Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday, July 16. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Institutional restraint

After Saturday’s attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life, it’s clear many college leaders really are following a new communications strategy.

The college presidency increasingly avoids the role of “chief current events interpreter.” The flood of strong statements that arrived during the George Floyd racial-justice protests and the Jan. 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol has yet to fully materialize since a 20-year-old tried to assassinate Trump.

That can be seen as a continuation of a trend that accelerated with the Israel-Hamas war and politicians’ harsh scrutiny of how leaders handled campus protests. Or it could be a result of college leaders’ struggle to talk about Trump, a divisive figure on campuses, and his polices, which are often seen as hostile to higher ed and those in it.

Still, the assassination attempt attacked the democracy that’s core to colleges’ position in society. Higher education casts itself as a civic institution, filled with colleges that help students become active citizens. Violence against political candidates robs those citizens of their right to peacefully debate and choose their leaders.

To be sure, there are benefits to leaders who don’t dominate the conversation. Institutional neutrality’s supporters say colleges can protect students from harassment without administrators weighing in on the news, because staying neutral gives others on campus the freedom to debate hard ideas or even take the lead commenting on current events.

While more presidents stay silent, faculty remain vocal, and are experiencing the consequences. They’re subject to the outrage-industrial complex and can stray from their expertise.

• After an online outcry this weekend, Forbes took down a column by Shaun Harper, founder and executive director of the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center. The column questioned whether Trump would now stump to reduce gun violence or to create “another racially problematic kinship narrative” with Black voters. Harper said it was misinterpreted.
• The historian William Hogeland has rebuked historians who appoint themselves advisers on current politics, then use their academic authority to support their own preferences, as our Len Gutkin recently noted.

It’s worth looking at the presidents who still do comment on current events. Lamont Repollet, president of Kean University, a public institution in New Jersey, sent a message to campus after the attempt to assassinate Trump.

• “No matter your politics or personal convictions about any candidate, or any individual for that matter, hate and violence have no place in the United States,” Repollet wrote on Sunday.

Kean doesn’t have a policy about issuing public statements, Repollet said in an interview with the Daily Briefing. The president makes the decision, in consultation with his executive team. He also keeps his board appraised.

Repollet regularly issues statements to campus, including about current events. It can be a natural fit in part because Kean is a state institution that counts public impact as a core value. Every year it encourages people to vote, regardless of their partisanship.

The goal is to communicate authentically, with empathy and purpose, Repollet said. “You cannot control what someone else feels,” Repollet said. “Your statement must be objective. We’re in positions where we’re not to influence anyone’s decisions.”

The bigger picture: Finding the right voice at the right volume at the right moment is a never-ending challenge for college leaders. This weekend’s dearth of statements from college presidents showed just how hard that can be.

Quick hits

• Could colleges face more taxes? Republicans are considering new levies on nonprofit institutions, including colleges, as they seek ways to extend a set of tax cuts from a 2017 reform package. The 2017 tax rewrite drew rebuke from wealthy colleges because it added an excise tax on large endowments. Though the endowment tax generates relatively little revenue, it stoked fears that it was a first step to steeper taxes on nonprofit colleges. (Politico, The Chronicle)
• Professor who found Oct. 7 “exhilarating” may return to classroom: A review determined that Jodi Dean’s statements caused harm and were inconsistent with the values of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, President Mark Gearan said. But Dean’s behavior didn’t rise to the level of harassment or discrimination, and she may resume teaching this fall. Dean, a professor of politics with tenure at the private institution in Geneva, N.Y., was barred from the classroom this spring after publishing a blog post saying the images of Palestinian para-gliders entering Israel on October 7 “were for many of us exhilarating.” (Finger Lakes Times, The Chronicle)
• Pennsylvania sets up coordinating board: The state’s new budget deal includes a State Board of Higher Education, adding an entity that’s common elsewhere to the state’s fractured public higher-education landscape. Also part of the agreement is performance-based funding for a group of the state’s best-known public universities as well as new scholarships to help students pay for programs in high-demand fields. It’s a compromise between Republican lawmakers and Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who is seeking a vast overhaul of public higher ed. (Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Lancaster Online, The Chronicle)
• Community-college trustees ousted: County commissioners in Pennsylvania said financial issues prompted them to replace five trustees at Bucks County Community College. But one of the outgoing trustees said commissioners hadn’t raised any financial questions before they acted last week. The community college’s enrollment fell 20 percent during the pandemic. (Bucks County Courier Times)
• Court overturns researcher’s China Initiative conviction: The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week ordered a lower court to strike Feng (Franklin) Tao’s conviction of making a materially false statement, dealing a blow to the already-thin record of a Trump-administration program that sought to root out espionage. The court ruled that the government didn’t do enough to show that Tao affected any federal research grant decisions by failing to disclose on a conflict-of-interest form that he’d been traveling to China to set up a lab. Wire-fraud convictions against Tao, who was a professor at the University of Kansas, were previously thrown out. (Associated Press, The Chronicle)

Stat of the day

4,451 words

That’s the length of a resignation message posted on Monday by Steve Easton, president of Dickinson State University, in North Dakota. Easton read the message in a video that stretches for more than 11 minutes.

Easton resigned after long-simmering tensions regarding the institution’s nursing program boiled over. All seven of Dickinson State’s full-time nursing faculty members opted not to renew their contracts last week, saying new efficiency requirements conflicted with a need to teach nursing students in small groups. Easton said that faculty members would have been required to teach an average of 13.3 students per class, calling the number “not an unreasonable standard” as he sought to make programs financially viable.

The North Dakota Board of Nursing blocked the college from replacing the departed faculty members, Easton said. Dickinson State initially sought to hire new faculty members and draw from other colleges in the North Dakota University system for help. But the nursing board, which accredits the program, said Dickinson State wasn’t complying with a requirement that a nurse administrator oversee faculty recruitment. Easton repeatedly mentioned that the board of nursing did not interview him.

Dickinson State was left with just one option: re-hire the faculty members, Easton said. He pledged not to put his name on their contract offers and said he’s stepping aside so others can do so.

Easton suggested donors might withhold funding if he remained and asked faculty members to refrain from hurtful comments about administrators in the future. “Criticism and disagreement are not just fine, but needed,” he wrote. “But the viciousness of attack that one is required to endure as a DSU administrator is inhumane.”

The bigger picture: Such ugly incidents serve no one well. This resignation can be read as a warning against becoming too personally invested in struggles over how to improve programs’ financial viability — and a reminder to consider what will happen if faculty members are pushed further than they’re willing to go.

For more from The Chronicle: After Sparking a Mass Resignation of Nursing Professors, This College President Resigned, Too

Quote of the day

“We need to figure out a plan to get rid of those buildings.”

— Larry Dietz, the new interim president of St. Cloud State University, in Minnesota, wants to demolish several unused buildings on campus and replace them with green space.

St. Cloud State recently decided to cut some 90 programs and 50 faculty members to close budget gaps. It enrolls about 10,000 students after peaking at 18,300 in 2010.

The big question: Who’s willing to pay to “right-size” campuses? St. Cloud State will need to raise money or receive state funding to demolish former residence halls, academic buildings, a visual arts center, and a performing arts center, Dietz said. As enrollment declines set in, more institutions are going to have to decide whether they should pay to dismantle buildings, repurpose them, or let them sit unused.

Comings and goings

• Susan Kazama, interim chancellor of Hawaii Community College, has been named to the post permanently.
• David A. Thomas, president of Morehouse College, will retire after the 2024-25 academic year.
• Garrett Thompson, vice president for academic affairs and chief academic officer at Sonoran University of Health Sciences, in Arizona, has been named president of Logan University, in Missouri.

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

Footnote

It’s a tough time to be house hunting in the University of Georgia’s home city of Athens. Strong demand and a dearth of listings have squeezed prices sky-high, university experts said earlier this year. Prices are up 7 percent since this time in 2023, according to Zillow.

As is the case with many booming institutions, the university is probably contributing to the tight market, because it doesn’t have enough housing for its swelling student body. But fear not! Leaders are taking symbolic action: selling the president’s house.

Snag this 10,800-square-foot landmark for a cool $5.1 million — only $34,000 per month with a 30-year mortgage at prevailing rates. In return you’ll enjoy the most exclusive of homes, which, per the realtor’s listing, is “meticulously maintained and updated,” “whispers stories of generations past,” and appears on the National Register of Historic Places.

You should know a handful of disclaimers. Consider asking for information about the “protective easement and zoning,” and know that there are rental restrictions (a.k.a., don’t go in planning to use the five bedrooms and seven bathrooms as boutique student boarding).

Also, the university didn’t actually decide to sell the home to inject liquidity into the local market. It did so because the 1850s-era structure was expensive to maintain.

Worried about those minor drawbacks? Just consider that “thousands of people have attended events here.” Many would be your new best friends, at least until they attend your housewarming party and judge what you’ve done with the “expansive wraparound porch” and “famous gardens.”