Self-important university leaders have long been the scourge of faculty, and a British study supports that view—finding evidence that “narcissistic” vice chancellors, who are equivalent to American university presidents, really do make an institution worse.
Displayed through “excessive financial risk taking and empire building,” narcissism damages an institution’s research and teaching, as well as its performance in rankings, the paper found.
Researchers measured narcissism based on the size of a vice chancellor’s signature—an approach used in recent research in accounting, finance and management—and tracked the performance of U.K. universities between 2009–10 and 2019–20.
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The study, published in Research Policy, examined the signatures of the leaders of 133 universities, a total of 261 vice chancellors over that period, and found that those deemed to have more narcissistic leaders registered declines in key measures, such as the National Student Survey and the Research Excellence Framework. It also showed that older and more prestigious universities were more likely to employ narcissistic bosses.
The authors described the position of vice chancellor as a “high-status, high-visibility role that is occasionally recognized with a knighthood.” As such, it arguably provides narcissistic individuals with opportunities to satisfy their need for excessive admiration and a stage to perform on, they said.
“We argue that it is worthwhile to examine universities as they represent the ideal environment for narcissists to shine.”
One of the authors, Richard Watermeyer, professor of education at the University of Bristol, told Times Higher Education that there were many notable examples of narcissistic university leaders, such as those who refused to negotiate on pay and conditions, which has formed the cornerstone of recent industrial action.
Speaking on behalf of the group of researchers, he added, “There is good evidence that universities, as hypercompetitive and highly stratified organizations, are tolerant of and even incentivize and reward narcissistic behavior, and at all levels, allowing those who choose to act in such ways to do so with impunity.”
The four-person team identified excessive financial risk-taking and empire-building strategies as key characteristics of narcissism.
Watermeyer said extreme narcissism causes people to privilege their own needs for reassurance and admiration above all else; as the trait is associated with overconfidence, it often means that narcissists ignore the advice of others.
“Not quite the clear head required for leading highly complex organizations, and research and teaching missions, of multiple moving parts, whose success depends on the integration of multiple leadership contributions,” he added.
Those in charge of hiring leaders should measure the egotism of candidates using psychometric tests, suggested the research team, which included Thanos Verousis of Vlerick Business School, Shee-Yee Khoo of Bangor Business School and Pietro Perotti of the University of Bath.
“It may also be theorized as a response to hypercompetition, which requires those in universities to constantly broadcast their excellence to get and stay ahead of a chasing pack,” he added.
This week’s episode of The Syllabus, from the Office of Open Learning at American Jewish University and Inside Higher Ed, features a discussion with Raphi Gold, a sophomore who shuns the smartphone, about how she monitors today’s politics without the information sources her friends rely on.
BUCKEYE LAKE, Ohio — AUGUST 17: Marijuana plants in a flowering room where the artificial sunlight is adjusted to stimulate growth of the flowers, August 17, 2023, at PharmaCann, Inc.’s cultivation and processing facility in Buckeye Lake, Ohio.
Despite what some of the truest of believers might contend, legalization of marijuana would come with costs to Ohioans. But an economic analysis that was released last week found that the benefits would outweigh those costs by a quarter-billion dollars a year.
Issue 2, an initiative that would legalize recreational marijuana for people over 21 in Ohio, is on the ballot in next Tuesday’s election.
A study by Columbus-based Scioto Analysis attempts to identify the pluses and minuses that would come with such a move in a state where medical marijuana is already legal.
To do the analysis, the group used studies from states such as Washington and Colorado, where recreational weed has long been the law. To examine how the pros and cons identified in those states might play out in Ohio, the researchers looked at economic and census data, as well as at crime statistics.
The biggest benefit they identified has to do with the extra revenue passage of Issue 2 would produce, with its 10% excise tax on top of Ohio’s normal sales tax. But the report explains that the benefit isn’t merely from the $190 million a year legalization is expected to…
Gisborne’s central business district (CBD) is the focus of a huge line-up of fun Christmas activities this year.
A Kiwiana Christmas workshop at the HB Williams Memorial Library will be Christmas central for everyone in town.
There’ll be visits from Santa, music, a photo booth, workshops for children, and a present-wrapping HQ at the library throughout the month of December.
There’s also a new party in town with The Christmas Street Festival being held at the Grey Street Skate Park on Sunday 10 December from 12noon to 6pm.
That event is being organised by the Tairāwhiti Adventure Trust (TAT).
In the line-up for Sunday’s event are food trucks, craft stalls, and a parade float stall where the winner will be decided by public vote. This year’s theme is Beach Days.
Santa will be there from 2pm and if you have a Christmas-patterned jersey, dust it off because there’ll be a worst-Christmas-jersey competition.
There’ll be heaps for tamariki with a twinkle light tunnel, face painting, games, carols, and a fashion parade along a candy cane runway.
“We’re excited to move the annual celebration of Christmas to a different platform this year,“ says Gisborne District Council Chief Executive Nedine Thatcher Swann.
“All the key components of our traditional Christmas parade will be there including floats and Santa with heaps of extras for a festive…
De Anza College students, faculty and local community members are pushing for a name change at the California community college, The Mercury Newsreported.
The college is named after Juan Bautista de Anza, an 18th-century Spanish military officer who led two expeditions to California. Those in favor of a name change circulated a petition, arguing that Spanish colonization wreaked havoc on Indigenous communities in the region.
“The missions soon became bases from which the Spanish priests and military officers could exercise control over the surrounding land, disrupting the environment and indigenous ways of life, thus forcing indigenous peoples to seek food and shelter in the missions,” the petition read. “Once there, Native people were forbidden to leave the missions and their traditional cultures were severely limited.”
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Sherwin Mendoza, a part-time faculty member at De Anza, told The Mercury News that he and others advocating for a name change were inspired by Cabrillo College, which also bears the name of a Spanish explorer and is in the midst of a name change process. (Cabrillo’s Board of Trustees, however, voted to delay the name change in August.)
“I feel like I have an obligation to try to do my part in correcting these past wrongs that were committed against indigenous people by settlers,” Mendoza said.
Marisa Spatafore, a college spokesperson, wrote in an email to The Mercury News that “the group is more than welcome to engage in conversation on this issue and any other topic.” She noted that the college changed its mascot last year from the Dons, a Spanish nobility title, to a mountain lion.
There are several reasons why I enjoyed reading and highly recommend Mauro Guillén’s new book, The Perennials: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society.
First, Guillén is a sociologist. I’m a sociologist. We need more sociologists writing nonfiction books for a general audience. Guillén teaches at Wharton.
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Second, The Perennials has some smart things to say about universities. Most books I read and talk about in this space say nothing about higher education, forcing me to make the connections. Guillén brings his arguments about rethinking how we think about generations and the life course back to the university.
And third, The Perennials gets the formula right for fun nonfiction. There is some Goldilocks nonfiction zone of ideas that make you think, trends and data that build some knowledge, and stories that drive the narrative. Guillén’s writing hits that sweet spot.
There are three big arguments in The Perennials. The first is that, as individuals, we would be wise to rethink our lives following a rigid play/learn/work/retire sequence. As life spans (and health spans) grow ever longer (if you are reading this, you should prepare for a 100-year life), the rigid segmentation between school, employment and retirement no longer makes much sense. We must consider integrating learning, work and play into all segments of our healthy life.
Throughout The Perennials, Guillén talks about the importance of online learning. And he actually seems to know what he’s talking about when he talks about online learning. That is unusual for authors (and academics) outside the field. The book points out how online learning enables full-time workers to be learners. I appreciated that observation.
The second big argument in The Perennials is that organizations, including for-profit companies and nonprofit universities, would benefit from rejecting a sequential life course mind-set. Companies would attract and retain a more talented and diverse workforce if they allowed employees to integrate work and family commitments fully. Both universities and companies would be better off if they proactively integrated different age groups into their classes, programs and work teams.
University leaders should double-click on the idea that learning is catalyzed by intergenerational collaboration. Too many of our degree and nondegree programs are de facto or de jure age-segregated. We are probably doing too little in higher education to build degree and nondegree programs (both residential and online) that are explicitly directed at building multigenerational cohorts.
Finally, The Perennials makes the case that sequential life thinking helps to structurally disadvantage low-income and underrepresented groups. As a society, we leave behind too many people who cannot progress through a standard set of milestones. There is far too much emphasis on getting young adults into college and not enough on keeping them progressing toward graduation. Nor does our society do enough to provide educational opportunities to working parents and older workers.
While segmenting populations by generation may be illuminating and fun, there is little evidence that generational thinking is either a valid or reliable tool for social analysis.
The Perennials makes a good case that individuals, organizations and policy makers would benefit from adopting a multigenerational mind-set.
Being accepted to your choice of graduate school and program is usually an exciting moment. The chance to dedicate yourself to your passion through intimate, rigorous classes and to reading literature faster than you can binge-watch your favorite show is enthralling. Yet, unfortunately, the excitement often collides with the hidden challenges of graduate education, such as mental health issues, a toxic culture in some institutions and feelings of isolation.
Having a sense of community can help offset those challenges, but most communities among graduate students are limited to specific classes and aren’t sustainable beyond them. Meanwhile, many individual graduate programs and academic departments prioritize academic programming, offering fewer if any events that improve graduate students’ well-being and sense of belonging.
Often, if graduate students want programming for their wellness or sense of belonging on campus, it has to come from fellow students. But organizing a longer-term community is difficult. Graduate students have many responsibilities—taking or teaching classes, conducting research, contributing unpaid labor—often in a space or culture that is foreign to them, all the while struggling with financial insecurity. And although most universities provide resources to graduate students for events and other activities, those resources are frequently less than what’s needed.
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Overwhelmed and underfunded, it is to no surprise that many students aren’t interested in taking on a leadership role to help create and maintain a sense of community. Yet it takes student leadership to transform a student body into a community. And in our many communications with other grad students, we’ve found that they definitely want more of a sense of community and camaraderie.
A healthy partnership between the university and its graduate student organizations is key to successfully creating a sense of community for students. Based on our own experiences as student organizers, we would like to provide some recommendations to both institutions and grad students on how to approach community-building efforts.
Advice for Institutions
Intentional events for students are a good way to build and maintain communities, but it takes an organized and detailed planning process to create a good event and ensure momentum for future ones. That can be a lot for grad student organizations to handle, so institutions should offer more training and support—including leadership development, access to space and funding for activities.
Leadership development. Student leaders should receive adequate training and professional development. Marketing, event planning, communications, developing a culture of engagement—these are all skills that grad students don’t have equally and could all benefit from learning. A series of workshop on internal communication, conflict management, work-life balance and advocacy would also be helpful for the success of a student-run effort to build a community organization.
Depending on the structure of the graduate school and the connections between different departments, one way to create and maintain community among grad students may be to keep it small. A larger institution could help train department-based units about how to enhance grad students’ sense of community within their disciplines and keep an updated list of all organizations open to graduate students.
Access to space. Graduate students should have a reliable and easy access to spaces on the campus to study, work on their research, host writing camps, practice interviews, network or just relax between classes. It is hard to feel a sense of belonging when there isn’t a place you can comfortably occupy.
Funding. More direct financial support from the institution or departments for programming for grad students—as well as compensation for student leaders who step up—is also greatly needed. When institutions provide such resources, it goes a long way toward helping students feel appreciated and valued. Also, student leaders cannot sustain themselves with just the experience and network they might develop from their role. They simply can’t focus on the future if the now is neglected.
Advice for Student Leaders
If you are a student leader hoping to create community among grad students, we suggest you aim to provide the following.
Connections, options and inclusion. No one time will be perfect for everyone, but you should be aware of class schedules and other conflicts as much as you can when planning your events. Connect with other graduate student organizations to know when they’re planning their events to occur so you aren’t competing for attendees. In addition, consider offering multiple sessions of the same event to give people options.
You should also have at least a rough idea at the beginning of the semester about what types of events you want to host, what events should be offered on different days to capture the most attendees and what can be done once or should be repeated or rotated with other events.
We also recommend sending out a survey at the beginning of the semester or academic year to all graduate students—from those in their first year to the most seasoned—to help you identify students’ interests and what would be most helpful and useful to them. Surveying students will also help you create an inclusive culture early on by providing information about the various backgrounds of students and their particular needs. The outreach should be intentional and include graduate students from different backgrounds who have different focuses and are seeking different degrees.
Balanced event types. Plan a variety of programs. Students may need professional development help, such as creating CVs, polishing up interviewing skills, or learning how to network at a conference. They may also need a safe space from such pressures. Create boundaries and allow no job talk at some social events to help maintain work-life balance and avoid burnout.
Incentives and encouragements. As an organizer, you know your event is exciting and people should attend. But that might not be clear to your potential participants, who often need to be encouraged to come to programs created for them. Catering food, providing local restaurant gift cards as giveaways or distributing silly and fun items (that are not offensive or insensitive) can help increase interest and involvement, especially during a financially difficult time.
Another way to draw grad students can be to explain the benefits of community engagement to them early on. Remind them that while academic development opportunities are vital, they should not let them completely overshadow the importance of relationships with others. Also, encourage more students to help with the planning process by highlighting how much it can be a leadership-development opportunity. Explain that it will be a chance for them to develop transferable skills that they will need in most, if not all, occupations. Holding yourself and your peers accountable for managing conflict and communicating to a diverse audience—these are skills you can learn and practice by being in a student leadership position.
Discouragement to encouragement. You’ll experience times when you’re excited about your event and have done all you can but the turnout isn’t as good as expected. It will be discouraging, but it’s helpful to remember the limitations we as students must work within. At our universities, we must compete for spaces, funding and other resources, which all take time and energy.
And while it can perhaps be easy to come up with an idea for an event, making that event successful and well attended is a different story. It takes an organized and detailed planning process, marketing, content development, intentional assessment, a lot of luck and more to have a good event and create momentum for future ones.
If you feel an event misses the mark, remember that leadership is more than just a title; it is also the willingness to learn and listen. Perfection is a hoax, so view each event and interaction as a lesson for improvement. It is good to reflect, and it is healthy to move on and apply what you’ve learned in the future.
Communicate and Collaborate
Perhaps the most important advice we want to share is that students and universities need to collaborate. Creating community and a sense of belonging is a huge task that should not simply fall solely on graduate student leaders’ or staff members’ shoulders. We encourage both parties to take the initiative to start conversations with each other about the roles they can and should play. Our hope is that such communication and collaboration will lead to a greater focus on wellness and retention for graduate students, as opposed to just admission and enrollment.
Ryan S. C. Wong is a Ph.D. student in the sociology department at Loyola University Chicago.Bayleigh Smith is the project coordinator for the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University.
Approaching AI as an opportunity, rather than a threat to academic honesty or job security, doesn’t mean ignoring the threats or vulnerabilities altogether.
hirun/iStock/Getty Images Plus
ChatGPT dropped like a bomb last November, sending educators—and students—scrambling to understand its utility and shortcomings.
The reactions from college faculty varied. Some embraced it. Some forbade it. Others took a wait-and-see approach. We don’t yet know the extent to which ChatGPT will change how we learn and work. Nor can we predict what other technologies and factors will shape education or industry going forward. But we don’t have the luxury of waiting for answers.
As educators, we have a responsibility to prepare our students for a world in which ChatGPT and its competitors are widespread. To do that, we need to teach them how to use it expertly and creatively—incorporating it into their learning in ways that will make them better critical thinkers and problem solvers. This means thinking beyond guardrails like cheat-proof assignments and digging into AI’s real power to increase the skill sets and employability of our graduates. Approaching AI as an opportunity rather than a threat to academic honesty or job security can be a helpful framing. That doesn’t mean ignoring the threats or vulnerabilities altogether. But our energy is better spent, and we ultimately serve our students better, when we accept the realities of AI—including the fact that some people will use it to cheat—and focus on ways students and faculty can reap benefits from its application.
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Here are three approaches at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business.
Teach the tool
Pam Bourjaily, associate professor of instruction in accounting, was quick to incorporate ChatGPT into writing assignments last spring. She required students to use the technology to complete writing prompts. She then asked them to revise the draft, giving them the option of doing it on their own or using ChatGPT. Most students chose to rewrite the text on their own. When talking with students about why they chose this method, she realized students weren’t using ChatGPT to its full potential, because they didn’t know how to do so.
This fall, she has added instructional time to teach students how to create effective prompts that generate quality writing, thus increasing their efficiency and the tool’s results.
Using ChatGPT “out of the box” doesn’t give great results. But improving the quality of inputs—including specific instruction on whom the intended audience is, what the audience should learn or feel from reading the piece, and how the writing should be structured—can start to introduce students to the full capabilities of the technology and can produce quality writing more efficiently than traditional methods.
Enhance traditional ways of teaching
Carl Follmer, director of the Frank Business Communications Center, introduced AI to enhance group problem-solving and decision-making in his M.B.A. course. He observed that when students are assigned to play devil’s advocate, they tend not to want to risk their social capital with their peers by pushing back on decisions the team is making. As a result, he has started assigning the contrarian role to an AI bot.
The goal is to create some pushback to encourage students to think through problems, and their solutions, from additional perspectives. Ultimately, this is exactly what good instruction should do. And we know the related skill sets we are building—thinking differently and creatively—are among those employers want in new graduates.
Collect data in real time
The combined use of ChatGPT with data and feedback is also informing how and when we introduce new instructional strategies. In addition to end-of-semester surveys, we’re collecting data as we see what works and what doesn’t. Some of this data analysis is done in real time, with the help of ChatGPT, so that faculty can adapt their methods in real time.
For example, a professor may ask students to share their top three takeaways from a lecture. Using ChatGPT, the professor can immediately sort and summarize the students’ responses to see what content is resonating and what concepts they need to clarify or spend more time on in future lectures.
We owe it to our students to explore the potential of ChatGPT and adapt as it adapts. There are risks associated with implementing any technology-based change. And there are also risks associated with missed opportunities to make our instruction stronger and arm our students with both the knowledge to use AI effectively today and the resiliency to adjust to technology’s changing application in the future.
Amy Kristof-Brown is professor of management and entrepreneurship and dean of the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business.
Remember the old quip “The easiest way to turn C students into A students is to admit them to graduate school”? In most of doctoral programs I am familiar with, grades range from A to B, with a B tantamount to an undergraduate D.
Three recent articles in The New York Times brought that old wisecrack to mind. One, entitled “Do Schools Need to Do More to Hold Students Accountable?,” claimed that snowplow parents and bad school policies have rendered grades meaningless and made it nearly impossible for low-performing students to fail. Some districts reportedly don’t allow teachers to give a score of less than 50 percent on any assignment—even in cases of plagiarism or student absence.
A second article, on grade inflation, is entitled “If Everyone Gets an A, No One Gets an A.” It notes that an “A is now the most popular high school grade in America,” and that in 2016, “some 47 percent of high school students graduated with grades in the A range.”
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The third article, entitled “New SAT Data Highlights the Deep Inequality at the Heart of American Education,” examined the correlation between SAT scores and family income. It dismissed the standardized college admission exam as a wealth test, noting that nearly a third (31 percent) of students in the top 1 percent of family incomes scored 1300 or more, compared to just 2.4 percent in the bottom quintile.
Testing and grades are ideal clickbait. They’re highly charged topics but far less likely to prompt readers to drop their subscriptions than coverage of conflict in the Middle East.
If you look at the readers’ comments, you’ll be struck by how starkly polarized the opinions are. Some readers condemn what they consider a flight from accountability:
“When, as so many elite publications assure us, objective reality is a ‘colonial idea,’ and ‘truth’ is a ‘social construction,’ it is logical for students and parents to expect nonobjective grades.”
Others take a diametrically opposed point of view, dismissing grading and testing altogether:
“The dirty secret about grades is they are (and always have been) a ridiculously inconsistent, subjective and vague metric for how a student is doing … Grades serve no bearing whatsoever on developing students who are capable problem solvers and empathetic citizens.”
Debates over grading and standardized testing aren’t new, but they are colored today by two issues that were less prominent in the past. The first is equity—whether grading practices or standardized testing perpetuate or exacerbate inequalities. The second involves students’ self-image and mental health—whether grading and testing demoralize, dishearten, discourage, depress and deflate.
There are many arguments advanced against letter grades. That:
Grades fail to provide the specific feedback students need to improve.
Grades reduce learning to a competition.
Grades boil down a range of skills, effort and achievement into a single letter or number.
Grades prioritize extrinsic motivation (i.e., working for a grade) over intrinsic motivation (i.e., genuine interest or love of learning)
Grades deter students from pursuing topics or subjects from taking risks or pursuing creative endeavors if they fear these efforts won’t result in a high grade.
The pressure to achieve high grades is a significant source of stress and anxiety for students.
Grading is often inconsistent and can be subjective and reflect an instructor’s conscious or unconscious biases.
Standardized college admissions tests prompt similar arguments. That:
The tests’ validity in predicting college success is in dispute.
In addition to correlating with socioeconomic status, test scores tend to reflect the quality of the school, classmates and teachers that a student encountered.
The tests emphasize certain skills at the expense of other attributes like, creativity, leadership or grit.
High stakes tests induce significant stress and anxiety among students, which not only affects their performance, obscures their true abilities and negatively affects their mental health.
Standardized tests reduce students to a number and fail to take account of the unique talents, experiences and attributes that might be more effectively captured through essays, interviews and letters of recommendation.
You are I are well familiar with the arguments for and against letter grades and standardized college admissions tests. So we might well ask, how can we best evaluate students if we are to rely less on tests and grades? Are there ways that we can fairly evaluate student performance and learning, while providing our undergraduates with the kinds of motivation and feedback that they need?
It can be done, but it will require us to rethink the design of our classes and the pedagogy that we use.
The answer lies, first, in adopting a competency approach that makes demonstrated mastery of essential knowledge and skills central to course design.
Second, we need to place a greater emphasis on the learning process and on growth than is the case in most existing courses.
Third, our classes need to provide students with more formative and constructive feedback and greater opportunities for self-reflection.
Here are 10 steps that you’ll need to take.
Spell out fine-grained learning objectives. Use the principles of backward design to construct your courses. Identify in granular terms the knowledge and skills you expect your students to master. Then devise the activities that will help students acquire those skills and knowledge and the assessments that you will use to determine students’ level of mastery.
Adopt a multipronged assessment strategy. Give students multiple ways to demonstrate their understanding and skills. These might include low-stakes quizzes, but also presentations, projects or practical applications.
Incorporate authentic and performance-based assessments in your classes. Authentic assessments require students to apply their knowledge and skills in meaningful real-world contexts. Examples might include an essay abstract, a background paper, a discussion starter, an event analysis, a grant or project proposal, a job application, a legal brief, a literature review, an op-ed essay, a policy brief, a position paper, a draft of a speech, or a sample recommendation.
Have your students collaboratively create grading rubrics. A rubric—spelling out clearly defined criteria for evaluating an assignment on various levels of proficiency or achievement—might be for a paper, a presentation or a project. There is no better way for students to recognize that the grading process is not arbitrary.
Integrate frequent low-stakes activities and assessments into your classes. Make learning active. These activities might include having your students introduce a class session, lead a discussion, participate in a debate and wrap up the session. Other activities might entail annotating a document, an artwork or a photograph or film clip, mapping a concept or visualizing data or causation, or creating an infographic, a photo essay, a podcast or a digital story.
Make writing a more integral part of your classes. Have students write an abstract of an article, evaluate an exhibition or performance, compare and contrast two or more arguments, enter a debate, or formulate a thesis.
Have your students evaluate an essay, a presentation or a project. Give students opportunities to comment on papers, pointing out strengths as well as weaknesses. Make sure that they pay attention to what’s most important: an essay’s focus, argument, arrangement and development of ideas, use of evidence and handling of counterarguments.
Encourage metacognition. To promote self-reflection and make students more responsible for their own learning, have students record and evaluate their own learning journey. Ask them to keep a journal in which they discuss and evaluate their own work and progress.
Make growth an explicit element. At the start of the course, outline the specific skills and knowledge that students will acquire over the course of the semester. Tier activities and assignments so that they build upon earlier classwork. Consider integrating skills building workshops at various points in the semester.
Ensure that students receive lots of constructive feedback. Enhance student learning with timely, specific and constructive feedback that focuses on how performance can be improved. That feedback should take multiple forms. It might include frequent low-stakes formative assessments such as quizzes, as well as peer and instructor feedback. You might consider workshopping student papers. You might also consider gamifying feedback, for example, by identifying several areas of strength and an area for improvement or using points on various metrics as a way to provide feedback or establishing criteria for the levels of mastery that students might meet.
As I read New York Times readers’ comments, one particular sentence stood out. In a comment decrying the supposed decline in academic rigor, the reader wrote, “It is of course part of, one dimension of, the sissification of American childhood.” The notion that overprotective and indulgent adults are coddling fragile or spoiled young people is quite widespread.
The idea that young people are fragile, delicate and vulnerable creatures is a relatively new concept. It’s certainly a far cry from how I was introduced to graduate school, when my adviser pointed out the window and said, “There’s the library. See you in four years.”
Certainly, contemporary society is more aware of mental health concerns that were once hidden, dismissed or undiagnosed. Also, many young people feel greater academic and social pressures than their predecessors, and that stress has certainly contributed to higher rates of anxiety and depression. At the same time, social media, by exposing the young to carefully curated images of seemingly happy and successful peers, appears to have increased feelings of inadequacy, jealousy and loneliness. There’s also reason to think that for some young adults, overprotective parents gave them fewer opportunities to develop resilience and as a result, they’re ill equipped to handle failures or challenges.
But as I have tried to suggest, it is possible to hold high academic standards and make students responsible and accountable for their own learning. Instructional design is the key. Shifting to a competency-based model isn’t easy. But it’s well worth the effort.
Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
A recent study shows that using multiple measures to decide whether students belong in remedial coursework, as opposed to standard placement exams, results in more students taking and succeeding in college-level English and math courses.
The findings are outlined in a new brief and working paper released by the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness, a research center focused on developmental education reforms. The center was created by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College and MDRC, an education and social policy research organization.
The study, a follow-up to earlier research, tracked nearly 13,000 students who enrolled at seven community colleges in the State University of New York system in the fall 2016, spring 2017 and fall 2017 semesters. Some of the students were placed in English and math courses based on the colleges’ existing placement system, while others underwent an algorithmic multiple-measure assessment, a formula that considers a broader range of factors, in addition to or instead of placement tests, such as high school GPAs and the time since high school graduation. The goal of using multiple measures, a reform increasingly adopted by colleges across the country over the last decade, is to give students a better chance of being placed in courses that earn them college credit.
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The study tracked students’ academic outcomes for nine terms after their placement tests, through spring 2021, including their enrollment and completion rates in college-level English and math courses and attainment of college-level credit. The data were disaggregated by race and ethnicity, gender, and whether students received Pell Grants, federal financial aid for low-income students. Researchers also took an extra-close look at students who would have had a different placement had they not been assessed using multiple measures.
Elizabeth Kopko, a senior research associate at the CCRC and an author of the working paper, said the study findings suggest that multiple-measure assessment strategies aren’t necessarily more accurate than placement tests at predicting which students are ready for college-level courses, but they improve the likelihood that students will succeed in these courses simply by ensuring more students have access to them.
“Just increasing access alone is the most important thing to help propel or improve student success,” she said.
Students assessed using multiple measures were placed and enrolled in college-level English and math courses at markedly higher rates than their peers who went through the usual placement process. These students were 18 percent more likely to be placed in college-level math and 73 percent more likely to be placed in college-level English. These students also had higher completion rates, earning at least a passing grade, in English courses across all nine terms, according to the working paper. In college-level math courses, these students initially had higher rates of completion, but completion gains weren’t statistically significant after the first term.
Meanwhile, students who otherwise would have been in developmental courses but were “bumped up” to college-level courses by the multiple-measures assessment had notably better outcomes than their peers, while those who otherwise would have been in college-level courses but were “bumped down” by the assessment fared worse.
Students put in college-level courses because of multiple measures were about nine percentage points more likely than similar students placed using the standard process to complete college-level math or English courses by the ninth term. Students bumped up to college-level English specifically were two percentage points more likely than their peers to earn a credential or transfer to a four-year university in that time period. In contrast, students bumped down to developmental courses were five to six percentage points less likely than their peers to complete college-level math or English.
Kopko noted that if multiple-measure assessments determined preparedness for college-level courses with more accuracy than placement tests, students bumped down to developmental education by the new method would complete college-level math and English at higher rates over the long run, bolstered by the extra academic preparation these courses are intended to provide.
But “the extra support offered through developmental education courses is not helping these students do any better than their peers who don’t get that extra support and are placed directly into college-level [courses]. And in fact, it’s quite the opposite … They’re actually doing worse,” she said.
Alexandra Logue, a research professor at the Center for Advanced Study in Education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York system, said the stakes are high for students placed in remedial coursework when they could succeed in credit-bearing courses. Extra courses for no credit cost them extra time and tuition dollars and lessen their academic momentum.
“You’re making the degree more distant in time, and that is demotivating,” she said. For low-income and first-generation students or students with childcare responsibilities, “the longer it takes for you to get from starting college to finishing college, the more likely it is that things are going to get in the way. Things are going to happen in your life that make it very difficult or impossible for you to finish.”
Logue said she wished the study also examined outcomes for students in corequisite education, extra academic support intended to help underprepared students succeed in college-level courses, an offering that’s grown more popular at community colleges since the study started in 2016. But she praised the research for furthering knowledge on multiple-measures assessments and their advantages for students.
But multiple-measures assessments also weren’t a silver bullet, according to the working paper. The study found that the more varied placement process improved outcomes across student subgroups, but it didn’t close equity gaps between them.
“We generally find that there’s no change in the outcome gaps that pre-existed,” Kopko said. That might be “discouraging” at first glance, but “it’s important to take a step back and realize MMA was never intended to do anything of the sort. It really was a reform that was meant to impact the full student body,” so alone, it’s not enough. “We need to take into consideration the needs of certain populations, and we can’t just cross our fingers and hope that a universal reform is going to do what we want it to do with regard to equity.”
Hollie Daniels, a research associate at the CCRC and one of the paper’s authors, said for that reason, these assessments should be designed with equity in mind and paired with other kinds of supports that aren’t a “one-time intervention,” such as intrusive advising, tutoring or corequisite supports. She added that those designing these assessments should also be mindful not to set placement test score cutoffs or GPA requirements too high to give as many students the opportunity to take college-level coursework as possible.
The brief offered a series of recommendations for community college leaders. It suggested colleges place students in college-level courses whenever possible so more of them have access to these courses earlier and are more likely to complete and that they start by implementing “easy-to-adopt” multiple-measures assessment processes that don’t risk unnecessarily lowering students’ placements, among other suggestions.
Multiple-measures assessment doesn’t necessarily “decrease long-standing inequities, but it can be just one piece of a larger tool kit that helps to address some inequities that we see in higher education,” Daniels said.
Nearly 220,000 students will gain eligibility for the Pell Grant, a key tool for helping low-income students access college, when the federal government finalizes revisions to the system for applying for financial aid later this year, according to a new report from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
The increase in Pell-eligible students could mean more than $617 million in additional federal aid going to students and colleges. About $29.8 billion was available for students in Pell Grant funding in 2023–24, according to federal budget documents.
The report precedes the highly anticipated overhaul of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and the underlying formula that determines how aid is disbursed, which are both scheduled to be released by the U.S. Department of Education in December. The report examines the impact the revamp will have not only on Pell Grant eligibility but also on anticipated out-of-pocket costs for students in specific states, higher ed sectors and demographic groups.
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Under the new FAFSA, students will not only have fewer questions to answer, they also will likely be eligible for more federal aid. Combined with changes in awards for previously Pell-eligible students, the net increase of total Pell aid is expected to be approximately $7.85 billion, an increase of about 25 percent over the current spending level, according to the report.
Experts say the alterations to FAFSA are significant and will have wide-reaching consequences for higher education. Several reports over the last few years have sought to document how the formula shifts would influence students’ out-of-pocket payments.
But the SHEEO report is the first to assess the impact of those changes at the state level, said Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO and author of the report. Burns used existing FAFSA data to model how students’ eligibility will differ under the Student Aid Index, or SAI—the new formula for determining how much a student is expected to pay for tuition and how much they should receive in aid—and how it compares to the previous Expected Family Contribution formula.
“We’ve been looking for the past two years at who are the winners and losers. And over all, certainly, there’s a lot more winners … So that’s a great thing,” Frank Ballmann, director of federal relations of the National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs, said of the new FAFSA. His organization partnered with SHEEO to produce the report.
However, there will also be students who see an increase in their out-of-pocket costs. Of those students, about 56,600 are currently Pell eligible but are anticipated to lose their eligibility under the new model, according to the report.
Ballmann and others do worry about possible unintended consequences of the federal aid reforms. The new formula won’t account for the strain on families with more than one person in college, who previously received additional aid. It will also include the net worth of small family businesses and farms owned by students’ parents in the calculation of aid eligibility.
“In some cases, they might be students from well-to-do families, and that’s not terrible,” Ballmann said. “But there’s several cases where a family might have to choose which child gets to go to college … It’s already challenging enough as a rural student to find the place to go to college, because lots of people live in what we call educational deserts. If this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back in terms of rural students being able to go to college, that would be a tragedy.”
While SHEEO’s predictions are intended to help state higher education agencies plan for the new FAFSA, Burns notes that the report is “preliminary and speculative,” as full effects of the change won’t be clear until at least the 2024–25 school year.
State-by-State Variations
The report predicts that in general students will be expected to pay less out of pocket because the formula is more generous over all. While Pell Grants may make up a large portion of the expected aid, many students will still have unmet financial need that is expected to be met with grants and other financial aid at the state level. According to SHEEO, the effect of the new SAI formula on individual state grants will vary depending on the structure of the programs.
In first-dollar programs—where state awards are granted prior to accounting for any other forms of aid received—students with lower SAIs will be eligible for more state aid, regardless of how much their Pell Grant increases.
In last-dollar programs—which award grants after accounting for other forms of aid—students could receive more state aid, but the extent will vary. Last-dollar programs are the most common, but changes to the programs will also be the most challenging to predict, the report says. While research suggests a decrease in SAI, which could require states to fund a larger sum of aid, the increase in Pell Grants could end up “crowding out” students’ eligibility for state grants.
“States’ grants will be the last resort for students to fill in the gaps in unmet financial need after federal aid is accounted for … and we expect that they may need to fill even larger gaps than they filled before,” Burns said. She added, “We should also keep in mind that Pell Grant awards may increase for many students, which could absorb some of this unmet financial need and reduce the need for expanded state grants.”
State-level changes will also vary based on whether state education departments and lawmakers modify their local aid programs.
“It is possible that some states will not be able to expand their state grant program budgets significantly, or at all, and will have to make decisions about which students are eligible and how much they are eligible to receive,” Burns said.
Eligibility for state-based aid could also shift due to the way distribution of state-level grants is often directly connected to data from FAFSA. As Pell eligibility increases, the number of students who qualify for state programs modeled on Pell is expected to increase as well.
North Carolina, for example, developed a consolidated state grant program. It guarantees students state and federal aid if their familyhas an adjusted gross income at or below $80,000 and anticipated out-of-pocket costs under $7,500. The number of students eligible for state funding is anticipated to increase by approximately 7 percent.
“Our Legislature passed roughly close to $180 million available for our public colleges and universities,” to fund financial aid in 2024–25, said Kathy Hastings, interim deputy director of communications at the North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority. Students who qualify are “guaranteed a base level of support of $3,000 per year for a community college and $5,000 a year for a [University of North Carolina system] four-year institution. And then those students who need more will get more support.”
The report also says students in the state are expected to receive a further $106 million in Pell Grant awards.
“On the whole, almost every student will receive more in total aid, however, because our formula works to guarantee a certain amount of total aid, some students will see a shift in the split between state and federal funds,” Hastings said. “There are a small number of students that, due to the federal changes in the SAI calculations compared to EFC, would lose funds over all.”
The state’s Education Assistance Authority is providing one-time funds to public institutions to help out in these instances, she added.
Other states highlighted in the report include New Jersey, where the average out-of-pocket cost is anticipated to be roughly $3,000 lower under the new formula, and Kentucky, where Pell Grant awards are estimated to increase by a more modest $500. The report does not include representative data for all 50 states.
A life and biomedical sciences journal ousted its editor in chief after he posted on social media about the Israel-Hamas war—including sharing an article from The Onion, a satirical news site.
“I have been informed that I am being replaced as the Editor in Chief of @eLife for retweeting a @TheOnion piece that calls out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians,” Michael Eisen, the now-former editor, wrote on X Monday.
Eisen, a genetics and development professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is Jewish, didn’t return Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment.
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The controversy has included scholars announcing resignations from eLife roles over Eisen’s comments—and resignations over his ouster.
eLife, an open-access journal, emailed Inside Higher Ed a statement Tuesday rather than provide a requested interview about the decision. The United Kingdom–based organization said its governing board, which is “distinct from the staff and editors,” made the call to replace Eisen.
“We thank Mike Eisen for his creativity and vision in building eLife’s transformative new publishing model,” the statement said. “Mike has been given clear feedback from the board that his approach to leadership, communication and social media has at key times been detrimental to the cohesion of the community we are trying to build and hence to eLife’s mission. It is against this background that a further incidence of this behavior has contributed to the board’s decision.”
The statement said eLife’s board is made up of representatives of eLife’s founding funders—the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Germany-based Max Planck Society and the London-based charity Wellcome—and “independent board members.”
The headline of the Oct. 13 Onion article Eisen shared was “Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas.”
“Instead of issuing a full-throated denunciation of the violent attacks by Hamas that have left over 1,300 Israelis dead, one dying woman holding her 6-year-old son who had just been killed in a bombing is said to have doubled down by telling her child she loved him,” the article said. “At press time, the Israeli Defense Forces [sic] Twitter account underscored the massive surge of contempt they were contending with by posting a video that featured the shocking savagery of a Palestinian corpse that refused to condemn Hamas even when kicked.”
Eisen reposted a link to the article on X that same day, adding, “The Onion speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together. I wish there were a @TheOnion university.”
That repost, formerly called a quote tweet when X was still called Twitter, had racked up over 4,700 likes and 900 reposts as of Tuesday evening.
Multiple X users criticized Eisen’s post, including scholars in Israel. One was Karina Yaniv, the Enid Barden and Aharon J. Jade Professorial Chair in Vascular Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
“It is with lots of moral clarity that I’ve just resigned from my role as reviewing editor in eLife,” Yaniv tweeted Oct. 14. “Prefer to dedicate my volunteering time to groups whose ‘courage, insight and moral clarity’ are now speaking up for babies, kids and women kidnapped by Hamas #Hamas_is_ISIS.”
In an email to Inside Higher Ed, Yaniv wrote, “I have more important things to do with my volunteer time than contributing to a project led by someone whose judgment and sensitivity I cannot fully trust. I believe that comments hurting others’ feelings or that can be perceived as a threat to particular groups, cannot be part of the lexicon of someone in such a position of power.”
She wrote that she doesn’t “have a stance on whether eLife should or should not replace the EIC [editor in chief]; this request is not reflected in any of my previous statements and it is for them to decide. I can only decide for myself, based on my principles and moral clarity, where I stand.”
An American academic, Dion Dickman, associate professor in the University of Southern California’s department of neurobiology, also tweeted Oct. 14 that he was resigning from eLife’s editorial board.
“This is a time for moral clarity and leadership amidst all the pain,” Dickman tweeted. He told Inside Higher Ed he didn’t have further comment.
Eisen explained his views in further posts on X.
“Every sane person on Earth is horrified and traumatized by what Hamas did and wants it to never happen again,” he posted Oct. 14. “All the more so as a Jew with Israeli family. But I am also horrified by the collective punishment already being meted out on Gazans, and the worse that is about to come.”
Eisen had tweeted about Israel before. Critics shared one post from 2018, in which he just wrote, “Fuck Israel.”
On Oct. 14, eLife tweeted that it “condemns the atrocities committed by Hamas” and that editorial board members’ opinions are “covered by our code of conduct.”
“We take breaches of this seriously and investigate accordingly,” it tweeted.
The journal didn’t say what part of the code of conduct Eisen allegedly violated. An online version of the code says it “applies to all eLife staff, editors and early-career advisors—when acting with or on behalf of eLife.” It includes under “Examples of unacceptable behavior” a reference to “Trolling, insulting or derogatory comments, profanities and personal attacks.” It also links to a separate social media policy.
Lara Urban, a principal investigator at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, said she resigned Monday from her eLife editor and early-career adviser positions in response to Eisen’s ouster. She had been trying to stop the firing.
“It should have been very important to listen to the early-career advisory group as people who might bring in very different perspectives to the mainly white, Western society–based leadership and Board of Directors,” Urban said. Yet, she said, she learned about Eisen’s firing from X.
Urban said a “sort of internet mob” and “cyber inquisition” made eLife investigate something that should never have been investigated. She said Eisen’s ouster was an irrational attack on his freedom of speech from an organization that has historically tried to make “access to science more equitable.”
“It can even happen at such an organization,” she said, adding, “we have to avoid these sorts of things in the future.”
I have written several times in the past about how disruption is the enemy of learning and how one of the first principles of course design should be to cushion against possible disruption, for example by making sure that if circumstances require that some portion of the course material be skipped, the subsequent experiences aren’t additionally compromised, allowing one disruption to cascade over the rest of the semester.[1]
Until the other day, however, I hadn’t properly considered that there is an inverse corollary to that rule, that maximizing consistency and continuity beyond the baseline provides an active boost to learning.
Essentially, the deeper relationships forged through more time together allowed for teachers to more effectively gear their instruction and support to the individual student. This quantitative finding makes sense at the qualitative level. The more you know about someone, and the stronger relationship you have with them, the better able you are to contextualize specific acts. If you know a student is generally conscientious but is struggling with a new concept, rather than suspecting they may not be doing their work, you can zero in on other causes.
Many instructors have had students who thrived in a class ask if they’re teaching anything else they could take. This is students seeking out this benefit within the structures available to them. I recall this happening to me as a graduate student when I was teaching developmental English (a pass-fail course) where a student who had failed purposefully signed up for my section next semester under the theory that I would best be able to track their progress. The thought hadn’t occurred to me.
The student passed the second time around.
For the years I taught in the communication department at Virginia Tech, I saw the benefit of enhanced consistency and continuity firsthand. I was instructor for a two-semester course (CommSkills) that was essentially first-year writing the first semester and college research and public speaking the second semester. Having the same students over two semesters allowed for much deeper engagement at an individual level. By the second semester, I knew these students and could tell when something was off. I could refer to something we had covered months earlier as a shared reference, and students also were much more likely to seek out aid and support (of all stripes) from each other.
I recall one student who was struggling and was considering plagiarizing as a solution to a time-crunch issue, but instead of making that bad mistake, they had the confidence that coming and talking to me about their problems would be a better choice. (It was.)
After my first year, the instructors for the course also became the academic advisers for any communication majors in the course, extending that relationship even beyond the first year, continuing up until the student chose an emphasis in the department and was assigned to senior faculty. The cohort of instructors was largely consistent as well, with very little turnover. I’d probably still be there if we hadn’t come to Tech for my wife’s three-year residency rather than my career.
At the College of Charleston, I had a chance to teach as part of a first-year “learning community” where all the students in my first-year writing course were also enrolled in the same section of Intro Biology. This was a great help, particularly for students who had entered school with a science degree in their plans (usually premed) but were having other ideas once they got their feet wet in college. Imagine, too, if the same students who persisted in biology could then also take an advanced writing course with me, how quickly they could hit the ground running.
At the Times, Grant observes how in K-12 education, the practice of “looping” teachers so they have the same students more than once doesn’t cost a dime, which is true. While it’s not covered in the article, my guess is that it may be a benefit to teachers as well, giving them the opportunity to experience a change of pace while also moving through these predictable loops.
The challenge in higher ed is greater for a number of reasons. As Timothy Burke observes on Substack, the contingent nature of so much academic labor is perhaps the biggest hurdle. Having a large class of laborers who have no idea if they’re going to be employed year to year and who are primarily used to absorb the burden of courses senior faculty don’t want to teach is not a great way to establish continuity and consistency.
In fact, it’s a recipe for disruption, as the students who I worked with found out when they tried to track me down for recommendation letters only to find that I was no longer employed.
As Burke says, institutions make a big rhetorical fuss about being communities, but how many of them take substantive actions that build communities around learning? Honors colleges seem to fit the bill in some cases, but why are these opportunities reserved for elite students when they would benefit everyone?
The research is very promising, and as with K-12, in terms of dollars, it wouldn’t cost higher ed institutions a penny to give students more opportunities to loop.
What’s stopping us from doing it?
[1] This principle is part of what led me to frame teaching writing as the development of the writer’s “practice,” the skills, knowledge, attitudes and habits of mind of writers. If I make sure everything is oriented around developing some aspect of the practice—rather than trying to run students through a lockstep sequence—and if something is missed or omitted, the subsequent learning can still continue. This helps also for students who may have different strengths or weaknesses or who may not be progressing as quickly as others. Everyone can still be developing their practices.
Christmas szn is back, baby! Well, nearly. With the days getting alarmingly colder and shorter, the festive holiday is right around the corner and this year we are pledging to celebrate Christmas bigger and better than ever before because we could really do with some of that Christmas cheer. And where better to do it than in the capital?
London comes alive in the run-up to Christmas. Each winter, the capital is alight with magical light displays, sparkling bauble-adorned shop-fronts, tons of festive attractions and enough mulled wine to fill the Thames.
And because we’re so excited about it, we’ve compiled a handy selection of all the festivities London has to offer; from afternoon tea to ice-skating and every festive happening in between.
Despite the cost of living crises rumbling on, there are plenty of ways to ring in the festive period on a shoestring budget (with plenty of free festive activities thrown in too), so you can celebrate Christmas in all its glory, whether you’re flying solo, looking for group activities or need something fun to do with the kids, whatever your budget this year.
Here are the best Christmas things to do in London this year:
Available until 2 January, 2024, Claridge’s Festive Afternoon Tea includes delights such as salmon, lemon and dill finger sandwiches, black forest Christmas tree pudding, a gingerbread tart and Claridge’s Christmas pudding with brandy sauce.
Feeling the festive cheer already for 2023, Browns Covent Garden is the place to dine this December. From it’s £45 three-course festive menu, including maple and cinnamon glazed pork belly and salted caramel profiteroles, to its festive afternoon tea and gluten-free menus, there’s something for everyone. It’s also open for dining on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve to prolong the Christmas spirit.
Relax and enjoy an irresistible assortment of delicately crafted sandwiches, warm baked scones and deliciously Christmassy sweet treats that will be served in the hotel’s beautiful Hyde Café, accompanied by a selection of the finest Camellia’s Tea House teas and fizz.
Hotel Café Royal is the magical place to experience Christmas and New Year right in the heart of London by Regent Street, Piccadilly Circus and the brilliant light displays. The Grade II listed Oscar Wilde Lounge will also be serving up a decadent and musical Festive Afternoon Tea, complete with award-winning patisseries and a live pianist. Throughout the festive holiday the hotel will also be hosting an array of family-friendly activities in its Children’s Club to keep the little ones entertained, from cookie decorating to bauble making.
The Ritz’s iconic Christmas Afternoon Tea is making a return for 2023 from the 18 November until the 1 January. Seatings will take place every two hours from 11.30am to 7.30pm each day, with every adult receiving a glass of Ritz champagne on arrival and every child receiving a Ritz teddy bear. If you book on Christmas Day, you’ll be lucky enough to get a visit from Father Christmas himself.
Reese Witherspoon and her Hello Sunshine media company hosted its inaugural Shine Away event on Saturday, featuring a number of conversations with Witherspoon’s A-list friends and collaborators.
The event, held in downtown Los Angeles, welcomed hundreds of ticketed guests to hear from participants including Jennifer Garner, Mindy Kaling, Tracee Ellis Ross, Allyson Felix, The Home Edit’s Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, Eve Rodsky, Hannah Bronfman, Cheryl Strayed and an afternoon performance by Dove Cameron.
Fortune Feimster kicked off the day with a short standup set, followed by Witherspoon taking the stage to discuss her journey to launching Hello Sunshine in 2016. She recalled how few women-centered stories she was seeing at the time, despite women consuming two to three times more media than men.
“After I did a whole lot of soul searching and a lot of complaining to anyone who would listen, namely my mother, I realized what so many people in this room have realized, is that if you want to fix a problem, you have to be part of the solution. I would like to also point out women are always part of the solution,” she said, noting, “We’ve had enough of people telling our stories for us. One of the biggest rules in my family is you get to tell your own news, and a version of that in Hello Sunshine terms is women get to tell their own stories.”
The star also commented on holding the event amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, saying, “I am a mom first before anything, and watching the Jewish lives that have been lost, the Palestinian lives that have been lost, it’s just devastating. And I don’t profess to be any sort of expert on war or conflict in the Middle East so I’m not going to speak about that, but I do want you to know that for my team and myself, our hearts are broken and we just want to close our eyes and just send love and light to everyone who is suffering right now in the world.”
To start off the day of programming, Witherspoon joined Garner and Kaling for a panel conversation moderated by AT&T chief marketing officer Kellyn Smith Kenny. The group was not able to specifically talk about their past projects due to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, but spoke about their entrepreneurial and philanthropic work outside of acting, as well as their friendship.
Witherspoon recalled reaching out to Kaling about working together after reading her book Why Not Me?, and getting close to Garner after connecting over a children’s charity.
“These two women are two of the first people that I called when I did Hello Sunshine. I was like, ‘Will you work with me, how can we work together?’ I pitched Mindy 17 podcasts that we still never did. I was like, ‘What about this one where we just a watch a rom-com and drink wine? Is that a podcast or is that like a Friday night?’” Witherspoon joked. “And of course I called Jen every time I’d read a great book like, ‘Do you want to star in this? OK, but Jen,’ I’m like, ‘I want to be protecting your time with your kids because I know you’re going through a lot right now and this is a lot so is this a good one or not?’ It was just about the excitement of being able to work with my very dearest friends, too.”
For her part, Garner remembered “going through a very public, very hard moment in my life; [Witherspoon] was right there, and the way I needed to get through it was dance cardio and I dance cardio’d so hard we broke her foot but she kept going.” Kaling recalled working with Witherspoon on a movie where she floated the idea of having children by herself as a single woman, and Witherspoon told her to do it.
“That’s a scary thing to embark on and sometimes you need that person. I think we see Reese as an entertainer, she’s obviously so funny and so talented, but as a friend, the person who can tell you tough things and you believe her because you’ve been through so much and you’re incredibly open about it,” Kaling said. Garner also spoke about Hollywood actresses uniting for meetings at Witherspoon’s house during the Time’s Up movement: “It was the first time I’d ever sat down with that many actresses in the same room that we weren’t like passing each other at an awards show in big dresses, where we just sat. We’d been siloed off; the one place that doesn’t happen, the place that started the change where that no longer can happen, is Hello Sunshine.”
Witherspoon also discussed her approach to choosing her projects, saying she came to a realization that, “I’m not meant to be doing dark, heavy, intense, horror, gore, darkness movies. People like to see me do light movies, and I was like, OK. It doesn’t put you in the cool kids club a lot but I don’t care, I don’t want to be in the cool kids club. I want to make optimistic stuff that makes girls excited to be women in this world, because it is a wonderful thing to be a woman in this world.” Kaling teased that “B.J. Novak says it’s not a Mindy Kaling show unless there’s a man running shirtless in slow motion. And you know what, I’ve been so used to the male gaze my entire life that yes, I will look at a handsome torso. And I want to provide that for you.”
Later in the program, Witherspoon sat down for a fireside chat with Ross, after the two also became close during the Time’s Up movement. Ross spoke about her decade-long journey to launch her hair product company, Pattern Beauty, and how she finds balance in her life outside of business and her acting career.
“When you are single and don’t have kids, you really have to be conscious about curating what you want around you when you want to be happy, or you’ll just stay in your house or you’ll just spend your whole time working — neither works,” Ross said. “I don’t look for balance because I think it’s impossible, but I look for harmony. So it’s a sense of how the waves move: sometimes they’re big, sometimes they’re small. Sometimes there’s more work, sometimes there’s less.”
Witherspoon admitted she’s been trying hard to find balance outside of work, explaining, “I’m a person who fills my schedule with busyness so that I feel less alone or less nervous or less unsettled, like work has always been my bomb. And I started to realize that isn’t going to work for me; about a year ago I was like, ‘I was a robot and the robot broke.’”
The star said she texted Ross at this time and realized that amid all her work and family duties, “it’s really important to remember that you have to be the glue that holds yourself together,” adding that at the time, “I didn’t feel like I was taking very good care of myself and I wasn’t asking other people for help.”
The Shine Away event was put on in partnership with AT&T and also welcomed Lindsey Vonn, Kerri Walsh Jennings, and authors Curtis Sittenfeld, Jasmine Guillory and Laura Dave.
Everyone in academia seems to have an opinion on artificial intelligence, but Yike Guo is more qualified than most to speak about it.
The professor and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) provost has been researching AI for the better part of three decades. This spring, when other universities banned the use of ChatGPT, he oversaw its adoption at his institution, encouraging lecturers to work the tool into their lesson plans.
“Weeks after HKUST adopted its policy, I was writing to others,” he said, adding that a consensus soon emerged among Hong Kong universities that ChatGPT should not be blocked.
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Despite some early concerns, Guo said, there hasn’t been any “pushback” to the technology per se, with professors able to decide whether—and how much—to use the technology in their courses.
“We take a liberal view—if you feel that in your class you’re not sure whether you should use it … that’s your choice.”
Still, he said that concerns over cheating and misuse have “faded away” as the use of ChatGPT has become widespread at the institution.
The big challenge for teachers is to make their test questions more difficult so they cannot easily be answered by AI—and lecturers are already adapting, Guo said. “There seems to be a common understanding that this technology is useful.”
But this acknowledgment underplays the sizable shift the tool has brought about in mere months. Already, many of HKUST’s teachers are using ChatGPT to prepare for their classes, alongside traditional textbooks. Meanwhile, students are writing their essays with its help—something that most professors allow.
HKUST’s business school was an early adopter, scrapping essay-style exam questions in favor of more “debate” testing students’ reasoning.
Guo said in the “hard-core sciences” especially, ChatGPT has earned fans.
“Our physics department loves it … it’s a really good way to deepen students’ understanding,” he said. “They’re always asking fundamental questions.”
While a machine cannot answer these, it can provide learners with a wealth of useful knowledge and equations—ingredients toward answering difficult theoretical questions.
While HKUST hasn’t begun using AI in other areas—such as student recruitment—Guo thinks the technology is ready to be put in place elsewhere, for instance when hiring senior staff. Seasoned academics have published dozens of papers, and ChatGPT could save time by summarizing these for a panel, for example.
Guo believes testing and recruitment are just the tip of the iceberg. Today, ChatGPT is essentially an “interactive search engine,” a more “evolved” form of Google, but still a machine that spits back answers to relatively simple questions, he explained.
That is changing fast. Guo predicts that in just a couple years’ time, ChatGPT will become an intellectual sparring partner for academics, forever changing the way research is done.
“We want it not only to answer questions, but also ask them,” he said. “Then, it becomes dialogue. You tell it, ‘I have chest pain’; it should ask you, ‘Do you have other problems?’ That kind of system is coming.”
Although machines are still weak at judgment, at evaluating options and making a reasoned decision—something that has been developed in humans over millions of years of evolution—the day AI has a form of “common sense” is “not far away,” with enormous potential for scholars, he said.
“Machines are not enough now,” but in the future, they will turn the scientific process on its head, he said.
“If you start to make an assumption, a hypothesis … you could propose a view and the machine has a view. This kind of learning process becomes possible.”
AI will also get better at validation—checking itself, second-guessing its own assumptions and explaining why it took a certain route to its logical endpoint. This capacity will make it far more “human compatible,” as will its ability to acknowledge room for error, he believed.
“Sometimes it has to tell you, ‘It’s my guess. I’m not quite sure.’”
But for this partnership of minds—human and AI—to take place, people will also have to change.
Scientists must be prepared to “reverse engineer” their mind-set, Guo said.
“In a big way, our tools have expanded and the way of thinking has changed,” he said. “In the past, if we designed a new material, we would do trial and error. In AI, you define a property and then use the machine to generate the material you want with this property.”
But for many students, using ChatGPT is already ingrained. HKUST offers AI as an add-on to its majors. Next year, it will phase AI into its common core curriculum, alongside bread-and-butter subjects such as math and English.
Gone are the days when AI was seen as the villain in education, he believes.
“In Hong Kong, nobody’s talking about [ChatGPT as] the bandit anymore,” Guo said, and universities elsewhere are also beginning to follow suit.
“It’s just like the day we had the search engine come along. It’s certainly becoming more and more acceptable.”
Universities in China, Hong Kong, India and Singapore are supporting interdisciplinary science better than higher education institutions in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, according to a new report from Schmidt Science Fellows and Times Higher Education. (Disclaimer: Times Higher Education owns Inside Higher Ed but has no editorial oversight.)
The report highlights a gap between the interdisciplinary goals of many major scientific research institutions in the West and the actualization of those goals, which results in the continued siloing of major fields of scientific research.
“By adopting interdisciplinary approaches, which harness the skills and techniques from a broad range of science subjects, universities will be able to significantly innovate, enabling them to make breakthrough discoveries to help solve the world’s biggest challenges,” said Duncan Ross, THE’s chief data officer. “[But] for universities to address [interdisciplinary science rankings], far more importance needs to be placed on evidencing what they are doing.”
India scored especially high in its support for interdisciplinary research, both in the number of publications and in institutional and administrative support.
Higher education is still reeling from the Supreme Court decision in June that ended affirmative action.
While affirmative action has often been discussed in the context of exclusive universities—like Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—the Supreme Court decision that bans colleges from systematically considering race in admissions impacts the entire sector. From community colleges to public flagship universities to selective private institutions, all institutions of higher education have to navigate a new reality that threatens to exacerbate long-standing racial inequities that undermine the value of higher education.
Even before this summer’s ruling, higher education has often saddled students of color with insurmountable debt that they struggle to pay off their entire working lives. Three months after the end of affirmative action, higher education is in an even worse place when it comes to advancing racial equity. Colleges and universities have lost access to the tool they most relied on—albeit too often ineffectively—to increase racial diversity on their campuses. While exclusive universities grapple with new ways to recruit, admit and, ultimately, support students of color, one group of institutions has been particularly left out of the affirmative action conversation: community colleges.
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Community colleges serve roughly 40 percent of all Black undergraduate students and more than 50 percent of all Latino/a undergraduate students. Despite this, there has not been enough discussion on how community college enrollment trends, admission practices and student outcomes will change as a result of the end of affirmative action. As open-access institutions, community colleges do not deny applicants. But, with the end of affirmative action and other threats to DEI initiatives on college campuses, many community colleges worry their own recruitment and enrollment practices may trigger unwanted oversight from policy makers who seek to reduce efforts to advance racial equity in higher education.
Even more worrisome, community college transfer pathways to four-year universities are directly impacted by the end of affirmative action. While researchers estimate that 80 percent of community college students intend to transfer to a four-year university, in 2015, only 25 percent of community college students actually transferred to a four-year university within five years of starting college. This alarmingly low transfer rate was further exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the end of affirmative action threatens to make community college transfers even more challenging, as many successful community college transfer pathways were designed to specifically promote access to four-year universities for first-generation students, students of color and students from low-income backgrounds. Desirée Anderson, the dean of equity and inclusion at Prairie State College, expressed how the end of affirmative action will negatively impact her college’s ability to help students transfer by sharing in a conversation:
“We’ll see the biggest impact [from the end of affirmative action] in the transfer process. The lack of race-conscious admissions policies within four-year universities diminish opportunities for our students … a lot of our [previous] transfer opportunities were designed to create pathways for first-generation students, students of color and other students historically excluded from higher education … and those opportunities are going away. That transfer pipeline is now a hurdle.”
This grim reality will force community colleges to create new pathways to help their students transfer to four-year universities and achieve their academic goals in accordance with the new reality facing higher education admissions. While Anderson acknowledged that community colleges like Prairie State will need to create new transfer pipelines, she also shared that community colleges will need to find creative solutions to help their students transfer.
This could include helping students prepare stronger applications, providing students with deeper guidance on the four-year university landscape and building new partnerships with four-year institutions, as community colleges cannot rely on the pathways they’d previously established. This creates sizable obstacles for community colleges, but also an important opportunity to create new methods to help students succeed. And while this may sound daunting to community college leaders, particularly given the many battles community colleges have faced since the onset of the pandemic, this may jolt community colleges into action to address a critical problem facing the entire higher education ecosystem.
While community colleges navigate an unprecedented road ahead, they are well positioned to help more students than ever access higher education. The end of affirmative action will make it more challenging for students of color—particularly those from low-income backgrounds—to enroll in four-year universities. This means that community colleges will need to play an even more important role in expanding access to higher education. If community colleges seize this opportunity to re-evaluate their entire approach to transfer pathways, student success and completion, they could be better positioned than ever to expand their impact and meet their mission. Let’s hope colleges take on this challenge—and, importantly, state and federal governments provide them with the necessary resources to do so.
New York State is doubling down on artificial intelligence research, investing $20 million to be split between the University at Albany and the State University of New York, Governor Kathy Hochul announced Monday.
UAlbany’s portion of the funds will go toward its IBM partnership, to form the Center for Emerging Artificial Intelligence Systems. The center aims to boost the tech talent pipeline and attract companies to the state.
It is the next phase of a planned $200 million investment in AI, which University at Albany president Havidán Rodriguez described last month. The university has already hired 27 AI-focused faculty, including an AI institute director, following a $75 million investment from the state.
The new investment will also go toward building an “AI research group” for SUNY. The 60-member group will focus on SUNY’s AI research, policy, education and workforce development efforts.
“New Yorkers have a constant ambition to place ourselves at the vanguard of what’s driving change and offer opportunities no one else can,” Hochul said in a statement. “AI is fundamentally changing the world we live in, and New York doesn’t just want to get in at the ground floor—we want to set the standard in AI development. With this investment and the creation of the SUNY AI Research Group, we are centering AI within education so we can incubate and foster a brilliant future for New York.”
Several years ago, in my “Managing Yourself and Leading Others” executive program, one of the participants, Sharon, shared a story about managing someone with a style different from hers.
Sharon’s organization had an open office format with long tables, arrayed in rows, where people worked side by side (and back-to-back). Sharon’s right-hand person, the one she relied on most for helping her evaluate ideas, was in the row and seat right behind Sharon. When Sharon had an idea, she turned around to tell this employee and get their insights. This employee would often give Sharon their initial thoughts on the idea and then, several minutes later, come back to Sharon with further, more refined thoughts and insights.
After a while, Sharon, who is an extrovert, realized her thinking partner was an introvert and, knowing that introverts like to think about an idea before discussing it, changed her approach. From that point forward, when Sharon had something to discuss, she would send them a text, mentioning the idea and asking if they could talk about it a few moments later. This gave her introverted employee more time to think through the idea, including pros and cons, and their discussions became both richer, more nuanced and more effective.
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As Sharon finished her story, another person raised their hand to comment: “Why did you do that? You’re the boss and they work for you—they should adapt to your style.”
And that’s when Sharon said the most important part of her story: “No, my job as a leader is to get the best out of people. In this case, it was a small adjustment on my part that had a big impact on this employee, their effectiveness and our results.”
It was a great reminder for all of us in the room.
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