Member News

Dorm door decorations are emerging as the next battleground in the fight over academic freedom and free speech at Barnard College (NY).  As at many schools, Barnard students often use their dorm doors to display a bit of personality. A walk around the freshman dorms early this week found sorority pledge signs, Lunar New Year decorations and a pinned-up loose-leaf paper asking: “Who’s your celebrity crush?” But students had also posted stickers and slogans supporting the Palestinian cause and naming the war in Gaza as a genocide. “Zionism is terrorism,” one student’s door sticker said.

Notre Dame College announced that it will close at the end of the spring semester. The college has also worked out agreements so that students can finish their education at nine other colleges and universities. The South Euclid college, which first opened in 1922, cited financial challenges in its closing announcement. Notre Dame said it has dealt with declining enrollment, rising costs and significant debt — and that these challenges lead the college’s board of trustees to decide to close the institution.

The Albert Einstein College of Medicine (NY) will now be tuition-free for all students, thanks to a historic $1 billion gift from a former faculty member and board chair. The donation comes from Ruth Gottesman, who after joining the faculty at the Bronx, N.Y.-based Einstein in 1968 developed widely used tools to screen children for learning problems and launched an adult literacy program. Gottesman, 93 years old, and her husband, the late billionaire-investor David “Sandy” Gottesman, were longtime donors to the medical school, and Ruth Gottesman serves as chair of its board of trustees. 

Bay Path University, in western Massachusetts, has agreed to acquire Boston-based Cambridge College, the two institutions announced Tuesday. The two private nonprofit institutions share a focus on career education, and they are comparably sized: Bay Path enrolls about 2,500 students, split between women-only undergraduate programs and coeducational graduate programs, while Cambridge offers programs in Boston and in Puerto Rico that serve more than 2,000 mostly adult learners. Officials said the acquisition has been in the works since last summer.

Struggling Saint Augustine’s University (FL) has lost an appeal to maintain its accreditation and now plans to file an injunction to ask the courts to weigh in, SAU officials announced Tuesday. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges stripped the university of accreditation in December over financial and governance issues. However, SAU remained accredited until the appeal process played out. Now litigation is SAU’s only lifeline.