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Hurricane Florence is still moving and it remains unclear how much damage it will do to colleges in the Carolinas. At Inside Higher Ed, we hope the damage is minimal and welcome reports from colleges on how they are faring. Please email [email protected].

Colleges throughout the region are closed, many of them with mandatory campus evacuations.

Many students from the College of Charleston have been evacuated to the University of South Carolina, which posted this photo.

East Carolina University tweeted photos (below) of some of its students volunteering in various efforts before Florence's arrival.

The Department of Education plans to repeal the Obama administration’s gainful employment rule, it announced Friday.

The rule sought to hold all career education and certificate programs -- the vast majority at for-profit institutions -- accountable for producing graduates with debt they couldn’t repay. Programs that repeatedly failed the metrics risked losing access to federal student aid.

The rule was contested heavily by the for-profit college sector but eventually went into effect in 2014. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said she would suspend the rule last year though pending the outcome of a negotiated rule-making process, which finished earlier this year without producing a new regulation.

In place of the rule, the department plans to expand program-level outcomes data available from the College Scorecard but without any measures that punish those programs with poor outcomes. More program level data has long been a goal of advocates for higher ed transparency but will do nothing to placate advocates of more accountability for poor performing programs.

The department argues in an unofficial notice of proposed rule-making document that research results undermine the use of debt-to-earnings rates for graduates to determine programs' eligibility for federal student aid. And the department notice says public disclosure requirements for institutions were more burdensome than anticipated. 

The department will have to seek public comment on the proposed repeal after its publication in The Federal Register.

The for-profit college sector had long called for the same rule for all higher ed programs. But Congress would have to rewrite current law to apply such a provision uniformly. The proposal accomplishes that by applying the same transparency measure to all programs.

A tenth of all programs assessed under the gainful employment rule in 2017 failed the federal standards. Of those, 98 percent were at for-profit institutions.

The president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges resigned Friday, just weeks after the college started investigating allegations that he plagiarized his 2004 dissertation.

An anonymous email dated March 21 alleged several instances of plagiarism in the dissertation, which Gregory J. Vincent wrote to receive his doctorate in higher education from the University of Pennsylvania. Leaders at Hobart and William Smith Colleges then started investigating the matter.

On Friday, Vincent told trustees he was resigning. He said in a statement that he believed in the path Hobart and William Smith had been following under his leadership.

“Given the anonymous allegations leveled against my scholarship, however, and the distraction they have caused, I believe this is the best decision for the colleges and for me,” Vincent said. “My primary concern is to avoid any further stress to the campus community. I remain grateful for the partnership of the community and wish the colleges well.”

The college will conduct a national search for a replacement. In the meantime, Pat McGuire, professor emeritus of economics, will serve as interim president.

Mount Ida College announced Friday that it will shut down and its campus will become part of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Students in good standing will be eligible for automatic admission to the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where they have been assured they can finish their degrees.

Mount Ida has been struggling financially and looking for new options. In February it announced discussions with Lasell College about a possible merger. But those discussions ended last month.

The discussions came at a time when a number of colleges are considering mergers and some have closed. Small private colleges without substantial endowments have been particularly challenged by the current economy.

A statement from the college's board said, "The financial situation facing small private colleges nationwide is a difficult one. Despite extraordinary growth and progress over the last several years, Mount Ida, like its peers, is vulnerable to the realities of having limited resources. As a result, we have considered multiple options to secure the strongest possible long-term future for our students."

President Trump on Friday nominated Jon Parrish Peede (right) to become chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Peede has worked at the NEH since April 2017, serving as senior deputy chairman. Since William D. Adams, an appointee of President Obama, stepped down as chairman in May, Peede has effectively been the senior person at the NEH.

In his first two budget proposals, Trump proposed eliminating the NEH, but Congress has rebuffed him.

Peede has experience in the humanities publishing world. He has served as publisher of Virginia Quarterly Review, at the University of Virginia; literature grants director at the National Endowment for the Arts; director of communications at Millsaps College; and an editor at Mercer University Press.

The National Humanities Alliance published an interview with Peede in October. In that interview, Peede said that he viewed the NEH as “a catalytic funder” that can encourage “institutional buy-in” and help start “new areas of the humanities.”