Tag: Events

MANCHESTER, U.K.—Spread across three days, the World Academic Summit drew global leaders from far and wide to discuss the complexities of higher education in a changing world.

The event, put on by Times Higher Education (Inside Higher Ed’s parent company), featured more than 40 sessions on a wide range of issues including business challenges, global partnerships and research innovation. Based on observations from various panel sessions and conversations with academic leaders, CEOs and students, it’s clear that despite geographic differences, institutions around the world are grappling with similar challenges.

Shaky Business Models

While many U.S. institutions are reeling from financial challenges due to declining enrollment, a Tuesday panel comprised of leaders from Canada, England and Japan noted that pressures on university business models are widespread and often driven by factors outside their control.

Bill Flanagan, president of the University of Alberta, said that shortly after he stepped into his role in 2020, his institution was hit with steep funding cuts from the provincial government. Flanagan had to scramble to find roughly $84 million (in U.S. dollars) worth of cost savings.

The university was forced to restructure, he said, making cuts over a period of two years in a process that emphasized the retention of faculty and academic staff jobs. But given the depth of the challenge, “there was no service at the university that was not touched,” he said.

He also cited the impact of the loss of international students, now that Canada has restricted the number it is allowing into the country. Flanagan suggested that “Ottawa [the capital] is doing everything it can to drive away” such students, a matter he chalked up to political tensions over migration and housing shortages in Canada. Those bitter conversations, he said, will ultimately harm higher ed’s bottom line.

While raising tuition is one option to offset financial issues (and a lever the University of Alberta pulled), it comes with its own challenges.

At the University of Tokyo, a roughly $654-a-year tuition hike for undergraduate programs was met with student protests and media scrutiny when it was announced this fall, executive director and vice president Kunihiro Ohta said.

Global South’s Growing Influence

Does the future of international partnerships lie in the Global South? Duncan Ivison, president and vice chancellor of the University of Manchester, which hosted the summit, believes so.

In a main-stage interview on Monday, Ivison said the next wave of entrepreneurs and scientists will likely hail from Africa and Southeast Asia, noting that they are navigating global challenges “with a fraction of the resources” that Western nations have to respond to crises.

Because of such innovation and resilience, Ivison said, he is eyeing partnerships in Africa and the Middle East.

“My hunch is that we’re going to learn more from engaging with the global universities of the South, frankly, than we will … by signing yet another agreement with Harvard or MIT,” he said.

Ivison also expressed concern that governments may take what he cast as shortsighted positions on collaborative partnerships with institutions in countries that have been historically antagonistic or in competition with one another, arguing that universities needed to have a “long view.”

In a panel discussion on Tuesday, European research leaders discussed the future of the bloc’s influence as a research superpower. Evelyn Welch, the president and vice chancellor at the University of Bristol, mentioned the institution’s partnership with the University of South Africa to coordinate the African Charter, a coalition of signatories across the continent and Europe, North and South America that aims to create equitable research partnerships with institutions in the Global South.

Imposing a medical model of a university is “problematic for new or young higher education sectors,” Welch said. “We should be open to the challenge of finding new ways to do research and teaching. Saying everyone should occupy the same space as Paris in the 14th century isn’t right.”

Campus Tensions Have No Borders

Campuses across the world have been roiled by pro-Palestinian protests, and Manchester’s was no different. The first sessions hadn’t even begun Monday when protesters blocked access to the event’s registration, holding a banner that read, “1 year of Gaza Genocide” and “Israel out of academia.” They also disrupted a main-stage conversation with U.K. Department of Education skills minister Jacqui Smith and demonstrated outside receptions and other gatherings of conference attendees.

The first day of the conference, Monday, Oct. 7, marked the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel.

With dozens of universities from more than 30 countries in attendance, pro-Palestinian protesters saw an opportunity to address multiple institutions, one student told Inside Higher Ed.

Police officers fell to the ground in a tussle with protesters on the first day, but the scene ended without arrests. In one instance, students were allowed roughly 10 minutes to speak before being removed by campus security.

Some attendees told Inside Higher Ed the tolerance for protests was a function of British academia, with demonstrators being given time to make their points before being removed.

Josh Moody/Inside Higher Ed

Some attendees were visibly frustrated, while others voiced their support for the protesters.

“What’s happening in Gaza is atrocious,” Tyrone Pretorious, rector and vice chancellor of the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, told Inside Higher Ed as he observed a protest.

Numerous speakers also referenced the protests during speeches and panels, often highlighting the importance of engaging in hard conversations as a foundational tenet of academia.

“It is a very difficult day in our community for many people,” Ivison, the Manchester vice chancellor, said at one session. “The intensification of the conflict in the Middle East has impacted thousands, not only in the Middle East, but in our city and in our country. So I just wanted to acknowledge that the pain and suffering that’s been felt by all sorts of members of our community is real. We all, I think, hope for peace.”

Ivison added that protest is an outlet for those struggling on a painful anniversary.

“I’m grateful for your patience, but today is a day that many people are hurting and suffering,” Ivison said Monday.

As I write, I am on a flight home from spending a couple of days at Harvey Mudd College, where I was honored to deliver one of the talks as part of the Bruce J. Nelson Distinguished Speaker series, this year themed on “Learning in the Age of AI.”

The first speaker in the series was Sal Khan of Khan Academy, who was once named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. The next speaker, in about a month’s time, is Emily Bender, the linguist and AI researcher who was named one of the 100 most influential people in AI by Time magazine.

Sal Khan, Emily Bender and me, a former non-tenure-track lecturer/instructor at a handful of different institutions, a nonholder of his Ph.D. who does not have a direct line to Bill Gates in his phone contacts.

I’m thinking about how this wouldn’t have happened without Inside Higher Ed co-founder Doug Lederman.

If you didn’t see this week’s announcement, after 20 years, Doug Lederman is stepping away from Inside Higher Ed, an act following the departure of Scott Jaschik in July 2023 that now leaves the publication in the hands of the next generation of leadership.

In Doug’s announcement, he shares the origin story of IHE. While editors at The Chronicle of Higher Education, he and Scott felt like there were important aspects of the world of higher education that were not being covered, voices going unheard, and they wanted to see if there was an audience for these untold stories.

Starting a new journalistic media venture is never a good idea in terms of the odds of success, so it is worth a moment to pause and reflect on the audacity of a two-person team thinking they might be able to carve out a space alongside a legacy publication like The Chronicle.

Mission accomplished. I seriously doubt that Doug and Scott considered the potential of creating something that would have a life and legacy beyond them at the moment of launch, but this is exactly what they’ve done.

As one of the voices that had previously been unheard, I want to personally say thank you. Blogging at IHE has literally transformed my life. It became the vehicle through which I was allowed to explore my labor and my approach to writing pedagogy, a place to work out the concerns that had previously existed only in my head, a place to share thoughts with an audience that in turn supplied additional fuel and fodder for my own thinking.

It exposed my ideas to editors who wanted to know if I had a book (or two) in me. It exposed my ideas to others wrestling with the challenge of teaching and learning who now invite me to come and share thoughts on that worthy struggle in community with each other.

It gave me the confidence to believe that I could leave the profession I love (teaching) but continue that work in other contexts that have ultimately proved incredibly fulfilling.

Reflecting on my origin story as a contributor to IHE, I can’t help but observe how casual, how natural it was. Needing a temporary stand-in when he was relocating for a new position, my friend John Griswold (Oronte Churm) asked me to fill in at his blog space.

Sure, why not? After a few months, when Churm returned, Doug asked me if I wanted to launch my own space, and also, what would I like to call it?

I hit on “Just Visiting,” thinking of “just” in terms of both “only” and “that which is right.” It was meant to reflect my status as perpetual “visiting” contingent faculty inside of higher education and my attempt to say things I believe to be true. I have never asked Doug or Scott why they decided to give me a chance, but I think it was probably a choice consistent with their founding values, a desire to give voice to a perspective less likely to be heard.

To me, the fundamental value they were enacting was curiosity, and I can think of no better animating force for a publication that covers higher education.

I am tempted to say that I was grateful to be left alone to do what I had to do, but that’s not accurate. It’s true that Doug and Scott gave me enormous latitude to write toward my own sources of interest, but this latitude was not indifference and was instead a form of support, a belief in the power and benefits of letting people be curious.

Indeed, on the occasions when I wrote something that caused consternation and resulted in emails of complaint in their inboxes, I was always supported, even when they may have disagreed with me.

I look at the long roster of journalists—too many to mention—who have done such good work at IHE who have gone on to work elsewhere both in journalism and higher education writ large, and the scope of the legacy of the publication’s founders expands further.

And dare I say that the range of coverage at The Chronicle has significantly expanded over the last 20 years, perhaps thanks to IHE nipping at its heels for a couple of decades? IHE will always be an alternative to a legacy publication like The Chronicle, but alternatives are extremely important in a sector that benefits from as many different voices being heard as possible.

I was pleased to note the headline on Doug’s farewell, “Changing of the Guard at ‘Inside Higher Ed.’” A changing of the guard suggests a desire to maintain the continuity of and protect what came before. Of course, part of that continuity was a constant search for how to better serve the audience, so it’s not as though the new leadership will be standing pat.

In the announcement, Doug says that he’s “looking forward to the next career chapter,” where he can try to fix some of this industry’s problems. This is very good news for higher education indeed.

So, thank you, Doug, and I think we all look forward to whatever you do next.

A Centre County Court judge has delayed an effort to remove Pennsylvania State University trustee Barry Fenchak, who is suing Penn State for allegedly refusing to hand over details about endowment investment management fees despite multiple requests.

Fenchak, who is an alumni-elected trustee and an investment adviser, has clashed with the board over rising endowment management fees and asked for more information, which he argues is necessary to carry out his fiduciary duties. Fellow board members are seeking to oust Fenchak, arguing that he violated the Board’s Code of Conduct.

Penn State has not specified Fenchak’s alleged infraction. 

But court records show that Fenchak, who is bald, made a joke to a female employee about how he can’t wear baseball caps because his wife said such headwear makes him look like “a penis with a hat on.” Court records note he made the joke after receiving a Penn State cap as a gift at a board event and was referencing the PG-rated movie A League of Their Own.

Penn State’s 36-member board was expected to vote to expel Fenchak in a special meeting Thursday. Now a judge’s order has stopped that process as his lawsuit against Penn State plays out.

When asked for comment, a university spokesperson wrote by email: “We are reviewing the judge’s decision and determining next steps.”

Wednesday’s court injunction marks the second legal setback for Penn State in recent weeks, as the university is also being sued by trustee Anthony Lubrano. He alleges fellow trustees launched a retaliatory investigation into him for speaking out on Penn State financial issues and board decision-making and requested the university foot the bill for his legal defense in the process.

Earlier this month, a judge ruled that Penn State must pay Lubrano’s legal fees.

University of Washington biochemist David Baker has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in “computational protein design.”

He will receive half of the $1.1 million prize; the other half will be split between Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind, who won for “protein structure prediction.”

According to the Nobel announcement, Baker succeeded in using amino acids to design a completely new kind of protein in 2003, which has led to the creation of a whole range of new proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines and more.

The Nobel committee praised him for developing “computerized methods for achieving what many people believed was impossible: creating proteins that did not previously exist and which, in many cases, have entirely new functions.”

When Baker got the call Wednesday morning, he was asleep. “My wife promptly started screaming, so I had a little hard time hearing,” he said. “But then they got the news across.”

He said he was honored to share the prize with Hassabis and Jumper.

“There’s always been two sides to the protein folding problem going from sequence to structure and then back from structure to sequence,” Baker said. “And I think it’s neat that there’s a Noble Prize for them together.”

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded Princeton University professor emeritus John Hopfield, along with Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

Hopfield, 91, used tools from physics to develop an associative memory that can store and recreate patterns, known as the Hopfield network, according to the press release.

British-born Hinton, 76, an early pioneer of artificial intelligence, used the Hopfield network to create a different kind of machine that can learn to recognize characteristic properties in data.

“This year’s two Nobel Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning,” the academy said in a statement.

Hinton made news last year when he quit his job at Google so he could speak more freely about the dangers of AI—which he did during a press call after the prize was announced.

“We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us,” he said by phone to the Nobel press conference, Reuters reported. “It’s going to be wonderful in many respects, in areas like healthcare. But we also have to worry about a number of possible bad consequences. Particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

Hopfield and Hinton will split the $1.1 million prize.

A May 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found a majority of college students identified balancing academics with personal, family and financial responsibilities as their greatest stressor.

Officials at the University of South Carolina saw this in real time, as a share of students would lose their state-awarded merit scholarships each year because their grades faltered or they didn’t complete the required credit load needed to maintain the award. Adviser-led outreach has helped enroll learners in summer courses to ensure students meet requirements and stay on track to graduate.

Over the past three years, the intervention has helped thousands of students retain their scholarships and re-enroll for the fall term.

Scholars at risk: Each year, the state of South Carolina awards high school students merit scholarships based on their residency and their academic standing, which they can apply to an eligible South Carolina higher education institution. The top awards—the Legislative Incentives for Future Excellence Scholarship and the Palmetto Fellows Scholarship—provide students up to $20,000 and $29,200 over four years, respectively.

To maintain eligibility for both awards, students must maintain at least a 3.0 grade point average and complete 30 credit hours per academic year.

“The high cost of higher education and the academic requirements for retaining scholarships can create significant barriers for students at risk of losing their financial aid,” says Mike Dial, associate director of undergraduate academic advising. “Internal data shows that, without intervention, these students are less likely to continue their education.”

Among students who started in 2015, only 73 percent who lost their scholarships persisted to a second year, compared to 96 percent of first-year students who retained their scholarships. Graduation rates, similarly, were much lower for those who lost their scholarships (53 percent) than for those who retained them past their first year (89 percent).

Starting in 2021, the University Advising Center (UAC) partnered with the Office of Financial Aid and Scholarships (OFAS) to implement the Scholarship Risk Intervention program to help students hang on to their financial aid.

Put in practice: Each May, the financial aid office provides advisers with a list of at-risk students, identified based on their insufficient GPA, credit hours or both. From there, advisers create cases in the campus advising software, which are assigned to the student’s academic adviser. The adviser will then review the student’s case and which scholarship they’re receiving to see if it’s feasible for the student to meet eligibility criteria during the summer term, before the official scholarship review by the financial aid office.

If it looks like a student can bridge the gap during the summer, an adviser will reach out via email, text or phone calls. Once the student engages, advisers partner with students to identify strategies to make up the deficit, such as enrolling in a course that plays to the student’s strengths or balancing the number of credits a student takes to not hinder their GPA further.

What’s different: The initiative hinges on the cooperation between UAC and OFAS, breaking down silos to aid student retention and completion.

“This collaboration provides a holistic approach to student support, helping them understand how their academic choices directly affect their financial aid,” Dial says. “Advisers now play an active role in helping students retain their scholarships.”

A recent study by Tyton Partners found that, while many students want to discuss financial issues with their advisers (48 percent), advisers are less likely to consider financial issues an essential topic to discuss (30 percent).

The impact: The initiative has been largely successful, improving retention and scholarship eligibility for students who engage with advisers.

From March 2021 to August 2024, 5,650 unique students were flagged as at-risk, with a total of 6,634 flags created. Around three in 10 at-risk students were students of color, and a similar number were first-generation students.

About half (55 percent) of these students had a conversation with an adviser about their options, and 61 percent of these students enrolled in a summer session, compared to 38 percent of students who did not have contact with an adviser. Forty-six percent of students who discussed plans with their adviser retained their aid, and 91 percent who had discussions with advisers returned to the institution in the fall.

Spring 2024 data, specifically, found 55 percent of students (n=1,676) engaged with an adviser, 80 percent enrolled in a summer course, 59 percent retained their scholarships and 95 percent retained into the fall semester.

“The findings further illustrate the critical role of advisors in guiding students through the complexities of financial aid requirements, encouraging retention, and improving academic performance,” according to a university report.

Seeking stories from campus leaders, faculty members and staff for our Student Success focus. Share here.

To the editor:

In “The End of the Academy?” (September 19, 2024), Mark A. Boyer rightfully calls attention to the dangers of performative, one-sided activism in academia—activism that prioritizes symbolism over substantive change. The same dynamic is playing out in the halls of Congress, where the conversation around antisemitism has devolved into political posturing and talking points instead of meaningful action. If we are to make real progress in combating antisemitism on college campuses and beyond, we must be wary of those who merely pay lip service to combating antisemitism without proposing or supporting concrete, effective measures.

In contrast to symbolic gestures, leaders like Senator Bob Casey and Congressman Dan Goldman understand that fighting hate requires sustained effort and resources. Their proposed Showing Up for Students Act, which aims to bolster the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, represents a genuine effort to combat discrimination on college campuses. Fully funding this vital agency is critical for effectively investigating and addressing incidents of bias. Yet, recent attempts by Republican lawmakers to slash its funding actively hinder efforts to create safer, more inclusive campuses for all students.

Beyond legislative actions, universities themselves have a critical role to play in combating hate. We must encourage institutions to increase their capacity to protect all students from bullying, harassment, and threats, while fostering a culture of respect and understanding.

Central to this effort is helping students navigate the intellectual challenges inherent in higher education. Boyer emphasizes the need for campuses to maintain dialogue and embrace a diversity of perspectives. Universities should equip students with the tools to engage critically and empathetically with diverse viewpoints. The Nexus Task Force’s Campus Guide to Identifying Antisemitism in a Time of Perplexity provides a resource for differentiating between antisemitic threats and legitimate political expression.

Colleges and universities must take proactive steps that genuinely address antisemitism and promote a culture of respect on our college campuses. To do this, they need robust support from policymakers who understand that the safety and intellectual growth of students should not be sacrificed to partisan agendas. By addressing the root causes of intolerance and equipping our students with the tools for constructive dialogue, we can create campuses – and ultimately, a society – free from the scourge of antisemitism and all forms of bigotry. Let’s call on our elected officials to move beyond rhetoric and embrace these practical, substantive measures. If we are serious about combating hate in all its forms, this is the path we must take.

–Kevin Rachlin
Washington Director, The Nexus Leadership Project

“Write a brief history of your relationship to digital technologies, including social media.”

This is a diagnostic prompt I have been giving students for a decade or so, first only in composition classes, now in most first-year classes that I teach. In addition to helping me learn how each student writes, I use this prompt to learn about students’ changing relationships to technology. It was in this way that I initially learned about Snapchat and streaks, or the fact that many of my students first opened social media accounts at a sleepover in elementary school, unbeknownst to their parents. Too many of them recall their first incident of being bullied—or of bullying—in a group text in middle school, and most tell me that they get their news from social media, especially Instagram and TikTok.

In the aftermath of this assignment, together we create a set of communal best practices for the use of technological devices in the classroom, taking differing needs and accommodations into account. The related conversations that follow, around new and emergent technologies, wind through entire semesters.

This is because the ways students are growing up, and their day-to day-lives, are changing at such a rapid clip that without such conversations to bridge us, we might as well be speaking to one another using smoke signals. Just as higher education once made the shift, however unevenly, to integrating writing practices and training across the curriculum—an effect largely of postwar shifts toward increased democratization and diversification of colleges—so too it’s time to make the case for digital literacy across the curriculum in higher education.

Librarians have already been doing this work, often unacknowledged, for years, but those of us in classrooms need to highlight the cause and collectively join forces. We need a set of principles developed by instructors from different disciplines and all kinds of institutions that can be integrated into professional development training nationwide and continually cultivated over time.

Many of the same basic tenets of what are known as Writing Across the Curriculum programs could be applied to this new realm, like the importance of self-reflection on behaviors and practices (what that opening writing prompt elicits), the emphasis on teaching the whole student (which means delving more deeply into how students are now spending so much of their time), and the attention to differing expectations and norms depending on discipline, genre and context—something that could effectively be applied to the intake, creation and dissemination of information and story in all kinds of online modalities.

It’s 2024, and the majority of U.S. teens own iPhones and are on social media daily, many self-reporting they use various platforms “almost constantly.” This is where most of the adult public, including the professoriate, also spends at least some of their time, to socialize, elicit or share opinions and information, and, just as often, air grievances. While conversations around technology and education have typically focused on legislation and top-down policies, often induced by panic, these are ultimately stopgap, inadequate solutions to a complete reshaping of the world as we know it. There continues to be little sustained, deliberate professional development or training for professors teaching students whose experiences of the world are increasingly tied to the digital spheres in which so much of their social, educational and professional lives take place.

In colleges across the country, these shifts started long before COVID. I have witnessed professors around me scrambling, often on their own, to figure out best practices for integrating digital tools into their classrooms, or teaching students appropriate ways to find, evaluate and use online sources. For example, is Wikipedia a suitable resource? Both students and the professors I train ask me this question nearly every semester. What makes matters so complicated is not only that context and use matters, but that the answer has changed over time. How should cellphone and other tech use be treated in the classroom? Ask 10 professors, get 10 different answers.

One of the central issues seems to be that professors themselves have little background or training in understanding the history and development, including the design and use, of various online platforms and technologies. Consequently, as with teaching writing, they may feel unequipped and fearful. (Consider, for example, the recent, and continued, widespread panic around ChatGPT.)

It’s no wonder: Technology is changing at a propulsive clip, and no individual besides those working in the tech industry—or, for that matter, those working in digital studies—could be well expected to keep up while continuing with their professional obligations. This is why we professors, with support from our administrations, need to band together and create a new movement, using the highly successful Writing Across the Curriculum movement as a model, to introduce Digital Literacy Across the Curriculum.

It’s not as though we need to start from scratch. The Stanford History Education Group, for example, created its Civic Online Reasoning curriculum in 2014. It has free resources for educators, in secondary schools and beyond, invested in teaching students to diligently look for and evaluate all kinds of online sources. A colleague recently told me about Courageous RI, a media literacy program run by the University of Rhode Island and the Media Education Lab. These are just two of many programs, which have often been independently created as a reaction to the current crisis around using and understanding technology in education.

Most educators well know the problems such an integrative curriculum would be responding to: Things like the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation, an already urgent issue set to magnify with the integration of more artificial intelligence models; an alarming mental health crisis; and, perhaps least often highlighted and most difficult to address, a general lack of awareness and reflection on where and how digital technologies and tools might best fit into our lives.

The effects of technology are not foregone conclusions. Instead, technology consists of tools that can be shaped to work for the missions many higher education institutions have long set for themselves. We just have to be more intentional about making those connections.

Professors should not be expected to face every new shift in technology—small revolutions within a major revolution—on their own, particularly when so many are now working as contingent laborers and when most have experienced reduced resources and supports. These are not changes we can confront alone, and asking support service units across colleges and universities, like libraries and technology labs, to shoulder the burden is unfair and marginalizes the problem. We already have the WAC model we can look to as we similarly seek to integrate digital literacy across the curriculum: Let’s use it.

If you’ve ever attended graduate school, you probably have a list of things you wish your program had done better—or at least differently. Some of them may have been identifiable when you were there, while others might have become more apparent years later.

A case in point: It is only now, as a full professor, that I see how essential it is that graduate programs require that students publish at least one piece, preferably related to their research, in a respected national media outlet geared to a general audience. During my doctoral program, I had no way of knowing how important that can be. In fact, some people immediately bristle at this proposition, especially since it is so outside of the traditional configuration of how graduate school unfolds. Yet the merits are many, and I will explain seven key reasons why.

1. It’s essential to know how to successfully translate ideas for more general consumption. Anything worth researching and learning about is worth sharing and passing along in digestible ways so other people can gain insight and inspiration. And it’s the “Who cares?” factor that’s most important. Readers need and want—and deserve—to know why they should care about what you’re writing. They need to understand why it matters.

For example, how might your research on the water crisis impact public policy? Or, how might you make your expertise on tourism matter to both corporate executives to make the case for more responsible development and to average citizens who love to travel and want to do so more responsibly? Or, how does poetry impact people’s ability to read more effectively? Moreover, how does the overreliance on family caregivers affect physical and mental health as well as family dynamics?

2. Writing for a general audience will change what you write for the better. When you write for the larger public, you have to avoid jargon and communicate in a way that others can understand and appreciate without prior knowledge about your specific field. We must essentially communicate that way when we teach, and it is a valuable lesson to know how to do that in writing, too. Publishing in nonacademic outlets enhances your repertoire, versatility and fluency. Don’t be surprised that it helps you better express ideas when you teach, as well.
3. Writing for a national media outlet will reshape and improve your writing process and practice. Most outlets want pithy, snappy, substantive pieces that run between 600 and 1,000 words for a newspaper op-ed and about 1,000 to 1,500 for articles in magazines or other outlets. Learning how to write concise yet cogent pieces that are densely packed with key insights, richly nuanced and layered, and that invite readers to self-reflect can be deeply challenging yet also supremely rewarding.

When I was in college and graduate school, I had two terrible tendencies: I overwrote everything, and I procrastinated. Every paper I turned in was longer than it needed to be, and I was one of those annoying people who tested the boundaries of fonts and margins. A tyranny of perfectionism weighed heavily on me, and as I see it now, some of my waiting to the last minute was a warped way to deal with fear and impostor syndrome. If I didn’t do as well as I knew I could on something, I could attribute it to not devoting endless time to it. I know I’m certainly not alone as an academic who struggled with those two tendencies at one time or another. Procrastination and long-winded writing are basic love languages in academia. But they don’t serve us well.

Many years later, when I started to want to write for a much larger audience through the national media, those habits had to change. I got comfortable with the rhythms of writing in a way that’s more edited, that tells things more plainly yet, arguably, much more elegantly and creatively as well. And I now meet deadlines with far greater ease.

4. Submitting work to a national media outlet is good practice for developing a thick skin. In order to maintain writing and publishing momentum, you must be able to deal with rejection and criticism. When you submit an article for publication to a popular media outlet and it wants to publish it, someone there might get back to you in as little as a few hours or within a few weeks. It’s generally a far more streamlined process than submitting work to scholarly journals for example.

That swift pace is advantageous for several reasons. First, knowing so quickly where things stand puts you in a great position to either have your work out in a timely fashion or to know sooner that you should try and send it elsewhere. Second, you learn to regularly deal with failure and to keep pitching your work regardless, and the act of doing so can help you value and protect your work. Finally, such a quick turnaround time with an acceptance also means that editors want changes fast. That can motivate you to meet a deadline and help you stay less attached to your every word and idea. The key is to keep your work moving on an assembly line of your own making.

Not only must you deal with pointed feedback from an editor, but having your work available to many more eyeballs means that more people might critique it. Whereas a scholarly article may garner zero to 100 reads over a lifetime, a single article in the popular media may attract thousands or millions of viewers in a day. That can be exciting or daunting, depending on your perspective. But, in general, writing and publishing involve you in a larger conversation, and the possibility of so many more people interacting with your ideas is a good thing. It does necessitate letting go of perfectionism and embracing ideas in progress.

5. Publishing in a well-read outlet can be transformative for your career. Vibrancy and aliveness come from crafting shorter pieces for a wider and more diverse audience. The energy of ideas in those articles can ignite curiosity and connection that leads readers to reach out. Writing for a national media outlet can give you exposure among new audiences, expand your networks and even present opportunities for scholarship, teaching and service you had never imagined. One of the most fulfilling aspects of writing for a larger audience is hearing from people across the world with comments, questions and invitations. I’ve received emails from academics, senior administrators at other colleges and universities, average citizens, and everyone in between.

As a result of writing for the general public, I’ve been invited to speak, facilitate workshops, serve on dissertation committees, participate in webinars and conferences organized by institutions in several other countries, and author chapters in anthologies. I’ve been interviewed on television, radio and podcasts. A literary agent even offered to represent me because she liked an article I wrote.

6. Public scholarship and mentorship reinforce each other. Whether by choice or by circumstance, many people finish graduate school and do not go into academic jobs, and many others transition out of academia to pursue other lines of work. So it makes sense for graduate students to have the preparation and experience to write for a general audience.

Of course, for that to happen, senior faculty will need to know the ropes of how best to navigate this different writing landscape, so they can then mentor graduate students to successfully do this. While some may presume it is much easier to write and publish for a general audience, a good number of faculty members may find themselves surprised by the multitude of different challenges involved. It would be a positive step to see funding and other institutional support flow in the direction of professional development for these endeavors.

7. Publishing outside of the traditional constructs and confines of academia can ultimately benefit higher education. At a time when higher education institutions are under constant scrutiny and attack, and when the public is questioning if anything of worth, value and practical application is happening within these structures, it makes sense for faculty members to communicate with a larger circle and to write for the greater good. It also behooves us to mentor and encourage graduate students to do this regularly. At its best, engaging in public scholarship helps build bridges and increases trust between colleges and universities and their constituencies.

Research shows students who have at least one connection to campus are more likely to persist, retain and complete a college degree, particularly students from historically marginalized or less privileged backgrounds. Students who feel connected to their institution are also more likely to have better mental well-being, as well.

Mentorship is one way colleges and universities facilitate intentional relationship-building, but not every student has someone they can turn to for support while at college. A 2021 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed, conducted by College Pulse, found nearly half of students couldn’t identify a mentor who could give them advice on navigating college and planning for after college.

An additional challenge is preparing faculty and staff members to serve as part of a student’s support system, because some campus community members feel less confident in their role as a mentor.

In this episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Elon University’s Peter Felten, executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning, and Emily Krechel, director of new student programs. Felten and Krechel serve as members on the Mentoring Initiatives Design Team. The two discuss the role of relationships in student success and how Elon stakeholders look to create a relationship-rich university community.

An edited version of the podcast appears below.

Inside Higher Ed: Peter, you’ve done a lot of work around relationships in higher ed. Can you paint a broad picture about the role of mentorship, and these relationships in student success in general?

Felten: There’s decades and decades and decades of research that says the quality of relationships students form with peers, with staff and with faculty are really foundational for their learning, their well-being, their sense of belonging, their persistence, their success—all the good stuff that happens with undergraduate education. We’ve known that for decades and decades.

What we’re trying to do at Elon, and a lot of institutions are trying to do the same sort of thing, is create really relationship-rich environments where students can connect with lots of different people in lots of different ways, in the classroom and outside the classroom, so that they have the kind of connections, and the kind of supports that are going to support them in thriving.

Inside Higher Ed: Emily, you work with first-year students, specifically. How do mentorship and relationships play into the first year and that transitional period?

Krechel: What we’ve noticed is that, when students start to form relationships early, they’ve discovered they have a greater connection, not just to the institution, but to the environment that they’re within. They feel a part of the community.

I know different people have different feelings around the term “sense of belonging,” but really it’s that sense of connection that helps students feel like, “I can thrive here.”

So the sooner that we can help students create connections, not just with their peers, but with all those staff and faculty and peer leaders or peer mentors, the quicker we can do that and help them establish a foundation of community, the quicker that students are going to feel adjusted and transitioned into the institution, which leads to higher retention rates, or at least students thinking, “I can stick it out, I’m going to keep trying, I’m going to keep going because I have one friend, or I’ve connected with this staff member. I feel connected to my faculty, my classrooms, so they’re inspiring me to feel a sense of ownership of my experience, but also this connection to my community, and thus the institution and wanting to persist.”

Inside Higher Ed: It sounds like a really simple scenario: We just need students to meet people and like them and feel like they belong somewhere. But it’s not so simple. What are some of those barriers; what are the things that hinder student relationships and connections?

Krechel: That’s a great question, and it’s something that I think every institution is trying to figure out—how do we reduce the barriers to those connections? I think it’s about creating pathways.

Working in orientation, what can we do during orientation that helps inspire students to connect? And that is changing, and how orientation professionals do that work. If you look at the different research on students today, they don’t necessarily want to be programmed anymore, so these formal get-to-know-you programs, or you’re telling me what to do, that’s not necessarily the best move for an institution to help them build community. Rather, creating these informal experiences where students can be side by side, engaging in an activity that they have thus chosen to do.

We do in our orientation program a lot of social programming in which, here are multiple options, choose what you would like to engage in, or choose to just hang out and play games or hang out and talk. What we want you to do is just come out of your room, as opposed to just being a recluse and staying indoors; come out and at least engage and [try] to do multiple different types of activities. Things for those really extroverted people to do, to video games or esports opportunities or board games. Things that are going to be in a loud environment, and things that are going to be more in a personal, small group environment. Trying to cater to multiple different styles of engagement for our students and creating those spaces and places, that’s one way that we’ve tried to do it.

I think those connection points have been lost in students’ experiences over the last couple of years because of COVID and telling people to stay indoors, to not engage with other people. How do we kind of re-establish people’s skill sets around, how do I make friends? How do I go up to somebody new and introduce myself?

One other method that we do specifically in orientation is work with orientation leaders to help them see themselves as those bridge builders and give them the skill set to say, “When you put on your orientation leader shirt, you are basically imbued with a superpower of connection.” People are expecting you to connect with them and go up and introduce yourself to them. They’re like, “Oh, that’s just what an OL [orientation leader] does.” It helps, for them, remove some of the barriers that “maybe I’m shy, maybe that’s just not who I am. I hate networking.” But then I put on this OLK shirt, and I enter in this peer leader role, and I now feel more empowered to engage students and then thus help them connect and build bridges with one another. So kind of tackling it from multiple angles at the early stages in the student’s journey.

Felten: One of the barriers I see in the research, and in the research colleagues and I have done interviewing students around the country, especially [among] first-generation college students, is this sense that everybody else knows how to do college, everybody else has it figured out, and I’m alone in struggling. I’m alone in feeling like I’m not sure if I fit. I’m not sure how to do these things.

When you feel like that, when you feel like you’re alone, like everybody else has figured out, sometimes you feel like an impostor. What you’re most likely to do is isolate yourself even more. You’re never going to admit to people that you’re an impostor, right? So what you do is you stay disconnected. You don’t ask for help; you don’t connect with professors or with peers or staff or anything like this.

This is a barrier we see really strongly, especially in first-gen students. I think one of the things we need to do—whether it’s through an orientation like Emily coordinates at Elon for residential students, or it’s at a community college where none of the students live on campus—is help students recognize that it’s normal, it’s regular to have questions, to have doubts, to have concerns, and that successful students have appropriate help-seeking behaviors. Successful students take the risk to connect with a peer and say hi to somebody or something like that. That’s not a sign that you’re doing it wrong. That’s a sign that you’re going to be successful.

Inside Higher Ed: We see equity gaps in mentorship, specifically where students … have never had a formal mentor in their lives. I wonder if we could talk about that iteration of belonging and connection as well, finding that older mentor, peer, faculty, staff member who you want to connect with and not really knowing how to navigate that situation.

Felten: One of the things we’re trying to do at Elon—and I think lots of institutions are trying to do—is create this environment where students have lots of connections and lots of relationships. We know that a program can assign the student to mentor, Emily is now my mentor, and sometimes that works well, but real mentoring relationships are more organic than that. They’re more human than that. The best thing we can do is create lots of connections and then encourage everybody to try to move them into mentoring.

But we need to recognize that often students whose parents went to university or something like this, have expectations that this is what’s going to happen. First-generation students often have gotten to higher education because they’re so good at working on their own. They’ve often internalized this message that what you need to do to be successful in college is to work on your own. They don’t often seek out relationships, because they don’t value them. And it’s not that there’s something wrong with the students, it’s because they’re so persistent and so successful working individually.

I think the first thing we need to do is teach all our students, help all our students understand that relationships and mentors are going to help you succeed. They’re going to help you thrive academically and personally. And then we have to help teach them strategies. As a professor, I say come to office hours, and only until I had a child at college, and she’s like, “How do you do office hours?” did it occur to me that students might not know what it means to go to office hours.

Finally, I think we have to help students be brave enough to do this. We can offer them all these opportunities, but just as a human, it’s scary sometimes to go to that office and actually knock on the door. So helping them value relationships and mentors, understand some strategies and then develop the courage to actually act.

Krechel: I’ll go a step further and talk a little more about the Mentoring Design Team here at Elon.

We created a framework entitled Mentoring and Meaningful Relationships, where we define seven relationships that students, faculty and staff can have or be [in] one of those relationships. Maybe I’m a teacher, I’m an adviser, I’m a supervisor. How do we help folks apply mentoring skills to all of those different relationships?

Mentoring is happening across meaningful relationships. We often think about, [a] mentor is this one individual who is the penultimate goal of a relationship, in which I’m going to feel like they are changing my life in some way, shape or form. It’s this thing that I’m striving for. Whereas, if we look at meaningful relationships across the board and helping folks establish some mentoring skill sets in which they can apply them, then everyone benefits across the board. Recognizing that different types of relationships, mentoring can exist in some way, shape or form, and helping folks see themselves as a potential mentor for not just students, but also staff and faculty on our campuses.

So that person who is cleaning the library at night when students are studying, who stops and says, “Hey, how’s it going?” to students, they can see themselves building meaningful relationships and creating an environment that is relationship-rich, where students feel seen, they feel like people care about them, no matter the role in which they’re engaging with another human on campus, that everyone on campus buys in to this idea that we’re creating a relationship-rich environment in which I can apply mentoring to all of the different relationships that I have with students and my colleagues as well.

Inside Higher Ed: I love the idea that mentorship isn’t a one-to-one relationship. It’s a cohort, it’s a community, it’s everybody looking to improve their fellow community member. I wonder if you can speak about the tenets of good mentorship. What does it mean to be a good mentor to students, in this idea that anybody and everybody should be mentoring?

Felten: One of the concepts we use at Elon quite a lot comes from a scholar, Brad Johnson, who writes about mentoring, and he talks about what students need, and what humans need is not a single mentor, but a constellation of mentors, a set of people who can support them and challenge them in different ways. And Brad’s research shows that that’s what people tend to have instead of single mentor.

But he also shows that, actually, that’s liberating. It’s empowering for mentors, because then, as a faculty member, if I’m working with a student in undergraduate research, I don’t have to be all things to this student. I am their undergraduate research mentor, and I can support them in professional development and in thinking about themselves as a student and as a person, but they might have aspects of their lives that are far beyond my expertise or my knowledge, and I’m not the right person to be their mentor there. So helping students and helping all of us see that single mentoring relationships are good, but even more powerful as a constellation, [that] can be really helpful for everybody involved.

Krechel: To help folks work on the skills related to mentoring, we created four foundational competencies that can be utilized to create trainings, to create experiences for students and peer leaders, peer mentors, staff and faculty mentors, or just anybody who is interested in bolstering their mentoring skill set.

We created these four foundational competencies, the first one being cultivating empowered relationships with others. Thinking about, how am I actively listening? How do I build those skill sets? How am I working with folks to help them solve problems, help them reflect, clarifying the information they’re sharing with me to make sure I fully understand and helping? Then finding the solutions in those relationships.

The second one is supporting growth and learning. How do I help somebody set goals? How do I give feedback in an effective way?

The third one is developing a critical consciousness: emotional intelligence, self-awareness, understanding my implicit biases so I can engage more effectively in these relationships.

The last one is enhancing your own interpersonal skills. How do I make sure that I can be clear in my communication? How can I have intentionality within my interactions with people, the networking skill sets? How do I make sure that I have the ability to build trust in a relationship?

Those four skill sets help us establish a foundation of workshops. We did a LinkedIn learning pathway in which … we curated three different videos in each of those sections, where we had a pilot program with staff and faculty, where they went in and watched these videos in LinkedIn Learning to develop those skill sets. Then we had communities of practices in which they then engaged with one another to talk about the skill sets that they were learning and the videos that they were learning.

They found it really meaningful, both to watch the videos and be able to do that in their own time, but then have the ability to come together and have a discussion about things that they were having challenges with, whether that was around giving feedback—that was a hot topic. How do I give effective feedback?

Or, “I’m trying to work with this student and really empower them to work through this conflict scenario, and I don’t know if I’m being most effective.” So receiving feedback from their peers on how to do that more effectively, being able to define these four buckets and then have multiple skill sets underneath them, have really helped us think about how we might curate staff and faculty training, but also peer leader training, peer mentor training, which I think is essential because students are connecting with their peers more than they’re going to connect with faculty and staff.

So how can we help peers of students and figure out what are those skill sets that I need to then, maybe even be a more effective friend? Maybe I’m not their big [sister] in a sorority or a leader in a student organization, but this is my friend who is struggling, and so how can I apply some of these mentoring skill sets to help them work through this situation? I think that took us a little bit of time to define those four buckets, but we started with defining the key skill sets that I kind of talked about in each of those and then we themed them into those four competency areas.

Inside Higher Ed: The faculty and staff role has grown over the past decade-plus to include a lot of different things, and one of those is caring for students. Some will feel very drained by that, like, “This is a lot, I’m being asked to do more with less.” What kind of encouragement or advice would you share with somebody who’s like, “I want to do this, but I just don’t know how I can do that on top of everything else”?

Felten: This is such an important question, because we can’t just burn up staff and faculty in the service of student success. We need to have faculty, staff and student success.

There’s a wonderful new book by a scholar at the University of Wisconsin [at Madison], Xueli Wang, called Delivering Promise, and she says, “We need to be students first and educators first.”

I think the first thing I’d say to my faculty colleagues is that, how you teach can connect students with each other and with others at the university in really powerful ways. The connections don’t all have to be with you. Again, you can create an environment, you can create a set of relationships among peers that are really educationally purposeful and also emotionally supportive just in your teaching. That’s thing one: It doesn’t have to be one-on-one.

The second thing is, I think too often, faculty don’t fully understand all the resources at the university that can support students. It’s difficult if a student is in your office and they’re upset, they’re worried where their next meal is going to come from, or where they’re going to sleep tonight, or about a family member’s mental health or something like this. That’s really hard. That is also not your responsibility as a faculty member to solve.

But almost every college or university has staff and resources to do that work. So how do I help my students connect with those resources so that they can get the support they need, so they can thrive in my class? Because if we see this as entirely on us as individuals to do all of the work, we’re not going to be able to support our students very well because we don’t have enough expertise and enough resources, and we’re just going to burn ourselves out.

Krechel: Absolutely. That’s definitely a piece of feedback we heard loud and clear from our staff when we were looking into this more … that few people are feeling, “You’re asking me to do more” when, in fact, we’re not asking folks to do more. We’re just asking them to apply these mentoring skill sets to their everyday work. Ninety-five percent of people on a college campus are working with people. And so how can we apply these things to our colleagues? If I’m working in an advancement office, to the donors that I’m trying to engage, if I work in admissions to the prospective students and their families?

Felten: Emily reminded me of one of the studies … related to faculty, but I think it’s really powerful for all of us to think about in higher education. It’s from scholars at Arizona State University. The question in this paper is, does it matter if professors in very large enrollment first-year biology courses know students’ names?

What they find is that what matters is that students believe the professor cares to know their name. When a student believes the professor in the course cares to know their name, the student’s more likely to persist through struggle. They’re more likely to ask for help. They’re more likely to be successful in the course. This doesn’t turn F students into A students, but it’s a small thing, and it’s also an attainable thing. Because I don’t have to memorize 400 students’ names, but I can convey to my students that they matter to me as individuals, that I want to support and challenge them, and I think any of us in any role can do that same sort of thing, create that sort of environment where students feel welcomed enough that they’re willing to take a risk and ask for help.

Inside Higher Ed: It’s not about getting it right 100 percent of the time, it’s about trying to get it right 100 percent of the time.

Felten: And having students recognize that you’re trying and we all try.

Inside Higher Ed: I want to learn more about what’s going on at Elon with mentoring. We’ve talked a little bit about some of the different work and initiatives you’re both leading, but tell me what else is happening on campus.

Krechel: Through the work of the Mentoring Design Team, we recognize that mentoring is happening in a lot of different places across campus, whether it’s this small peer-to-peer mentor program in a specific department all the way through research with a faculty mentor; it’s happening everywhere. I think what we are now trying to do is harness that energy and create a shared language and shared understanding of what that means and how that can happen on our campus.

The Mentoring Design Team … worked for two years to uncover where mentoring is happening across campus, uncover where meaningful relationships are being established and cultivated and nurtured, to then be able to launch some pilot work.

We had some pilots last year, which explored different pathways to mentoring. We had a mentorship program called Phoenix Mentors; it was designed for first-year students who were— One of the metrics in our retention data is that students who don’t have anyone else from their high school attending Elon are less likely to be retained at Elon. So we were targeting that student population to help, very intentionally, connect them with an upper-class student leader.

We created mentoring learning outcomes in the first-year experience. We had a graduate student pilot doing this type of work within their graduate student orientation programs.

One of the big things is thinking about the infrastructure. We had a teacher-scholar statement for our faculty, which talked about the ethos of what it means to be a faculty member at Elon. This is a statement that faculty really buy in to and really dictates how they are engaging with students and with each other, and how they’re approaching their teaching in the classrooms and outside the classroom. It said “mentoring” in multiple places. And a lot of people actually refer to it as the teacher-scholar-mentor statement, but it was not the teacher-scholar-mentor statement when you looked at it online; it was the teacher-scholar statement.

This is something that faculty use in their unit ones and their P and T [promotion and tenure], and so the Academic Council actually worked with a subset of our committee to make that officially the Teacher-Scholar-Mentor Statement. We’re looking at other places where we can shift infrastructure, or just how we go about doing things, the culture of our campus.

After two years of work with the Mentoring Design Team, we wrote a report, which had numerous recommendations, specifically thinking about, how do we shift culture, how do we create an infrastructure that can sustain this mentoring and meaningful relationships work? Currently that report is sitting with our president and our provost, who are continuing to look through what is the feasibility of this, and where can we start? They are identifying the path forward with that report of this juncture.

But that doesn’t mean the work has stopped. Like I said, mentoring and meaningful relationship work is already here. We just created a framework to help define that more clearly, and there’s advocacy work to continue creating additional pathways and a different additional capacity across the institution to continue deepening that work that is already happening.

Inside Higher Ed: What’s something that you’re looking forward to with this next evolution of mentorship at Elon?

Krechel: A shared language. When I think mentoring, everyone has their own definition of mentoring. And there is in the scholarship definitions of what mentoring is. We, a small group of faculty and staff, did the ACE study in which they defined mentoring. Different people don’t see themselves within those definitions, though, and that’s why we looked at a more broad framework that defined mentoring and meaningful relationships with seven different relationships, where we can hopefully have folks see themselves more clearly in the work and how they fit into it, so we can have a culture across the institution where everyone feels like, “This is a part of my job. This is a part of what I do at Elon. This is just what Elon is.” It’s where everyone feels like they can cultivate and enhance environment that is rich with collegiality, rich with relationships that are intentional and meaningful for both students and then the faculty and staff as well.

Felten: Yes, and helping our students understand that they have agency in this, and they’re absolutely essential in building those kinds of meaningful relationships with faculty, with staff and with peers. Because I think sometimes students aren’t sure you know what to do, aren’t quite confident how to do college. So how do we help them see that they really have a huge role to play in making their own education really powerful and really connected like this, but also their peers? And actually, they can help me as a professor, make this class better by engaging more deeply in all this. And they can help Emily make orientation better by contributing, whether they’re an orientation leader or just a regular student.

I think the more we all see that connections and relationships are at the heart of education, the easier it is for all of us to make those kinds of connections, to do our work and to be well as we’re doing it.

Since reading Bryan Alexander’s book Universities on Fire, I’ve been immersing myself in every climate crisis novel I can lay my hands on. After reading all this fiction, I’ve been dreaming of turning my growing collection of climate crisis novels into a course.

This course would combine my passion for thinking about the future of the university with my growing obsession over climate change. The course would be called Climate Fiction and the University. We would read climate crisis novels through the lens of the future of the higher education.

Reading the IHE story “Helene’s Aftermath: Classes Canceled, Students Relocated” this morning, this seems like a good time to design a fiction-reading based course on the university and climate change.

Below is a list of the climate fiction books that I’ve read since reading Universities on Fire. There are likely too many novels to read in a single semester, so I’d have to make some choices about what to keep. (Any ideas?)

Any climate change novels that are not on this list that should be considered for the syllabus?

Are there any campus novels that put the climate crisis at the center of the story?

What are you reading?

The Universities of Wisconsin has fired Joe Gow for a second time over his pornographic double life: The Board of Regents voted unanimously on Friday to oust him from his tenured faculty position.

Gow was fired as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse late last year, after pornographic videos of Gow and his wife, Carmen Wilson, surfaced on adult websites. UW system president Jay Rothman called Gow’s actions “abhorrent” and alleged he caused “significant reputational harm” to the university in a statement echoed by board leadership.

Despite being fired from his chancellor post, Gow maintained a tenured faculty role until last week.

The Process

Though it took the UW Board of Regents less than an hour to announce a decision Friday, Gow’s fate has been hanging in the balance for months. Gow was fired almost immediately from his chancellor job, but tenure protections allowed him to remain employed while on leave.

In July a faculty panel voted 5-0 to recommend his termination after a June hearing. Beyond the charges brought against him, Linda Dickmeyer, chair of the Department of Communication Studies, which housed Gow’s faculty position, raised concerns about Gow’s ability to return to teaching, questioning his efficacy and arguing that notoriety “would follow him into that classroom.”

Gow’s successor, UW-La Crosse Chancellor James Beeby, concurred with the faculty vote and sent the recommendation on to UW’s Board of Regents, which had the final say on Gow’s fate.

Regents fired him from his faculty role due to allegations of engaging in “unethical and potentially illegal conduct” related to his pornographic activities, refusing to cooperate with a December investigation after lewd videos surfaced online, and violating information technology policies by receiving vendor emails for sex toys and other items, among other reasons.

Gow—who made pornography and vegan cooking videos with his wife and occasionally adult film stars—has rejected UW’s accusations of impropriety and pointed to calls from state lawmakers who demanded his termination, alleging that the system is bowing to political pressure. Gow has also argued in media interviews and two separate hearings that his actions are protected by the First Amendment and that his online activities would not interfere with his teaching duties.

On Friday, the UW Board of Regents rejected those arguments in a 17-0 vote.

In a statement sent on Friday morning, Gow accused the Board of Regents of violating his free speech rights and indicated he plans to sue.

“The regents claim to want to protect and promote free expression, but their action today shows this isn’t true,” Gow wrote. “Late last year, when they fired me as chancellor, they said it was because the books and videos my wife Carmen and I posted on the internet were ‘abhorrent’ and ‘disgusting.’ And now, after a long and fraudulent process, they have fired me as a tenured faculty member, as well.”

He also referred to the regents as “a Board of Hypocrites,” alleging they backtracked on UW’s commitment to academic freedom and freedom of expression by firing him over his video productions and erotic books.

UW and board officials did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.

Reactions

In the immediate aftermath of the decision, various free speech advocates, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, condemned the board’s move to fire Gow.

“In a major blow to academic freedom and faculty free speech rights, the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents has terminated tenured Professor Joe Gow for producing sexually explicit content off hours,” FIRE faculty legal defense counsel Zach Greenberg said in a statement. “FIRE has said time and time again: public universities cannot sacrifice the First Amendment to protect their reputations. We’re disappointed UW caved to donors and politicians by throwing a tenured professor under the bus.”

Christopher Terry, a media law professor at the University of Minnesota, called the decision by the UW Board of Regents “ridiculous and dangerous to free speech and academic freedom of everyone who works in the UW system” in a social media post.

Some online critics, responding to a post from FIRE, questioned whether it was a First Amendment issue, arguing that UW was within its rights to fire Gow over his productions.

Other of Gow’s detractors remained silent in the wake of the decision, including state Republican lawmakers Steve Nass and Rob Hutton, both of whom called for the university to fire him when the news broke. (Gow has alleged that pressure from state Republicans added to UW’s decision to fire him, given the power the GOP-led legislature has over university funding.)

Neither Nass nor Hutton responded to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.