Tag: career

Last year, Brown University announced that Mary Wright was embarking on a new adventure in early 2025.

If you are anywhere near or around the CTL world, you likely know (or know about) Mary Wright. Her 2023 JHU Press publication, Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape in Higher Education, is a must-read for every university leader. Mary—along with Tracie Addy, Bret Eynon and Jaclyn Rivard—also has a forthcoming book with Johns Hopkins (2026), which will provide a 20-plus-year look at continuities and changes in the field of educational development.

Therefore, it was big news earlier this year when Mary moved from her role as associate provost for teaching and learning and executive director of Sheridan Center at Brown to a new position as a professor of education scholarship at the University of Sydney. With Mary now more than six months in her new role, this was a good time to catch up with how things are going.

Q: Tell us about your new role at the University of Sydney. What does a faculty appointment in Australia constitute in terms of teaching, research and administrative responsibilities?

A: As in the U.S., a faculty appointment (here, called an academic appointment) varies greatly across and even within Australian institutions. In my role, I serve as a Horizon Educator, an education-focused academic role, which carries a heuristic of 70 percent time to education, 20 percent to scholarship and 10 percent to leadership or service-related activities. Like my prior 20-plus years of experience in the U.S., I am still an academic developer (called an educational developer in the U.S.), which means that education most frequently involves teaching and mentoring other academics as learners.

I am a level-E academic, which is akin to a full professor role in the U.S. (The trajectory starts at level A, which encompasses associate lecturer and postdoctoral fellows and goes through level B [lecturer], level C [senior lecturer], level D [associate professor] and level E [professor].)

There are many differences between U.S. and Australian higher education, but I’ll highlight two here in relation to those who work in CTLs. The first and most significant is that, in the U.S., educational developers are often positioned as professional staff. In Australia, many universities treat this work with parity to other academics. I feel that this substantially raises the credibility and value of academic development.

Second, professional learning around teaching is a required part of many academics’ contracts, initially or for “confirmation,” and it is structured into their workloads. I first worried that this would prompt a good deal of reactance, but I have not found this to be the case. I now find this to be a more equitable system for students (and academic success), compared to the U.S.’s (primarily) voluntary approach.

Q: Moving from Rhode Island to Australia is a big move. What is it about the University of Sydney that attracted you to the institution, and why did you make this big move at this point in your career?

A: Three factors attracted me to the University of Sydney. First, I was attracted to what I will call their organizational honesty. The institution was very open that they were not where they wanted to be in regard to teaching and the student experience; they wanted to be a different kind of institution. They also had a very clear theory of change, mapping very much onto metaphors I write about elsewhere: requiring convening and community building (hub); support of individual career advancement (incubator); development of evidence-based practice, such as the scholarship of teaching and learning (sieve); and advancing the value of teaching and learning through recognition and reward (temple).

Specifically, USyd was investing in over 200 new Horizon Educator positions, education-focused academics charged to be educational leaders. One part of my role is to work with this amazing group of academics to advance their own careers, as well as to realize the institution’s ambitions for enhanced teaching effectiveness. To anchor this work at a macro level, USyd also had been working very hard on developing and rolling out a new Academic Excellence Framework, which provides a clear pathway to the recognition and reward of education—in addition to other aspects of the academic role

The University of Sydney is also making a significant investment in grants to foster the scholarship of teaching and learning, which has been a long-standing interest of mine but was often done “off the side of the desk.” My role involves working with people, programs and practices to facilitate SoTL.

In addition to university strategy, I was attracted by the opportunity to work with Adam Bridgeman and colleagues in the university’s central teaching and learning unit. Educational Innovation has been engaged in very interesting high-level work around AI and assessment, as well as holistic professional learning to support academics, but like many CTLs, it has been stretched since COVID to advance a growing number of institutional aims. Because of my prior leadership in CTLs, I felt like I could also contribute in this space.

Q: Pivoting from a university leadership staff role to a faculty role is appealing to many of us in the nonfaculty educator world. (Although I know you also had a faculty position at Brown). Can you share any advice for those who might want to follow in your footsteps?

A: For some context, I started my career in the early 2000s in a professional staff role in a CTL and also occasionally adjuncted. I became a research scientist in the CTL, then moved to direct a CTL in 2016 and had an affiliate faculty position (with the staff/administrative role as primary). In 2020, I then moved to a senior administration role (again, my primary role was professional staff). So, I have worn a number of hats.

Three factors have been helpful in transitioning across roles. First, I love to write, and while the scholarly work rarely “counted” for anything in these series of positions, I think it helped me advance to the next step. Second, it’s important to read a lot to stay current with the vast literature on teaching and learning. I think this can add value to my work with individual academics—to help them publish—as well as my work on committees, where there is often some literature to cite on the topic at hand.

Finally, I think professional associations can be very helpful in building bridges and networks, especially for those considering an international transition. In the U.S., the POD Network was a key source of support. Now, before even applying to my current role, I subscribed to the newsletter of HERDSA (Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia) and I participated in one of their mentoring programs. I also serve as a co-editor of the International Journal for Academic Development, which exposed me to articles about Australian academic development, and I got some generous and wise advice from Australian and New Zealand IJAD colleagues about the job search.

What we learn in school comes in part, and perhaps the smaller part, through the manifest curriculum. We first learn skills—how to read and write and do arithmetic—and then we begin the long process of learning subject matter. This is what school is intended to impart to us. We are taught, in all manner of visible ways, how to do things and what we ought to know.

From the start, we learn other things as well: how to follow rules, how organizational hierarchies work and how we can be held accountable for misbehavior. We learn, too, what matters to other members of our tribe—individual achievement, success in competition—and what makes some people more important than others. These are elements of the hidden curriculum, or what might be called the meta-lessons of school.

By the time students get to college, they have already absorbed many such lessons, or they wouldn’t be here at all. But college offers a new set of meta-lessons. These are lessons about knowledge itself: how to assess it, how to identify its varieties, how it’s created. To miss out on these lessons, as can happen, is to miss out on what is most valuable about a college education.

The meta-lessons of college come with political implications. As political scientists and others have shown, there is a diploma divide in this country. On one side is the largest and most loyal group of Trump supporters: whites without a college degree. On the other side are those with bachelor’s or advanced degrees, who tend to vote Democratic. Clearly, there is something about a college education that makes a difference in political behavior.

Some analysts have argued that the divide reflects a feeling on the part of non-college-educated whites of being left behind in a high-tech economy. These feelings of disappointment and failure in turn make this group receptive to racist dog whistles—DEI policies are giving undeserving minorities unfair advantages!—used by right-wing politicians. Others have argued that the divide reflects an indoctrination into liberalism that students experience in college.

Analyses of the diploma divide have been going on for nearly a decade, since soon after Trump’s first election in 2016. Sorting out this body of work would require a separate essay. Here I am proposing only that the divide owes in part to the meta-lessons of college, in that these lessons should, in theory, make people less susceptible to political hucksterism, emotionally manipulative rhetoric and the embrace of simple nostrums as solutions to complex social problems.

And so it seems worthwhile for pedagogical and civic reasons to put the meta-lessons of college on the table. I identify seven that strike me as crucial. No doubt others’ lists will vary, as will ideas about how much these lessons matter. Yet it seems to me that these lessons, if taken to heart and applied, are what enable college graduates to sort sense from nonsense, fact from fiction and rational argument from demagoguery. Here, then, are the lessons.

1. Empirical claims are distinct from moral claims. To say, for example, that the death penalty deters capital crimes is to make an empirical claim. It isn’t a matter of opinion. With the right data, we can determine whether this claim is true or not (it’s not). To say the death penalty is wrong is to make a moral claim that must be addressed philosophically. Students who learn how to make this fundamental distinction are less likely to be distracted by philosophical apples when empirical oranges are the issue. Whether revenge feels like justice, they will understand, has no bearing on its practical consequences.
2. Evidence must be weighed. Arguments gain credence when supported by evidence, especially when it comes to empirical matters. But the importance of assessing the quantity and quality of supporting evidence is less widely appreciated. To the extent that college students learn how to do this—and acquire the inclination to do it even when an argument or analysis is emotionally appealing—they are less likely to be misled by anecdotes, atypical examples or cherry-picked studies that employ weak methods.

3. Errors often hide in assumptions. An argument can be persuasive because it sounds good and appears to be backed by evidence. Yet it can still be wrong because it starts from false premises. A key meta-lesson in this regard is that it is important to examine the foundations of an argument for logical or empirical cracks that make it unsound. To always ask, “What does this argument take for granted that might be wrong?” is a valuable habit of mind, a habit nurtured in college classrooms where students are taught, likely at the cost of some discomfort, to interrogate their own beliefs.
4. Logic matters. Poets might want to express the contradictory multitudes they contain, but those who purport to offer serious political analysis must respect logic, the absence of which ought to be discrediting. If your theory of social attraction says birds of a feather flock together, except when opposites attract, you had better find a higher-order principle that reconciles the contradiction or admit that you’re just making stuff up. The meta-lesson that logic matters, again learned through disciplined skepticism, provides at least partial protection against toxic nonsense.
5. Truth can be elusive, but it is not an illusion. Truth has taken a beating in recent decades under the influence of postmodernist social theories. Even so, it remains possible, unless we abandon the idea of evidence altogether, to have confidence that some empirical claims are true, in the ordinary sense of the term. Students learn this in their subject-matter courses; they learn that research can turn up real facts, that some empirical claims warrant more confidence than others and that some claims are demonstrably wrong. This meta-lesson can help ward off the nihilism—the paralyzing feeling that it is impossible to know what to believe—that often arises in the face of a blizzard of lies.

6. Expertise is real. In college, students encounter people who have spent years studying, and possibly creating new knowledge about, some aspect of the natural or social world. These people—scientists, scholars—know more about their subject-matter areas than just about anyone else. The meta-lesson, hopefully one that sticks, is that hard-won expertise exists, and while experts might not always be right, they are more reliable sources of analysis than glib pundits and unctuous politicians.
7. A slogan is not an analysis. Slogans that are useful as rallying cries often deliver no real understanding. “Defund the police” is as useful a guide to crime prevention as “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” is to addressing the problem of gun violence. Other examples abound. The important meta-lesson is that a useful, sense-making analysis of a complex problem is likely to be complex in itself—and it would be wise, as college students ought to learn, not to forsake complexity in favor of a catchy sound bite.

The suggestion that these meta-lessons inoculate college graduates against irrationality and unreason stumbles against the fact that college graduates can still succumb to these maladies. It’s hard to know whether this occurs because the lessons were not learned, or if circumstances make it expedient to forget them. I suspect that when well-educated people—the JD Vances and Josh Hawleys of the world—appear not to have learned these lessons, what we’re seeing is a cynical performance in the service of self-interest. The lessons were indeed learned, I further suspect, but are applied perversely, as when the physician becomes a skilled poisoner.

Nonetheless, the diploma divide is real; a college education, on average, all else being equal, does seem to make people more resistant to misinformation, comforting myths, evidence-free claims about the world, irrational emotional appeals, illogical arguments and outright lies. This is as it should be; it is higher education having the effects it ought to have, effects that can impede authoritarianism. To be sure, college is not the only place where this kind of critical acumen is acquirable. College is just the place best organized to cultivate it.

In the end, the issue is not the diploma divide. For educators, the issue should be how to do a better job of transmitting the meta-lessons of college, presuming a shared belief in the value of these lessons for the intellectual and civic benefits they can yield. Spotlighting these elements of the “hidden curriculum” of course means they are not hidden at all, and so when critics insist that our job is to teach students how to think, we can say, “Yes, look here: That is exactly what we’re doing.”

Some professors resist using teamwork in their classes because they mistakenly believe that team projects are too difficult to grade. One issue is that, as educators, we often only evaluate the team presentation, project or paper with a grade based on how well the team has met our learning objectives.

However, a single project evaluation at the end allows some members to potentially free ride on harder-working teammates, or enables one aggressive or dominating member to take over the entire project to ensure the team gets an A. If we simply grade team projects at the end, it is too late for our student teams to adapt or adjust and learn how to be better at working in teams, a key skill that employers look for in our graduates.

The key to effectively grading teamwork is to set up the grading process systematically at the start of the project. In this article, we offer four ways that you can grade team projects effectively to meet your learning objectives and help students become better team members.

1. Share your grading rubric at the start of the assignment. Students need to know at the outset of the team project how they will be graded. Many good students tell us they hate team projects because they know they will have to deal with “social loafers” who rely on one or two others to do the work. However, by sharing a rubric that highlights the expectations for each team member and how you will be combining individual and team grading, you can help students make more intentional decisions regarding how they distribute the assignment’s requirements. We not only distribute the rubric at the start of the project, but we post it on our course management system and frequently review it with the class so our expectations are clear.
2. Include peer evaluation as a part of the evaluation process. Students are sometimes asked to rate their fellow team members, but they are seldom taught how to do it well. As a result, they tend to only give positive feedback to avoid conflict or hurting another student’s feelings. Teaching peer feedback takes only a little class time, as few as 15 minutes. It starts with clarifying your expectations about how you will use peer feedback. You can use or create a form that allows students to provide quantitative and qualitative feedback, and then you should use this same form multiple times during the project. The first time you collect peer feedback should be a low-stakes or practice situation early during the project so that students have a psychologically safe opportunity to learn how to use it. Your students should begin with self-evaluation and then evaluate their peers.
   Next, you need to summarize the peer feedback and give results to individual students so they know how they are doing. Finally, have groups reflect on how well the group is doing without naming or shaming others. There are times when students will have to give feedback to a person who is free riding or loafing. When they do, make sure they know to first ask that person for permission before they give feedback, then praise in public, and finally provide any negative feedback in private. Finally, we have a YouTube video that instructors can show during class to help students learn about how to give and receive feedback.

3. Incorporate ongoing feedback from the instructor. We know of faculty who give out a team assignment and never mention it again until the week before the project is due. This is setting up the student teams for failure. Faculty need to check in frequently with their teams to be sure they are making progress on their work and any questions or concerns are answered. Taking just five minutes at the end of class for teams to meet can pay great dividends in a better project product. This instructor feedback can include a way to hold individual team members accountable for the work they are doing. For example, we have set up a separate Google folder for each team with instructor access. Each team member needed to post their contributions to the team project weekly. In this way, we could keep an eye on any social loafers, and provide feedback to those who were working independently instead of with the team. Instructors can also schedule a brief time to sit in on team meetings so that they get a more comprehensive update about the project and who is working toward each of the outcomes.
4. Carefully consider the weight you give to each phase of the project. It is essential to incorporate peer assessments and the instructor evaluation about how well the project met the learning objectives into any final grade; both are important. However, the weight of these different evaluations tells students the importance of each. More weight on the individual peer assessments stresses the individual work, while more weight on the instructor grade of the project shows the team efforts are more important. At a minimum, use the 80/20 rule: At least 20 percent of the student’s grade should be based on each.
   Also, be sure to check the peer evaluations to verify that they result from real behaviors rather than personal biases. We accomplish this by looking for consistency across the times of evaluation, across team members and between peer and self-evaluations. In most cases, we find that the evaluations show consistency in all three areas (though self-evaluations are often inflated). In the rare cases when they don’t align, we always refer to supporting documentation, such as agendas, meeting minutes and information that resulted from our ongoing check-ins to help make sense of the reasons underlying any inconsistencies.

Grading a team project may seem like a daunting challenge, but grading is by no means a reason to avoid giving students the experience of working with a team. By following these four principles for evaluating teamwork, instructors can account for the team’s achievement of the learning objectives as well as provide students with valuable teamwork experiences that they can take to future classes, internships, co-ops and employment.

Two American academics were among the three winners of this year’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. They were given the prestigious award “for having explained innovation-driven economic growth,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Monday morning.

Joel Mokyr, the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, will receive half the roughly $1.6 million prize “for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress,” according to the announcement.

Peter Howitt, a professor emeritus of economics at Brown University, will split the other half of the award money with Philippe Aghion of Collège de France and INSEAD and the London School of Economics and Political Science, “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction.”

“The laureates’ work shows that economic growth cannot be taken for granted,” said John Hassler, chair of the committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences. “We must uphold the mechanisms that underlie creative destruction, so that we do not fall back into stagnation.”

Staff members at the Department of Education will be affected by the mass layoffs taking place across the federal government, a spokesperson said Friday.

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has threatened the layoffs for weeks, citing the government shutdown. Vought wrote on social media Friday that his promised reduction in force had begun.

A department spokesperson then confirmed in an email to Inside Higher Ed that “ED employees will be impacted by the RIF.” The spokesperson did not clarify how many employees will be affected or in which offices. Other sources say no one who works in the Office of Federal Student Aid will be laid off.

Trump administration officials said in a court filing that an estimated 466 employees were given reduction-in-force notices. About 1,100 to 1,200 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services also got laid off. Overall, more than 4,200 workers across eight agencies were fired.

At the Education Department, the estimated layoffs will leave the department with just over 2,001 employees. The agency, which President Trump wants to close, already lost nearly half its career staff members during a first round of mass layoffs in March. In the wake of those layoffs, former staffers warned that the cuts would lead to technical mishaps, gaps in oversight and a loss of institutional knowledge. College administrators have also reported delays and issues in getting communications and updates from the department, though agency officials say critical services have continued.

The federal workers’ union and multiple outside education advocacy groups challenged the first round of layoffs in court. Lower courts blocked the RIF, but the Supreme Court overturned those rulings in July. Affected staff members officially left the department in August.

Another lawsuit challenged this latest round when Vought threatened the layoffs – before the pink slips had even been distributed today. It was filed at the end of September.

The union representing Education Department employees as well as sources with connections to staffers who were still working at the department as of Friday morning said that the latest round of cuts will at least affect staff members from the offices of elementary and secondary education and communications and outreach. A union representative added that all of the employees in the communications office’s state and local engagement division were laid off.

A senior department leader, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Inside Higher Ed that the layoffs were directed by OMB and came as a surprise.

“Last week the [education] secretary’s office had said no RIFs at all,” the senior leader explained. “We heard on Tuesday that OMB sent over a list of people for ED to RIF … ED apparently edited it and sent it back.”

In neither case were cuts planned for the Office of Federal Student Aid, which manages the Pell Grant and student loans, the senior leader added.

Rachel Gittleman, president of the union that represents Education Department employees, promised in a statement to fight the layoffs.

“This administration continues to use every opportunity to illegally dismantle the Department of Education against congressional intent,” Gittleman said. “They are using the same playbook to cut staff without regard for the impacts to students and families in communities across the country … Dismantling the government through mass firings, especially at the ED, is not the solution to our problems as a country.”

Through late September and into the first 10 days of the shutdown, both Vought and President Trump used the threat of further RIFs to try to convince Democrats in the Senate to acquiesce and sign the Republicans’ budget stopgap bill. But Democrats have stood firm, refusing to sign the bill unless the GOP meets their demands and extends an expiring tax credit for health insurance.

Health and Human Services Department spokesperson Andrew G. Nixon wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed earlier on Friday that “HHS employees across multiple divisions” received layoff notices. But he didn’t provide an interview or answer written questions about whether the layoffs include employees at the National Institutes of Health, a major funder of university research.

Nixon wrote that “HHS under the Biden administration became a bloated bureaucracy” and “all HHS employees receiving reduction-in-force notices were designated non-essential by their respective divisions. HHS continues to close wasteful and duplicative entities, including those that are at odds with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.”

Democrats and some Republicans have warned against the layoffs. Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who chairs the powerful appropriations committee, opposed the layoffs in a statement while also blaming Democrats in the shutdown.

“Arbitrary layoffs result in a lack of sufficient personnel needed to conduct the mission of the agency and to deliver essential programs, and cause harm to families in Maine and throughout our country,” she said.

But Democrats in particular have argued that firing federal workers during a shutdown is unconstitutional.

“No one is making Trump and Vought hurt American workers—they just want to,” Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington State Democrat and vice chair of the appropriations committee, said in a statement Friday afternoon. “A shutdown does not give Trump or Vought new, special powers to cause more chaos or permanently weaken more basic services for the American people … This is nothing new, and no one should be intimidated by these crooks.”

Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia democrat and ranking member of the House Education and Workforce Committee, pointed out in a statement that the administration has had to rehire employees who were fired earlier this year.

“In addition to wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to fire and rehire government employees, arbitrarily firing government employees means there are fewer people to help administer essential programs,” he said. “Moreover, I fear the lasting impact of mass firings will be an incredible loss of invaluable institutional knowledge. Furthermore, random and chaotic layoffs will make it difficult to recruit qualified employees in the future.”

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has rejected the Trump administration’s proposal to sign on to the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would mandate sweeping changes across campus in exchange for preferential treatment on federal funding.

MIT is the first of the nine universities invited to join the compact to publicly reject the proposal, which has ignited fierce pushback from other higher ed leaders, faculty and experts who see the document as a way to strip institutions of their autonomy. The Trump administration also asked Brown University, Dartmouth College, the University of Arizona, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University to sign. Most have provided vague statements saying that they are reviewing the compact, though Texas officials have expressed some enthusiasm about the offer.

MIT president Sally Kornbluth announced the move in a Friday morning letter to the campus community, which included a copy of her response to Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

Kornbluth highlighted a number of areas the White House had emphasized in the compact, such as focusing on merit, keeping costs low for students and protecting free expression.

“These values and other MIT practices meet or exceed many standards outlined in the document you sent. We freely choose these values because they’re right, and we live by them because they support our mission—work of immense value to the prosperity, competitiveness, health and security of the United States. And of course, MIT abides by the law,” Kornbluth wrote.

She also noted that MIT disagreed with a number of the demands in the letter, arguing that it “would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution” and that “the premise of the document is inconsistent” with MIT’s belief that funding should be based on merit.

“In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence,” Kornbluth wrote. “In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.”

Neither the White House nor the Department of Education responded to requests for comment.

Kornbluth has weathered searing criticism in recent years, both by Republican lawmakers and the broader public, after a disastrous congressional hearing in late 2023 over how universities handled pro-Palestinian protests and concerns about antisemitism.

She was one of three presidents, including former leaders of Harvard University and Penn, who offered equivocating answers when asked about hypothetical calls for the genocide of Jews and whether that would violate institutional policies. Kornbluth, who is Jewish, was somewhat more direct with her answers and the only one of the three to keep her job following the hearing.

Where Do Others Stand?

While MIT is the first institution to outright reject the compact, others have indicated they may be leaning that way.

Dartmouth president Sian Leah Beilock, for example, issued a statement last week saying she was “deeply committed to Dartmouth’s academic mission and values and will always defend our fierce independence.” The university “will never compromise our academic freedom and our ability to govern ourselves,” she wrote. While some observers have read Beilock’s statement as a rejection of the compact, Dartmouth spokesperson Jana Barnello rebutted that notion.

Barnello told Inside Higher Ed by email that deliberations continue as administrators are “engaging with faculty across the university through Dartmouth’s shared governance framework and working closely with the Board of Trustees.”

Officials in Texas—where concerns about academic freedom and political interference in the classroom are surging—have publicly welcomed the idea. UT system Board of Regents chairman Kevin P. Eltife, a former Republican lawmaker, wrote in an Oct. 2 statement that the university was “honored” to be among the nine institutions “selected by the Trump Administration for potential funding advantages” and the board looked forward to “reviewing the compact immediately.”

Some state government officials are aiming to make the university’s decision for them by threatening financial consequences if they sign onto the proposed compact. California governor Gavin Newsom was the first to do so, warning that any institution in the state that signs the agreement will lose funding, including access to scholarship funds known as Cal Grants.

Virginia Democrats made a similar threat to scale back state funding in a letter to UVA, to which the University of Virginia Board of Visitors offered a vague and noncommittal response. A working group at UVA is studying the proposal even as officials have expressed concerns. Pennsylvania lawmakers have also spoken out against the compact.

Boards for both the UT system and UVA are heavily stocked with GOP donors and figures.

Reactions Pour In

MIT’s rejection of the compact prompted celebration in academic circles.

“I am proud to say that MIT has rejected Trump’s poison compact,” American Association of University Professors president Todd Wolfson wrote on Bluesky shortly after the news broke.

And some scholars suggested that MIT had established a precedent that others may look to. Brendan Cantwell, a higher education professor at Michigan State University, questioned in a post on Bluesky whether MIT’s action changes “the calculus” for the other eight universities.

“The language MIT uses does put the onus on all universities that accept to explain how they are not surrendering academic freedom and institutional independence,” Cantwell wrote.

Some lawmakers also applauded MIT for rejecting the compact.

“This is what courage in the face of authoritarianism looks like. No university should take Trump’s bribe & surrender their integrity—bending the knee to a bully only feeds the beast & puts ALL our rights at risk,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, wrote in a post on X. He encouraged others to follow MIT’s example in rejecting the administration’s demands.

But some Trumpworld figures hinted that there may be retaliation ahead for MIT.

“It’s time for MIT to be held accountable for their noncompliance. We have a pending lawsuit,” Kenneth L Marcus, a former Department of Education official in the first Trump administration, wrote in a post on X, tagging Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice, who is playing a growing role in the pressure campaign against universities.

Months after Jim Ryan stepped down as University of Virginia president, state Sen. Creigh Deeds is still waiting for answers on whether political interference and external pressure played a role.

Ryan resigned in late June, citing pressure from the federal government amid Department of Justice investigations into diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at the public university. Although the Board of Visitors voted to shutter its DEI office in March, conservative critics accused UVA of failing to dismantle such efforts. The DOJ subsequently launched seven investigations, two of which have been closed. The status of the other five remains unclear.

Deeds, a Democrat who represents Charlottesville and the surrounding area, has been seeking answers since Aug. 1 through a series of letters sent to the Board of Visitors and a far-reaching Freedom of Information Act request. But so far, university lawyers have largely refused to answer the state lawmaker’s questions, citing ongoing investigations. Faculty members have also said they can’t get straight answers from the university or face time with the board.

And complaints over an alleged lack of transparency at UVA are piling up as state lawmakers are applying additional pressure over how the university will respond to an invitation to sign on to the proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that the Trump administration sent to UVA and eight other universities last week.

Trading Letters

In office since 2001, Deeds has a long relationship with the university. But for the first time in 20-plus years, the senator said, he’s being shut out by a Board of Visitors that refuses to talk to him.

“We’re just trying to get to the bottom of what role the federal government, the Justice Department, the president’s office, the governor, the [state] attorney general played in the decision that Jim Ryan made to resign,” Deeds told Inside Higher Ed in an interview.

Deeds has sent several inquiries to UVA since Ryan resigned. The first letter included 46 questions related to Ryan’s resignation, the DOJ investigations and whether the UVA Board of Visitors “operated within the bounds of its legal and ethical responsibilities.”

But so far, Deeds says, he’s been given “partial answers” and “gobbledygook.”

In a series of letters to Deeds from two law firms (Debevoise & Plimpton and McGuireWoods), the outside legal counsel offered little insights into Ryan’s resignation, arguing in an Aug. 15 response that UVA is “is currently focused on navigating an unprecedented set of challenges,” which includes the ongoing DOJ investigations.

Some information included in the responses is already in the public sphere, such as how the board voted to shutter DEI initiatives, and details on the presidential search committee, which Deeds had also asked about. UVA also included letters sent by the DOJ to the university when it closed two investigations; while the DOJ referenced “appropriate remedial action” by the university, it did not offer specifics. But the focus across several letters sent to Deeds by university lawyers was mostly on why UVA can’t respond.

“Counsel handling the discussions with the Department of Justice has indicated that providing a substantive response to the August 1 letter while negotiations are ongoing would be inconsistent with the need for confidentiality. Counsel has therefore requested that the Board refrain from doing so until a resolution with the Department of Justice is finalized,” wrote David A. O’Neil, an attorney with Debevoise & Plimpton.

UVA lawyers also repeatedly took issue with Deeds’s characterization of the events surrounding Ryan’s resignation.

In an Aug. 29 response, O’Neil wrote that the board “would like to correct a number of inaccurate premises and assumptions in your letter” but was “duty-bound to place the University’s interests above all else” and honor its “fiduciary obligation to the University.” However, UVA legal counsel did not specify what, if anything, was inaccurate.

O’Neil also asked the senator not to “draw conclusions or promote unfounded speculation.”

Deeds responded in a Sept. 4 letter that he was “surprised and concerned” that the Board of Visitors “felt the need to secure outside counsel to respond to a legislative request.” He added that he was equally troubled by the failure to fully answer any questions.

Frustrated by UVA’s response, Deeds filed a FOIA request Sept. 18, seeking a trove of documents related to Ryan’s resignation and the DOJ investigations. UVA has not yet fulfilled the FOIA request but did send Deeds a $4,500 bill to process the information, which he plans to pay.

Deeds then followed up in a Sept. 29 letter, pressing the university on what it agreed to in exchange for the DOJ closing two investigations and for more details on where the other five currently stand.

To date, Deeds is still seeking answers.

UVA spokesperson Brian Coy told Inside Higher Ed by email that the university has offered “as much information as possible at the time” in its multiple responses to Deeds. However, he said, the university is constrained by “active discussions with the Department of Justice regarding several investigations, and publicly disclosing information that relates to those investigations could hamper our ability to resolve them in a way that protects the institution from legal or financial harm.” He added that UVA is processing Deeds’s FOIA request in accordance with state law.

Coy did not address several specific questions sent by Inside Higher Ed asking about potential political interference, remedial action for closed investigations or the status of the active DOJ investigations.

Mounting Pressure

Deeds isn’t the only one struggling to get answers from UVA’s Board of Visitors.

Jeri Seidman, UVA Faculty Senate chair, said the board has declined to answer faculty questions about Ryan’s resignation and DOJ investigations. She added that the board has been less responsive since the Faculty Senate voted no confidence in the Board of Visitors in July.

“We have not had interactions with the rector or the vice rector since July 11,” Seidman said, adding that the board had declined an invitation to address the Faculty Senate last month.

Seidman credited UVA interim president Paul Mahoney with being accessible, though, she noted, he and other leaders have also declined to answer faculty questions due to DOJ investigations.

“We appreciate his willingness to come and answer questions. Those questions are never gentle. But it’s disappointing that the rector has not acknowledged any [faculty] resolutions or requests for information, even if the response were simply to say that now is not the right time,” Seidman said.

Recent Faculty Senate resolutions include demands for an explanation on Ryan’s resignation, the no-confidence vote and calls for UVA leadership and the board to reject the proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” The compact would require changes in admissions and hiring and a commitment to institutional neutrality, while simultaneously suppressing criticism of conservatives, among other demands. In exchange, the administration says signatories would receive preferential treatment from the federal government on research funding, though the document also threatens the institution’s funding if it doesn’t sign or comply.

Virginia Democrats have also opposed the compact and threatened to restrict funding to the university if it signs on. That threat comes as lawmakers are ratcheting up pressure on UVA and waging a legal battle to block Republican governor Glenn Youngkin’s board appointments.

The letter, sent Tuesday by Senate majority leader Scott Surovell, expressed “grave concern” over the compact and referenced Ryan’s resignation, which, he wrote, was “forced” by the DOJ via alleged “extortionate tactics—threatening hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding and the livelihoods of employees, researchers, and students unless he stepped down.”

Surovell warned that “the General Assembly will not stand by while the University surrenders its independence through this compact” and that there would be “significant consequences in future Virginia budget cycles” for UVA should the Board of Visitors agree to the arrangement.

Surovell’s warning shot comes amid a broader dispute over who can serve on Virginia boards. While a Senate committee has blocked a recent slate of gubernatorial appointments, including at UVA, Youngkin has insisted that members can still serve until they are rejected by the full Legislature. A related legal case will be heard by the Virginia Supreme Court later this month.

Board leadership and Mahoney replied to Surovell’s letter Wednesday with a noncommittal reply shared with Inside Higher Ed that did not indicate whether the university intended to sign on to the proposed compact or not. They wrote in part that UVA’s “response will be guided by the same principles of academic freedom and free inquiry that Thomas Jefferson placed at the center of the University’s mission more than 200 years ago, and to which the University has remained faithful ever since.”

Numerous academics are part of the 2025 class of MacArthur Foundation fellows announced Wednesday. This year, the foundation selected a slate of 22 “extraordinarily creative individuals” to receive the “genius award.” Each recipient will get $800,000—no-strings attached—over the next five years to “foster and enable innovative, imaginative, and ground-breaking ideas, thinking, and strategies.”

Since the fellowship launched in 1981, fellows have included writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers and entrepreneurs. While no institutional affiliation is required, the award went to the following 2025 fellows with ties to a college or university:

• Atmospheric scientist Ángel F. Adames Corraliza, an associate professor in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for investigating the mechanisms underlying tropical weather patterns. 

• Epidemiologist Nabarun Dasgupta, director of the Opioid Data Lab at the University of North Carolina’s Injury Prevention Research Center, for advocating for harm reduction and creating practical programs to mitigate harms from drug use, particularly opioid overdose deaths.
• Archaeologist Kristina Douglass, associate professor of climate at Columbia University, for investigating how human societies and environments co-evolved and adapted to climate variability. 
• Astrophysicist Kareem El-Badry, assistant professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, for leveraging astronomical data sets and theoretical modeling to investigate binary star systems, black holes, neutron stars and other stellar bodies.

• Political scientist Hahrie Han, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor in the political science department at Johns Hopkins University, for employing a range of ethnographic, sociological, experimental and quantitative methods to examine organizational structures and tactics that encourage individuals to interact across lines of difference and work together for change in the public sphere.
• Cultural anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte, the Watson Family University Professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University, for exploring the political and moral ambiguities of border regions, where state policies regulate historically shifting distinctions between legal and illegal practices.
• Evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers, research chair and professor in the Ecology and Evolution Department at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, for illuminating the evolutionary mechanisms underlying cooperation between species and the role of plant-microbe mutualisms in ecosystem health. 

• Structural biologist Jason McLellan, professor and Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin, for investigating virus fusion proteins and developing new interventions to prevent infectious diseases.
• Fiction writer Tommy Orange, faculty mentor in the creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, for capturing a diverse range of Native American experiences and lives in novels that traverse time, space and narrative perspectives.
• Nuclear security specialist Sébastien Philippe, assistant professor in the Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for exposing past harms and potential future risks from building, testing and storing launch-ready nuclear weapons.

• Interdisciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim, visiting critic in sculpture at the Yale School of Art, for proposing new ways to make visible the layered meanings and functions of cultural artifacts held in museums and institutional collections.
• Neurobiologist and optometrist Teresa Puthussery, associate professor in the Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry and Vision Science at the University of California, Berkeley, for exploring how neural circuits of the retina encode visual information for the primate brain.
• Chemical engineer William Tarpeh, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University, for developing sustainable and practical methods to recover valuable chemical resources from wastewater.
• Mathematician Lauren K. Williams, the Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, for elucidating unexpected connections between algebraic combinatorics and concepts in other areas of math and physics.

Three academics affiliated with U.S. universities have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday morning.

British physicist John Clarke, a professor of experimental physics at the University of California, Berkeley; French physicist Michel Devoret, professor emeritus of applied physics at Yale and a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and John Martinis, also a physics professor at UCSB, will share the nearly $1.2 million prize.

They won for performing a series of experiments using an electronic circuit made of superconductors, which can conduct a current with no electrical resistance, demonstrating “that quantum mechanical properties can be made concrete on a macroscopic scale,” according to the announcement.

“It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way that century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises. It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology,” said Olle Eriksson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

Two years ago, the Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to opportunity in America when it gutted access to higher education for underrepresented groups. That decision was not only legally misguided but also turned a blind eye to the deep inequities that have long shaped our education system. Our colleges and universities scrambled to find lawful tools to ensure that their student bodies still reflected the breadth of talent and promise in this country.

One of those tools was Landscape, a program recently canceled by the College Board that gave admissions officers data about a student’s high school and neighborhood while explicitly excluding race or ethnicity.

Standardized test scores and GPAs never tell the whole story. Median family income, access to Advanced Placement courses, local crime rates and other key indicators help admissions officers see the full picture and provide crucial context to help identify high-achieving students from disadvantaged communities. These are students whom universities might otherwise overlook. Tools that give context level the playing field—not by lowering standards, but by lifting students up according to their merit and the obstacles they have overcome.

The Supreme Court, even in striking down diversity initiatives, still made clear that universities could explore race-neutral alternatives to achieve equity. The use of socioeconomic and geographic factors is exactly such an alternative. Despite U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi’s recent nonbinding guidance warning against the use of geographic indicators as “proxies” for race, make no mistake: Abandoning consideration of these elements of an applicant’s background is not a legal requirement but a political choice, reflecting fear rather than courage.

Without tools that account for the barriers students face, colleges will fall back on practices that overwhelmingly favor the privileged, shutting out low-income and first-generation students who have already beaten the odds. This spoils opportunity for millions, and our campuses and our nation will suffer for it. Diversity is not a box to check; it is a vital engine of education and democracy. Classrooms that bring together students from different walks of life prepare all graduates to lead a diverse society, foster innovation and strengthen our communities.

We cannot allow the Supreme Court’s decision—and the chilling effect in its wake—to undo decades of progress. And we cannot allow educational institutions to abdicate their responsibility in this moment of crisis. The data that provides broader context for applicants remains available, but without the will to use it, too many doors will remain closed for the students who need them most.

America has always promised to reward hard work and perseverance, no matter where you come from. That promise rings hollow if we allow the wealthy and well connected to monopolize educational opportunity. Colleges and universities must honor that promise by continuing to seek out and support students who have succeeded against the odds. Fairness demands it, equal opportunity requires it and the future of our country depends on it.

Dwayne Dixon, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was reinstated Friday after the university performed a “thorough threat assessment,” Dean Stoyer, vice chancellor for communications and marketing, said in a statement. 

Dixon was placed on leave Monday following allegations that he was an advocate for political violence.

“The Carolina Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management Team consulted with the UNC System security office and with local law enforcement, undertaking a robust, swift and efficient review of all the evidence. We have found no basis to conclude that he poses a threat to University students, staff, and faculty, or has engaged in conduct that violates University policy,” Stoyer said in a statement. “As a result, the University is reinstating Professor Dixon to his faculty responsibilities, effective immediately.”

Dixon is a teaching associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies at UNC Chapel Hill, and he’s been active at counterprotests to alt-right rallies, including at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. He’s also a strong advocate for gun rights and used to be a member of the Silver Spring Redneck Revolt, a chapter of the now-disbanded antifascist, antiracist, anticapitalist political group Redneck Revolt. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, called for Dixon to be fired in an X post because of these affiliations.

Ask people at Columbia, Harvard or UCLA how things are going for higher education, and they might rightly say that things are quite dismal. Those places have been early targets in the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to bring colleges and universities to heel.

Funding cutoffs, intrusive demands for data and investigations have made life pretty difficult for those universities and some others. In addition, they have had to confront the excruciating choice of whether to defy the administration’s demands or try to reach a settlement.

At Columbia, Harvard and UCLA, budgets have been squeezed. Uncomfortable adjustments have been made. Reputations and careers have been damaged or ruined.

While some college presidents have publicly condemned what the administration has been doing, many other college and university leaders have tried to keep their heads down, to say nothing or do nothing to join with and support places that have been prominent on the administration’s hit list. But the days of duck and cover in American higher education may be coming to a close.

On Sunday, The Washington Post reported that the administration was considering a new strategy in its dealings with colleges and universities. The plan is to change the way the federal government awards research grants, “giving a competitive advantage to schools that pledge to adhere to the values and policies of the Trump administration on admissions, hiring and other matters.”

Then, on Wednesday, the administration sent letters to nine universities asking them to sign a 10-page “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” In exchange for getting preferential treatment for federal funds, among other benefits, colleges would agree “to freeze tuition for five years, cap the enrollment of international students and commit to strict definitions of gender.” They also must, per The New York Times, “change their governance structures to prohibit anything that would ‘punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.’”

The “Compact for Academic Excellence” seeks to get colleges and universities to sign onto President Trump’s priorities all at once. That means that the kinds of excruciating choices faced by a few colleges and universities will soon be coming to a campus near you.

Higher education is now facing an unprecedented moment of truth, with institutions needing to decide whether to stick to their commitments to independence and academic freedom at the cost of their financial well-being and capacity to carry out research, or to show their loyalty to the administration at a cost to their integrity and mission.

As I see it, there really is no choice. Colleges and universities must say no. They should do so now, when resistance might dissuade the administration from going any further with its plan.

If colleges relent, they will forfeit whatever moral capital they have left and send the message that the pursuit of truth matters less than loyalty to a political agenda and that colleges and universities can be made to give up their independence if the price of freedom is high enough.

I am enough of a realist not to take odds on what choices colleges and universities will make. And I know that resistance of the kind I am advocating may be very costly for students, faculty and staff, as well as the communities served by campuses that push back.

But as journalist Nathan M. Greenfield explained in 2021, “Academic freedom is the sine qua non of universities in common law countries as well as those in Western Europe and, indeed, is central to the functioning of universities in all but those countries with repressive governments.” Yale Law School professor Robert Post explains that “academic freedom rests on a bargain between society and institutions of higher education. Universities are granted independence so they can produce two necessities of modern life: knowledge and education.”

The very idea that the Trump administration is seeking to compel universities to adhere to the values and policies that it prefers suggests how little regard it has for either knowledge or education. Post gets it right when he says, “Democracy would become a farce, and the value of self-government meaningless, if the state could manipulate the knowledge available to its citizens.”

In 1957, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter approvingly cited a statement that identified four conditions for higher education to thrive: universities must be free to determine who may teach, what can be taught, how it is taught and who will be admitted. “For society’s good,” Justice Frankfurter wrote, “inquiries into [academic and social] problems, speculations about them, stimulation in others of reflection upon them, must be left as unfettered as possible. Political power must abstain from intrusion into this activity of freedom, pursued in the interest of wise government and the people’s wellbeing.”

The Trump administration is not displaying such restraint in dealing with all of American higher education. The Washington Post quotes Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, who said that the new policy is a frontal “assault … on institutional autonomy, on ideological diversity, on freedom of expression and academic freedom.”

“Suddenly, to get a grant,” Mitchell continued, “you need to not demonstrate merit, but ideological fealty to a particular set of political viewpoints … I can’t imagine a university in America that would be supportive of this.”

We may soon see whether he is right. But he may have framed the issue incorrectly.

The question is not whether America’s colleges and universities will support a clearly unconstitutional overreach by the Trump administration. The question is whether they will go along with it by signing on to the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”

The administration is asking colleges and universities, “’What are the things that you believe? What are your values?” Justice Frankfurter must be rolling over in his grave.

We can only hope that the first nine universities asked to agree to the administration’s latest intrusion into higher education will follow his wisdom and refuse to do so. And other colleges and universities should make clear now that if they are asked to follow suit, they too will say no.

One of the chief pleasures of traveling to schools and campuses to talk about More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI and my approaches to how we should approach the teaching of writing is getting the chance to see what other places are doing with the challenge of working in a world of generative AI technology.

My travels so far this semester have been very encouraging. It seems clear that we are in a new phase of reasoned consideration following on an earlier period of worry and uncertainty. I never saw outright panic, but there was a whiff of doom in the air.

There may be a selection bias in terms of the institutions that would invite someone like me to come work with them, but there is a clear impulse to figure out how to move forward according to institutional values, rather than being stuck in a defensive posture.

As I declared way back in December 2022, “ChatGPT can’t kill anything worth preserving.” The work of what must be preserved and how is definitely underway.

I want to share some impressions of what I think is working well at the institutions that are moving forward, so others may consider how they might want to do this work on their own campuses.

Going on Offense by Living Your Values

One clear commonality for successfully addressing the current challenges is by identifying the core institutional values and then making them central to the ongoing discussions about how instruction and institutional operations must evolve.

As one example, at my recent visit to Iona University, I was introduced to their framework of agency, expression and responsibility.

“Agency” is one of my favorite words when talking about learning, period, and in this case it means communicating to students that it is ultimately the students themselves who must choose the path of their own educations, including the use of AI technology. I’ve recently been speaking more and more about AI in education as a demand-side issue, where students need to see the pitfalls of outsourcing their learning. Agency puts the responsibility where it belongs: on students themselves.

Expression represents a belief that the ultimate goal of one’s education is to develop our unique voice as part of the larger world in which we work and live. Writing isn’t just producing text but using the tools of expression—including text—to convey our points of view to the world. Where LLMs use substitutes for or obscure our personal expression, they should be avoided.

Responsibility is related to agency in the “with great power comes great responsibility” sense. Students are encouraged to consider the practical and ethical dimensions of using the technology.

At other stops I’ve seen similar orientations, though often with wrinkles unique to local contexts. One common value is rather than retreating to assessments that can be monitored in order to prevent cheating, the goal is to figure out how to give life to the kinds of educational experiences we know to be meaningful to learning.

If you start with the values, things like policy can be evaluated against something meaningful and enduring. The conversations become more productive because everyone is working from a shared base.

I know this can be done, because I’ve been visiting institutions working on this problem for more than 18 months, and the progress is real.

Collective Spirit and Collaborative Action

Another common sign of progress is institutional leadership that communicates a desire to take a collective approach to tackle the issues and then puts specific, tangible resources behind this call to make collaborative action more possible and effective.

Several institutions I’ve visited have carved out spots for some version of AI faculty fellows, where these fellows are given freedom to explore the technology and its specific implications to their disciplines, before coming back to a group and institutional setting where this learning is shared.

To work, these must be more than groups tasked to figure out how to integrate AI technology into the university. I have not visited any institution that has done this—they are unlikely to invite someone like me—but I have been corresponding with people whose institutions are doing this who are looking for advice, and it seems like a sure route to a divided institution.

At my Iona visit, they took this approach to the next level by putting on a one-day conference and inviting community educators from all walks to hear not just yours truly, but also the AI fellows and other faculty discuss a variety of issues.

These conferences don’t solve every problem in a day, but simply demonstrating to the broader public that you’re working the problem is deeply encouraging.

Room and Respect for Difference

One of my favorite parts of my visits is the chance to talk with the faculty on a campus who have been wrestling with the same challenges I’m spending my time on. At the base level, we share the same values when it comes to what learning looks like and the importance of things like agency and transparency to achieving those things.

But when it comes to the application and use of generative AI technology to achieve these outcomes, there are often significant differences. I share my perspective, they share theirs, and while I don’t think we necessarily change each other’s minds, a great appreciation for a different perspective is achieved.

It’s a model of what I always based my courses in, the academic conversation, where the goal of writing and speaking is to gradually increase the amount of illumination on the subject at hand. We’re having a discussion, not a “debate.”

I am far more skeptical and circumspect about the utility of generative AI when it comes to teaching and learning than many. I often point out that anyone who is using the technology productively today established a whole host of capacities (or what I call a “practice”) in the absence of this technology, so it stands to reason that we should still be educated primarily without interacting with or using the technology.

But I’ve also seen tangible demonstrations of integrating the capacities of generative AI tools in ways that seem to genuinely open potential new avenues. These people need to keep experimenting, just as those of us who want to find ways to do our work in the absence of AI should be empowered to do so.

Do More Than ‘Doing School’

Maybe this belongs as part of the first point of “going on offense,” but the successes I’ve seen have come from a willingness to fundamentally question the system of schooling that has resulted in students primarily viewing their educations through a transactional lens.

In many cases, generative AI outputs satisfy the transaction of school in ways that mean students learn literally nothing. We’ve all read the viral articles about students using AI for everything they do.

But I can report from my visits to many different institutions and talking to people working at many more that this is not universally true. Many students are eager to engage in activities that help them learn. It then becomes the responsibility of schools and instructors to give students something worth doing.

Retreating to analog forms because they can be policed is a missed opportunity to rethink and redo things we know were not working particularly well.

There is not endpoint to this rethinking. Frankly, I find this energizing, and it’s clear lots of others do, too. This energy is something we can use to help students.

Late last spring, something disturbing happened in my classroom. For the first time in 15 years of teaching, I opened by telling my students I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to speak. The class was an introduction to the philosophy of education, and months earlier I’d scheduled this day for our opening discussion on critical pedagogy. But in light of charged campus climates and broader legal threats facing institutions nationwide, I realized that as an academic staff member who engages in teaching and research, I was particularly vulnerable.

What followed was one of the more important classes I’ve taught, though not about the subject I’d planned. We spent the hour investigating our institution’s academic freedom policies, asking questions of whom those policies included and excluded. We discovered the troubling reality: Although I was expected to facilitate complex educational discussions, I lacked clear protections to do so safely.

My situation reflects a growing crisis in higher education that has received little attention. While much has been written about the vulnerabilities of contingent faculty, there has been almost no discussion of the academic freedom needs of one of higher education’s most rapidly growing workforces: third-space professionals.

The Rise of the Third Space

Over the past two decades, universities have dramatically expanded what researcher Celia Whitchurch terms “third-space” professionals: staff who blend academic and administrative functions but operate in the ambiguous territory between traditional faculty and staff roles.

These roles aren’t new or unprecedented. The American Association of University Professors has long recognized that librarians, despite often holding staff status, require academic freedom protections given their integral role in teaching and research. What’s new is the scale and diversity of academic work now performed by nonfaculty academic professionals.

This growth represents the contemporary evolution of a workforce shift that began in the 1970s, when academic support roles developed in response to diverse students entering colleges through open admissions policies. The 1990s brought expansion into new fields like faculty development and community-based learning, as colleges recognized these roles could enhance teaching practices institutionwide. Most recently, colleges have seen explosive growth in data-driven student success and enrollment management roles.

What unites these professionals is their expertise in designing and delivering on the academic mission of the university, with special emphasis on student success. They lead pedagogical and curricular initiatives, make decisions about learning interventions, analyze data that reveals uncomfortable truths about institutional performance, and advocate for evidence-based policy revisions. They also regularly teach college courses, write and receive major grants, and publish in peer-reviewed journals. In essence, they do academic work, but without academic protections.

Why Academic Freedom Matters for Third-Space Work

The problem is easy to name but difficult to address. Institutions have radically restructured how academic work gets done based on the shifting needs of students and priorities of institutions, without a reciprocal restructuring of how academic work gets supported or protected. Third-space professionals need academic freedom protections for four key reasons.

1. Educational decision-making: These professionals make pedagogical and curricular choices about student learning interventions, program design and educational strategies. Without academic freedom, they face pressure to implement approaches based on administrative convenience, pressure from faculty or donor preferences, rather than evidence-based best practices. What happens, for instance, when a faculty member feels the writing center’s approach to writing pedagogy conflicts with their own vision for writing in their classroom?
2. Data interpretation and reporting: Student success professionals analyze retention, graduation and achievement data that may reveal uncomfortable truths about institutional performance or equity gaps. They need protection when their findings challenge institutional narratives or suggest costly reforms. What happens when an institutional researcher’s analysis shows that a flagship retention program isn’t working, but the administration has just featured it in a major donor presentation?
3. Policy advocacy: Their direct work with students gives them insights into institutional policies and processes that harm student success. They should be able to advocate for necessary changes without fear of retaliation, even when those changes conflict with administrative priorities or departmental preferences. What happens when an academic adviser discovers that the prerequisite structure in a major is creating unnecessary barriers for students, but changing it would require difficult conversations with powerful department heads?

4. Research and assessment: Many third-space professionals conduct and publish research on student success interventions, learning outcomes and institutional effectiveness. This scholarship requires the same protections as traditional academic research. What happens when assessment reveals the ineffectiveness of first-year seminar teaching, but presenting findings could damage relationships with faculty colleagues?

The Problem of Selective Recognition

Universities have already recognized that faculty work has diversified and requires differentiated policy structures. Many institutions now distinguish between research professors (focused on scholarship and grant acquisition), teaching professors (emphasizing teaching practice) and professors of practice (bringing professional expertise into academic settings). Each category receives tailored policies for promotion, performance evaluation and professional development that align with their distinct contributions.

Yet on the staff side, institutions continue to operate as if all nonfaculty work is identical. A writing center director publishing on linguistic justice, an assistant dean of students developing crisis-intervention protocols for student mental health emergencies and a facilities director managing building maintenance are all governed by the same generic “staff” policies. This isn’t just administratively awkward: It’s a fundamental misalignment between how work actually happens and how institutions recognize and protect that work.

Applying Consistent Logic

The way forward isn’t revolutionary, but simply the application of the same logic that most universities already use for faculty. Rather than the outdated single “staff” category, colleges and universities need at least three distinct categories that reflect how staff work actually happens.

1. Academic staff: Professionals engaged in teaching, research, curriculum design and educational assessment, including learning center directors, faculty developers, institutional researchers, professional academic advisers and academic program directors. These roles require academic freedom protections, scholarly review processes and governance representation.
2. Student life staff: Professionals focused on co-curricular support, belonging and student life, including residence life coordinators, activities directors and counseling staff. These roles need specialized professional development and advancement pathways that recognize and support their expertise in student development.
3. Operational staff: Professionals handling business functions, facilities and administrative operations. These roles can continue with traditional staff policies and support structures.

This framework enables differentiated policy environments and support structures across multiple areas. Critically, academic freedom policies can be tailored to protect inquiry for staff who engage in this kind of work, while recognizing that other staff have different professional needs.

The expansion of third-space/academic staff roles represents higher education’s recognition that effective student success requires diverse forms of expertise working collaboratively. But without policy frameworks that acknowledge and protect this academic work, institutions risk undermining the very innovations they’ve created. When the professionals responsible for student success cannot engage in free inquiry, challenge ineffective practices or advocate for evidence-based approaches, everyone loses—especially students.