classified as amateurs or employees, athlete handbooks have become a central piece of evidence, our Nell Gluckman reports.

Handbooks hold athletes to higher standards than their peers:

• Members of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s men’s golf team last year were told they “must do something nice for someone EVERY DAY.”
• Caitlin Clark and her teammates on the University of Iowa women’s basketball team were subject to a curfew during the season.
• Other teams set dress codes, restrict what athletes can post on social media, or require them to sit in the first three rows of every class — and of course commonly impose requirements for academic performance.

Two recent legal cases cited handbooks as evidence in favor of athletes. The National Labor Relations Board quoted heavily from the athlete handbook at the University of Southern California in one case. And the NLRB’s decision to let the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team unionize cited the handbook there.

The NLRB says: “The student-athlete handbook in many ways functions as an employee handbook,” a regional director wrote in the Dartmouth decision, “detailing the tasks athletes must complete and the regulations they may not break.”

Colleges say: Dartmouth’s handbook provides “guidelines” for athletes and is not an employee handbook, the college said in a statement. The golf coach at Boulder said the niceness rule is a “guideline/area of focus for all members of our team — coaches and players.”

Quote of the day

“I am surprised that my own university — my home for four years — has abandoned me.”

— Asna Tabassum, the Class of 2024 valedictorian at the University of Southern California. The university on Monday canceled her commencement speech, citing safety concerns. Tabassum, who is Muslim, accused USC of “succumbing to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice.” It’s perhaps a glimpse of more caution and pushback we’ll see this commencement season.

Read more from our Alecia Taylor.

Comings and goings

• Joanne Berger-Sweeney, president since 2014 of Trinity College, in Connecticut, will retire in June 2025.
• Brad Bohlander, senior vice president and chief communications and marketing officer at the University of Arizona, has been named senior vice chancellor for university relations at the University of Denver.
• Anne Magro, a professor and former interim dean of the Costello College of Business at George Mason University, has been named dean of the College of Business, Innovation, Leadership, and Technology at Marymount University, in Virginia.
• Jennifer Mueller-Phillips has been named dean of the Raymond J. Harbert College of Business at Auburn University, in Alabama. She has been serving as interim dean since September 2023.

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

Footnote

Are you a morning person or a night owl? The Daily Briefing editor Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez recently sent me a newsletter about rituals and routines in which the author describes the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch’s (rather extreme) morning habits.

“I rise at midnight; I go outdoors with the first light; and whether in the fields or in the house I am busy thinking, reading, writing. As much as I can I fend off sleep from my eyes, sloth from my body, distractions from my spirits, torpor from my actions,” he wrote in a letter dated February 22, 1353.

I’m admittedly a morning person, but I certainly don’t get up at midnight. Maybe that’s the productivity hack I’ve been missing all these years.

☀️🦉 What about you? Are you at your best work-wise before most people wake up or after they’ve finally gone to bed? And is your sacred time an opportunity for your best thinking, writing, coding, or whatever else — or a time to pursue hobbies that otherwise get crowded out? Send your approach to dailybriefing@chronicle.com, and it may appear in a future Footnote.