Member News

Tufts University (MA) has named a provost from Johns Hopkins University (MD) as its new president.
Sunil Kumar will begin in his new role next July. Kumar, whose appointment was announced Thursday, will succeed Anthony Monaco, who's led Tufts since 2011. Monaco announced in February that he would step down at the end of this school year. The Indian-born Kumar has also served as the dean at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and as a faculty member at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He's been Johns Hopkins' provost since 2016.

The Board of Trustees at Seattle Pacific University has been under fire for months for refusing to budge on a policy that bars hiring openly LGBTQ+ individuals, despite widespread opposition across campus. Now that stance, and the fallout, have led S&P Global to lower its bond rating for SPU. The private, Free Methodist–affiliated university maintains the hiring policy in accordance with church doctrine, which states that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

Part-time faculty members at the New School, a historically progressive university that includes the Parsons School of Design, walked out en masse on Wednesday to protest pay and working conditions. The strike is a culmination of years of contentious relations between the adjunct faculty and the university’s administration and is part of a nationwide trend; earlier this week, 48,000 academic staff in the University of California system went on strike over job security.

Eastern University’s (PA) membership in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities is on hold, following changes to Eastern’s stance on hiring LGBTQ employees. The university, located in Pennsylvania and affiliated the American Baptist Churches USA, used to prohibit the hiring or retention of LGBTQ employees. It reversed this policy in May, in consideration of the interdenominational campus community and its varied theological positions on these issues. The university added sexual orientation to its employment nondiscrimination policy at the same time, for the same reasons. This put the university at odds with the CCCU, which has said that hiring policies should align with “the historic Christian view of marriage.” (Religion News Service first reported this week that Eastern’s CCCU membership is on hiatus.)

Brown University (RI) will use all union labor on all construction projects over $25 million for the next five years as part of an agreement with Rhode Island Building and Construction Trades Council and Building Futures, a local apprenticeship program, the university announced Monday.