Member News

The University of Southern California is enlarging its operations in Washington with the acquisition of a 60,000-square-foot building near Dupont Circle that will be home to a new D.C. campus. The $49.4 million purchase of the property at 1771 N St. NW, announced Wednesday, enables the private university in Los Angeles to establish an eastern hub for teaching, research, lobbying, recruiting, alumni networking and community outreach. The deal underscores that higher education institutions based elsewhere often find it desirable to establish a prominent Washington address.

The Michigan Attorney General’s Office is investigating a complaint that alleges Albion College is violating state law over its use of its endowments to cover budget deficits. The allegations, detailed last year in an April 11 letter to Attorney General Dana Nessel and her office, allege the private college is illegally overdrawing from its endowment fund and using donor gifts to cover budget shortfalls. Albion College officials have denied the allegations, stating that COVID-19 pandemic-related budget deficits were covered using unrestricted pots of the endowments.
 

A student protest that interrupted a controversial speaker at Stanford University last week led its president and law dean to criticize campus staff, including, apparently, the associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion who joined the speaker at the podium and discussed the students’ concerns. Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, was invited to give a talk titled “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation With the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter,” by the law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society, a conservative and libertarian legal organization.

Students at Wellesley College voted Tuesday to allow transgender men and nonbinary people who were assigned male at birth to be eligible for admission, in a move that could symbolically change the face of the Massachusetts women’s liberal arts college. The nonbinding vote followed an occasionally fraught debate in recent weeks that had pitched students against the college administration, which has resisted the move.

Duke University (NC) will legally challenge its graduate student workers’ latest effort to unionize. The Service Employees International Union–affiliated Duke Graduate Students Union is currently trying to earn recognition after a failed attempt in 2016–17.