Member News

While the courtship between Cleveland State University and Notre Dame College remains uncertain, mergers involving small private colleges  – while still relatively uncommon – are happening more frequently nationwide. 
Cleveland State acknowledged last month that the university has discussed “potentially absorbing” Notre Dame College, which framed it as an opportunity for a “partnership.” Cleveland State President Laura Bloomberg pointed to two New Jersey institutions for a potential roadmap for how colleges can merge. 

Harvard University is again embroiled in a controversy over antisemitism on campus, after student groups and a faculty group shared an antisemitic cartoon. In a statement late Tuesday, Harvard interim president Alan M. Garber condemned the cartoon, calling it “flagrantly antisemitic,” after it was shared on social media by two student groups — the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and the African American Resistance Organization — and reposted by Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine. Garber said the cartoon depicted a hand labeled with a Star of David with a dollar sign in the middle holding nooses that were tied around the necks of an Arab man and a Black man. Screenshots of the cartoon appeared to show that the men were boxer and antiwar activist Muhammad Ali and former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The cartoon was shared as part of an infographic on the historical links between pro-Palestinian and civil rights groups.

All great institutions — and Penn is surely a great institution — run into trouble from time to time. When they do, the best strategy is to fall back on their mission and guiding principles to get them through it. Penn’s problem isn’t that its now-deposed president didn’t — how’s this for irony? — have the right answer to a tough question. It’s that Penn’s actions for 30 years have mostly been about advancing Penn and creating an unequal world in which Penn thrives. Nothing Liz Magill said or didn’t say was going to change that.

According to University of Pikeville President Burton Webb, the recently-released study on whether there should be a four-year state-run university in Eastern Kentucky is the beginning of a welcomed conversation. But it’s not the conclusion. On Nov. 17, the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education voted to release the findings of the study, which was performed as a result of a Senate resolution sponsored by Senate President Robert Stivers (R-Manchester).
 

Tania Tetlow, the newish president of Fordham University, was in New Orleans, isolating with a case of Covid over winter break, when she learned that Claudine Gay had been forced to resign as Harvard’s president. She did not know all the facts of the case, but it was still a sobering moment.  The ability to navigate through turbulence is one of the many assets that brought Ms. Tetlow to Fordham. Added to her wide-ranging résumé — putting murderers and drug lords in jail as a federal prosecutor in New Orleans, challenging longstanding gender barriers while untangling the finances of a foundering institution, singing the national anthem at Yankee Stadium — Ms. Tetlow’s somewhat unusual profile seems uniquely suited to Fordham.