Daily Briefing

Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday, June 10. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Transitions. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

College sports tries to hold it together

Last week’s approval of a long-awaited antitrust settlement may have been the easy part for big-time college sports. Now comes the hard part: enforcing the deal’s terms in a way that keeps campuses happy, gets athletes on board, and convinces fans that the rocky road ahead looks something like an even playing field.

Meet Bryan Seeley, the 46-year-old chief executive of the new College Sports Commission. He takes the job after serving as head of investigations for Major League Baseball, whose teams don’t have a hard salary cap but are restricted when spending to sign international amateur talent.

• “I think I’m one of the few people in the country who’s probably led investigations into salary-cap circumvention,” Seeley told The Athletic.

Cap talk comes first because the College Sports Commission will enforce key rules under the landmark antitrust settlement. The commission oversees the “revenue-sharing” payments colleges can now send directly to players, as well as name, image, and likeness payments between third parties and athletes.

Here’s a refresher on the settlement basics:

• Colleges can directly pay athletes up to 22 percent of the average revenue that power-conference colleges draw from media rights, ticket sales, and sponsorship. That’s estimated to be up to $20.5 million per institution for the upcoming year, and more going forward.
• Athletes can still strike NIL deals with third parties as long as they’re made “for a valid business purpose and do not exceed a reasonable range of compensation.” The consultancy Deloitte built a new clearinghouse to ensure that deals valued at $600 or more comply.
• Roster limits are here, replacing restrictions on how many scholarships athletic departments can give out.
• Past players get back pay. About $2.8 billion has been earmarked for athletes who competed between 2016 and 2024. The NCAA and conferences are footing that bill, effectively by reducing the payouts they send colleges from money makers like March Madness basketball, the Associated Press noted.

Conferences need the commission to keep their members in line. Power-conference commissioners make up the College Sports Commission’s board. Their college members are expected to sign agreements dictating that they will follow rulings issued by Seeley and arbitrators.

Yet no one’s ready to say exactly what happens when a college breaks the rules. Violators will face “punitive” measures, Brett Yormark, commissioner of the Big 12, said on Monday, according to ESPN. “We’re in the process of developing some of those rules and structure,” Jim Phillips, commissioner of the ACC, said on Monday.

Can the College Sports Commission succeed where the NCAA couldn’t? “For several years, Division I members crafted well-intentioned rules and systems to govern financial benefits from schools and name, image, and likeness opportunities, but the NCAA could not easily enforce these for several reasons,” NCAA President Charlie Baker wrote. “The result was a sense of chaos: instability for schools, confusion for student-athletes, and too often litigation.”

Now the NCAA doesn’t have to worry about athlete pay. It will still be in charge of academic and eligibility rules, “minimal” recruiting rules, and regulations covering playing seasons and sports betting.

But make no mistake, this isn’t the end of the fight over college athletics. Looming issues include:

• Are athletes employees? The NCAA staunchly opposes such a change, which could open the door to a players’ union.
• State legislation: States helped bring about the current free-for-all by passing laws preempting NCAA rules. There’s nothing to stop them from doing the same thing here so their home teams have a leg up in recruiting.
• Title IX and equity: Though they have flexibility, institutions are generally expected to send 75 percent of revenue-sharing payments to football, 15 percent to men’s basketball, 5 percent to women’s basketball, and 5 percent to other sports.
• Antitrust: Last week’s settlement could leave institutions exposed to future lawsuits alleging illegal collusion in college athletics.

“We’re not going to have Final Fours and College Football Playoffs and College World Series with 50 different standards,” said Greg Sankey, commissioner of the SEC, according to ESPN. Writing the settlement into law would be “enormously healthy,” he added.

At least some congressional Republicans seem ready to give athletic power brokers what they want. Draft legislation from two House committees would block state laws that conflict with rules set by the NCAA and its conferences, bar college athletes from being classified as employees, and carve out an antitrust exemption for college sports, The Washington Post reported on Monday.

What’s next: The NIL clearinghouse is set to go live on Wednesday. Colleges that weren’t named in the lawsuits have until June 15 to opt in to the revenue-sharing terms. Revenue sharing starts July 1.

The bigger question: If the settlement creates a level playing field across college athletics, institutions in the power conferences still get to start on the opposing team’s 20-yard line. How long will it take for future players, colleges in smaller conferences, and state lawmakers to stop buying into the latest set of rules they’ve had precious little say in shaping?

📱 For more from The Chronicle: Judge Approves Landmark Settlement Changing the Way College Sports Are Run

Federal news

• Harvard turns over program in the pressure cooker: None of the original leaders of Harvard University’s Religion and Public Life program will remain after June 30, and five remaining staff members were told last week that their contracts won’t be renewed. The program was singled out by the Trump administration as needing more oversight, and it was identified by a university report on antisemitism as having problems. The program has a new permanent director. (The Chronicle)
• Universities back Harvard in court: Two dozen institutions, including Princeton and the Johns Hopkins Universities, have asked for permission to file “friend of the court” briefs in support of Harvard University’s legal battle against the Trump administration. Their arguments include that the government’s attempts to cut federal funding for Harvard threaten more broadly to harm research, hurt scientists’ careers, and undercut investment in higher ed. (Court Listener, Bloomberg Law)
• NIH employees decry research changes: More than 60 National Institutes of Health employees on Monday signed a letter accusing the Trump administration of censoring research, illegally withholding funding, and endangering study participants. Signatories said they fear being fired but cannot follow directions they see as unethical or illegal. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director, replied that “respectful dissent in science is productive,” even as he described the letter as containing “fundamental misconceptions” about the agency’s policies. (The New York Times)
• Small colleges hope to be spared from endowment-tax hike: Two dozen liberal-arts colleges are lobbying to pay lower rates than large research universities if Congress forges ahead with plans to raise the excise tax on investment income. Their ideas include adopting a different tax rate for institutions with fewer than 5,000 students, creating a carveout for religiously affiliated institutions, and sparing colleges from the highest tax brackets if they meet thresholds for high financial-aid spending or enrollment of low-income students. The lobbying comes as wealthy institutions have sought to stave off a higher tax by suggesting they’d agree to 5-percent annual endowment-spending rates. (Politico)
• Who here knows how to use IPEDS? The Trump administration is not renewing a contract with an association that trains college officials to submit key statistics to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. The U.S. Department of Education said it’s evaluating how to deliver the training more efficiently, but observers are concerned reporting accuracy could slip. The contractor, the Association of Institutional Research, says it’s looking for ways to keep offering training under its own brand, though institutions won’t be able to tap it for free, as they could previously. (Inside Higher Ed)

Join us Thursday

📺 We’re going live this summer to talk Trump, Congress, and all the other federal shakeups hitting higher ed. Join Chronicle Senior Editor Sarah Brown, in-the-know guests, and your Daily Briefing scribe for the latest news and analysis. We’ll also prioritize subscriber questions.

• 📅 June 12 at 1 p.m. ET is the first webinar our new monthly summer series.
• 🖊️ Sign up here to attend. 🖊️

Quick hits

• Prospective students weigh politics and expression: Almost a third of prospective college students, 29 percent, said they’d removed a college from their list because of political concerns, according to polling released today by the consultancy EAB. High-income students were more likely than others to nix colleges they saw as too liberal or too conservative. Six in 10 students said a safe campus includes the freedom to express thoughts without harassment, up from 55 percent last year. (EAB)
• U. of Michigan dumps security contractors amid surveillance scandal: The flagship is cutting ties with plainclothes security contractors after one company’s employees were accused of following pro-Palestinian activists on and off campus. Officials said one contractor’s behavior was “disturbing, unacceptable, and unethical” without offering further details. The university said it hired contractors to report on suspicious activity in heavily trafficked areas, not to do surveillance. (Associated Press, The Guardian)
• President on leave after cover-up allegations: Truett McConnell University, a Christian institution in Georgia, placed its president, Emir Caner, on administrative leave and hired an independent investigator. A lawyer alleged that the president failed to act on allegations from a former student, who said she was groomed and raped by a former administrator. Caner, who has led the institution since 2008, has denied that a cover-up took place. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
• Professor on leave over video clip: Portland State University placed a faculty member on administrative leave after she was shown in a 7-second video clip answering an interviewer’s questions by saying “I am Hamas” and “We are all Hamas.” The video appeared to have been recorded at a rally to support a local school board member who’s being investigated for posting online that Israel should “stop the genocide” in Gaza. President Ann Cudd condemned the comments as “absolutely unacceptable.” (Willamette Week)

Transitions

• Antoinette M. Hays, president of Regis College, in Massachusetts, will retire next year after 15 years leading the college.
• Jill Wilberg, chief operations officer for university advancement at Illinois State University, has been named vice chancellor for finance and administration at the University of Illinois at Springfield.
• Sorin Lerner, a professor and chair of the department of computer science and engineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California at San Diego, has been named dean of the Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University.

To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com. You can also find Transitions online here.

Footnote

Feeling depressed because big tech is pushing products on us that even the companies themselves don’t understand — and disheartened that colleges brag about becoming willing accomplices? Then find hope, for at least a moment, in the young people who reject parts of the last digital revolution that went wrong.

Seán Killingsworth, 22, started hosting gatherings with friends after he enrolled in college. Those grew into the Reconnect Movement, which now counts chapters at several institutions.

“It’s a way to see and be able to experience what is possible with just connecting with a group of people for no reason and just hanging out purely to hang out,” Killingsworth told USA Today. “That doesn’t really happen anymore, because everything’s so facilitated and planned out by technology.”

The smartphone, with its dopamine-driving doomscrolling and distractions, tends to be out with such students. The flip phone, with its bare-bones calling and texting capabilities, is much more likely to be in.

Yes, the difficulties of navigating young adulthood without ride-hailing services and dating apps have reportedly caused some young Luddites to fall off the wagon. But even those who’d never swear off a smartphone would do well to think critically about building a world that’s a little more concrete and a little less digital hallucination.

College students have turned to the likes of vinyl, print books, and even typewriters. “It’s a craving for connection, both social and tactile — to feel and experience things, to be present in a given moment,” as The Chronicle’s Maddie Khaw put it in April.