Good morning, and welcome to Friday, December 13. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

The more things change …

The narrative writes itself.

As this year began, the University of Alabama’s wildly successful football coach, Nick Saban, retired, lamenting changes that were widely seen as moving the sport further away from the amateur. Now, as the year closes, one of Saban’s mentors and friends is bringing a wealth of professional experience to another university’s coaching job, reshaping college athletics in the process.

But of course the story’s not that simple.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hired Bill Belichick as its head football coach, making the move official on Thursday after days of rumors. It’s a big swing for a university looking to supercharge its long-middling program.

• Belichick, 72, is the second-winningest coach in NFL history. He captured six Super Bowls in 24 seasons leading the New England Patriots. But he didn’t win consistently in his final NFL seasons, and he’s never coached at the collegiate level.

UNC isn’t just hiring a coach. It’s hiring an institution. Belichick denied reports that he required the university to accept a 400-page “organizational bible.” But he’s bringing a former assistant from the Patriots, Michael Lombardi, to be general manager of UNC’s football program.

“If you hire Belichick, you hire him to do it his way,” wrote Seth Wickersham, of ESPN. “Belichick’s system is him, from his player-procurement program to contract incentives.”

The hiring reflects how big-money college sports is professionalizing as a $2.8-billion settlement is poised to lock in the pay-for-play era.

• Belichick’s vision for a college program is “a professional program — training, nutrition, scheme, coaching, techniques — that would transfer to the NFL,” he said before he was hired at UNC.
• Players are free agents: At his introductory news conference on Thursday, Belichick compared a college’s need to recruit high-school and transfer players to an NFL team’s need to draft college players and recruit free agents.
• General manager is a fast-growing job in college sports as the transfer portal and pay-for-play make recruiting players much more complex than it used to be. High-profile GMs are popping up in the revenue-generating programs of football and basketball.

And yet UNC’s pick shows how college athletics hasn’t changed. Squint, and Belichick’s career arc might end up resembling Alabama’s Saban, who left for college after a rocky patch in the pros.

• Revenue-generating sports rule the day: “The more successful we are in football, the more successful we are in basketball, the more opportunities we are going to be able to provide for everyone else here,” Bubba Cunningham, UNC’s athletic director, said at Belichick’s introductory news conference. “Those two sports provide all of the finances for the rest of the department.”
• College teams give coaches a wider berth than today’s pros: Professional ownership groups now shy away from the coach-centric model that Belichick demands, The Guardian noted.
• Adults say they care about off-the-field development: Along with a winning program, “We want to develop good kids,” Belichick said at his introductory news conference.
• … even though they’ve been accused of flouting the rules: Chapel Hill famously avoided major penalties from a phony-class scandal. Belichick presided over NFL teams that made “Spygate” and “Deflategate” part of the sports lexicon.

The bigger picture: Belichick may have unwittingly drawn the best metaphor for how his own hire seems to shake up college sports even as it reinforces dynamics of power and money that have long been in place. “The game has changed a lot, really in every area, whether it’s the size of the players, the equipment, the technology,” he said on Thursday. “But in the end, you’ve got 120 yards, a 100-yard field, and it comes down to blocking, tackling, ball security, fundamental execution.”

Quick hits

• Advocacy group’s survey finds campus censorship: About one in seven faculty members said they were disciplined or threatened with discipline because of their teaching, research, academic discussion, or off-campus speech, according to a survey of more than 6,000 faculty members at 55 colleges by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Almost nine in 10 said it was hard to have an open and honest conversation on campus about at least one hot-button topic, with the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” by far the most cited. More conservative than liberal faculty members said they at least occasionally hid their political beliefs — 55 percent vs. 17 percent. (FIRE)
• Professor apologizes for social-media posts: In a TikTok video earlier this week, Julia Alekseyeva, an assistant professor of English and media studies at the University of Pennsylvania, appeared to refer to Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old who’s been accused of killing the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, as the “icon we all need and deserve.” A deputy dean at Penn called the remarks antithetical to the university’s values. Alekseyeva has since voiced regret, saying she does not condone violence and that she retracts the video and other posts that were “completely insensitive and inappropriate.” (USA Today)
• Venture capitalists wary of endowment-tax hike: Republican proposals to increase the excise tax on wealthy colleges’ net investment income could depress funding available for companies, Ann Miura-Ko, co-founder at Floodgate Partners, warned. College endowments are major private-equity investors. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance unsuccessfully tried to pass legislation as a senator that would increase the tax from 1.4 percent to 35 percent. (TechCrunch)
• Republicans pick new education-committee chair: Tim Walberg, of Michigan, will lead the House Education and the Workforce Committee in the next Congress, replacing Rep. Virginia Foxx, of North Carolina, who wasn’t seeking another term in the role. (Committee on Education and the Workforce, K-12 Dive)
• Congress passes anti-hazing measure: If President Biden signs it into law, the Stop Campus Hazing Act would require colleges that take part in federal student-aid programs to include hazing incidents in annual federal security reports, publish reports on hazing incidents, and hold anti-hazing programs. An anti-hazing group lauded it as a major step after years of advocacy. (Congress.gov, Stop Hazing)
• Biden signs FAFSA Deadline Act: The bipartisan law requires the Free Application for Federal Student Aid to launch by October 1 each year. One of its sponsors, Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican, cast it as a way to prevent the delays that have hampered the last two FAFSA launches and made it impossible for some students to know how much financial aid to expect this fall. (U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions)
• New student-loan ombudsman in Connecticut: Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, announced the office has been created under the Connecticut Department of Banking, as called for by a new law. It’s tasked with offering guidance and making sure loan servicers don’t mistreat borrowers. (State of Connecticut)

Quote of the day

“I am deeply skeptical of student activism. It’s often the most embarrassing activism.”

— Zak Penn, a co-writer of PCU, a 1994 comedy film about a fictional politically correct college

Discussion of some divisive issues has grown much darker since PCU debuted, Penn told our podcast host Jack Stripling on College Matters from The Chronicle. Many of the campus conflicts that underlie the film are nonetheless relevant today.

🎧 Subscribe to the podcast today wherever you get your podcasts.

Weekend reads

• Why One University Axed Its Entire Library Faculty (The Chronicle)
• Higher Ed’s Dubious Deal With Prison Health Care (The Chronicle Review)
• Why Has Boston University Stopped Accepting Grad Students? (The Chronicle Review)
• Stanford Persecutes a Student Journalist, Again (The Chronicle Review)
• Should a Student Reporter Face Prosecution for Embedding with Protesters? (Columbia Journalism Review)
• Small-Town Students Can Be Overlooked. Colleges Are Now Looking Their Way. (The Christian Science Monitor)
• Is Calculus an Addiction That College Admissions Officers Can’t Shake? (The Hechinger Report)
• A ‘Reverse Aging’ Guru’s Trail of Failed Businesses (The Wall Street Journal)

Comings and goings

• Michael Littman, a professor of computer science at Brown University, has been named the inaugural associate provost for artificial intelligence.
• Joshua Dodds, a faculty member at South University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has been named the inaugural executive director of diversity, equity, and belonging programs at Fitchburg State University, in Massachusetts.
• Greg Reilly, a professor and head of the management and entrepreneurship department in the School of Business at the University of Connecticut, has been named interim dean of the school.

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

Footnote

Readers are weighing in on good television shows about college. Today’s recommendation comes from Thom D. Chesney, president of Southwestern College, in New Mexico.

“When this question comes up at the lunch or beer table, I inevitably default to The Paper Chase, which shaped my perspective on college before I even attended; then, occasionally invaded my teaching and student engagement as a faculty member a decade after it aired. It lacks some of the diversity I would like to see today, but it otherwise holds up pretty well. (Sidebar: John Houseman’s character would not be a fan of student-retention and academic-program-assessment initiatives so common in higher ed today.)”

📺 Do you know a good TV show about college? Email the show’s name and why you like it to dailybriefing@chronicle.com. Include your name and title, and your submission could appear in a future Footnote.