Higher Education Quick Takes

Today on the Academic Minute, part of Cornell College Week, Rhawn Denniston, professor of geology, discusses how Earth’s history is written in the rock. Learn more about the Academic Minute here.

A district court judge ruled Monday that a Pennsylvania restaurant must pay a former college student $40,000 for racial discrimination. The decision closes a lawsuit in which the student claimed an employee called him the N-word and did not process his food order, according to court documents.

Ricky Lee Bugg Jr., a black student who attended Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa., at the time of the incident in January 2017, said he put in an order at Just Wing It, a local restaurant chain, and was called a racial slur by Christopher Behney, who was working at the restaurant. Bugg said he was told by Nikki Meyer, the owner of the Annville restaurant, that he had to pay for his food before receiving it, which the restaurant does not ask of its white customers.

According to the complaint, Behney told Bugg as he and his friends were leaving the restaurant to, “get out, n-----s, Trump’s president now, I can say what I want.” In a press conference after the incident, Meyer said the restaurant was not racist and that Behney “merely repeated the slur” to Bugg after he had said it, Pennlive.com reported. However, Just Wing It failed to appear in court and did not file a reply to Bugg’s lawsuit, Jennifer Wilson, judge for the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, wrote in court records.

The incident sparked a demonstration for racial healing on the Lebanon Valley campus a month later, Pennlive.com reported. The court agreed that the incident "affected Bugg greatly, and that he should receive damages for emotional distress and humiliation," Wilson wrote in a memorandum. "Bugg’s perspective -- based on his life experience up to that point -- that he was an equal, valued, and respected member of the community was cruelly destroyed in an instant, because of the unprovoked racist insults that Behney hurled at him."

Hope International University of Fullerton, Calif., plans to close Nebraska Christian College at the end of the spring semester, just a few years after acquiring the Nebraska institution in 2016 through a merger.

The move is a result of the same financial pressures bearing down on small, private, Christian institutions nationwide, according to a statement from the chair of Hope International’s Board of Trustees, Toby Yurek. The Nebraska location was operating at losses deemed unsustainable.

Nebraska Christian College added intercollegiate athletics and online offerings, and enrollment grew 27 percent to 140 students after the 2016 merger. But enrollment since plunged to 85 this spring, a 30-year low.

“It is imperative that our students and their families understand this is a branch campus closure,” Hope International’s president, Paul Alexander, said in a statement. “Students enrolled at NCC are already HIU students, by virtue of the merger, and will continue to be enrolled at HIU. We fully understand that this news, initially, is shocking, unsettling, and disappointing for our students, but we want them to know that we will do everything in our power to assist them through this.”

Students will have the option of transferring to Hope International’s campus in California or finishing their degrees online. The Nebraska location enrolls 85 students, half of them enrolled in online programs.

Two single-sex institutions in Minnesota are moving toward having only one president.

The College of St. Benedict and St. John's University expect to announce a search for a new joint president later in the year, the St. Cloud Times reported, citing a Thursday memo. The idea still needs legal, governance and accreditor sign-off.

Each institution would maintain a separate identity under the plan. They currently share academic programming.

"A single leader would provide a more integrated structure that effectively implements new and exciting opportunities for our students while retaining our unique identities as separate schools for women and men," board chairs at the two institutions wrote in the memo.

Mary Dana Hinton, president of the College of St. Benedict, is leaving at the end of June to take the same position at Hollins University in Virginia. St. John’s has an interim president, Eugene McAllister.