Good morning, and welcome to Thursday, July 18. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Andrew Mytelka contributed the Footnote. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Rendering history

Keen professors are finding unexpected ways to level up their instruction, as our Amelia Benavides-Colón reports.

Tore Olsson remembers picking up a copy of Red Dead Redemption II, a popular video game set in the Wild West in 1899.

The game surprised the history professor with its richness. It touched on key themes, including:

• Industrialization and capitalism
• Feminism and women’s suffrage
• How the South remembers the Civil War
• Racial integration and African American rights after the Civil War
• War between Native peoples and the U.S. government

“Yes, it’s an overly violent game and bizarrely unrealistic, but it’s also not a stupid game,” Olsson says.

So began a course Olsson teaches at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, called “Red Dead America.” Olsson uses the game as a tool in class, walking students through different scenes.

Students are asked to analyze the game and its relationship to history. For example, one assignment asks them to compare fictional newspapers from the game with real newspapers, identifying what’s important to video-game scriptwriters versus newspaper readers at the time.

At least five times as many students enroll in each section as take Olsson’s more typical electives.

Don’t underestimate pop culture’s ability help students relate to a subject. Mega-celebrities like Taylor Swift aren’t the only attention-grabbing hooks available to professors who want to attract students and hold their attention at a time when many colleges are cutting low-enrolled programs.

Quotable: “The academic world could do much more to engage fans about things they’re familiar with,” Olsson says.

Read the full story: How This Professor Made History Class Cool Again

Quick hits

• Accreditor takes big step toward shorter bachelor’s programs: The Higher Learning Commission is drawing up guidelines for colleges that are interested in offering bachelor’s degrees that take less than 120 credits to complete. The move comes in response to increased interest from higher-ed stakeholders, including colleges. (HLC)
• Science optional on new, shorter ACT: The college-entrance exam’s required parts will take an estimated two hours to complete under changes debuting next spring, down from three hours. Reading passages will be shorter, each section will have fewer questions, and science will join writing as an optional part of the test. Students will still be required to take English, reading, and math sections. (ACT)
• New federal regulations proposed: The U.S. Department of Education wants to increase reporting requirements for distance-education programs and prevent asynchronous education in career-focused programs. It’s also seeking to extend eligibility in federal TRIO programs to students who lack legal immigration status, and to streamline processes that kick in when a student withdraws from college and must pay back some federal financial aid. The Biden administration cast the changes as increasing college access and improving oversight of distance education, while Republicans panned the TRIO changes as “stretching college-prep programs thin to cover illegal immigrants.” (Education Department, House Committee on Education and the Workforce)
• Title IX will apply to athletic-revenue sharing: A U.S. Department of Education official said that institutions “must provide equal athletic opportunities based on sex, including with respect to benefits, opportunities, publicity, and recruitment.” But the agency hasn’t explained how colleges will need to divvy money up between men and women under a National Collegiate Athletic Association settlement that will allow colleges to distribute about $20 million each to athletes per year, or as they send name, image, and likeness payments to athletes. Questions loom about whether colleges must evenly distribute payments to men and women or if they might allocate money based on NIL values. (ESPN)
• After commenting on Saturday’s assassination attempt, Bellarmine instructor is out: John James, an instructor, was initially suspended from the private institution in Louisville, Ky., after writing, “If you’re gonna shoot, man, don’t miss,” in reference to the attempt to kill former President Donald Trump. Now James no longer works at the university. A spokesperson wouldn’t say if James had resigned or had been fired. (Courier Journal)
• Former dean apologizes for affair with student: Julie Lythcott-Haims, a member of the City Council of Palo Alto, Calif., and the author of the best seller How to Raise an Adult, apologized for a relationship with an undergraduate while she was dean at Stanford University over a decade ago. The former student detailed the relationship in a piece in the LGBTQ publication Autostraddle, which said Lythcott-Haims had stepped down as Stanford’s dean of freshmen after her parents reported the relationship. But Lythcott-Haims has publicly said she left to seek a master’s degree in fine arts. (Los Angeles Times, Autostraddle)
• Goddard sale falls through: The shuttered college’s Vermont campus went under contract earlier this year, but a letter now shows that it’s back on the market with a list price of $3.4 million. Full payment is sought at closing, frustrating a local group that says its entreaties to buy the campus have been ignored even though it’s raised $1.2 million in pledges and needs a sales agreement to apply for additional financing. (Seven Days)

Mergers and acquisitions update

• Kansas merger approved: The Higher Learning Commission approved a plan to slot a pair of two-year institutions, North Central Kansas Technical College and Northwest Kansas Technical College, under Fort Hays State University. Leaders sought the change in anticipation of declines in the state’s rural population and fewer students enrolling in college. The technical colleges’ presidents will report to the university’s president, but each institution will keep its own accreditation. (Fort Hays State University)
• For-profit acquisition planned: The Perdoceo Education Corporation, a publicly traded company based in Illinois that owns Colorado Technical University and the American InterContinental University System, has agreed to buy the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences, a for-profit with campuses in California, Florida, and Texas that offers graduate degrees in physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech-language therapy, and nursing. Perdoceo’s institutions enroll about 41,000 students, while the university it’s acquiring enrolls about 4,500 students. The purchase price is expected to be $142 million to $144 million. (Perdoceo)

Stat of the day

$500,000

That’s how much the University of Maryland at College Park will pay to put to rest allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by not disclosing research funding from foreign sources.

The Justice Department alleged that, when submitting five grant proposals to federal agencies, the university didn’t properly divulge funding that researchers received from two companies in China: Huawei Technologies and an Alibaba subsidiary. The agreement settles the claims without a determination of liability.

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Comings and goings

• Donald Bobbitt, president of the University of Arkansas system, plans to retire by January.
• Mary Lou Retelle, president of Anna Maria College, in Massachusetts, plans to retire at the end of the 2024-25 academic year.
• Bradley Thiessen, vice provost at New College of Florida, has been named interim vice president and provost at Florida Polytechnic University.
• Matthew Hincman, a professor of sculpture at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, has been named dean of the faculty.

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

Footnote

Andrew Mytelka, who leads the copy desk at The Chronicle, submitted the following musings on the real source of media bias in national politics.

Donald Trump’s choice of Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate has drawn plenty of attention this week. What has been ignored is how Trump’s selection reinforces the power of copy editors in American politics.

Copy editors handle many duties at newspapers like The Chronicle, including checking facts, fixing grammar, enforcing a stylebook, and writing headlines. And as I noted in this space eight years ago, fitting long names into tight headline specifications is among the most challenging of those tasks. In an election year, copy editors do their utmost to prevail on voters — and candidates picking running mates — to choose people with short surnames.

Republicans seem more vulnerable than Democrats to copy editors’ pressure. In the 1990s, for example, the GOP’s presidential nominees were Bush and Quayle (10 letters) and Dole and Kemp (eight letters!), while the Democrats countered with Clinton and Gore (11 letters). Since 2016, the Republicans have continued to oblige copy editors, offering us the 10-letter choices of Trump-Pence and now Trump-Vance, compared with the Democrats’ Clinton-Kaine (12 letters) and Biden-Harris (11 letters).

So when Trump says the election is rigged, he’s right in part. But the riggers are not elites or foreign powers. They’re your copy editors.