Member News

One week ago, after months of intense pro-Palestinian demonstrations, Pomona College (CA) hit a breaking point. Students had been camping on the small California campus’s main quad for several days, alongside a 32-foot-long art installation they put up to highlight harms done to Palestinian people. The morning of April 5, students had voluntarily taken down all their tents.

Cabrini University hoped to save itself. Enrollment at the small, Catholic liberal arts college in Radnor, Pennsylvania, had fallen more than 60 percent since 2016, putting the tuition-dependent school with a small endowment under serious financial pressure. When Helen Drinan arrived to serve as interim president in June 2022, she quickly grew concerned that while Cabrini had already made cuts in staffing and other areas, there was more work to be done.

Mary Jane Rein, director of the Center for Civic Friendship at Assumption University (MA), writes:  Among the many ills plaguing higher education is a lack of civility, friendship and intellectual humility. I observed this firsthand on March 13, when an unruly and hate-filled audience shut down a lecture I helped organize at Worcester State University. Because of the response of my own institution, Clark University, I am resigning my position as executive director of Clark’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
 

The president and Board of Trustees at Northland College voted Thursday to declare financial exigency after failing to raise enough funds to stay open. The small liberal arts institution in Wisconsin announced three weeks ago it was in such a dire financial state that it would be forced to shutter if it could not raise $12 million by April 3. Despite the college having raised only $1.5 million, the board delayed the decision to shutter its doors, saying it would give the institution two more weeks to explore program, staffing and budget adjustments before making a final decision about its future.

Stanford University (CA) announced Thursday that its 13th president will be Jonathan Levin, an economist and alumnus who has led the Stanford Graduate School of Business as dean for the last eight years. Levin will take the helm on Aug. 1, nearly a year after the resignation of Marc Tessier-Lavigne who was plagued by allegations of misconduct reported by a Stanford campus newspaper in 2022. The story spawned a months-long inquiry into his scholarly work. The investigation concluded that Tessier-Lavigne did not falsify data but failed to correct mistakes.