Case In Point: Lessons for the proactive manager

Volume 16 Number 05 | May 2024

Quotable .....

“ The safety of the people shall be the highest law. ”

-- Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman philosopher born in 106 BC

This month we conclude our evaluation of the Case in Point news stories from the previous year, focusing on the category of Campus Life/Safety. As we've noted throughout the years, this category has consistently proven to be the most diverse, showcasing the vast imagination of those who reside, study, or visit our campuses. Over the past few months, we’ve seen turmoil on many campuses, and as we head into a national election in the USA, there is potential for even more incidents later this year.

Here were the Top 5 categories in Campus Life/Safety in 2023:

Campus Safety. This category was far and away the most frequent type of story linked. Ensuring a safe environment for our students, faculty, and staff is of paramount importance. Institutions that are successful in providing a safe environment may well find themselves in greater demand after potential students and their parents witness incidents that have been allowed at other institutions.
Free Speech. Speech has been at the heart of much of the turmoil witnessed on campuses the past few months. With an election coming this fall, I’d expect more speech related events as a result of an increasingly tense political climate.
Hazing. While hazing dropped from the top five in 2022, it made a comeback in 2023. We highly recommend ensuring that you have reporting mechanisms for both students and parents to keep on top of this issue.
Race Related Issues. Major court rulings on affirmative action along with the controversies surrounding DEI offices and state laws banning such activities have certainly impacted the number of stories linked on this topic. We expect these numbers to remain high.
Social Media Use/Threats/Misuse. This category often involves individuals using social media and not anticipating the repercussions of what is posted or threatened. Jokes and offhand comments can often have unintended consequences for students.

At most institutions, the summer tends to be the most laid-back time of the year. This is a great opportunity to ensure you have plans in place to deal with campus safety issues, and in particular, evaluate ways people on campus can report issues. It takes the entire campus community working together to maintain a safe environment. Additionally, mental health issues on campus are at an all time high. Anything a campus can do to expand their services can have a direct impact on campus safety in my opinion.

There are many risks facing institutions each day. We again invite you to review the events noted over the past month with a view toward proactively managing risk. As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions.

M. Kevin Robinson, CIA, CFE
Vice President
Institutional Compliance & Security& Privacy
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Information Security & Technology Events

May 16: Erroneous Emails: An unfortunate mistake caused 1,500 people who applied for admission to Georgia State University in Atlanta to celebrate their acceptance a little too early. The affected students who applied for admission for the 2024-25 school year received a welcome email from the university on April 29, congratulating them on their acceptance. However the university said the students, who had incomplete applications, received the welcome email by mistake. In a statement to NPR, a university spokesperson, Jo Ann Herold, said the 1,500 students were not sent an official acceptance letter but were sent "communication from an academic department" that welcomed students who intend to major in their prospective academic area. (link)

May 16: Cyberattack: Collège Ahuntsic, in Montreal, will resume its activities on Friday after being forced to close its doors on Thursday due to a "potential cyberattack"."All computer systems are back to normal following the cyber-attack alert that forced the closure of the college," read a statement on the college's website on Thursday evening. The college added details of the school calendar and exam week. Earlier on Thursday, the college's management said on its Facebook page that all regular teaching and continuing education activities had been postponed. (link)

May 15: Data Breach: A recent breach notification from Georgia's University System is informing some 800,000 students and employees of a May incident that may have exposed sensitive information. However, that's May of 2023, not the present month. The data loss is tied to the MOVEit breach that ran rampant last summer, a campaign that ultimately racked up over 2,700 victims. The breach notification confirms that the university system was using MOVEit in 2023 and was part of the widespread breach by the Cl0p ransomware group, which leveraged a previously unseen zero-day vulnerability and managed to keep the campaign quiet until it had already infiltrated many of its victims. (link)

May 01: Data Breach Report: Verizon published its 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) Wednesday, highlighting the interplay between actions and attack vectors that provide the initial pathway for breaches. The 100-page report is the 17th annual Verizon DBIR, covering cybersecurity incidents and data breaches between Nov. 1, 2022, and Oct. 31, 2023. With nearly 30,500 incidents and a record 10,626 confirmed data breaches across 94 countries analyzed for the report, the 2024 DBIR provides a comprehensive view of the global threat landscape with some changes to its analysis method compared with previous years' reports. (link)

May 01: AI: Many students at D'Youville University say they are not happy. "I think it's odd that the college is promoting AI technology when it's the very thing that's opposed," one student said. "You guys are just here for the robot, reporting and stuff, but it's like, the students are graduating," another student said. They don't like the idea that their spring 2024 commencement speech will be delivered by an AI robot "Sophia." "I graduated high school in 2020. We didn't get a graduation. So to hear that someone who's not even real is speaking at our graduation, it's kind of like like, they couldn't do better," a student said. (link)

Fraud & Ethics Related Events

May 28: Fraud: A University of Florida research employee and students have been implicated in an illegal, multi-million dollar scheme investigated by the Justice Department to fraudulently buy thousands of biochemical samples of dangerous drugs and toxins that were delivered to a campus laboratory then illicitly shipped to China over seven years, according to federal court records. Among the students tied to the scheme was the president of UF's Chinese Students and Scholars Association. The materials smuggled to China included what the government described as purified, non-contagious proteins of the cholera toxin and pertussis toxin, which causes whooping cough. The substances can't legally be exported to China. (link)

May 28: Occupational Fraud: Fayetteville State communications staff racked up more than half a million dollars in improper credit card charges from January 2022 to August 2023, according to a report from the state auditor's office published Tuesday. The report said that the $692,239 in transactions with insufficient documentation and/or unallowed by university policies included first-class flights, a ride to a New York City spa, hotel charges, food and payments to businesses owned by former FSU employees while they were still employed by the school. Findings of the investigation are being referred to the State Bureau of Investigation to determine if there is enough evidence to pursue criminal charges, the report said. (link)

May 20: Research Security: A U.S. congressional committee on China has asked leading research university Georgia Institute of Technology to detail its collaboration with a Chinese university facing U.S. government restrictions due to its alleged ties to the country's military. Georgia Tech partnered with China's northeastern Tianjin University on cutting edge technologies despite its documented ties to the People's Liberation Army (PLA), John Moolenaar, the new Republican chairman of the House of Representatives' select committee on China, wrote in a letter on Thursday to the U.S. school's president Angel Cabrera. (link)

May 17: False Claims Act: The Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) has agreed to pay $7,600,000 to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act (FCA) by submitting to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) federal grant applications and progress reports in which CCF failed to disclose that a key employee involved in administering the grants had pending and/or active financial research support from other sources. The settlement resolves allegations that CCF made false statements to NIH, a component of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in connection with three federal grant awards. (link)

May 15: Donation Vetting: A senior official at Florida A&M University stepped down Wednesday over her role in accepting what was initially billed as a transformative gift for the school that abruptly collapsed amid questions about its actual value. The resignation of Shawnta Friday-Stroud, a vice president at the historically Black university in northern Florida, was announced at an emergency board meeting, as school trustees launched an investigation into how the dubious gift from a Texas hemp farming executive was accepted without their knowledge. Several trustees blamed President Larry Robinson for the ordeal, who took “full responsibility” for accepting a donation that raised almost immediate red flags once it was announced. (link)

May 14: Plagiarism: Employee Conduct: In June 2021, a year into the cultural aftershocks of George Floyd's death, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set out to meet the moment, as so many other schools had, by hiring more diversity officers. MIT welcomed six new deans of diversity, equity, and inclusion, one for each of the institute's main schools, as part of a "DEI Strategic Action Plan" launched the previous year. But according to a 71-page complaint filed with the university on Saturday, at least two of the six DEI officials may not be living up to those standards. The complaint alleges that [two deans] are serial plagiarists, copying entire pages of text without attribution and riding roughshod over MIT's academic integrity policies. (link)

May 13: Occupational Fraud: Ten people have been indicted on charges of theft of federal program funding from Tuskegee University. The university, located in Macon County, receives more than $10,000 annually in federal funding. All ten are charged with conspiracy to commit federal program theft. Authorities did not disclose the amount of money reportedly stolen in the scheme. According to the indictment, four people were Tuskegee University employees during the time frame of the alleged conspiracy, which began at an unknown date and continued until 2020. (link)

Compliance/Regulatory & Legal Events

May 26: Employee Conduct: San Jose State University has temporarily suspended a justice studies professor who served as a liaison between administrators and pro-Palestinian demonstrators, the Chronicle has learned. Sang Hea Kil, a renowned professor at the university, received notice of her suspension Friday, according to a document reviewed by the Chronicle. The suspension letter says Kil is being suspended for violating Article 17 of the collective bargaining agreement between California State University and California Faculty Association. The university didn't specifically state what Kil did to warrant suspension, but alluded to certain actions in the suspension letter. (link)

May 24: Title IX: The looming athlete pay system that will upend the traditional college sports model and still-to-be-determined details about how millions of dollars will be distributed are certain to bring questions about gender equity. Of special interest will be whether schools must comply with Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in any school or education program that receives federal funds. There are many questions to be addressed should a $2.77 billion settlement of House vs. NCAA end up being approved by a federal judge in the months ahead after a key step forward by the NCAA and major conferences Thursday night. Among other things, the settlement is expected to allow the nation's wealthiest schools to spend approximately $20 million each year on their own athletes, beginning as soon as next year. (link)

May 23: NCAA: Since its founding, the N.C.A.A. has operated with a business model that defined the college athlete as an amateur. Over the years, as college sports evolved into a mega-enterprise, lawsuits and labor actions chipped away at that model, which came to be increasingly seen as exploitative in big-money sports like football and men's basketball. But the N.C.A.A.'s $2.8 billion settlement on Thursday night in a class-action antitrust lawsuit represents the heaviest blow -- and perhaps a decisive one -- to that system. If approved by a U.S. district judge in California, the settlement would allow for the creation of the first revenue-sharing plan for college athletics, a landmark shift in which schools would directly pay their athletes for playing. (link)

May 21: Campus Protest Litigation: Colleges around the country are dealing with the effects of ongoing anti-Israel protests that have disrupted campus life and have prompted lawsuits from students who argue administrators failed in their responsibilities to keep campuses safe. Several such lawsuits have been filed against schools in recent weeks, including proposed class action lawsuits against Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and an individual suit brought by a Rutgers University student against the school. The Columbia suit is a proposed class action in federal court, while the Rutgers and UCLA cases were filed in state court. (link)

May 21: AI Lawsuit: The student cofounders of an AI studying tool won a $10,000 entrepreneurship prize from Emory University for their idea, were championed publicly and repeatedly by the university's business school for creating the software, and then were promptly suspended by the school for a semester for building exactly what the school had just given them money to build. The students were suspended by the school's Honor Council because their AI tool "could be used for cheating" and because they connected it to a software platform used by the university to host course reading material, homework, and other assignments without obtaining express permission, though this feature was mentioned at the competition it won $10,000 at. "While nothing about Eightball changed, Emory's view of Eightball changed dramatically," a lawsuit filed by Benjamin Craver, one of the suspended students against the university reads. (link)

May 20: Discrimination Complaint: A federal civil rights complaint accuses the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of discrimination over a program that offers resources and mentorships to students who are women of color. The complaint, filed with the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), alleges that MIT's Creative Regal Women of Knowledge program (CRWN) discriminates on the basis of both sex and race by offering its resources to women of color. The complaint, from the Rhode Island-based conservative Legal Insurrection Foundation, alleges that the program violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars race and sex discrimination in federally-funded enterprises like education, as well as OCR guidance. (link)

May 20: Wrongful Termination Lawsuit: Western Washington University's former top auditor won a huge award after a jury found she was retaliated against over her investigation into a "ghost courses" scheme. Antonia Allen filed a lawsuit against the university in 2020, claiming she was fired in violation of the Washington State Employee Whistleblower Act. She launched an investigation into the alleged "ghost courses" in November 2018 after receiving a complaint from the registrar. Her investigation found that the Woodring School of Education had offered courses that didn't exist to some students so their credit load would keep them eligible for full financial aid. University officials urged her to edit her report and remove the term "financial fraud," which she refused to do. (link)

May 17: Labor Investigation: The U.S. Department of Labor is investigating Saint Augustine's University amid its months-long financial crisis, sources tell WRAL News. According to the federal government, the labor department's wage and hour division is investigating Saint Augustine's as an employer after employees went months without paychecks. In early May, a group of students graduated from Saint Augustine's University, just one month after students were asked to leave the campus and finish the semester virtually in an attempt to save money. Saint Augustine's is fighting a challenge to its accreditation for a third time. In early 2024, employees told WRAL News they hadn't been paid for multiple pay periods. (link)

May 16: Title IX: Texas A&M University System administrator Rick Olshak is the Director of Title IX and Student Conduct Compliance. Olshak recently lamented the fact that the new Biden administration Title IX rewrite did not go far enough in extending to transgender competition in athletics. State lawmakers passed a law against that practice just last year. Questions were raised regarding Olshak's adherence to Texas values. Texas Scorecard began investigating Olshak after his comments and contacted Texas A&M on the afternoon of May 15 regarding their employment of him. (link)

May 15: State Law/DEI: In a significant legislative move, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed into law an education-funding bill that includes stringent anti-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) provisions. This new law not only bans DEI offices in public institutions but also imposes strict limitations on activities and initiatives related to DEI. The legislation represents a substantial escalation of previous measures taken by the state's Board of Regents, which oversees major universities in Iowa. (link)

May 14: State Law/DEI: Texas universities eliminated or changed hundreds of jobs in recent months in response to one of the nation's most sweeping bans on diversity programs on college campuses, school officials told lawmakers Tuesday. In the fullest public accounting of the new Texas law to date, the head of the University of Texas system announced that its nine academic and five health campuses alone had cut 300 full- and part-time positions. Those campuses combined also did away with more than 600 programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion training. (link)

May 10: Employee Conduct: The Texas Department of Public Safety arrested a University of Texas professor Wednesday, more than a week after he was accused of grabbing a DPS trooper's bike and yelling expletives during the April 29 encampment that was staged to protest the Israel-Hamas war. He was then fired by the university this week, according to his lawyer. Gerry Morris, the lawyer representing the former professor, disputed law enforcement's characterization of the professor's actions, saying evidence contradicts the accusations against him. The DPS charged the professor, who has worked at UT for almost 18 years and is listed as a lecturer in the school of liberal arts and architecture, with interfering with public duties. The charge is a Class B misdemeanor, which can be punished with a fine of up to $2,000 and no more than 180 days in jail. (link)

May 09: Employee Conduct: An Arizona State University faculty member was placed on leave after a viral video showed him arguing with and cursing at a woman wearing a head scarf at a pro-Israel rally. The university says he had already submitted his resignation at the time of the incident and won't be allowed back on campus. The incident happened on Sunday in front of ASU. The man, listed as a postdoctorate research scholar at ASU's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, is shown in the video getting very close to a woman in a head scarf along University Drive. According to ASU's course catalog, he taught two classes at the last school year: Great Debates in American Politics and Great Ideas in Politics and Ethics. (link)

May 08: Hazing Lawsuit: Three more former Northwestern football players have filed suit against the university and former head football coach Pat Fitzgerald for alleged violent sexual hazing. The first is a 27-year-old former Wildcat linebacker who attended Northwestern from 2015-2019; the second attended from 2019-2023; and the third was at Northwestern between 2020 and 2023. Two of these plaintiffs spoke with former Illinois Inspector General Maggie Hickey when she was investigating allegations of hazing at Northwestern, and two of the complaints say the players took steps to alert Northwestern employees about "violent sexual hazing" and "emotional abuse" in the football program. More than 50 former student athletes have filed suit against the school and Fitzgerald, claiming they experienced physical and mental harm through hazing and racism on the team. (link)

May 07: Title VI Guidance: President Joe Biden is trying to demonstrate his support of the Jewish community, with his Department of Education providing more guidance to schools and colleges regarding how to deal with antisemitism on campus under Title VI. The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights circulated the guidance in a "Dear Colleague Letter" on Tuesday, coinciding with Biden's address during the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's annual Days of Remembrance and the pro-Palestinian protests such as those at Columbia University during the past couple of weeks. Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, no person should “be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination” as part of any federally funded program or activity on the basis of race, color, or national origin. (link)

May 03: Title IX Investigation: The University of California, Berkeley, has opened a Title IX civil rights investigation into whether a law professor harassed a Muslim student during a dinner last month in the professor's backyard. The investigation by the university's Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination stems from an April 9 incident at the home of a professor and her husband, who is dean of the university's law school. Graduating law student Malak Afaneh said she was subjected to harassment and discrimination when she attempted to deliver an unexpected pro-Palestinian speech at the invitation-only dinner. A spokesperson for the university declined to comment, saying it was a personnel matter. (link)

May 03: ADA Compliance: A small group of students staged a walkout at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh this week, accusing the university of discriminating against people with disabilities. Students said the university is violating the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. They argue the violations "undermine the rights and dignity of disabled students," and present barriers to their access to education. Melissa Mitchler, who has been a part-time student for nine years, has multiple sclerosis. She is set to graduate this spring. In an interview with WPR, she said when she started at Oshkosh, professors were understanding of accommodations she needed. When she returned to in-person class after the pandemic, she said things were different. She felt like she had to prove she had extenuating circumstances, whereas before it was a given. (link)

Campus Life & Safety Events

May 30: Campus Protests: New College of Florida is planning to discipline students, including withholding degrees, for "disrupting" a May 17 graduation ceremony after several students were accused of booing a commencement speaker. In an op-ed published Monday in the Wall Street Journal, New College President Richard Corcoran said students will face consequences, including "withholding degrees until students issue apology letters or take mandatory classes on civil discourse to suspension or expulsion." "That students intermittently disrupted the proceedings was a disheartening reflection of prevailing intolerance for diverse viewpoints in today's society," Corcoran wrote. "But that illiberal attitude hasn't and won't rule New College." (link)

May 24: Campus Protests: While some universities in California are negotiating with student protestors, hundreds of students and faculty throughout the state are facing legal and academic repercussions for protesting the Israel-Hamas war. Protesters, who have largely been non-violent, have disrupted events, occupied buildings and public spaces, erected encampments, and skirmished with counterprotesters, resulting in university leaders citing campus policy violations and calling in law enforcement to forcefully remove protesters. At some campuses, students and faculty are facing consequences for what they see as engaging in their First Amendment rights to speech and to peaceably assemble. (link)

May 21: Homicide Verdict: A former University of Arizona graduate student was convicted Tuesday of first-degree murder for fatally shooting a hydrology professor on campus, months after he was expelled. A Pima County Superior Court jury deliberated for less than three hours before reaching a verdict against Murad Dervish, 48, in the death of Thomas Meixner, who was shot 11 times near his office in October 2022. Dervish also was convicted of five other felony counts, including aggravated assault for a bullet that grazed a building manager. Dervish, who showed no emotion as the verdicts were read, is set to be sentenced on June 24. He could face life in prison. Meixner, 52, headed the university's Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences. Dervish was in the master's degree program in atmospheric sciences. (link)

May 18: Compensation Inequity: Shannon Garland has been a college teacher for 10 years, including four at the University of California, Merced. She is a lecturer in music and has a doctorate from Columbia University. Planning, testing and grading are among the duties she handles for her classes. Garland estimates that she spends at least 15 hours per week on every class. Imagine her surprise to discover that she earns less than her teaching assistant, who Garland says helps her but does not have primary responsibility for teaching classes. This pay inequity is not unique to UC Merced. At UC Santa Cruz, teaching assistants earn about $300 more per month per class than lecturers. (link)

May 18: Campus Protests: The University of Pennsylvania police arrested 19 pro-Palestinian protesters Friday night after they allegedly tried to occupy a campus building, the school said. The university's police department said the protesters, the majority of whom were not students, attempted to get into Fisher-Bennett Hall when campus officers and officers from the Philadelphia Police Department intervened. Officers were seen scuffling with protesters and several people were taken away in handcuffs. The protest group Penn Gaza Solidarity said in a release that it was planning on occupying the building. (link)

May 17: Campus Protests: The president of Sonoma State University is abruptly retiring after being placed on administrative leave this week for "insubordination" related to an agreement he had announced with pro-Palestinian student protesters. President Mike Lee's retirement announcement came two days after his public reprimand. Lee sent a campus-wide memo Tuesday noting that he had made several concessions to occupants of a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus. Among other promises, Lee told students he would initiate an academic boycott of Israel and work with a local chapter of the activist group Students for Justice in Palestine to form an advisory council on some decisions. (link)

May 17: Campus Protests: Police on Wednesday took back a lecture hall from pro-Palestinian protesters who for hours occupied the building at the University of California, Irvine, then cleared a student encampment that stood for more than two weeks, witnesses said. Officers from about 10 nearby law-enforcement agencies converged on the campus after university officials requested help because protesters had occupied the lecture hall, leading the school to declare it a "violent protest," police and university officials said. "The police have retaken the lecture hall," UC Irvine spokesperson Tom Vasich said by telephone from the scene. "The plaza has been cleared by law-enforcement officers." (link)

May 16: The encamped, pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the University of Michigan's campus on Wednesday brought the protest to the front lawns of the homes of Board of Regents members. Protesters placed fake corpses and bloody toys in front of eight regents' homes around 6 a.m., May 15, according to the university student organization Tahrir Coalition. The same student group has set up an encampment on the university's Diag for more than three weeks, saying Wednesday's step makes the encampment boundaries "limitless." Regents and university officials called the escalation "unacceptable." (link)

May 16: Shooting Report Released: On Aug. 28, 2023, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill experienced an active shooting incident that resulted in the tragic murder of faculty member Dr. Zijie Yan. At 1:02 p.m., UNC Police were notified of shots fired in Caudill Laboratories. Two minutes later, Alert Carolina sirens began to sound, and campus members were advised via text and email messages to shelter inside immediately because an armed and dangerous person was at large. Following a coordinated search conducted by UNC Police and multiple local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, the suspect, graduate student Tailei Qi, was taken into custody at 2:38 p.m. and later charged with first-degree murder and possession of a weapon on educational property, both felonies. (link)

May 15: Greek Life: There are new allegations of hazing at Virginia Commonwealth University. It's why one fraternity is now suspended for the next two years. Meanwhile, a sorority is in even bigger trouble after some of its members were found to be dealing prescription drugs. VCU just released its latest student organization conduct report. It details that the all-inclusive fraternity Delta Epsilon Mu has been suspended for two years for hazing, and the sorority Phi Mu has received a four-year punishment for using a group message forum to buy and sell prescription pills. (link)

May 14: Greek Life: Federal appellate court judges expressed doubt Tuesday about whether they could rule on a transgender woman's admission into a University of Wyoming sorority or if a lower court should continue to hear the case. The admission of a transgender student into the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority prompted a lawsuit from six other sorority members last year. After hearing from both sides in the case, the three-judge U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals took the arguments under advisement without ruling. The case at Wyoming's only four-year public university has drawn widespread attention as transgender people fight for more acceptance in schools, athletics, workplaces and elsewhere, while others push back. (link)

May 13: Safety: Howard University cancelled a graduation ceremony for the College of Nursing and Allied Health Sciences an hour into the ceremony Thursday. Video shows a smashed door at the Cramton Auditorium and a group of people outside of the building. The Hilltop, the student newspaper at Howard University, reported that crowds formed two hours ahead of the 6 p.m. start of the ceremony. The event was not ticketed. The paper reported that university security closed the doors to the building's foyer after it reached its approximately 1,500 seat capacity. There were to be 280 degrees awarded during the ceremony and the university's page for the ceremony says the auditorium can handle, "an estimated 3-4 attendees per graduate." (link)

May 08: Campus Protests: Police used pepper spray to clear a pro-Palestinian tent encampment at George Washington University and arrested dozens of demonstrators on Wednesday just as city officials were set to appear before hostile lawmakers in Congress to account for their handling of the 2-week-old protest. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability canceled the hearing after the crackdown, with its chairman and other Republicans welcoming the police action. House Speaker Mike Johnson said, "it should not require threatening to haul D.C.'s mayor before Congress to keep Jewish students at George Washington University safe." District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, said she and Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith decided to clear the camp based on shifting information about increased threats. Smith said there were signs "the protest was becoming more volatile and less stable." (link)

May 07: Hazing: A fraternity president at the University of Connecticut is accused of "hazing" and assaulting a pledge during the initiation process while off-campus in Willington earlier this year. A UConn student made a report with Connecticut State Police on March 23 about an incident that happened on Feb. 8 and Feb. 9. The warrant said the student reported that while in the initiation process for a fraternity, he was assaulted by the 23-year-old head pledge master and president of the fraternity. According to the warrant, the president of the fraternity brought the pledges to a house in Willington on Feb. 8. The pledges were reportedly forced to do push-ups while reciting what the pledge masters were saying and when one would fall, they would all have to start from the beginning. (link)

May 06: Campus Disruptions: Two universities announced changes to their commencement plans on Monday, after a tumultuous few weeks on campus. Columbia University is canceling its main ceremony and will focus on multiple school-specific celebrations instead. And Emory University announced it will relocate graduation from its Atlanta campus to a complex in Duluth, Ga., over 20 miles away. Officials at the New York City institution said in their Monday announcement that based on feedback from students, they will prioritize Class Days and school-level ceremonies, "where students are honored individually alongside their peers," rather than the universitywide ceremony that had been scheduled for May 15. (link)

May 02: Student Journalism: As New York police officers stormed the campus of Columbia University earlier this week and arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters, many onlookers from around the country were glued not to their TVs or social media, but to a student-run radio station. The WKCR-FM website crashed Tuesday as people tried tuning into its live broadcast to hear a team of student journalists recount police movements throughout the night and the moment officers began clearing the area around the occupied Hamilton Hall. They also told of a tense standoff where NYPD threatened to arrest the reporters themselves. As some of the most knowledgeable sources of news about their own campus, some student journalists of WKCR worked 18-hour days after the first tents went up at Columbia's encampment about two weeks ago. (link)

May 01: Campus Safety Lawsuit: Hudson Valley Community College is facing a lawsuit from members of its own faculty over a new safety assessment report the school is reportedly refusing to release. CBS 6 is now hearing from both sides -- the HVCC Faculty Association (HVCCFA) who filed the lawsuit and the college's response to it. While the HVCCFA says it wants full access to the report to help improve campus safety, college leaders say releasing the full report to the public would actually put campus safety at risk. The assessment was completed in September, months after a brutal stabbing on campus that happened in November 2022. But when the faculty asked to view the report, college leaders denied their request, which is why the union is suing the college. (link)

If you have any suggestions, questions or feedback, please e-mail Kevin Robinson at robinmk@auburn.edu or Robert Gottesman at gotterw@auburn.edu. We hope you find this information useful and would appreciate hearing your thoughts. Feel free to forward this email to your direct reports, colleagues, employees or others who might find it of value. Back issues of this newsletter are available on our web site.