Good morning, and welcome to Friday, July 19. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Task forces, but where is the force?

Colleges turned to a tried-and-true strategy in the face of fervent concerns about antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus: the task force. Our Kate Hidalgo Bellows asks if they’re taking action or giving the appearance of action.

Task forces on antisemitism and Islamophobia have largely dodged the toughest calls. For example, a May report from a University of Pennsylvania group sidestepped the question of whether criticism of Israel is antisemitic, instead defining antisemitism as “the expression or manifestation of hatred, violence, hostility, or discrimination against Jews because they are Jews.”

They disagree on regulating speech. Two Stanford University task forces offered contradictory advice. One on Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian communities called for expanding free expression and eliminating the so-called Palestinian exception to free-speech protections. An antisemitism task force recommended more consistent enforcement of content-neutral rules governing expression, arguing the university has been too tolerant of antisemitism.

Recommendations often focus on studies and students. Reports from these task forces frequently call for backing more Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim studies programs, and for accommodating Jewish and Muslim students’ religious observances.

• Window dressing alert: Several recommendations from a Harvard task force, like making kosher hot meals more widely available on campus, struck Leonard Saxe, director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, as “things that one can do if you need to feel that you’re doing something.”

It’s not always clear that campus leaders are committed to following through. Penn implemented temporary rules for campus demonstrations, banning encampments and overnight protests. They’ll be in place while a faculty-led panel reviews free-expression guidelines this year. Harvard’s interim president promised a committee’s long-term recommendations “will be developed, refined, and implemented in due course.”

The bigger picture: Task forces can’t wave a wand and fix problems as persistent and pernicious as antisemitism and Islamophobia. But it is fair — and healthy — to ask leaders what actions they’re taking beyond running out the clock in hopes the latest controversies blow over.

Read the full story: Colleges Created Task Forces to Address Reports of Antisemitism and Islamophobia. What Have They Done?

Quick hits

• Sasse resigning from U. of Florida after less than two years: Ben Sasse will step down as the flagship’s president at the end of the month, he announced on Thursday, saying his wife, who had an aneurysm and a series of strokes in 2007, was recently diagnosed with epilepsy and has been experiencing memory issues. He said he needs “to step back and rebuild more stable household systems” for his family, which includes two children in college and another who is turning 13. Sasse, a Republican who left the Senate to take the job in a controversial hire, was only appointed to the presidency in November 2022. He plans to remain at the university as president emeritus and a professor. (University of Florida, X)
• New restrictions on faculty speech: University of California regents approved a controversial policy limiting faculty members’ ability to share political opinions on institutional websites, capping a debate sparked by statements criticizing the Israel-Hamas war. Statements are now barred from departmental homepages but will be allowed elsewhere if they are accompanied by a disclaimer. In a nod to academic-freedom concerns and negotiations with faculty members, the new policy has been relaxed from earlier drafts to allow for statements related to scholarly endeavors and links to political statements. (EdSource, The Chronicle)
• High-paying professional jobs aren’t evenly distributed: Women and people of color are less likely to hold well-compensated positions than white men, an analysis of the Professionals in Higher Education Survey found. White men held four in 10 professional jobs that pay more than $100,000 but just 28 percent of jobs with earnings below that threshold. (College and University Professional Association for Human Resources)
• N.C. State chancellor set to depart: Randy Woodson was set to announce his intent to retire from the university, which he’s led since 2010, at the end of the academic year. The 67-year-old is noted for affable, low-key leadership that’s kept North Carolina State University out of fervent political battles, though he’s recently taken heat amid concerns about toxic chemicals in a shuttered academic building. His departure would leave four chancellorships to be filled in the University of North Carolina system, which has been roiled for years by power struggles. (The Assembly, WRAL, The Chronicle)
• Trustee sues Penn State for information: Barry Fenchak, a trustee elected by alumni, alleges university leaders and his fellow trustees have prevented him from viewing information about the university’s $4.6-billion endowment, including its assets and the administrative fees it pays. He said that trustees aren’t given information they need to make decisions, extending a long history of accusations the board is overly secretive. (Spotlight PA, The Chronicle)
• Florida for-profit plans closure: City College, a small institution that offers health-care training in Hollywood, told students on Monday that it will stop new enrollment, though it expects to stay open through its winter term to allow students who have almost completed their programs to finish their studies. (WPLG)

Stat of the day

35,000

That’s how many people will have their federal student loans forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, or PSLF, the U.S. Department of Education said on Thursday.

Borrowers will see a collective $1.2 billion in debt wiped away. The Biden administration described the debt relief as a result of actions it’s taken to fix problems with PSLF, a program designed to support teachers, nurses and the like if they still owe money after making on-time loan payments for 10 years.

But a federal appeals court blocked another student debt-relief effort on Thursday. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals stopped the Biden administration from implementing the remaining parts of its generous SAVE income-driven repayment plan that hadn’t already been blocked by lower-court rulings.

The bigger picture: The Biden administration is still touting piecemeal fixes to the student-loan system as fulfilling a key campaign promise from 2020, even after the courts have blocked its wider-ranging debt-relief efforts, and as different ideas circulate for a more substantial overhaul of the problem-plagued system.

Misinformation cleanup

Two private colleges found themselves forced to correct the record on polarized topics this week.

Washington University in St. Louis is not shutting down a transgender center, officials said. A whistleblower who’d previously alleged problems at the center claimed it was closing, and Andrew Bailey, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, repeated that in a news release that celebrated it as a “huge win.” But the institution told KSDK that it continues to support transgender patients after changing the scope of its care to conform to a new state law.

California Lutheran University denied that one of its professors posted an inflammatory message after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. A right-wing account, Libs of TikTok, posted images on the social-media platform X that appeared to show an exercise-science professor saying on Facebook that she wished Trump would be killed and that she’d take action herself if she “wasn’t so far away.”

The university and the professor said the image appeared to be doctored. The Ventura County Republican Party then walked back a call for the professor to be fired, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The bigger picture: Communicating facts clearly and quickly matters more than ever when political silly season takes serious turns.

Weekend reads

• Why You Should Still Want to Be a College President (The Chronicle)
• The Scholar Who Inspired a Legion of Cranks (The Review)
• Sacramento State Rolls Out Faculty ‘Cluster Hire’ to Meet Latino Student Needs. Is It Enough? (The Sacramento Bee)
• Here Are the Steps North Carolina’s Public Universities Are Taking to Obey a New DEI Ban (WUNC/Open Campus)
• Universities Don’t Want AI Research to Leave Them Behind (The Wall Street Journal)
• What I Learned In the 1960s About Universities and Political Statements (The Hill)
• How a Second Trump Term Could Turn Up the Heat on Higher Ed (Inside Higher Ed)

Comings and goings

• Jim Lucchese, chief executive of Sofar Sounds, has been named president of Berklee College of Music.
• Brian K. Lee, vice president for alumni affairs and development at Harvard University, will retire at the end of the year.
• Denis P. O’Brien, a member of Drexel University’s Board of Trustees, has been named interim president of the university following John Fry’s appointment as president of Temple University.
• Omolola (Lola) Eniola-Adefeso, a professor of chemical engineering, biomedical engineering, and macromolecular science and engineering at the University of Michigan, has been named dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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

Footnote

After swelling to nearly unbearable levels, the anticipatory buildup is over. EA Sports College Football 25 is out, 11 years after legal considerations halted the popular video-game franchise’s annual release.

I call the anticipation “nearly unbearable” not because I’m excited. For anyone who keeps an eye on news related to the word “college,” talk of this game has become maddeningly inescapable.

National publications explained why the game is important to fans and what it does for college football’s pop-culture status. Regional news outlets found the local angles, telling us how colleges contributed to the game’s creation. Fans argued over player ratings, and critics complained about errors.

Thank goodness, then, for the stories that were absurd enough to transcend from annoying to amusing. A University of Colorado at Boulder star said the game’s representation of his team’s offensive line is accurate because “They can’t block for nothing.” In-game score bugs botched Stanford University’s logo, committing the cardinal sin of replacing the currently used white tree superimposed on a red “S” with an old logo showing the same red “S” with a green tree.

The bigger takeaway is that college sports’ hype machine keeps finding new gears in an era when players can be paid for use of their name, image, and likeness — but the benefits flow unevenly. For evidence, look no further than the story of Arch Manning, a highly touted quarterback and member of football’s first family who’s expected to be a backup throughout his second year at the University of Texas at Austin.

Manning announced that he agreed to have his virtual likeness appear in College Football 25. If you believe reports, he did so in exchange for as much as $60,000, far more than the $600 and copy of the EA title that most players receive. Manning, it seems, is playing a different game than most others.