Tag: Events

We were very excited to read Ruffalo Noel Levitz’s new report on generational differences among online learners and what this means for the development and expansion of new online programs. Scott Jeffe, vice president, graduate and online research at RNL, sat down with us to discuss what he’s learned in writing the report and what institutions should consider as they develop new online programs. This Q&A builds on our earlier conversations in 2021, 2022 and 2024 with Scott.

Q: So, what would you say is the most interesting finding in this new report? 

A: Well, I think that the biggest headline of this new report, now that it is finished, is that online learners across the three generations (Gen X, millennial and Gen Z) are more alike than they are different. I shouldn’t have been surprised, most of the research that I have conducted has made similar conclusions. Whether you are a graduate student in an online or classroom program, an online student at the undergraduate or graduate level, or an adult undergrad seeking retraining, what drives them and how they search and evaluate programs is more similar than different. This is good news for institutional marketers and recruitment leaders because it essentially says that they do not have to rebuild the wheel for every program. 

Q: How do the generations differ/diverge in terms of what they expect and need from an online program?

A: When we started scanning the data for the differences among the generations that really matter for marketing, recruitment and even program development, some things were more obvious than others, but our list includes:

• Gen Z and millennials use AI in their daily lives—and in their college search—much more frequently than does Gen X. However, those Gen X who used it in their search are just as satisfied with the experience as their younger counterparts.
• Gen Z and millennials are considerably more likely to be concerned about having the self-discipline required while Gen X is more concerned with being able to get the classes they need. All the generations, though, are most concerned about how they will interact with their instructors.
• The three generations differ considerably on the advertising that made the biggest impact on their awareness of online programs, albeit with all three generations leading with search engines and the generations differing on the digital platforms that work best.

Q: Where are those needs and expectations similar across all the generations?

A: All of the generations are most often looking for online programs that are close to home. The era of defaulting to far-off institutions that they have never heard of is a thing of the past. They expect that the institutions they know and love in their backyard will offer online options. The interesting outlier is that about one-third of we Gen Xers are still looking beyond our communities and regions.

Whether you are Gen X or Gen Z or somewhere in the middle, everyone now expects a timely response to their inquiry. This was interesting to me because, again with my Gen X bias, I assumed that we old-timers would be more willing to wait than our succeeding generations that have grown up in a tech-enabled world.

In a corollary finding, the report also documents that regardless of age, when a response takes longer than expected, online students take it personally (with nearly half saying that it is a sign that they are not important to the program). I fully expected this to be another point on which Gen X would diverge from succeeding generations, since we all grew up waiting in every kind of line imaginable. This tech-enabled world has changed this dramatically.

These are just a few of the things we learned. There is so much more to discover in the full report, which you can download here.

Q: How do institutions apply these learnings to their positioning (and programming) strategies?

A: When we started this project, our goal was to showcase the data in a way that maximizes its usefulness. To that end, each of our 15 points presents the data alongside three critical components: finding, implication and action. This format provides a specific—and succinct—recommendation for each finding that (I hope) will help readers enhance their online programs—from first contact through to enrollment.

We present an important set of universals that online program leaders can use to help set their top-line strategy and start evaluating the extent to which their operations are aligned with online student expectations and preferences across the generations. It does not, however, take the place of building specific-student personas for each of your online programs. Without understanding how your online business administration student differs from your online social work student, you will not know the specific messaging, marketing channels, communications platforms and methods (and more) that should be used.

So, I would recommend that online stakeholders use this report to evaluate where they are today and begin to make decisions on how their operations can better align with student needs. When these student expectations do not align across the generations, always default to what millennials need—they represent nearly half of all online students today and will do so for some time to come. Their expectations also more commonly align with Gen Z than with Gen X, so this strategy will, more often than not, be your best option.

Last spring, CNN published an article on teachers using generative AI to grade student writing. On social media, a few of my colleagues at other institutions instantly complained—before reading the article to see that at least one person quoted made the same point—that if students are using AI to write all their papers and teachers are using it to do all the grading, then we might as well just give up on our formal education system entirely.

They’re not wrong. Fortunately, most students aren’t only using AI, and most professors aren’t asking AI to do all their grading. But there’s more to this issue than the potential for an AI circle jerk, and it illustrates a core problem with how we’ve conceptualized writing and grading in higher education, one that we must grapple with as the new academic year begins again.

The article describes several professors who are using AI for grading and giving feedback, all of whom seem to be interested in figuring out how to do so ethically and in ways that support their educational mission. I had many of the same questions and have been engaging in many of the same conversations. Last year, I was a fellow at the University of Southern California’s Center for Generative AI and Society, focusing on the impact AI is having on education and writing instruction. My colleague Mark Marino, inspired by Jeremy Douglass’s “perfect tutor” exercise, worked with his students to write several bots (CoachTutor and ReviewerNumber2) to teach about rubrics and how different prompts could result in different kinds of feedback. His initial thought was that CoachTutor gave very similar feedback to his own, and he offered the bots to the rest of us to try.

I used those bots as well as my own prompts in ClaudeAI and ChatGPT4 to explore the uses and limits of AI-generated feedback on student papers. What I found led me to a very different conclusion than that of the professors cited in the CNN article: While they saw AI as reducing the time it takes to grade effectively by allowing faculty members to focus on higher-level issues with content and ideas, I found using it creates more problems and takes longer if I want my students to get meaningful feedback rather than just an arbitrary number or letter grade.

Those cited in the article suggested that AI could take over grading certain elements of writing. For instance, a professor of business ethics suggested teachers can leave “structure, language use and grammar” to AI to score while teachers look for “novelty, creativity and depth of insight.”

That separation reflects a very common view of writing in which thought and structure, ideas and language, are distinct from each other. Professors use rubrics to separate those categories, assign points to each one and then add them up—but such a separation is largely arbitrary. The kind of surface-level structures and grammar issues that the AI can assess are also the ones the AI can edit in a student’s writing. But structure and grammar can intertwine with elements like creativity, depth and nuance. Many of my students develop the most interesting, creative ideas by thinking carefully and critically about the language that structures our thought on any given topic. My students can spend half an hour in class working over a single sentence with Richard Lanham’s paramedic method, not because excessive prepositional phrases and passive voice are that important or difficult to reduce, but because focusing on them often reveals deeper problems with the thinking that structured the sentence to begin with.

That is not a problem just with AI, of course. It’s a problem with our grading traditions. Analytic grading with points gives a sense of objectivity and consistency even when writing is far more complex. But if we can’t trust AI to assess novelty or depth of insight because it can’t actually think, we shouldn’t trust the AI to offer nuanced feedback on structure and grammar, either.

Generic in a Specific Way

The problems with assuming a divide between what AI can evaluate and what it can’t are reflected in the results I had when generating feedback on student work. I started by commenting on student papers without AI assistance so that I would not be biased by the results. (Indeed, one of my initial concerns about using AI for grading was that if faculty members are under a time crunch, they will be primed to see only what the AI notices and not what they might have focused on without the AI.) With student permission, I then ran the papers through several programs to ask for feedback.

When using Mark’s bots, I explained the prompt and my goal for the essay and asked for feedback using the built-in criteria. When using ClaudeAI or ChatGPT, I gave the AI the original prompt for the essay, some context of what the aim of the paper was, one of several different roles (a writing professor, a writing center tutor and so on), and asked specifically for feedback that would help a student with revision or improvement in their writing. The AI produced some pretty standard responses: It would ask for more examples and analysis, note the need for stronger transitions, and the like.

Unfortunately, those responses were generic in a very specific way. It became clear over the course of the experiment that the AI was giving variations on the same feedback regardless of the quality of the paper. It asked for more examples or statistics in papers that didn’t need them. It continually encouraged the five-paragraph essay structure—but, unfortunately, that went against what I wanted, since I (like so many other writing professors at the college level) want students to develop arguments that go past the five-paragraph structure. When focusing on language and grammar issues, it flattened style and student voice.

Even when I rewrote the prompts to reflect my different expectations, the feedback didn’t change much. AI offered stronger writers conservative feedback rather than encouraging them to take risks with their language and ideas. It could not distinguish between a student who was not thinking at all about structure and, as I have generally learned to do, one who was trying but failing to create a different kind of structure to support a more interesting argument. The AI feedback was the same either way.

Ultimately, the AI responses were so formulaic and conservative that they reminded me of a clip from The Hunt for Red October, where Seaman Jones tells his captain that the computer has misidentified the Red October submarine because when it gets confused, it “runs home” to its initial training data on seismic events. Like the submarine computer, when the AI was presented with something out of the ordinary, it simply found the ordinary within it based on past data, with little ability to discern what might be both new and valuable. Perhaps the AIs were trained on too many five-paragraph essays.

That said, AI is not completely incapable of giving feedback on more complex issues. I could get some reasonable feedback if I prompted it to attend to a specific problem, like “This paper struggles with identifying the specific contribution it is making to the conversation, as well as distinguishing between the author’s ideas and the ideas of the sources the paper uses. How would a writing professor give feedback on these issues?”

Yet asking an AI to respond to an element of a text without alerting it to the fact that there was a problem was often insufficient. In one instance, I ran a student’s essay through multiple AI applications, first asking it to give feedback on the thesis and structure without saying that there was a problem: The body of the paper and the thesis didn’t line up very well. While many of the paragraphs had key terms that were related to the thesis in a general way, none of them actually addressed what was needed to support the central claim. And AI didn’t pick any of that up. It wasn’t until I specifically said, “There is a problem with the way the structure and content of the paper’s points support the thesis,” and asked, “What is that problem and how could it be fixed?” that the AI started to produce useful feedback, though it still needed a lot of guidance.

Upon hearing about this failure across the bots and chat programs, Mark Marino wrote a new bot (MrThesis) focusing specifically on thesis and support. It didn’t do much better than the initial bots until I again named the specific problem. In other words, an AI might be used to help fix problems in an individual piece of student writing, but it is less effective at identifying the existence of problems other than the most banal.

Skeptical Readers, Skeptical Questions

Over the course of this project, I was forced to spend more time trying to get the AI to produce meaningful feedback tailored to the actual paper than I did just writing the feedback on my initial pass through the paper. AI isn’t a time saver for professors if we are actually trying to give meaningful reactions to student papers that have complex issues. And its feedback on things like structure can actually do more harm than good if not carefully curated—curation that easily takes as much time as writing the feedback ourselves.

I do believe there are ways to use AI in the classroom for feedback, but they all require a pre-existing awareness of what the problem is. If professors are so crunched for time they need AI to make grading go faster, that reflects bigger issues with our employment and teaching, not the actual skill or accuracy of AI.

Last year, my students struggled with identifying counterarguments to their ideas. Students often lack the facility to think about new topics from other perspectives, because they haven’t fully developed subject matter expertise. So now I teach students to use AI to ask questions from other perspectives. For example, I have them choose paragraphs from their paper and ask, “What would a skeptical reader ask about the following paragraph?” or “What questions would an expert on X have about this paragraph?” After a semester of using such questions with AI, I heard my students echo them in their final peer-review sessions, taking on the role of a skeptical reader and asking their own skeptical questions—and that’s the kind of learning that I want!

But this is entirely different than the kind of evaluative feedback that comes in the form of a grade. Over the last two years of AI availability, it’s become clear that AI tools reflect back at users the biases of their data sets, programmers and users themselves. Even when we put “rules” in place to protect against known biases, it can easily backfire when moved just slightly outside an assumed context—as when Google’s Gemini produced a “diverse” group of four 1943 German soldiers, including one Black man and one Asian woman.

Using AI for grading papers will not only reflect back a lack of genuine critical thinking about student work but also years of biases about writing and writing instruction that have resulted in mechanized writing—biases that professors like me have spent a great deal of time and energy trying to dismantle. Those biases, or the problems with new rules to prevent biased results, just won’t be as visible as an AI-generated image staring us in the face.

Just two days after seven states sued to block the Biden administration’s new effort to relieve debt for nearly 28 million student loan borrowers, a federal judge in Georgia issued a temporary restraining order, putting the plan on hold for 14 days. 

The Education Department proposed regulations in April that would provide either full or partial debt cancellation for borrowers who fall into discrete categories. The groups include people who owe more than they initially borrowed as a result of accrued interest, along with those who have been repaying loans for more than 20 years. The regulations have not been finalized—the last step in the federal rule-making process before the department can carry out its plans.

Fearing that the department was going to issue the final regulations this week and then immediately cancel some borrowers’ loans, the states filed the lawsuit to pre-empt any action, arguing that the proposed plan was unlawful.

Judge J. Randal Hall of the Southern District of Georgia didn’t consider the merits of the states’ claims but found that their lawsuit was likely to succeed “given the rule’s lack of statutory authority, and the [Education] Secretary’s attempt to implement a rule contrary to normal procedures. This is especially true in light of the recent rulings across the country striking down similar federal student loan forgiveness plans.”

Under the order, the department can’t cancel student loans, forgive any interest or implement any other actions whenever the rule is finalized. The judge also prevented the department from instructing federal contractors to take such actions. He scheduled a hearing on the issue for Sept. 18.

The National Labor Relations Board has filed a complaint against Edward Waters University, a historically Black university in Florida, after the university stopped recognizing its faculty union, The Tributary reported. The case goes to trial in November.

Leaders at the university, which is affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, withdrew recognition of its chapter of the American Association of University Professors two years ago, arguing the university’s “rights as a religious educational institution” permitted them to do so.

In a letter to faculty members, administrators wrote that getting rid of the union would “allow the University to expand its faith-based Christian mission, rather than the political agendas often associated with federal labor policies.” In response, the AAUP chapter filed a charge with the NLRB claiming the university violated federal labor law.

Edward Waters isn’t the first religious higher ed institution to argue that its religious status enables it to shutter its faculty union, The Tributary noted. A 2020 decision by the NLRB concerning Bethany College, a Lutheran institution in Kansas, and a federal court decision regarding Duquesne University, a Catholic institution in Pittsburgh, broke with Obama-era precedent to rule that the NLRB didn’t have jurisdiction at religious institutions, paving the way for the argument Edward Waters leaders made. Also in 2020, Saint Leo University in Florida unrecognized its faculty union, citing its Catholic roots. Based on the Trump-era ruling on Bethany, an NLRB judge concluded that Saint Leo qualified for the religious exemption.

Edward Waters has until Sept. 12 to respond to the NLRB complaint.

To the editors,

Unions are essential to building strong, cohesive universities where research and critical thought thrive because professors and students are secure and protected. While negotiations are sometimes strained, they result in greater consensus, enabling universities to fulfill their role of improving and transmitting knowledge for generations to come.

More recently, however, lengthy strikes, protracted negotiations, and anti-union conduct have become increasingly common not only in the United States but on the campus of McGill University in Canada. University administrators at McGill are fighting tooth and nail to kill all faculty unions, including its first, the Association of McGill Professors of Law.

There are many parallels between the Boston University Graduate Workers Union situation and that of the Association of McGill Professors of Law. Both came into existence in late 2022, both suffered from foot-dragging bargaining by the university, and in both cases, management retaliated against union members for union activities.

The differences are just as striking. McGill is in Quebec, the most labor-friendly jurisdiction in North America where unionization and anti-scab legislation is the norm. It is thus all the more surprising that McGill is deploying the worst private sector tactics developed by Walmart, Amazon, and Starbucks against its faculty unions.

McGill says it has a commitment to academic freedom, integrity, responsibility, equity and inclusiveness, yet seeks to deny academics the freedom of selecting their own union. Faculty unions are a sign of engagement and commitment, and a call for partnership. It is time for Boston U, McGill and higher education more generally to heed that call.

Sincerely

Evan Fox-Decent, McGill Law professor and President, AMPL

Kirsten Anker, McGill Law professor and Vice-President, AMPL

In our book Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education, we profile Duke’s learning innovation unit. That organization is now called Duke Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education and is headed by higher education superstar Yakut Gazi. Yakut graciously agreed to answer our questions about her work at Duke, her career and her advice for those aspiring to leadership roles in the academic innovation space.

Q: Tell us about Learning Innovation and Lifetime Education. What does the organization do? And why is it important for those of us outside of Duke to understand the structure, role and culture of the organization?

A: Since being highlighted in your book, Duke has established a vice provost for learning innovation and digital education, and I am honored to have been selected for this inaugural leadership role. This vice provostial position is a signal that this is now a top-level strategic area that will propel the institution forward, building upon past successes. Under my leadership, the Learning Innovation and Continuing Studies units have merged to form Duke Learning Innovation and Lifetime Education. Together, we bring innovative, evidence-based teaching practices and learning opportunities to Duke’s faculty and community of learners across a wide variety of ages, backgrounds and geographies. Our goal is to position Duke as a powerhouse for learning innovation and lifetime education.

Our new structure views education as a lifelong endeavor that is neither marginal nor siloed but rather an integrated activity central to the university’s mission and to every stage of life. Our organization is connected to and supports all five presidential priorities of Duke. As a top-10 research-intensive institution, our approach is centered on research-driven educational consulting and market-driven lifetime learning opportunities that serve all learners, from precollege to postcareer.

For example, last year, we held our inaugural Emerging Pedagogies Summit as a platform to bring together ideas, technologies and people—and this October we’re inviting all educators, from any campus, to join us for these discussions about how we can all do more. This fall we are launching a major new research initiative—stay tuned for big news coming out of Duke. And within our lifetime education portfolio, we are investing in market-driven insights for program development, an important departure from traditional supply-based program creation.

Q: Throughout your career, you have been a champion of premier universities leveraging online and digital modalities to enhance access to higher education. You are perhaps best known for your work on scaled, low-cost ,high-quality degrees at your previous university, Georgia Tech. Where does your current leadership role at Duke fit into that broader movement to bend the higher education cost curve?

A: This world needs more people to be touched by institutions like Harvard, Stanford and Duke. Institutions like ours not only have the resources and capacity but also a global social responsibility to expand access to learning opportunities and create impact at scale. We need to move beyond the selectivity notions of the past and recognize them for what they are: capacity problems. We now have successful examples of affordable and accessible educational programs from highly selective institutions that have solved these capacity issues through innovative educational delivery and financial/business models. So why do we still cling to outdated notions about how people learn and limit our impact to our relatively small campuses?

At Duke, I am committed to building upon the institution’s long and established history of micro-innovations and transforming them into mezzo innovations that will revolutionize teaching and learning at elite institutions. This represents a significant cultural shift both within and outside of my unit. I see this as the crowning challenge of my career. Duke is the ideal place to achieve this, and the team we are building has what it takes.

Q: What advice do you have for someone looking to build their career towards a leadership role in an academic innovation unit? What experiences, skills, roles, networks and communities should they invest in and nurture? From your own career arc, what advice do you have for others looking to follow a similar path to leadership?

A: When I was pursuing my Ph.D. a quarter century ago, my fellow graduate students in engineering and science often teased me, saying, “How does one do a Ph.D. in educational technology? You bring an overhead projector to the classroom and there you have it.” Look at where we are now with ed tech and academic innovation! Academic innovation units proved to be absolutely critical during the pandemic as well. What we do is exciting and impactful work. We are riding the wave!

Having said this, we are on the cusp of major changes in our schools and societies, especially given the technological advances of our time. We are in an interesting position to both help educators prepare students for this future as well as prepare ourselves for this future. No one in our field should be operating solo. If you are not connected to others and professional organizations, you will not be able to learn, keep up with the pace of change and upgrade yourself to remain relevant in the workforce. We all need to be entrepreneurs of our careers. There are always opportunities for growth, even if that growth is not where you currently are. To borrow an Apple motto, we need to be “relentlessly restless” to be successful and, more importantly, to make an impact on the world.

For members of marginalized groups, experiences of any success they achieve could be tainted by racial resentment and accusations of unfairly benefiting from diversity initiatives. This harsh reality became evident to me, a queer daughter of Iranian-Kurdish parents, early in my academic journey.

My second year in my Ph.D. program, I noticed a troubling pattern: Friends I once had been close to suddenly distanced themselves. I initially dismissed it as stress from a new semester, but the situation gradually intensified. Invitations to off-campus department gatherings excluded me. People who had sat and chatted with me for hours appeared eager to end a greeting. A longtime project collaborator abruptly quit. I was left bewildered, sensing something was amiss and questioning myself but unable to get any answers from my former workplace ties—who all assured me I was just imagining things.

Was I? Perhaps. But the situation seemed to come to a head after I was awarded two prestigious national fellowships and our department chair announced several student accomplishments, including my own. A fellow student then revealed that discussions had been rampant among some of my peers about how I must have “leveraged my identity” to secure grants. They even accused me of academic dishonesty by exaggerating my background for “diversity points.”

And since then, I’ve learned that such experiences are painful but not uncommon.

My conversations with other students of color have revealed a pattern: Those who won competitive fellowships or awards often faced similar backlash. Faculty members of color were sympathetic and shared their own experiences. Friends of color in different industries assured me this was a shared struggle. Some were more explicit in stating that white supremacy and systemic racism permeate academic institutions, which is why the successes of people of color are seen as a threat to the status quo.

Rather than being comforted, I was disheartened to learn about the widespread prevalence of this vitriol. Research supports this: Perceived threats to the existing hierarchy, a possessive investment in whiteness and status quo, can lead to targeted harassment of underrepresented people in academia. As far back as 1958, sociologist Herbert Blumer suggested that racial prejudice arises when the dominant group feels their status and privileges are threatened. Competitive environments, like the workplace, can make prejudices worse because people fear losing their economic and social standing. That often leads to more discrimination and harassment, as dominant groups try to protect their positions by pushing others down. In fact, this kind of targeted bullying is common enough to be seen as a career strategy.

When dominant group members feel their status is under threat, it can lead to serious anguish. Research by Anne Case and Angus Deaton on “deaths of despair” among white Americans links economic distress and loss of social status to severe outcomes such as suicides and drug overdoses. Racial resentment also contributes to such outcomes, as white Americans sometimes vote and act against their own best interests—against public assistance programs, for example—to “maintain an imagined place atop a racial hierarchy.”

Simply put, that resentment and perceived loss of status among white Americans often negatively impacts other groups. For example, women of color often face compounded disadvantages due to both racial and gender discrimination. They are expected to be warm and nurturing, which can conflict with the qualities needed to succeed professionally, like confidence and assertiveness. Research shows that high-achieving women who don’t fit those expectations face workplace discrimination. That is why women, especially those of color, are overrepresented in lower-ranking positions and underrepresented in higher-ranking roles. The paradox is that they are expected to be good, but not too good.

Implementing Protective Measures

To address the discrimination often bred by academia’s competitive culture, especially against minoritized students, institutional leadership must be proactive. Solutions include prioritizing equity and inclusivity through unbiased hiring practices, bias training and workshops for graduate students, and more equitable fellowship allocations and job evaluations. For example, college and university leaders can use the following strategies to assist students and reduce discrimination.

• Create robust support networks. Mentorship programs should pair students of color with advocates who can provide guidance. Peer support groups offer safe spaces for sharing experiences and celebrating achievements to combat feelings of isolation. Additionally, mental health resources tailored to the needs of minoritized students can help them manage the distinct stressors they face and help them develop effective coping strategies.

• Enhance sensitivity training. Make diversity, equity and inclusion training mandatory for all faculty members, administrators and students. While research on such training is mixed, effective programs should go beyond just raising awareness about biases and focus on building genuine understanding and empathy. A key component is dealing with issues like racial resentment and the impact of seemingly minor actions—such as dismissing the concerns of students from underrepresented groups or questioning their experiences. Training programs should also include lessons on how to recognize and prevent such subtle harms. Additionally, integrating diverse perspectives into the curriculum can help create a more inclusive learning environment for everyone.
• Clarify affirmative action and DEI initiatives. It’s important to clear up misunderstandings about affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Many negative attitudes toward affirmative action stem from misconceptions, such as the belief that DEI leads to privileging unqualified people or unfairly advantages certain groups. These pervasive misconceptions can contribute to the challenges students of color face. By openly communicating the goals and successes of these policies, we can change perceptions and foster wider acceptance.

Safeguarding DEI initiatives is essential to educating white students and professionals about the different forms of harm they might unintentionally cause—from overt discrimination to more subtle actions that undermine inclusivity. Preserving these initiatives is key to creating an environment where everyone feels valued and included.

• Take a zero-tolerance approach to harassment. Institutions must also establish clear protocols for addressing discrimination and harassment. Proactive measures and swift, decisive action against such behaviors send a strong message that they will not be tolerated. Those measures include developing and making transparent clear, accessible channels for reporting such incidents and ensuring that all faculty, students, and staff are aware of how to use them.

In sum, competitive environments can amplify exclusion, discrimination and harassment, creating significant challenges for students of color. To safeguard their well-being, colleges and universities must implement comprehensive strategies—including policy changes, supportive networks, and increased awareness—that foster a more inclusive and beneficial atmosphere.

My experience left me feeling helpless and alone, but the approaches and resources that I’ve highlighted would have made a significant difference in my academic journey. Higher education institutions must prioritize creating environments where all students feel valued and supported, regardless of their background or achievements.

Last week, if you’d asked me for an ideal model for establishing a program that employs nontenured faculty in a fair and sustainable way while serving student needs by delivering excellent instruction, I would’ve pointed you to the Stanford University creative writing Jones Lecturers program.

This week, as reported by Ryan Quinn here at IHE, it was announced that Stanford will be firing all of the existing 23 Jones Lecturers over the course of two years and replacing them with new people.

Stanford is apparently going scorched earth on what has been a model program. What is going on here?

To answer my question, in addition to Quinn’s reporting, we have a series of posts on Medium from Tom Kealey, one of the Jones Lecturers, who has been at Stanford for 20 years.

Dumbfounded, I also reached out personally to talk to Kealey, and he told me exactly what’s in his posts and his comments to Ryan Quinn: that despite being praised for their excellent work, all existing lecturers will be phased out over two years and replaced by new faculty on short-term contracts with finite limits on renewal.

I guess this is happening, but from my perspective, it makes absolutely zero sense, not for Stanford’s students, not for Stanford’s faculty or administration, not for Stanford’s reputation, not for anything.

There’s lots of stuff apparently burbling underneath the surface here that the public is not privy to and maybe isn’t even fully appreciated by faculty working in different silos within Stanford. Consider this me trying to put together some pieces in order to make sense of my own shock.

Longtime chair of Stanford creative writing Eavan Boland started and nurtured the program along with lecturers like Kealey as a quasi-personal project. Her passing in 2020 left a void that no one has filled. The small cadre of existing tenured creative writing faculty seems disinclined to do the administrative heavy lifting for a program that has grown to be a significant share of the overall offerings in the Stanford English department. According to a fact sheet provided to me by Kealey, in addition to creative writing being over 50 percent of the courses in English (90 percent of which are taught by Jones Lecturers), two-thirds of English majors choose a creative writing focus, and just under half of English majors choose a Jones Lecturer as their adviser.

In some ways, the successful growth of the program is the very thing that has it in the crosshairs.

While everyone in Stanford administration says it isn’t an issue of funding, the fact that longtime lecturers asked for and received raises last year suggests another possible complication. You know who isn’t going to agitate for a raise in the future? Someone on a short, fixed-term fellowship who knows they’re not going to be sticking around long term anyway.

I’m going to do something out of character for me and express some sympathy for the administration in this case. It’s clear that the program and the number of courses and students it serves has grown far beyond what can or should be managed on an ad hoc basis. This thing needs structure; guidelines for hiring, evaluation and retention; and sufficient capacity to administrate those duties.

I have even more sympathy for the administration. (Let’s not get used to this.)

Because of the incredible growth and development, the program has outstripped its original intention. As conceived, the Jones Lectureship was a landing spot for a limited number of the creative writing Stegner Fellows. The Stegner is the most prestigious creative writing fellowship in the country, a two-year program that requires no teaching and provides lots of time to write, along with a generous stipend (by creative writing fellowship standards). It is an incubator for future major literary writers and works. Stegner Fellows in fiction include Ottessa Moshfegh, Jamel Brinkley, NoViolet Bulawayo, Anthony Marra, Justin Torres, Maggie Shipstead, Jesmyn Ward, ZZ Packer and my old M.F.A. mate, the Pulitzer Prize winner and current professor of creative writing at Stanford Adam Johnson.

The Jones Lectureship was conceived as additional incubation time post-Stegner, including teaching duties, the kind of required experience for pursuing a tenure-track job in creative writing.

The program grew, and while it remained a launching pad for some, for others it became a final destination, where they could engage in the kind of teaching that changes student lives done by people dedicated to that aspect of the university mission. For example, Kealey co-created a graphic novel project, a novel-writing course where students complete a full manuscript over the course of a semester and the Levinthal Tutorials, a one-on-one mentorship program between Stegner Fellows and Stanford undergraduates.

What was conceived as a temp job became something else, something that has benefited students and the university. I get that this was not the intention and managing this kind of program is more involved than envisioned, but what is gained by scaling back and putting the courses in the hands of less experienced faculty who, by definition, will not be trying to put down roots and further the institutional mission, but instead channeling their energies toward their individual launches?

This has become complicated for Stanford, and maybe a purge allows for a reset, but it is strange to me that they are not ready or willing to take advantage of this amazing thing that has happened, almost by accident.

Consider the competitive advantage in enrollment among technical and professional majors who may also desire a double major or minor in creative writing and have a chance to be taught by highly experienced, highly dedicated, highly accomplished faculty.

(The current Jones Lecturers have won dozens of fellowships, prizes and grants, and the longtime lecturers have CVs that look like those of tenured faculty anywhere in the country.)

Consider the halo effect for the English department as a whole, as more students are exposed to their programming through creative writing.

Consider how the program has been and could continue to be a feather in the cap of Stanford as an institution that has the resources to not only maintain what’s been built but continue to grow and innovate.

This thing is just too good to let go, and yet that seems like what Stanford is going to do.

It’s a shame, because this looks easily solvable to me.

Yes, it needs administering, but I assume there are existing lecturers who could be tasked with those duties as part of their jobs.

Yes, it’s possible that the teaching load that was conceived for people on the career launching pad is not appropriate for those in their landing spot, but this is something easily addressed and codified in clear contracts.

Yes, there must be room for some number of Stegner Fellows to move into a lectureship. Obviously not everyone can stay forever, but not everyone will want to stay forever. Some balance between long-term contracted faculty (say, three- or five-year contracts following initial probationary periods), and shorter, limited-term faculty is entirely common across higher ed—and this is the ideal situation for that kind of structure.

Additionally, the fact sheet about the program indicates there were 314 students on the wait list for classes in spring 2023. This suggests to me that there’s room for growth in terms of student demand.

Put it under the auspices of the English department, with its own administrators who report up to the chair. Or be even bolder: Spin it off into its own program and tap into the sources of funding that have already supported creative writing at Stanford so generously.

For some reason, this feels personal, maybe because my background is in creative writing, or because I’ve seen too many examples of years of dedicated work of NTT faculty that has a direct benefit to students flushed away by shortsighted decisions. Maybe it’s because I would have (metaphorically) killed for an opportunity like a Stegner Fellowship or Jones Lectureship. (Me and my work were not up to snuff at the time.)

Maybe it feels personal because when I was an undergrad, it was one creative writing professor at the University of Illinois, Philip Graham, who cared enough about the well-being of his students to help put me on the path that has led me here. I see the Jones Lecturer program as an opportunity for that kind of experience at scale (to use a term familiar to those in Silicon Valley).

To walk away from this when there are the resources, personnel and student desire to keep it going just seems like a terrible waste.

I hope Stanford finds a better way forward.

Higher education unionization has been surging. Story after story of successful union drives has suggested this. But a new report, which collected data on more than 95 percent of the collective bargaining relationships between academic workers and their institutions, finally provides national figures for the phenomenon.

The biggest boom was among graduate student workers. In 2012, the first year of the study period, they had about 64,400 unionized employees among their ranks. But, by early 2024, that number surged to 150,100. That’s a 133 percent increase, and 38 percent of grad workers are now unionized.

The number of unionized faculty members rose more slowly, from roughly 374,000 in 2012 to 402,000 in January, when the study ended—around a 7 percent increase. That means more than one in four faculty members are unionized, according to the report from the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.

These figures are from the center’s new Directory of Bargaining Agents and Contracts in Institutions of Higher Education, a 114-page report released today that includes hyperlinks to over 800 collective bargaining agreements.

Joe Berry, a labor historian, said, “The trend has been definitely for people to organize.” He said, “There’s a number of reasons for that, but I would say the No. 1 reason has been the progressive casualization of the faculty—the turning of the majority of the faculty into contingent workers.”

Berry, a longtime contingent faculty member himself, said the “campus labor movement has been one of the healthiest parts of the labor movement, even in its darkest days over the past 20, 30 years.”

The National Center’s data does show that higher education’s unionization trends are diverging from what’s happening off of campuses. While the share of faculty members and grad workers who are unionized has risen, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says the proportion of American workers overall who are unionized dropped from around 13 percent in 2012 to just 11 percent in 2023.

The report also shows changes in who’s seeing the most unionization: The main action has moved to private, nonprofit colleges and universities.

A Private-Sector Push

In 2004, the National Labor Relations Board ruled against a graduate student union forming at Brown University, effectively preventing these workers from organizing at private colleges and universities. The ruling didn’t affect grad workers at public institutions, but whether those students could unionize or not was already left to the whims of state lawmakers, who set their states’ public sector collective bargaining laws.

But in 2016, the NLRB reversed course, ruling that Columbia University graduate student workers could unionize. That cleared the way for others at private universities to do the same. Some union organizers said they withdrew their petitions during the Trump presidency, but the organizing push at private universities surged forward after his successor named labor-friendly appointees to the NLRB and the pandemic abated. The report finds roughly 64,000 grad workers newly unionized between 2021 and 2023, nearly triple the number “during the prior eight years combined.”

Sixty percent of the increase in unionized grad workers since 2012 occurred at private colleges and universities, the report finds. And as the center notes, the unionization of grad workers at private institutions has sped along this year as well, beyond the January 2024 end point of the report.

As for faculty members, William A. Herbert, the National Center’s executive director, told Inside Higher Ed that unionization at private institutions started declining after a 1980 court decision. But then, he said, private institutions started relying more on instructors who weren’t on the tenure track—and who unionized.

Prior to 2012, faculty unionization grew much faster at community colleges and public four-year institutions than at private colleges and universities, the report says. Private institutions “saw periods of actual decline resulting from the Yeshiva decision,” the report says, referring to the 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision NLRB v. Yeshiva University, which held that tenured and tenure-track faculty members at private universities don’t have the right to unionize.

But after 2012, faculty unionization at private, nonprofit institutions ramped up. In fact, the report said the number of union-represented faculty members at private colleges and universities grew by 56 percent since that year, compared to just 4 percent among public institutions. And since that year, most new faculty bargaining units have been at private institutions, “nearly doubling the total number of private sector units.”

Non-tenure-track faculty members are driving this trend. They face lower pay and less job security. Jacob Apkarian, who worked on the report and is an associate sociology professor at the City University of New York’s York College, said they’re “being squeezed more and more.”

Adrianna Kezar, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California, said the report, which she didn’t write, “finally captures what I think we’ve heard anecdotally from many people.” What she’s heard is that “there is increasing disgruntlement among faculty and an interest in creating better work environments.”

Herbert cited another factor: Around 2012 and 2013, national unions began supporting faculty who had already been trying to unionize on their own. For decades, there were around 70 to 85 bargaining units of faculty members at private, nonprofit institutions, Apkarian said. “It was almost the same for 30 years.” Now, he said, there are 150.

Apkarian said the Service Employees International Union, in particular, seemed to recognize that faculty who weren’t on a tenure track represented a big, untapped niche “and really went hard” at organizing them. Clearly, though, SEIU wasn’t alone.

Growth: A History and a Reckoning by Daniel Susskind

Published in April 2024

While it is doubtful that the economist Robert Lucas ever uttered these exact words, they—the words—feel true.

My experience has been that once I started thinking seriously about climate change after reading Bryan Alexander’s indispensable Universities on Fire, I thought (or read) about little else.

The more you learn about climate change, the more worried you become.

If you count yourself among the climate change obsessives, then Daniel Susskind’s book Growth: A History and a Reckoning should be on your reading list. Reading Growth helped me—and maybe it can help you—balance two seemingly contradictory beliefs.

The first belief is that the history of rapid economic growth made possible by burning fossil fuels since the industrial revolution is how we got ourselves into this climate mess in the first place. The second belief is that the way to address the threat of climate change by decarbonizing our society requires a different sort of economic growth, one with renewable energy at its center.

In other words, it is possible to simultaneously champion economic growth and support policies to address climate change.

The book’s strongest parts are where Susskind unpacks the causes and consequences of economic growth until today while explaining why simplistic degrowth policies may have significant unintended negative consequences.

Transitioning from carbon burning to renewable energy sources will require enormous investment. This reality plays out across higher education, as universities take seriously the necessity of directing significant long-term investments towards decarbonization.

At my own institution, there is a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60 percent by 2030 (compared to the 2010 baseline), with carbon-zero operations reached by 2050. This energy transition will be accomplished with a $500 million investment in eight core infrastructure investments and technologies: geo-exchange borefields, geo-exchange plants, building conversions, thermal storage, electrical resilience, heating plant upgrades, distribution piping and solar thermal/PV installations.

Living through a campus decarbonization initiative (lots of construction) provides a tangible education about the effort and resources necessary to accomplish the energy transition at scale. The infrastructure required to generate and distribute renewable energy is highly capital-intensive. Unlike fossil-based energy sources, where the costs are ongoing as the fuel is burned, renewables require heavy up-front costs (solar, battery, turbine, geo-exchange borefields and plants, etc.).

At any scale, paying for the energy transition will be expensive up front. Over the long run, investments in renewable energy almost always pay off—whether for homeowners installing solar panels to campuses drilling geo-exchange borefields or governments financing grid-scale wind, solar, hydro and nuclear projects.

Those long-term investments come with trade-offs. A university committed to decarbonizing its long-term energy footprint will have fewer resources in the near term for other priorities. Any university’s success in energy decarbonization will be dependent, at least partly, on that school’s ability to drive new revenues.

For higher education, the cost of decarbonization will be high enough that redistributing existing budgets to pay the costs of transitioning to renewable energy sources will be inadequate. Universities will need to grow revenues to pay for the necessary infrastructure changes.

I suspect the story will be much the same outside of higher education. Fighting climate change will require economic growth. Here, Susskind’s book is particularly helpful, as Growth provides an intellectual foundation for a pro-growth/pro-environmental orientation. Admittedly, the book succeeds more in its effort to combat anti-growth activists than in articulating a robust set of policies and investments.

Perhaps we view the energy decarbonization initiatives across numerous colleges and universities as living laboratories, with lessons applicable to large-scale investments and policy initiatives.

University communities grappling with how to pay to decarbonize their campuses might want to broaden their thinking by reading and discussing and reading Growth: A History and a Reckoning.

What are you reading?

To truly address the issue of credit mobility, we must take a hard look at the implications and contributing factors of the industry’s completion agenda. This agenda, which has effectively and necessarily laid the foundation for higher education’s focus on impact and an institution’s role in ensuring students leave with meaningful outcomes, reinforces a degree construct that fails to consider the broader context in which students are learning and transitioning. We’ve been trying to address the credit mobility transfer issue for decades, and while some states or systems do it better than others, the issue of credit mobility is still rooted in holding individuals to the idea of a variety of institutionally defined finish lines—degrees, certificates, etc.

Navigating the labyrinth of higher education transfer and credit mobility is a daunting task for most students. The complexity of these processes often stems from self-preservation mechanisms within educational institutions, designed to maintain financial incentives and institutional prestige. However, these mechanisms frequently overlook the evolving needs of today’s learners and the dynamic technological and economic environment they are entering.

As a longtime higher education practitioner, I am excited to join Sova and continue to support and build upon the work of the national Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board. My vision is to complement the board’s work and push to evolve the conversation beyond transfer and credit mobility, focusing on how higher education is transforming to effectively meet the needs and expectations of today’s learners.

The Need for a Paradigm Shift

In a post-industrial era, we see increased questioning of the purpose of higher education and should likewise evaluate the extent to which it must evolve. Unlike the industrial era, which emphasized standardized education to prepare individuals for specific roles in a manufacturing-based economy, today’s world demands a more flexible and adaptive approach. We need to create new practices and redesign institutions to facilitate and validate the continuous nature of learning and the diverse career trajectories students will encounter over a lifetime.

A deliberate focus on teaching learners how to learn—fostering critical thinking, creativity and the ability to adapt to rapidly changing technological landscapes—is a critical element, ensuring that structurally education is no longer just a phase but rather a daily practice. Agile learning, which emphasizes flexibility, adaptability and continuous improvement, should be at the core of these new institutions, enabling learners to swiftly respond to new challenges and opportunities.

Rethinking Institutional Roles

While workforce-aligned programming and return on investment have been the hot topics of higher education reforms, many education practitioners, for a variety of reasons, have pushed back on the idea of aligning with industry needs and using job placement or career advancement as metrics. They argue that education should not be solely driven by labor market demands but should also focus on fostering critical thinking, creativity and a well-rounded, informed citizenry. And as a liberal arts major myself, this resonates deeply. And thankfully, in a post-industrial age environment, these are no longer opposing binaries.

The ability for students to leverage technology to articulate new and unique career trajectories will be highly dependent upon the ability of educational institutions to substantially evolve and support customized, just-in-time educational opportunities. This requires a shift from preserving institutional interests to championing student empowerment. Our education institutions need to adapt delivery modalities, credit and degree constructs and their purpose in an emerging knowledge economy, taking steps to move away from the concept of degrees as the main product of higher education and degree completion as the main metric. Balancing these perspectives is crucial as we rethink the roles and goals of educational institutions in the modern era.

Many would point to certificates, noncredit, credit for prior learning or other alternatives to a formal degree as options that are already available, but I would posit that juxtaposed to the revered degree, these options are continually fighting for legitimacy. And their real appeal is their viability given that they leave the existing structures intact. This holding of the degree construct and status quo within higher education is reinforced by the larger higher education ecosystem—policy makers, philanthropy, federal financing, researchers, etc. This, along with the gravitational pull of elite or Ivy League institutions, poses the most significant challenges for the future viability and relevance of higher education.

Prototyping the Future

At Sova, my role is to prototype and explore what a postdegree and postcompletion-agenda world might look like. Through meaningful partnerships with organizations across the higher education and workforce ecosystems, we aim to prototype the future of higher education in ways that are concrete and actionable. This involves deliberate trial and error and unapologetically challenging the status quo and, most importantly, this requires some unlearning and new experiences for the higher education workforce.

The journey to reimagine higher education transfer and credit mobility is complex, but it is essential for meeting the needs of today’s learners. By breaking away from outdated models and embracing innovative approaches, we can create systems that truly support student success and prepare learners for the challenges of the future. While retiring the completion agenda may not be the right vehicle for solving credit mobility, it would certainly change up the conversations and highlight where we may be influenced by self-preservation and protectionism. It would prompt discussions around how the degree construct is at the core of the credit mobility and transfer challenges—and whether the idea of a “finish line” is still relevant in a world where new information is generated daily and perpetual, scaffolded learning is essential. The answer lies in our collective willingness to move beyond degrees and the completion agenda and envision a new social compact for higher education.

The first day of class, especially if it’s the first day of college for first-year students, is one of possibility smothered by anxiety. Every professor knows this. The students are excited but nervous. They rarely talk to each other—more often they are locked into their own heads via earbuds and smartphones. Some are hoping for a syllabus day; others are dreading a syllabus day, already intimidated by the amount of work and policies set out in that mighty tome.

Every professor also knows the importance of this first day, how it sets the tone for the entire semester. But finding a way to engage students in a comforting yet intellectually stimulating manner is a continuing challenge. For almost 15 years, I’ve had a lot of success with an activity designed to fail: an activity involving flying candy. I throw M&Ms at the students, or, more accurately, at small paper cups resting on their desks. They brighten, pay attention and laugh as I hurl candy-coated chocolates across the room, missing the tiny cups every time.

The activity is fun and breaks the tension, but it also does so much more. At the end of the initial barrage, I tell them their goal is to get as many M&Ms into their individual cups as possible. Everyone agrees my approach of tossing candy at stationary cups from across the room is not a winning strategy. I ask for suggestions on a better approach.

Someone always suggests holding the cup to try to catch the candies. We give it a try. It rarely works. The candies bounce out, even if we manage to connect candy with cup. Someone else always suggests I walk around the room distributing the candy. I respond it’s a good idea, but too much exercise for me. Then someone, sometimes brimming with confidence, hand raised in the air Hermione Granger–style, other times with shyness, hand partially up, sheepishly asks, “Can I come and take the M&Ms myself?”

I smile and ask the students if that would be an effective way to get M&Ms. Everyone agrees. I encourage the student to come on up and take what is theirs. After the student returns to their seat with a cup of calories, I inquire about the purpose of this exercise, other than to have a fun and memorable first day of class.

Sometimes silence. Sometimes a few hands in the air. Most often, the students are not prepared to consider the deeper meaning of candy zipping past their heads, missing the intended target in utter failure. They are not expecting figurative language in an introductory biology class, but they unknowingly are primed for an analogy on learning.

I explain the M&Ms represent discrete bits of information called facts. The cup is their brain. I could throw a fact at them: “Carbon dioxide has low potential energy.” It misses their brain. I sling another bit: “Oxygen has high electronegativity.” It sails past their cup, passive and empty. Time and time again, the metaphorical fact misses their metaphorical brain. They need to realize learning is an active process. All the world’s information is at their disposal; they just need to get up and take it. They can’t expect to learn if they consider themselves empty vessels waiting to be filled by the sage on the stage. It takes work on their part.

Conversely, I can’t expect them to learn if I treat them as empty vessels, each the same size and shape—yes, subtle inclusivity reference—waiting passively to be filled. It takes work on my part to help them fill their metaphorical cup. It’s an important lesson for them, yet it’s also a reminder for me to engage, not lecture.

I continue the analogy. If M&Ms represent facts, then of what good is a collection of them? What can they do with this cup of M&Ms? Someone says, “Eat them.” I agree but then ask how they could be eaten. By themselves, in cookie batter, spread as a topping on ice cream, crushed and sprinkled on brownies. Or don’t eat them at all but use them as raw material for an art project. Each of us could come up with different ways to use the M&Ms to create something new, something wonderful, from those otherwise individual candies.

I then suggest—no, plead—for them not to think of their education as the simple collection of information, but to consider how this information can be used and how it relates to other topics. This conversation then leads into an introduction of Bloom’s taxonomy, which is new to most students. I ask them to consider our fact “carbon dioxide has low potential energy.” The fact isn’t particularly useful unto itself. It’s meaningless without an understanding of potential energy and bonding between carbon and oxygen. And then we can consider the importance of this fact to biological processes and to climate change. I end by commenting if any of them can create a new way to effectively capture and store carbon dioxide, they could make a fortune. They are primed to learn that each fact is connected to a universe of other information, that making those connections is the essence of learning.

As the class nears its end, we as students and professor come to an explicit agreement not to treat ourselves and each other as empty vessels waiting to be filled. We will engage with each other and be active in our learning. And when the class in fact ends, I invite each student to come up and help themselves to M&Ms—or to Skittles for those who either prefer or need a nonchocolate, nondairy alternative. Yes, another nod to inclusivity.

My hope is that students leave the class a little less nervous and possibly even excited about what is before them. I hope they leave inspired to be active in their education and strive to do more than collect facts, more than memorize.

And my hope is usually rewarded. I love it when seniors, often with one hand reaching for their diploma, tell me they distinctly remember that first day of class, of college, of the lesson of the flying candies. Or when I hear alumni who are visiting for homecoming reminiscing with their spouse or significant other about that first lesson and how they realized, as they dodged projectile candies, that learning is more than collecting and they are more than a vessel to be filled.

On those occasions, I wish I had a stash of candy to disperse to reward them for a job well done. But then, their long-term reward is much greater than anything I could bestow, even with candy-coated chocolate perfection. Starting a semester or a college career with a lesson hidden in thrown candy missing its mark is a meaningful way, in any course, to connect to nervous students. And all it takes is a bag of M&Ms, a few inexpensive paper cups, a little performance bravery, a discipline-appropriate fact and the willingness to clean a floor littered with dirty, but certainly not wasted, candy.