Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday, September 3. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

The big questions we’re asking this fall

It’s time once again to take stock of the most-pressing questions higher ed faces as it turns the page on the academic calendar. A special thanks to our Dan Berrett, Lee Gardner, and Adrienne Lu for contributing.

1. How drastically will enrollment patterns change?

This always-important question is more complex than usual, putting an extra spotlight on fall enrollment reports. Here’s why:

• FAFSA: Free Application for Federal Student Aid glitches might have dissuaded students who were on the fence about going to college and steered some high achievers toward safe options.
• SFFA v. Harvard: Early results from the first class admitted under the Supreme Court’s ban on race-conscious admissions suggest racial diversity could fall at highly selective institutions, even as the number of low-income students doesn’t.
• DEI: A string of shuttered diversity, equity, and inclusion offices threatens years of work to retain more underrepresented students.

This fall’s curveballs layer on top of other long-developing trends: Families continue to question the value of higher education, and an enrollment cliff threatens to depress the number of traditional-age college students for years to come.

2. Will protests prompt escalation or negotiation?

Though the fledgling fall semester has yet to produce anything resembling this spring’s clashes with the police, protesters have already disrupted university events, gathered at Hillel Jewish-life centers, and challenged new rules colleges drafted in response to spring encampments. And yet, after a summer of talks led San Francisco State University to dump investments in weapons manufacturers, the door appears open for campuses to embrace dialogue instead of dogma.

3. Is this much leadership churn sustainable?

Nemat (Minouche) Shafik encapsulated higher ed’s leadership struggles this summer when she resigned after little more than a year as president of Columbia University. She’d weathered harsh congressional questioning and backlash to her decision to send the police to break up protests this spring, only to step down in August, weeks before classes started. Her departure became the latest in a string of abbreviated presidencies that leave Ivy League leadership less diverse than it was a year ago.

Outside of the Ivies, colleges have increasingly struggled to develop, attract, and retain talented leaders in the face of financial challenges and political pressures. Governing boards offer a dispiriting litany of bad hires, inadequate fiscal oversight, and infighting that will have to change if talented people are going to decide leadership offers more benefits than drawbacks.

4. Can unions keep their momentum?

Graduate students have supercharged unionization in higher education, with their ranks in labor more than doubling over a dozen years, according to a new report from the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. That outpaces even a 7.5-percent increase in the number of unionized faculty members over the same time period.

Staff unions have recently negotiated big pay increases, and athletes are fighting to collectively bargain. Much of the activity is taking place at private nonprofit institutions. But the future of campus labor will be deeply influenced by the answer to our final question ...

5. Who wins in November?

So much hinges on whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump is the next president of the United States, as well as how many down-ballot candidates ride the winner’s coattails. We’ll save the full policy breakdown for another day and stick to the simplest of summaries: Democrats have offered little reason to think they’d deviate from pumping money into higher education, even as they seek sometimes-difficult reforms. Republicans take a much harsher view, although different conservative factions promote punitive action, fundamental overhauls, or more incremental changes.

📫 What did we miss? Submit other big-picture questions you’re asking this fall, and they could appear in a future Daily Briefing. Email dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Quick hits

• U. of the Arts merger talks collapse: The family that donated about half of the University of the Arts’ endowment opposes transferring that money to Temple University, ending hopes of an acquisition after the private art school in Philadelphia closed on seven days’ notice in June. (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
• Former cheerleader drops sexual-harassment lawsuit: Hayden Richardson’s lawyer declined to say why she withdrew her lawsuit against Northwestern University. She sued the institution in 2021, alleging that the cheer team’s coach at the time, Pam Bonnevier, required cheerleaders to mingle with donors, who groped her, and that Mike Polisky minimized her concerns when he was deputy athletic director. Northwestern drew protests by promoting Polisky to athletic director. He stepped down after a week, citing “current challenges.” (Associated Press, The Chronicle)
• Commonwealth U. board backs president: Trustees for the public institution in Pennsylvania pledged “unwavering support” in Bashar Hanna despite a federal jury finding against the president in a retaliation case. The board urged the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education to appeal the jury’s decision, which awarded $3.9 million to Jeffrey Krug, a former business-school dean who alleged he was fired because he helped an administrative assistant file a sexual-harassment report against Hanna in 2017. (WVIA)
• Dormitory bomb-building leads to charge: Federal prosecutors charged Aram Brunson, 21, with lying to authorities after a January 2023 explosion in his sixth-floor dorm room at the University of Chicago. Brunson allegedly told authorities that he had potassium nitrate to make fireworks, but investigators say they found evidence he was planning terrorist acts and had joined the Chicago chapter of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. Brunson has not been enrolled at the university since the explosion and is currently thought to be living in Armenia. (WLS)

Quote of the day

“The tenure of a president today is lower than ever before.”

— The “University of Florida: The Road Ahead” report

That’s the type of insight produced by the consultancy McKinsey & Company under a $4.7-million contract with the University of Florida. The contract is one of several spending lines that ballooned under the university’s former president, Ben Sasse, before he stepped down in July to help care for his ailing wife.

• Some of Sasse’s other spending has already been cut: At least six people he hired from Republican politics and his former U.S. Senate office have been shown the door, The Gainesville Sun reported.

McKinsey sent the university eight documents from August 2023 to March 2024. The university provided them in response to a public-records request from The Chronicle.

See what’s in them here: Ben Sasse Spent Far More Than His Predecessor. Including on These Reports.

Comings and goings

• Michael T. Chin has been named dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the Tufts University School of Medicine, in Massachusetts, after serving as interim dean since July 2023.
• Walter Snipes, assistant dean of students and director of residence life at Davidson College, in North Carolina, has been named dean of students at Lafayette College, in Pennsylvania.
• Rakesh Khurana, dean of Harvard College, will step down at the end of the 2024-25 academic year.
• Elizabeth Magill, a former president of the University of Pennsylvania, has been named a visiting senior fellow in the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard University’s Law School.

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

Footnote

I’ve been asking readers to send photos from student move-in days. Today’s submission comes from the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota.

St. Thomas counts itself as the first institution to make the jump from Division III to Division I in the NCAA’s modern era. The Associated Press called the change “a bold move born out of the Minnesota private school’s ejection from its conference for being too dominant.”

St. Thomas skipped what would normally be a 12-year process, including a stop in Division II, to start Division I competition in 2021-22. No athletic department had made that leap since 1993.

Maybe the athletes bulked up by carrying their stuff across the quad.