Tag: Events

Seventy-four members of Congress on Friday signed a letter urging the governing boards of Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania to fire their presidents as fallout continued from the campus leaders’ disastrous testimony during a hearing on antisemitism Tuesday.   

“Testimony provided by presidents of your institutions showed a complete absence of moral clarity and illuminated the problematic double standards and dehumanization of the Jewish communities that your university presidents enabled,” wrote the lawmakers. … “[W]e demand that your boards immediately remove each of these presidents from their positions and that you provide an actionable plan to ensure that Jewish and Israeli students, teachers, and faculty are safe on your campuses.

“Anything less than these steps will be seen as your endorsement of what Presidents Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth said to Congress and an act of complicity in their antisemitic posture. The world is watching – you can stand with your Jewish students and faculty, or you can choose the side of dangerous antisemitism.”

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The highly unusual request from nearly one in five members of the House of Representatives—all but three of whom are Republican—carries no legal weight. But the lawmakers’ letter was the latest sign of how much the politics of the Israel-Hamas war have poisoned the political climate surrounding higher education.

The failure of the three college presidents to clearly say that calling for the genocide of Jewish people violated their campus policies quickly went viral on social media—galling alumni, free speech experts and advocates in the Jewish community alike. Pennsylvania’s governor, a Democrat, called Wednesday for Penn to fire Liz Magill, and Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president, has also come under intense pressure from alumni and some students.

The lawmakers’ letter was led by Elise M. Stefanik, the Republican congresswoman from New York whose disbelieving questioning of the three presidents was the hearing’s seminal moment. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat from Florida, was the other lead co-signer.

A nearly six-month standoff between the Universities of Wisconsin and the Republican-led state Legislature over diversity, equity and inclusion spending seemed poised to end Saturday morning. The Board of Regents had agreed to vote on a deal between system leaders and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos that would freeze and cap DEI hiring in exchange for funding held up by the Legislature.

But in a shocking turn of events, the board rejected the proposal 9 to 8 , leaving over $800 million on the table and the future of the system’s DEI offices in limbo. The board also voted not to table the vote for further discussion, effectively killing the deal.

On Friday, UW system president Jay Rothman and UW Madison chancellor Jennifer Mnookin announced they’d reached a deal with Vos after weeks of secret negotiations. The system would make significant concessions on DEI initiatives and staffing in exchange for a release on much-needed funding for pay raises, utilities and construction projects—including a new engineering building at UW Madison—which the Legislature rejected last month.

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“The agreement we’ve reached is the result of an arduous process,” Rothman said during a press conference Friday afternoon. “While it funds UW, it also makes compromises to get there.”

Rothman recommended that the board vote to approve the resolution at a special meeting Saturday morning. But in the hours between the deal’s announcement at the meeting, multiple factions within the UW system and state government made a concerted effort to convince regents to vote no. The faculty union issued a strong rebuke of the proposal Friday afternoon, and that night Assembly Democrats and UW student groups gathered more than 1,000 signatures on a petition opposing the deal, which they sent to board members.

Representative Dora Drake, a Democrat and member of the House’s Black caucus, told Inside Higher Ed that she did not expect the proposal to be defeated, but she was heartened.

“I was very surprised, but I feel very good about the board’s decision,” she said. “We’re making sure students of color feel welcome and protected at our universities.”

In a statement issued Saturday afternoon, Vos and his fellow Assembly Republicans issued a statement decrying the decision. They did not indicate whether they were open to returning to the negotiating table with system leaders.

“It’s a shame they’ve denied employees their raises and the almost $1 billion investment that would have been made across the UW system, all so they could continue their ideological campaign to force students to believe only one viewpoint is acceptable on campus,” the statement read.

The failed proposal included the following concessions from the system:

• A cap on all DEI hires, to remain in place for three years.
• Renaming and redefining the positions of one-third of DEI staff—about 45 system employees—to roles more closely related to student success.
• A three-year freeze on all new administrative hires across the system.
• Elimination of the UW TOP program, an initiative to promote diverse faculty hires, to be replaced, starting next year, with a program promoting faculty who support underrepresented and “at-risk” students.
• Excising the diversity statement currently included on applications to two UW campuses.
• Creating a new endowed faculty chair at UW Madison dedicated to conservative economic thought, classical economics or classical liberalism.
• Implementing a new module on free expression for all entering undergraduate students. 
• Adoption of a guaranteed admissions program for the top 10 percent of state high school graduates, who would automatically be accepted to all UW campuses except Madison, which would take the top 5 percent.

In return, the state Legislature would free up funding for pay raises by Dec. 31 at the latest, as well as over $800 million in funding for utilities, maintenance and essential construction projects like new dormitories and the long-awaited engineering facility at UW Madison.

The UW system’s struggle to secure the funds has been part of a deepening nationwide political schism over diversity, equity and inclusion spending, especially at public universities. The state has avoided the kind of anti-DEI legislation that passed in red states such as Florida and Tennessee largely because there is a Democrat in the governor’s office.

“Our caucus objective has always been aimed at dismantling the bureaucracy and division related to DEI,” Vos wrote in a statement announcing the deal Friday. “I’m proud that Wisconsin is the first state with [a] divided government to make real progress on reducing these negative influences across our public higher education institutions.”

The board’s rejection of that deal is a symbol of a growing spirit of resistance from DEI advocates and embattled institutions, Drake said, even as Republicans across the country grow more entrenched in their attacks on the practice.

“This really shows the power of organizing and lets people know that Wisconsinites truly value diversity,” she said. “But the work continues. This is not the last strategy Representative Vos and the Republicans will attempt.”

The deal immediately garnered opposition from faculty and students, who said it would be a hard-fought victory for the right wing of the Legislature and deal a blow to students and faculty of color.

“We do not want our administration to make a deal that sacrifices much-needed DEI resources for our students,” Jon Shelton, the vice president for higher education at the American Federation of Teachers–Wisconsin, the statewide public educators’ union, told Inside Higher Ed before the vote. “Not that we want to forgo a salary increase, but if it’s a choice between that and our students’ needs, we’re going to stand with our students.”

Rothman had emphasized repeatedly that the system’s “commitment to values of diversity and inclusion” would be unaffected by the deal. Mnookin said that DEI was not going away, but rather that the system was beginning a process of “reimagining” it along the lines of student success—a message that echoes those of other public universities that have restructured their DEI offices under political pressure. But both leaders recognized that the outcome is far from ideal.

“Neither side thinks this is the greatest thing since sliced bread,” Rothman said. “That’s just reality.”

Liam Knox/Inside Higher Ed

Critics described the war of attrition that played out in the Wisconsin Legislature as an unorthodox tactic in an increasingly bitter conflict, and its success could embolden other states with split governments, such as Kentucky, to take similar action.

In the lead-up to the vote, Drake said that while she understood the pressure the system has been under, the money isn’t worth the price of the political and cultural victory she believes the system would be handing to Wisconsin Republicans—and other conservative state legislators across the country.

“I’m sympathetic, and [the system leaders] are in a tough position. But there are some things you just can’t compromise on,” she told Inside Higher Ed. “If we concede now, there’s no stopping that train.”

A War of Attrition

In June, House Speaker Vos held up a vote on the state budget by proposing a last-minute $32 million cut to the system—the amount that Vos alleged UW is currently spending on the salaries of DEI-focused employees—unless the university eliminated its DEI offices and positions. Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, threatened to veto the entire state budget, and the appropriations process ground to a halt.

The state budget wound up passing with a partial veto by Evers that prevented DEI staff cuts, though it still included significant cuts to higher ed funding in a year of ample financial surplus for the state. But at the last minute Vos made good on his threat to block the $32 million, which the system had earmarked for staff cost-of-living adjustments and raises. That money has been in limbo ever since.

After months at a standstill, the pitched battle over the withheld higher ed funding reached a boiling point this fall. Evers sued Republican lawmakers for “obstructing basic government functions” by freezing funding. In early November, the UW system proposed a plan to secure the money by promising to invest the funds in workforce development for engineers, nurses, data scientists and businesspeople, but Vos stood firm in his demand that the university also cut back on diversity programs.

Secret negotiations between system leaders and lawmakers have been underway for weeks, according to legislators with knowledge of the deal-making, as a last-resort effort to secure the funds and end the impasse.

“This has been a difficult process,” Mnookin said during Friday’s press conference with Rothman. “We recognize the stress and strain this has caused our communities as it has played out over the past six months, partly in public.”

In putting the DEI restructuring proposal to the Board of Regents Saturday, the deal aimed to circumvent Evers and his veto power, which killed the proposed DEI cuts the first time around.

“[State Republicans] are trying to make sure nothing concerning DEI ever has to come through the Legislature and be subject to Evers’s veto,” Drake said. “It’s absolutely about circumventing that fail-safe. They’re desperate to demonstrate their power.”

The whole ordeal has been a grand display of “political showmanship” from state Republicans in general, and Vos in particular, Drake said.

“He had every opportunity to come to a compromise, but instead he put his foot in his mouth and we haven’t moved an inch,” she said. “It’s downright insulting.”

The Dangers of Budgetary ‘Brinkmanship’

Tom Harnisch, executive vice president of the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, expressed worry that legislators don’t understand how much their entrenched position could damage the state system’s reputation and ability to function—or worse, that they don’t care.

“Higher education is vulnerable to these kinds of political games from state lawmakers, as it does not have the political power of other state interest groups,” he said. “This kind of brinkmanship is really disappointing, not to mention shortsighted … the Universit[ies] of Wisconsin is a huge economic asset to the state, and it should be treated as such.”

Shelton, who is also a professor of justice studies at UW Green Bay, said the effects of what he calls politically punishing budget cuts are already showing throughout the system—especially at smaller campuses facing severe deficits after a decade of austerity. In the past two months, UW Green Bay announced that it would cut six majors and minors; UW Platteville cut 12 percent of its workforce, eliminating over 100 positions; and UW Oshkosh, facing an $18 million shortfall, cut 200 positions and laid off 140 employees.

“I’ve been at the UW system for 11 years, through Act 55 in 2015 that took away shared governance and tenure and through rounds of massive budget cuts,” he said. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen faculty and staff morale.”

Rothman seemed conscious of the worsening tension between higher education and state policymakers, and he said he hoped the deal could be a first step in realigning the system’s goals with those of the Legislature.

“This agreement can hopefully reset our relationship with the Legislature,” he said. “Our universities rank 42nd in the nation for public funding; we will continue to advocate for our state to do better.”

Harnisch said it’s not just DEI driving the budget crisis in Wisconsin; after generations of legislative commitment to higher education as a public good, a political shift in the early 2000s has led to years of cuts and stagnation, which the university systems have struggled to overcome.

“Every budget cycle for the past 10 years, the Wisconsin Legislature conjures up a new reason not to fund the UW system,” he said. “Now it’s DEI, but in 2025 it will be something else.”

The House of Representatives voted 246 to 170 on Wednesday to pass a bill that would require colleges and universities to report more foreign gifts or risk their access to federal financial aid. 

The legislation is the first in a series of bills aimed at reforming the Higher Education Act of 1965. It addresses a number of concerns Republicans have raised in recent years about the flow of foreign dollars to colleges and universities, and about institutions’ compliance with federal reporting requirements.

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires colleges and universities to disclose, twice a year, all foreign gifts and contracts totaling $250,000 or more.

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The Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions (DETERRENT) Act would, if passed by the Senate and signed into law by President Biden, lower the threshold to $50,000. For gifts and contracts from countries of concern—China, Russia, Iran and North Korea—colleges would have to report gifts and contracts of any amount. The bill also would make reporting an annual requirement. Further, institutions wouldn’t be able to sign contracts with countries of concern unless they receive a waiver from the Education Department, among other changes.

The House voted 372 to 39 to amend the legislation to require that foreign entities disclose any ties to designated foreign terrorist organizations, which includes Hamas.

The American Council on Education and 17 other higher education groups opposed the bill, writing in a letter to House leadership that it was unnecessary and could curtail “international research collaboration and academic and cultural exchanges.”

Thirty-one Democrats voted with Republicans to pass the bill. Other Democrats, including Virginia representative Bobby Scott, echoed higher education’s concerns in their remarks opposing the act. Scott, the top Democrat on the House education committee, said the legislation does nothing to protect research security at colleges and universities.

“For example, colleges must report any gift from a representative of a ‘country of concern’ no matter the value—even a cup of coffee,” Scott said. “The faculty’s information is then shared in a publicly searchable database, regardless of whether the action was nefarious or not. This is so excessive and burdensome—to say nothing about the potential discriminatory effect—that it would disincentivize universities from conducting critical research using collaborative partners from around the world.”

North Carolina representative Virginia Foxx, the Republican chair of the House education committee, who sponsored the bill, said in a statement that it would help address declining public confidence in American universities.

“Yes, passing this legislation would send a strong message to our foreign adversaries, but more importantly it would send a strong message to our constituents—we are good stewards of your votes,” she said. “While I know we cannot restore public trust in the university system overnight, requiring a basic level of transparency in foreign donations and accountability from universities is a great first step.”

Paul LeBlanc

Paul LeBlanc, who as president of Southern New Hampshire University helped transform a struggling private residential institution of 2,500 students into one of the country’s largest online providers, announced Wednesday that he would leave the job next June after more than 20 years.

The university also announced Wednesday that Lisa Marsh Ryerson, the university’s provost and former president of Wells College and of the AARP Foundation, will succeed LeBlanc as SNHU’s president.

LeBlanc is one of a relatively small number of campus leaders—think Leon Botstein of Bard College, Michael Crow of Arizona State University, Freeman Hrabowski of the University of Maryland Baltimore County and Patricia McGuire of Trinity Washington University—whose names have become almost synonymous with the institutions they have either built or refashioned.

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“Paul’s two decades of leadership have not only transformed SNHU, but also the landscape of higher education,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, whose board LeBlanc formerly chaired. “His dedication to student success and willingness to challenge the status quo underscore a legacy that will resonate far beyond his tenure. Paul has not just led, but he has redefined what it means to be a true innovator in higher education.”

When LeBlanc became president of Southern New Hampshire in 2003, it was one of numerous independent colleges in New England whose ability to survive for another decade might have been a coin flip. (Quite a few of the others have since closed.)

The institution had begun offering online courses before LeBlanc arrived, but LeBlanc and his colleagues kicked its digital operation into high gear, helping it—alongside Western Governors University—develop into a new breed of private nonprofit universities with enormous online enrollments.

“I’m sometimes asked if in those early years I envisioned what we have become today—a national powerhouse in higher education, a trailblazer in innovation, a trusted name among policymakers and employers, and the place thousands of students turn to improve their lives—and my answer is simple: ‘Absolutely not,’” he said in an email Wednesday.

Under LeBlanc, the university used its scale and spirit of experimentation to play leading roles in efforts to embrace competency-based learning and expand education for refugees and other displaced learners, among other things.

LeBlanc’s efforts to transform Southern New Hampshire did not come without controversy. The university’s explosive growth, which LeBlanc and other leaders acknowledged they had achieved in part by borrowing some operational practices from for-profit colleges, drew scrutiny from politicians and policymakers concerned about potential abuse of students. At two Senate hearings in the 2010s, LeBlanc took heat from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts over the university’s growth and the revenue from its online operation.

But those moments were largely blips in a 20-year career in which LeBlanc’s counsel was much sought. He served as a special assistant to Mitchell when he was U.S. under secretary of education during the Obama administration, and on the Education Department’s oversight committee for accreditation for several years.

LeBlanc said in an email to colleagues that he would begin a sabbatical next June and would work on developing “new AI-supported learning models” and “a new global data consortium, which we think is critical if higher education is going to shape its AI future as opposed to being merely reactive.”

House Republicans lambasted the leaders of three elite universities for more than four hours Tuesday in a contentious hearing that was focused on campus antisemitism but frequently veered into broader conservative critiques of higher education.

“I do not refer to colleges and universities as ‘higher education,’ because it’s my opinion that higher-order skills are not being taught or learned, and I think today’s hearing indicates that,” said North Carolina representative Virginia Foxx, the top Republican on the House Education and Workforce Committee, which hosted the hearing.

“I have always defended higher education, but today I am embarrassed,” said Louisiana representative Julia Letlow, also a Republican.

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Harvard president Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth testified Tuesday and defended their actions over the past two months as tensions flared on their campuses following the start of the Israel-Hamas war. The hearing was the committee’s second in the last month focusing on campus antisemitism, and likely not the last. House Republicans have used the recent protests and campus tensions to perpetuate their attacks on higher education.

The presidents stood by their policies and commitments to free expression, their efforts to support Jewish students and their institutions’ diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which Republicans on the committee have blamed for the rise in antisemitism. Gay, Kornbluth and Magill all condemned antisemitism and said they need to do more to make students and faculty aware of its “insidiousness.”

“We must get this right,” Magill said. “The stakes are too high. Penn would not be what it is without its strong Jewish community, past, present and future. I am proud of this tradition and deeply troubled when members of our Jewish community share that their sense of belonging has been shaken. Under my leadership, we will never, ever shrink from our moral responsibility to combat antisemitism and educate all to recognize and reject hate.”

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the start of the war and subsequent campus protests, college administrators have sought to find a balance between promoting free expression and keeping students safe. In the process, they have struggled to please anyone. The challenge of striking that balance was on display at Tuesday’s hearing.

Many students at Harvard, Penn and other colleges have rallied to support Palestinians—demonstrations that outside organizations, lawmakers and alumni have criticized as supporting terrorism. Meanwhile, Jewish students have reported feeling unsafe on campuses in light of the protests, and campuses nationwide have seen an increase in antisemitism. Muslim students also have reported a rise in Islamophobia since the start of the war. Although the hearing didn’t focus on those incidents, the presidents and some Democrats on the committee did acknowledge that many Muslim and Arab students are hurting.

Throughout the morning and afternoon, Republicans appeared frustrated when the presidents didn’t give clear-cut answers to yes-or-no questions, speaking over the witnesses and cutting them off. Most of their queries were directed at Gay and Magill. They hammered the institutions’ leaders on what they perceive as a lack of ideological diversity among faculty members and pressed the presidents on whether faculty members have been disciplined or students expelled for their actions in the past two months.

Gay said discipline processes were underway and wouldn’t say more, citing student privacy.

“Harvard ranks the lowest when it comes to protecting Jewish students,” said New York representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican and Harvard graduate. “This is why I’ve called for your resignation and your testimony today. Not being able to answer with more clarity speaks volumes.”

‘Antisemitism Is the Result’

Foxx set the tone for the antagonistic hearing in her opening remarks, calling antisemitism and hate the “poisoned fruits” of the institutions’ cultures.

“After the events of the past two months, it is clear that rabid antisemitism and the university are two ideas that cannot be cleaved from one another,” said Foxx, who played a video of recent campus protests.

Foxx later asked the three presidents to explain the rise of antisemitism on their campuses, suggesting that hiring practices and curriculum choices were fostering a hatred of Jewish people.

“To be a successful teacher and educator at Harvard requires the ability to draw out all of the viewpoints and voices in your classroom, irrespective of one’s political views,” Gay said. “And we devote significant resources to training our faculty in that pedagogical skill and prioritizing that in our recruiting and hiring.”

New York representative Brandon Williams, a Republican and a Penn alum, echoed Foxx in a line of questioning near the end of the hearing, asking the presidents about their budgets, staffing and endowments. He questioned a claim from earlier in the hearing that education is the solution to antisemitism.

“If education is the solution, you don’t seem to be accomplishing that solution, even though you’ve had a 387-year run to stamp out antisemitism,” he said. “I’m looking backward. I’m saying, ‘How did you arrive here if education is your mission and antisemitism is the result?’” he said.

Williams suggested that the current climate has its roots in a century-old cap, long since reversed, on the number of Jewish students enrolled in the Ivy League.

The presidents acknowledged that they have work to do to improve the campus climate for Jewish students. Williams said the universities’ federal funding should be discontinued if they can’t do better.

“I think you have a need for leadership or need of federal intervention to cut off the resources that allow this mission that’s failed to continue,” he said.

Multiple representatives pushed for specifics about how the universities were planning to confront antisemitism and discipline students and faculty who make antisemitic remarks or bully Jewish students. Gay reiterated that she couldn’t comment on specific situations because of ongoing investigations and that Harvard has policies to address harassment against Jewish students.

“I love the lip service. I do. I’m looking for an action item,” said Michigan representative Lisa McClain, a Republican. “It is clear that Jewish students on your campuses are afraid to be themselves because you have refused to take action.”

Other Republicans said the institutions weren’t teaching enough Jewish history classes. Some Democrats on the committee also said there should be general curriculum requirements to educate students about the Holocaust and the history of the Jewish people.

“There are so many opportunities for students to learn more about the relevant history,” Gay said. “But I think one of the things that has become apparent over the last couple of months is that we have to find ways of making that education more broadly available to our campus community to all of our students, our faculty and staff, and we have work to do on that for sure.”

Free Speech or Hate Speech?

Academic freedom and free expression are bedrock principles in higher education, Gay, Magill and Kornbluth said repeatedly as Republicans on the committee called for action against antisemitic speech.

“What we seek is not simply free expression, but the reasoned dialogue that leads to truth and discovery and that does the work of moving us all forward,” Gay said. “We don’t always get it right, and our students don’t always get it right.”

Kornbluth said that problematic speech should be countered with more speech and education. “I strongly believe that there is a difference between what we can say to each other, what we have a right to say and what we should say as members of one community,” she said. “Yet, as president of MIT, in addition to my duties to keep this campus safe and maintain the functioning of this national asset, I must at the same time ensure that we protect speech and viewpoint diversity for everyone.”

Pennsylvania representative Susan Wild, a Democrat, said she wished the hearing was a “robust intellectual discussion” about the limits of free speech. “I feel for all of you,” she told the presidents. “It is a balancing act that you have to perform.”

Wild asked at what point speech incites violence and crosses the line, pointing to the video played at the start of the hearing that showed students calling to “globalize the intifada.”

“That video, as a human being, was very hard to watch,” Magill responded. “The chanting—calling for intifada, global revolution—was very disturbing. I can imagine many people’s reaction to that would be one of fear. I believe at a minimum it is hateful speech that has been and should be condemned. Whether it rises to incitement of violence under the policies at Penn … is a much more difficult question. It is a very narrow category.”

Magill repeatedly defended her decision to allow a Palestinian literature festival to move forward on campus in late September. The event featured several speakers who have been accused of making antisemitic remarks, and has been blamed for a rise in incidents against Jewish students at Penn even before the war broke out.

“Our approach is not to censor based on content but to worry about the safety and security and time, place and manner in which it would occur,” she said. “Canceling that conference would have been inconsistent with academic freedom and free expression.”

Magill added that the university’s approach to free speech is guided by the U.S. Constitution. She disputed an assertion by Indiana representative Jim Banks that Penn regulates other speech it doesn’t like.

Banks, a Republican, questioned why professors who have made remarks supporting Hamas were still employed at Penn while the university was also starting a process to discipline Amy Wax, a polarizing law professor who has made incendiary and racist remarks. And like other Republicans on the committee, he accused the institutions of having a selective commitment to free speech.

“You’re speaking out of both sides of your mouth,” Banks said. “You’re defending it. You allow these professors to teach at your college. You create a safe haven for this type of antisemitic behavior. You said something earlier about antisemitism being symbolic of the larger society—your university is a hotbed of it.”

From start to finish, the hearing laid bare the minefield college administrators are facing right now when it comes to free expression.

Stefanik, allotted several rounds of questions, repeatedly sought to pin down the presidents on when exactly speech violates their institutions’ code of conduct. In a combative round of questioning near the end of the hearing, she asked each president whether calling for the genocide of Jews amounts to bullying and harassment.

All three said that decision depended on the context of the remarks in question and whether the speech turned into student conduct—a common refrain throughout the hearing.

“It’s a context-dependent decision?” Stefanik said. “That’s your testimony today? Calling for the genocide of Jews is dependent upon the context? That is not bullying or harassment? This is the easiest question to answer yes, Ms. Magill.”

Then Stefanik turned to Gay, who agreed with her colleague that whether speech violated the code of conduct depends on context and whether it is targeted at an individual.

Stefanik closed her final round of questions by accusing Gay of “dehumanizing” the Jewish people. “It doesn’t depend on context, and this is why you should resign,” she said. “These are unacceptable answers across the board.”

Students are trapped in a matrix of assumptions that lead them to take out loans for college that they won’t be able to pay back, a lawyer–turned–student loan researcher argues in a new book.

Dave Shutler, who wrote Graduate Debt Free: Escaping the Student Loan Matrix (Greenleaf Book Group Press), is a father of three adult sons, a lawyer and business owner. He spent years researching student debt, trying to figure out why the price of college was increasing and how students can get a postsecondary education without saddling themselves with more debt that they can afford to repay.

He distilled the findings in the book, which outlines a set of 12 assumptions that Shutler argues are flawed, drive students into unaffordable debt and make up the “Student Loan Matrix,” a metaphor inspired by the Matrix movie series. Students can free themselves from this matrix by challenging the assumptions, which include thinking you need a college degree to be successful, you can get an athletic scholarship and you can get a job to cover the debt.

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“As you become familiar with them, you will begin to notice as the assumptions arise in your thought, and you will be prepared to challenge those assumptions,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “Like Neo, you will be able to discern if the bullet headed your way is only harmless zeroes and ones.”

Mark Kantrowitz, an expert on student financial aid and paying for college, gave the book his stamp of approval, writing in the foreword that Shutler’s book can help unravel the dilemma of student debt.

“We need new approaches about how to sensitize students and parents to college costs and education debt so that they don’t fall into a student debt trap,” Kantrowitz writes.

Shutler started looking into the issue of student debt after sending three sons to college from 1998 to 2010—St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M.; Brown University in Rhode Island; and New York University—and seeing the annual sticker prices increase from $35,000 to $45,000 to $55,000 with each child. His youngest son attended NYU, one of the more expensive institutions in the country. The average tuition at a private nonprofit four-year institution increased by about 81 percent over those 12 years, according to College Board data. In the 2009–10 academic year, the average tuition was $26,273.

“Even as a ‘certified smart guy’ with two professional degrees, I did not notice that student debt had been weaving a web around my family until after our third son was out of college,” he writes. “Frankly, I felt like a fool for having missed the signals.”

Shutler is hoping Graduate Debt Free will help other families make more informed decisions about a potential college education.

Shutler spoke with Inside Higher Ed over the phone about his new book, the assumptions families are making and how high school students can avoid debt. Excerpts of the conversation follow, edited for length and clarity.

Q: Your book is structured around a series of 12 assumptions about college and student debt. Are they all created equal, or does one assumption have a greater impact?

A: I think the one that keeps people down is the idea that they can’t get a scholarship. There are hundreds of scholarship sites. Thousands of scholarships available—$3.2 billion goes unawarded in grants from the feds every year because people don’t fill out the [Free Application for Federal Student Aid]. The second one is that tuition is the total cost of college. The third one is the athletic scholarship. When you get to the bottom line, your prospect of a high school [athlete] getting an athletic scholarship at a college is half of 1 percent—one out of 200.

That means you’re a big shot in high school, you’re the big man on campus and you say you’re gonna go get an athletic scholarship at some university. To do that, the simple fact is that you have to be the best in your sport in your position and in your state to do that—the best—to have a shot.

Q: Why did you want to approach this issue through the lens of a matrix and the different assumptions students and families hold about college?

A: It took shape in my mind along the lines of the movie The Matrix, where [the main character] was in a separate reality. And in time, 12 lines create a cube, and that’s the cube, and so I began to think in terms of thinking inside the box or outside the box, and I began to see these different flawed assumptions and how they affect students. Some of them aren’t so flawed, like networking … The networking that matters is not peer networking in college, as you’re talking to your buddies at the coffee shop. It’s the professors.

It’s important for students who do go to college to take advantage of faculty office hours and alumni visits. Talking to your friends over coffee, probably less important. You aren’t going to find a lot of Bill Gateses hanging around campus. But you’ve got so many opportunities when you have a professor who you talk to and they are interested in you. You can say, “Hey, you have any assistantships or anything like that?” and you begin to develop a connection. Those professors have hundreds of connections and may be able to guide students very well.

Q: How would that help them get out of college debt-free?

A: I have a caveat: you may not be debt-free, but you may be [in] minimal debt.

I do a whole section on when you are underpaid after graduating. There’s a whole study about people who graduate from college and, five years later, they’re flipping hamburgers, and they just have the debt. So the idea is that rather than being underemployed when you graduate, be appropriately employed in your field and that will help you actually pay off the debt.

I have a rule of thumb that says you should accumulate no more debt than your projected first-year salary.

What’s amazing to me is you can get the answer to that question. You can go to the Department of Education website and ask, “What does an anthropology major at Oberlin College make in their first year out of college?” And there’s 10 years of data to back it up. So you can say, “OK, I’ll make $50,000 if I follow this career path; that means I can accumulate no more debt than $12,500 a year. Therefore, when I graduate, I’ll have $50,000, and then within 10 years, I can pay it off.”

The title is supposed to be eye-catching, but the book itself has a great deal of nuts-and-bolts research on how you can actually do it with the hand that you’re dealt. Not everybody can do it debt-free. But the hand that you’re dealt typically is you have got to take on debt. When you do, this rule of thumb is very helpful. Knowing what you’ll make at the end of your academic career allows you to gauge backwards to what you can afford.

Q: You don’t have any background in education policy or higher education, right? What did the research for this book look like?

A: I am an autodidact. I just found it fascinating. I read hundreds of articles and dozens of books. I couldn’t not do it. I simply was impelled. I have a construction business. I have a private candy bar business—I make candy bars as morale boosters for our GIs overseas.

Q: You wrote about how your experience with your sons’ college educations motivated your research and this book. Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently?

A: Man, we had no idea. By happy coincidence, I had saved for college. We had a pretty extensive college preparation fund, so the older two had a little debt. And the youngest one did not because he skipped his second semester senior year, saved that $25,000, paid it in against his debt and graduated debt-free.

[Looking back], we would not have sent him to NYU. We would’ve done something different. It ended up being $250,000. A good education, but he works as a production assistant in Brooklyn, for which he requires none of his NYU education.

That’s part of the motivation. I looked at our third son and thought, “We didn’t serve him very well.” As parents, we needed to have taken more time with him and say, what do you really want to do? What he really wanted to do is work with his hands … Part of the conversation I wish we had with our son is “Hey, what do you really want to do?”

It was my own ego. I wanted the kid to go to a name school, and so he did.

Q: How do you see this book fitting into the current national conversation about student loan debt and pathways to forgiveness?

A: This effort is two-pronged. The first prong is for the high school student to be aware and avoid it in the first place. For the college students, look at your expenses, look at how you’re doing this and rethink the proposition. For the graduate who has already got the debt, I need to write a second book, because there are some avenues. But that’s hard, because you’ve already got the debt.

In the last few chapters, there’s a lot of stuff about policy in there that talks about how it can be changed … The big rule that’s problematic is PLUS loans, because they’re uncapped. So people can go in and get an uncapped PLUS loan with no collateral and no capacity to repay. Well, that shouldn’t be. That’s a dangerous thing, particularly for people who are, let’s say, unsophisticated. They don’t know what they’re getting into, and suddenly they’re in it.

So there was an effort to do that, and Congress is currently looking at it again, and that will begin to do it.

We’re talking about $1.7 trillion. To visualize that, in my book I show a graphic of a football field covered with $100 bills stacked 10.6 feet high. It’s a gargantuan issue, and so I just take that as it is, and I say, I’m not going to change that. But I can warn students, and I can give them a ton of tools to help them not enter that debt pool.

To the Editor:

Workforce shortages and growing student interest in high-demand fields present a chance for our higher education system to scale programs and reimagine pathways that lead to economic mobility. But it’s frustrating to see that when our colleges and universities are afforded the chance to diverge from the norm, they often don’t.

As Johanna Alonso recently reported in her article, “Universities Can’t Accommodate All the Computer Science Majors” (Nov. 2), institutions across the country are facing a conundrum. STEM degrees are rapidly growing in popularity due to the perception that they’ll lead to better job outcomes with higher pay, but universities can’t keep up with demand.

It’s not from a lack of trying or a lack of care; in fact, one faculty member is quoted as saying they’ve done “everything” to scale up their classes, and that faculty across the board feel strongly about meeting the demand. Yet “everything” is really just code for “more of the same”: hiring more faculty and building new facilities to reduce ballooning class sizes. Measures like these can help, but they’re not a sustainable solution for achieving scale. Instead, they’re yet another example of higher ed’s tendency to over-index on what we already know how to do, rather than exploring new, innovative models that could benefit students, institutions, and the workforce.

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Case in point: despite online learning likely being our greatest tool for dramatically scaling programs at a fraction of the cost, those cited in the article did not reference it once as a solution, and it’s not because some of the universities mentioned in the article haven’t yet dipped their toes into the world of tech-enabled learning. Today, both innovative online universities and established brick-and-mortar institutions are leveraging online learning to provide students with greater flexibility and personal ownership over their experience; recently it was reported that 70 percent of college students are enrolled in at least one online course.

But offering online courses or even programs doesn’t necessarily mean an institution is fully capitalizing on technology’s potential to significantly expand access to education and address workforce needs. As with any innovation, its potential rests in how it’s deployed. Unfortunately, promising innovations like online learning are often deployed with the same artificial constraints that exist in traditional models of learning, for instance faculty teaching loads, synchronous virtual lectures, and fixed-pace schedules.

The good news is higher ed can reimagine learning to address the growing interest for in-demand degrees like computer science and cybersecurity, and help hundreds of thousands of students improve their lives and those of their families. But to realize this promise, they’ll need to think more expansively than many do today, free themselves from conventional notions of what learning looks like, and address demand problem by solving from the ground up. While approaches will vary, reimagining the following traditional constraints can be a start:

• Perceptions of quality: Small classes, impressive facilities, distinguished faculty, and other such criteria are often considered hallmarks of quality. But strong, equitable learning outcomes and program relevancy to the world of work are what really count.
• Barriers of time and place: Innovations like online learning can be a powerful tool for reaching more learners, but to capitalize on its potential students should be enabled to learn whenever and wherever it best suits them. Unfortunately, some institutions still require faculty to deliver online lectures at specific times, akin to forcing Netflix users to log in at a set time each week to catch the latest episode of their favorite series.
• Traditional faculty role: Often when institutions embrace new models of learning, they retain the conventional role of faculty members. A single faculty member can only accomplish so much, yet they may be required to develop the syllabus, deliver a virtual lecture multiple times a week, grade papers, and design assessments. Deploying faculty in this way impedes innovations with the potential to expand capacity to enroll, teach, and graduate more students. In contrast, addressing volume from the start might result in removing the “lecture” format of content delivery to allow students to consume rich digital content on their own time and in their own way, with credentialed instructors available to offer one-on-one teaching as needed. It might also mean rethinking office hours and replacing them with peer-to-peer mentor communities, and leveraging AI to identify when students are struggling.

I have no doubt that the individuals and institutions cited in Alonso’s article are motivated to put more individuals on a pathway that can lead to economic mobility and security. But even if a forward-thinking president advocated for removing some of the constraints mentioned, they’d likely experience significant resistance due to structural challenges, restrictive policies, and traditional mindsets. Wide-sweeping changes require a new way of thinking and understanding of education’s primary purpose: connecting individuals to opportunity.

As more organizations digitize their operations, we can expect to see a greater need for highly skilled workers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, for instance, projects a 23% increase in computing job demand this year, but Brookings reports that the US is not producing enough individuals skilled in STEM competencies. Unable to keep pace with growing demand, if colleges and universities continue to do more of the same, they’ll have no choice but to turn away students who are eager to learn. We have a chance to break from convention; let’s not waste it.

—Scott Pulsipher
President
Western Governors University

Many faculty members across North America have sat on the sidelines in 2023, hoping for someone or something to keep generative artificial intelligence out of their institutions. The primary lesson we all learned, however, was that no one can save us from AI but ourselves.

Many of our colleges’ students are already using generative AI—without guidance—and many recent graduates say they feel unprepared for jobs because of AI. Businesses of all types have embraced generative AI, and significantly more say they will in the coming years. The trend seems likely to accelerate because early research suggests that AI can save workers time and improve the quality of their work.

So, as we look forward to starting a new year, the academy can no longer live in denial. We must help our students learn to use generative AI in effective, ethical ways in their learning and, eventually, in their careers and lives as citizens. In other words, the academy must step off the sidelines and into the scrum, especially as AI continues to change rapidly.

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What Instructors Can Do Now

We’ve all received abundant advice about how to prepare students and ourselves for using generative AI in class, and many instructors have used the past year to learn new skills. But if you are still feeling uncertain—or overwhelmed—with the pace and scale of change that generative AI is bringing, that’s OK. You can still take some easy, concrete steps to begin moving your classes and students into the age of generative AI.

In the examples that follow, we offer both some basic approaches (“good”), as well as more nuanced ways (“even better”) to integrate generative AI into teaching and learning. The key is to start making changes now.

• Good: Create syllabus language about AI use. Yes, this is basic, but including guidelines and expectations for how students may and may not use generative AI in your classes is crucial. With clarity and transparency about what to expect, students will be better able to make good decisions. Examples of syllabus language abound. The University of Toronto and the University of South Florida offer examples you could adapt for your own class.

• Even better: Draft a plan with students. Add a statement to your syllabus that the class will collectively develop a plan for appropriate class use of generative AI. Empowering students in the process will improve their motivation to follow the policy.
• Good: Plan conversations about AI. Help students understand how generative AI tools were created, how they work and why they must be used with caution. Include topics such as accuracy of information, stereotyping and biases in generative AI; appropriate use of generative AI; data privacy; and equitable access to generative AI. Kathryn Conrad’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights for Education and the AI Pedagogy Project are good starting points. The Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Kansas also offers materials on helping students understand biases in AI and the ethical use of AI in writing assignments. The emerging field of explainable AI can also provide areas for discussion.
• Even better: Embed exploration of ethical practice into assessments. Create an assignment that asks students to explore the ethics of generative AI use in your discipline.

• Good: Create an exploratory assignment. Identify an assignment in which students must use AI tools. This exercise will help students—and you—learn about the workings of AI. It will help you better guide students in its use and generate ideas about how to adapt future assignments. The Center for Teaching Excellence at Kansas has curated a list of tools you might consider, or you can find your own at such sites as Futurepedia and There’s an AI for That.
• Even better: Take this approach with all your assignments. The more opportunities students have to develop facility with generative AI during structured activities, the better they will understand their role and responsibility in using the technology.

Deepening Your Practice

Once you have the basics down, consider deepening your use of generative AI as a teaching and learning tool. Here are five approaches that we and colleagues have found to be helpful.

1. Evaluate assignments through the lens of generative AI. Consider which activities are most vulnerable to misunderstanding, misuse or bias if students use generative AI. Evaluate how you might better integrate AI into those assignments, focusing students’ attention on ensuring responsible practice. You might have a chat bot create questions for class discussion or ask students to use different chat bots for the same assignment and report back to the class about their experiences.

The Center for Teaching Excellence at Kansas provides an example of how Bing Chat can tutor students in a research and writing assignment. Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies and teaches innovation and entrepreneurship, also offers examples of using AI in assignments. Anna Mills, an English instructor at the College of Marin, has curated an extensive list of AI-related teaching materials. Sites like AutomatED, the Sentient Syllabus Project and the online community AI in Education provide additional approaches. If you are feeling ambitious, you can even use ChatGPT to create a class.

2. Add a methods or reflection component to assignments. Academic research usually contains a methods section in which authors explain how they gathered and analyzed data, as well as how they arrived at their conclusions. Faculty members can treat generative AI as another method for completing tasks or assignments and arriving at conclusions. Students could describe their use of generative AI just as they would any other method. APA Style, the Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Style Center have all published guidelines on citing and acknowledging use of generative AI.

Alternatively, instructors could have students briefly reflect on the approach they used for their work. How did they use generative AI? How did they adapt the output so that the work became their own? These practices encourage transparency and also help students improve their metacognition, the understanding of their own learning and thought processes.

3. Allow students to work on assignments and activities in class using AI. Work performed in class will allow you to observe and guide students to use AI tools in valuable and appropriate ways. Assignments or quizzes must be short so students can complete them during limited class time. They should also be low stakes, as some students don’t work well under time pressure. If you need to free up class time for that type of work, consider a flipped class model, which offers flexibility for interacting and observing students.
4. Do oral checks of students’ understanding. If you are concerned that students aren’t doing assignments on their own, set up short individual meetings. Ask students to lead you through the process of their work and to explain key concepts, ideas or methods. As they do, it is usually easy to tell who has done the work and who hasn’t. These meetings don’t have to be long—five minutes, perhaps—and they can often be done in class. If you suspect problems, set up a longer meeting with the student to discuss academic integrity.
5. Adopt authentic assessments. Authentic assessment lets students apply their developing knowledge to real-world situations, and that contextualization can improve relevance and motivation. Such assessments can take many forms, depending on the discipline. Generally, authentic assignments apply content in ways that students are likely to encounter in their careers, that allow students to share their learning outside the class, or that encourage students to connect disciplinary thinking to other fields, their own lives, or a general audience. For example:

• Students in a chemistry class create posters about how chemical interactions affect everyday life (hand washing, water purification).
• Students in a psychology class write an op-ed article applying the principles of psychology to inform an event in the news.
• Students in a journalism class work with a nonprofit agency to create messaging about mental health resources for high school students.
• Students in a physics class create a poster describing what might have destroyed a deep-water submersible vessel.
• Students in a biology class hold an end-of-semester poster session for which they create displays and activities to help attendees learn about threatened species.
• Students in a film and media studies class create video and social media messages about the impact of digital literacy and fluency on teen deaths by suicide.

Generative AI offers powerful new opportunities to expand authentic assignments and infuse them with technological skills that students will need in careers and their daily lives. In each of the examples above, generative AI could initiate ideas, provide examples, create images and illustrations, design posters and brochures, and draft materials. You can also use it to create discipline-specific case studies or interactive scenarios in which students grapple with real-world problems. Or you could challenge students to envision using generative AI in various professions, both to learn more about potential careers and to consider how the technology might change a profession. The teaching center at South Florida has created a document on how to approach these areas.

Just Another Tool

Increased familiarity and facility with generative AI will help you and your students see it as just another technological tool, not a fatal foe. AI hasn’t broken education. Neither did the internet, smartphones, Wikipedia, digital search, Wi-Fi, ebooks or other technologies that have emerged over recent decades. Yes, teaching practices must change, and that will require time and resources. But colleges and universities, and we as academic professionals, should consider this work to be an investment in the future that will help shape the standards of a new AI-infused world.

A group of at least 150 faculty members in the University of California system recently signed an open letter to the system’s president asking him to rescind plans to start educational programs that teach “viewpoint-neutral” Middle East history as part of a wider strategy to address antisemitism and Islamophobia on campuses in light of the Israel-Hamas war.

Dr. Michael V. Drake, president of the UC system, said at a Nov. 15 Board of Regents meeting that people within and outside the system have expressed “anger, fear, frustration, horror and sadness about how they see this conflict playing out on our campuses” as tensions among students, staff and faculty members on opposing sides of the conflict continue to escalate.

Dr. Drake announced a series of initiatives to address the problem, including a $2 million investment in educational programs on UC campuses “focused on better understanding antisemitism and Islamophobia, how to recognize and combat extremism, and a viewpoint-neutral history of the Middle East.” Another $2 million will go toward offering guidance to university leaders and educators to ensure they’re “equipped with the knowledge they need to respond when issues arise” related to the conflict and “that our university policies are supportive, preventative and viewpoint-neutral.”

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Faculty members in history, humanities and social science disciplines, representing nine UC campuses—but just a fraction of the 25,000 professors systemwide—signed the letter taking issue with the term “viewpoint-neutral.” They said the wording echoes legal terminology used to prevent government agencies from discriminating against certain views under the First Amendment. They argued that “presenting conflicting viewpoints” is an important part of a history education and that scholars should be making teaching decisions without administrative interference. They also said Dr. Drake’s comments undeservedly called into question the “academic integrity” of UC professors already teaching about the Middle East.

“We insist … that professional historians and those in allied fields trained in the study of the Middle East are best-positioned to determine the curriculum, safeguard rigorous standards of research and teaching, and protect the climate of open discussion and critical inquiry which are the cornerstones of our scholarly community,” the letter read.

A statement from the UC Office of the President, shared by a spokesperson via email, said that the system “remains deeply committed to shared governance and the academic freedom of our faculty.”

“The president’s remarks were referencing voluntary educational programming on our campuses, not classroom content or curriculum,” the statement read. “We are actively working with our campuses to determine how to distribute these funds in ways that will benefit our campus communities.”

Sherene Seikaly, an associate professor of history and director of the Center for Middle East Studies at UC Santa Barbara, said the statement doesn’t alleviate her worries. She believes Dr. Drake’s decision to announce new Middle East history programming without consulting the system’s Middle East scholars undermines their authority over the teaching of these subjects and fails to acknowledge the expertise professors like her developed over decades.

“It’s like, pick up the phone and talk to the people who know the most about this who all work for you,” said Seikaly, one of the drafters of the letter and the daughter of Palestinian refugees.

James Steintrager, chair of the systemwide Academic Senate, said his ears also “perked up” when he heard the term “viewpoint-neutral,” but he was unclear about what Dr. Drake meant by the term or what additional educational programming would entail.

“I don’t think it’s that unusual for the administration to mark out topics of interest for the campus and provide some funding to create programs,” he said. He said he would just want that programming to “maximally involve the faculty.”

He added that Dr. Drake had “good intentions,” including improving campus climate and increasing understanding of Middle East history, but the president used some terms “meant to be innocent or even helpful that have raised concerns. I hope that the good intentions can be both recognized and salvaged, but certainly in a way that satisfies my colleagues that academic freedom is safeguarded and that disciplinary expertise has been respected.”

‘Viewpoint-Neutral’ History

Mark LeVine, a history professor and director of the Global Middle East Studies program at UC Irvine, believes teaching history in a “viewpoint-neutral” way is “literally impossible.” He said the concept harkens back to a “19th-century idea of objective history” disfavored by historians for “decades and decades.”

Scholarship is “based entirely on developing a point of view based on evidence and your research and your qualifications and arguing it,” said LeVine, one of the drafters of the letter. Professors should be sharing their perspectives, and “if that understanding is critical of any particular ideology—it could be Zionism, it could be capitalism, it could be communism, it doesn’t matter—you go with your research. That’s why we’ve been hired by UC.”

He added that no student should ever feel physically unsafe in the classroom.

But “the university is not a space of comfort,” he said. “The university is a space where every premise you’ve ever had in your life should be torn down and you have to be forced to recreate it based on all the new things you learn,” whether that process strengthens or changes a student’s original positions.

He and other drafters of the letter believe that the funds Dr. Drake announced could be better spent on other kinds of educational resources related to the Middle East. For example, he noted that UC Irvine could use more funding for Hebrew and Arabic language classes.

Seikaly said she tells students that she’s the daughter of Palestinian refugees, a scholar of the conflict and “also a product of it.” But she also works hard to create a classroom environment “that’s both brave and safe for people to have opposing viewpoints.”

She said she also signed a letter in October that accuses UC system leaders of maintaining “a stony silence with regard to the extreme violence perpetrated by the Israeli state against Palestinian civilians” after UC officials released an Oct. 9 statement condemning the Hamas attacks in Israel. The statement also mentioned “warfare now underway in Gaza” and grief for “all innocent people affected by this ongoing conflict,” but she felt it fell short of the same kind of full-throated condemnation of Israeli civilian deaths.

She said she doesn’t trust that “viewpoint-neutral” actually means neutral.

“I’d ask, whose viewpoint are you neutralizing, and on behalf of who?” she said.

Muriam Haleh Davis, a drafter of the letter and an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz whose research focuses on North Africa, said teaching history requires presenting diverse viewpoints, but that’s different from lacking a viewpoint.

“The first thing I teach my students is that everybody has a perspective that has to do with what documents you’re reading, what framework you’re using, what concerns and questions you’re asking,” she said. “The notion of history and the craft of history is that there are many viewpoints on things and we have a methodology and a way of studying those differences,” including digging into archival materials and reading the works of past historians. To her, Dr. Drake’s remarks implied “we don’t know what it is to integrate multiple viewpoints,” which she found “condescending.”

James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, a professional organization for historians, similarly noted “the imperative to read a range of sources and consider historical developments from a variety of angles.” But at the same time, he doesn’t believe “all narratives are equally compelling. Evidence matters,” he wrote in an email.

He highlighted the association’s Statement on Standards and Professional Conduct, which says “practicing history with integrity does not mean having no point of view.”

Historians “understand that all knowledge is situated in time and place, that all interpretations express a point of view, and that no mortal mind can ever aspire to omniscience,” the statement reads. Simultaneously, history involves seeking to understand people from the past who “held views of their lives that were often very different from each other—and from our own. Doing justice to those views means to some extent trying (never wholly successfully) to see their worlds through their eyes,” which is “especially true when people in the past disagreed or came into conflict with each other.”

Dov Waxman, Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Chair in Israel Studies and director of the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at UCLA, said “viewpoint-neutral” is an “awkward term” that rang understandable alarm bells for scholars.

But “I think when it comes to teaching in the classroom, it is important that professors allow for multiple viewpoints and don’t penalize students for having particular perspectives,” Waxman said, adding that he suspects that’s what Dr. Drake might have meant by neutrality, and if so, he agrees.

He believes professors should try to keep their opinions and politics private in the classroom, even though he agrees “perfect objectivity” is impossible. He said it’s valuable for “professors to not just teach from their own perspective and ignore other viewpoints, especially other viewpoints of academics or other experts.” He also noted there’s a “power differential” between professors and students, so students are less likely to share perspectives they think are at odds with a professor’s.

“I’m often happy at the end of the course when students tell me they don’t know what I thought,” Waxman said.

He believes additional Middle East history programming—developed in partnership with and featuring current scholars on campuses—would be helpful to students who are curious about the conflict but don’t have room in their schedules for relevant courses.

Waxman said the letter was an “overreaction,” though an “understandable” one at a time when tensions are high and lawmakers in Florida and other states have passed laws limiting how professors can teach other topics, such as African American history and gender studies.

Recent attacks on academic freedom in other states were top of mind for scholars who drafted the letter, and some expressed fears that “viewpoint neutrality” could be applied to other fraught topics as well.

“We tend to think of California as a kind of liberal bubble, and that what happens in Florida or other states will never happen here,” Davis, of UC Santa Cruz, said. But “we should think about the role of higher education and the kind of language that even liberals can use to make those of us who work at universities feel that we do not exercise freedom to think and teach and research sensitive topics.”

Today is ChatGPT’s first birthday, and already this novel application has had a profound impact.

One domain where this is particularly pronounced—and perhaps most discussed—is higher education. As a humanities professor who teaches the skills of critical thinking and analytic writing, I have witnessed firsthand the effects of ChatGPT on student writing and learning. I’ve seen everything from students relying on it for idea generation and content summaries to feeding it essay prompts and blatantly copying its outputs. I’m currently managing a tenfold increase in suspected academic integrity violations this semester—all due to ChatGPT.

Many of these deleterious effects have been both accurately predicted and, at this point, well established. But as I look back on how things have changed in just the past year, I see two further changes to teaching and academic writing that are both subtle and profound.

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The first concerns the various roles that professors like me take on. First, and above all else, I am an educator: my job is to teach students the relevant content knowledge and skills. But unlike, say, a yoga instructor, who also educates their students, professors play a second role as assessor: we are tasked with assessing the student’s abilities with respect to that knowledge, and with communicating that judgment to our institution, which in turn communicates it (in the form of a grade point average, transcript and diploma) to third parties, like graduate and professional programs, future employers, and so on.

These two roles—educator and assessor—are not in deep tension. Indeed, assessment is often an essential tool for furthering educational goals. But the rise of ChatGPT has introduced new and confounding tensions between these two roles that pose a deep threat to the most central task of professors like me—namely, to educate.

In my field, philosophy, and many others like it, the bulk of our assessment comes from essays that students write outside of class. But, as many have pointed out, ChatGPT is quite good at producing plausible-sounding academic writing. Even if it can’t write the perfect essay in one attempt, clever students will be able to easily manipulate the outputs to suit the needs of the assignment—all while saving countless hours of difficult writing time.

Given all this, many professors are scrambling to find ways to “ChatGPT-proof” their assignments. For example, some professors now give much narrower and complex essay constraints, in the hopes of throwing ChatGPT off or rendering its use less efficient than writing the paper oneself. Others have switched to strictly using alternative writing assignments, like in-class essays.

Many of those who have made these changes felt they had no real choice: there is simply no other way to ensure students are actually doing the work themselves. And many (if not most) recognize that these methods are not ideal—not simply in terms of course administration, but also in terms of education. I find in-class essays completely inappropriate for philosophy—a discipline in which slow, deliberate thinking and a careful organization of ideas ought to be valued over quickly scribbling one’s first thoughts. I know many of my colleagues across the humanities and beyond feel similarly.

So, in order to evade ChatGPT, professors are now tasked with introducing substantial changes to their assessment methods. They are all but forced to do this—and this is important—even when doing so is substantially less effective in terms of student learning. That is, ChatGPT has forced professors to place greater emphasis on their role as assessor over that of educator. And this is only likely to get worse with time.

A second major issue concerns accountability for those students who do unjustly rely on ChatGPT. Unlike other forms of plagiarism, which can be more easily proven by identifying where students have taken their ideas from, plagiarizing from ChatGPT is essentially impossible to prove.

To be sure, there are detectors claiming to provide evidence as to whether a given essay is generated by artificial intelligence, but there are two problems. First, the “evidence” constitutes statistical probabilities that an essay was written by AI—not exactly a smoking gun. And, second, students will quickly learn, if they haven’t already, how to avoid detection through subtle manipulation of the grammar and syntax.

Essentially, the only way to hold a student accountable for using ChatGPT is to secure a confession. Soon, students will know this, and many will exploit it: use ChatGPT, and if confronted about it, deny, deny, deny. It’s not unreasonable to believe that many students who violate academic integrity standards—particularly when they know they can do so cost-free—will not suddenly feel compelled to be honest about having done so, particularly when honesty is likely to be incredibly costly to them.

In fact, if we are forced to rely only on student confessions, then the only students held accountable will be those who have had this rush of honesty. It is odd, if not unjust, to have a system of punishment that exclusively metes out sanctions to those who demonstrate remorse and regret for their mistakes and does nothing to those who show no such integrity.

As ChatGPT continues to evolve, it will only get better and better at producing quality writing. Our students will also grow increasingly comfortable using it, often in ways that will be difficult to detect and even harder to prove. We all must adapt, in one way or another, to ChatGPT and its seismic effects on higher education. But to do so without seriously reflecting on the true nature of these changes will only frustrate our ability to respond appropriately and effectively.

We’re only a year in, and already so much has changed. By this time next year, I can only imagine where we’ll be. I, for one, fear we’re in for many unhappy returns.

We regularly do an exercise with higher education audiences in which we ask them to list three to five characteristics of vibrant academic units—ones they’d be proud to be a member of―and three to five characteristics of a troubled or dysfunctional unit, the kind where your stomach hurts when you think about going to work. Pretty quickly, it’s clear the participants are all on the same page.

Vibrant units are strong in their academic mission, feature a culture with an ethos of trust and respect, and have leaders who advance the institution’s mission by supporting the work of the unit and its members. In contrast, challenged units feature competition, silos, declining or very uneven academic performance among their members, troubled interpersonal relationships, social media or email battles, stagnant research or teaching programs, budget struggles, and/or generally low morale among students, staff and faculty.

In a series of essays in Inside Higher Ed, we at the National Center for Principled Leadership and Research Ethics have shared our experience and tools for supporting institutional integrity, including practical, principled approaches to academic leadership and stewarding environments that support cultures of excellence—ones that feature rigorous, reproducible work with a culture of meaningful inclusion and mutual support. At the center of all those efforts is the goal of fostering healthy, vibrant academic units for all those who work within them.

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When an academic unit has become dysfunctional or even toxic, institutional leaders may recognize the problem and understand the need for action but be at a loss in knowing where to begin or what their role should be in unit transformation. We have identified approaches and steps that, applied consistently and with clear goals, can help.

With a group of institutional leaders we have known and worked with over many years, we formed the Principled Academic Leadership: Transforming Challenged Units Consortium, which hosts an annual conference to help working groups from struggling departments in institutions across the country to formulate individualized, actionable plans for addressing their challenges. This conference fosters an environment where people can discuss their specific issues, gain access to successful general strategies, discuss how to adapt those strategies to their situation and collaboratively develop concrete action plans to pursue positive change within their units. Each group meets sequentially in successive working groups with a member of our team who helps guide and facilitate the implementation of those plans.

We’ve also developed the Academic Unit Diagnostic Tool, the AUDiT, which evaluates a unit’s culture, starting with an assessment of its strengths and challenges and where its working environment can be improved. The AUDiT can be a useful tool for units in identifying goals and starting places for improvement or revitalization. Challenged units find that while their problems might feel unique to them, and irresolvable, many have the same fundamental issues in common, so they can apply interventions that others have found effective.

Four Categories of Dysfunction

When considering the characteristics of your own institution, you should think about how institutional and departmental leadership, norms and incentives affect it. Cultivating a culture of trust and respect within academic units is a delicate process that requires intentional effort and continuing commitment from people at multiple levels of leadership.

Clear, consistent and coordinated planning is essential. Open communication channels must be established, encouraging dialogue and the free exchange of ideas within an atmosphere where individuals feel heard and valued. Additionally, unit leaders play an important role in setting a tone and modeling certain ways of acting and treating people; by demonstrating integrity, empathy and fairness, leaders who walk their talk get better results. Recognizing and appreciating diverse perspectives and contributions to the unit’s success further reinforces a sense of belonging and respect among colleagues.

In helping leaders restore their units to vibrancy, we’ve found that dysfunctional units tend to fall into one or more of four categories, each with different manifestations of dysfunction.

Lost units. These units are those that have lost their academic or research way. In such cases, a combination of data analysis and meaningful discussions about mission can help realign such a unit with its core values and objectives. Consider a process for gathering and presenting data to members of the unit, including using information from similar peer and aspirational units to set realistic goals and milestones.

In some instances, basic data—for example, a multiple-year trend of declining student enrollments—focus attention in a way that perceptions and anecdotes don’t. You should also identify where the unit’s current status and mission align effectively; the more bright spots you can find to build upon, the better. Establishing an external advisory group of respected individuals can offer valuable benchmarks, guidance and achievable goals that can foster progress.

When the time is right, work with members of the unit to explore the data and start a candid discussion of ways forward. It can be illuminating to have them generate lists of three to five of the unit’s positive and negative characteristics, like the exercise we described at the beginning of this article. Once generated, pose a question: Which list does the current unit most resemble, and which list describes a unit they want to be part of? An open discussion based on data, benchmarks and aspirations can provide a strong foundation for a renewal process.

Here the immediate challenge isn’t to jump toward solutions but rather to focus on creating a shared sense of the challenges and the opportunities. Moving forward, incentives tied to benchmarks―such as the ability to conduct new hiring― can encourage a group to take charge of its own destiny and keep at it. Clarity about the options in the event the current trajectory isn’t changed can also crystallize and focus attention on priorities.

Gridlocked units. These units often have frequent meetings with no actionable outcomes, an inability to make decisions and difficulty in reaching consensus. Understanding the source of the problem is the first step: if it stems from weak leadership or poor habits of governance, a new approach to leadership may be in order. Take the example of a unit holding weekly meetings for one or two hours focused on low-priority issues or matters unsuited for group decision-making. (One of us once worked with a unit that placed on its faculty meeting agendas items including color combinations for the department’s hallways.)

Such habits may have developed because the unit has become rudderless, with an ambivalent or weak leader who is uncomfortable in their role and unwilling to make decisions, or who says one thing up the chain and another inside the unit. We fully support shared governance and collective problem-solving, but faculty members value their time, and every meeting needs to have a clear and important purpose as well as work toward a tangible, productive outcome.

Divided, factionalized or siloed units. Such units are often catalyzed by big personalities, identity group clusters or disciplinary or methodological differences. An external review can provide needed guidance to understand where the unit should be headed to maintain vibrancy. In some cases, physical or organizational realignment may help to start reducing the daily effects of the differences among members of the units. Often, placing the unit into receivership for a period of time under strong external leadership can also help refashion how the factions interact, reorganize internal interactions or revise existing counterproductive habits. If engaged constructively by a new or interim leader, unit members caught in the middle between the factions, or drawn into their disputes unwillingly, are often the key to forward progress.

Both gridlocked and divided units need strong leadership. Central to that leader’s tasks are revisiting the unit’s mission and restructuring reward systems to promote collaboration and a shared sense of purpose.

Injured units. These units have been negatively impacted by a crisis or critical incident they are struggling to move past. They are often, and perhaps surprisingly, among the easiest to fix because the problems are so visible; with the other presentations we have discussed, part of the difficulty can be collective denial or disputes over whether a problem needing attention even exists. Moreover, the source of injury is often an identifiable external event or crisis, not a self-inflicted problem that some unit members may benefit (or think they benefit) from perpetuating.

At the same time, as with other forms of unit dysfunction, people of goodwill in the unit very likely wish to be part of the solution, but they just don’t know how. A sense of hopelessness, fatalism or intimidation then becomes part of a cycle of dysfunction. In injured units as well as other types of dysfunctional ones, a key step is to identify those people, engage them and empower them. Facilitated or moderated retreats or discussions in which participants can openly review the problems and explore solutions can harness those positive actors within the group. Encouraging active participation and assigning specific roles, such as reviewing governance documents or refining the curriculum, allows those individuals to contribute meaningfully to the unit’s improvement efforts.

Of course, many troubled units might share more than one of these prototypical features. When working to reclaim unit mission and productivity, the specific manifestations of dysfunction will dictate the direction a revitalization plan should include.

No matter which manifestations of dysfunction your unit may face, a key step is to start the process of reform and problem-solving. Review the unit’s policies to ensure they are evenly applied—a number of problems begin with real or perceived inconsistencies and/or people or groups gaming the system. A related problem is to ensure that bad behavior is not rewarded; it is corrosive to morale when people see that bullies get away with their behavior or that circumventing the rules gets you what you want.

Then, start by tackling the low-hanging fruit and earning some small wins. Look for existing bright spots that can be expanded, and, if possible, seek some early successes: places where modest changes will produce visible positive effects.

In addition, recognize that sometimes unit leaders are unintentionally communicating messages that contribute to the problem. Sometimes, given all of their concerns, they fail to prioritize a problem as needing their direct involvement, and sometimes they become risk-averse and seek to avoid intervening where they need to. Well-intended ones need to think carefully about strategies for transforming the unit’s culture, gathering and sharing data that vividly document the issues, and sometimes even considering programs for their own leadership development.

In a previous article, we proposed a framework for developing these kinds of recovery plans that bears repeating here:

• Build a team
• Collect information systematically
• Activate the people of goodwill
• Develop your plan with specific steps
• Be patient and adaptable—but not too patient and adaptable.

Reinforcing the importance of the unit’s mission and building an actionable plan that assigns roles, draws boundaries, sets realistic milestones and communicates a shared vision for the unit’s future can all be important steps. Ultimately, building a climate of mutual trust and respect within academic units requires a shared commitment to identified ethical standards, to embracing diverse viewpoints as a positive good, to valuing the distinct strengths and contributions of every member, and to creating a positive and inclusive environment where everyone can thrive—these are all foundations of a culture of excellence.

How does the learning and employment ecosystem (hereafter called the Ecosystem) work? What are its problems? How can we address the Ecosystem problems related to the higher education system and make it more efficient and effective?

In the post-war boom era of 1950, less than 15 percent of the U.S. population completed four years of college to earn a credential. In that period, a degree, by itself, distinguished the learner/earner from more than three-quarters of U.S. workers and so a degree carried inherent value. Today, about 38 percent of the population in the U.S. have completed four years of college. The job market followed this trend: Per the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, in 1973, 28 percent of jobs required post-secondary education, but in 2018, 63 percent of jobs offered required some post-secondary work. Ironically, 33 percent or more of all college graduates are working in jobs that don’t require a college degree. At the same time, higher education is going through a period of increased scrutiny and accountability regarding the return on investment (ROI) of their credentials and how well they serve recipients.

In addition, the cost of a college degree has risen dramatically over the last 20 years. “Between 1980 and 2020, the average price of tuition, fees, and room and board for an undergraduate degree increased 169 percent.”

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There appears to be a disconnect. The workforce is demanding more post-secondary attainment and skills more directly related to employer needs, yet many learners who have earned the expensive credential cannot find employment or a position commensurate with their degree. This has placed public scrutiny on the value and return on post-secondary investment.

In 2018, Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen predicted that 50% of colleges and universities will close or go bankrupt in the next decade. The fear is that as they are currently funded and managed, colleges may increasingly be unable to cover their costs through revenue. There is increasing competition from accredited, nontraditional colleges such as Western Governors University (in business since 1997, with over 120,000 current students) and Southern New Hampshire University (a formerly traditional college that became a nontraditional university in 2001, with currently over 130,000 online students), from alternative education entities such as boot-camps like General Assembly, from online course providers such as Coursera and Udemy and from corporate training organizations.

It seems there may be alignment issues between providers of learning and fulfillment in the employment economy that go beyond the last few years of COVID.

So, to restate this issue, how does the learning and employment ecosystem work? What are its problems? How can we address the Ecosystem problems related to the higher education system and make it more efficient and effective for the learner?

What is the Learning and Employment Ecosystem

The learning and employment ecosystem is the set of stakeholders, organizations, policies and practices (including laws), tools and data that collectively interact to enable learning, learning attestations (credentials), hiring and the pursuit of careers.

Overview of the Ecosystem

The following is a very high level of the Ecosystem and its key stakeholders:

Figure 1

The arrows in this diagram represent the primary engagements between the key stakeholders.

Learners/earners clearly engage with education, training and certification providers and, separately, with employers and with talent/professional networks (e.g., Indeed or LinkedIn). Employers also use those networks to search for potential hires. Though there are opportunities and occasions where education providers may engage with employers or talent networks, those tend to occur on an individual basis and not as a standard Ecosystem function.

The Ecosystem actually includes many stakeholders and many, more complex relationships.

Figure 2

The great variety of stakeholders (depicted above) have various relationships with each other. For example, credentialing organizations such as state nursing boards, define standards that graduating nurses must meet and provide testing and related management of their certifications, which are, in turn, used as evidence of credentials for hiring by employers.

What Can Institutions of Higher Education Do to Support the Ecosystem?

Both the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) and International Business Machines (IBM) are active in pursuing the development of an ecosystem that enables learners to communicate, with trust and confidence, their skills, competencies and learning to support their next career opportunities. The opportunities might present themselves academically via pursuit of a credential from another institution or in the labor market. In either case, the ability to transmit trusted, verifiable credentials to reviewers with enough information embedded for recipients to discern how these skills translate into their specific contexts is, we believe, crucial for both sectors, and for the learner, as we move into a more volatile future. We felt the combined subject matter knowledge of the two organizations might highlight the need for the learning and employment ecosystem, the challenges to adoption, and some recommendations for how to proceed.

Below are five ways institutions of higher education can better support the skills-based ecosystem to the benefit of all key stakeholders. Read the full set of recommendations here.

Some recommended approaches are:

1. Identify programs/departments that serve in-demand jobs and work with instructors, administrative support and/or consultants to generate learning outcome/skills-based descriptions for their courses. These do not necessarily require the instructor to rewrite course descriptions but allow the institution to correlate or enhance those descriptions with the skills/competency information.
2. Identify courses and/or experiential learning activities that lead to student attainment of a specific award (e.g., certificates) including the expressions of the skills and competencies the student demonstrated to earn the award. Examples include undergraduate research, internships, supervised community support programs and others.
3. Capture the skills/competency information for the courses within the course management system (whether it is part of the SIS or in another system). This may be done by either using existing system data fields or creating an associated table. If a table is created, it should use (or can be converted to) the Open Badge (OB) or the Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR) standard data structure. Committing to these standards means the institution can interoperate with others who issue and receive digital credentials. This will directly benefit the learner and provide for more cost-effective record processing for the institution.
4. Provide a means to generate an enhanced student report or transcript, preferably following the OB or CLR standard, that captures both the traditional student transcript content and the underlying achieved skills/competency information in a machine-readable form. If the information was already captured in this form (see #3) then it becomes extremely easy to report it out. In either case, using these standards can make that relatively easy and can become an automated process for any skills/competencies aligned courses.
5. Create a policy (or policies), and the practices supporting it, to guide the institution toward its digital credential vision. In much the same way that policies define currently issued credentials, digital credentials or skills-based policies should specify what is issued and distinguish it from traditional ones. This exercise need not be onerous. Rather, it should be similar to traditional policies and assist all in understanding the credentials being asserted.

This is a minimal effort that can be scoped as narrowly as a few courses in a single discipline or more broadly, depending on the institution’s resources.

In following these steps, first in a small way (e.g., perhaps single program or department and perhaps only undergraduate courses in the major), the institution now has tools to:

1. Help market the value of the program to potential and current students
2. Help students with learning and career pathway counseling (by reference to needed job skills)
3. Work with employers to perform early placement (internships) and promote the institution brand
4. Collaborate with employers to align the descriptions with the industry skills needed
5. Demonstrate positive outcomes in terms of retention and hiring, again promoting the brand

Then the institution can expand to include more courses and programs, and work more closely with industry, government and others to achieve a better alignment of skills and competencies for mutual gain.

At some point, the institution will likely want to address related technologies and services with regard to skills and competencies. These may include:

• The institution issuing trusted “badges” or microcredentials for achievements, using the Open Badges standard.
• The ability to award “stackable” achievements as “badges” or microcredentials for skill attainment within components of a course and groups of courses, such that someone who completes a course not only gets course credit but multiple microcredentials for well-defined skills achievements, and those who do not finish a course may still achieve partial credit for the attainment of some of the defined competencies in the course.
• The promotion and governance of co-curricular activities to the status of credentialed skills/competency achievements by the institution.
• The use of an institution or institution affiliated “wallet” (a digital wallet—an app or online service used to store electronic documents) for students and alumni to maintain their achievements in a form that is digitally readable in a manner that the wallet owner has control over who has access to their information.
• The ability to aggregate credentials and related achievements from multiple sources (other education institutions, certification entities, employers) such that it represents the “whole” learner/earner (this is often referenced as a Learner and Employment Record (LER)). This in turn can be a means for the institution to engage (with the wallet holder’s permission) in meaningful additional learning and alumni opportunities.

Building on the skills/competencies aligned curriculum, the use of technologies to support the institution and learner provides the institution with greater influence with all other stakeholders in the Ecosystem and creates viable additional revenue opportunities.

Zayed University, in the United Arab Emirates, faces the loss of its U.S. accreditation unless it can show the Middle States Commission on Higher Education why the accreditor should not withdraw its approval.

A statement from Middle States Monday said that Zayed must show why its accreditation should not be withdrawn. It did not say why the institution faces that demand, but notes that the reasons for a show-cause order can include failure to make sufficient progress toward compliance, demonstrating a lack of integrity that could harm students, or facing imminent closure. (Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Middle States had asserted that Zayed faces imminent closure. Inside Higher Ed regrets the error.)

Officials at Zayed provided a statement Wednesday that said: “Zayed University underwent an MSCHE self-study evaluation earlier this year. The MSCHE Commission concluded ZU was compliant with 11 out of 15 requirements of affiliation and 5 out of 7 standards. The Commission provided the university with additional time to submit additional necessary documents to show cause by 1 March. We have already taken action to address most of the issues raised by the visiting team, and we are in the process of addressing the rest of the issues. We remain accredited whilst this process is still going on and are confident that the accreditation will be renewed.”

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College presidents have long had to balance the rights of students, faculty and staff to speak freely, protest peacefully and debate civilly while also ensuring their campuses are safe spaces open to free exchange of ideas and political and religious perspectives.

Doing so was never easy, but it has grown exponentially difficult since the start of the Israeli/Palestinian war. College leaders are now grappling with numerous challenges to this often delicate balancing act and finding themselves under fire from internal stakeholders and external critics, including federal and state lawmakers, national advocacy groups and influential thought leaders and deep-pocketed donors.

Four university presidents recently took part in a virtual conversation about their differing approaches and processes for deciding when to speak on behalf of their institutions about the major issues of the day and how they’ve navigated recent tensions on their campuses. The event was held last week and organized by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank. Speakers discussed whether they engaged in national debates in an ad-hoc fashion or relied on a structured process where carefully calibrated statements are prepared behind the scenes.

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Their perspectives and approaches varied greatly.

Lori S. White, president of Depauw University, a small liberal arts college in Indiana, said her top priority when she assumed office in 2020 was to establish a clear protocol for making official public statements.

“There will be particular instances when the campus community can expect to hear from the President,” she said. “But I am not always the only voice that might have expertise on a particular issue, I might not be the only voice that is needed when the campus is in crisis.”

She said particular situations could call for a comment from the vice president for academic affairs, or the vice president for student affairs or a faculty member.

Ana Mari Cauce, president of the University of Washington, a public research institution in Seattle, said her office has guidelines for making public statements that are not currently available to the public. She wondered aloud if perhaps this should change.

“Is it creating a high level of stress among our community members? Are there direct inquiries on social media? We have a number of things that we look at,” Cauce said of the policy.

The presidents discussed a variety of factors they weigh in their decision process: Does the issue affect a large number of students, faculty or staff? Does it have a significant impact on campus operations? Does it involve the death or serious injury of a member of the campus? Is it related to the mission and values of the institution? Can the president or other administrators remain nonpartisan in speaking on the matter?

“During a crisis is not the time to be trying to figure these things out,” Cauce added.

Jonathan J. Sanford, president of the University of Dallas, a Catholic institution, believes presidents “ought to resist the temptation to comment on current affairs.”

Sanford, a philosophy scholar, referenced Plato’s Republic, and noted that Plato removed himself from the city of Athens during his dialogue about justice.

“That signifies the way in which the kind of serious questions about how it is that we ought to live well together requires a certain distance from the day to day affairs,” Sanford said. 

Sanford argued that it’s similarly important for academia to be removed from politically charged affairs. 

“That’s a general principle that bears in mind what it is to be a university and to create an emphasis on what I think of as the sanctity of the classroom,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s indifferent to what’s happening within the polis, the wider scene.”

Other presidents challenged that sentiment and pointed out that maintaining that kind of distance can be difficult in today’s political climate when colleges and universities are no longer the isolated ivory towers they once were.

“This idea of being the isolated ivory tower is not the way we describe our institution at all,” said Jonathan R. Alger, president of James Madison University, a public research institution in Virginia. “We’re the exact opposite. We talk about being the engaged university, engaged with ideas and the world.”

White recalled her tenure at Washington University in St. Louis in 2014 when Michael Brown, an 18-year-old in nearby Ferguson, Missouri, was shot and killed by a Saint Louis County police officer.

“There was no way that the institution could not respond when this was an issue that happened, literally right around the corner,” she said.

Sanford, who said he has not commented on other past controversial events, received “a great deal of pressure” to issue a statement about the Israeli/Palestinian war. He subsequently released a written call to prayer and eventually a statement about the conflict.

“I was receiving complaints that my silence was damning, one direction or another,” he said. “That brought me to the point where I thought I’d better articulate what my approach is.”

“I can see how somebody could say, ‘Well, you did just comment on a current political and military affair,’” Sanford said. “But it was in the context of articulating principles that can help guide reflection, the way in which we might each do this in a classroom.”

The presidents agreed that when they do decide to make a public statement, it’s the result of a nuanced thought process and, regardless of how much time and thought goes into what they say, it is impossible to please everyone. They also agreed on the importance of being selective about when and how often to speak

“The more that you put out statements, it waters the others down. So you really do want to be very cognizant of when you’re going to say something,” Cauce said.

“Using the presidential bully pulpit, you need to be judicious,” Alger added. “I think of it as a blend of principle and pragmatism.”

Cauce agreed. “There is an art involved,” she said.

Despite their different views about when or whether to make a public statement about domestic or foreign affairs, the presidents agreed college leaders are dutybound to set examples for having productive and civil public discourse.

“Our responsibility is to create an educational experience that really results in teaching our students and giving them the tools to engage in these really difficult conversations in an environment where there are not great role models externally,” White said.

Over the past few decades, colleges and universities have become increasingly corporatized, to the point that students are seen as consumers who are recruited through promises of a safe and wonderful learning experience. As such, students’ “satisfaction” is diligently measured so that institutions can trumpet the positive results in marketing campaigns to increase student enrollment.

Student satisfaction has been measured through annual institutional surveys, national and international multi-university surveys, and by magazines such as U.S. News and World Report and, in Canada, Macleans, which rank different institutions based on, among other things, students’ experiences and perceptions. Most often, universities conduct quantitative surveys with open-ended questions, commonly known as student evaluations of instruction, to assess “good teaching.”

In addition to significant concerns regarding the reliability and effectiveness of those evaluations, dozens of articles have demonstrated an equity bias in student evaluations. That is, the evaluations can often be more about the race, gender identity, weight and perceived accent of their instructor than class content. The widespread use of such biased and discriminatory results has had detrimental effects on hiring, tenure and promotion decisions, especially for women and those from other marginalized groups. As a result, many faculty senates and unions are calling for the end of using student evaluations as assessments of effective teaching—particularly for tenure, promotion or securing job contracts.

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Faced with calls to reduce or eliminate the use of student evaluations, colleges and universities are increasingly turning to peer assessments of teaching. Originally conceptualized as peer observations of teaching, they began as nonevaluative, voluntary, formative, reciprocal, self-reflective and collaborative modes of professional development in teaching. In those modes, peer observations of teaching are quite effective ways to improve teaching.

Over the past 20 years, however, such exchanges have become required, formalized and summative.  In fact, in Canadian universities, peer evaluations of teaching are increasingly being used to inform personnel decisions such as tenure, promotion and the hiring of instructors.  Moreover, such evaluations are often no longer conducted by peers. Rather, the people performing the observations are usually tenured and, in some cases, program chairs, while the observed are frequently untenured or precariously employed instructors. Thus, a power differential always exists between the observer and the observed, making the use of the term “peer” misleading and deeply problematic. Peer observations have often become bureaucratic evaluations.

At some institutions, untenured faculty encounter several teaching evaluations over their first five years, performed by the chair or chair designate, an internal departmental tenured peer, and/or an external (to the department) tenured peer.  Although the observers are required to undergo training, it often does not include content on discrimination, racism, ableism, fatphobia, transphobia, homophobia and gender-based bias. Two of the authors of this piece, Mary-Lee Mulholland and Breda Eubank, undertook a cursory scan of 25 universities in Canada and found that a handful of them require training yet only one referenced equity, diversity and inclusion as part of their training module.

Due to the concerning power differential present within these contexts and the potentially negative implications of such evaluations on people’s careers, higher education needs to study the impact of bias, power and hierarchy within peer evaluations of teaching. That’s the case especially given the fact we already know how evaluative frameworks in the postsecondary context—such as student evaluations of teaching and tenure—can discriminate against teachers located within intersections of race, gender, class, disability, nationality, gender identity and sexuality.

Equally pressing and related to the issue of bias is a very foundational, yet seemingly unanswered, question: Who should constitute a peer in these evaluations of teaching? Should peers be of the same rank? Should they be from the same academic discipline? Which peers are equipped to evaluate the feminist, Indigenous or anti-racist pedagogies of their colleagues?

To answer those questions, more nuanced discussions and research are required to identify the validity and impact of peer evaluations of teaching. Specifically, to avoid encountering the same pitfalls that occur with student evaluations of teaching, we need more information on who is doing the evaluation, what is being evaluated, and how is it being evaluated.  Based on our observations, experiences and research, we have serious concerns regarding the validity of peer observations of teaching, as currently conducted, being used as a measure of “good” teaching.

In the meantime, in the absence of any evaluation of peer evaluations of teaching themselves from a critical and intersectional lens, faculty should approach peer evaluations with great caution. Under what circumstance can peer evaluation be done effectively? By whom? For what purpose? Can any training make it better?

Underlying those questions are larger questions regarding who gets to decide what constitutes “good teaching.” To the point, we need to carefully examine whether or not measures of “good teaching” used in peer evaluations are reflections of feminist, anti-racist or decolonial pedagogies or whether they are products of privilege. It is not lost on us that those who do the evaluation disproportionately have racial, gender and other forms of privilege that have led to their current position of power within academe. Similarly, those evaluated are disproportionately from historically marginalized and/or currently underrepresented groups.

Thus, how can we ensure that peer evaluations of teaching do not get constituted as gatekeeping by those who arrived first and are seen as “natural” (read as white and male) inhabitants of academia?

Although we realize that academia is not about to do away with teaching evaluations in the immediate future, we urge caution against an uncritical large-scale adoption of peer evaluations of teaching. Instead, we need research on their efficacy in their formal and summative mode today. In particular, the use of such evaluations must be informed by research on the impact of the power imbalance and bias that frequently can occur in them. 

The University of Southern California has opened an internal investigation of a leading neuroscientist, Berislav Zlokovic, over concerns from within his laboratory about allegedly fraudulent data being used to promote a major new drug for stroke treatment.

The complaints from four members of Professor Zlokovic’s lab included evidence of suspicious manipulations of images in journal articles, and unusual controls over entries in individual lab notebooks, as part of a purported culture of professional intimidation, Science magazine reported, citing a dossier compiled by outside scientists.

Professor Zlokovic, a professor of physiology and neuroscience at USC, is a well-recognized leader in work involving the blood-brain barrier—the ability of the body to let some compounds into the brain and block others, a topic with importance to multiple neurological conditions including Alzheimer’s and strokes. He has headed the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute at USC for the past decade, leading its funding to grow more than 10 times, to nearly $40 million.

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The work raising concern involves an enzyme, known as activated protein C, or APC, that helps prevent blood clots. Professor Zlokovic created a company, ZZ Biotech, that has been developing a form of APC known as 3K3A-APC that was created by a colleague, John Griffin, a professor of molecular medicine at the Scripps Research Institute.

The US National Institutes of Health funded the start last year of a $30 million study to test the 3K3A-APC compound on 1,400 people shortly after they experience a stroke. The whistleblowing lab members and the dossier authors argued that the trial should be suspended given early signs that 3K3A-APC is not beneficial and possibly even harmful, and that the study’s approval was based on manipulated data.

The team of authors who produced the 113-page dossier was led by Matthew Schrag, an assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University, who began the investigation after detecting signs of possible image manipulation in Professor Zlokovic’s work.

USC issued a brief statement in which it said it “forwards any such allegations to its own Office of Research Integrity for careful review.” The university said it cannot comment beyond that because such reviews are confidential.

Professor Zlokovic did not respond directly to questions, though he agreed to Professor Griffin sending a written rebuttal that provided scientific explanations for their confidence in 3K3A-APC.

“The scientific knowledge of the authors of that dossier gave no credence to the huge body of knowledge about APC and 3K3A-APC,” Professor Griffin wrote.

Professor Griffin said he could not address the dossier’s photographic evidence of what the authors and other experts described as strong indicators of image manipulation, or the allegation by the dossier authors of Professor Zlokovic sometimes ordering changes in lab notebooks to reflect desired test results. But he said he “never perceived any professional intimidations in Zlokovic’s lab”.

The dossier authors said they had concerns about images from 35 studies published by Professor Zlokovic and his team, which have accumulated more than 8,400 citations, far above the levels of similar work in the field, and which have gained citations by 49 patents held by 30 companies, universities and foundations, Science said. The magazine also said it heard from multiple experts who raised alarm about the seriousness of the case.

The case follows a series of similar instances of alleged research fraud by star academics, including Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who agreed earlier this year to resign as president of Stanford University after internal investigations found the neuroscientist did not correct known errors in his published research.

One former Republican politician who now leads a Florida public university is criticizing a current GOP politician who was floated to lead another Florida public university—all over what a former faculty member allegedly said about Israel.

Politico reports that Randy Fine, a Jewish Florida state representative whom Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis had wanted to lead Florida Atlantic University, posted Friday on X that a University of Florida professor was “teaching that Israel eradicating Hamas is like Germany eradicating Jews.” Fine’s post included a screenshot in which an account under the name Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons referenced the deaths in Gaza and said “Israel is a Nazi state.”

Fine’s post that Politico linked to had been taken down as of Tuesday afternoon, and Inside Higher Ed was unable to find Simmons’s alleged post. A “Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah” account posted Sunday on X that “Israel’s Evil Actions are so horrible that it takes your breath away! These people who were the victims of a Nazi Holocaust is [sic] now doing the same to the Palestinians!”

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On Monday, former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse, who now leads UF, posted an online statement titled “Education amid endless online screaming.” The statement is addressed to his cabinet and deans.

“Just wanted you to know that I’ve gotten many versions of this allegation all weekend: A tenured UF professor is supposedly forcing despicable antisemitic garbage on UF students in UF classrooms,” Sasse wrote. “This seems to have started from a member of the legislature in Tallahassee exaggerating on social media and sharing too-good-to-be-checked clickbait that he knows isn’t true. I won’t link here to the thirsty, attention-desperate post.”

While Sasse didn’t mention Fine or Simmons by name, a UF spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday that Sasse was referencing them. The spokeswoman said Simmons retired from UF as a lecturer in 2019 “and has no active appointments with the university.”

Sasse wrote that “This was an instructor, not a tenured professor. The individual left UF in 2019, and hasn’t been paid here for four years.”

“The First Amendment gives everyone the right to make an abject idiot of themselves, and that seems to be what this former instructor is doing here,” Sasse wrote. “Speech is protected; violence and vandalism are not,” he wrote. “We’ll protect everyone’s speech rights here. But we’ll absolutely take action to suspend or fire anyone in the UF community who crosses the line with violence or vandalism.”

Fine didn’t return requests for comment late Tuesday afternoon, and Simmons didn’t respond to an email to her UF address.

An unspecified security threat prompted City College of New York to shut down Tuesday afternoon, according to a message from the president’s office.

“Due to a threat to the City College campus, and out of an abundance of caution, CCNY will close today, Tuesday, November 21st at 1 PM,” the message read. “If you are on campus, please depart the campus promptly. If you have not arrived on campus yet, please do not come to the campus, and please note that all buildings will be closed.”

The campus, part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, is scheduled to re-open Wednesday as planned, though classes are not in session.

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Graduating. Graduating on time. Graduating with manageable student loan debt. Graduating with technical and people skills needed to launch a career. Thinking about the completion aspect alone, the essence of what student success is varies widely. Add in all the steps required to reach these accomplishments and the barriers along the way. Then consider the many perspectives of higher ed professionals helping to support students in that journey and whether those working in all corners of campus should be viewing student success through the same lens.

Those are some of the large- and small-group points made earlier this month in a workshop at Student Success US, hosted by Times Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed in partnership with the University of California, Los Angeles.

In a pre-event discussion and as a kickoff to breakout discussions during the live event, the workshop’s four panelists took on four big questions related to student success definitions and measurement.

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1. How do we define student success?

Any attempt to define it is dependent on the audience, noted Diane Z. Chase, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Houston, as well as vice chancellor for academic affairs for the UH System. “For most of us, we’re looking at things we can benchmark, like persistence and degree completion. But it’s about communication skills, critical thinking, the whole person. It’s about preparation for what happens next. That can be: Do they have jobs? Are they in grad school? Depending on who [we are] talking to, we might focus on one space versus the other.”

Giving one example, an area of focus for deans discussing student success may be what’s happening in courses with high rates of Ds, Fs or withdrawals.

Eileen L. Strempel, the inaugural dean of and a professor in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, will speak about definitions in terms of what is equitable student success. “We’re trying to think proactively about structures and data-tested interventions that we continue to see, and what it means to serve the broader public,” she said.

Student success is also wrapped up in students’ sense of belonging, said Louie F. Rodríguez, vice provost dean of undergraduate education at University of California, Riverside, whose research has included a school/community-based initiative aimed at understanding student engagement and disengagement. He asks, “Are they engaged? Are they serving as peer mentors? Are they ready for their communities, for society, for the world?”

Conversations about understanding what student success is focus on “layers and drivers,” said Julie Payne-Kirchmeier, vice president for student success for the Indiana University System. “I’ve been very intentional about not saying ‘IU’s definition of student success is …’ That ignores the layered issues, and it undermines the message that we’re trying to support, that it’s not one person’s job. Everyone has a role in it.”

2. How do we reconcile students’ definitions of success with the institution’s view of success?

When Rodríguez speaks with students—who may be focused on being in their major of choice, getting good grades and doing research with faculty, to give a few examples—he will tell them this: “Academic or student success is everything you could imagine and so much more.”

As he thinks about high-impact practices in his work, it involves helping to support students in whatever they want to pursue. In addition, he said, “It’s our role as institutional agents to paint that broader picture of what student success is.”

Strempel added that meeting the needs of students both inside and outside of the classroom involves hearing their voices and using the right language around student success. “Over the course of the last half a decade, we’ve seen a pandemic, a time of racial reckoning, January 6th, and numerous brutal global conflicts,” she said. “Given this backdrop, it is no wonder that our students have become increasingly attuned to language and the subtexts that they discern. When we discuss ‘student success,’ it sets up a binary where students either succeed or fail. We fail to be truly student-centric by failing to include with our language choices [for] students with a more nuanced personal journey and definition of success.”

She challenges higher ed to consider the following questions:

• What if we were more expansive?
• What would an Office of Student Thriving look, sound, and feel like instead?

From Chase’s standpoint, conversations with students around student success should not be about the numbers. “It’s about what are their goals and how can we help them get to those goals,” she said. “Our students want a voice.”

Such discussion, however, could involve offering additional perspectives. Many students, for example, would like to graduate but aren’t focused on on-time graduation. “There is a lot of work we do on trying to help students see how they can graduate more quickly so they can not spend more on their education than is necessary,” she said. Higher ed professionals can also help students build excitement for experiences such as undergraduate research, learning abroad or working with a mentor.

3. How do we measure student success throughout the student lifecycle?

For undergraduates, indicators of student success often involve retention, persistence, completion, four- and six-year completion and differences among student groups, such as Pell-eligible, said Chase. “But it’s way, way more than that. One of the things we know enhances student success is engagement. Are we measuring those positive things that correlate highly with student success? It’s all of those pieces. It’s really a kitchen sink enterprise—we can’t say we’re going to fix this one thing and watch for three years and then tweak.”

Higher ed must be willing to think outside the box when coming up with supports, she added. Yet determining when an existing effort is working takes time. “Sometimes we think of an innovation [and] go to colleges and say, ‘we have a great idea.’ Partway through, they say, ‘we have a completely different idea.’”

The COVID pandemic has resulted in new ideas about all the aspects involved in student success. “Think about the Coronavirus blessings: How we pivoted in an unimaginable situation. We saw the Zoom pictures of what students were going through. That brought to the forefront the holes and gaps, meeting needs both in and outside the classroom,” Strempel said. That’s when colleges really began thinking about assisting with not just food and shelter but also Wi-Fi, computers or even an instrument to practice with. “We have more of a 360-view of student needs since COVID,” she said.

Rodríguez added, “We know there are many structural barriers to student success that hinder progress.”

Having more factors to measure brings in a need to consider the language used when offering supports. One example Rodríguez gave was the term academic probation. “Why do we use that for students who are in recovery?”

Payne-Kirchmeier is having similar conversations on her campus now. The term “temporarily withdraw,” for example, is more negative than “take a medical leave.” She noted that “withdraw is so final. You have to frame [it] not as a deficit; an early support, not a warning.”

It’s about “using language that embraces where [students] are,” Strempel said. “The precepts around ‘academic advising’ are also seeming (to me) to be increasingly outdated as well. To advise someone automatically heightens a power differential, where the ‘professional’ advises the ‘student.’ What if we moved instead towards ‘student advocates’ versus ‘student advisers’? The former implies that someone is on your team and looking out for you, helping rather than directing you.”

Chase will also be intentional about language used when speaking to colleagues. Rather than speaking more generally about retention or completion and university goals, she said, “I will talk to deans about how many more student we need to save, need to help. It’s a different framing from saying we need to increase retention by 10 percent.” Broken down by college, that 10 percent might just be a handful of individual students.

4. How can we facilitate a campus-wide, unified approach to student success?

Bridging academic and student affairs was a big goal for Rodríguez coming in to his role six months ago. “I’ve been cultivating strong connections with the vice chancellor of student affairs, and the vice chancellor of wellness. We’ll meet quarterly across student affairs, academic affairs and wellness to discuss student success,” he explained.

Presidents must make facilitating a campus-wide approach a priority, Payne-Kirchmeier said, adding that IU’s president did just that. “It speaks volumes when the president says, ‘this is what we’re going to do’ and then puts resources behind it. We have 17 communities of practice around areas that impact student success … And all staff play a role.”

Chase noted that at UH, academic affairs is working with residence life. “That hasn’t been an academic space, other than with support services. But we have faculty in residence. We need to build that piece.”

In unifying departments across campus, Chase sees the sharing of individual student success stories and how individual staff members have helped as crucial. “Some of the stories are really complicated,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what role you have [in supporting students]. You can see that every person matters.”

Tell us about a unique aspect of a student support initiative on your campus.