Harvard gets record gift for School of Public Health
Harvard has received a $350 million donation — the largest in its 378-year history — for its School of Public Health from a foundation managed partly by Harvard alum and billionaire investor Gerald Chan, the university announced Monday.
The school’s new designation as the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, after Chan’s father, marks the first time the institution has renamed one of its schools to acknowledge a gift, the Harvard Crimson reported.
The donation, from the philanthropic Morningside Foundation, is the sixth largest to any university in the history of American higher education, the New York Times reported based on a list compiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Harvard President Drew Faust characterized the gift as “transformative,” and Julio Frenk, dean of its public health school, called its unveiling a “a magical moment for the school,” the Crimson reported. Frenk cited four areas of public health where the gift will allow the school to make a difference: pandemics, hazardous environments, humanitarian crises and subpar health care systems.
Princeton considers shift in sexual assault policy
A Princeton faculty committee has suggested a series of changes to the university’s policies governing sexual misconduct allegations, Princeton announced last week.
The committee’s most significant proposal would lower the standard of proof from requiring “clear and persuasive evidence” to needing “a preponderance of evidence” — the threshold used by the rest of the Ivy League — in order to find a student guilty of sexual misconduct.
Another proposed measure recommends that the university hire trained investigators to decide sexual misconduct complaints, the New York Times reported. Currently, volunteer members of Princeton’s Faculty-Student Committee on Discipline resolve such cases. Parties to cases would now be permitted to attend hearings with legal counsel, and the university would grant the right to appeal to the alleged victim, whereas previously only the accused perpetrator was allowed to do so, the Times reported.
Princeton is one of more than 75 postsecondary institutions under federal investigation for Title IX violations in its handling of sexual assault cases.
“It became clear that we needed to modify our sexual misconduct policies and procedures to become fully compliant with current Title IX requirements, and that in the interest of fairness to all members of our community, we should make these changes as promptly as possible,” announced Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber, the Times reported.
The faculty will vote on the package of proposed policies Sept. 15.
Yale reverend resigns after penning controversial letter
Rev. Bruce Shipman resigned as priest-in-charge of the Episcopal Church at Yale last week after a letter he wrote to the New York Times attracted criticism for alleged anti-Semitic statements, multiple news outlets reported.
Shipman’s Aug. 21 letter asserted that growing anti-Semitism in Europe could be traced to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, its military actions in Gaza in recent years and the stalled peace negotiation process. He concluded that “the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel’s patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.”
The letter was a response to a Times essay by Deborah Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, titled “Why Jews Are Worried.”
In a subsequent letter to the editor of the Yale Daily News, Shipman apologized to Yale students, saying, “Nothing done in Israel or Palestine justifies the disturbing rise in anti-Semitism in Europe or elsewhere.”
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