Daily Briefing

Good morning, and welcome to Monday, July 15. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Nick Perez compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

An unproven prescription

Big gifts that allow students to become doctors without paying tuition have a proven track record of drumming up positive headlines for donors and medical schools. But many of their other claimed benefits haven’t exactly survived clinical trials.

To be sure, Bloomberg Philanthropies’ $1-billion gift will change some students’ lives. The donation, announced last week, will allow many students to pay nothing for medical school at the Johns Hopkins University. To recap the specifics, starting this fall, the gift will enable:

• Free tuition for M.D. students from families making less than $300,000.
• Paid living expenses for medical students from families making up to $175,000.
• Additional financial aid for students in other graduate programs, including nursing and public health.

But it’s not a cure for the physician shortage that ails the country’s medical system. Hopkins admits just 120 medical students with each entering class. By contrast, America faces a shortage of as many as 86,000 physicians by 2036, as many clinicians near retirement age and the population requires more care because it’s growing older, the Association of American Medical Colleges estimates. Even if the school scaled up, graduates have to go on to find residency spots, and there simply aren’t enough, thanks to arcane government rules.

Yet other medical schools have also gone tuition-free lately. They include New York University in 2018 and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine this year.

They say they’re fixing a different problem: the high cost of attending medical school. It can discourage non-wealthy applicants and skew the pool of doctors so that it looks nothing like patients, the thinking goes. And it saddles graduates with heavy debt loads, making them more likely to pursue the highest-paying specialties — and less likely to become the general practitioners that are most needed in many communities.

The evidence so far isn’t promising. STAT has reported that the share of new NYU medical students who identified as Black or African American actually dropped after the free-tuition announcement, from 14 percent in 2017 to 11 percent between 2019 and 2022. Its percentage of applicants who self-reported as financially disadvantaged plunged from 12 percent in 2017 to 3 percent in 2019 and hasn’t eclipsed 7 percent since then.

Last week, the Daily Briefing asked NYU for data that would show if its medical-school classes have grown more socioeconomically diverse, more likely to become general practitioners, or more likely to graduate since the free-tuition program began. A spokesperson said numbers weren’t available and provided a statement instead:

• “We saw it as a moral imperative to drive down the staggering amount of medical-education debt that graduates too often face and allow the best and brightest to follow their passions in medicine,” the NYU statement said.

Until numbers prove otherwise, expect beneficiaries to disproportionately come from high-income backgrounds. A third of Hopkins M.D. students come from families making $300,000 or more.

And expect free tuition to improve admissions metrics more than physician supply or equity. “Johns Hopkins has had to compete with a couple of other places that have had these big donations and free tuition recently. And this is an effort to compete with them and attract the best [future] doctors,” Joshua Gottlieb, a health economist at the University of Chicago, told STAT.

The bigger question: Prescribing money to wealthy institutions in hopes it will have broad benefits can be a placebo for challenges that require much more holistic treatment. But is free tuition for future doctors a start that at least draws attention to shortages and inequities?

Quick hits

• Committee backs firing ex-chancellor who made porn: Five University of Wisconsin at La Crosse faculty members unanimously agreed that Joe Gow should lose his job as a professor, writing that Gow capitalized on controversy after he was stripped of his chancellorship because he and his wife made online pornography. Gow, who has argued his actions were protected free speech, denied using the situation to drum up interest in his pornography and said he plans to take his case to the system’s Board of Regents, which will ultimately determine the fate of his faculty job. (WPR, The Chronicle)
• Brace for transitions after Chevron ruling: Watch for court challenges that could undercut the U.S. Department of Education’s ability to enforce new gainful employment, Title IX, and student-debt-relief regulations, as well as any new scrutiny of online-program managers, Moody’s Ratings said last week. The bond evaluator said higher education is one of many sectors that is in for a “rocky transitional period” after the U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for courts to overturn federal regulations drafted by agencies. (Moody’s Ratings, The Chronicle)
• Budget cuts blamed on FAFSA problems: Queens University of Charlotte, a private institution in North Carolina, says it expects to miss its undergraduate enrollment goal by 100 students because of problems with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid — a significant amount for an institution with about 1,300 total undergraduates. Cost-cutting is expected to include staff reductions, hiring freezes, fewer raises, limited campus events, and reduced travel. (The Charlotte Observer)
• Swimming, bowling, in-line skating slashed at small college: Faculty and staff positions are also being reduced at Bethel University, a private institution in Tennessee, as it seeks to bring expenses into line with revenue amid enrollment declines. (WBBJ)
• HBCUs vie to snap up Birmingham-Southern campus: Even after being outbid, Alabama A&M University, a public historically Black institution in Huntsville, remains interested in acquiring the campus of Birmingham-Southern College, which closed in May. Birmingham-Southern signed a letter of intent to sell to Miles College, a private HBCU in Fairfield, but Alabama A&M officials said they’re open to negotiations if those talks fall apart. (Al.com, The Birmingham Times)
• President resigns after a multimillion-dollar gift dissolves: Larry Robinson announced he’s stepping down as president of Florida A&M University and will join the faculty after a yearlong sabbatical. While Robinson did not cite a reason for his decision, the news follows weeks of scrutiny over a botched $237-million donation announced at spring commencement. (The Chronicle)

Protest watch

• Secret social-media search warrant: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill police officers obtained a search warrant in May to review information from the Instagram account of a pro-Palestinian student group that organized a commencement-day protest, saying information like direct messages, location data, and a list of followers was needed for a criminal investigation after a building was defaced with graffiti. The warrant said that warning the group, a chapter of the national organization Students for Justice in Palestine, could harm the investigation. One of the group’s members denied that it had any part in the vandalism, while civil-rights advocates raised privacy concerns and said such investigations could be used to chill free speech. (The News & Observer)
• Longtime spiritual- and religious-life employee leaves: Isam Vaid resigned from his position as a Muslim religious-life scholar at Emory University, where he’d worked for 16 years, amid a campaign to oust him after a secretly recorded video circulated online that showed him saying “every single Israeli is obligated to serve” in the Israel Defense Forces and “therefore then you are a military target.” Accuracy in Media, a conservative group, campaigned to force the resignation, including by dispatching a mobile billboard to campus on Wednesday. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
• Virginia asks colleges about investing strategies: An official in the administration of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, cited calls for colleges to divest from companies with connections to Israel and asked the state’s public colleges to confirm that they focus on returns while investing and not “social, political, or ideological interests.” The state’s colleges raise money through nonprofit foundations, but the governor’s office said they’re of interest because they affect taxpayer-supported institutions. (Cardinal News)

Comings and goings

• Bradley Thiessen, vice provost at New College of Florida, has been named interim vice president and provost at Florida Polytechnic University.
• John Haller, vice president for enrollment management and new student strategies at the University of Miami, in Florida, has been named vice president for enrollment management at Denison University, in Ohio.
• Gilbert Hinga, with recent work at the Registry for College and University Presidents, in Massachusetts, has been named vice president for student engagement and dean of students at Warren Wilson College, in North Carolina.
• Stanley Robertson, associate dean of clinical relations at the University of Arizona’s College of Veterinary Medicine, has been named the first permanent dean of the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore’s School of Veterinary Medicine.

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

Footnote

Drake University is a private institution in Des Moines with enrollment of about 4,700. It has an arrangement that guarantees admission to some students at the nearby Des Moines Area Community College, or DMACC, which has some 21,600 students across several campuses. So the two institutions clearly operate in lockstep, focused on educating students, right?

Of course not. They’re in a turf war, battling over who owns the fourth letter of the alphabet.

Drake is suing DMACC after the community college ditched some Reagan-era branding in favor of a block “D,” blue color scheme, and education seal that the university argues are much too close to its own. Drake wants the court to award damages and force DMACC to abandon its new branding.

“Drake has a legal obligation to take action to enforce its rights in the Drake Brand to protect not only itself, but the renown, esteem, and pedigree that all past, current, and future Drake University students have invested in,” the university’s lawsuit says.

But Drake doesn’t own the letter “D,” DMACC recently told the local news. The community college hopes to resolve the issue amicably and without racking up legal expenses, it said.

Take a look at the above illustration to see the two brands for yourself. The Chronicle put it together using U.S. District Court exhibits.

Mind you, Drake doesn’t always use the block “D.” Often, it uses a “modern stand-alone ‘D’” featuring “an extended arc that is slightly positioned away from the stem” for academics. Drake’s athletics department often uses a slanted version of this modern, stylized academic D, typically nesting the letter with an image of Drake’s bulldog mascot. You can even order an Iowa license plate with that pairing.

Even so, Drake has used block-style Ds since at least 1902, it asserts. Over the years, the letters have appeared on yearbook covers, athletic uniforms, marketing materials, and letter jackets — including one worn by the rapper Drake in 2016. Today you can find it on some athletic jerseys, the university’s basketball court, and merchandise for sale. An alumni group called the “D Club” awards former Drake athletes “The Drake Double D Award” for professional and community achievement. That award features a pair of block “Ds” nestled together.

If these examples aren’t enough color for you, consider these other pieces of evidence in Drake’s lawsuit:

• Fire hydrants around an athletics center are painted blue and white, to “let visitors know they are in ‘Drake Country.’”
• Drake has trademarked itself as “Des Moines’ Hometown Team.”
• Drake’s fight song includes the lyrics “Here’s to the one who wears the ‘D.’”

Particularly titillating is an exchange between the two institutions’ presidents this year that the lawsuit quotes. Marty Martin, Drake’s president emailed that “D for us is Drake and has been for the totality of our existence. D for you is ‘Des’, and thus, does not have the same essentiality for you as it does for us.” Rob Denson, DMACC’s president, replied in part that “you can’t say DMACC without saying the D first.”

Nor can you say “dumb” or “distraction.”