Tag: Events

In case you missed it, as they say.

As higher ed largely closes down for the holiday season, take a moment to catch up on any or all of these opinion essays that were among the most widely read by Inside Higher Ed readers over the past year—we’ve collected a dozen (no, a baker’s dozen) pieces for you here.

Not surprisingly, threats to higher education, its autonomy and its integrity were top of mind for many of our authors and readers. Chief among these threats were state-by-state attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and “divisive topics” in the classroom, legislative proposals to end or undermine tenure, and continuing cuts to the teaching and research infrastructure for the humanities and other liberal arts fields, as well as literal threats to physical safety.

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Readers and authors also grappled in these pages with urgent questions about the impact of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence programs on the curriculum and the workforce.

Other pieces collected here speak variously to pressing issues around access and rigor, faculty working conditions, student disengagement, antisemitism and free speech, and the corporatization of the academy.

It’s been quite a year. Rest up; eat some cookies. See you here in 2024.

“A Liberal Education in Name Only”: Surveying program cuts at West Virginia University, Marymount University and elsewhere, Christopher A. Snyder argues that colleges that decimate their departments and disciplines should not claim to offer a liberal arts education.

“A Tenured Professor’s Call to Arms”: Higher ed is under threat, and tenured full professors must defend it, Mathew H. Gendle writes. “No hero will be swooping in to support our institutions—we must take on that responsibility to do this hard (and sometimes painful and personally detrimental) work ourselves.”

“4 Ways Universities Gaslight DEI Initiatives”: The authors—Megan MacKenzie, Özlem Sensoy, Genevieve Fuji Johnson, Nathalie Sinclair and Laurel Weldon—identify four strategies universities use to gaslight and resist the DEI efforts they claim to champion.

“Does Humanities Research Still Matter?”: Ticking through the long list of fellowships that have been shuttered in recent years, Asheesh Kapur Siddique argues that the rapid collapse in research funding is one crisis in the humanities that gets far too little attention.

“Education as Privilege Laundering”: In favoring students from affluent backgrounds, elite colleges practice a kind of magic, turning money into merit, Musa al-Gharbi writes. Such “privilege-laundering schemes … are the rule, perhaps even the telos, of the American educational system.”

“Walking Faculty Back From the Cliff”: Drawing on their original survey research, Sean McCandless, Bruce McDonald and Sara Rinfret warn that “burnout is a critical concern for the academy.” Among their findings, 40 percent of faculty they surveyed said they “often” or “always” feel worn-out.

“Amy Gutmann’s $23 Million and the Triumph of Cynicism”: No president deserves $23 million, Jonathan Zimmerman writes of the former University of Pennsylvania president’s pay in 2021 (about $20 million of which was deferred compensation). Where, Zimmerman asks, is the outrage?

“When Faculty Face Violent Threats”: On a Tuesday evening in 2019, police came to Adam S. Ward’s door and told him a former student wanted to kill him and his family. Ward reflects on what happened after, with an eye toward helping other faculty and urging colleges to improve their support systems.

“When Commitments to Free Speech and Against Antisemitism Collide”: As conflicts between these values increasingly arise on campuses, Jeffrey Herbst argues that college leaders should be asking different, tougher questions, including “whether antisemitism is being handled differently than other hatreds.”

“Behind Declining Standards in Higher Ed”: A “broke-woke-stroke” convergence–corporatization combined with “woke” sensibilities of faculty and administrators and student entitlement and fragility–may be to blame for decreasing rigor, Mark Horowitz, Anthony L. Haynor and Kenneth Kickham write.

“Students Are Less Engaged: Stop Blaming COVID”: Jenny Darroch argues it’s past time to stop blaming the pandemic for students’ disengagement and instead adapt instruction to account for the different ways this generation of students prefers to learn.

“In Battle for Tenure, Words Matter”: Terms like “job for life” and “permanent position” imply that tenure is categorically different than other forms of just-cause employment—but it’s not, writes Deepa Das Acevedo. Academics should work to counter this “powerful, misguided and misleading rhetoric … at every opportunity.”

ChatGPT, a mini-compendium: we’re cheating here (how appropriate) in counting all these essays on AI as one entry, but 2023 was after all the year of the ch(e)at bot in higher education. In “Yes, We Are in a (ChatGPT) Crisis,” Inara Scott writes that colleges must urgently confront the “tidal wave” of AI-generated assignments even as they fundamentally rethink their curricula.

Speaking of rethinking curricula, Melissa Nicolas argues that colleges can “Eliminate the Required First-Year Writing Course” now that AI can complete many of the tasks that professors outside writing programs want such a course to teach. (For an alternative view, see Mandy Olejnik’s rebuttal, “AI Won’t Replace Writing Instruction.”)

Meanwhile, Jennie Young argues that AI will actually be a boon for first-year writing instruction in “Why I’m Excited About ChatGPT.”

Finally, in other popular “View” essays about the impact of AI, Jonathan Alexander stands up for “Students’ Right to Write” in an AI era; Molly Vollman Makris, Nate Mickelson and Ryan Coughlan recommit to three pedagogical practices with an eye toward “Readying Students for the AI Revolution”; and Barbara Fister and Alison J. Head look at ChatGPT through the lens of what higher ed got wrong about Wikipedia in their essay “Getting a Grip on ChatGPT.”

Steven Almquist, professor of English and associate provost for arts and sciences at Spring Hill College, in Alabama, has been chosen as provost at Mount St. Joseph University, in Ohio.

Virginia Fraire, vice provost for student success and strategic initiatives at the University of Texas at El Paso, has been appointed president of Lone Star College’s University Park campus, also in Texas.

Caroline Attardo Genco, interim provost and senior vice president at Tufts University, in Massachusetts, has been named to the job on a permanent basis.

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Mark R. Ginsburg, provost and executive vice president of George Mason University, in Virginia, has been selected as president of Towson University, in Maryland.

Bennie Lambert, vice president for student success at Lone Star College’s Cyfair campus, in Texas, has been chosen as president of the college’s North Harris campus.

De ‘Reese Reid-Hart, vice president of instruction at Lone Star College’s Montgomery campus, in Texas, has been named president there.

Claudia E. San Miguel, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M International University, has been selected as provost and vice president for academic affairs there.

Kyle Washut, academic dean at Wyoming Catholic College, has been appointed president there.

There has been much concern in higher education about the possible negative effects of students using artificial intelligence for their academic work. For example, many professors worry that their students are using ChatGPT to complete assigned papers, instead of the students composing the assignments themselves. After all, ChatGPT constructs dinner party thank-you notes that are models of the genre, as one of us (AWL) has discovered to her great glee. Nevertheless, in contrast, there have also been higher education professionals who have embraced the use of AI to enhance student learning and success.

AI can indeed be useful to higher education in ways other than the writing of assigned papers. In this post we describe multiple ways that AI can be useful in helping students transfer from one college or university to another.

City University of New York

Nearly 40 percent of postsecondary students transfer at some point, and transfer students can face many challenges. A good illustration of these challenges involves the over 80 percent of community college freshmen who wish to obtain at least a bachelor’s degree, which necessitates transfer. Six years after entering community college, only about 11 percent of these students have received that degree. At least one of the reasons for this low success rate is the transfer students’ general education and major credits changing to elective credits upon transfer or disappearing entirely. Given that community colleges tend to have higher percentages of students from underrepresented groups, transfer impediments disproportionately harm students from those groups.

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Thus, in addition to AI possibly saving institutions time and money, any assistance that AI can provide in facilitating transfer should be seriously considered for its potential to significantly increase equity in higher education.

So, how can AI help transfer? Let us count (just three of) the ways …

1. AI can help identify likely course equivalencies.

Course equivalencies are the currency of the transfer process. When a transfer student submits a transcript with courses or other forms of credit that have not been previously evaluated, it can significantly slow down the transcript evaluation process. It can be a substantial amount of work for an evaluator to identify possible equivalencies, gather relevant materials and perform the analysis. As with any judgmental process involving multiple decision-makers, results can also be inconsistent.

By comparing available information on course descriptions, syllabi and prior-equivalency determinations, a natural language processing algorithm or large language model (types of AI) can identify likely course equivalencies in a variety of contexts. Such processes can be used to suggest course equivalencies to administrators or faculty who are reviewing a course or other form of credit for the first time, greatly reducing evaluation time and burden and supporting consistency in evaluation. A similar process could also be used to search a receiving institution’s catalog to identify additional or “better” equivalencies where an equivalency has already been recorded—the model may, for example, identify an equivalent course that would count toward a specific degree requirement when the previous equivalency was a general or disciplinary elective.

These two examples focus on a receiving institution’s catalog, but the model could also be focused externally—for example, searching online catalogs at other institutions to help identify potentially equivalent courses that a student could take on a nonmatriculated basis to meet a requirement.

Another example of applying the model externally would be to identify potential equivalencies at other institutions for a newly proposed course, helping to integrate transferability into the course design process. This might be particularly useful for colleges that are all within one system or state, where proposals for new courses could be required to include identification of equivalencies, thus heading off time-consuming, and possibly nonproductive, searches for course equivalencies after students have taken the new course and then transferred.

In all these cases in which existing equivalencies are inadequate, AI can help remove from students at least some of the burden of identifying better equivalencies, students who otherwise would have to appeal to faculty and administrators to change these equivalencies, actions that some students may be unlikely to take.

2. AI can help students and those who support them understand and make use of program requirements and articulation agreements.

There is growing recognition that degree-requirement applicability—whether and how transferred courses count toward degree requirements at the destination—is the key question in students being able to carry their credits with them as they move from one institution to another. Unfortunately, determining applicability can be quite challenging. One reason is that program requirements are often quite complicated and are only recorded in natural language in a catalog. Articulation agreements, which are meant to mitigate the burden of this comparison exercise, ironically suffer from the same issue—they are typically rendered in natural, but exceedingly complex, language and recorded in a static format such as a PDF (which, even if they aren’t just stashed in someone’s dusty file cabinet, are rarely, if ever, consulted and/or are quickly out of date).

An AI model could be developed to process catalog information about program requirements and the courses that apply to them, as well as existing articulation agreements, and to render the information as structured data that could then be used in a more flexible way. For example, the structured data could populate an informational tool such as CUNY Transfer Explorer (T-Rex) that informs users about transfer credit applicability, to help potential transfer students plan. The data could also be utilized by faculty and administrators to compare and improve coherence of curricular offerings—either within an institution or in transfer pathways across institutions. Further, an AI model could use the structured data on program requirements as well as catalog and equivalency information to identify transfer options for individual transfer students or their advisers, based on the student’s existing records as well as their stated educational and career goals.

3. AI can provide a first line of support to transfer students and other users of transfer information.

Access to knowledgeable transfer advising is critical to transfer student success, but due to high caseloads and the challenges of navigating complex information, far too many students don’t have such access. Administrators and faculty also may be stymied by a lack of accessible, authoritative information about transfer.

As is now commonplace in other situations, a well-trained AI chat bot can provide an effective first line of support for these users. It can understand natural language questions and respond in natural language. It can help direct users to existing resources that they might not discover on their own. And it can escalate the most complicated cases to (direct human) support, assisting advisers in triaging and prioritizing their caseloads.

What Underlies These Three AI Approaches?

In each of these scenarios, there are two core points that are essential to understanding and accepting the use of the technology.

First, AI, as employed to facilitate transfer, can be designed to utilize only authoritative catalog information, source data, policies and other information that has been written and approved by faculty and administrators, and it can therefore be limited to providing responses that are based solely on that information. AI’s responses regarding equivalencies, transfer pathways, etc., would then reflect an analysis of those input data, and only those input data. AI’s responses would not be created out of thin air and would consist of making time-efficient use of an institution’s own existing views. This is unlike the situation for ChatGPT, which can seem to “hallucinate” (i.e., can seem to generate responses that have nothing to do with its input) due to its having the whole of the internet at its disposal.

Second, at least initially, the AI output (for example: credit for course A should be given to a student transferring in with course B) can be treated as a recommendation to an institution as opposed to as a decision for the institution. The recommendation might become a decision failing sufficient evidence-based objections. However, until we gain experience with the use of AI for transfer, we humans should proceed with caution in implementing its output.

In this post we have described some of the great many ways in which AI can be helpful to students who wish to transfer, as well as faculty and administrators who support the transfer process. In the future, we will be using, within the Articulation of Credit Transfer (ACT) Project (under the Associate’s to Bachelor’s project umbrella) these methods and strategies to help ensure everyone has the information, guidance and best equivalencies needed for efficient and effective transfer, largely by means of T-Rex and its offspring. Our goal is to ensure that all students have the same opportunities to transfer and achieve their educational goals.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce wants more information from Harvard University about how officials responded to allegations that its president, Claudine Gay, plagiarized parts of four academic papers, including her dissertation.

The Harvard Corporation, which first received word about the allegations in October, independently reviewed the president’s work and found that there was no violation of Harvard’s standards. Gay did submit corrections for two previously published articles, and Wednesday night the university acknowledged that it had found three additional “examples of duplicative language without appropriate attribution” in the president’s 1997 dissertation, The Boston Globe reported.

Representative Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the committee, requested numerous documents and emails concerning the allegations in a letter sent Wednesday to the Harvard Corporation, the board that oversees the university. She questioned whether the university was applying its policies consistently.

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Foxx added that the university is obligated to investigate each claim of plagiarism with “the seriousness with which it investigates allegations against students.” She went on to threaten the university’s access to federal funds, noting that it must adhere to the standards of a recognized accreditor in order to receive those dollars. Those standards include provisions focused on academic integrity and preventing plagiarism.

“If a university is willing to look the other way and not hold faculty accountable for engaging in academically dishonest behavior it cheapens its mission and the value of its education,” she wrote. 

The allegations against Gay surfaced as she was dealing with the fallout from her recent testimony at a House hearing on campus antisemitism. The corporation has publicly backed Gay in the face of calls for her to resign.

This committee is already investigating how Harvard has responded to incidents of antisemitism. The House rules give the committee power to conduct oversight over all postsecondary education programs, according to the letter.

“An allegation of plagiarism by a top school official at any university would be reason for concern, but Harvard is not just any university,” Foxx wrote. “It styles itself as one of the top educational institutions in the country.”

Foxx requested Harvard’s response by Dec. 29.

Nonprofit colleges and universities that announced closures this year largely fit the same profile: mostly small, private, tuition-dependent institutions with meager endowments that have seen enrollment slipping for years and have been unable to recover from those sustained losses.

Over the course of 2023, 14 nonprofit four-year colleges announced closures. (A handful of others announced mergers or acquisitions.) A 15th institution, the King’s College, did not announce it was closing but has essentially shut down, a move apparently necessitated by financial issues coupled with a loss of accreditation.

Among the 15 institutions that announced closures, 10 were religiously affiliated. Four were Catholic, which is the only denomination represented multiple times in this year’s round of closures. Three of the colleges were located in New York; Wisconsin was the only other state where more than one college announced a closure.

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Presentation College

The first institution to announce a closure this year was the private Catholic institution in rural South Dakota, which in January said it would shut down after the summer 2023 term, bringing an end to the mission that began with its founding in 1951. Presentation, like many others represented here, struggled with enrollment in recent years.

The college enrolled 577 students in fall 2021, according to the recent available federal data. The college never cracked 1,000 students in any given year over the past two decades; its highest enrollment during that period appears to have been 821 students in fall 2016.

Finlandia University

Citing enrollment issues that officials attributed to demographic changes and a “steep decrease in interest in going to college,” Finlandia announced in March that it would not enroll students in fall 2023 and had entered into teach-out programs with other colleges as it prepared to close. The private Lutheran college in Michigan was founded by Finnish immigrants in 1896.

According to federal data, Finlandia enrolled 479 students in fall 2022, the last admissions cycle before it announced it would no longer accept students. That number had been in flux over the years, though enrollment has hovered around 500 students for most of the last two decades.

Iowa Wesleyan University

The private, 181-year-old United Methodist institution named inflation, enrollment challenges and decreased fundraising as the key factors driving the announcement of its closure in March. University officials also suggested that Governor Kim Reynolds’s decision to deny their request for $12 million of the state’s federal coronavirus relief funds played a part, a notion that was quickly disputed by Reynolds and local observers of higher education.

Despite what officials said, Iowa Wesleyan’s enrollment had been trending up. In fall 2022, the last regular recruiting cycle before the closure announcement, the university enrolled 820 students, up from 622 in fall 2019, the last semester before the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S. Federal data show Iowa Wesleyan was experiencing one of its strongest enrollment years in the last two decades.

But revenue problems persisted, prompting the institution to formally cease operations in May.

Medaille University

Following the collapse of merger talks with nearby Trocaire College, Medaille announced in May that it would close due to a mix of budget issues and enrollment challenges. That closure, which faculty members told local news was driven largely by poor financial management, was almost immediate; the university officially shut down in late August.

Like many institutions that announced a closure or merger this year, Medaille had struggled to attract students. Enrollment at the private college in Buffalo, N.Y., slipped from nearly 2,400 students in fall 2013 to 1,814 in fall 2021, according to the latest federal data.

Cardinal Stritch University

President Dan Scholz cited “fiscal realities, downward enrollment trends, the [coronavirus] pandemic” and “mounting operational and facility challenges” as the factors that drove Cardinal Stritch University to announce its closure in April. The small Roman Catholic college in Wisconsin formally ended operations the next month, following its May commencement.

Plunging enrollment was key to its downfall; Cardinal Stritch lost more than 3,000 students in less than a decade, with the head count falling from 4,407 in fall 2013 to 1,365 in fall 2021, according to federal data.

Cabrini University

Despite a public appeal for partners that began in 2022, Cabrini announced in June that it would shut down, citing financial issues brought on by dwindling enrollment, the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors. Cabrini officials noted in the closure announcement that nearby Villanova University, a fellow Roman Catholic institution, was working on a deal to acquire its campus, which might allow the Cabrini name to live on in some way at Villanova.

At the time of the closure announcement, officials told Inside Higher Ed that enrollment stood at about 1,500 in fall 2022. But federal data show that number had been trending downward for years; Cabrini enrolled more than 2,400 students in fall 2013. Unable to sustain the loss of almost 1,000 students in less than a decade, the university is set to officially shut down in May 2024.

Cabrini University/Facebook

Alliance University

What was formerly known as Nyack College sold its campus in 2020 to move to New York City, rebranding as Alliance in 2022. But that wasn’t enough to fend off closure; the university announced in July that it would cease operations by Aug. 31. A loss of accreditation due to noncompliance issues prompted the sudden shutdown; the Middle States Commission on Higher Education had placed Alliance on probation over financial matters in March, and it closed without an approved teach-out plan, according to MSCHE.

The private Christian university, which traces its history back to 1882, struggled to draw students in recent years. While the latest federal data show enrollment at 1,863 in fall 2021, that number had slipped from 1,981 in fall 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The drop is much more precipitous going back to fall 2013, when the university enrolled 3,082 students.

The King’s College

While the King’s College in New York has not formally declared a closure, the institution canceled its fall 2023 semester, had its accreditation stripped and is no longer operational. Its website notes that TKC is not accepting applications but does not clearly say it is closed. In its waning days, officials said in a statement, “This is not a decision to close The King’s College permanently,” adding they would continue to seek “strategic alliance opportunities.”

The small evangelical institution’s closure—whether temporary or permanent—came about after years of declining enrollment and failed efforts to expand online. TKC enrolled 384 students in fall 2021, according to recent federal data. By comparison, enrollment topped 500 for most of the past decade before falling below that number in fall 2020. Officials also noted that declining fundraising had played a role in the college’s financial issues.

The King’s College/Facebook

Hodges University

Shortly before the start of its fall semester, the small private institution in Florida announced it was shutting down. Officials blamed declining enrollment and financial challenges when they delivered the news in late August that Hodges would call it quits before the end of August 2024.

The university enrolled just 443 students in fall 2022, according to federal data—a significant drop since the start of the pandemic; in fall 2019, 977 students were enrolled. And back in fall 2013, 2,000 students attended the university, according to federal data, meaning it lost more than 1,500 students in the past decade.

Alderson Broaddus University

West Virginia governor Jim Justice pressed state officials earlier this year to give Alderson Broaddus University more time to address its falling enrollment and shaky finances, which they feared might trigger a midsemester closure. It didn’t help. In late July, the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission voted to strip the university’s degree-granting authority, prompting Alderson Broaddus to formally announce its closure in August, when it also filed for bankruptcy.

The university had long dealt with accreditation and financial issues, operating at a deficit in nine of the 10 years preceding the closure announcement. Enrollment had also slipped from 1,117 students in fall 2013, according to federal data, to roughly 670 students at the time the closure was announced. ABU formally closed at the end of August, roughly a month after the HEPC vote.

Cox College

In a move that seems to straddle the line between a merger and closure, Cox College in Missouri has announced it will admit students through spring 2025 and shut down when those programs conclude. Then it will hand over certain programs to Missouri State University and Ozarks Technical Community College as part of the formation of the Alliance for Healthcare Education, a nonprofit corporation that is expected to open by fall 2025. CoxHealth, an affiliated nonprofit hospital system, will offer instructional sites to partners in the alliance.

Cox is closing despite enrollment gains; the college enrolled 956 students in fall 2021, federal data show, an increase from 880 students in fall 2013 and 486 in fall 2003.

Lincoln Christian University

Ongoing enrollment issues and a case of mistaken identity are among the issues that officials cited in October when Lincoln Christian University announced it would close by the end of the academic year. Part of the problem, officials told a local newspaper, was that prospective students were confused by the closure of the nearby but unaffiliated Lincoln College in 2022; the two private Christian institutions share the same namesake city, Lincoln, Ill.

Like its neighbor, Lincoln Christian University had been losing enrollment for years, falling from nearly 1,000 students a decade ago to 537 in fall 2021, federal data shows.

University of Wisconsin–Platteville Richland

Among the institutions on this list, the University of Wisconsin–Platteville Richland has the highest enrollment, but like most of the others, those numbers have long been trending downward. Though it enrolled 6,702 students in fall 2023—a 3 percent increase over the prior year—the university had lost more than 2,000 students since fall 2013, when the head count stood at 8,712, according to federal data.

Ultimately, hobbled by reduced state funding, Universities of Wisconsin officials pulled the plug on the branch campus.

In announcing UW Platteville’s closure, system officials also declared that two other institutions will go online: the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee at Washington County (which state officials hoped to merge with a nearby community college) and the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh, Fond du Lac, a move attributed to shifting enrollment trends.

Magdalen College

Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts cited low enrollment and financial challenges in November when officials announced plans to close at the end of the academic year. The small Catholic liberal arts college in New Hampshire offered only one degree: a bachelor of arts in liberal studies, with majors in literature, philosophy, history and theology. Its website emphasizes a “deep integration of liberal education and the Catholic faith within a joyful community.”

With only 60 students enrolled when it announced it was closing this fall, Magdalen College is the smallest institution represented here. While the college’s head count never surpassed more than 100 students in the last two decades, its recent high point was in fall 2016, when it enrolled 90 students, according to federal data.

The College of Saint Rose

In late October, the College of Saint Rose Board of Trustees voted to close the institution after asking local and state officials for a $5 million emergency funding lifeline that never came. The closure comes amid years of financial struggles, which prompted deep programmatic and job cuts. Officials had sought partnerships prior to the closure, but the effort was unsuccessful.

The College of Saint Rose, a private institution located in Albany, N.Y., had been shedding students for years. While federal data put Saint Rose’s head count at around 2,800 last year, enrollment collapsed from 4,004 students in fall 2019 and 4,542 students a decade ago.

Not Closing, but Changing

While various institutions announced assorted strategic partnerships that will see greater collaboration with peers, seven colleges and universities announced mergers or acquisitions that will have them absorbed by larger institutions with deeper resources.

Such arrangements were often driven by larger institutions seeking to grow enrollment through the addition of new programs and to establish footholds outside of their traditional home bases.

Valley College

The for-profit institution with four sites in Ohio and West Virginia was purchased by Hilbert College, a four-year, nonprofit Catholic college located in New York. The acquisition marks what experts believe may be the first of a for-profit college by a nonprofit religious institution—a move more commonly seen in health-care mergers and acquisitions.

Hilbert College officials told Inside Higher Ed in January that acquiring Valley College will allow them to grow online programs and tap into a pipeline of students eager to earn four-year degrees. Valley will retain its name and operational sites while sharing some services with Hilbert. The move comes several years after failed merger talks between Hilbert and St. Bonaventure University and as Hilbert seeks to expand on enrollment gains in recent years.

Hilbert College/Facebook

B. H. Carroll Theological Institute

Two Baptist institutions will become one as B. H. Carroll Theological Institute outside Dallas is absorbed by the larger East Texas Baptist University, a move announced in February. As part of ETBU, B. H. Carroll will drop the term “Institute” and use “Seminary” instead. The move is expected to be completed by early 2025, depending on necessary outside approvals.

Salus University

The Pennsylvania institution announced a merger with the much larger Drexel University over the summer. But a more accurate term might be acquisition, as Drexel—which has 23,000-plus students—absorbs Salus, a health sciences–focused institution with about 1,100 students. Drexel officials noted earlier this year that the two universities have complimentary programs. Proximity is key here: Drexel is located in Philadelphia and Salus in nearby Elkins Park.

Compass College of Film and Media

The small institution in Grand Rapids, Mich., was acquired by crosstown Calvin University in a deal announced over the summer. Both are Christian colleges, though Calvin is the much larger of the two, enrolling more than 3,300 students in fall 2023. By comparison, Compass enrolled 74 students in fall 2021, according to the latest federal data. While that number is down from the norms of recent years, Compass’s enrollment has typically hovered below 100. Its strongest year in recent history was fall 2016, when it enrolled 132 students, according to federal data.

Compass College officially ended operations as a free-standing institution over the summer.

St. Augustine College

Chicago’s St. Augustine College in April announced a merger with the larger Lewis University, which will absorb St. Augustine. Lewis, a Catholic university located outside Chicago, enrolled more than 6,000 students in fall 2021, according to recent federal data, while St. Augustine’s dwindling head count stood at 737 that same semester. St. Augustine College has lost more than half its student body since fall 2013, when enrollment topped 1,600.

The merger has already received formal approval from accreditors and state officials. Now the two colleges are awaiting federal approval before formally joining forces as one institution.

Maryland University of Integrative Health

Seeking to add new graduate-level health programs, Notre Dame University of Maryland, a private Catholic institution, announced in October that it had acquired Maryland University of Integrative Health, a private graduate school located roughly 30 miles away. Pending approvals from regulators and accreditors, the merger is expected to be finalized in late 2024 or early 2025.

Maryland University of Integrative Health’s enrollment had been trending up over the past decade, climbing from 591 students in fall 2013 to more than 800 in fall 2021, according to recent federal data. Notre Dame of Maryland, by contrast, has seen its enrollment slip, from nearly 2,900 students in fall 2013 to almost 2,200 in fall 2021, federal data show.

Multnomah University

Facing financial challenges, Multnomah University announced in October that it would become a satellite campus for Jessup University. Officials described the partnership between the two private Christian colleges—Multnomah is in Oregon and Jessup is in California—as “a necessary intervention in order to preserve the legacy of Multnomah while launching into the future.” Without the partnership, there was no viable path for Multnomah to continue, officials said.

Like most colleges on this list, Multnomah had been losing students for years. While enrollment stood in the 900s in the early 2010s, federal data show it dropped to 777 in fall 2013, 635 in fall 2019 and then 595 in fall 2021. By contrast, Jessup enrolled 1,685 students in fall 2021 and has grown in the last decade.

The number of Americans studying abroad in China has remained negligible since the start of the pandemic, largely because of extended federal government restrictions, but officials and other experts expect that to rebound soon.

Only 211 American students were in China this past academic year, down from more than 11,000 before the COVID lockdowns, according to the latest annual data compiled by the Institute of International Education (IIE) and the U.S. Department of State.

Even that pre-pandemic total was a fraction of the number of students going the other way—despite declines caused by COVID and political tensions, nearly 300,000 students from China are enrolled at universities in the U.S. But the much smaller U.S.-to-China flow nevertheless has represented a key part of a relationship valued by the students as well as the two countries involved.

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State Department officials described the obstacles to resumption as a mix of chronic and rising political antagonisms with China offsetting what the U.S. ambassador in Beijing, Nicholas Burns, has openly called a strong U.S. government desire to see more young Americans learn Mandarin and Chinese culture.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has said that he too wants more student exchanges, declaring during a visit last month to San Francisco that he hoped to see 50,000 Americans studying in his country over the next five years.

For now, however, the Biden administration appears to be putting more emphasis on the distrust. The U.S. government assesses nations by their perceived safety for Americans, and China ranks so low on that score that U.S. students are currently not eligible for federal student aid if they are in China.

Over all, there was no need to panic about the very low numbers of U.S. students in China, said one expert in U.S. study abroad programs, Rosalind Latiner Raby, the director of California Colleges for International Education.

“I’ve been in the field since the 1980s, and I’ve seen trends in locations going up and down and up and down,” Raby said. “We’re in a down mode, but in a couple of years, the interest is going to come back, and students will want to go back to visit China.”

And while many American students are disappointed at not being able to study in China, she said, many of the educational and employment benefits they can gain there can be obtained elsewhere. “It’s the act of studying abroad that’s important,” she said.

U.S. higher education largely appears to realize that, according to the IIE, which also promotes study abroad activity. The total number of U.S. students abroad increased in the 2021–22 academic year to nearly 190,000, the IIE said. That is more than half of pre-pandemic levels, the institute said, with 82 percent of institutions in the U.S. participating in its annual survey saying they expected their numbers to rise even more this academic year.

China should experience that revival in students from the U.S. once the Biden administration clears away the aid-based obstacles, Raby said. “The second it’s open, you’re going to get students flooding in. It’s just a matter of the gatekeepers who are saying it’s open [or] it’s not open.”

A State Department spokesman, without giving details, suggested optimism on that front. “We expect those numbers to continue to climb in next year’s report,” the spokesman said of the U.S. student presence in China.

The California Faculty Association says its members will strike from Jan. 22 to 26 across the California State University system.

The union says it represents over 29,000 tenure-line instructional faculty members, lecturers, librarians, counselors and coaches across the 23-campus system. A CSU System spokeswoman said the union had 15,820 dues-paying members as of September, and the total represented employees in its bargaining unit was 27,796.

The union announced in October that its members had voted to grant its Board of Directors the authority to call a strike. This month, it held one-day strikes on four campuses. In a Wednesday news release, it announced the dates for the weeklong systemwide strike, which it said the Teamsters Local 2010 union, representing other CSU employees, would join.

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“As CSU management refuses to listen, we have no alternative but to disrupt the business of the CSU to get their attention,” Meghan O’Donnell, a CSU Monterey Bay lecturer and union leader, said in the release. “We will not tolerate disrespect for the people who make the CSU work.”

Among the union’s demands is a 12 percent salary increase this academic year. In a news release earlier this month, the CSU system balked at that, saying it “would cost $380 million in new recurring spending,” which would be “$150 million more than the funding increase that the CSU received from the State of California for all operations in 2023–24.”

The union is also demanding, among other things, more counselors for student mental health, “Accessible lactation and milk storage spaces for lactating faculty” and “Safe gender-inclusive restrooms and changing rooms,” Wednesday’s union release said.

In an email Wednesday, Hazel J. Kelly, a CSU system spokeswoman, wrote that CSU “respects the right of the California Faculty Association (CFA) to engage in lawful concerted activities. Our goal is to reach an agreement at the bargaining table, but if strikes do occur in January, we hope to minimize disruptions to our students.”

Today on the Academic Minute: Yi Cao, assistant professor of accounting at George Mason University, explores whether artificial intelligence might help us glean more information about companies from earnings calls. Learn more about the Academic Minute here.

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The Department of Education released details Friday on the rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, noting that the previously announced Dec. 31 deadline represented a “soft launch period,” during which officials will monitor for technical issues, field concerns from families and make last-minute tweaks.

The ED will also implement periodic “pauses,” when students already working on FAFSAs may continue doing so but new forms cannot be started. The department clarified that “full processing” of forms will not begin until late January, and students need not rush to complete the form once it’s released.

Because of this delay and the potential for maintenance interruptions, the department advised college financial aid and admissions offices—many of which have already begun planning or conducting FAFSA information and completion sessions for prospective students—to hold off on doing so until late next month.

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“We will be treating the period leading up to and following Dec. 31 as a soft launch period, which will allow us to monitor and respond in real time to any potential issues impacting the applicant experience,” the announcement said. “[We] will not transmit results to schools until later in January.”

The release comes a week after lawmakers sent a letter to the department asking for clarification on the launch date as well as increased support services for students and families navigating the new form. It caps off a year of uncertainty and frustration surrounding the simplified FAFSA, especially its much-delayed rollout.

The leaders of Saint Mary’s College, a Catholic women’s institution in Indiana, recently became embroiled in a controversy after a local bishop publicly criticized them for deciding to consider transgender women applicants for admission.

The policy decision was made by the college’s Board of Trustees in June, but the policy was not widely known until Kevin Rhoades, the bishop of Fort Wayne–South Bend, learned about it last month and publicly denounced it, prompting a backlash against the college by some alumnae and others.

The board voted to amend the college’s nondiscrimination policy to allow applications from undergraduates “whose sex is female or who consistently live and identify as women.” The new policy is set to take effect in fall 2024.

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Rhoades read the news in The Notre Dame Observer, a student newspaper, which reported on the decision on Nov. 21. He issued a statement on Nov. 27 condemning the decision and urging the board to “correct its admissions policy in fidelity to the Catholic identity and mission it is charged to protect.”

“The desire of Saint Mary’s College to show hospitality to people who identify as transgender is not the problem,” Rhoades wrote. “The problem is a Catholic woman’s college embracing a definition of woman that is not Catholic.”

He added that it was “disappointing” that “he was not included or consulted on a matter of important Catholic teaching.” He also noted that “In this new admissions policy, Saint Mary’s departs from fundamental Catholic teaching on the nature of woman and thus compromises its very identity as a Catholic woman’s college.”

Rhoades’s statement followed an earlier email sent by St. Mary’s president, Katie Conboy, on the same day the article was published in the student newspaper, to faculty, students and staff saying she was “pleased” by the board’s decision.

Conboy responded to Rhoades’s comments with a second statement to the campus saying that she and Sister M. Veronique, president of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, the congregation that founded St. Mary’s, met with the bishop shortly after his public comments. She noted that they would be “continuing dialogue to discern and learn more about his concerns” and that “our next steps will be informed both by the input we have received and by our ongoing dialogue.”

Conboy declined interview requests from Inside Higher Ed through her spokesperson, who would only provide Conboy’s two public statements about the policy change and the meeting with the bishop. Rhoades’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comments.

Joining the Trend

As one of eight Catholic women’s colleges and one of 30 women’s colleges in the U.S., Saint Mary’s is not the first to amend its nondiscrimination policy to be more inclusive of transgender and/or nonbinary students.

Mills College in California and Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts were among some of the first women’s institutions to modify their admissions policies, doing so in 2014. St. Catherine University in Minnesota was one of the first Catholic women’s colleges; it did so in 2018. All eight of the Catholic colleges now admit trans women; Saint Mary’s is the last to do so.

Over all, at least 22 women’s colleges have amended their policies, according to a list compiled by Campus Pride. However, the policies vary in language, with only some directly addressing nonbinary individuals and/or students who identify as women at the time of admission but transition to masculine gender identities while in college.

“The revised policy demonstrates our commitment to providing an inclusive environment that responds to the needs of all women,” Conboy wrote in her letter to the campus.

She also noted the formation of a President’s Task Force for Gender Identity and Expression earlier in the year, “charged with gathering information and best practices from other Catholic colleges and women’s colleges” and presenting “recommendations on student housing considerations, as well as on community education around both Catholic identity and women’s college identity,” she wrote.

Saint Mary’s students and alumnae had mixed reactions to the new policy, and some shared their thoughts on Instagram.

“I love seeing my Alma mater live up to its Catholic values of loving ALL people and valuing ALL lives. Never been more proud of Saint Mary’s,” Colleen Kross Kollasch wrote on the platform.

“I’m highly disturbed at your new policy,” alumna Emma Panowicz wrote. “My family will not be attending smc any more. Or promoting it. Take the word ‘Catholic’ out of the mission statement.”

Caroline Dutton, a junior at the college, seemed to view the decision as living up to the institution’s values and mission.

“SMC was founded to educate women who were overlooked or excluded in traditional education environments and trans women can surely relate to that,” she wrote.

Gail Porter Mandell wrote to the editor of The South Bend Tribune, recalling a similar issue that “caused a firestorm” when she was a student at Saint Mary’s 60 years ago.

Mandell said many people back then considered it “unnatural” to educate students of different races together, and she recalled a single bishop who supported the college’s decision to admit its first Black student.

“I pray that our bishop, echoing another long ago, may eventually find it possible to say to President Katie Conboy and Saint Mary’s, ‘Stick to your guns,’’ she wrote.

Priscilla Pilon took to Facebook to say she was removing Saint Mary’s as a beneficiary in her will.

“I, for one, wrote to the college to express my disappointment and have publicly stated that not one more dime, nor my advocacy for the college will continue unless they reverse this course,” Pilon wrote.

Joseph Strickland, who recently was removed as the bishop of the diocese of Tyler, Tex., commended Rhoades on X.

Jonathan Coley, an Oklahoma State University professor who has studied how Catholic and Christian institutions are addressing LGBTQ+ issues and responding to students who identify as members of that community, said Catholic colleges nationwide are becoming more inclusive, particularly in comparison to Protestant colleges.

“Because transgender issues have become a hot topic in our political discourse and there has just been increasing consciousness about issues facing trans and nonbinary people in the United States,” Coley said, “a lot of Christian colleges and universities are responding either by adopting more inclusive policies or more discriminatory policies.”

Just over 70 percent of Catholic institutions promote inclusive policies for gender identity, compared to 42 percent of Protestant institutions, according to Coley’s research. He noted that only 4 percent of Catholic colleges and universities have a formal ban on gender transition, compared to 28 percent of Protestant institutions.

Coley said his research found that more colleges have publicly taken a stance on LGBTQ+ issues than a decade ago. Only 10 percent of Christian colleges and universities addressed gender identity in their student handbooks, and none had introduced formally discriminatory bans in 2013, when he first started his research.

Finding a Path Forward

The Reverend Dennis Holtschneider, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, said how Catholic educators should approach sexual orientation and gender identity policies is a “controverted” question. He pointed to a similar situation, also in Indiana, in 2019, when a different bishop demanded two Indianapolis high schools fire gay staff members or lose formal recognition as Catholic institutions. Leaders at one of the schools complied and fired a gay teacher; administrators at the other school refused to do so.

Father Holtschneider said that if Saint Mary’s moves forward with its policy and disregards the bishop’s opposition, it would “get really complicated really fast.” He noted that although Saint Mary’s administrators report to the Sisters of the Holy Cross—who have not released a statement for or against the board’s decision—they also regularly work with the bishop.

“So that relationship is important,” Father Holtschneider said.

Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, which has a women’s undergraduate program, said most Catholic colleges operate as a corporation independent of their local dioceses, and therefore the local bishop can’t influence internal governance of the institution. She noted, however, that the bishop could try to penalize the college in other ways.

“I don’t know that it would rise to that level,” she said. “The stakes are very high.”

Although Trinity never formally established a policy on gender identity, McGuire said the institution has long welcomed trans students. In her view, limiting women’s colleges to “biological women” is “old-fashioned” and does not align with Catholic teachings.

“This rigid definition of a women’s college is something we should have left in the 20th century,” she said. “It’s a devastating concept to say that a person may not benefit from the fruits of a good Catholic education because of who they are.”

As more Catholic colleges have discussions about these issues, Father Holtschneider said his association encourages them to approach these matters from an academic perspective through research and discussion.

“We’ve also encouraged them to be kind and welcoming,” Father Holtschneider said. “These are humans, our brothers and sisters. They’re God’s children. And it’s appropriate that we treat people with all the kindness that we would want to be treated.”

He added that the association’s approach is “pretty consistent” with the recent words and actions of Pope Francis, who made headlines in November for having lunch with a group of trans women in a seaside town south of Rome.

“Tutte, tutte, tutte, everyone, everyone, everyone is welcome,” Father Holtschneider said, quoting the pope.

Extreme weather—including heat waves, hurricanes, tornadoes and heavy storms, along with associated disasters like wildfires, flooding and mudslides—are increasing to the extent that the World Meteorological Organization has referred to them as “the new normal” and The Guardian has warned that we should expect more. Such disasters often impact electricity and internet and telephone access and can force residents to evacuate. For instructors, that means we may be well served by planning for specific weather-related scenarios that can impact our virtual and HyFlex courses, as well as residential courses that move online in response to emergencies.

Online courses in particular rely on internet access and electricity, with no physical classroom, and students and instructors are geographically dispersed around the country or around the world. Members of the classroom community do not always experience the same weather, and weather events may impact individuals in ways that others in the classroom community are unaware of. This is also true for the online students enrolled in HyFlex courses. Additionally, not everyone in the class is affected equally, even when residential classes are moved online in response to a shared weather-related situation.

As online educators, we recommend that our higher education colleagues consider the following questions so that they are more prepared for situations in which extreme weather can impact their courses.

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Considerations for Impacts on Students

Depending on your particular course and institution, you may want to ask your online students where they are located. You don’t need to keep track of the weather in each of those locations, but the information can be helpful in cases when a student misses class or drops out of communication. If they don’t have internet or phone access, they won’t be able to contact you, but if they are out of touch and you can check the news about their location, you may discover that residents have lost power due to storms or other weather.

If that happens, you will have some questions to consider, and it may help you to learn more about your options before a time-sensitive situation occurs.

• What kinds of extensions on assignment deadlines can you provide?
• Can you excuse their absences or provide makeup options?
• Are there trauma-informed online teaching strategies that can be helpful in this particular situation?
• Can you offer time in the class, office hours or another space for students to discuss their experiences and needs?
• Depending on the severity of the situation, your student may have long-term electricity or internet access issues, or may have lost their computer or even their home. Whom at your institution should you notify? Are there institutional resources that you can share with your student, such as emergency financial aid, an advising department or counseling or spiritual services?

Considerations for Impacts on Instructors

You may also be hit by a power outage, internet outage or something more extreme. If you are teaching a synchronous class session, that might even happen unexpectedly during the middle of class, causing you to disappear from the virtual classroom.

To help prepare for such scenarios, you may want to consider the following.

• What’s your backup plan for teaching if your building or neighborhood experiences a blackout while you’re in the middle of a synchronous class session? Is your laptop battery fully charged, do you have a charger that can power your computer and/or do you have access to a hot spot or somewhere nearby where you can reconnect? Do you have a battery-powered light that can help you avoid looking spooky on webcam? If you don’t have a teaching assistant or technical support person in the virtual classroom with you, how will your students know to wait for you to be logged back in soon? Does your web-conferencing platform close the virtual meeting room for everyone if you disconnect, and if so, how will you let students know to rejoin?
• If you’re teaching a synchronous course and your area has an extended issue, do you have a colleague who could be a guest lecturer or substitute instructor if you have to miss the next class? Does your institution offer an honorarium for guest lecturers?
• What’s your backup plan for grading, responding to emails, holding office hours or teaching asynchronously if your area has an extended issue with electricity or internet access?
• Might it be helpful to let your students know your contingency plans for the scenarios above ahead of time—for example, in your course site—so they have a heads-up about what to expect if something like this happens?
• Depending on your course topic, might it be relevant to connect your plans to the impacts of climate change or to climate justice?
• Whom do you need to notify in the administration if your course is adversely affected by weather? Can they provide you with support, and what would that look like?

Considerations for Administrators

Administrators may want to share these areas of consideration with instructors and be ready to answer the questions raised in this article. They may also find it helpful to identify responses that are specific to their department as well as link with other departments or schools within the institution to create a more cohesive plan of support. Questions to consider:

• How can my team support instructors and students who are unable to engage in class due to severe weather conditions and their aftermath?
• How can my team disseminate information about our support services prior to and during potential incidents?
• Is our team able to track the location of instructors and students and reach out when an incident occurs? For example, can we send an email to all instructors and students located in California following an earthquake? If yes, how will we know when an incident occurs, as not all local weather events receive national news attention? How will we decide which events require outreach?
• Which departments or schools can we partner with to streamline the process of providing support during such stressful times?
• How can administrators more consistently prioritize preparation and lead difficult conversations regarding the likely impacts of the climate crisis on the institution, as Joshua Kim proposed in a piece discussing The Devil Never Sleeps and Universities on Fire?

Additionally, many institutions rapidly shifted instruction while developing new protocols in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It may be helpful to look at prior interventions and recommendations to identify and replicate practices that have best served your institutional community.

We have found that having an idea of what to do in unexpected situations can help reduce the stress of nasty surprises, and we hope these questions are a helpful starting point for thinking about the possible impacts of extreme weather on your courses.

This week’s episode of The Syllabus podcast, from the Office of Open Learning at American Jewish University and Inside Higher Ed, features a conversation with Laura Roberts, vice chair of the equity task force at Vacaville Unified School District in California.

Speaking with host Mark Oppenheimer, Roberts discusses the state’s new ethnic studies curriculum, what classes will be dropped to make room for this new required course and more.  

Listen to the episode here, listen to previous episodes of The Syllabus here or subscribe to The Syllabus on Spotify or other podcast platforms.

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To the Editor:

Rebecca Cypess’ own ideological and ahistorical “Ideologically Driven Scholar Activism Contributes to Campus Activism” (Dec. 13, 2023) demands a response from a historian who has been part of universities since 1967, and who is an American Jew. I attended college when Jewish  as well as Catholic, Black, Latinx, Asian and gender quotas had only recently been eliminated. I confronted active antisemitism in universities that at one point threatened my career. 

Writing with understandable outrage, Cypess simplifies a very difficult and often contradictory set of circumstances as she cherry-picks. 

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I ask Ms. Cypess and readers to consider this: 

1. Scholar activism in its diverse forms is as old as colleges and universities themselves. It has been central to American universities since the 1890s and led to formal codes of free speech and academic freedom. Among the major episodes, now forgotten, was the Stanford family’s orders to fire the prominent political economist E.A. Ross for his progressive political stances. 
2. Scholar activism is absolutely central to the necessarily intellectual, cultural, and political lives of universities for faculty, students, administrators, and our multiple publics. Would she object to support for Progressivism in the late 19^th and early 20^th century? Welfare reform in the 1930s? Civil rights from the 1950s through the present? Anti-war movements? Free speech and reasoned controversies? They are inescapable in genuine higher education. 
3. Cypess endorses a historically, intellectually, and logically false distinction between “scholar activist” and “ordinary scholars” that her own activist position contradicts. Consider her conflation of distinct issues and lack of attention to historical chance and contexts. 
4. Scholar activism—in support of an ideology of which Cypess surely approves—was among the factors central to the half century battle for the elimination of quotas for Jewish and other students. 
5. In other words, it is unscholarly to brand all that one does not like as “ideological.” That is biased, unfair, and itself dangerously ideological. I refer Cypess and others to my own essay, “The best scholarship is political but with no ideological stamp,” Times Higher Education, July 26, 2022  

I urge a historical perspective with recognition of controversy and conflict. 

I ask writers like Cypess not to cherry-pick examples so selectively and one-sidedly. I ask for close reading of supposed  “calls for genocide” and admission that they exist on all sides, not only one side. Scholars must recognize complexity. 

I ask all commentators to remember their first year English, rhetoric, and philosophy courses when responding to political rhetoric and distinct forms of expression. We must read carefully  and thoughtfully the few expressions of rights of Palestinians for peace and safety in a free land of their own—“from the river to the mountain”—rather than immediately declare them to be calls for the literal abolition of Israel as an independent state and genocide for Israelis or Jews (these are not the same). What about “from sea to shining sea.” In other words, we must be scholars ourselves regardless of our differences in points of view. 

Similarly, calling for an “Intifada” is a call for an uprising, not for genocide or elimination of Israel or any other entity. 

I ask scholars to be scholarly and professors to be professorial. I ask scholars and professors to lead intellectually. Am I asking too much in 2023? I end by referring professor of music Rebecca Cypess and readers to my “Speaking out on the Israel-Hamas conflict doesn’t mean taking sides,” Times Higher Education, Nov. 29, 2023. 

–Harvey Graff
Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies & professor emeritus of English and history
Ohio State University

Since Hamas’s brutal attacks in Israel on Oct. 7 and the start of the ensuing war, college campuses have been convulsing with controversy—and with naked displays of antisemitism that have gone far beyond anti-Israel rhetoric.

• At Cornell University, an undergraduate allegedly threatened to “bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig jews.”
• At a protest in Washington Square Park attended by students from New York University, a protestor waved a blatantly antisemitic sign calling for the world to be cleansed of Jews.
• At Stanford University, an instructor allegedly singled out Jewish students as “colonizers” and made them stand in a corner.
• At Rutgers University, where I am a professor, a student has been criminally charged in connection with a posting on a campus social media app that urged “Palestinian protesters” to “go kill” an Israeli at AEPi, a Jewish fraternity. Rutgers president Jonathan Holloway’s condemnation of Hamas has led campus protesters to hold up signs characterizing him as a perpetrator of genocide.

Belatedly, universities like Cornell, Stanford, Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania have begun to address the problem of antisemitism on their campuses by issuing statements and convening committees. Yet the recent congressional testimony by the presidents of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the now former president of Penn, suggests that these first steps have yet to prompt the kind of serious reform that is needed. Our academic institutions must directly address the underlying problems that have led us to this point.

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As they do that work, they should carefully examine one contributing factor that may seem benign on the surface but is in fact quite insidious: the replacement of the model of the impartial scholar who searches for truth with that of the scholar activist, who elevates political or ideological goals above the search for complexity and understanding.

On its surface, scholar activism sounds appealing. Its defenders will tell you that ordinary scholars are locked in an ivory tower, removed from real-world problems, while scholar activists emerge from that tower to change the world for the better. Scholar activism is often rooted in Marxist ideologies that inherently view knowledge as a form of power. Scholar activists generally tie their work to questions of race, class and identity, positioning themselves as bridges between academia and the underprivileged communities they seek to serve. Scholar activism does not refer to scholars who also march in protests or engage in community service. Rather, it refers to the use of scholarship for the purpose of activism.

Scholar activists claim that, because no one is truly neutral—because all academic research is inevitably influenced by the experiences, concerns, interests and biases of the people who perform it—it is pointless and even undesirable to adopt the pretense of neutrality. As explained in a description for a Harvard event on what it means to be a scholar activist, the “unspoken expectation for research to be ‘neutral’ often creates tensions for students and scholars who are uncomfortable simply studying discrimination and inequality, and want their work to have an impact in advancing social justice.”

In recent years, the model of the scholar activist has not only grown in popularity; it has also taken on more extreme forms, with scholar activists calling for all academic labor to be exercised as a means to a political end. Some scholar activists now describe the pursuit of knowledge as valuable only insofar as it has immediate benefit to their cause. They contend that we should “reframe politics as our job description” so our work will have “meaning and consequences beyond our hallowed halls.” Such positions have contributed to the erosion of trust in academia, and, as I’ll show, they can lead scholars to downplay or ignore evidence or ideas that do not fit their preconceived conclusions.

In contrast to scholar activists, “ordinary” scholars view the pursuit of knowledge as intrinsically valuable. We try to convey our sense of that intrinsic value to our students, and we introduce them to research as a way of illuminating the full complexity of the human experience. We do not dispute the fact that academic researchers are never entirely impartial. Yet we insist on maintaining the goal of impartiality as a guiding principle. Ordinary scholars try to recognize and correct for our biases. Scholar activists often lean in to those biases.

Nowhere are the dangers of scholar activism more clearly on display than in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where a notoriously complex political struggle—one that has frustrated diplomats, divided people of good will and caused suffering for both Israelis and Palestinians for decades—gets reduced to a simple morality play, with Israel cast in the role of villain. Scholar activists have taken a leading role in creating this caricature, often refusing to acknowledge or account for any evidence that does not support their desired outcome.

The resistance of scholar activists to taking in the complete picture of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was evident long before Oct. 7, 2023. I think, for example, of a blatantly one-sided petition condemning Israel that circulated within Rutgers in May 2021. That petition interpreted the entire conflict through the lens of “settler-colonialism”—a common but highly problematic move that makes it impossible to view Israelis and Jews as anything other than white supremacist colonizers. Within the paradigm of settler-colonialism, one is either the oppressor or the oppressed, the colonizer or the colonized. People are sorted into good and bad with remarkable ease, as explained in this testimony by a current Stanford student.

Yet, to cast Israelis universally as white oppressors is to willfully ignore Jews’ indigeneity to Israel, their ethnic heterogeneity, their history of victimhood and migration in the 20th and 21st centuries, the rejection of peace by generations of Palestinian leaders, and the fact that Israel is a racially, ethnically and religiously diverse society that includes as full citizens many Arabs and people of wide-ranging origins and heritages.

I met with one of the authors of the 2021 petition and raised my objections to the settler-colonialist framing, among other problems. He readily admitted that the petition engaged in exaggeration and oversimplification “for rhetorical effect.” When I asked him how this was different from the “alternative facts” put forth by some right-wing politicians, he had no ready answer.

A similar approach has characterized the many anti-Israel petitions circulating today. For example, an open letter from a group of ethnomusicologists claims to “hold multiple truths and contradictions” regarding the current war but in fact promotes only one view, as evident in its failure to mention Hamas at all. This refusal to acknowledge Hamas’s role in the current conflict leads its signatories to be so disconnected from reality that they call for “an immediate peaceful resolution.” Such a resolution would be possible only if Hamas were interested in peace—something its founding charter rejects entirely. And the letter throws around phrases like “catastrophe of genocidal proportions” with no regard for the actual meaning of the word “genocide.”

If such statements seem largely symbolic and therefore trivial, they point to troubling trends in academic studies. The ongoing boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel is a case in point: this movement opposes the free exchange of ideas, and it seeks to remove Israeli scholars and institutions from the international community of learning, thus suppressing the perspective of an entire population.

In 2015, the National Women’s Studies Association became one of several scholarly societies in the U.S. to sign on to the BDS movement through the overwhelming assent of its members. If NWSA had not been so quick to excise Israeli perspectives, perhaps one of the two statements that the group has issued since Oct. 7 might have acknowledged Hamas’s brutal rape and mutilation of Israeli women that day. Instead, like most human rights groups, women’s advocacy groups and scholarly societies worldwide, NWSA has remained silent on this issue. The inconvenient testimony and forensic evidence concerning Hamas’s heinous acts do not align with the narrative of NWSA’s self-styled activists. Those perspectives, along with the documented, routine mistreatment of women in areas controlled by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, are thus easily swept aside.

On college campuses across the United States, it has now become quite normal not only to excuse but to celebrate Hamas’s actions. Faculty and students alike repeat and retweet such ideas—never mind that Hamas has no room in its autocratic society for the kind of diversity and inclusion that U.S. universities claim to espouse. Meanwhile, Jewish students, faculty and staff members are ostracized, confirming what many have known all along: the principles of diversity and inclusion do not extend to Jews.

In sum, universities are now staring into a moral abyss of their own making. The recent outbreak of antisemitism on our campuses can be traced, in part, to scholar activists’ insistence on treating complex problems as simple ones—as straightforward matters of victim versus villain. Such characterizations not only contribute to the polarization that will make peace ever more elusive, but they foment antisemitism on our campuses. Pulling back from this abyss will require a renewed commitment to the university’s central mission of discovering and sharing knowledge—in short, the mission of the scholar. The abuse of the scholar activist model must be carefully examined for its role in leading us here.

To ensure incoming undergraduates are best prepared for college life, staff in DePaul University’s neuroscience program are piloting an asynchronous course this year, automatically enrolling all new students and providing success resources throughout the first year.

The new initiative, Navigating Neuro, utilizes existing tech resources and relies on near-peer student mentors to provide encouragement and motivation to new learners. It also creates a chance for neuroscience majors to engage with their peers prior to starting the term and stay connected throughout their four years at the institution.

The background: The neuroscience program at DePaul University in Chicago has grown dramatically over the years, from enrolling 90 students in 2019 to around 190 students this fall. In response, the university created an office suite on campus for the program and hired Jaimie Engle, then an academic adviser, to serve as the neuroscience program success coordinator.

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“I sit at the front desk of our neuro suite, nice and accessible to any students that come in for quick questions or more intense success coaching interactions,” Engle explains. “It’s an excellent way to pair my previous eight years in advising and my passion for flipped advising approaches and better utilizing university technology while learning new administrative skills and knowledge.”

Engle identified a need to increase support to learners before they even stepped foot on campus, because DePaul is on a quarter system. With shorter terms, more academic content gets presented at a faster pace.

“If [they are] not as prepared, or if they don’t get off to a strong start, students can fall behind academically and not have as much time to catch up, and [they] also risk not building as strong a foundation in their first term,” Engle says.

How it works: Navigating Neuro launched this fall, helping 36 new students.

Prior to the start of the term, staffers wrote letters to incoming students with neuroscience-related stickers enclosed, letting them know they’d be “enrolled” in the no-credit course and how to access the materials. Students received an email a week later as an additional nudge.

The course is hosted on the university’s LMS, D2L, and is broken into modules that open throughout the academic year. The first two modules—Welcome and Overview and Building Community—were accessible as soon as students received their letters, and an additional module, Get Involved, unlocked the first week of classes.

Each module features videos filmed by a diverse group of more experienced neuroscience students, called Neuro Navigators, with tips for wellness, support resources and how to navigate social life, campus and Chicago.

The perks: Many institutions use third-party platforms such as social media channels or Discord to create community spaces for learning and engagement. Using a “course” instead allows for seamless integration into institutional systems and has the added benefit of familiarizing students with the LMS prior to starting classes.

Neuro Navigators are paid to record videos shared in the course, send helpful and encouraging messages, and provide mentoring to newer students—all of which serve as professional development opportunities for them. Engle also learned not all of her student employees knew how to address a letter, so even initial outreach provided a learning opportunity for the navigators.

While hosting the course on the LMS has no additional charge for the university, staff use a $15,000 grant from the university’s Vincentian Endowment Fund to pay for T-shirts, stickers and academic planners to give to learners. Incoming students also attended a welcome event at the beginning of this year, giving them a chance to connect in person.

Looking ahead: After the pilot term, DePaul leaders will evaluate the outcomes of the initiative.

Engle hopes to continue the Navigating Neuro course into a second year for the current cohort, providing information on career and graduate school exploration and how to participate in research. Modules will open in the summer, and one student employee will stay on the payroll to keep students engaged and retained over the break.

How does your institution promote successful onboarding of new students in their academics or campus life? Share here.

After months of mounting pressure—and days after comments at a congressional hearing that prompted widespread outrage—University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill has resigned.

Magill stepped down voluntarily, according to a statement from Penn’s Board of Trustees.

“It has been my privilege to serve as President of this remarkable institution. It has been an honor to work with our faculty, students, staff, alumni, and community members to advance Penn’s vital missions,” Magill said in the board statement announcing her resignation.

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Board chair Scott Bok also reportedly stepped down on Saturday.

The move comes as donors and lawmakers have criticized Magill for what they saw as her failure to offer a strong enough condemnation of antisemitism at Penn following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas. While Magill’s initial statements were seen as tepid, her remarks Tuesday at a congressional hearing on antisemitism in higher education—especially her failure to clearly state that calls for genocide violated Penn’s policies—prompted broad outrage.

Donors, already seething, called for her job, as did powerful lawmakers. While Magill apologized and sought to clarify her comments in a video posted online, it did little to persuade her critics. Tensions were already high over her handling of a Palestinian literature festival this fall, which Penn allowed to proceed despite criticism from powerful Jewish advocacy organizations.

Her critics applauded the move, including Republican representative Virginia Foxx, chairwoman of the House education committee, who said in a statement she welcomes Magill’s departure.

Magill was one of three college presidents to address lawmakers at the House hearing alongside Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Claudine Gay of Harvard University. Lawmakers have subsequently called for all three presidents to be fired.