Change Agent?
Rolling Stone’s allegations that a horrific gang rape in a University of Virginia fraternity house went unreported and unpunished continued to reverberate across the country last week, on campuses as well as on social media and in news accounts. The article seemed assured of being the year’s most influential higher-education story, notwithstanding complaints by some publications that it was not as thoroughly reported as it would have been had it appeared in their own pages (which, obviously, it had not).
Sniping aside, few people questioned the article’s central assertions. “I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone who doesn’t think what Jackie said is true,” said Logan Webb, a first-year student, referring to the woman at the heart of the Rolling Stone article. “I definitely believe what Jackie said did happen.”
Last week the university’s president, Teresa Sullivan, announced a series of changes, including training to help bystanders intervene and prevent assaults and training for the campus police in how to handle rape reports. Meanwhile, Wesleyan University put a fraternity on probation after a student said she was assaulted there in 2011, and the Johns Hopkins University suspended a fraternity while investigating charges that a 16-year-old girl was raped at one of its parties by two men who aren’t Hopkins students.
Earlier, activities at San Diego State University’s fraternities and sororities were suspended after “fraternity members interrupted a ‘Take Back the Night’ march by yelling obscenities, waving sex toys, and hurling eggs at the marchers,” according to a local newspaper, U-T San Diego. A Brown University fraternity remained suspended because two students tested positive for a date-rape drug after drinking punch at one of the fraternity’s parties.
It’s tempting to ask whether all this might signal the beginning of a shift that would move campus culture away from its obsession with drinking and partying. But alcohol, fraternity parties, tailgating, and the like are so thoroughly ingrained in student culture on many campuses that it’s hard to imagine change coming fast. (Read about why some experts say the Rolling Stone story may not help efforts to prevent sexual-assaults on campuses on Page A9.)
Game Over
It takes a tough president to shut down a university’s football program.
That’s what Ray L. Watts did last week at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Watts, a neurologist who became the institution’s president in 2013, said it could no longer afford to subsidize $20-million of the athletic department’s $30-million budget.
“As we look at the evolving landscape of NCAA football, we see expenses only continuing to increase,” he said in a statement. “When considering a model that best protects the financial future and prominence of the Athletic Department, football is simply not sustainable.” The bowling and rifle programs will also be closed down.
It won’t surprise you to hear that the decision was immediately vilified. A “Fire Ray Watts” website appeared even before Dr. Watts, surrounded by university and city police, announced the closure. The football program, which has attracted an average of about 20,000 people to home games, won six and lost six this season.
Cheeky
Oh, the humanity! Imagine you’re a college public-relations person and your president is going to a big meeting with President Obama—and the White House says you are not allowed to say anything about it in advance!
That was the case last Thursday as college presidents streamed into Washington for the second Summit on College Opportunity. Where the first summit, in January, focused on college access and was limited to colleges that the White House had invited to submit proposed commitments, last week’s event was devoted to getting students to graduate and to colleges’ collaboration among themselves and with secondary schools. This time the White House issued a call for proposals and got responses from a “broadly representative” group of institutions.
Not all the PR people involved respected the White House’s wishes. A news release from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, for instance, arrived Thursday at 9:54 a.m. to trumpet the participation of the university’s chancellor, Jimmy G. Cheek. But by then presidents at the meeting had been tweeting about it since they lined up to get in the door—at 7 a.m. Attendees proposed some 6oo actions to meet the event’s goals.
Union News
About 1,500 graduate teaching assistants at the University of Oregon went on strike last week after a year’s worth of negotiations between their 38-year-old union and the university failed to produce a contract. The sticking point, according to The Register-Guard, was a demand by the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation that the contract include two weeks of paid medical or parental leave. The university instead proposed creating an emergency fund that graduate students could tap, but the union said administrators had refused to include specifics in the contract.
And a wavelet of unionization continued to sweep across Vermont, as adjuncts at Saint Michael’s College joined counterparts at Burlington and Champlain Colleges in voting for union representation. All three institutions are in or near Burlington, the state’s largest city.
Reversals
Getty Images for the Jackie Robinson Foundation
Bill Cosby, the comedian who has been accused of a string of sexual assaults, resigned from the Board of Trustees at his alma mater, Temple University. He had been a board member since 1982. ... Nature said it would begin a trial program allowing reporters and subscribers to its 49 publications share their articles with others at no cost. The journal’s hope is that it can balance demands for open access to research with its need for a revenue stream that pays for good editing and peer review.
A ‘No’ on Coal
The investment committee for the University of Maine system voted last week to sell its direct investments in coal-mining companies—worth about $500,000—but not to get rid of more than $9-million in investments in other fossil-fuel companies. According to the Portland Press Herald, the committee’s decision came after consultants said divesting from all fossil-fuel stocks could limit the system’s future returns.
While a small number of colleges have opted to rid their endowments of all fossil-fuel investments, others have rejected divestment calls. Harvard University’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, said in a 2013 letter that the endowment “is a resource, not an instrument to impel social or political change.” Stanford University charted what some call a middle course in May with its decision to sell coal stocks while retaining other fossil-fuel investments.
Lost
Ada Meloy, general counsel at the American Council on Education since 2007 and before that deputy general counsel at New York University, was killed in an automobile accident while on her way to a Thanksgiving event. ... Mark Strand, a former U.S. poet laureate and a professor of English at Columbia University, died at age 80. Among many other honors, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999 for a collection titled Blizzard of One. ... Kosta Karageorge, an Ohio State University senior who wrestled for the university for three years and then joined the football team as a walk-on in August, was found dead in a dumpster not far from his apartment. A police spokesman said it appeared Mr. Karageorge, who had complained of concussions that he said had left him confused, had killed himself. He was 22.