Tag: Events

Recent days have brought another spasm of commentary and debate about the role and fate of the SAT, triggered by a piece by influential New York Times voice David Leonhardt titled “The Misguided War on the SAT.”

Leonhardt contends that the movement away from the SAT is potentially harming lower-income students who do well on the tests, thus showing “enormous potential” that is not going to be realized because they cannot compete for the precious spots in the “Ivy-plus” cohort of institutions. Rather than getting in the weeds about to what extent the SAT is predictive of future college success in these institutions or is useful in deciding which students are most deserving (whatever that means) of matriculation, I will note that these institutions serve 0.6 percent of the undergraduate population in the United States.

I’ll also point people toward the comprehensive roundup by Inside Higher Ed’s Liam Knox of comments made in the aftermath of the publishing of Leonhardt’s piece. If you want the full scoop of who said what and where they’re coming from, it’s one-stop reading.

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Mostly I want to talk about the SAT itself, what kind of test it is, what it values in terms of learning and performance, and how little those things relate to what I think most people would say is meaningful in terms of one’s intellectual development.

Those who believe in the value of the SAT think it is an indicator of intelligence and therefore a valid proxy for the ability to succeed at school. In fact, I’ve heard from someone just recently that the evidence for this claim is right in the name of the test, SAT—Scholastic Aptitude Test—but the College Board, in recognition of reality, changed it to the Scholastic Assessment Test in 2012.

I get the sense that most of the people who write in praise of the SAT have not taken the time to familiarize themselves with the specifics of the SAT.

But I have.

Back in 2021, I retook the SAT, 34 years after the first (and only time) I’d taken it previously as a junior in high school. The reading and writing test was administered by Akil Bello, the senior director of advocacy and advancement at FairTest, and the math test was overseen by my friend since nursery school, Stephen Weber, who directs an educational services company, Educational Endeavors, and whose work includes tutoring students for tests like the SAT and ACT.

On the reading and writing exam, I scored a 660, a drop of 60 to 80 points from my previous performance. On math, I came it at 570, well below my high school score but higher than my pretest prediction of 520.

My first impression of both was how much they had changed since my high school days. The verbal SAT in 1987 was primarily a vocabulary test and therefore up my alley since I was a committed reader of everything. The reading and writing SAT wanted me to skim a bunch of short passages and then answer questions where the purpose was not entirely clear to me. I took the test cold without any prep, orientation or coaching, and there were a few questions where it wasn’t entirely clear (to me) what I was being asked to evaluate.

Bello told me that the reading section “tests your ability to read with a pedantic specificity and paraphrase with flexible precision,” and that sounds about right. I kept wanting to evaluate the short passage as a whole—as I do when I’m responding to student writing—but the test wanted me focused on individual bits in isolation. With practice I’m sure I could get my brain oriented around what the test demands, but I’m not sure why I’d want to do that, since reading that way does me no good when it comes to my work.

In that section I also failed to correctly transcribe two of my answers from the question sheet (where I’d circled everything) to the scan sheet—massive rookie error, the kind of error that could prevent a student from achieving a threshold score that would put them into the consideration set for an elite institution.

Ironically enough, given that I make my living as a writer, it was the writing and language section where I gave away the most points. Of this section, Bello said that its focus is “on rules above convention in specific, pedantic ways.” Zeroing in on what the test requires in this section requires you to almost obliterate any appreciation for style, expression or meaning in order to focus on whatever pedantic rule the question is predicated on.

When it came to the math exam, anything past Algebra I and basic geometry was a virtual no-hoper for me, though I did pull out a couple of correct answers on questions where I had no underlying knowledge of the math mechanics by reasoning through the answers relative to the question and making an educated guess or two. My oldest friend called that lucky, but I knew better.

Both Weber and Bello made clear that the chief challenge of these tests is their “speededness”—that they are deliberately designed to make it difficult to complete all the questions in the given time. Thinking quickly under pressure is a necessary component to a very high score.

Having no expertise in mathematics pedagogy, I cannot say whether the way the SAT questions are designed for the math exam is narrow and pedantic in the way the questions on the reading and writing exam are, but I can say I’ve had a successful adulthood without having to be able to do anything meaningful with sines, cosines and tangents.

Back in 2014, I wrote a post about the vacuity of the phrase “college and career ready” when applied to students, particularly when this supposed readiness was predicated on standardized test scores.

I argued that there were a number of traits that I thought served students well when it came to maximizing the potential of their college educations: being curious, being passionate and being capable of self-regulation.

If you squint, you could see how doing well on the SAT could be a by-product of these traits, but the curiosity, passion and self-regulation would have to be singularly directed toward the object of doing well on the SAT. I bet this is the mindset of students who do score at the top of the curve, and good for them.

But I think we can all agree that there are many other ways for someone to manifest those traits and that doing aces on the SAT is probably well down the list of meaningful activities in which we could demonstrate those traits.

Deep down, when someone has passionate feelings about the importance and validity of the SAT, I think it’s mostly a matter of them operating from a different set of values than I attach to education. I think they believe in the central importance of the ranking and sorting function of schooling.

I’ve always been interested in the learning and development side of things, and for me, there’s not much of interest to be learned by taking the SAT.

Nationally, 29 percent of young adults (18 to 24 years old) in rural areas are enrolled in higher education—19 percentage points lower than their urban counterparts and 13 percentage points lower than those in suburban areas, according to U.S. Department of Education data.

Rural learners face additional challenges in accessing and completing college, including reliable transportation, food and housing insecurity, and access to health care and high-speed internet, along with paying for and applying for college.

The Institute for College Access and Success published a brief in December highlighting trends, challenges and solutions for rural college students and four initiatives institutions can take to better support these students.

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State of play: Students from rural communities, while completing high school at similar rates to their peers, enroll in postsecondary education at a lower rate. Rural communities tend to be diverse, with between 15 and 20 percent of all rural residents identifying as people of color.

Adults from rural communities are more likely to return to postsecondary opportunities, with degree attainment higher for those aged 35 to 44 than 25- to 35-year-olds.

Challenges for rural learners interested in pursuing a college education include:

• Affordability. Poverty rates are higher in rural communities across ethnic and racial groups, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and rural students are more likely to have greater financial need.
• College-readiness programs: Teacher and staff shortages at rural high schools can create reduced academic resources including college readiness programs (Advanced Placement, dual enrollment, International Baccalaureate or SAT and ACT prep).
• College recruitment. Many institutions overlook rural communities in their recruitment efforts, creating a void of information for interested students.
• Long distances from colleges. Most college students attend an institution 25 miles away from their permanent address or closer, but rural students face postsecondary deserts, where there is no college or university within commuting distance. A lack of reliable broadband internet can also present challenges for students who consider enrolling in online or hybrid courses.
• College-going mindset. Parents and students in rural communities can hold negative perceptions about the value of college, which can hinder students’ postsecondary pursuits.

Recommendations: TICAS offers four recommendations for institutional stakeholders looking to improve rural students’ enrollment and completion:

1. Invest in rural recruitment. Increasing counseling services, including application support, can aid rural students and provide a pipeline to the partner institution. The Small Town and Rural Students (STARS) College Network is one group looking to better advise and support high schoolers from rural areas and small towns.
2. Create summer programs. Colleges can partner with rural high schools to show prospective students what life at college could look like, including offering summer program opportunities and campus visits.
3. Bridge knowledge gaps. Rural students can be at a disadvantage if they lack institutional knowledge of how to navigate college. Creating mentorship or advising initiatives can help level the playing field for students to persist and succeed. College-readiness courses can also be adapted to be dual enrollment, providing high schoolers a glimpse into college while still in high school.
4. Provide financial aid and resources. Financial challenges can hinder academic pursuits of rural students. Helping students access state, federal and institutional aid with the FAFSA or providing individualized financial assistance can help.

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The president of Lincoln University of Missouri went on paid administrative leave Friday after the university’s vice president of student affairs died by suicide last week, according to a news release from the Board of Curators, the university’s governing board.  

The board hired a third-party investigator to review President John Moseley’s conduct toward Antoinette (Bonnie) Candia-Bailey, who claimed in emails to him and to the board that he caused her mental harm while she was suffering from depression and anxiety. The news of her death on Jan. 8 left the historically Black university’s campus reeling, and sparked a larger conversation nationwide about the pressures put on Black women in academe and the negative effects on their mental health. Candia-Bailey had served in her position for less than a year.

“As a Board, we are committed to make certain the mental health of Lincoln University employees is a priority and that every employee is always treated with dignity and respect,” Board of Curators President Victor Pasley said in the release. “The Board has confidence in the leadership team we have at Lincoln, but as we all work together to serve students and the Lincoln University community, this review will fully examine important questions, concerns and gather facts. Dr. Moseley agrees those issues should be examined and has volunteered to go on leave during the review so that it can move forward in a fully independent way.”

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An earlier statement from the university described Candia-Bailey as a “gifted colleague and always a passionate advocate for Lincoln University, HBCUs and other causes in which she believed.”

Moseley sent Candia-Bailey a termination letter on Jan. 3, obtained by Inside Higher Ed, outlining his “serious concerns” with her work performance, including failing to follow his and other administrators’ instructions in certain instances, charging non-standard dorm rates for some students without proper approval resulting in a loss of revenue, and failing to address concerns raised by her employees. Another letter he sent that day said she was to go on administrative leave until her firing went into effect in February. A notice also said she must vacate her apartment on campus by that time, otherwise campus police “will promptly remove you and your possessions from the apartment.”

Candia-Bailey sent an email to Moseley on the day she died specifying who should collect her belongings and speak with her family from the administration.

“You are not to have any contact,” she wrote in the email, shared with Inside Higher Ed. “You’ve caused enough harm and mental damage.”

She detailed a negative evaluation she received in November and said in the email that their relationship had gone “downhill” after she submitted documentation under the Family and Medical Leave Act and Americans with Disabilities Act “due to my severe depression and anxiety.” She said she asked for an improvement action plan but Moseley “ignored requests (failing to respond to emails), or when face-to-face, danced around the topic.”

“You intentionally harassed and bullied me and got satisfaction from sitting back to determine how you would ensure I failed as an employee and proud alumna,” she wrote.

An anguished email from her to the board in November, obtained by Inside Higher Ed, indicates she previously brought up her mental health to the board and to Moseley.

Alumni are calling for Moseley’s immediate termination.

Sherman Bonds, president of the Lincoln University National Alumni Association, wrote a letter to Pasley on Jan. 9 saying that the incident left the institution “heavy-laden with despair, discontent, and disappointment.”

“… I have become compelled to demand a change in the Office of the Presidency of the University effective immediately,” he wrote. “… Today I along with many others assert this appeal to you and the Board. We—the community, family members, friends, and alumni—seek a path to healing.”

Bonds told Inside Higher Ed that he was “overwhelmed” by the news of Candia-Bailey’s death and quickly started receiving emails and phone calls from other alumni feeling the same way.

“People out there were hurting,” he said. “I thought the health of the university was at stake …. This is a tragedy that happened on the watch of this administration and to heal, that person needs to be removed.”

Alumni have taken to social media with the hashtag #FireMoseley, with some posts arguing Moseley, who is white, shouldn’t have been selected to lead the HBCU in the first place. (Bonds and other alumni have disagreed with Moseley’s leadership on other issues.)

There’s also been an outpouring on social media from Black female academics who see Candia-Bailey’s passing as emblematic of some of the challenges they face in higher ed settings and the sometimes dire costs to their mental health.

“Black women are held to very different standards,” said Jasmine Roberts-Crews, a strategic communication lecturer at Ohio State University. “There’s this sentiment among many Black people in general that you have to work twice as hard to get half as much respect, accolades and empathy as white people do. And this is worse when you consider the compounding oppression of both racism and sexism, that Black women often experience in higher education.”

Roberts-Crews said those pressures can wear away at Black women in the academy and contribute to “burnout, self doubt, and really this tendency to want to be perfect.”

She also noted that the Candia-Bailey’s death comes on the heels of the resignation of Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black woman president. Gay’s six months at the institution ended after her performance at a December House hearing on campus antisemitism sparked outrage and amid accusations of plagiarism. The two stories raise similar concerns for Roberts-Crews.

“Why is it that with Dr. Gay, there was this impulse to double check her qualifications, double check her dissertation?” she said. “Has that ever happened in the history of Harvard’s presidency? Why was it that with the first Black woman, there was an impulse to do that but not with all these white male presidents?”

“It makes me wonder, personally as a Black woman, … I want to pursue a leadership role in higher education – is it really worth it?” she said. “Because I’m not seeing Black women in these roles actually succeed.”

Research has shown that Black women in academe, particularly faculty members and scholars, are more harshly judged and evaluated by students, non-Black colleagues and supervisors. They’re also often asked to do more service work and student mentorship for which they aren’t credited and that largely goes unacknowledged or accounted for in tenure and promotion reviews. They also face significant barriers to getting tenure.

What’s more, Black women in higher ed, including at HBCUs, often have heavy teaching loads and service and research expectations.

Ashley Robertson Preston, assistant professor of history at Howard University, said she hopes Candia-Bailey’s death prompts campus leaders across the country to take concrete steps to protect the mental health of Black female academics. She wants to see institutions ensure that faculty members and administrators have easy access to mental health care and equal access to resources when they’re in crisis.  

She hopes campus leaders “hear Black women,” she said, “hear them when they cry, hear them when they say, ‘I’m not okay,’ hear them when they say this is what I need to be successful.… Let her death be a spark to make change. We don’t want this to be another name that loses significance. Let’s honor her with our actions.”

Students who borrowed $12,000 or less for college and have been paying their loans back for at least 10 years got a pleasant surprise Friday, when the Biden administration announced that they could see their debt wiped out next month.

The relief will apply only to borrowers enrolled in the Education Department’s new income-driven repayment plan. Known as Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, it offers a quicker path to cancellation for low-balance borrowers or those who took out $12,000 or less. Borrowers on an income-driven repayment plan typically see forgiveness after 20 or 25 years.

While elements of the new SAVE plan took effect last summer, the cancellation provision wasn’t supposed to kick in until July. The Education Department didn’t specify a reason for the accelerated timeline.

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“I am proud that my administration is implementing one of the most impactful provisions of the SAVE plan nearly six months ahead of schedule,” President Biden said in a statement. “This action will particularly help community college borrowers, low-income borrowers, and those struggling to repay their loans. And, it’s part of our ongoing efforts to act as quickly as possible to give more borrowers breathing room so they can get out from under the burden of student loan debt, move on with their lives and pursue their dreams.”

Borrowers eligible for forgiveness will be notified in February and won’t have to take further action. So far, about 6.9 million borrowers have enrolled in the SAVE plan, but the department didn’t say how many people are expected to see relief next month.

Republicans in the House and Senate slammed the Biden announcement, saying it will make college more expensive and put America on a path toward bankruptcy. They also criticized the department for moving up the timeline on SAVE implementation while “blundering” the rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

“President Biden is downright desperate to buy votes before the election—so much so that he greenlights the Department of Education to dump even more kerosene on an already raging student debt fire,” said Representative Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the House education committee.

Borrowers who attended community colleges are expected to particularly benefit from this debt-cancellation pathway. Some analysts have argued that the SAVE plan could lead to a version of free community college. The department estimates that 85 percent of future community college borrowers will be debt-free after 10 years under the SAVE plan, according to the release.

Kyle Humphreys was pursuing a career in human resources and didn’t have a professional background in higher education when a former professor suggested he apply for a new position at Sacred Heart University.

The small Catholic college in Fairfield, Conn., was breaking new ground with the newly created position of manager of LGBTQ+ affairs. Mark Congdon, an assistant professor of communication at Sacred Heart, thought Humphreys might be a perfect fit for the role.

Humphreys was intrigued and surprised to hear that a religious institution even had such a position. He attended the College of Saint Rose, a Catholic institution in New York where Congdon formerly taught. It had no programs focused on LGBTQ+ affairs, much less a leadership position to direct such programs.

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“All my life, I’ve wanted to contribute to something larger than myself,” Humphreys said. “Being a queer and trans masculine person, I felt like I had a lot to offer to this role with my lived experiences. Having transitioned in college, I know how stressful and challenging that can be.”

Humphreys applied for the position last August and was hired in September. He moved to Connecticut a few weeks later and started working at Sacred Heart in early October, just in time to serve as master of ceremonies for the college’s annual Coming Out Day celebration on Oct. 9. He was joined by university president John Petillo, who has openly voiced support for LGBTQ+ students.

“Equality is rooted not in laws, but firmly in the hearts and minds of the community, this community,” Petillo said at the event. “We gather to unequivocally profess our support for each of our sisters and brothers. We refuse to be bullied into silence.”

The position, and the recent establishment of a Sexuality and Gender Equity Center, or SAGE, which Humphreys will oversee, is part of a larger initiative by university leaders to boost diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

Maurice Nelson, Sacred Heart’s chief diversity officer and head of the Office of Inclusive Excellence, said these efforts are part of the university’s Catholic-rooted mission to “love and care for the whole person.”

“We are a Catholic institution. But we have so many people who work and are educated here who are not Catholic, or even Christian,” Nelson said, noting that only about 60 percent of the estimated 1,700 members of each freshman class identify as Catholic. “We have a responsibility. We committed at the inception of the institution to support everyone holistically.”

Humphreys noted that not many colleges are launching or promoting similar new DEI initiatives, and some are even backing away from or reversing them entirely in the wake of the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in college admissions and growing opposition to such programs among largely Republican state lawmakers .

“They’re seen as a threat or they’re becoming aggressively challenged,” Humphreys said of DEI and LGBTQ+ support programs. “But Sacred Heart doesn’t seem to have shied away from that at all.”

A Small, Like-Minded Community

Sacred Heart isn’t the first Catholic college to open an LGBTQ+ students’ center and hire a designated LGBTQ+ affairs staff member—Georgetown University established its center in 2008. Sacred Heart’s remains one of few, however. Others include centers at Marquette University in Milwaukee and Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley, both located in urban, progressive communities.

Data from LGBTQ+ advocacy groups tracking college resource centers suggest that the majority of public and private secular institutions lack such services. According to the LGBTQ Centers Directory, created by the Calamus Foundation, Pennsylvania State University; the University of California, Riverside; and the University of Oregon, there are only 183 campus LGBTQ+ centers for the nearly 6,000 colleges and universities in the U.S.

But Jonathan Coley, an Oklahoma State University professor who has studied how Catholic and Christian institutions are addressing LGBTQ+ issues, said these centers are slowly becoming more common. Some colleges may also employ LGBTQ+ affairs staff members within a larger women’s center or DEI department.

“Research shows that LGBTQ resource centers have positive impacts on students,” Coley said in an email. “Not only do they help educate their larger campus communities about LGBTQ issues, but they also provide a place of belonging for LGBTQ students who may feel isolated on their campuses.

“I attended graduate school at Vanderbilt University, which has a dedicated LGBTQ student center, and that center helped me quickly find a community,” he said.

Student and Alumni Support

Nicole Sperling, a senior at Sacred Heart and president of the Gender and Sexuality Alliance club, or GSA, was one of a few students on the university’s LGBTQ Task Force. She was a leading advocate for the establishment of both Humphreys’s position and the SAGE Center, which serves as an educational resource on LGBTQ+ issues as well as a hangout spot for students.

Sperling said when she arrived at Sacred Heart as a freshman in 2020, the university had few programs in place to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. It wasn’t a hostile campus for LGBTQ+ students, she noted, but members of their community were hesitant to advocate for queer representation.

“People don’t like to step outside of their comfort zone,” she said.

But a campus Multicultural Center, which opened in 2020, and the new SAGE Center, which opened in 2022, are changing that and creating space for people to feel comfortable being themselves and for others to learn more about LGBTQ+ culture.

Sperling hopes people on campus will feel less hesitant discussing LGBTQ+ issues or asking questions about the LGBTQ+ community without fear of misspeaking or offending someone.

“People know that they can make a mistake because others are willing to educate them, so more people are becoming more open-minded,” she said.

Alice Ferreira, a vice president on the university’s alumni board, said she and other alums have been involved in ongoing conversations about DEI efforts and that she “applauds the bold steps” university leaders have taken.

The SAGE Center and its efforts are heavily influenced by input from student organizations such as GSA. So far they have pushed for and gotten university leaders to establish all-gender restrooms and gender-inclusive housing on campus.

Ferreira also hopes the SAGE center and LGBTQ+ student organizations will partner with alumni to promote LGBTQ+ advocacy through newsletters and homecoming events.

The Office of Inclusive Excellence is also working to create an infrastructure for collecting demographic data on the LGBTQ+ population. Sacred Heart administrators are only aware of the 80 out LGBTQ+ students who are active members of the GSA. But those data are unrepresentative, as not all queer students are involved with the LGBTQ+ student organization.

Sperling knows the center is starting off small, but she hopes similar work continues after she graduates.

“There’s power in numbers. So the louder that we are, the more people will know about us—that we’re here and we’re staying,” she added.

Little Public Pushback—So Far

Sperling and Ferreira both noted that they have seen little to no pushback from students, staff or alumni since Humphreys’s position was introduced. There has been some opposition to general inclusion efforts from outside groups, however.

Some Catholic colleges have had more problematic experiences with LGBTQ+ inclusion efforts—Saint Mary’s College, for one, a Catholic women’s institution in Indiana, recently reversed its decision to consider transgender women for admission after significant opposition from the local bishop and various students and alumnae.

Nelson, the diversity officer, said the lack of significant opposition to Sacred Heart’s initiatives is due to the institution’s formation in 1963 during the Second Vatican Council, which supported lay university governance, which means the university is not sponsored by a religious congregation, institute or diocese.

“Even though we are deeply rooted in that faith, there’s always been this openness and understanding that we evolve with time,” said Ferreira, the alumni board member. “And I’m Class of ’91, so this is how far back it goes.”

Despite the absence of opposition so far, Humphreys isn’t under the illusion that everyone on the campus supports his work.

“I expect a lot of pushback,” he said. “And even now, doing this interview, I know that it draws more attention to me and puts a target on my back … but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.”

Nelson is confident Petillo, the president, will continue to support the SAGE Center and Humphreys’s role despite any opposition.

“He affirms our mission,” Nelson said. “He says, ‘This is what we stand for. Take it or leave it,’ and he’s pretty adamant about that.”

Francis Origanti, senior vice president of mission and culture at Sacred Heart, agreed.

“SHU plays an important role in shaping today’s modern, vibrant Catholic intellectual tradition, where faith and reason coexist,” he said in an email. “We see a call to embrace social justice as part of our mission, one that requires discernment, reading the signs of the times and properly celebrating the diversity in our midst as a gift.”

With a near-record 113,000 postgraduate research students based in the U.K., including 46,350 foreign Ph.D. candidates, Britain’s doctoral education landscape would seem to be thriving. Buoyed by an extra 109 million pounds ($119 million) from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to support Ph.D. and midcareer researchers in 2023–24, and Horizon Europe membership secured, there might appear little cause for concern.

But there are signs that things are not as rosy in U.K. doctoral education as some imagine. In November, the Student Loans Company noted the “first potential yet small decline in the take-up of postgraduate doctoral student loans,” with sums borrowed in 2022–23 down by 12.3 percent.

There are also indications that the number of funded Ph.D. studentships will not be as plentiful over the next few years. The biggest single funder of Ph.D.s—the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which sponsored nearly half of the 4,900 UKRI-backed doctoral students who began their studies in 2022–23—announced last year that the number of its Centers for Doctoral Training would fall from 75 to “about 40” starting in 2024, leading to about 1,750 fewer funded places over the next five years.

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In addition, the Arts and Humanities Research Council is reducing its Ph.D. studentships by nearly a third, from 425 to 300 per year by the end of the decade, and the Wellcome Trust is severely reducing its support for Ph.D. students under its new strategy to focus on longer grants for early- and midcareer scientists.

Things could get a lot worse in the next few years, with the Institute for Fiscal Studies warning that tax cuts announced in Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement would lead to budget reductions of about 3.4 percent a year in “unprotected departments,” one of which might be the new Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

“It’s going to be tough going with an election and a spending review, whichever party wins,” predicted Rory Duncan, UKRI’s former director of talent and skills, who is now pro vice chancellor, research and innovation, at Sheffield Hallam University.

If universities were forced to tighten research spending, support for Ph.D. students could be an early casualty, because doctoral researchers—while sometimes seen as a source of cheap labor—are a big cost center for institutions, explained Duncan. “If you look at Trac [Transparent Approach to Costing] data, the cost recovery for doctoral students is very low—the lowest for any type of research activity,” he said, pointing to data that showed U.K. universities incurred losses of £1.4 billion ($1.7 billion) educating Ph.D. students in 2021–22, claiming back just 46.6 percent of the cost of training researchers.

In the Money: Ph.D. Funding

Thanks to U.K. universities’ success in attracting higher-paying international students, the sector has been able to cover such losses—which amount to $6.3 billion (£5 billion) a year for research over all—but that balancing act is “becoming much more challenging due to government rhetoric” over foreign students, continued Duncan. “There is huge pressure on the research sector, and it’s becoming harder and harder to do research—which includes supporting Ph.D. students,” he said.

That will be bad news for the U.K.’s “science superpower” ambitions, as the country’s innovation model had leaned heavily on having high Ph.D. numbers, Duncan said. “For many years the U.K. has been a leader for investing in Ph.D. training—it’s always been a top-three nation, alongside Germany and the U.S., for Ph.D.s. Others, like Japan, have taken different routes and changed their support to focus on midcareer scientists, which has a very detrimental impact on research quality,” he added.

But the level of the U.K.’s investment in Ph.D. training seems to be waning—at least, if judged by the numbers of doctoral students trained in recent years. A recent Freedom of Information request by Times Higher Education found the overall numbers of doctoral students starting UKRI-funded training fell from 6,835 in 2018–19 to 5,580 in 2021–22—an 18 percent drop—with reported figures for 2022–23 lower still at 4,900, though UKRI said this tally could increase as universities continued to submit data for that year. The decline in U.K. student numbers was even sharper, falling from 4,815 new candidates in 2018–19 to 3,420 in 2021–22—down by 29 percent—and to 2,840 in 2022–23.

Wrong Numbers: Falling Ph.D. Figures

For Douglas Kell, a former executive chair of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, such reductions are distinctly at odds with the government’s desire to bring an extra 150,000 researchers into the workforce by 2030.

“Cutting funded Ph.D. numbers under any circumstances, especially in a knowledge economy, is simply short-termist and absolute madness,” said Kell, now based at the University of Liverpool, who observed that these “further cuts extend those that have already been going [on] under this administration for more than a decade. We need massive increases in those who are technically and intellectually qualified, not cuts.”

However, UKRI’s collective talent funding—which supports both Ph.D. studentships and midcareer fellowships—is due to increase by only 5 percent in 2024–25, so funded places could “go down in the absence of additional investment,” warned Duncan, citing the continued need to increase tax-free doctoral stipends in line with inflation.

Group Interests: Talent Funding

The hefty increases to UKRI’s stipend—£18,622 ($23,672) in 2023–24, up 20 percent from 2021–22—still might not be enough to fix a bigger issue facing doctoral education, according to Robert Insall, professor of computational cell biology at UCL. “A lower proportion of the most brilliant students are doing Ph.D.s—those who are really ambitious and who might become future leaders in their field,” said Insall. “Even if you increased the stipend by 10 percent again, it might not be enough to make it acceptable. Its level was acceptable a few years ago, but now it just isn’t.”

The gloom hanging over U.K. higher education and research might explain why “the attractiveness of a Ph.D. has gone downhill” for highfliers who might have previously considered a research career in academia, continued Insall. “The government is not selling British academia and the media is painting it as a very troubled place, so students and potential Ph.D.s see that,” he said.

For its part, UKRI seems alert to the challenge of keeping the Ph.D. attractive, with plans for a new “core offer” around professional and career development set to be unveiled this year. According to UKRI’s chief executive, Dame Ottoline Leyser, this would “provide consistent talent offers that are still responsive to the needs of individuals and disciplines” and “strengthen the crucial link between career diversity and excellent research and innovation, better enabling people to follow their ideas across disciplines and sectors.”

Concerns over the direction of travel remain, but the fact that the U.K. is still a key destination for postgraduate students, behind only the U.S., suggests its doctoral model is far from broken, said Giulio Marini, visiting professor of education at the University of Hong Kong, whose research has focused on how Ph.D. graduates fare in global job markets. “The U.K. is highly attractive, and it seems it will remain so—Brexit was not helpful, but now that the U.K. is back into European funding schemes, I would not worry too much,” he said.

However, the country’s international popularity among foreign Ph.D. students might serve U.K. universities but not the U.K. economy in the long run if restrictive immigration rules push them to leave after a few years, warned Marini. “If Ph.D.s do not continue to live in the U.K., their economic contribution will be limited. In that situation, U.K. universities are really ‘making brains for other countries,’ which is not good policy.”

Is There a Doctor in the House? Ph.D. Population

Science and science education face significant threats these days, whether in the form of bans on what types of science can be taught in schools, criticism from mainstream politicians who seem to have an antiscientific agenda or other perils. Indeed, for a dangerous number of Americans, science has become unpopular—or worse, seen as not true. Yet as scientists, mathematicians and engineers, we have distinct points of view and basic facts that people should know about, as they can have a significant impact on many individuals’ lives.

That information needs to be shared. We have to get our ideas out there—because if we don’t, no one else will. And that means we have to expand our communication strategies. This is where writing comes in.

It’s amazing how much time those of us in the STEM disciplines in higher education spend writing. We write papers, grant proposals, white papers and notes for classes. But many of us often follow certain academic formulas and conventions that aren’t always accessible or understandable outside the narrow fields we are writing for. In fact, that is becoming more and more of an issue, according to a news article from Nature: “Science is getting harder to read. From obscure acronyms to unnecessary jargon, research papers are increasingly impenetrable—even for scientists.”

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Here’s the problem. Many of us are terrible writers. And honestly, when I finish a large grant proposal, the last thing I want to think about doing is more writing. But we need to make science more understandable and digestible to the general public if we stand a chance at combating the rise in antiscience rhetoric. I’ve found writing op-eds, magazine articles and posts for websites outside the narrow physics world can be rewarding, and it is helpful because our fields keep getting more and more complicated.

Communicating didn’t always come easy for me. I vividly remember trying to find ways to write essays in high school and college without using the word “different,” because I couldn’t spell it. (Spell check wasn’t yet around.) Now a professor of physics, I joke with my students at Adelphi University that if they knew how low my verbal SAT scores were, they would run into the president’s office and demand their tuition dollars back. Someone reading the first draft of my thesis questioned if I had ever taken a college English course. In fact, when I lived in a country where all the members of the team didn’t speak English as their first language, people still didn’t listen to my grammar recommendations. I have even been held up for promotions solely because my writing has been so poor.

Recently, however, I have managed to successfully publish 18 op-eds in higher education publications in just a couple of years, as well as a bunch of peer-reviewed articles, and I am in the process of actually signing a book deal. People now walk up to me and say, “You are such a good writer.” I usually blurt out a giant belly laugh. But my writing success started when I realized that I had good ideas, but if I couldn’t communicate them, I could never, ever be successful.

I started working on that. It’s been a slow and painful process, and I’ve experienced many setbacks. But I have made it a career mission to become a better communicator.

Here are the lessons I’ve learned about how to be successful as both a scientist and someone who writes about science.

Use a framework. As a management consultant, I was given the book The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking, which has a simple. straightforward framework for writing. Sometimes, as a professor who is nearly 50 years old, it seems a little silly to use a framework. But it helps so much whenever I am unsure of what to do next.

Be honest and humble with students about your difficulty writing about your ideas. When I admit how poor a communicator I was—and, in many ways, still am—it seems to help me in the classroom. It enables me to identify strongly and empathize with students who are still learning and don’t have all their professional skills yet. Whenever I get annoyed about how a student can’t solve what appears to me to be a particularly easy problem, I remember how much trouble I’ve had writing.

Surround yourself with communication experts. I have been sucking up every piece of advice I can find from people whose writing I admire, even if some of the feedback is critical and quite difficult to hear. Most of them have been in my university community. So many wonderful people have helped me put together strong pieces about higher education. I even married a writer!

Recognize that writing for us scientists will always be a team effort. When I write op-eds for higher education publications, it always takes many eyes and editors. I lean on people. I bounce ideas off them, and they introduce me to other big ideas. They help me work through my arguments. They help me focus my words. I never want to be a nuisance, but I’ve found that people will happily give you feedback, as long as it goes both ways and you are working together.

Practice with a blog. My blog, wrightresearchlab.wordpress.com, is a great platform for me. It allows me to develop ideas and keeps me writing. Sometimes it’s as silly as sharing stories about my guinea pigs. Other times I dive into professional issues that really matter to me. For starters, I personally make it a point to share when my students do amazing things—and fun things that are amazing. Physics is difficult, and I want my students to know how much I value their hard work and accomplishments. The blog also provides an opportunity for me to share information about projects, new teaching ideas and physics outreach successes.

Communicate with TikTok or YouTube. If you don’t like writing, don’t write. You can choose from many other amazing tools to share your ideas. I am particularly fond of TikTok and making fun videos about whatever is happening in my life or in the lab. I am not the best at it, but I still have gotten the word out about a number of issues that I care about.

In my case, writing outside the lab tends to be about advocating for undergraduate students. For your part, you might want to write about quantum or environmental science. Both those subjects are in the news continuously, and we need more experts. Each of us is going to have a different focus of concern, but whatever it is, we have a responsibility to communicate and share with other people our STEM experience and knowledge.

The fact is, my raw language skills are very poor, even though I am a passable experimental physicist. But I am committed to getting my ideas out there. Our voices as scientists are important, and we are going to need them to navigate our future successfully.

“Plagiarism means the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credit.”

This tidy sentence, the work of some unnamed, unknown federal employee, was published in the Federal Register in December 2000.^[1] Since then, it has been quoted, republished and—according to the current discourse—plagiarized by institutions of higher education nationwide.

Here it is, sans any credit or citation, advising students and faculty at Texas A&M University, at UC Santa Barbara and at Caltech. At the University of South Carolina. Oregon State. Northwestern. Penn State. Utah State. The University of Connecticut. Brown. Over and over, on webpages with ominous titles like “Research Misconduct,” these schools are declaiming their official policies on plagiarism … and they’re all plagiarized.

At least, we must assume so, if we are to believe recent media outrage. Surely this is what Megan McArdle means by “unequivocally plagiarism”? And isn’t plagiarism always wrong? “Using watery euphemisms to refer to blatant plagiarism debases our profession, and the assertion that everyone plagiarizes if you just look hard enough debases it further,” warns Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic. In the examples above, schools are using verbatim copies of a complex and specific definition. They could easily provide a citation. But they haven’t. Why are they, in Harper’s terms, “debasing” themselves so?

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We’d like a clean-cut definition of plagiarism, but real-world reuse of language is complex. Writing studies experts Carol Haviland and Joan Mullin have explored this conundrum in their edited collection, Who Owns This Text? Plagiarism, Authorship and Disciplinary Culture. In a chapter on administrative writing, the late Linda Bergmann (former director of the Writing Lab at Purdue University) calls “plagiarism” a “catchall term that fails to take into consideration the different practices of research, writing and attribution in different fields.” Administrators and faculty, she notes, operate in substantially different discourse communities. One important difference lies in how attribution is handled:

In higher ed administration, Bergmann explains, “the ‘ownership’ of administrative ideas and documents tends to be located in the institution or the position, not in the individual.” The same view holds in the business world, where executives are named as authors of reports written by their subordinates. In both settings, this process is considered normal and uncontroversial. It’s no secret, and it’s not considered misconduct.^[2]

So all the plagiarized plagiarism definitions? Schools probably consider them administrative texts, expressions of an institutional voice. They want their academic misconduct policies to sound absolute, to impress readers with the institution’s forceful condemnation of plagiarism. The impulse is to not clutter up that message with other voices, because the schools are positioning themselves, not the federal government, as the authorities who judge and punish transgressors.^[3]

When questions about textual ownership arise in a community, they’re typically settled by the community’s members. Administrators settle them one way and faculty settle them in other ways. Every discipline has its own culture of sharing and acknowledging ideas, built over years of shared conversations (what we academics call “discourse”). This is why, for example, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics^[4] investigates charges of inadequate citation by asking if the contested material is “regarded as common knowledge in the SIAM community.” They don’t assess plagiarism charges by consulting national op-ed pages, or political think tanks, or angry hedge fund managers, because those people aren’t industrial and applied mathematics professionals. SIAM wants qualified professionals to decide questions like whether omitted citations are “essential to the work presented.” Those are the only people who can decide those questions. Outsiders don’t know the field’s scholarship and have no idea what is essential to it.^[5]

The problem, as Haviland and Mullin point out, is that this disciplinary knowledge—what, when and why to cite; what’s considered “common knowledge”; who “owns” a text—is often “tacitly held” by members of a discourse community (11). It’s not taught explicitly and may be invisible to novices and outsiders. Higher education is a collection of many disciplines that all have slightly different expectations around attribution, authorship and citation. Yet most schools officially define plagiarism as a generic concept, even though many normal practices of scholarship and administration fall outside their definition. Rather than talking about these differences and the very practical reasons for them, we’ve outsourced the problem to software that claims to “detect plagiarism,” and then we struggle to enforce its largely arbitrary accusations and blame underpaid, overworked instructors for “failing to teach citation skills.”

As we have just seen at Harvard, the tacitly held, discipline-specific nature of citation standards offers a golden opportunity for those seeking to punish, harass or bully writers, especially writers from marginalized groups. Definitions of “common knowledge” and “substantial copying” can be broadened or narrowed, opened and closed like a gate, to separate community members from outcasts, sheep from goats, university presidents from the academic rabble. People we don’t want in our community, for whatever reason, can be bounced out because they have, in effect, “transgressed the unwritten law.” Like the inscrutable literacy tests that prevented Black Americans from voting, citation concerns can be weaponized by people who want to control or punish.^[6]

Our current discourse about plagiarism, driven by bad faith and worse software, feels like a particularly frustrating captcha, where we peer at a grid of tiny, unrelated images and puzzle over which bits of chrome might or might not be part of a bus. But we really don’t care about the buses. Whether there’s a bus or boat or traffic light in any one image is irrelevant to the actual process we’re supposedly concerned with: the scholarship, the centuries of compiled knowledge, that plagiarism standards are meant to protect.

The questions we should be asking are things like, Where does this bus go? Which bus takes us to the airport or the hospital? What are the connections that let you transfer from one bus to another? That’s how you sort out the voices in disciplinary discourse, where authors use the work of their peers to derive new ideas, strengthen or condemn old ones, and generally move human knowledge forward.

Haviland and Mullin call on faculty “to investigate and then articulate” the different, field-specific concepts of textual ownership, “and to challenge the one-size-fits-all definitions of plagiarism and their origins” (18). Heeding their call would give us a better understanding of our own professional practices and would help us teach students far more effectively. It would also make us less vulnerable to the mercurial vendettas of aggrieved billionaires like Bill Ackman. It could head off what Ian Bogost envisions as a plagiarism war, “with automated accusations and manual rebuttals,” prosecuted by opponents of higher education. It might even generate appreciation for the painstaking work of research and scholarship and the collaborative, consensus-building individuals who make it possible.

Or we could keep engaging in circular debates with whoever currently has an ax to grind with higher ed. Just keep in mind that the people challenging you to SELECT ALL IMAGES CONTAINING A BUS will happily throw you under one.

---

^[1] Vol. 65, No. 235.

^[2] Bergmann points out that something similar happens in large science laboratories, where lead researchers’ names take the top slot among an article’s authors and the contributions of lowly lab assistants may not be credited at all. This system is certainly subject to abuse, but it is considered appropriate, even necessary, to the discipline.

^[3] Ironically, the likely reason these schools adopted this particular definition is that it’s part of the National Science Foundation’s rules for grant recipients. Any institution receiving NSF funding obviously wants to make sure those rules are followed on campus. Some schools do cite the federal rules as part of their plagiarism definition. But choosing to elide the connection doesn’t constitute academic misconduct. At least, I haven’t heard of any schools losing NSF funding because they plagiarized their plagiarism definition from the NSF. Maybe The New York Times will run a few dozen articles about that.

^[4] Which, notably, cites both the NSF and the Federal Register in its discussion of plagiarism.

^[5] See Appendix B of Who Owns This Text? for many more amusing examples of people trying to define “common knowledge” in generic terms.

^[6] As scholars like Rosina Lippi-Green have documented, “standards” of usage, grammar and pronunciation serve this same function.

“Three months.” The visa coordinator’s voice sliced through the quiet hum of laboratory equipment, each syllable laying another brick in the wall encircling my future. My familiar world of research and routine now felt claustrophobically narrow. A wave of fear and disbelief welled up inside me, hovering dangerously close to plunging into despair.

As I held the ultrasound photo in my pocket, it crinkled softly in my grasp, serving as a silent testament to the unexpected life flourishing amid the chaos of my professional turmoil. The imminent visa expiration, the pregnancy and my adviser’s sudden departure felt like fault lines snaking through the foundation of my postdoc journey, threatening to bring it all crashing down.

Amid this swirling chaos, a stark realization pierced the fog: I had dedicated eight years to experiments, analysis and deadlines, yet I had no blueprint for the road ahead. The absence of a clear forward-thinking strategy cast a profound shadow—a void more disconcerting than the immediate uncertainties before me. More than a professional dilemma, this moment represented a significant line dividing my past self from the future I was yet to shape.

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Standing at the crossroads of change, I knew my journey as an international scholar demanded active self-advocacy, not just adaptation. Understanding and articulating our needs while making informed decisions becomes paramount when navigating the complex terrain of building a career in a new country. This isn’t a luxury; it serves as the guiding compass that keeps us oriented and propels us forward in these uncharted waters, far from the security of our familiar shores.

Craving a professional network, I dove into LinkedIn, meticulously crafting my online persona as a springboard for building meaningful connections and shaping my career path. This platform proved fertile ground for exploration, unveiling opportunities I never foresaw. As my profile evolved, it reflected my academic and personal growth—with each connection, endorsement and shared article contributing metaphorical bricks to my emerging professional identity.

However, that online achievement starkly contrasted with the intricate challenges that many international scholars face: the pervasive and profound impact of visa restrictions. These regulations are woven into every career aspiration, rendering the pursuit of stability a fragile and unpredictable journey.

To traverse this complex terrain, I actively pursued expert legal counsel to explore my options and remained receptive to unconventional career avenues that aligned with visa requirements. Yet I realized that authentic self-fulfillment extended beyond merely accommodating legal hurdles. It involved wholeheartedly embracing and cherishing the diverse cultural mosaic of my identity, which I had, perhaps inadvertently, downplayed.

During one of the early meetings that I attended as a Ph.D. student, I confidently introduced myself, each syllable of my name echoing my heritage. However, a seemingly innocuous question caught me off guard: “Do you have a simpler name to use?” This casual inquiry, while polite, subtly transformed my familiar name from something comfortable to out of place. It triggered a sense of not fully belonging in what should have been a welcoming environment. The perplexed expressions when I pronounced scientific terms with my accent and the gentle confusion over my cultural references amplified this feeling, leaving me questioning my true place within the academic community.

Then, within the warm embrace of international student groups, everything shifted. In those gatherings, my identity ceased to be a perceived barrier and became a source of communal strength and pride. This newfound sense of belonging wasn’t just liberating; it also illuminated the broader gaps in cultural understanding and underscored the pressing need for inclusivity within academic settings.

My personal narrative seamlessly became a chapter in a larger anthology of shared experiences, all resonating with a common yearning for recognition and a voice. To fully embrace my identity, I took concrete steps: I ceased making excuses for my accent and instead spoke with unapologetic clarity. I started incorporating cultural elements into my attire during interviews, blending the traditional with the professional. I redirected my focus toward producing top-notch content rather than fretting about whether I would be understood. My journey mirrored the courage and resilience that countless international scholars must summon, each forging their own distinct paths yet confronting similar trials of adaptation and acceptance.

This newfound clarity prompted profound contemplation, urging me to ponder the potential of individual advocacy in challenging the expectations of assimilation within higher education. It led me to question, is it the unwavering efforts of different individuals or the collective action of a harmonious community that truly brings about transformation within our institutions?

To my fellow international students, I say this: own your stories. Share them with confidence, not apology. In those narratives lies the power to break down walls, to build bridges of understanding, and to unlock the vast potential that lies within each of us.

At the same time, while individual stories undoubtedly hold significant sway, my journey in self-advocacy has brought forth a fundamental truth: success is intricately linked to collective progress rather than solitary endeavor. Flourishing as an international scholar and professional is profoundly entwined with the unity and cooperation within a supportive network. For instance, my lab adviser recognized my potential amid uncertainties; his unwavering belief played a pivotal role in my decision to pursue a Ph.D. Similarly, friends can act as beacons, sharing job leads with messages like “You’re the perfect fit for this role,” while mentors can skillfully guide you and instill confidence with their seasoned insights and encouragement. Moreover, proactive supervisors don’t just oversee you—they also acknowledge and reward your contributions, provide motivation and affirm your impact on your field.

Consider the immense potential if our classrooms evolved beyond conventional learning, becoming fertile grounds for ongoing, deep discussions about cultural identity. Such an environment wouldn’t just benefit the individual; it would enrich our research and communities. Diverse perspectives foster innovative thinking, leading to more comprehensive and creative research outcomes. When departments like International Services and Diversity join forces with student organizations, they create a robust network of support, encouraging a broader exchange of ideas and experiences. This collaborative approach not only enhances the quality of academic discourse but also strengthens the social fabric of our communities, cultivating a more empathetic, informed and inclusive society.

As I reflect on my journey, I see self-advocacy not merely as a skill but as an essential strategy, especially crucial for international scholars as we navigate our distinct paths through academe. A vital lesson has been the importance of prioritizing well-being. Asserting my needs and rights as an international professional is about balancing professional advancement with mental and emotional health. It’s about knowing when to adapt and when to assert, all while maintaining the self-care that is crucial for sustained success.

In high-stakes situations like job interviews and academic negotiations, where cultural nuances play a significant role, striking the right balance becomes imperative. This journey has taught me to blend analytical reasoning with cultural awareness, and to lean on a diverse network for guidance, enhancing my ability to respond to challenges with insight and adaptability.

For example, regarding the visa issue mentioned earlier, I sought advice from visa experts who provided a viable solution moving forward. That experience underscored a key lesson: knowledge is power. Staying informed about deadlines and understanding the intricate details of visa regulations early on is crucial. It taught me the importance of proactive planning and not leaving critical matters until the last minute. That proactive approach has become a guiding principle in both my professional and personal life.

As I conclude, I offer my fellow international scholars a piece of practical wisdom: cherish your unique experiences and let them guide you. Network not just for professional gain, but also to cultivate a supportive circle. Seek mentors who understand your path and can provide personalized advice. Gently remind yourself that while obstacles are part of the journey, embracing and expressing your distinct perspective is what truly enriches both that personal path and the wider academic community. Approach each day with kindness toward yourself and steadfast confidence in your voice.

Whether on student loan policy or oversight of for-profit colleges, federal higher education policy over the past decade has resembled a ping-pong match, with rules adopted by one administration reversed or revised by the next. With college accreditation now on the Biden administration’s agenda with rule-making meetings starting this month, are we in for a wholesale reversal of the Trump administration’s 2020 rule changes?

While noisy fights over free speech and other issues on campuses may get the headlines, much of the important work on higher education policy and quality is, fortunately, more amenable to constructive discussion and solution. We should know, because in our roles as two of the 18 members of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which advises the secretary of education on accreditation, we led a subcommittee tasked with identifying ways to improve federal oversight of the accrediting agencies that open the door to federal grants and loans.

NACIQI is designed to cut across ideological lines. The committee includes Trump and Biden appointees; officials from a religious college, a public university, for-profit colleges, a historically Black college and a community college; and a range of independent experts. One of us is among the appointees of congressional Republicans, the other, Democrats.

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Despite our diversity, our subcommittee was able to work through the details of a number of issues relating to the policies and processes around accreditor recognition, culminating in recommendations that were accepted unanimously by the full NACIQI membership last summer. These recommendations provide the U.S. Department of Education with a constructive starting point for the upcoming rule making. Here are some of the topics we raised.

Groups that lean both left and right have complained that while the public may provide input on accreditors’ applications for recognition, or on reviews of their adherence to federal rules, under current regulations the public can only do so without access to the relevant documents and under time frames that don’t make sense. Reporters, too, have been frustrated, forced to file Freedom of Information Act requests that take years to bear fruit, long after the issue has been decided. The subcommittee recommended changes to the timeline and public record policies so that the public—and NACIQI members—would have both the information and opportunity to weigh in on specific accrediting agencies.

How accreditors handle complaints was also a key topic. Our review and experience found that some accreditors have processes that make it too difficult for students and others to voice concerns or complaints about a college. The subcommittee recommended changes that would require accreditors to be more open to input, even if the person did not submit the complaint in precisely the manner requested by the agency. An agency should not be able to ignore the substance of a complaint just because it was not written in legalese, came in the wrong envelope, lacked a phone number or was anonymously made.

While college accreditation is a peer-review process, federal law requires that boards of recognized accrediting agencies include at least one member for every six who represents the public or student interests rather than those of the accredited colleges. Because some accreditors have treated that requirement somewhat half-heartedly, the subcommittee drafted rule changes to make those positions more independent.

Perhaps the weediest topic discussed by the subcommittee related to the requirements surrounding “substantive change” and written arrangements between institutions and third parties. Given the amount of work colleges and universities are doing with third parties to offer online certificates and programs, the subcommittee’s recommendations focused on the need for specific changes to current regulations to ensure accrediting agencies are consistently and appropriately reviewing changes in program offerings and growth in new areas at an institution.

News coverage of the subcommittee report focused largely on the thorny issue of student achievement. Should the federal government require accreditors to be more aggressive in requiring evidence that students are learning? Committee members were divided, but all accepted the subcommittee’s modest approach of requiring accreditors to have some standards they set to assess student achievement rather than no standards at all, and expecting them to be able to tell NACIQI what those standards are and how they monitor them.

In an effort to find consensus, we are encouraged that some ideas referenced in the subcommittee’s report appear are included in the Education Department’s initial issue papers as starting point for the upcoming rule making. We agree about the importance of ensuring the billions of dollars that consumers and taxpayers spend on higher education are getting the value we all deserve.

When Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel catalyzed a contentious protest movement on college campuses across the country, Michelle Murray, an associate professor of political studies at Bard College in New York, and her colleagues wondered if there was a role they could play in promoting thoughtful discussion of the conflict on their campus.

“I was observing students, on the one hand, being really hungry for knowledge and, on the other hand, kind of encountering a lot of terminology that’s circulating around in the discourse,” she said.

Those observations, combined with extensive discussions with her fellow faculty members, led Murray and another professor to develop a course for the spring semester designed to give students tools to talk about the conflict in Gaza by focusing on key terminology. In the course, titled Keywords for Our Times: Understanding Israel and Palestine, students will explore how words like “Zionism,” “genocide” and “settler colonialism” have been defined and applied by different groups of people.

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Murray said she was only able to pull off the new offering so quickly because Bard expedited the approval timeline for the course, which involves the collaboration of many other colleagues who plan to guest lecture.

But Bard is not the only institution hoping to foster understanding by examining the conflict through an academic lens. Ever since protests over the Israel-Hamas war arose on college campuses, proponents of open dialogue have called on universities to use their cornerstone resource—education—to tamp down tensions. Protesters’ vitriol, the argument goes, comes at least in part from a lack of knowledge of others’ perspectives.

“College campuses should be a place for protest and disagreement and free speech—and they should be a place where students can learn about complex subjects and have safe spaces for respectful dialogue with those they disagree with,” wrote The Boston Globe’s editorial board, lauding Dartmouth University for hosting forums on the history of the region in the weeks following the attack.

The appetite is clearly there. Many professors who teach courses on the conflict report that their spring semester classes have seen all-time high demand, filling quickly and boasting substantial wait lists. While few of these classes are new offerings—as they can take several semesters to develop—existing courses are being updated with new information about the current conflict, increased historical context and lessons on how to parse information about the war from different sources.

Smadar Ben-Natan, an Israeli lawyer turned academic who is teaching an undergraduate course and a graduate seminar on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the University of Washington this spring, said that her courses, which focus on exploring multiple perspectives, will be able to meet “the moment that we’re at and … answer some of the difficult questions about colonization, self-determination, resistance, violence, state violence that this moment brings up.” (The undergraduate course is full, with 45 students registered and more on the wait list.)

The courses were previously taught by another professor, but Ben-Natan is updating them in light of the ongoing war. She plans to add an exercise at the end of each class in the graduate seminar that asks students to reflect on how the conflict impacts their lives on and off campus.

“I think it’s important, because many times students feel that they’re alone and they don’t have safe spaces to question things that they hear and think in a setting that is both safe and also informed and nuanced and, in a way, confidential,” she said. “I want to reflect that we are all, in a way, facing new realities and having to reconsider: How do we position ourselves? How do we connect with demonstrations, rallies, all kinds of political movement that is happening?”

Passionate Participants?

Professors aren’t sure what kind of impact their courses will have on campus climate, though. Derek J. Penslar, the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University, will be a teaching a class on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict next fall. Tensions run especially high at Harvard, which has made headlines both for pro-Palestinian student protests and the administration’s response; university president Claudine Gay resigned Jan. 2 following widespread condemnation of her performance at last month’s congressional hearing on antisemitism and mounting allegations of plagiarism.

The course—which Penslar has taught at least 15 times and describes as “an overview of the history of Israel and of the Palestinians viewed through the lenses of Middle Eastern history, Jewish history and global historical movements such as nationalism and colonialism”—has never attracted the students who are most impassioned about the issue, he said.

“The students who walk in my door are not necessarily the same ones as those who are in Harvard Yard screaming,” he said. “More often than not, my students are curious, intelligent, and they usually do have a political view at one point or another. But they’re open-minded or else they wouldn’t bother taking my class.”

Paul Scham, a professor in the University of Maryland’s Israel Studies department who teaches an introductory course about the conflict every fall, has had the same experience in his classes. Even when the war between Israel and Hamas began in the middle of last semester, he said, few students shared their own opinions on the matter.

Adam, a pro-Palestinian student organizer at the University of Maryland who declined to share his surname out of fear of being doxed or blacklisted, is not planning to take any courses related to the conflict. He isn’t worried about professors being biased, he said. But having grown up learning about the Palestinian territories, he believes he is already “very well accustomed to the narratives and counternarratives” surrounding the conflict, he said, and he did not want to have to argue with other students about “who deserves what rights.”

Pro-Palestinian protesters “stay away from dialogues that seek to paint the two sides as equal because … [we] see this relationship as a colonized/colonizer relationship,” he said. “It’s not two equal sides beefing it out.”

Learning to Disagree

Still, some professors wish students were more willing to voice opinions—even unpopular ones—in their courses.

For next year, Scham added a couple of sentences to his course description, saying, “‘We of course will talk about the war, and bring your opinions; all opinions are welcome,’” he said. “Because I have been disappointed, for the 14 or 15 years I’ve taught this course, that comparatively few people in the course seem to really be involved or passionate. I thought I would have to keep people from each other’s throats, and at least in Maryland … everyone seems really respectful of others’ feelings. That’s good, obviously, but I’d love to hear some passion.”

Penslar plans to take a similar step: he is considering making it a course requirement to disagree with him on at least three occasions during the semester so that students learn to feel more comfortable and confident with respectful discordance.

Paul Kohlbry, a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University who teaches a class called Palestine and the Palestinians, believes that taking an academic approach to the conflict can actually increase tensions. For students enraged about an injustice, “learning more will probably make you more upset,” he said. “It would be strange if the more you learned, the less tension, antagonism and conflict there was.” But he believes that tension can be good thing, raising the stakes and awareness of important issues.

Kohlbry’s course, which focuses more on the culture of the Palestinian people than on politics, has attracted students who are curious but uninformed about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as impassioned activists—which makes it hard to tailor the lessons to all levels of interest, he said.

The first time he taught the class, last spring, the conversations weren’t particularly contentious. “Most of the students were Muslim students or Palestinian students who wanted to take the class to learn more about who they were and where they were from,” he said.

But this spring, things might be different; Kohlbry, who plans to reorganize the course slightly to deepen understanding of the current war, believes student anger about Cornell administrators’ response to the Oct. 7 attack and subsequent protests will make its way into the classroom.

Whether or not the biggest activists sign up for courses on the conflict, both Penslar and Murray said they hope the lessons they teach will spread to others on campus through word of mouth. Both their courses are lower level, meaning they are open to almost all students. They are also larger-than-average courses for their respective campuses; 40 students are enrolled in Murray’s course, despite Bard typically capping class sizes at 22.

Especially at a small college—Bard enrolls 1,800 undergraduates at its main campus—one impactful class can go a long way.

“One of our goals with this course is to foster richer dialogue within the community at Bard,” Murray said. “That’s what my hope would be, even as these students who are already really committed and passionate don’t take the course, that there’ll be ripple effects.”

As a formerly undocumented immigrant who has spent a decade in academe fighting for the advancement of Latino students in higher education in the sciences, I want to shed light on the struggles that students of color face in graduate school and why so many of us are leaving it.

Growing up, I never dreamed of becoming a scientist, because I figured that such a career path was not available to me as a child of immigrants. As the oldest in my family, I told myself that I would major in business administration in order to find a well-paying job to support my family. I did not have the luxury of thinking big.

All of that changed one day in community college, however, when I attended a biology class taught by a Black woman professor. Her lectures sparked something in me that gave me permission to dream. From community college to a four-year institution, CUNY’s York College, I built up research experiences working on the social behavior of the fruit fly, attended scientific conferences and published academic papers. All that led to my acceptance to a doctoral program at Yale University in molecular biophysics and biochemistry.

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But I found that I faced distinct obstacles at Yale that I had not encountered before. I was the only Latino in my Ph.D. class and one of just three in the entire department. I met peers who were more prepared for the rigors of a biochemistry doctoral program than I was. After a semester, I found myself on academic probation after failing a core biochemistry course.

Several factors led to that fateful day: feeling isolated in the program, transitioning from a biology to a biochemistry field and being afraid to ask for help, as I did not want people to think the only Latino in the program needed extra assistance.

At the end of the semester, as I walked up what seemed endless stairs to Science Hill to meet with the director of graduate studies, I recalled how my parents had made so many sacrifices in coming to this country, and I felt like I had failed them.

Luckily, I was given a choice that day: “Do you want to stay, or do you want to go?” I told myself that I did not want my story to end that way, so I chose to stay.

But this time, I decided, I would do my Ph.D. differently. I rewired myself to feel comfortable asking for help from my colleagues, teaching assistants and professors. Through the support of mentors, I excelled, and I went on to earn the PD Soros Fellowship, pass my qualification exams, start diversity initiatives and receive my Ph.D. in 2020. I am also thankful that I had a supportive Ph.D. adviser, Michael R. Koelle, who believed in my potential as a budding scientist and continually encouraged me.

I’m happy that my story ultimately ended well. But, unfortunately, those of so many other Ph.D.s students of color do not. A recent report from the nonprofit RTI International, commissioned by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, was alarming; it found Black students face a longer time to earn their doctoral degrees, and both Black and Hispanic students carry significant financial debt in graduate school compared to white peers. Systematic change has to be made to ensure those students can, in fact, succeed in academe.

For starters, universities should ensure that data on how students of color progress in their doctoral programs are easily accessible so prospective students know what to expect when it comes to an institution’s diversity of student body, retention rate and alumni outcomes. One example of a university that has publicly published outcomes for students of color is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

MIT’s data showed, for example, that the population of enrolled graduate students in biology who identified as underrepresented minorities increased from 4 percent in 2005 to 19 percent in 2023—suggesting that the institute’s recruitment efforts for that department have improved over time. Meanwhile, the attrition rate for underrepresented minorities in biology, or the percentage of those exiting the program, was slightly higher than that of white students—10.8 percent compared to 9.6 percent between 1997 and 2016. Other institutions that have made similar efforts in recent years to provide publicly available data include Johns Hopkins University and Yale University.

More higher education institutions should also publish successful intervention strategies that other universities can use as models to improve their retention rate for students of color, along the lines described by Marenda A. Wilson, Anthony L. DePass and Andrew J. Bean. Increasing that rate starts with inclusive and intentional recruitment and retention practices.

Some of the strategies that I’ve personally found to be most effective include offering:

1. holistic application reviews,
2. structured programs whereby senior graduate students mentor new students,
3. workshops on topics like how to choose a research adviser or obtain a fellowship, and
4. mock examinations in which students receive feedback on their written and oral dissertation proposals.

Programs that focus on retaining and supporting underrepresented students once they are in doctoral programs include the Duke University BioCoRE program and the student-run Yale BBS Diversity and Inclusion Collective (YBDIC). Establishing such programs can significantly help an institution improve retention rates for students of color. For example, Duke’s BioCoRE program for underrepresented graduate students in the biosciences hosts an annual DEI symposium allowing graduate students to present their research, network and build a community with underrepresented graduate students. Similarly, they also offer candidacy-exam preparation and peer graduate student mentoring.

During my time in the YBDIC program, we organized fellowship-writing workshops for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships Program, which allowed students to receive feedback from awardees and faculty mentors of awardees. We also hosted fireside chats on how to tackle impostor syndrome and social gatherings to celebrate each other and build a support system for underrepresented students across all the biological and biomedical departments. Just those two programs have played a vital role in supporting graduate students’ development throughout their Ph.D. programs, providing structured support as well as a community for underrepresented students that previously took me to four years of graduate school to find.

Finally, the Graduate Student Engagement and Community Program established by the STEM organization Científico Latino, which I co-founded, is an example of an institution-independent program for building community for students of color. The program is now in its third year and has a cohort of 100 minoritized first-year graduate students. Those students have access to peer mentorship from senior graduate students and postdoctoral scientists; professional development workshops, such as how to choose a research lab, apply to fellowships or tackle impostor syndrome; and access to a professional network of scholars and mentors across the United States.

It’s hard enough to get into graduate school, and Ph.D. students of color need and deserve support once they are there so they can become future leaders in STEM. It’s time to create more welcoming and inclusive spaces that encourage them not only to enroll but also to stay in academe. The future of those students is on us.

In classic works of literature or drama, tragedy tends to take one of three forms.

First, there are the tragedies that are self-inflicted—that grow out of central character’s inherent flaws, or what the ancient Greeks called hamartia. This term refers to an inherent defect or shortcoming in the character that ultimately leads to that character’s downfall. That flaw might be a weakness like jealousy, ambition or indecisiveness or a virtue taken to an extreme. Often, that flaw is hubris, the excessive pride or arrogance that leads the character to overstep boundaries, defy moral codes or disregard warnings, setting the stage for tragedy.

Second are the tragedies that result from external forces or circumstances beyond a person’s control. Sometimes these forces are supernatural or cosmic; at other times they are products of an unfortunate course of events. In many tragedies, the characters are at the mercy of fate. Their destinies are predetermined and their attempts to escape fate only bring them closer to it.

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When classic mythology, drama and philosophy refer to human beings as the playthings of the gods, the phrase reminds us of the limits of human agency—that we, as human beings, have only limited control over their own destiny or lives. Instead, their fates are determined by the gods’ whims or by supernatural forces or fortuna—that is, fortune and chance. The phrase implies that the gods are capricious, whimsical or cruel in their actions, using humans for their own entertainment or purposes without regard for human suffering or desires.

The phrase also relates to the trials and tribulations faced by humans as a result of divine intervention. This can be seen in various stories in which humans are subjected to tests, punishments or challenges imposed by the gods.

Philosophically, the notion of humans as playthings—as “flies to wanton boys”—can also be interpreted to reflect on the unpredictability and inexplicability of life events. It offers a way to acknowledge that many aspects of human experience are beyond individual control, subject to forces (be they fate, nature or societal structures) that can seem as arbitrary and powerful as the whims of mythological gods.

Then there is the most profound tragedy of all, which centers on individuals ensnared in conflicts larger than themselves, where contrasting moral and ethical frameworks are in stark opposition. This narrative structure is compelling because it encapsulates the complexity of the human condition, the struggle with moral ambiguity and the often tragic consequences of choices made under such duress. These conflicts are not just personal but are reflective of broader societal, cultural or existential tensions.

Characters in these latter tragedies are often caught between their personal moral convictions and the prevailing norms or rules of their society. This conflict can lead to a sense of isolation, internal turmoil and, ultimately, tragic choices. For instance, in Sophocles’s Antigone, the titular character’s moral duty to her brother conflicts with the edicts of the state, leading to her tragic demise.

These tragedies frequently explore situations where characters must navigate conflicting ethical values. Each choice presents its moral quandaries and the inability to reconcile these values often leads to a tragic outcome. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the protagonist’s impulse for revenge conflicts with his moral uncertainty about the dictates of justice.

In addition, many classic tragedies involve the tension between destiny (or fate) and free will. Characters struggle to assert their agency in a world where their fates seem predetermined, often by divine or supernatural forces. This struggle is central to tragedies like Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, where Oedipus cannot escape his prophesied fate despite his efforts.

Frequently, tragic figures must grapple with the collision of idealism and realism. In some instances, their adherence to certain ideals in a pragmatic world can lead to their downfall, a tension that can be seen in the character of Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, whose stoic and republican ideals are inadequate for the treacherous political realities of the Roman republic. In other cases, tragic characters are torn between their duties (to family, country or a cause) and their personal desires or emotions.

Through these moral conflicts, classic tragedies often critique cultural and societal structures. They reflect on the human repercussions of rigid societal norms, corrupt power structures or unyielding traditions.

The moral conflicts and ethical dilemmas that these tragedies portray are intrinsic to the human experience, transcending specific historical or cultural contexts. They derive their depth and enduring relevance because they compel audiences to reflect on the difficult choices that we face, the ethical complexities of life and the often-painful consequences of our actions in an imperfect world.

You might consider the events we have just witnessed as merely a matter of power and politics, in which wealthy donors, right-wing ideologues and an assortment of disgruntled academics, motivated by jealousy or bitterness, took down a campus president to advance their own ends. But I think that interpretation is incomplete.

What took place instead was, first of all, a painful personal tragedy. Just as Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne wasn’t brought down by freshman journalist Theo Baker Harvard’s president wasn’t ousted by billionaire William Ackman. Both were unseated by their own flaws and missteps and by various political machinations. Still, anyone with a scrap of empathy or compassion or decency must feel a deep sense of shame while watching the politics of personal destruction.

The word “schadenfreude”—the sense of pleasure, amusement and satisfaction we feel when observing another person’s misfortune—helps explain why many of us feel dirty in the wake of the president’s resignation. After all, those of us who aren’t in positions of power or prominence invariably take a bit of sadistic pleasure in seeing the eminent brought low.

Circumstances and bad luck, too, contributed to the demise of Claudine Gay’s presidency. Had she not testified before the House committee, it’s conceivable that none of this would have happened.

Yet something much larger was also going on. Harvard’s president was, in certain respects, the product, symbol and exponent of diversity, equity and inclusion, and we are now in the midst of a backlash against that framework.

Let’s not delude ourselves. Even though there were many bad-faith actors with self-serving motives in this sequence of events, the deeper tragedy grew out of a conflict of values and moral frameworks. It reflected a deep divide over the campus culture that has emerged at this nation’s wealthiest institutions.

Many individuals who support the intentions behind DEI initiatives—promoting fairness, combating discrimination and fostering inclusiveness—express concern over specific aspects that they consider problematic. They worry that an overemphasis on political correctness in attitudes and language has produced a culture of self-censorship among students and faculty and compromised academic freedom and campus free speech. They fear that the social justice movement has overemphasized identity politics, leading to divisiveness, focusing more on differences than commonalities and, at times, overlooking individual merit and diverse perspectives.

Then there are concerns that these ideologies have influenced and distorted curricular decisions, leading to a narrowing of academic perspectives and a focus on issues of power, inequality and social justice issues at the expense of broader educational goals.

A source of particular concern, in many critics’ eyes—and not just in the red states—is the growth of campus DEI bureaucracies and perceptions of administrative overreach. These detractors worry that the growth of this administrative layer has undercut a commitment to academic excellence, individual achievement and liberal values; promoted groupthink, where dissenting opinions are discouraged; and stifled critical thinking and robust intellectual debate. There is also concern that this initiative has trampled on faculty control over hiring and promotion; diverted resources from other initiatives; failed to genuinely foster inclusion and equal treatment for all, regardless of their background; and has, ironically, reinforced negative stereotypes and generalizations about various social and cultural groups.

We have just witnessed a train wreck that has left many of us feeling sordid, much as watching the devastation of Gaza makes anyone with an ounce of human compassion feel distraught. In its wake, the elite campuses need, at a minimum, to rededicate themselves to a liberal education and a civil campus environment. They also need to seize this opportunity to commit their campuses to advancing diversity in all forms, including intellectual diversity.

More than that, these campuses need to clearly demonstrate that merit, scholarly achievement and diversity are not in tension, but are fully compatible. They must articulate a university identity that goes beyond institutional wealth or admissions selectivity and voice an agenda and purpose that goes beyond the scripted.

Harvard (and MIT) received $800 million for selling edX. But those institutions have failed to articulate a meaningful strategy for using that money to fulfill edX’s original purpose: to provide a high-quality education for free. Shouldn’t Harvard do much more to open its resources to the world?

There’s a reason why MIT has escaped the firestorm that has engulfed Penn and Harvard. No one doubts MIT’s value or contributions to society. It’s clearly advancing the frontiers of science and technology and contributing to the nation’s defense. But can Harvard or Penn or Yale clearly state why their demise would be a loss to this country?

One path forward for the elite campuses that do not need to worry about graduation rates and finances is to recenter themselves and to declare, quite boldly, that their purpose is to produce global citizens who serve the world—and not just the worlds of consulting and finance. They need to reassert their role as protectors of the fragile research that defines our history and humanity. And they need to expect much more from all community members—to ensure that those fortunate enough to attend or teach at an elite university are respectful and are able to interact civilly in a world of discord.

These campuses are sending their graduates into an environment where true evil exists and where the planet is in jeopardy, and those graduates have an obligation to acquire the skills and knowledge that will allow them to make a positive difference.

Claudine Gay is out as president of Harvard University after roughly six months on the job.

Gay announced plans to resign on Tuesday following a firestorm of controversy in recent weeks related to numerous allegations of plagiarism and a widely criticized appearance at a House hearing on antisemitism in December, at which she and two other college presidents equivocated on questions about threats to Jewish students on campus.

The news of Gay’s resignation was first reported by The Harvard Crimson.

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Gay made headlines in late 2022 when she was named the first Black woman to lead Harvard. Now her departure makes her the shortest-serving president in the university’s 388-year history.

A Sudden Resignation

Gay released a statement on Tuesday afternoon detailing her plans to step down.

“It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president. This is not a decision I came to easily. Indeed, it has been difficult beyond words because I have looked forward to working with so many of you to advance the commitment to academic excellence that has propelled this great university across centuries,” Gay wrote.

She added that her resignation was “in the best interests of Harvard” to allow the campus to “navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”

Gay earned her Ph.D. at Harvard in 1998, joined the faculty in 2008 and became dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2018 before she was tapped to be president.

Critics have accused Gay of plagiarizing part of her Ph.D. thesis and other published works. The president largely downplayed the accusations—while submitting some corrections over citation issues—but the allegations continued to pile up, including new claims that emerged Monday.

She suggested that criticism of her scholarship has been “fueled by racial animus,” an apparent nod to the conservative activists who first raised the plagiarism allegations. Chief among them: Chris Rufo, a New College of Florida trustee who has staunchly opposed diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Gay resigned despite a recent statement of support from the Harvard Corporation, one of the university’s two governing boards, which in December affirmed its confidence in the president.

The body reiterated its support for Gay on Tuesday afternoon, even as it accepted her resignation.

“These past several months have seen Harvard and higher education face a series of sustained and unprecedented challenges. In the face of escalating controversy and conflict, President Gay and the [Harvard Corporation] Fellows have sought to be guided by the best interests of the institution whose future progress and well-being we are together committed to uphold,” members said in a statement thanking Gay for her “deep and selfless” commitment to Harvard.

The statement also acknowledged Gay’s resilience in withstanding “repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls,” condemning such attacks “in the strongest possible terms.”

The Hearing Fallout

Gay was one of three university presidents to speak at December’s congressional hearing on antisemitism, spurred by campus acrimony over the Israel-Hamas war. Snippets of the testimony quickly went viral as the presidents sidestepped pointed questions about institutional policies and how they would respond to calls on campus for the genocide of Jewish people.

Their responses prompted widespread condemnation and even a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Gay and the two presidents who appeared alongside her—Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—all fit the same profile: women leading highly selective institutions who had been in their jobs for a year or less.

And so far, two of the three have resigned their presidential posts.

Magill was the first to go, stepping down in early December under pressure from donors and board members dating back to a Palestinian literature festival she permitted on campus in the fall. Her disastrous performance at the hearing only compounded their discontent, making Magill’s position increasingly untenable. Following her resignation, Board of Trustees chair Scott Bok also stepped down, raising concerns about the level of influence donors have on campus.

Both Magill and Gay are expected to join the faculty ranks at their respective institutions.

Harvard is now elevating Provost Alan Garber to the position of interim president.

Reactions

News of Gay’s resignation sparked predictable reactions Tuesday afternoon. Conservatives who had called for her head celebrated, while supporters lamented her decision to step down.

After Magill resigned in December, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican who peppered the three presidents with questions at the hearing, wrote on X, “One down. Two to go.”

On Tuesday, Stefanik—a Harvard graduate—celebrated the news of Gay’s departure on social media.

“The resignation of Harvard’s antisemitic plagiarist president is long overdue. Claudine Gay’s morally bankrupt answers to my questions made history as the most viewed Congressional testimony in the history of the U.S. Congress,” Stefanik wrote on X.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has sought more information about how Harvard is handling the plagiarism allegations against Gay.

Education Committee chairwoman Virginia Foxx, a Republican representative from North Carolina, issued a statement Tuesday welcoming the news of Gay’s resignation and accusing higher education of falling captive to “political activists, woke faculty, and partisan administrators.”

Rufo, the activist who first leveled plagiarism allegations against Gay, took a victory lap on X.

“Today, we celebrate victory. Tomorrow, we get back to the fight. We must not stop until we have abolished DEI ideology from every institution in America,” Rufo wrote in a post on X, appearing to suggest that Gay was a diversity hire who was unqualified to serve as president of Harvard.

Others cast Gay’s resignation as an ominous win for right-wing forces and major donors.

“I have no particular love for Claudine Gay, but this is a *major* victory for reactionary donors and the far right’s campaign to dismantle American higher education,” David Austin Walsh, author of Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right, wrote on X.

Some sitting college presidents also weighed in. Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, had previously criticized Gay, Magill and Kornbluth over the hearing, arguing that all three failed to speak with moral clarity and fell into a congressional trap. In a post on X, McGuire suggested that Gay, like all college presidents, had a target on her back.

“Tragic, inevitable. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over many years as president of a far less visible university: someone is coming for you every day—you have to keep your record spotless because they will find the one loose thread and pull it until you are naked,” she wrote.

University of Wisconsin–La Crosse chancellor Joe Gow was fired Wednesday for appearing with his wife in pornographic content on at least two websites, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

A statement from the UW system Board of Regents noted that the decision to fire Gow as chancellor was unanimous but did not address his appearance in the videos, referring to the matter only in vague terms.

“Upon my recommendation, the UW Board of Regents today terminated Dr. Joe Gow from his position as chancellor of UW-La Crosse effective immediately. In recent days, we learned of specific conduct by Dr. Gow that has subjected the university to significant reputational harm,” UW system president Jay Rothman said in the statement. “His actions were abhorrent.”

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In the same statement, Board of Regents president Karen Walsh accused Gow of showing a “reckless disregard for the role he was entrusted with at UW-La Crosse to serve students, faculty and staff, and the campus community,” adding that the board was “alarmed, and disgusted, by his actions, which were wholly and undeniably inconsistent with his role as chancellor.”

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Gow and his wife, Carmen Wilson, appeared in videos on several pornographic sites and they published two books, under pseudonyms, detailing their experiences in creating adult content. In an interview with the newspaper, Gow said his actions were consensual and protected by the First Amendment.

He also questioned whether he was given due process as part of his termination as chancellor, though he will return to the faculty. In August, Gow announced plans to step down at the end of the academic year after leading La Crosse for 17 years.

In addition to the pornographic videos—some of which remained up as of Thursday morning—Gow and his wife have X and YouTube accounts titled “Sexy Healthy Cooking,” in which they describe themselves as a “passionate plant-powered couple cooking, conversing, and shooting with top adult video stars.” While most posts are recent, the X account was established in 2018.

As news of the scandal spread, the couple’s viewers addressed the controversy.

“I hope they had enough money to retire. Not sure this scandal gets a movie or a book deal!” one user wrote in the comment section under a video of Gow and Wilson on one adult site.

The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday sued Grand Canyon University in federal court, alleging that the institution, its parent company and its CEO deceived prospective doctoral students about the price and requirements of its programs and its tax status.

“Grand Canyon deceived students by holding itself out as a non-profit institution and misrepresenting the costs and number of courses required to earn doctoral degrees,” Samuel Levine, director of the trade commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a news release about the lawsuit.

Grand Canyon and the Biden administration have been locked in a years-long battle over the Christian university’s tax status, including the university’s 2021 lawsuit challenging the Education Department’s rejection of its conversion to being a nonprofit institution. Grand Canyon has been recognized as a nonprofit by the Internal Revenue Service, but it can’t market itself that way until the Education Department approves the conversion. The university has asserted that the department, along with the FTC and the Department of Veterans Affairs have been coordinating their efforts to “unjustly target GCU in what appears to be retaliation for the university filing an ongoing lawsuit against ED regarding its nonprofit status.”

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In the lawsuit, the FTC states that Grand Canyon University “deceptively marketed the school as a nonprofit,” even though, the agency alleges, it “has been operated for the profit” of Grand Canyon Education, the for-profit company that provides marketing and other services to the university.

The university pays 60 percent of its revenue to Grand Canyon Education, and Brian Mueller, president of Grand Canyon University, is also CEO and a stockholder of Grand Canyon Education, the trade commission’s lawsuit asserts. Per the lawsuit, Grand Canyon University is the most significant source of revenue for Grand Canyon Education.

The FTC accused Grand Canyon Education and Grand Canyon University of violating federal rules prohibiting abusive and deceptive telemarketing acts or practices. Alleged violations include calling people on the National Do Not Call Registry or who requested that GCU not contact them.

Grand Canyon could not be reached immediately for comment on the FTC lawsuit.

The lawsuit also alleges that the university and the services company understated the cost of completing Grand Canyon’s “accelerated” doctoral programs; just 2 percent of doctoral program graduates complete their program within the cost that Grand Canyon advertises, the complaint alleges.

Grand Canyon University is already fighting a $37.7 million fine in connection to how it advertised the cost of doctoral degree programs.

In October, the Education Department accused the university of misleading more than 7,500 students by saying their degree program would cost between $40,000 and $49,000. That figure was based on completing a program within 60 credit hours and failed to account for the continuation courses needed to complete the dissertation program, the department said. Students on average need nearly 10 continuation courses to earn their degree.

This is a developing story.

The U.S. Education Department has added George Mason University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to the list of colleges and universities it is investigating for alleged discrimination based on shared ancestry.

In updating the list, the department does not say what possible violations it is investigating under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires federally funded institutions to protect students from discrimination based on race, color or national origin. 

Like many campuses, UNC-Chapel Hill has been the site of numerous protests and sit-ins by students over the Israel-Hamas conflict, and pro-Palestinian students have accused the university’s administration of a “hostile climate” and Islamaphobia.

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George Mason, according to news reports, has faced accusations of permitting antisemitic behavior (in the tearing down of posters about hostages held by Hamas) and of allegedly deleting emails from pro-Palestinian students who were critical of a statement by the university’s president.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has seen an influx in complaints alleging antisemitism or Islamophobia on college campuses since the Israel-Hamas war began in early October. Since then, the department has opened dozens of investigations into complaints about a K-12 school district or a college. The agency began publicly listing institutions under investigation in mid-November.

After several weeks of controversy, Saint Mary’s College, a Roman Catholic women’s institution in Indiana, has reversed its previous decision to allow the admission of transgender women.

The about-face follows significant pushback from Fort Wayne-South Bend bishop Kevin Rhoades and some alumni. It was announced in an email from the college’s president, Katie Conboy, and the chair of its Board of Trustees, Maureen Karantz Smith, to students, faculty, staff, alumnae and donors on Thursday.

The statement says that college leaders “clearly underestimated” the desire of stakeholders to be engaged in rethinking “a policy of such significance” and that the board has been reflecting on division since the June decision was highlighted by a student news organization in late November.

“We believed it affirmed our identity as an inclusive, Catholic, women’s college. It is increasingly clear, however, that the position we took is not shared by all members of our community,” the statement reads. “Some worried that this was much more than a policy decision: they felt it was a dilution of our mission or even a threat to our Catholic identity.”

“We lost people’s trust and unintentionally created division where we had hoped for unity. For this, we are deeply sorry,” it adds.

The leaders stressed that Saint Mary’s is “firmly committed” to ensuring a “welcoming and safe environment for all.” The college will begin a series of “listening sessions” to discuss both Catholic values and desired inclusivity after the winter break.

A gunman killed 14 people and wounded dozens of others at Charles University in Prague on Thursday, making it the worst mass shooting in the history of the Czech Republic.

The 24-year-old shooter, who has not been identified but was reportedly a student at the university, died at the scene, according to news reports. (Note: News reports originally indicted that 15 people had been killed, excluding the gunman.)

The head of the Czech police told journalists that the shooter had planned the attack and had probably been inspired by mass shootings elsewhere, The Financial Times reported.

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A gunman killed 14 people and wounded dozens of others at Charles University in Prague on Thursday, making it the worst mass shooting in the history of the Czech Republic.

The 24-year-old shooter, who has not been identified but was reportedly a student at the university, died at the scene, according to news reports. (Note: News reports originally indicted that 15 people had been killed, excluding the gunman.)

The head of the Czech police told journalists that the shooter had planned the attack and had probably been inspired by mass shootings elsewhere, The Financial Times reported.

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