It’s 9 p.m. in London, and Gita Selli is still at her computer, finishing up one last Zoom call with her team in the U.S. Her son has taken his bath, her husband is already in bed, and while the idea of a late-night video call may sound horrendous to some, Gita is feeling incredibly satisfied.
“Of course, American companies do pay better than European companies,” says Gita Selli, Senior Manager of Global Talent Acquisition at Chicago-based tech firm Loadsmart. “I’d lose between half and a third of what I make today if I were working for a European company.”
European workers, on average, earn 20-40% less than their American counterparts for similar jobs. For example, software engineers in the U.S. typically earn around $115,000; in Europe, the average is $75,000, depending on the region. Marketing managers see a similar gap, with U.S. salaries averaging $107,000 compared to Europe’s $70,000.
Before the pandemic, Europeans working for U.S. companies wasn’t unheard of, but holding U.S.-based roles with American-level salaries was a rarity. The shift to remote work has opened the floodgates, enabling Europeans to land positions traditionally reserved for American workers.
How do Europeans make it work?
Landing a U.S. job can feel like hitting the jackpot, but the rewards come with strings attached. European workers must adjust to U.S. hours, often working late into the night to align with American time zones.
Seasoned remote workers prefer companies on America’s East Coast, where a five- to six-hour time difference is easier to manage compared to those on the West Coast, where the eight- to nine-hour gap can make for grueling nights.
For many, especially working parents, this trade-off is worth it. “It’s helped a lot with family life,” says Selli, who has two kids. “I take breaks to pick up the kids, which I couldn’t do with a traditional nine-to-five UK job. But in the evenings, I’m glued to my desk, which is balanced by help from my husband.”
The flexibility is attractive to many, but not everyone can handle the time zone challenges. “It’s a killer for early-morning people,” Selli admits. “If you’re someone who wants to hit the pub after work, this isn’t the right place for you.”
“If you’re someone who wants to hit the pub after work, this isn’t the right place for you.”
Breaking up the day helps many remote workers. Some like to complete the first round of tasks in the European morning when coworkers aren’t around to interrupt with calls, emails, or instant messages, saving the afternoon for video conference calls. “I don’t need to be at my desk for eight hours straight,” says Romanian video and audio editor Otinel Mezin. “I can stay nearby and get back to my computer if any urgent editing requests come in.”
American companies have also become increasingly flexible with remote workers’ schedules. “I noticed a significant shift when COVID hit,” says Irish marketing executive Laura Mundow. “I’ve been working remotely for over a decade, but during the pandemic, many companies finally seemed to acknowledge time zone differences and adjusted accordingly.”
Selli offers practical advice: “Make sure everyone can see your calendar. If they know when you start and finish work, they won’t schedule meetings at unreasonable times. It won’t always be perfect, but it will help avoid having to work until 3 a.m.,” she advises.
Cultural differences also play a noteworthy role. American companies often operate at a faster pace, with a more aggressive approach to sales and more open discussions around salaries than their European counterparts. Despite these contrasts, many Europeans say they have come to appreciate the innovative and optimistic spirit.
“I really love working with Americans,” Mundow says. “There’s an openness there that you might not get in Europe. The stereotype of work being a massive focus for Americans is true. That might not suit everybody. It suits me, but I can see how it could be jarring if work weren’t a central part of your life.”
Although it requires some initial adjustment, many find the cultural differences refreshing. “I find clients to be more polite in the way they request work and not haggling over prices,” Mezin says.
Laura Mundow.
‘Geographic arbitrage’
One piece of advice from European workers is to avoid undervaluing yourself in the American market by accepting a salary lower than what an American would earn, even if it’s higher than typical European pay.
“My goal is always to be paid at an average U.S. rate, even though I live in Romania,” Mezin says.
“I wouldn’t consider undercutting myself,” Mundow states, who entered remote work upon graduating due to the dearth of media jobs in Ireland. “I just wouldn’t be happy with getting European wages working for an American company.”
One of the significant financial benefits is what Mundow dubs geographic arbitrage. “If you’re earning American money, you can live very well somewhere that is not America.”
It doesn’t have to be limited to Western Europe; Mundow has set up shop in Eastern Europe, using her mornings to explore before America wakes up. She’s also done stints from cost-effective spots in Latin America. Asia, however, has been impossible to pull off due to the time zone.
Are there days when the remote workers long for the 9-to-5 of a regular European job?
“Never! Never, ever,” Selli says. “I could never go back. The flexibility is so much better.”
Royal Bank of Canada said it has proof that its former chief financial officer engaged in an intimate relationship with a colleague that she failed to disclose, citing exchanges between the two over text messages and emails.
Canada’s biggest lender filed a statement of defense and counterclaim on Friday in the wrongful dismissal lawsuit filed earlier this month by Nadine Ahn, the executive it fired in April after 25 years at the bank.
The legal filing said Ahn began a close personal relationship with a colleague, Ken Mason — an executive in the bank’s corporate treasury group — as early as 2013 and that it continued until the time of her departure.
The document offers a remarkably detailed look at how the bank alleges the relationship played out over more than a decade. It includes descriptions of how the two bankers frequently met outside work for cocktails, celebrated anniversaries, swapped romantic poetry, and called each other by pet names — “Prickly Pear” for Ahn and “KD” for Mason.
Their text messages “fantasized about a life together, such as reading in bed together,” RBC’s court filing states.
“Ms. Ahn forwarded romantic poetry to Mr. Mason, expressing that she had fallen in love with Mr. Mason when she first saw him,” according to the filing. “Ms. Ahn and Mr. Mason continued to regularly see each other outside of the office during this time period, arranging a lunch on August 18, 2017 to celebrate their ‘fourth anniversary.’”
The close relationship continued after she was promoted to CFO in 2021, according to the documents. RBC alleges that Ahn used her position within the company to orchestrate promotions and pay raises for Mason, an endeavor it says Mason referred to as “Project Ken” in a document he drew up. She also shared confidential information with Mason, the bank claims, such as a draft of a speech to be given by Chief Executive Officer Dave McKay.
The filing states that RBC doesn’t have access to their messages, “except to the extent that Ms. Ahn and Mr. Mason copied personal communications to RBC systems.”
Lawyers for Mason and Ahn didn’t reply to messages seeking comment. Ahn said in her lawsuit that she and Mason were friends but denied that they were romantic partners. Mason, who filed a separate wrongful dismissal lawsuit against RBC, also denied a romantic relationship and said the bank would have treated them differently if they had both been men.
‘I Love You Too’
The bank cites “intimate communications” exchanged between the two via text message. As one example, it states, “On March 11, 2019, Ms. Ahn messaged Mr. Mason to say, ‘I love you.’ Mr. Mason responded 15 seconds later, ‘I love you too.’”
The two allegedly used calendar invites to schedule “liquidity meetings,” which the bank said was code for going for cocktails. At one such meeting, the two scribbled notes about their drink orders and other topics such as “concert, night out, winery” on a coaster from Canoe, an upscale restaurant in Toronto’s financial district. Mason had the coaster encased in plexiglass and kept it in his office, RBC claims.
The bank said it began investigating in March after an anonymous whistleblower alleged that Ahn and Mason had been seen “hugging and kissing and exiting the elevators” at the Fairmont Royal York, a hotel that’s right beside RBC’s head office.
Bank officials “immediately commenced a thorough investigation conducted by external legal counsel,” RBC spokesperson Gillian McArdle said in an emailed statement on Friday. “We were disappointed to learn the allegations were true.”
The Globe and Mail newspaper earlier reported on RBC’s court filing.
Ahn’s lawsuit complained about the way Royal Bank handled the investigation, the speed with which she was fired after being confronted with the allegations on April 5, and the damage to her reputation when the bank put out a press release that same day.
“Contrary to the statements of claim from Ms. Ahn and Mr. Mason, the investigation showed there was an undisclosed close personal relationship, and that Ms. Ahn misused her authority as CFO to directly benefit Mr. Mason,” McArdle said. “As she was a Named Executive Officer, we had an obligation to disclose.”
Ahn’s lawsuit is seeking almost C$50 million ($37 million) in pay and damages while Mason is suing Royal Bank for more than C$20 million in pay and damages.
In its counterclaim against Ahn, RBC is seeking about C$4.5 million for “excess compensation” paid to Mason and to claw back bonuses paid to Ahn, plus other damages and costs.
RBC’s filing states that when another employee raised concerns about Mason’s pay, Ahn terminated that person’s employment without cause. The bank said that former employee “has demanded compensation from RBC for bad faith termination of his employment, because of Ms. Ahn’s conduct.”
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If you work an office job, perhaps it’s happened to you. You didn’t get enough sleep last night. You’ve powered through the morning, yet your to-do list stretches on. You’re moving a bit slower, sated from lunch. Your computer screen becomes hazy. You glance out the window to see the sun starting its afternoon descent, and your eyelids droop with it. You decide to let yourself snooze just for a few minutes…
Occasionally falling asleep at work is par for the course, according to a new survey by sleep wellness company Sleep Doctor, with 46% of respondents saying they nap during the workday at least a few times a year. What’s more, 33% reported doing so weekly—9% once per week, 18% several times per week, and 6% daily.
Particularly if you didn’t get enough shut-eye the night before, taking a 20- to 25-minute nap may help you recharge and take on the remainder of your workday, says Sleep Doctor founder and clinical psychologist Michael Breus, Ph.D. But don’t make a habit of it.
“While you might feel slightly sleepy between one and three in the afternoon—because everybody does, it’s due to a post-lunch dip in core body temperature—you should not require a nap,” Breus tells Fortune. “If you’re getting the sleep that you should be getting at night, you should not require a nap.”
Midday snoozing is a big no-no for people with insomnia, Breus adds: “If you have difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep at night, napping, all that does is make it worse.”
Nearly 1,300 full-time U.S. employees completed the survey in March via Pollfish. Sleep Doctor didn’t provide additional details about the respondents, such as their shift schedules, workplace environments, or socioeconomic statuses. Though the survey isn’t a scientific study, it offers insight into the post-pandemic habits of the nation’s workforce, Breus says.
Half of in-person employees nap in their cars
It’s not just remote and hybrid employees who are catching Z’s during work hours. About 27% of in-person workers reported napping at the office on a weekly basis, compared to 34% of remote and 45% of hybrid workers. In-person employees napped in these locations:
“There are a lot of health care disparity issues related to sleep,” Pelayo tells Fortune. “You can only nap at your job if you have a place to nap and it’s accepted by your employer. So a lot of people don’t have a place to nap where they work.”
Pelayo adds, “If you work in an assembly line and you take a train to work, you don’t have a chance to nap anywhere. Or, if you’re in a place where you don’t feel safe; somebody who is napping is vulnerable to being robbed or attacked.”
Men, younger staffers more likely to nap during workday
More than half of male employees, 52%, told Sleep Doctor they nap at least a few times a year during work hours, compared to 38% of females. It’s unclear whether the survey collected data on non-cisgender workers.
A majority of younger adult employees admitted to workday napping, a higher percentage than more seasoned staffers:
18–34: 54%
35–54: 46%
55+: 25%
Younger adults tend to be more sleep-deprived because they have less control over their lives, Pelayo tells Fortune. They may have children interrupting their sleep, elderly parents to care for, longer commutes, and more demands on their free time.
“When people get older and they have medical problems, medical problems interrupt our ability to sleep, like arthritis, chronic pain. But healthy elderly people sleep really, really well,” Pelayo says. “They get better sleep than healthy young people. Healthy older people, the reason they ended up being healthy old people is they had good lifestyles.”
More than half of male employees, 52%, told Sleep Doctor they nap at least a few times a year during work hours, compared to 38% of females. It is unclear whether the March 2024 survey collected data on non-cisgender workers.
“This increases the likelihood that your brain will stay in the lighter stages of sleep and that you will wake up refreshed,” Tiani tells Fortune via email. “When we nap much longer, we may cycle into deeper stages of sleep, which may be harder to wake from. We also recommend taking the nap as far in advance of your desired bedtime as possible to lessen the impact on your nighttime sleep quality.”
More than half of workday dozers keep their naps under 30 minutes, according to Sleep Doctor:
Fewer than 15 minutes: 26%
15–29 minutes: 27%
30–59 minutes: 24%
1 hour: 12%
2 hours: 9%
3+ hours: 3%
On average, 34% of remote and 31% of hybrid workers nap for longer than an hour, compared to 15% of in-person workers.
“The fact that many people who are working from home are more likely to take advantage of opportunities to nap was very surprising,” Grandner tells Fortune via email. “It suggests that many workers would prefer to integrate napping into their lifestyle if they could.”
Why are employees napping at work?
Staffers primarily cited some form of exhaustion as a reason for snoozing on the job, while others were simply bored:
Re-energize: 62%
Recover from poor sleep at night: 44%
Handle long working hours: 32%
Stress: 32%
Boredom: 11%
Avoid work: 6%
But why are they so sleep-deprived to begin with? Ironically, the flipside of napping at work is 77% of survey respondents said job stressors cause them to lose sleep nightly. About 57% reported losing at least an hour of sleep on an average night. Most cited work-life balance as their top job stressor:
Work-life balance: 56%
Demanding projects: 39%
Long hours: 39%
Upcoming deadlines: 37%
Struggling to get to work on time: 30%
Issues with boss: 22%
Interpersonal conflict in workplace: 20%
Fears of being fired or laid off: 19%
Employees who lose sleep over job stress only to crave rest during the workday aren’t the norm, but their predicament isn’t rare either, Breus tells Fortune: “They kind of get their days and their nights mixed up.”
Hybrid workers were most likely to report job stressors impacting their sleep, 88%, compared to 73% of in-person and 71% of remote workers. In addition, more higher-level employees, such as CEOs and senior managers, reported losing sleep over career stress, 84%, than lower-level employees, 71%.
Napping on the job may have health, performance consequences
Dozing at your desk may seem inconsequential on a slower workday or when you think your boss won’t notice. But some employees have paid the price, Sleep Doctor data show.
Among nappers, 17% miss deadlines and 16% miss meetings at least once a month because they’re asleep on the job. About 27% of workers admit to falling asleep during a remote meeting in the past year, and 17% have done the same in person.
While just 20% of workers faced consequences, some were serious:
Check in with supervisor more often: 62%
Workload changed: 56%
Sit down with manager: 49%
Suspended: 24%
Fired: 17%
“Limiting sleep to one major nighttime window can help to ensure that you obtain an appropriate amount of sleep at night and thus do not require a daytime nap, which could interfere with work or other responsibilities,” Tiani says.
Strategic daytime napping can be an effective tool to boost energy and productivity, Grandner says, but falling asleep at work when you don’t mean to may indicate an underlying health issue.
“For people who are unable to maintain consciousness, I would recommend evaluating your nighttime sleep to see if you have any untreated sleep disorders like sleep apnea, or if there are other steps you can take to achieve healthier sleep,” Gardner says.
You should also consult your doctor if you’re typically not a napper but begin having unexplained fatigue, Pelayo says: “An abrupt change in your need for sleep would indicate a medical problem being present.”
A longtime law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who is also a prolific critic of legal education is suing the institution, saying it is discriminating against him because he is Latino.
Paul F. Campos alleges that Boulder’s law school has failed to offer an explanation or recourse for a poor evaluation he received last year, and his complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado stakes that treatment on his ethnicity. Campos has also been an outspoken critic of the legal-education industry and specifically of what he characterized in his lawsuit as the Boulder law school’s “reckless financial behavior,” which he says has made him “quite unpopular” with colleagues.
To Campos, who has written for The Chronicle, the retaliation he claims to have faced in recent years reflects a decade spent criticizing legal education from the inside, including on a blog he wrote from 2011 to 2015 called Inside the Law School Scam, and pointing out in faculty meetings what he saw as financial mismanagement at his home institution.
That Campos is Latino only expands the “target on my back,” he told The Chronicle. “If you are a whistleblower, naturally it makes you unpopular in a variety of ways. But if you’re nonwhite and also a whistleblower, that’s kind of two strikes against you,” Campos said. “I think my own experience indicates the extent to which my white colleagues are willing to put up with criticism about the basic finances of the institution from a nonwhite colleague. And the answer is they’re pretty much not.”
But others say Campos’s history of disparaging his industry and his own institution has damaged his reputation and, in turn, made his lawsuit difficult to take seriously.
In May 2022, Campos alleges, he received an unusually low grade — three out of five — for his performance in the previous calendar year. Just 2.3 percent of law faculty received a rating that low over a four-year period, Campos alleges in his complaint. That rating came from a peer-review committee that makes recommendations on evaluations to the dean, Lolita Buckner Inniss. It came as a surprise to Campos, who wrote in a blog post that he’d had a particularly successful year in both publishing and service (Campos did not teach in 2021, having been on parental leave during one semester and on sabbatical for the other).
When Campos asked the reason for the low rating, the chair of the review committee, Pierre Schlag, did not provide an answer, according to Campos’s complaint. Nor did Inniss. In a meeting, Campos told her he believed his rating had been influenced by racial bias and his reputation as a critic of the law school’s financial management, and asked Inniss to independently evaluate his performance.
If you are a whistleblower, naturally it makes you unpopular in a variety of ways. But if you’re nonwhite and also a whistleblower, that’s kind of two strikes against you.
Inniss refused, he said, although university policy would have allowed her to do so. In that conversation, Campos told The Chronicle, Inniss said she hadn’t been at the university long enough to evaluate his performance — she arrived at Boulder in July 2021 — and that she was sure the law school “isn’t the kind of place” that would discriminate against him based on his ethnicity.
Schlag, the review-committee chair, and Inniss did not respond to requests for comment, nor did other members of the review committee contacted by The Chronicle. The university recently became aware of Campos’s lawsuit and “must review it and determine the appropriate course of action,” a spokesperson wrote in an email, saying the institution was unable to comment further.
‘Not Afraid of Litigation’
When Campos told Inniss he was considering legal action, he added, she replied that she was “not afraid of litigation.” From there, in Campos’s telling, the retaliation escalated. Inniss removed him from the law school’s evaluations committee, citing “your recent communications with me regarding your concerns with the law-school evaluation process and your indication of possible litigation,” according to an email quoted in Campos’s complaint. Campos was also removed from teaching a property-law course in the spring of 2023, on grounds that he’d made “racially offensive and gender-biased” comments in class the previous year. (Campos said the university hasn’t provided evidence that he did so and that a thorough review of video recordings of his classes showed he had not.)
Campos said his history of being discriminated against at Boulder stretches back further. According to the complaint, a university-pay study in 2021 found that he was being underpaid relative to his white colleagues, by $13,756 each year. That discrepancy is even more pronounced, Campos’s lawsuit says, because he is the most-senior law faculty member without an endowed professorship.
Among those leery of Campos’s lawsuit is Brian Leiter, a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Chicago and a frequent commentator on law-school happenings. In a post on his own blog Monday, Leiter called Campos’s discrimination claims “weak” and his allegations of retaliation “not much stronger.” The former, he said, are undercut by the fact that Inniss is Black and the law school’s previous dean was Native American.
“But the real question,” he told The Chronicle, “is whether there is a nondiscriminatory explanation for how the school is treating him. It seems to me there’s a pretty obvious one, which is that he’s not doing a lot of legal scholarship.” Instead, Leiter said, Campos has published books on obesity and the experience of being a sports fan.
“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a lot of law professors who have a favorable impression of him,” Leiter said of Campos. “The general view is he’s kind of opportunistic. He likes to be in the limelight, he likes to be in the newspapers, he likes to attract attention to himself.”
Higher-ed unions had their most active academic year in recent memory. A series of strikes led to changes that graduate students and faculty members touted as big wins: better wages, more benefits, and improved working conditions.
The work stoppages, which often lasted weeks, disrupted campuses. Many graduate students and faculty weren’t teaching their classes; in some cases, final exams and grades were delayed. Things got so bad in New Jersey, for instance, that the governor felt the need to step in and mediate between the state’s flagship public university and its faculty union in hopes of staving off a court battle.
The conflicts stemmed from a convergence of trends in higher education and the broader U.S. economy. Among them are colleges’ growing reliance on contingent faculty and a cutthroat academic job market, as well as soaring living costs and a burgeoning labor movement.
Here’s a rundown of six institutions where strikes this past year resulted in pay raises for graduate students and faculty members.
University of California
A standoff across the University of California system went on for six weeks, from early November to late December. The UC strike of 48,000 graduate students, postdocs, and researchers, the largest in higher-ed history, proved influential — and prompted even more union activity on campuses this spring.
After a 40-day work stoppage, the unions secured base pay increases ranging from 55 to 80 percent for academic employees and 25 to 80 percent for graduate-student researchers. For example, for a first-year teaching assistant, the minimum annual salary will increase to $36,000 from $25,000 by 2024. However, some student workers have argued that the cost of living near many UC campuses remains significantly higher than those minimums.
“Our members stood up to show the university that academic workers are vital to UC’s success,” said Ray Curry, then-president of the United Auto Workers, which represents the grad students and postdocs, in a statement. “They deserve nothing less than a contract that reflects the important role they play and the reality of working in cities with extremely high costs of living.”
The New School
Shortly after UC graduate students and postdocs walked off the job, so did part-time faculty at The New School, a private liberal-arts university in New York City. About 90 percent of the institution’s faculty are adjuncts or lecturers.
New School faculty said their wages hadn’t kept up with inflation for years. Classes came to a standstill. Students occupied the university center. Parents threatened a lawsuit over the disruptions.
The union reached a five-year deal three weeks later with the university. In the first year, some of the lowest-paid adjuncts will see their pay go up by about a third.
For a faculty member teaching studio or lab courses that add up to 90 contact hours — a measure of time spent in the classroom with students — minimum pay will increase to nearly $13,000, from about $8,600, by fall 2026. Instructors will also be paid for their out-of-classroom work; the stipend will start at $400 per course and rise to $800.
University of Illinois at Chicago
In January, faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago fought for increased wages and more job security. After a six-day strike, the contract was ratified.
The minimum salary for nontenured faculty increased to $60,000 from $51,000; for tenured faculty, the minimum salary rose to $71,500 from $60,000. Union members also received a one-time bonus of $2,500 to adjust for inflation.
Faculty also lobbied for increased mental-health support and free psychological testing for students. As a result of bargaining, the university has promised to create a strategic plan focused on mental health.
Eastern Illinois University
After the University of Illinois at Chicago’s strike came a work stoppage at Eastern Illinois University. Unions at five of the state’s public colleges went on strike this academic year.
The Eastern Illinois union is made up of around 450 workers, including professors and academic advisors. Students picketed alongside instructors in solidarity.
After a six-day strike, faculty received a 15-percent raise in pay over four years and, for the first time, paid parental leave.
Temple University
At Temple University, in Philadelphia, a bitter fight dragged on for six weeks. It started with a walkout in late January by the Temple University Graduate Students’ Association, which represents about 750 student workers and research assistants.
After a week of disruption, the university said it would take away tuition and health-care benefits from the striking students. By mid-March, the sides came to an agreement.
The new four-year contract standardized pay across fields and will increase graduate students’ minimum salary to $27,000, from the current range of $19,292 to $20,840, by the fall of 2025. The university also agreed to improve parental and bereavement leave, and to start a committee to review student workloads.
Rutgers University
Roughly 9,000 instructors at Rutgers went on strike in mid-April for the first time in the university’s history. Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, was so concerned about how the strike could affect the university’s nearly 70,000 students that he called both sides to the state capital for a “productive dialogue.” The strike ended after five days.
Adjunct professors came away with a 43-percent raise. Graduate students saw their pay go up by more than a third. They were also guaranteed five years of funding.
“In important ways — especially in confronting precarity and poverty wages in higher education — we have set a new standard,” the union said in a statement.
At the annual conference of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education in Baltimore last week, faculty members, staff, and administrators gathered to learn from one another, commiserate, and strategize.
Lawmakers in at least 19 states have introduced bills in the current legislative sessions that would restrict colleges’ efforts to improve diversity, equity, or inclusion, with six states proposing to ban DEI offices or staff altogether. Those advancing the bills argue that the administrations working to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion are discriminatory and a waste of taxpayer dollars, and that they inhibit academic freedom.
There were numerous signs at the conference that business was not as usual.
One audience member received a warm round of applause after introducing himself as working at a college in Florida. A session titled “Slow-Burn Tactical Hell: Doing DEI Work During Situational and Prolonged Crisis Mode” promised practical advice. One keynote speaker, Ijeoma Oluo, who writes and speaks about race, urged the audience to celebrate small victories even while under attack. And one session — closed to the media — focused on how to reclaim the narrative around the framing of diversity, equity, and inclusion in education.
What does it mean to work in a diversity, equity, and inclusion office on a college campus in 2023? The Chronicle spoke with four administrators at the conference, working in red and blue states, at public and private institutions, both two-year and four-year colleges, from early on in their careers in diversity, equity, and inclusion to the more well-established, about what they do and what they’re thinking about at this critical time in their field.
Emilio Solano
In some ways, Emilio Solano, assistant provost for institutional equity and community engagement at Willamette University, has come far from his first jobs as an eighth-grade history and English teacher and later, assistant high-school principal. But Solano has also wound up right where he began, returning to his hometown of Salem, Oregon.
Solano, who is in his first year as assistant provost, views his role as that of a quarterback and coordinator for all things diversity, equity, and inclusion at Willamette, a private, liberal-arts college with 1,236 undergraduate students, of whom 63 percent are white. In the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, 73 percent of tenure-track faculty are white, 24 percent are people of color, and 4 percent unknown; among those hired since 2016, 79 percent are people of color.
Solano recently created a website for the Office of Institutional Equity, an office of one. “The office is me,” Solano says, laughing, “and I’m very real with that.”
André Chung for The Chronicle
Emilio Solano.
Willamette recently undertook a strategic-planning process; one goal was to formalize the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Solano is proud of getting the University DEI Committee off the ground and says he’s already seeing departments come together to talk about common challenges such as faculty retention or recruitment. “It’s neat to see, like, the law school and the art school talking to each other [to say] let’s meet on the side and let’s brainstorm because we’re going through the same thing right now,” Solano says.
Solano says that much of his work is “not always super visible” to students, staff, or faculty. The diversity committee, for example, spent four months defining diversity, equity, and inclusion and figuring out what the terms mean in the context of Willamette. But Solano said that work has helped to get everyone at the university on the same page about goals and language, laying a critical foundation for the work ahead.
Among the priorities at the top of Solano’s list is thinking about how the university can expand its work with local tribal communities. For example, one faculty member who has built a strong relationship with the Grand Ronde, a federally recognized Native American tribe, including curating art from the tribe at the college’s art museum and teaching about Indigenous studies, will be retiring soon, so Solano has been trying to figure out how to keep Willamette’s partnership going and fill the gap in the curriculum.
Solano is also looking forward to getting the results of the university’s recent campus-climate survey, the institution’s first since 2019, which asked students, faculty, and staff about their perceptions of the campus climate, including experiences of discrimination and harassment. He’s also started thinking about how the university should measure its success in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and whether to focus on goals related to admissions or retention of faculty and staff, or financial aid, for example.
When Solano was thinking about whether to take the job, he was warned that most people burn out in such roles after two or three years. “They do something different because they either realize there’s too much to do or the institution doesn’t feel supportive of them, and so they leave,” Solano says. “They realize that they were promised something that is impossible to do.”
For now, though, Solano is holding on to his belief that institutions can change for the better, to help more students reach their full potential.
Andrea Abrams
As an anthropology professor, Andrea Abrams has taught courses on cultural diversity, race, and gender at Centre College in Danville, Ky., which has 1,320 undergraduate students, 72 percent of whom are white. Five years ago, during a sit-in protesting the way the college handled incidents of racial discrimination, students demanded, among other things, an office to oversee diversity and inclusion. Administrators asked Abrams to serve as an interim vice president to the new office.
Abrams saw it as a good opportunity to apply the theory she had been teaching in anthropology and took the job, intending to stay only until the college had found a permanent hire. But she found the job so rewarding — and challenging — that she decided to stay, while continuing to serve as an associate professor of anthropology.
Today, as vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion, Abrams oversees an office with four other staff members. Together they train faculty and staff to create a more inclusive environment, for example, by offering workshops on how to make classrooms more inclusive for neurodiverse and differently abled students and how to help international students feel a sense of belonging. They also handle cultural and social-justice programming for the college, and run the programming for students who want to work in diversity, equity, and inclusion or conduct research in the field. The office also coordinates a half day each November dedicated to helping students, faculty, and staff learn about different perspectives, which includes workshops on talking across political differences and dealing with racial trauma, panels on the experiences of LGBTQ students, and classes on hip-hop dance and making kimchi.
André Chung for The Chronicle
Andrea Abrams.
“My job is to make sure that Centre is actually a more diverse place,” says Abrams. That includes ensuring diversity in hiring and making sure that policies are fair, for example.
Abrams has been watching the attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion at colleges around the country with concern. She recognizes that, as someone at a private college, and with the protection of a Democratic governor (albeit in a mainly red state), she has advantages that some of her counterparts across the country do not. Still, she fears the attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion will hurt all of their work.
“The point seems to be to vilify diversity, equity, inclusion, to say that it is inherently unequal because you’re privileging a certain group,” Abrams says. If some states succeed in eliminating DEI offices at public universities, she says, there will be a chilling effect at all kinds of institutions.
Even at private institutions, Abrams says, improving diversity, equity, and inclusion takes constant effort. “It’s still work. There’s still a struggle to get everyone to believe that it’s important, that diversity actually matters, that efforts toward inclusion are, in fact, equitable and necessary.”
To Abrams, the current attacks are evidence that those efforts have been working, and that college campuses are more diverse and more equitable today than they used to be. More equity, she says, means more sharing of resources and opportunities. Those who used to be able to keep those resources and opportunities to themselves have fewer privileges now and they’re resentful that the privileges they used to take for granted are no longer there, Abrams says. Those changes — coupled with the country’s demographic changes — have sparked the current backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion work on college campuses, Abrams believes.
Abrams says her field was caught off guard by how quickly the attacks have come, how quickly they have escalated, and how coordinated the assault has been. She worries about the damage that can be done if those critics get their way. But she also senses a renewed sense of commitment among her colleagues to their work, and a resolve to push back.
So much good work has already been done to make college a welcoming place for people of all kinds of backgrounds, Abrams says. She hopes it will be enough to keep the current attacks from taking hold.
Ricardo Nazario-Colón
Ricardo Nazario-Colón, chief diversity officer at Western Carolina University, says that there is a misconception that he and his colleagues in diversity, equity, and inclusion offices on college campuses across the country only serve certain kinds of students. “If a student comes to my office or any of my colleagues’ offices, regardless of the background of that student, we will provide services to that student,” Nazario-Colón says. “There is no administrator in higher ed who would say oh, I can’t help you — my job description says that I cannot work with you or my job description doesn’t serve you.”
There’s a lot out there that’s being challenged with really no understanding of the impact that these decisions are making.
“That is a false narrative,” says Nazario-Colón.
Nazario-Colón became the first person to serve as chief diversity officer at Western Carolina, a public university with 10,145 undergraduate students, 77 percent of whom are white, in Cullowhee, N.C., close to seven years ago. In May, he will begin a new position as senior vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and inclusion and chief diversity officer for the State University of New York system.
André Chung for The Chronicle
Ricardo Nazario-Colón.
Reflecting on his time at Western Carolina, Nazario-Colón says that he and the university have grown together. Today, it’s second nature at the institution to consider the implications related to diversity, equity, and inclusion in decision-making, rather than thinking of them as competing interests. “The individuals that come to that institution understand that this is a value of the institution,” he says.
Nazario-Colón sees himself as a guide, helping people figure out how diversity, equity, and inclusion manifest themselves in their areas of work, rather than telling them what they should do. Recently, for example, the university completed its first strategic inclusive-excellence action plan, part of the university’s broader strategic plan. The action plan includes goals around equity, access, and success; climate and belongingness; curriculum and scholarship; infrastructure and commitments; and community and partnerships, with goals and measurable outcomes for each. “I may have been the bus driver on this, but really it took members from across campus and the support of senior leadership to be able to accomplish that,” he says.
Nazario-Colón believes the very identity of the United States is at stake in the current debate over diversity, equity, and inclusion. He says that those who oppose the work of DEI offices on college campuses don’t realize the broad spectrum of students they serve, including first-generation college students, students with disabilities, and students who receive Pell Grants. “There’s a lot out there that’s being challenged with really no understanding of the impact that these decisions are making.”
Unnamed, from a Tennessee community college
One DEI administrator, who works in compliance at a community college in Tennessee, agreed to speak with a reporter on the condition that her name not be used, because she was worried about the potential impact on her job.
“There is a definite fear,” she says. She even questioned whether she should attend the Nadohe conference this year because she worried about the potential ramifications of going to a convening with the word “diversity” in the title.
So much of what we deal with is hard, emotional, time-consuming. You have to have a degree of empathy to reflect the entire student body and faculty and staff. That passion is a requirement to do the job.
Last week, Tennessee’s General Assembly, which drew attention recently for expelling two of its Black members for participating in a gun-control protest, gave final legislative approval on a bill that would allow students and employees to report alleged violations of a divisive-concepts law adopted the previous year. That law states that students and employees may not be penalized for declining to support certain divisive concepts, such as that one race or sex is inherently superior or inferior to another or that an individual by virtue of their race or sex is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive.
The current bill, which would allow reports of potential violations, would require institutions to investigate each report and create corrective action plans for any violations. The bill would also require employees whose primary or secondary job duties or job title includes diversity, equity, or inclusion to strengthen and increase intellectual diversity and individual liberty among those with divergent points of view and allocate at least 50 percent of their duties to supporting the academic success of students eligible for Pell Grants.
Tennessee lawmakers have also introduced bills this year that would end mandatory implicit bias training and prohibit public colleges offering health care-related degrees from requiring diversity, equity, and inclusion training or education as a condition of admission or graduation.
Some of the DEI administrator’s colleagues have been discussing whether to try to scrub the word diversity from job titles and department names to protect their work.
If she were younger and just starting out in the field, or lacked the support of family and friends, she would probably be looking for opportunities in the private sector. “No one is in higher education for the money,” she says.
“The work is too hard to not be committed to it,” she says. “So much of what we deal with is hard, emotional, time-consuming. You have to have a degree of empathy to reflect the entire student body and faculty and staff. That passion is a requirement to do the job.”
Thousands of instructors at Rutgers University joined a national surge in union activity on Monday, becoming the fifth currently active strike on a college campus.
Three unions representing roughly 9,000 educators, researchers, and clinicians announced the strike on Sunday after nearly a year of contract negotiations. The strike will disrupt classes for Rutgers’ nearly 70,000 students across three campuses.
Union leadership is asking its members to join the picket line and refuse to conduct teaching, research, and other business at Rutgers, according to the largest of the three unions on strike. Strikers are still permitted to complete certain responsibilities, like writing letters of recommendation for students.
“By exercising our right to withhold our labor, we will prove to the administration that WE are the university,” the union, Rutgers American Association of University Professionals-American Federation of Teachers, wrote in a letter to its members.
The standoff has put a harsh spotlight on Jonathan Holloway, the Rutgers president. Holloway drew pushback for initially suggesting that his administration would seek a court order to stop the strike and force a “return to normal activities.”
The Rutgers administration walked back that threat on Monday after a meeting with New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, according to Rutgers spokesperson Dory Devlin.
Murphy “asked us to delay taking legal action asking the courts to order strikers back to work so that no further irreparable harm is caused to our students and to their continued academic progress,” Devlin wrote in an email. “We agreed to his request to refrain from seeking an injunction while it appears that progress can be made.”
A labor expert said turning to the courts amid a strike might make the situation worse. “One thing that injunctions can cause is it can actually exacerbate the conflict as opposed to hoping to resolve the conflict,” said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College in the City University of New York.
Holloway is a scholar of African American studies and history. An open letter from over 40 prominent historians of labor and African American history — including Ibram X. Kendi, a professor at Boston University and the founder of the Center for Antiracist Research — had called on Holloway to rescind his threat of an injunction. The letter also voiced support for the striking workers.
“We know that as an expert in African American history, you have thought deeply about how struggles for racial justice have consistently been aligned with the demands for jobs, labor rights, and democracy in the workplace,” the letter stated.
Holloway expressed his frustration with the strike in a letter to the campus community on Sunday. “To say that this is deeply disappointing would be an understatement, especially given that just two days ago, both sides agreed in good faith to the appointment of a mediator to help us reach agreements,” Holloway wrote.
Rutgers is facing financial woes, and Holloway said in February that the university would have to remedy a $125-million shortfall over the next three years.
In a message to students and faculty about the strike, Rutgers wrote that it was “committed to ensuring that our more than 67,000 students are unaffected by the strike and may continue their academic progress.” Rutgers plans to continue classes and distribute grades and expects employees to report to work. The issue is a pressing one as the end of the semester looms, with finals and grades coming soon.
Rutgers officials wrote that employees who engage in the strike “are subject to a loss of pay and/or benefits, and other sanctions as they may apply or as the court deems appropriate.”
There is no state law that prohibits public-sector workers from striking in New Jersey, Herbert said, adding that Holloway’s argument relied on common law, or legal precedent from the courts, which have intervened in strikes from public workers in the past.
“Although there is no state statute that bars strikes, in some instances, courts in New Jersey have issued injunctions against walkouts by public employees,” the Rutgers AAUP-AFT wrote on its website. “An injunction may require public employees to end a strike and return to work. The University administration would have to petition a court for an injunction.”
The strike comes after 94 percent of members of two of the unions — representing primarily full- and part-time faculty and graduate workers — voted to authorize a strike in March.
We’ve been bargaining for 10, 11 months — got virtually no response to any of our proposals, and when we did, they were paltry. They were insulting.
The unions’ bargaining demands include increased pay to keep up with inflation for graduate workers, better job security for part-time lecturers, and more affordable housing for university community members.
Rutgers officials have offered salary increases for faculty, postdocs, and graduate employees, but union leaders say the raises aren’t good enough.
The university’s proposal would provide across-the-board 12-percent pay increases for full-time faculty by July 1, 2025; 3 percent in lump-sum payments to all the faculty unions to be paid out over the first two years of the new contract; a 20-percent increase in the per-credit salary rate for part-time lecturers over the four years of the contract; a 20-percent increase in the minimum salary for postdocs in four years; and higher wages for graduate assistants and teaching assistants.
“The offers that they’re presenting still aren’t enough to guarantee a living wage for the people who are most essential, one could argue, to the successful operation of the university,” said Manu Chander, an associate professor of English at Rutgers’ Newark campus and the president of the Newark chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT.
Chander said he’s on strike to improve conditions for adjunct faculty and graduate employees, whom he described as the most vulnerable workers.
Kyle Riismandel, an associate professor of history and American studies at Rutgers and the vice president of the Newark chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, said the picket line drew a large crowd on Monday.
“We’ve been bargaining for 10, 11 months — got virtually no response to any of our proposals, and when we did, they were paltry,” Riismandel said. “They were insulting.”
In an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos criticized administrative bloat at Stanford University, writing that the institution “employs more administrators than it enrolls undergrads.” DeVos’s commentary, which takes aim at Stanford’s handling of false sexual-assault accusations made by a student, repeats a sentiment that’s circulated in many publications in recent months. The Free Press, for instance, noted that Stanford has nearly enough administrators “for each student to have their own personal butler.”
That eye-popping claim capitalizes on a frequent criticism of higher ed: that it relies on an ever-increasing tally of administrative staff whose duties are of dubious value, whose often heavy-handed decisions tend to lead to controversy, and whose presence on the nation’s campuses is driving up the cost of college.
DeVos’s numbers are correct: Stanford enrolled 7,645 undergraduates in the fall of 2021 and employed 8,800 full-time staff members outside of its medical school who didn’t have teaching as a primary duty according to data it reported to the Department of Education. But the numbers also ignore several layers of nuance, one expert says. (While Stanford offered the data, university officials did not respond to a request for comment; the Department of Education referred The Chronicle to a 2022 statement about proposed changes in Title IX guidance.)
Undergraduate education is only a part of what they do.
For one thing, Stanford, like many highly selective research institutions, isn’t focused on only the undergraduate experience. “A lot of people don’t understand how a large research university functions, and especially these super-elite ones that have small undergraduate populations,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “But even in your big public flagships, undergraduate education is only a part of what they do. There’s a lot of graduate education and a lot of research, and that’s where a lot of the staff and administrators are.”
That’s true of Stanford, which in the fall of 2022 had 10,035 graduate students and devoted $1.82 billion to externally funded research projects, including its Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which employed 1,700 people in 2021-22.
Data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or Ipeds, doesn’t account for those differences, making it difficult to discern which administrators are working directly with undergraduates or with graduate students or on external research projects. In the fall of 2021 — the most recent data available through Ipeds — Stanford’s payroll included 9,201 full-time staff members outside of the medical school, 8,800 of whom didn’t have teaching as a primary duty. That number has increased by 35 percent in the past decade.
Included in that total were 294 research staff members and 1,011 people in “management occupations,” which can include chief executives and managers in fund raising, facilities, computer systems, and more, according to the government classification system Ipeds uses. Stanford also employed 1,173 people in “computer, engineering, and science occupations,” a category that includes such positions as customer-support specialists, web developers, architectural drafters, and life-, physical-, and social-science technicians. The university had 703 employees in “office and administrative support occupations,” and — the largest category of staff members — 2,725 people working in business and financial operations. That category can include business managers, project managers, and accountants, Kelchen said. “A lot of what used to be considered just purely staff secretarial support, they’ve moved into this ‘business and financial operations,’” he said. “For example, anything with HR is there; compliance; anyone who touches finance, essentially.”
DeVos’s column highlights how administrative staffing numbers can easily be turned into grist for a wide variety of criticism. The former secretary, who during her tenure sought to strengthen rules protecting the rights of students accused of sexual assault, wrote about a case at Stanford in which an employee in its housing department was charged with filing false reports of rape. The university spent more than $300,000 on an investigation and improving security measures in the wake of initial claims, which were also part of the impetus for a campus protest. The situation, DeVos wrote, was “complicated by the incessant buildup of nonteaching bureaucrats.”
Other voices in higher ed have complained about the influence of administrators, but for different reasons. Some professors, for instance, protested Hamline University administrators’ intervention after an art-history lecturer showed a painting of the Prophet Muhammad in an online class (the lecturer’s contract was not renewed; Hamline’s president announced her retirement on Monday). One faculty member wrote in The Chronicle about her “cartoonish cancellation” by University of Michigan administrators when she became the subject of an equity-office investigation there. Meanwhile, some say the proliferation of administrative staff is necessary — because students clamor for more mental-health services, for example.
In addition to student demand, risk-management and legal concerns can drive some of the growth in administrative positions. Kelchen pointed out that Stanford’s Title IX website lists 20 employees, two of whom are students. “We could have a discussion about whether they should have five or 50″ employees in that office, he said. “But even if they have 50, it’s a small percentage of their staff.”
The educational-services industry — a category that includes graduate students, faculty members, and undergraduates as well as K-12 staff — accounted for the majority of workers involved in labor stoppages in 2022, according to the Worker Institute at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
According to the 2022 Cornell-ILR Labor Action Tracker Annual Report, 60.4 percent of all workers who went on strike last year were part of the educational-services industry. This resulted in a total of more than 2.5 million strike days, the most of any industry.
A significant factor in education workers’ large showing can be attributed to one strike: the work stoppage at the University of California’s 10 campuses last fall, said Eli Friedman, associate professor and chair of international and comparative labor at Cornell’s ILR school, and an author of the report. That strike included roughly 48,000 workers, most of them graduate students, and lasted for almost six weeks. Its organizing union described it as the largest work stoppage at any higher-education institution in history.
Friedman said the UC strike certainly skewed the 2022 data, but it still represents what’s happening in labor movements nationally.
“The scale [of the UC strike] skews the numbers a little bit, but in terms of looking at the underlying dynamics, I don’t think we’re getting a misread of the labor movement or of labor conditions specifically in higher education by including what’s happening in California, because I think it actually does reflect these broader trends,” he said.
The Cornell analysis is based on a variety of public sources and collects data on both work stoppages and other labor actions. It groups K-12 and higher-ed workers under the category of “educational services industry.” Friedman said that without the UC strike, K-12 movements would likely make up the majority of labor activity in the educational-services industry because K-12 employs more people than higher education does.
Overall, education and health care are driving labor activity in the U.S. Friedman said this is because they are two industries that have had success with forming unions, which are losing ground in the private sector.
“The public sector has become the core of the labor movement,” he said.
Friedman predicts that higher education will see much more labor activity in the coming year, similar to what Starbucks experienced in 2022. As more graduate students unionize, like employees of the popular coffee giant did, they will form collective-bargaining units and begin to negotiate contracts. Strikes typically occur once contract negotiations have stalled.
And at Temple University, striking graduate students recently voted overwhelmingly to reject a tentative agreement to end their three-week-old walkout on the Philadelphia campus.
Last year’s labor activity included a 52-percent increase in work stoppages relative to 2021, though the report’s authors noted this activity was still lower than earlier periods, like the 1970s, and falls short of recent increases documented by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2018 and 2019.
Risa L. Lieberwitz, professor of labor and employment law at Cornell’s ILR school and academic director of the Worker Institute, said labor activity on college campuses in the past year has been notable because of the large numbers of people participating in work stoppages and the wide range of workers involved.
Lieberwitz, who also serves as general counsel for the American Association of University Professors, said the Covid-19 pandemic brought attention to job security and working conditions in higher education, which spurred labor-organizing efforts. Another, and somewhat less recent, factor she pointed to was the 2016 National Labor Relations Board ruling that allowed graduate students at a private institution, Columbia University, to unionize. And longer-term changes, like the widespread decrease in tenure-track faculty, also set the conditions that unionization efforts responded to, she said.
Generational shifts in opinion about organized labor are another factor in the recent uptick in unionizing activity, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, in New York City.
“People are now seeing unionization as the best mechanism for improving their working conditions, whether they are on campus or off campus,” he said.
In a 2021 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 69 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 said unions have a positive effect on the country. Herbert said this generational shift has increased unionization efforts across many industries, and that the pandemic also helped drive that growth in organizing across higher education.
Herbert said that unlike private companies, most universities have abstained from union-prevention activities in recent years. Some institutions, including the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, have neutrality policies regarding their position on unionization efforts.
According to data from the National Center at Hunter, the number of graduate assistants represented by a union went up by over 10,000 people in 2022.
Herbert attributed some of the rapid growth in higher-education labor movements to undergraduates, namely resident assistants and dining staff, who chose to unionize.
The provost of Metropolitan State University of Denver is stepping down after the institution’s Board of Trustees put on hold a plan to reduce faculty workload that he’d advocated.
Faculty members at MSU-Denver had for decades talked about cutting down workloads, not simply the teaching load, and Alfred W. Tatum saidthat he’d “embraced” the project “as my supreme charge as provost.” Under a proposal backed by Tatum and the Faculty Senate, most tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty members would go from teaching four classes per semester to three, without an accompanying increase in research or service expectations, beginning this fall. The goal of the proposal was to enable the faculty to “maintain the vitality of its programs while affording faculty the time to think innovatively to revise academic programs when warranted to best serve the needs and aspirations of traditional, non-traditional, and transfer students,” Tatum wrote.
But concerns about the plan’s long-term financial viability prompted MSU-Denver’s board to pause the plan, highlighting the tension between two pandemic-driven forces that have dominated higher ed in the past three years — faculty burnout and financial constraint.
The decision to delay the plan, months before it was set to go into effect, came as a shock to faculty and administrators, Colorado Public Radio reported. But the board thought it didn’t have adequate information to move forward, Kristin Hultquist, the vice chair, told The Chronicle. After hearing a presentation from Tatum in late January about how the plan would be rolled out — including the hiring of about 78 new faculty members at a cost of $7.4 million in the 2023 fiscal year — board members posed questions about its long-term financial implications and about whether the plan would impede MSU-Denver’s ability to pay faculty well.
“We reached the conclusion that we didn’t have, ourselves as a board, the level of information we needed to take this significant step,” Hultquist said. “So we asked our president, ‘Do you have the information you need to make a recommendation?’ And she told us, ‘Frankly, I don’t.’” Together, Hultquist said, the board and the university’s president, Janine A. Davidson, decided they needed more time and information.
‘Can We Afford It?’
The idea of reducing workload has been a goal for “close to 20 years,” Tatum wrote in the proposal. “This request hit a crescendo during the Covid-19 pandemic.” Hultquist acknowledged that the board knew that cutting workload was a “stated priority” of MSU-Denver’s Faculty Senate. “This is not a brand-new conversation for us. But what is important is that the strategic decision to extend this policy to all of our tenure and tenure-line faculty is really a significant budget question, and significant budget questions are the fiduciary responsibility of the board,” she said.
At the same time, she added, among the board’s priorities is ensuring that faculty members feel valued and that their concerns about workload and pandemic-induced fatigue are heard. “While we deeply understand and respect that this would be a good direction for our faculty and for our students, it’s, Can we afford it? How much can we afford, and what can we afford now?” Hultquist said. She cited enrollment declines and low state funding — among states, Colorado had the second-lowest allocation of higher-education funding per student in 2021, according to federal data — as additional constraints on the institution’s budget.
In a memo on January 31, Davidson informed faculty members the plan was being delayed, noting the board believed it could have “critical implications for budget and mission.” That announcement was met with consternation from many who’d already begun planning fall schedules, CPR reported. But Hultquist said she’s also heard from faculty who favor the pause.
Davidson’s memo said that the board would discuss the issue at its fall retreat, though Hultquist said a decision could come sooner. “If we have the information we need before then, we’ll make a decision before then,” she said.
In the meantime, MSU-Denver faces the loss of Tatum, who commissioned a committee to explore the possibility of trimming faculty obligations shortly after his arrival in 2021. That group’s recommendations were approved by the Faculty Senate, and endorsed by Tatum, in March 2022. He had also earmarked about $3 million in faculty savings to put toward the plan’s $7.4-million cost.
Even in deciding to step down, Tatum threw his support behind the plan. “I am convinced that our students will be the beneficiaries, and the university could enact fiscal stewardships to honor the faculty’s decades-old request as we diversify our resources,” he said in a statement to The Chronicle. “I am convinced my university colleagues will ultimately move in this direction as they gather more fiscal certainty.”
Tatum, a scholar of literacy development in Black boys, will remain on the faculty, and he told The Chronicle he “could no longer resist my sacred calling to become a professor again.” Hultquist said she respected Tatum’s decision to step down. Marie Mora, the deputy provost, will serve as interim provost beginning March 16, according to a university statement.
Four faculty leaders said they’ll continue pushing for lesser workloads despite Tatum’s departure. In a statement to The Chronicle, these leaders vowed to “conduct the necessary data analysis and discussions to end the pause and move forward with an improved workload model,” said Meredith L. Jeffers, Liz Goodnick, Elizabeth Ribble, and Sheila Rucki. The four wrote in a statement earlier this week that a reduced teaching load “would provide faculty the opportunity to engage more deeply with their student-centered pedagogy and invest more time and energy in student interactions beyond the classroom, including activities related to recruitment and improving student retention.”
Colleges are facing challenges recruiting and retaining top talent in a pandemic-fueled employees’ market. But Virginia State University this month introduced a new strategy to set it apart from other institutions: It’s offering to help faculty and staff members buy a house.
The historically Black institution will use discretionary funds to match up to $10,000 toward employees’ down payment or closing costs on a home. The program, called the Home Assistance Payment Initiative, is open to current and incoming employees, who can use the money to purchase any home, townhouse, or condominium in the village of Ettrick, where the university is located, or the neighboring city of Petersburg, Virginia.
The idea of colleges helping employees pay for homes isn’t completely novel: The University of California system, for example, has a faculty recruitment allowance program, the amount of which is determined by the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. And the Virginia State effort is the latest that caters to staff members as well as faculty, joining institutions like the Johns Hopkins University and the Universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, though VSU’s program stands out for its dual emphasis on bolstering the local economy and enticing employees.
Colleges have adopted a range of strategies — like tweaking job listings and salary expectations, expediting the hiring process, and adding remote-work and flexible-scheduling perks — to stem recruitment and retention woes the past few years. In a “candidate’s market” that’s allowed prospective employees to be picky about their place of work, institutions have found themselves competing with one another and with the private sector for top talent. In a 2022 Chronicle survey, conducted with support from Huron Consulting Group, 84 percent of college leaders said hiring for administrative and staff jobs had been more difficult in the last year. Meanwhile, more than half of staff members who responded to a 2022 survey from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources said they’d consider leaving their job within a year.
Some institutions have in recent years taken steps to attract residents to their communities. Purdue University and West Virginia University have lured workers to their college towns, aiming to encourage economic revitalization. But those programs have targeted people outside higher education whose jobs were remote. Purdue, for instance, is offering some applicants a $5,000 stipend, plus housing discounts and access to campus facilities, to join a “remote-working community”; participants can choose to live anywhere in the greater Lafayette, Ind., area. And West Virginia’s program, geared toward outdoor enthusiasts, offers remote workers $12,000 and a year’s worth of free outdoor activities like skiing and rafting.
Our mindset is if people work in the community where they live and they shop, that would help the economy of those communities.
Virginia State hasn’t experienced particular problems with attrition, said Donald E. Palm, the university’s executive vice president and provost. Rather, the home-assistance program is intended as a “more proactive versus reactive” approach to a competitive job market. Including it in a recruitment package for new employees, Palm said, “does a lot to communicate to future faculty and staff members that we are investing in them.” He hopes it will help set Virginia State apart in in-demand faculty disciplines like computer science and business.
“At 5:00 every day, the majority of the employees of Virginia State hit Interstate 95 and head to other parts of Chesterfield, Richmond, other areas as well,” Williams Dandridge said. “Our mindset is if people work in the community where they live and they shop, that would help the economy of those communities.”
Virginia State leaders hope that faculty and staff members, many of whom rent property in the area, will be enticed by the prospect of home ownership, which could encourage longevity in their employment. Palm said the program’s announcement has already made a noticeable difference in morale. While administrators aren’t sure how many people will take advantage, employees and local realtors have already reached out for more specifics on the program, Williams Dandridge said.
There’s no set cap for how much money the university will put toward the program or when it will end, Williams Dandridge said, adding that the university’s president, Makola M. Abdullah, will make those decisions depending on demand. Participating employees will need to commit to staying at Virginia State for at least a year after buying their home — which must be their primary residence — and use a lender approved by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
More than 300 academic scientists from around the world are fighting a decision by the University of California at Los Angeles to suspend an award-winning faculty member without pay, ban her from campus, prohibit her from speaking to her students, and cut her off from a National Science Foundation grant she brought in.
The university isn’t saying why penalties were imposed on Priyanga Amarasekare, a tenured professor of ecology and evolutionary biology who’d recently been awarded two of the highest honors in her field.
Amarasekare has been prohibited by the university from talking about the campus proceedings that resulted in the sanctions. Contacted this week by The Chronicle, she declined comment.
But conversations with current and former students and faculty members both within and outside UCLA reveal a messy dispute over allegations of racial discrimination in the ecology department and retaliation against those who complain. According to information obtained by The Chronicle, some of Amarasekare’s critics had suggested that she was using a time of national racial unrest to further her own grievances and turn students against the department.
In an email list set up in 2020 for the department of ecology and evolutionary biology, she complained of being repeatedly passed over for promotions and leadership opportunities after drawing attention to discrimination that she says she and others had experienced in her department.
“All decision-making authority has been granted to a few white male professors,” Amarasekare, a native of Sri Lanka and one of two women of color with tenure in the department, wrote. The department is trying to combat racism, she concluded, “by rendering invisible the very individuals it purportedly wishes to protect.”
After learning of her suspension, some of the prominent ecologists who have recommended her for promotions at UCLA circulated a petition that was sent on Monday to Michael V. Drake, president of the University of California, Gene D. Block, chancellor of UCLA, and the University of California regents. The petition, signed by a worldwide assortment of ecologists and other scientists, most from the United States and Europe, said they were “deeply troubled” by what they considered the secretive nature of the actions taken against “a highly distinguished ecologist.”
A UCLA spokesman said, in an email on Tuesday, that the university could not comment on the specifics of Amarasekare’s case because of personnel processes and privacy laws. However, in a statement attributed to the university, he said that UCLA supports freedom of expression and doesn’t condone retaliation, and that it’s “committed to maintaining a diverse, inclusive, and respectful learning, teaching, and working environment for all members of our community.” When someone is accused of failing to uphold those values, the statement said, UCLA investigates the claim and takes appropriate action, if warranted.
What’s unclear is what kind of behavior would warrant her punishment: a one-year suspension without salary or benefits, a 20-percent salary cut for two years after that, and a ban from university facilities including her office, lab, and email. The university also removed her from an NSF grant that she has been using for lab experiments, some of which examine the effects of rising temperatures on the survival of insect species.
“This is the kind of punishment normally applied only to the most egregious wrongdoings such as scientific misconduct and Title IX violations,” the petition states.
“We do not know the details of the proceedings at UCLA, but some things are clear to us from the outside,” it says. “Dr. Amarasekare has long been denied significant advancement within her department, out of keeping with her contributions to the field. The high quality of her research is unquestioned, as recently formally affirmed through a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Robert H. MacArthur Award from the Ecological Society of America, the highest honor a scientist in her field can receive.”
In April, the university announced her MacArthur honor, which is given every other year to a midcareer ecologist for outstanding contributions to the field. A few months later, she’d been suspended.
The “exceptionally severe” sanctions have not only caused her financial stress, the petition said, but have halted valuable federally-funded research and destroyed time-sensitive experiments that could have yielded important information about the effects of climate change.
The main author of the petition was Peter Chesson, a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona who has recommended Amarasekare for several promotions at UCLA that she didn’t end up getting.
“I’ve been writing recommendations for her for years for good reason,” he said in an interview with The Chronicle. “Her work is outstanding. It’s pathbreaking.” He called her “one of UCLA’s star performers” and asked: “How can they destroy her life and career in this way and keep it all secret? It’s utterly appalling.”
Amarasekare’s suspension is particularly harmful for graduate students, Chesson said. “For students to suddenly lose their adviser and their ability to work is devastating,” he said. “ Suddenly, the person you’ve looked up to and admired is inexplicably removed.”
Two students who worked in her lab, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said they were shocked to receive word last July that their adviser had gone on leave. Their emails to her bounced and they were assigned to other advisers who didn’t have the same expertise that had drawn them to Amarasekare’s lab.
Students, they said, have experienced stress as well as significant setbacks in their research. The disruption occurred shortly before fellowship, postdoc, and graduate-school applications were due, hurting the career prospects of students who were counting on her letters of recommendation and mentorship.
In June 2020, Barney A. Schlinger, who was serving as interim chair of the ecology and evolutionary biology department at the time, circulated an email to members of the department announcing the creation of an email list “to express our opinions and ideas for how EEB can move forward in positive ways.” It was announced in the aftermath of the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer and shortly after UCLA ecology students had circulated a statement of support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
In an email to students, Schlinger said he hoped the site would be a place “where we can indeed listen, especially from those hurt, even if unintentionally, by any aspect of the EEB culture.”
Given the opportunity, Amarasekare didn’t hold back. In a copy of the lengthy August 2020 post that was shared with The Chronicle by a former member of the department, she said that for years she had complained about discrimination against minorities in recruitment, retention, and advancement at UCLA. “The department’s way of addressing the problem, which it has done with the knowledge and approval of the higher administration, is to take measures that essentially render me voiceless and invisible,” she wrote.
Schlinger did not respond to a request for comment. The Chronicle reached out to 18 of the 28 UCLA faculty members listed on the department’s website, including the current chair, Michael Alfaro. Of the few who responded, none were willing to be quoted.
Andy Dobson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, helped draft the petition protesting Amarasekare’s punishment. He too had been writing letters on her behalf for promotions she didn’t receive. He said he ran into her at an ecological association meeting and was shocked to hear of her suspension.
Amarasekare told him she was struggling with health problems and the stress, as a single parent of two school-age children, of having lost her salary and health insurance.
The petition asks the university “in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary” to lift the sanctions, compensate Amarasekare for “unnecessary infliction of hardship,” and help her recover her research program.
Daniel Pullin is the next president of Texas Christian U.
CHIEF EXECUTIVES Appointments Kim E. Armstrong,vice chancellor for student, equity, and community affairs at Arkansas State University-Three Rivers, has been named president of Clovis Community College, in California.
David Doré,president of campuses and executive vice chancellor for student experience and work-force development at Pima Community College, in Arizona, has been named chancellor of the Virginia Community College system.
David Guzick,senior vice president for health affairs at the University of Florida and president of UF Health, has been named president of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center at Shreveport.
Mirta Martin,former president of Fairmont State University, in West Virginia, has been named interim president of Ferrum College, in Virginia.
Calvin McFadden Sr., a former chief of student affairs at Norwalk Community College, in Connecticut, has been named president of Arkansas Baptist College.
Colin Neill, interim chancellor of Pennsylvania State University-Great Valley, has been named to the post permanently.
Art Pimentel,president of Woodland Community College, has been named president of Folsom Lake College, part of the Los Rios Community College District in California.
Daniel Pullin, dean of the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University, has been named president of the university.
Karen Riley,provost at Regis University, in Colorado, has been named president of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania. She will succeed William Behre, who plans to retire at the end of June.
Robert K. Vischer,interim president of the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, has been named to the post permanently.
Resignations David K. Balkin,president of Erie Community College of the State University of New York, has resigned after being suspended by the Board of Trustees.
Mark Biermann,president of Blackburn College, in Illinois, has stepped down due to health concerns.
Ted Raspiller,president of Brightpoint Community College, in Virginia, plans to resign in February.
Elwood Robinson,chancellor of Winston-Salem State University, part of the University of North Carolina system, plans to step down at the end of the semester.
Meredith Jung-En Woo, president of Sweet Briar College, in Virginia, plans to step down at the end of the 2023-24 academic year.
Retirements Clarence D. Armbrister, president of Johnson C. Smith University, in North Carolina, plans to retire in June.
Ronnie Green,chancellor of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, plans to retire in June.
CHIEF ACADEMIC OFFICERS Appointments Laurie Elish-Piper,dean of the College of Education at Northern Illinois University, has been named interim executive vice president and provost.
Katherine L. Gantz, interim provost and dean of faculty at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, has been named vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty.
Patrick Wolfe,dean of the College of Science and a professor of statistics and computer science at Purdue University at West Lafayette, has been named provost and executive vice president for academic affairs and diversity.
OTHER TOP ADMINISTRATORS Appointments Robert B. Ahdieh, dean of the School of Law at Texas A&M University, has been named the university’s vice president for professional schools and programs.
Nicole J. Johnson
Brandon A. Frye,vice president for student affairs at Stephen F. Austin State University, in Texas, has been named vice chancellor for student affairs at East Carolina University.
Nicole J. Johnson,dean of students and associate vice president for student affairs at Goucher College, in Maryland, has been named vice president for student life at Rhodes College, in Tennessee.
Todd Lineburger, associate vice president and special adviser for strategic-advancement communications at the Rutgers University Foundation, has been named vice president for communications and marketing at Muhlenberg College, in Pennsylvania.
DEANS Appointments Lisa R. Carter,vice provost for libraries and university librarian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has been named university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Thomas Dunne,deputy dean of students at Princeton University, has been named dean of students at Harvard University.
Levon Esters,associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion and of faculty affairs at Purdue University’s Polytechnic Institute and a professor of agricultural-sciences education, has been named dean of the Graduate School and vice provost for graduate education at Pennsylvania State University at University Park.
Catherine Heyman, an associate professor and associate dean of student affairs at Marshall B. Ketchum University’s Southern California College of Optometry, has been named dean of the School of Optometry at High Point University, in North Carolina.
Martha Hurley, chair and a professor in the department of criminal justice and security studies at the University of Dayton, has been named dean of the division of liberal arts, communication, and social sciences at Sinclair Community College, in Ohio.
Mary Loeffelholz, a former dean of the College of Professional Studies and a professor of English at Northeastern University, has been named dean of the School of Continuing Education at Cornell University.
Andy Morgan,associate vice president for student affairs at Indiana State University, has been named associate vice president and dean of students at Illinois State University.
Daniel J. Pack,dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, has been named dean of the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Baylor University, in Texas.
Steve Prudent,director of high-school partnerships and pathways at Bunker Hill Community College, has been named dean of admissions and early college at Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology, in Massachusetts.
Arturo P. Saavedra,chair of the department of dermatology at the University of Virginia and president and interim chief executive of the UVA Physicians Group, has been named dean of the School of Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University and executive vice president for medical affairs for the VCU Health System.
Nate Y. Sharp, head of the department of accounting in the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University at College Station, has been named dean of the college.
Anna Westerstahl Stenport, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York, has been named dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia.
Danelle Stevens-Watkins,associate vice president for research, diversity, and inclusion and a professor in the department of educational, school, and counseling psychology at the University of Kentucky, has been named acting dean of the College of Education.
OTHER ADMINISTRATORS Appointments Megan Callow,associate teaching professor in the department of English at the University of Washington, has been named the university’s inaugural director of writing.
Chris Emmanuel, deputy director of policy in the Executive Office of the Governor of Florida’s Office of Policy and Budget, has been named director of government relations at the University of Florida.
Susan Gross
Susan Gross,assistant vice president for enrollment management at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in New Jersey, has been named vice provost for enrollment management at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Ryan Hudes, associate dean of strategy, enrollment, and administration in the College of Communication and the Arts at Seton Hall University, in New Jersey, has been named senior associate dean of strategy, planning, and administration in its College of Human Development, Culture, and Media.
Keona Lewis, associate director of research and evaluation for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been named assistant provost for academic diversity and inclusion at the University of Notre Dame.
Fredrick Muyia Nafukho,senior associate dean of faculty affairs and a professor of educational administration and human-resources development at Texas A&M University at College Station, has been named vice provost for the Office of Academic Personnel at the University of Washington.
Renee Robinson, interim dean of the College of Communication and the Arts at Seton Hall University, in New Jersey, has been named vice dean of faculty affairs in the College of Human Development, Culture, and Media.
Kent Michael Smith, deputy director of the Madison Museum of Modern Art, in Wisconsin, has been named director of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University.
Brad L.R. Spielman, associate provost for student services at Des Moines Area Community College, in Iowa, has been named director of the Center for Academic Engagement at Guilford Technical Community College, in North Carolina.
Retirements Stephen Fain,chair of the Ignite campaign at the Florida International University Foundation, is retiring after more than 50 years at the university.
FACULTY Appointments Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. secretary of state and U.S. senator, has been named a professor of practice in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and a presidential fellow at Columbia World Projects.
ORGANIZATIONS Appointments Fanta Aw,vice president for undergraduate enrollment, campus life, and inclusive excellence at American University, in Washington, D.C., has been named executive director and chief executive of NAFSA: Association of International Educators.
DEATHS Russell Banks,an author who taught at New England College and Princeton University, among other institutions, died on January 8. He was 82.
Molly Corbett Broad, a former president of the University of North Carolina system, died on January 2. She was 81. Broad served as system president from 1997 to 2005 and was the first woman to lead the American Council on Education.
Jean Franco,a professor of Latin American studies who taught at Stanford University and Columbia University, died on December 14. She was 98.
Willard Gaylin, a co-founder of the Hastings Center with Daniel Callahan, died on December 30. He was 97. Gaylin also served as a professor of psychiatry and law at Columbia University’s Law School.
Stephanie Hammitt,the first female president of Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, in Minnesota, died on November 14. She was 60.
Albert Madansky, a professor in the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, died on December 8. He was 88.
Herbert Morris,a professor emeritus in the School of Law at the University of California at Los Angeles, died on December 14. He was 94.
Theresa A. Powell,vice president for student affairs at Temple University, died on January 2.
Georgia Clark Sadler,the U.S. Naval Academy’s first female instructor, died on November 30. She was 81.
Menahem Schmelzer,a former professor and chief librarian of the Jewish Theological Seminary, in New York, died on December 10. He was 88.
Meredith Smith,a former member of the admissions staff at Elon University, in North Carolina, died on November 27. She was 35.
Susan Smyth,dean of the College of Medicine and executive vice chancellor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, died on December 31. She was 57.
Claudine Gay will lead Harvard starting on July 1.
CHIEF EXECUTIVES Appointments Marshall Criser, a former chancellor of Florida’s university system, has been named the next president of Piedmont University, in Georgia. He replaces James Mellichamp, who announced his retirement in June.
Ron Darbeau,vice president for faculty affairs and academic operations at Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania, has been named chancellor of Pennsylvania State University at Altoona.
Claudine Gay, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard University, has been named president. She succeeds Lawrence Bacow and will be the university’s first Black president.
Naydeen González-De Jesús,executive vice president for student success at Milwaukee Area Technical College, has been named president of San Antonio College.
Jean Hernandez,who retired from Washington’s Edmonds College as president emeritus in 2017, has been named interim president of South Seattle College for the remainder of the academic year.
James N. Johnston,provost and vice president for academic affairs at Midwestern State University, in Texas, has been named chancellor of the Eastern New Mexico University system.
John B. King Jr.,president of the Education Trust and a former U.S. Department of Education secretary, has been named chancellor of the State University of New York system.
Elva LeBlanc,who has served as interim chancellor of Tarrant County College, in Texas, since Gene Giovannini’s resignation in June, has been named chancellor.
Charles Lepper,vice president for student affairs and enrollment management at Salt Lake City Community College since 2015, has been named president of Grand Rapids Community College. He succeeds Juan R. Olivarez, who has served as interim president since July.
Anne E. McCall,provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Xavier University of Louisiana, has been named president of the College of Wooster, in Ohio.
Pamela Monaco,vice president for academic and student affairs at Wilbur Wright College, has been named president of Ocean County College. She succeeds Jon H. Larson, who plans to retire next year.
Cathy Monteroso, interim provost and vice president for academic affairs at West Liberty University, has been named the university’s interim president. She will be the first woman to lead the West Virginia college and will assume the role on January 1.
Harriet Nembhard,dean of the University of Iowa’s College of Engineering, has been named the next president of Harvey Mudd College, in California. She will assume the role on July 1.
Amy Parsons, founding CEO of the e-commerce company Mozzafiato, LLC, has been named president of Colorado State University at Fort Collins. She succeeds Rick Miranda, who became interim president after Joyce McConnell’s departure in June.
Brian Pellinen,academic dean at Montserrat College of Art, in Massachusetts, has been named interim president. He will succeed Kurt T. Steinberg, who will leave in January to become chief operating officer of the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Mass.
Melanie Perreault,provost and executive vice president for academic and student affairs at Towson University, in Maryland, has been named interim president of the university. She will take office on February 1.
Kim Schatzel,president of Towson University since 2016, has been named president of the University of Louisville. She succeeds Lori Stewart Gonzalez, who has served as interim president since December 2021.
Linda Schott
Linda Schott,a former president of Southern Oregon University, has been named interim president of Texas A&M University at San Antonio. She succeeds Cynthia Teniente-Matson, who has been named president of San Jose State University.
Charles Seifert,a longtime professor and business-school dean at Siena College, has been named its president. Seifert replaces Chris Gibson, who plans to retire in May.
Jayda Spillers,vice chancellor for academics and student affairs at Northwest Louisiana Technical Community College, has been named chancellor.
T. Ramon Stuart,president of Clayton State University, in Georgia, has been named president of the West Virginia University Institute of Technology. He will assume the role on January 1.
Strom C. Thacker,dean of the faculty and vice president for academic affairs at Union College, in New York, has been named president of Pitzer College, in California.
Resignations Melanie Dixon,president of American River College, in California, will step down at the end of the semester.
Kay Ellis, vice president for administration and finance at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York, will step down at the end of the month.
Jennifer Raab, president of Hunter College of the City University of New York, will step down at the end of June.
Retirements Sean M. Decatur,president of Kenyon College since 2013, has been named president of the American Museum of Natural History. He will step down at the end of the month. Provost Jeff Bowman, who has served as acting president since July, will continue in that role.
Louise Pagotto,chancellor of Kapiʻolani Community College, in Hawaii, will retire on December 31.
Jennie Vaughan,chancellor of Ivy Tech Community College at Bloomington, plans to retire in May.
CHIEF ACADEMIC OFFICERS Appointments Peter Blitstein,interim provost and dean of faculty at Lawrence University since July, has been named to the post permanently.
Sean Burke,associate provost of Luther College, in Iowa, has been named provost and vice president for academic affairs at Alma College, in Michigan.
Anne D’Alleva, interim provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Connecticut, has been named to the post permanently.
Francis J. Doyle III,dean of Harvard University’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has been named provost at Brown University.
Resignations Alan Utter,provost and executive vice president for academic affairs and research at Arkansas State University, plans to step down at the end of the fall semester and return to the faculty. Todd Shields, the chancellor, will serve as acting provost.
OTHER TOP ADMINISTRATORS Appointments Michael Andreasen,senior vice president for university advancement at the University of Oregon, has been named vice chancellor for development at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He succeeds David Routh, who plans to step down at the end of the year.
David Go,a professor and chair of the department of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Notre Dame, has been named vice president and associate provost for strategic planning.
Mark J. Heil, interim vice president for finance and administration at Ohio University, has been named to the post permanently.
Jeremy P. Martin, chief of staff at the College of William & Mary, has been named the university’s vice president for strategy and innovation.
Joseph Morales,associate director of strategic initiatives and partnerships in the Office of Inclusive Excellence at the University of California at Irvine, has been named chief diversity officer at California State University at Chico.
Jared Mosley,interim vice president and director of athletics at the University of North Texas, has been named to the post permanently.
Grant Myers,dean of enrollment management at Tabor College, has been named vice president for enrollment management at Hesston College.
Cynthia Pickett,associate provost for diversity, equity, and inclusion at DePaul University, has been named presidential associate for inclusion and chief diversity officer at California Polytechnic State University at Pomona.
Scott Rabenold,vice president for development at the University of Texas at Austin, has been named senior vice president for university advancement and alumni relations at the University of Southern California.
Marshall Stewart
Marshall Stewart,chief engagement officer for the University of Missouri system and vice chancellor for extension and engagement at the University of Missouri at Columbia, has been named senior vice president for executive affairs, university engagement, and partnerships and chief of staff at Kansas State University.
Retirements Melody Bianchetto,vice president for finance at the University of Virginia, plans to retire in February.
Mark Lanier,assistant to the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, plans to retire in December 2023.
DEANS Appointments Rachel Clapp-Smith,interim dean of the College of Business at Purdue University Northwest, has been named to the post permanently.
Kelechi (K.C.) Ogbonna, interim dean of Virginia Commonwealth University School of Pharmacy since June, has been named to the post permanently.
Joseph M. Valenzano III,chair of the communications department at the University of Dayton, has been named dean of the communications school at Butler University, in Indiana. He replaces Brooke Barnett, who was promoted to provost and vice president for academic affairs.
Resignations Robert Shibley,dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo, plans to step down.
OTHER ADMINISTRATORS Appointments Nicki Webber Moore,vice president and director of athletics at Colgate University, has been named director of athletics and physical education at Cornell University.
Amy Overman,assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Elon University, has been named assistant provost for scholarship and creative activity.
Jay Pearson, an associate professor of public policy at Duke University, has been named the inaugural associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at its Sanford School of Public Policy.
Jonathan Tran,an associate professor and chair of religion in the College of Arts and Sciences at Baylor University, has been named an associate dean of the Honors College.
China L. Wilson,equity and civil-rights compliance specialist at the Maryland State Department of Education, has been named assistant dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Peabody Institute at the Johns Hopkins University.
ORGANIZATIONS Appointments Gov. Charlie Bakerof Massachusetts, a Republican, has been named president of the NCAA.
Marni Baker Stein,provost and chief academic officer at Western Governors University, has been named chief content officer at Coursera.
DEATHS Willard (Sandy) Boyd,president emeritus of the University of Iowa, died on December 13. He was 95. Boyd led the university from 1969 to 1981.
Charles Somerville Harris, who recently retired as executive vice president at Averett University, in Virginia, died on December 7. He was 71.
George C. Herring,author of America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 and a professor emeritus of history at the University of Kentucky, died on November 30. He was 86.
Henry Rosovsky,a former dean of the faculty of arts and sciences who also served as acting president of Harvard University, died on November 11. He was 95. Rosovsky was the first Jewish dean of the faculty and founder of the Center for Jewish Studies. He was also a key figure in the development of the Black studies program at the university.
Gaddis Smith, a professor emeritus of history at Yale University, died on December 2. He was 89.
Sunil Kumar, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the Johns Hopkins U., will be the next president of Tufts U.
CHIEF EXECUTIVES Appointments Kim Armstrong,vice chancellor for student, equity, and community affairs at Arkansas State University-Three Rivers, has been named president of Clovis Community College, in California.
Hector Balderas, attorney general for the state of New Mexico, has been named president of Northern New Mexico College.
Patrena B. Elliott,vice president for instruction and student-support services at Robeson Community College, has been named president of Halifax Community College. Both colleges are in North Carolina.
Carlos Hernandez, interim president of Sul Ross State University since June, has been named to the post permanently.
Sunil Kumar,provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the Johns Hopkins University, has been named president of Tufts University. He will succeed Anthony P. Monaco, who will step down next year.
Karen Lee,interim chancellor of Honolulu Community College, has been named to the post permanently.
Charles Lepper,vice president for student affairs and enrollment at Salt Lake City Community College, has been named president of Grand Rapids Community College.
Rosana Reyes,vice president for enrollment management and student affairs at Luzerne County Community College, in Pennsylvania, has been named president of Lamar Community College, in Colorado.
Charles F. Robinson,interim chancellor of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, has been named to the post permanently. He is the university’s first Black chancellor.
Cynthia Teniente-Matson,president of Texas A&M University at San Antonio, has been named president of San Jose State University.
Resignations Noelle E. Cockett,president of Utah State University since 2017, plans to step down in July 2023.
Kristina M. Johnson,president of Ohio State University since August 2020, plans to step down in May 2023.
Ashish Vaidya,president of Northern Kentucky University since 2018, plans to step down in December.
Retirements Cathleen McColgin,president of Herkimer County Community College, in New York, plans to retire next year.
CHIEF ACADEMIC OFFICERS Appointments Alison Del Rossi,a professor of economics at St. Lawrence University, has been named vice president and dean of academic affairs.
Julian Vasquez Heilig,dean of the College of Education at the University of Kentucky, has been named provost and vice president for academic affairs at Western Michigan University.
Meera Komarraju,provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, has been named provost and vice president for academic affairs at California State University at Northridge.
Catherine Lucey,vice dean of education and executive vice dean of the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, has been named executive vice chancellor and provost.
Ivan Pulinkala,interim provost and vice president for academic affairs at Kennesaw State University since July 2021, has been named to the post permanently.
Jennifer Rexford,chair of the department of computer science at Princeton University, has been named provost of the university.
Catherine Whelan,national dean of the School of Business at the University of Notre Dame Australia, has been named provost and vice president for academic and student affairs at East Georgia State College.
Barbara E. Wolfe
Barbara E. Wolfe,dean of the College of Nursing at the University of Rhode Island, has been named provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.
Resignations John Karl Scholz,provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, plans to step down and return to the faculty at the end of the 2022-23 academic year.
Charles Zukoski,provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Southern California, will step down in January.
OTHER TOP ADMINISTRATORS Appointments Robert W. Davis Jr., vice president for student life at the University of Scranton, has been named vice president for university advancement.
Kelly Dowling, assistant vice president for advancement at Stony Brook University, has been named senior vice president for philanthropy and alumni engagement at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
Lacretia Johnson Flash,vice president for diversity and inclusion at Berklee College of Music, has been named inaugural senior vice president for DEI, community, campus culture, and climate.
Rebecca Z. German, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at Northeast Ohio Medical University, has been named vice president for research.
Scott Goings, interim general counsel at Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, has been named to the post permanently.
Eyal Gottlieb,director of the Rappaport Institute for Biomedical Research, in Israel, has been named vice president for research at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Zebadiah Hall, director of student disability services at Cornell University, has been named vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Wyoming.
Jeff Harris,associate vice president for marketing and communications at Minnesota State University at Mankato, has been named chief marketing officer at Sam Houston State University.
Joe Manok,senior director of philanthropic partnerships in the Office of Resource Development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been named vice president for university advancement at Clark University, in Massachusetts.
James Patti,former director of administration in the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, has been named vice president for planning at Nichols College.
Jacqueline Taylor,associate vice president for retention and student success at Southwest Tennessee Community College, has been named chief strategy officer and chief of staff.
Scott Vignos,interim vice president and chief diversity officer at Oregon State University, has been named to the post permanently.
Michael Wenz,executive director of university budgets at Northeastern Illinois University, has been named vice president for finance and administration and chief financial officer at Linfield University.
Jeffrey Lewis Williams,chief operating officer and senior vice president for finance and administration at Capitol Technology University, in Maryland, has been named vice president for finance and administration at Lourdes University.
Resignations Eugene Lowe Jr.,assistant to the president of Northwestern University, will step down after more than twenty years.
Retirements Thomas J. Hollister, chief financial officer and vice president for finance at Harvard University, plans to retire at the end of the academic year.
DEANS Appointments Gerard E. Carrino,head of the department of health policy and management at Texas A&M University’s School of Public Health, has been named dean of the Julia Jones Matthews School of Population and Public Health at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.
James T. Robinson,interim dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School since July 2021, has been named to the post permanently.
Colin P. Roche, a former professor and department chair at Johnson & Wales University, has been named interim dean of Biscayne College at St. Thomas University, in Florida.
Maridee Shogren, interim dean of the College of Nursing and Professional Disciplines at the University of North Dakota, has been named to the post permanently.
Paul B. Tchounwou,principal investigator and executive director of the Research Centers in Minority Institutions Center for Health Disparities Research at Jackson State University, has been named dean of the School of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at Morgan State University.
Resignations Kathleen Boozang,dean of the School of Law at Seton Hall University, will step down on January 1.
Vikas P. Sukhatme,dean of Emory University’s School of Medicine and chief academic officer of Emory Healthcare, will step down and return to the faculty in March 2023.
Paul Zionts,dean of the College of Education at DePaul University, will step down at the end of the year.
Retirements Christine Theodoropoulos, dean of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, plans to retire.
Jay Drowns/UVU Marketing
Matthew S. Brogdon
OTHER ADMINISTRATORS Appointments Matthew S. Brogdon,an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, has been named senior director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University.
Cassandra Crifasi,deputy director of the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University, has been named co-director of the center with Joshua Horwitz.
Jay Golan, vice president for advancement at the City University of New York Graduate Center and executive director of the Graduate Center Foundation, has been named executive director of the LaGuardia Community College Foundation.
Craig Greene, director of equal employment opportunity in the New York City Department of Design and Construction, has been named chief diversity officer and Title IX coordinator at LaGuardia Community College.
Kristi Hoskinson,former vice president of CareerEdge at the Sarasota Chamber of Commerce, has been named assistant vice president for strategy and campus initiatives at the University of South Florida-Sarasota/Manatee.
Trey Jones, executive director of corporation and foundation relations at West Virginia State University, has been named assistant vice president for university advancement and vice president for the university’s foundation.
Danielle McCourt,associate director of university communications and marketing at the University of South Florida-Sarasota/Manatee, has been named director of university communications and marketing.
Joanna McNulty,senior director of planning and business operations in the research office at the University of Notre Dame, has been named associate vice president for academic finance and administration.
Luis F. Paredes,director of institutional diversity at Bridgewater State University, has been named associate vice president for institutional equity and belonging at Wheaton College, in Massachusetts.
Resignations Shane Lyons, associate vice president and director of athletics at West Virginia University, resigned in November.
ORGANIZATIONS Appointments Patricia Akhimie,director of the RaceB4Race Mentorship Network and an associate professor of English at Rutgers University at Newark, has been named director of the Folger Institute, in Washington, D.C.
Carol L. Folt,president of the University of Southern California, was elected chair of the Board of Directors for the Association of American Universities.
DEATHS Bobbie Knable, a former dean of students for the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, died on November 15. She was 86. Knable worked at Tufts for 30 years, starting in the English department in 1970.
Staughton Lynd,who taught at Spelman College and Yale University, died on November 17. He was 92.
Jay M. Pasachoff,an astronomer at Williams College, died on November 20. He was 79.
Edward C. Prescott,an economist who taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Minnesota before moving to Arizona State University, died on November 6. He was 81. While at Arizona State University, he won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economics with Finn Kydland.
Statistical snapshots of the percentage of minority noninstructional employees, by job category, at four-year public and private colleges.
Source: Chronicle analysis of U.S. Department of Education data
Note: Data cover full-time noninstructional, nonmedical staff members at degree-granting higher-education institutions in the United States who were eligible to receive Title IV federal financial aid in 2018-20. For-profit institutions and two-year private nonprofit institutions were not included. Those institutions employed 2.2 percent of all eligible staff members in 2020. Percentages of the racial or ethnic groups were calculated by dividing them into the totals minus the numbers of nonresident aliens and people whose races were unknown.
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Nearly 1,800 part-time faculty members who have been on strike since November 16 will return to work at the New School following the announcement on Saturday night that negotiators had reached a tentative collective-bargaining agreement.
“This is a strong, fair five-year contract that increases compensation significantly, protects health-care benefits, and ensures that part-time faculty are paid for additional work done outside the classroom to support our students,” a joint statement by the New York City university and the union says.
The leadership of the union, ACT-UAW Local 7902, will unanimously recommend that its members vote to ratify the deal, with a vote expected to take place in the next few days. “In the meantime, the union has ended the strike, and all university classes and events will resume, as scheduled, effective immediately,” according to the statement.
On Thursday the university issued a statement saying it had taken “the extraordinary step to agree to all of the union’s compensation demands, with the addition of an administrative-services fee to compensate part-time faculty for their work outside the classroom.” The New School had announced on Wednesday it would stop paying and making retirement and health-care contributions to the striking workers.
The university has not yet said publicly how it will pay for the raises. The New School’s president, Dwight A. McBride, said in an interview on Sunday that the agreement would require financial sacrifices. “Today, we celebrate and are thrilled that the strike is over and that we are back to work, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say the contract is a significant financial stress for the university” over the next five years, he said. Although projections are still being calculated, he estimated the New School could face “somewhere in the order of around $20 million a year that we’ll have to make up.” He said it would be “a challenge and a stretch, but one that is important in this moment in terms of recognizing the work of our part-time faculty.”
Asked whether tuition increases were likely, McBride said that “all options” for cutting costs and increasing revenue would have to be on the table.
In a statement late Saturday, the union said the contract included “substantial raises,” with the largest going to faculty members currently being paid at the lowest rates.
Lee-Sean Huang, who teaches part time at the New School’s Parsons School of Design, said in an interview on Sunday that his pay, for a 45-hour seminar he taught this fall, would increase from $127 to $136 per contact hour — a 7-percent increase. “I’m feeling really good about it,” he said of the tentative agreement, although he said the raises would not make up for the 18-percent hit the union said its members had suffered in real earnings due to inflation since their last pay raise, in 2018.
The contract also would strengthen job security and offer paid family leave and a professional-development fund, the union said. And it apparently would resolve what had become the major sticking point in the negotiations late last week, by addressing concerns that some people might lose health-care coverage and others could see their rates soar.
The tentative contract, the union said, includes “expanded health-care eligibility to faculty teaching one course, no hikes to our out-of-pocket health-insurance costs, and caps to annual premium increases.”
Part-time workers make up more than 80 percent of the teaching faculty at the private liberal-arts university. As the strike dragged into its fourth week, with classes canceled and grades up in the air, a group of angry parents threatened to file a class-action lawsuit against the New School and to withhold tuition payments.
Total costs for full-time new undergraduates who live on campus amounted to about $79,000 last academic year, up 7 percent from the previous year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The cost, which included some $52,000 in tuition and fees, was significantly less for students with scholarships.
‘Back to Our Mission’
Many full-time faculty members had pledged to support their part-time colleagues by refusing to cross picket lines. The university told them last week that they’d have to start submitting weekly forms showing that they were fulfilling their teaching, research, and service responsibilities. Meanwhile, it indicated, in a post on Twitter, that it was considering hiring replacements for the striking workers if the walkout wasn’t resolved by the end of the year.
“This is an excellent contract that demonstrates the deep respect we have for all the contributions of our part-time faculty at the New School, as well as one that sets new standards for part-time faculty nationwide,” the university’s statement on Thursday said. “We want nothing more than to get back to our mission of teaching, learning, and creating.”
In the plan it outlined on Thursday, the New School said it was also providing a supplemental bonus of $2,100 for each member of the adjuncts’ union who taught during the pandemic. The university said it had also agreed to improvements in health insurance, retirement, and tuition benefits. And it said it was adding a new way for part-time faculty members to challenge disciplinary decisions stemming from internal sexual-harassment investigations.
The union contends that it’s unfair for a single person, paid by the university, to make binding decisions in such cases without instructors’ having the opportunity to appeal to a neutral arbitrator. The details of the university’s new plan weren’t spelled out in its statement.
There’s a lot of healing that’s going to have to happen in our community on all sides.
The strike had gotten increasingly ugly last week, with reports of violent and racist threats’ being made on social media against university staff members and their families. The New School’s faculty, student, and staff senates issued a joint statement condemning the threats against “at-will employees who were just doing their jobs.” The union also condemned the threats, and the university released a statement saying it “shares the outrage and concern” and had notified law-enforcement and campus-safety officials.
McBride, the president, said the social-media threats had been “soul-crushing” to the university leaders and staff members targeted. “No one should feel unsafe coming to their workplace,” he said. “On a personal note,” he said, “there’s a lot of healing that’s going to have to happen in our community on all sides — leadership, students, faculty — for us to effectively move together as a community.”
Students who supported the striking workers staged a protest at the campus’s University Center after the New School said it would stop paying the strikers on Wednesday. The students had pledged to remain there until the university resumed paying the instructors and a fair contract was signed.
Meanwhile, progress was reported in resolving strikes that have brought much of the teaching and research to a standstill across the University of California system in recent weeks. Members of UAW Local 5810, the union representing postdocs and academic researchers, announced on Saturday that their members had voted overwhelmingly to ratify five-year contracts that include significant pay raises.
At the same time, negotiators have agreed to bring in a private mediator to try to resolve a continuing dispute involving thousands of graduate students who have been on strike since November 14. That strike has paralyzed the 10-campus system and thrown the end of the semester, including final exams and grading, into chaos.
For over a decade, colleges have committed (and recommitted) to diversity, equity, and inclusion among faculty. But how close is higher education as a sector to achieving the goal of racial parity?
According to a new study, the increasing diversity of tenure-track faculty is barely keeping up with that of the U.S. population. At the current rate, the study’s authors wrote, higher education will “never achieve demographic parity among tenure-track faculty.”
Using data from 1,250 institutions and the U.S. Census Bureau’s projections, the study found that the percentage of underrepresented tenure-track faculty increased by 0.23 of a percentage point per year on average between 2013 and 2020, to 13 percent. But according to Census projections, the same underrepresented groups, which made up roughly 35 percent of the U.S. population in 2020, will increase by 0.2 of a percentage point per year. The researchers calculated that parity — defined as the faculty and the U.S. population having equal shares of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups — would be effectively unattainable at this rate.
The study projected that, by 2060, the percentage of underrepresented tenure-track faculty at all institutions will be 22 percentage points behind the U.S. population. The findings are similar to that of previous studies, which found student-body demographics are also failing to reach parity with the country’s population.
“If universities are going to continue to make old claims about how much they value diversity and inclusion and how important it is, then they should walk the walk,” said Neil A. Lewis Jr., one of the study’s authors and a professor of communications and social behavior at Cornell University.
Having a diverse faculty, research shows, is linked to student success. A new report from the Education Trust found that Black and Latino students are more likely to graduate when the faculty is more diverse. White students, meanwhile, are more likely “to develop deeper cross-cultural and critical-thinking skills and greater levels of empathy.”
The authors of the study on faculty parity question a common explanation for the lack of faculty members from underrepresented groups: the “leaky pipeline” problem. The model asserts that higher education, the pipeline to tenured faculty positions, is a straight line along which barriers and inequity create “leaks” through which underrepresented groups are more likely to fall. In order to increase the pool of diverse candidates for tenure-track positions, the “pipeline-repair” model’s proponents seek to remove barriers for underrepresented students, increasing the diversity of hiring pools.
But the study’s authors found that there has “clearly” been an overall increase in diversity among qualified candidates for faculty jobs since 2007.
“There’s always this talking point that comes up — that, ‘Well, there’s just not enough people in the pipeline to hire. That’s why we can’t diversify.’ But that’s actually an empirical question.” Lewis said. “Then we looked, and there’s actually tons of people that could be hired.”
Lewis said that institution-level initiatives — programs focused on improving a single university’s faculty diversity — can lead to, for example, underrepresented faculty members’ moving from institution to institution rather than introducing new qualified people to academe.
“Yeah, your school might temporarily solve this problem. You might increase the diversity of your faculty,” Lewis said. “But if you zoom out and look at the broader system, nothing has changed.”
The authors suggested that colleges collectively increase hiring of underrepresented faculty, giving young academics of color more opportunities. They called for “sector-wide cooperation” to make parity a reality — including more support for faculty of color, more reliable evaluation of diversity initiatives across higher ed, and more resources directed toward underrepresented researchers.
If colleges diversified their faculty at 3.5 times their current pace, parity could be possible by 2050, the study found. That rate would be just 0.78 of a percentage point over the current pace — a small number, but a big jump compared with the sector’s minimal progress thus far.
“We’re not asking to turn universities upside down overnight,” Lewis said. “It’s taking the pool of candidates that’s there and the pool that we know is growing and dipping into it at a reasonable level.”
Lewis said colleges should consider the systemic problems within higher ed and confront them so that underrepresented scholars “can have productive and positive experiences.”
“They stay longer,” he said. “And that’s how we create this larger change.”
Inside a campus coffee shop at the University of California at Los Angeles, students were hunched over laptops on white plastic tables, armed with cups of coffee. The students didn’t react to the cries and chants happening outside, largely drowned out by chatter and music streaming through AirPods. Finals were coming up, and students were starting to cram.
Steps away from the cafe, a group of 50 UCLA workers and faculty members walked in circles and carried picket signs around the university’s iconic inverted stone fountain. Around 1 p.m., they resumed their chants — calls for higher wages and better benefits.
A three-week-long strike by graduate students, postdocs, and researchers has profoundly disrupted life at one of the nation’s most prominent university systems. Now finals are here, and with no teaching assistants on the job, there’s widespread confusion among students and professors on how to proceed.
Students and professors say the campus feels emptier than usual. Since Thanksgiving, some have left entirely and not returned, due to modified and canceled classes and exams. Those who have stayed stuck around for a reason: Their classes are forging ahead.
With the end of the term approaching, faculty members say they’re struggling to fulfill obligations to their undergraduate students. Undergraduate students are concerned with how the strike will impact their grades — and wondering whether they’ll even get grades in the end. All are worried about how long the strike will last.
The UC system reached a tentative agreement with postdocs and academic researchers this week, agreeing to wage increases that the union says reflect the cost of living in one of the most expensive states in the country. But graduate students are still negotiating, and postdocs and researchers are continuing to strike with them.
The university has repeatedly emphasized that it expects faculty members to meet teaching and research responsibilities and ensure the continuity of instruction for students. A Wednesday letter from the UC system’s provost suggested alternate ways that faculty can show support for the strike. Colleges often respond to striking instructors by criticizing how work stoppages harm undergraduates’ learning.
People across the UC system have different perspectives on the strike and whom to blame for the ensuing chaos. But just about everyone feels conflicted in one way or another.
Peyton Quijano, a third-year biology major at UC-Santa Cruz, says she’s caught between wanting to support her TAs and being frustrated by yet another disruption to her studies. She says she understands why the strike has to happen. She’s also paying for her education and wants to get the most out of it.
“I just didn’t think the strike was going to go on this long,” Quijano said.
At UCLA, life hasn’t stopped. It’s just slowed way down.
Grading has been backed up, particularly for large lecture classes. Some students have had finals canceled or made optional. Other courses are operating as usual — save for the echoes of strike chants seeping into classrooms.
A spokesperson for UCLA didn’t respond to a question about how many classes had been canceled or affected by the strike.
Students who have returned to campus are there because their instruction is continuing — either modified or business as usual. By midafternoon on Thursday, nearly every desk was full inside UCLA’s main library.
Dylan Winward, a first-year student at UCLA, said one of his finals was made optional only five days before his exam was set to take place.
Over the last three weeks, Winward and his friends had been completing lectures and assignments from The Hill, a student hub for dorms, dining, and student services on UCLA’s campus. Winward and many of his friends said on Thursday that they were returning to the main campus for the first time since the strike began.
Although students said they sympathize with the TAs and others who are on strike, some are also concerned about grades. “I’ll be really upset if I put in all this work for finals and get nothing back,” said first-year student Sydney Roberts.
It feels a lot like when we were taking classes during the pandemic.
Jacob Castaneda, a third-year political science student who transferred to UCLA this semester, said his course load hasn’t been impacted. His final exams and essays are proceeding as usual. For his three lecture classes, each of which typically have TA-led discussions, his professors have committed to getting grades in on time.
For Mauve Spillard, a fourth-year comparative literature student, one of her professors who usually works with a TA has said grades will be turned in late.
Trent Brown, a first-year American literature undergraduate student, hasn’t had any classes or finals canceled since the strike began. But Brown is worried that delayed grading could affect students trying to apply for honors or other programs.
At UC-Santa Cruz, Quijano said her classes were canceled or moved online during the first two weeks of the strike; by late last week, some were back to in-person. She said her professors respect the cause of the striking workers, but they said they need to continue lessons for students to be able to complete the course.
But Quijano is struggling to get answers to her questions about the material without the help of TAs, and her labs have been canceled. Instead of conducting her own experiments, she has to write a paper based on a photo of the results she would have gotten.
“It feels a lot like when we were taking classes during the pandemic,” she said.
Much like during the pandemic, faculty members have had to make contingency plans.
Anna J. Markowitz, an assistant professor of education at UCLA, spent the weekend before the strike recording videos of lectures for her undergraduate Introduction to Quantitative Methods class. The next day, she stopped teaching.
Markowitz’s classes enroll 40 students, and she works with two graduate students. One of them runs the coding lab portion of Markowitz’s undergraduate course and grades all student assignments — work that has now been left ungraded. Markowitz said she will not submit grades or hold a formal final during the strike. For students who want to test their knowledge, she will release an optional exam, but it will not be graded.
I couldn’t look my students in the face and not fully support their right to strike.
As a graduate student at Georgetown University more than a decade ago, Markowitz said she earned the same wage as her graduate students make now: $25,000 for a three-quarter academic year. They are paid for part-time work capped at 20 hours a week, she said, but many graduate students work more.
“Knowing what my students make and knowing how bad I’ve been feeling about that for a long time, I couldn’t look my students in the face and not fully support their right to strike,” Markowitz said of her decision to not cross the picket line.
Markowitz is among 1,000 faculty who have pledged not to teach or submit grades until the strike ends. For some professors, it’s an act of solidarity. Others say that without the help of teaching assistants, it would be impossible to complete grading for classes with hundreds of students — no matter their personal positions on the strike.
David Shorter, a professor of world arts and cultures at UCLA, stopped teaching in solidarity with the graduate-student employees. He’s still holding listening sessions for his students, many of whom aren’t receiving clear directives from their professors or the university about how to exist amid the strike, he said.
Shorter is teaching three classes this quarter and doesn’t know how he’ll grade 300 papers before the end of the term, even if the deadline to submit grades is extended to January. He’d usually have the help of six TAs.
He stopped teaching his classes, one of which is an 80-person lecture, when the strike began. Nearly 25 percent of his students haven’t even returned to campus since Thanksgiving. And a lot of courses for the next term, he said, don’t even have TAs assigned yet.
While Shorter’s classrooms sat empty, a 300-person life sciences lecture at UCLA was nearly full on Thursday. Students were wrapped up in last-day-of-class chatter as the professor continued to make announcements about review sessions, about practice-exam questions, about their final — yes, there would be a final.
The professor went around the room as students were tasked with answering a practice question. Murmuring picked up among the students. They graphed their guesses and checked their responses with one another. The strike hadn’t changed much for these students, beyond canceling their TA-led discussion sections.
The Academic Senate at UCLA has released guidance suggesting that professors could shorten final exams or make them multiple choice, to ease the grading burden.
There have been a handful of incidents where strikers have interrupted midterm exams, said Winward, the first-year student; he reported on them for the campus newspaper, the Daily Bruin. He said some students are concerned about such disruptions happening again during finals week.
The University of California system views its graduate students like most colleges do: Their employment is “strictly part time,” and campus policy prevents them from working more than 20 hours per week. Meeting some of the students’ demands, university officials say, would cause an “unprecedented” and “unpredictable” financial impact.
The university has proposed paying TAs between $25,000 and $31,000 per year, and graduate-student researchers between $28,000 and $47,000 per year, for part-time work — which officials say would make UC graduate students the highest compensated among public institutions in the Association of American Universities. The union has called for a minimum salary of $54,000.
Another sticking point is housing costs. University officials have stressed that UC-owned housing for graduate students is already 20 to 25 percent below market rates. Tying raises to housing costs, as the union has called for, could cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to the university.
We’re eager to get back to work. We just want to make sure we are living and working in dignified conditions.
UC officials said they had reached agreements with other employee unions in the past year, demonstrating their “flexibility and a genuine willingness to compromise.” The university has proposed working with a private mediator to resolve differences, which the union doesn’t support.
Meanwhile, on most campuses, the deadline to submit final grades this fall has been extended — but only by a few days. And there’s little consistency across campuses.
Faculty members are also struggling to figure out what legal rights they have to participate in a sympathy strike.
A Wednesday letter from Michael T. Brown, the UC-system provost, stated that if faculty members choose not to hold classes or submit grades during the strike, the “university in turn may withhold their compensation.” If faculty members participate in a “partial strike,” where they don’t submit grades but continue to do research, they could also risk disciplinary action.
The letter said that faculty have the responsibility to maintain course and curricular requirements, including “the timely awarding and submission of grades.” The Council of UC Faculty Associations called the letter “misleading.”
For some faculty members, the university is making a frustrating, if not impossible, ask — especially after the pandemic left them feeling burned out and exhausted.
“Most of us are confused, if not stressed, because we just spent three years being very agile for our employers due to COVID,” Shorter said. “And now the expectation is that we would spend our holiday breaks or winter breaks grading hundreds of papers for a situation we did not create.”
The faculty associations’ council also released a Google form for professors to fill out if they expect not to be able to submit final grades without the help of TAs. As of Friday, the group said the total number of expected missing grades was 23,000.
Bernard Remollino, a graduate-student researcher and teaching assistant at UCLA, said what’s happening across UC campuses now sends a critical message: The university works because of its academic student workers. The question of when their work will proceed is up to the UC system, he said.
“We’re eager to get back to work,” Remollino said. “We just want to make sure we are living and working in dignified conditions. And that’s it.”
Disillusioned with formal reporting channels, some women are taking to Twitter with accusations of sexual harassment against senior economists in their field. Supporters say explicitly airing names previously confined to informal whisper networks — a tactic reminiscent of the crest of the #MeToo movement in 2017 — is a needed corrective to inaction, while others worry that Twitter is far from the best medium to litigate these claims.
The saga started when accusations against two high-profile male economists appeared on social media last week. Jennifer Doleac, an associate professor of economics at Texas A&M University who studies crime and discrimination, named the scholars on Twitter, where she has over 50,000 followers, after receiving emails and direct messages about the accusations.
“I’m involved in these kinds of conversations,” she told The Chronicle. “And so I felt I should say something about how this is troubling, mostly because we have no way as a profession of handling these allegations.”
Her initial post circulated widely among economists on Twitter, prompting a flood of responses — many detailing their own experiences with harassment and applauding the public airing, and others expressing concern about the manner in which the accused were named.
Doleac said she has received dozens of accusations in her inbox against several economists over the past week. She has since tweeted the names of three other economists against whom she says she received allegations. Doleac has encouraged victims to reach out to her with their accusations.
Our formal institutions have been promising change and failing to deliver.
The development comes three years after what many saw as a breakthrough moment for a discipline that has long struggled with gender diversity. Revelations about discrimination reached a fever pitch when female economists called for stronger action by the American Economic Association in 2019 — two years after a report on gender stereotyping in economics by Alice H. Wu, then a student at the University of California at Berkeley, prompted professionwide conversations about latent misogyny in the field.
The response was robust. Prominent male scholars acknowledged harassment in the field. The AEA conducted a survey that found striking evidence of gender and racial discrimination, and then announced measures to prevent harassment and create a reporting mechanism. The organization established an anti-harassment code, appointed an ombudsperson, and introduced the possibility of professional consequences for members who violate the code.
Doleac, who was among the women calling on the association to take action in 2019, said these measures felt like a major turning point at the time. But she’s since become disillusioned with the association’s investigative process — and doesn’t trust university Title IX offices to hold harassers accountable either. The AEA has acknowledged the limits of its investigative ability as a professional organization.
“What is happening right now is a result of simmering frustration and anger that has been building for a few years as our formal institutions have been promising change and failing to deliver,” said Doleac, who said she was involved in an AEA investigation of one of the scholars she named publicly, as a supporter of the complainant. “We’re done waiting for or counting on our institutions to protect us.”
Justin Wolfers, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who has written about gender issues in the field for The New York Times, said the conversation unfolding now looks different from the one that was happening a few years ago. At that time, he said, the rage was directed at the field in a broad sense, and didn’t have a focus on sexual misconduct or involve publicly naming alleged harassers. “I think this current moment is, in a very literal sense, the MeToo moment.”
Wolfers said there has been little formal institutional response, but the public conversation is leading parts of the economics community to pay much closer attention to the issue. “There’s a sense of waiting for the next shoe to drop,” he said.
Doleac said she’s looking to the AEA for action. “What I’m waiting for is acknowledgment that the current system is not just insufficient, but it is backfiring, and a public commitment to changing that and figuring something else out,” she said. “I love the toolkit economics gives us. I believe there are solutions to this, and I’m hopeful that all of this will also lead to my colleagues’ taking this more seriously as an academic and research question — how do we build better institutions?”
A media contact for the AEA did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment.
The Economic Science Association, a professional organization for experimental economists, released a statement in response to the accusations on Monday, condemning “scientific and personal misconduct” and encouraging those with information about such behavior to report it to the organization.
The group also said it will be announcing a project to encourage research on misconduct in professional settings and mechanisms to prevent bad behavior.
While I think we should certainly report and investigate and do our best to limit the power of bad actors, I don’t think we should be doing it on Twitter.
Catherine Eckel, the association’s ethics officer, said the group can keep reports confidential and give accusers advice about how to proceed. But as a professional organization, it has no legal power. “All we can really do is kick somebody out of our club,” she said. And that’s for the executive committee to decide. Eckel said her organization encourages people to report to the AEA, where the consequences for the accused may have more professional weight. “Being banned from that is a big deal,” she said.
Eckel said she has seen firsthand how risky it can be for a woman’s career to report sexual harassment to a university — and how often efforts to formally report misconduct are unsuccessful, often because accused scholars find jobs at different universities to prevent their cases from going forward.
“We’ve felt really frustrated for a long time that there’s nothing we can do,” Eckel said. “Many of us know who the very few bad guys are. But to have to have this kind of thing limited to a whisper network is just extremely frustrating.”
Still, she says, if she could remove the past week’s accusations from Twitter, she would. “While I think we should certainly report and investigate and do our best to limit the power of bad actors, I don’t think we should be doing it on Twitter,” she said. “I think it’s unnecessarily traumatic for a lot of people.”
Doleac said she would prefer to have reliable processes for litigating these kinds of accusations: “I think that would be better for everyone involved.” Bringing allegations to social media, or to the press, she said, are last resorts. “I feel like we’ve been pushed into a corner where our institutions are clearly not able to keep women safe in the academy, and so we feel like this is our only option for getting some accountability — particularly for the worst offenders.”
Wolfers acknowledged that questions like these are not easy, and that there is a growing sense that formal institutions have failed to protect women against sexual harassment. “No one thinks it’s a good solution, but it may be the least worst solution,” he said.
