Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday, July 30. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Unpacking professors’ politics

Two new pieces of research undercut the caricature of college campuses as intellectually stifling and politically conformist.

Professors’ political beliefs are both more extreme and more varied than is widely appreciated, our Alex Walters reports. A forthcoming paper in The Review of Higher Education, a peer-reviewed journal, evaluated more than 4,000 faculty members’ Twitter accounts in 2021 and 2022, finding:

• About 13 percent of faculty members lean strongly to the right, outpacing the 9-percent estimate from a 2013 survey-based study.
• Just 15 percent are moderate. About half of professors said they were moderate in the 2013 research.
• Tenured faculty members are more conservative than junior scholars are.
• Ideological divides follow disciplines. Business professors and economists are often conservative, while the humanities tend to have liberal professors.

Varied political leanings don’t necessarily mean ideas can be freely exchanged. Colleges need to build mechanisms that ensure all views can be expressed, said Alexander Arnold, director of research at the Heterodox Academy.

But faculty members don’t say they’re self-censoring all that frequently, according to new polling from the consultancy Ithaka S+R. It surveyed about 2,600 instructors in February and March about academic freedom and censorship, determining that:

• Most instructors don’t feel unsafe teaching sensitive topics. That said, more feel comfortable discussing controversial issues with students, 53 percent, than with colleagues, 46 percent.
• However, some said they avoid teaching about controversial topics. About a fifth said they refrain from discussing conflict in the Middle East, and a fifth said they stay away from talking about abortion and contraception. Faculty members of color were more likely to bypass talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion than were white instructors.
• Almost a third of instructors said they don’t face academic-freedom challenges. Asked what they needed to navigate threats to academic freedom, instructors were most likely to seek help to engage students about sensitive topics, advocate for academic freedom, or understand how their colleges respond to new government regulations.
• Instructors are more likely to seek help from their peers than from their colleges. They’re skeptical that their colleges can foster civil discourse.

The bigger picture: Yes, faculty members tend to lean left, and yes, many campuses could make it easier to talk about controversial topics. But the data still suggest higher ed allows much more space for intellectual diversity than election-year political rhetoric might suggest.

For more from The Chronicle: Actually, There Are More Conservatives on the Faculty Than You Think, Study Finds

Quick hits

• Relations thaw between Liberty U. and Falwell: Liberty has agreed to pay Jerry Falwell Jr., its former president, an undisclosed amount of retirement and severance, ending four years of legal and public-relations fights that began when Falwell stepped down under pressure amid news coverage of his wife’s affair, and a photo he’d posted of himself and his wife’s assistant with their zippers partly open. Liberty and Falwell also settled a dispute over how the university uses the name, image, and likeness of its co-founder, Falwell’s father. Liberty expressed “appreciation” for Falwell, both sides apologized for “errors and mistakes,” and Liberty’s current president said it’s time to welcome Falwell Jr. back onto campus. (The Washington Post, The Chronicle)
• University celebrates financial-aid guesstimate: As the Free Application for Federal Student Aid’s botched revamp prevented many colleges and their students from knowing how much federal aid to expect earlier this year, Colorado Mesa University used its own calculations to send about 4,000 financial-aid offers to students, promising to absorb the difference between its promises and what the government eventually awarded. The public university’s estimate ended up missing by about $283,000, or less than 5 percent. Leaders tout that as a success because freshman enrollment is poised to surge by 31 percent. (The Denver Post)
• Undocumented students’ aid applications plunge in California: The number of students who’ve filled out the California Dream Act Application for state aid has fallen by 16 percent since last year, outpacing a 6-percent decline in FAFSA applications in the state. Student advocates say the tumultuous FAFSA rollout, the state form’s late release, and political campaigns’ threats of harsh penalties for people without legal residency status probably contributed to the decline. (LAist)
• U. of New Orleans outlines deep cuts: The public institution is attempting to close a $15-million deficit by cutting administrators’ pay, closing an academic building, and eliminating more than 70 positions, including by laying off nine non-tenured faculty and staff members. An employee union has complained workers don’t know if their jobs are safe, while the college’s president said cuts would come throughout the year and focus on inefficient operations. Just 6,600 students enrolled last year after a peak of more than 17,000 in 2003. (The Times-Picayune)

Quote of the day

“They’re now taking my text and using it to contribute to this wicked system.”

— Bennett Gilbert, a professor of history and philosophy at Oregon’s Portland State University, objects to his published research’s use to train artificial-intelligence models.

At least two major publishers are sending academic content to train AI models, our Christa Dutton reports. Microsoft paid Informa, the parent of the publisher Taylor & Francis, $10 million in one deal. Informa also entered a partnership with an undisclosed company. And the publisher Wiley has a generative-AI project with a large tech company, plus another in the works.

The publishers defended the deals. Wiley promised “compensation and rights protection, in accordance with existing contractual agreements.” Taylor & Francis said its agreements call for work to be cited, limit verbatim reproduction, and allow authors to receive royalties, if stipulated in their contracts.

Unhappy scholars say it’s another example of how unpaid labor is forced on professors. Some talk of avoiding imprints owned by companies that license academic content to train AI, or about contractually restricting how their work can be used.

Read the full story: Two Major Academic Publishers Signed Deals With AI Companies. Some Professors Are Outraged.

What’s in the NCAA settlement?

Court documents filed last week detail vast changes in store for college athletics if a judge approves a proposed class-action settlement. Here’s a quick rundown of the deal:

Damages are on tap for athletes who have played Division I sports since 2016. The payments, to be spread over 10 years, could total $2.8 billion. They include:

• Football and men’s basketball players who competed at Power 5 colleges would each receive $135,000, on average.
• Women’s basketball players at Power 5 colleges would each receive $35,000, on average.
• Other Division I athletes would collect payments based on their sport, their college, the years they played, and the number of claimants.
• Division I athletes who played before name, image, and likeness (NIL) rules were relaxed, in 2021, could receive additional damages, the highest of which could be more than $1.8 million.

Big paydays loom for future athletes, with just a little transparency in return:

• Colleges could pay athletes, with each institution’s total annual payments capped at 22 percent of the average Power 5 college’s revenue — estimated at more than $20 million per college per year.
• Colleges could directly send NIL dollars to athletes. But those payments would count toward the 22-percent cap.
• NIL payments from third parties would be allowed and wouldn’t be subject to the 22-percent cap.
• Third-party NIL payments would need to be disclosed to a clearinghouse for review if they were worth more than $600.
• Scholarship limits would be eliminated in all sports. But roster limits would be imposed.

Comings and goings

• Giorgio Gotti has been named dean of the Robert C. Vackar College of Business and Entrepreneurship at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley after serving as interim dean since August 2023.
• Michael Lipitz, director of intercollegiate athletics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has been named associate vice president and director of athletics at George Washington University.
• Michele Rasmussen, dean of students at the University of Chicago, has been named vice provost for student affairs at Stanford University.
• Lisa Wood, assistant dean of student success in the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food, and Life Sciences at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, has retired.

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

Footnote

Every year a handful of colleges celebrate family graduations, where relatives cross the same commencement stage. Sometimes it’s siblings who simultaneously don caps and gowns; others it’s a parent and her child. You know the arc of such stories, which typically praise hard work and valuing education highly.

How about a new twist that reveres avian arrears? It’s the first time I’ve seen a man graduating alongside his son after being excluded from commencement four decades earlier … all because of a dispute involving a parrot.

Jonny Clothier would have graduated from the University of Bristol, in England, in 1983, if not for the unfortunate flap. Blame his roommate’s unsupervised parrot, which “had free run of their university accommodation and was said to have wrecked the place,” as The Guardian so eloquently put it.

They found other housing, but Clothier still faced a bill for his final term’s rent. He refused to pay it, leading the university to invoke a policy preventing him from attending graduation, although he did receive his diploma.

More than four decades later, the university has stopped pursuing the charge. Clothier, 62, walked at graduation last Thursday alongside his 21-year-old son.

What albatross of an invoice prompted 41 years of ruffled feathers? A whopping £64.80, which, if I’m doing my math correctly, is the equivalent of about $275 today. That’s a lot of preening for such little payment.