Tag: Events

Three-year bachelor’s degrees are coming to Brigham Young University–Idaho and affiliated Ensign College next year, following approval of the truncated programs by an accrediting body.

By eliminating electives, BYU-Idaho will bring five three-year programs online in April: applied business management, family and human services, software development, applied health, and professional studies. Ensign will offer two such programs: communication and information technology. Both institutions are owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and operated by the Church Educational System.

The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities approved the seven programs—each of which requires between 90 and 94 credit hours instead of the standard 120—at its June meeting and sent a formal approval letter late last month.

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Now BYU-Idaho and Ensign College are advancing a rare concept in the higher education world. The two institutions are the first among a dozen participants in a three-year degree pilot program to win accreditor approval, sparking hope for other colleges that intend to bring similar proposals before their respective accreditors at some point in the future.

From Concept to (Virtual) Classroom

Interest in three-year bachelor’s degrees has existed in some form since at least 2009, when Newsweek ran a cover story focused on the idea. The story featured Robert Zemsky, longtime University of Pennsylvania professor and architect of the idea. But despite some initial hype, the degree never took off; Zemsky told Inside Higher Ed in April that accreditors were resistant.

But Zemsky never gave up on the idea. He later partnered with Lori Carrell, chancellor of the University of Minnesota at Rochester, and recruited various colleges to develop a pilot in which each designed its own three-year degree program. BYU-Idaho and Ensign College will become the first to take the program from concept to classroom next year.

While many colleges market three-year degrees, such offerings usually involve condensing the timeline rather than shrinking the number of credit hours. Most bachelor’s degrees still require 120 credit hours, with rare exceptions, including a handful of programs available at Western Governors University (also accredited by NWCCU) that range between 97 and 110 credit hours.

BYU-Idaho and Ensign College have been considering three-year degrees for years.

Boyd Baggett, director of institutional effectiveness and accreditation at BYU-Idaho, said he has been following the conversation since 2009. When he read about recent efforts to launch a three-year degree, he reached out to Zemsky and Carrell, “and it was a perfect match,” he said.

Brian Ashton, president of BYU-Pathway Worldwide—which oversees online education offerings at BYU-Idaho and Ensign College—said that three-year degrees hold great potential. Students enrolled in the colleges that BYU-Pathway oversees are spread across 180-plus countries and tend to be working adults, often low income, with an average age of 33, Ashton said.

BYU-Pathway students earn certificates as they progress through their coursework, officials explained, which often helps them get jobs before they graduate. And as students acquire skills, they meet their learning outcomes well before hitting 120 hours.

In many programs, Baggett noted, students get the education they need in 90 credit hours.

“Then we found ourselves in this awkward situation of saying, ‘All right, you’ve completed everything that’s required for the degree, except you need another 30 credits roughly of whatever classes you want.’ And it seems so disingenuous, I think, to say that to this working father or working mother that’s trying to take care of their families and put food on the table,” Baggett said.

Condensing the length of the program saves students time and money. As Ashton noted, 30 hours can make the difference between a student finishing a degree or not.

Broader Implications

Earlier this year, representatives from a dozen colleges convened at Georgetown University to discuss their shared interest and individual efforts in launching three-year bachelor’s degrees.

The sessions, led by Zemsky and Carrell, featured updates on their efforts as well as broad discussions on program design and challenges. Since 2009, one of the most persistent obstacles has been how accreditors might view three-year degrees. And among the pilot group that met this spring, only one institution, New England College, had brought forth a proposal to its accreditor—which the New England Commission of Higher Education shot down.

NECHE had considered approval under its policy on innovation but ultimately determined that “graduates of 100-credit baccalaureate programs would not receive equivalent benefit” to those earning a 120-credit degree, according to a proposal summary shared with Inside Higher Ed.

Undeterred by that pilot’s denial, BYU-Idaho and Ensign submitted a proposal to NWCCU in April. After multiple rounds of questions, the accrediting body approved the programs at its June meeting and officially informed the colleges of the decision last month.

NWCCU president Sonny Ramaswamy said his organization has been following the conversation around three-year degrees closely as the concept has gained momentum. Initially, the accreditor was worried about approving a “watered-down” degree, Ramaswamy said. But NWCCU was relieved to find elements of the electives maintained in the three-year bachelor’s degree programs, even if the credit hours associated with such classes were cut.

Ramaswamy also said he did a deep dive into the origins of the 120-credit hour degree and found that it was rooted largely in the number of work hours required for faculty members. He also noted the commonality of three-year college degrees in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

Finally, after multiple rounds of questions, the organization approved the proposal, which emphasized measuring progress by learning outcomes—not a minimum number of credit hours.

Carrell told Inside Higher Ed that the approval of three-year bachelor’s degrees at BYU-Idaho and Ensign College is a major step forward for the movement. She and Zemsky are co-authoring a book on the subject and working with the pilot institutions, but she noted that they have not dictated the design; each institution is progressing at its own pace and building a program that suits its institutional needs and ambitions.

After the setback with New England College, the first approval is a positive sign, she said. Each accreditor upholds its own established standards, but she’s hopeful others will follow suit.

The key, said Carrell, is for colleges to be able to prove that students can learn the skills they need in three years through well-designed programs that ensure the learning outcomes required for a successful future.

“In the end, that’s what all of us care about. I hope that would be of interest to other accreditors and state agencies and anyone involved in the approval process. Let’s talk about how students are learning and how we’re going to demonstrate that learning is sufficient for a college degree,” Carrell said.

Edgar Quiroz Sanchez, a senior studying psychology and law, society and justice at the University of Washington at Seattle, has experienced new-student orientation from multiple perspectives. Today, he works as an orientation coordinator in the campus’s first-year programs office. Previously, he led orientation sessions. And in 2020, in the early months of COVID-19, he was a first-year student participating in a rapidly reimagined, all-online orientation.

Sanchez’s personal orientation experience may not have been what he expected, but he says it was still impactful—especially his time with his small-group orientation leader, then a student at the university.

“Just having that conversation with an actual student, I was able to ask him all the questions I had,” Sanchez recalls. “I feel like a lot of my anxieties were lessened.”

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Beyond connecting with current and other incoming students, Sanchez’s own orientation accomplished several important things. Among them: he signed up for a first-year interest group, a cohort of incoming students who take certain classes together during their first quarter. He also met with an adviser in the university’s minority affairs and diversity office, who answered questions about his financial aid package and about being a first-generation student.

With help from an academic adviser and his orientation leader, Sanchez registered for classes as well.

“It made me feel very prepared academically.”

But what’s the primary function of orientation in Sanchez’s view? Building community, whatever that looks like to the individual student.

“That’s the No. 1 thing, just feeling support in general.”

How do Sanchez’s insights and experiences compare with other students’? According to the newest Student Voice survey from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse, 29 percent of the 2,802 undergraduate respondents who attended some form of orientation rate their experience as excellent, and 44 percent rate it as good. The experience was fair for 21 percent and poor for 5 percent.

Modality Matters

Various factors drive orientation satisfaction. One is orientation modality, with more students seeming to prefer in-person orientations than virtual ones—with some qualifications. That is, among four-year students (n=2,289) who attended new-student orientation in person, 80 percent rate their experience excellent or good. But just 55 percent of four-year students who attended virtual orientations rate them as excellent or good. Meanwhile, among two-year college students (n=504), 86 percent rate both their virtual and their in-person experiences favorably.

Krista Soria, an assistant professor of leadership and counseling at the University of Idaho who has researched new-student orientations, says these and other findings suggest a “one-orientation-type-fits-all” won’t be effective across campuses. Students’ expectations and needs surrounding orientation may differ, highlighting the importance of assessing incoming students on these issues, she adds.

The vast majority of students in the survey, which had a total of 3,000 respondents from 170 colleges and universities, attended on-site or online orientations. But some 307 students attended hybrid orientations involving in-person and virtual components, which two-thirds of students rate favorably.

Smaller numbers of students attended a variety of specialized orientation experiences, and generally they rate them highly. Close to 100 respondents attended summer bridge programs or pre-orientation programs, such as those that involved living on campus for several days prior to the main orientation, and 86 percent of these students rated the experience as excellent or good, for example.

Orientation at the University of Washington at Seattle has been virtual since COVID-19, but the campus is reintroducing an in-person component this year. Courtney Saben, associate director or advising and orientation for first-year programs, says that all-online orientation formats increase access, since no one is required to travel to campus during, say, June or July to attend sessions.

At the same time, she says, there’s some demand among students and especially campus offices to reintroduce an on-site orientation element. So in addition to asynchronous and synchronous online orientation phases, the university will offer a one-day, in-person orientation next month, just prior to the start of classes.

What Orientation Should Cover

Student Voice survey data indicate that four-year college students value academic and social information and experiences equally. Asked what topics orientation should include, these students rank both social events and information about academic support highly. Similarly, students cite community-building efforts and information about academic expectations as top priorities.

Two-year college students tend to prioritize academic information over more social experiences, however. Just about a third of community college students each say it’s important that orientation include social events to meet other students and that it highlight extracurricular opportunities.

That said, there are some gaps between students’ top priorities for orientation and what students say they got out of their own orientation experiences.

Some findings:

• Three in five students say orientation helped them feel connected to their campus, while one in five feels strongly that orientation did not help them feel connected to their campus.
• Nearly half of students (44 percent) say that orientation helped them feel more comfortable accessing resources for students, but rates were lower among community college students (32 percent) and nonwhite students (37 percent, versus 51 percent of white students).
• Two in five students over all agree that orientation helped them feel more prepared for college, but rates were again lower than this for community college students and nonwhite students.
• A quarter of students say that orientation helped them make friends, but a slightly larger share (29 percent) feel strongly that orientation did not help them make friends. Four-year students who attended virtual orientations were especially dissatisfied on this point, with 47 percent of them saying the experience did not help them make friends (compared to 17 percent of two-year college students who attended online orientations).

About half of students say orientation familiarized them with campus facilities and layout, such as dining, housing and fitness services. This jumps to 62 percent when excluding students who only had a virtual orientation (n=1,725). Still, 44 percent of the virtual orientation group say their online experience helped them understand campus layouts and facilities.

About two in five students in the full sample of orientation attendees say their experience helped them gain knowledge of academic supports, academic expectations, their college’s online portals and campus apps. About the same share say orientation helped them register for classes.

Just three in 10 students each say orientation was successful in helping them connect with other students, familiarizing them with extracurricular opportunities and connecting them with campus staff they could turn to for help. Connecting with other students jumped to four in 10 when those attending a virtual-only orientation are filtered out, but the other two results stay about the same.

Crucial to mental health promotion efforts, 47 percent of students over all say it’s important for orientation to address mental health awareness. But just 25 percent of students say the orientation they attended familiarized them with mental health resources. This outcome was especially low for students who attended virtual orientations (15 percent) and highest for students who attended specialized experiences, such as a summer bridge program (35 percent).

Improving Orientation

A second, related insight from Soria from the University of Idaho: institutions may want to consider customizing orientation experiences based on individual students’ needs and expectations—something like a “choose-your-own orientation adventure.” It’s potentially challenging to organize, she adds, but “students who are looking for specific experiences in orientation will likely be more satisfied with the outcomes.”

Sanchez, the student coordinator at UW Seattle, agrees that students are seeking some degree of “autonomy” in their orientation experiences. This year, for instance, the university is offering a series of 10-plus student-led workshops that incoming students can choose to attend—on top of required programs. Workshop topics include living on campus or off and how curved grading works.

“I know that as a new student, I would have really loved to have been able to get exposed to that,” Sanchez says of curved grading, in particular.

Asked how they would improve orientation on their campuses, students in write-in comments suggest they want more practical knowledge up front, in addition to more structured activities for meeting peers and making friends.

Some examples:

“If I was in charge of orientation, I would definitely focus more on familiarizing students with the campus (like how to get [from] one place [to] another). One time when I had a meeting with my adviser, I was having trouble finding the building where we were supposed to meet, so much so that I was wandering on the street for twenty minutes lol. I think the campus tour should’ve been at the beginning of orientation and not the end.” —Student at a public university in Texas

“More activities for students to connect and get to know each other. After the general tour and group activities, students were let go to do whatever they want, but students such as myself didn’t have anyone to hang with so I spent the rest of the day by myself. I would hope to make more activities for students who want to find connections.” —Student at a public university in Illinois

“I would try to have students connect with each other more and show them how to use Canvas and other apps that are required. I would also explain more about how to register for classes rather than spend so much time learning songs and cheers.” —Student at a public university in Florida

Both Sanchez and Saben argue that the key to a successful orientation program is staying responsive to students’ changing needs. Sanchez adds, “We tell our orientation leaders that our program is not set in stone, and we will change things from one day to the other if something doesn’t work.”

What more would you like to know about our orientation findings? Submit your questions and suggestions here.

The U.S. Department of Education has given Florida SouthWestern State College approval to seek a new accreditor, setting in motion a state plan that will require its 40 public institutions to move away from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges.

Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, attributed the approval to a lawsuit the state brought in June challenging the Department of Education and the accrediting system. In his telling, the federal government blinked.

“The Biden Administration backed down & allowed a Florida college to seek new accreditation. We will continue to fight to protect our nation-leading higher education system. The federal government can’t use shadowy accreditors to dictate what’s best for our students,” DeSantis posted on X (formerly Twitter) last week, after Florida SouthWestern received approval to seek a new accreditor.

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The Department of Education, however, said such requests simply take time to approve: “We began the review process once we received notification from Florida SouthWestern State College in January of this year. This is an iterative process that involves engaging with schools to obtain necessary information. We concluded this process this month,” an Education Department spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Regardless of whether the federal agency bowed to pressure or the months of review were due to the slow-grinding gears of bureaucracy (the agency remains short-staffed), the process of changing accreditors will now begin for Florida SouthWestern. And with a state law passed last year requiring all of Florida’s public colleges and universities to change accreditors every 10 years, whether they want to or not, the former two-year college in Fort Myers is the first domino to fall in what appears to be a massive migration on the horizon from SACS to other accrediting bodies.

The Background

When Republican state senator Manny Diaz Jr., now Florida’s education commissioner, crafted a bill last year to require state institutions to change accreditors every decade, he said, “A different perspective from a different regional accreditor would be helpful to our universities.”

The proposal was immediately met with suspicions that it was politically motivated, coming after SACS raised concerns about Richard Corcoran’s candidacy for the Florida State University presidency, while Corcoran was a member of the system’s Board of Governors, and the University of Florida’s plan to bar three professors from testifying on state voting rights restrictions. (Corcoran is now interim president of New College of Florida, and UF did allow the three professors to testify.)

The bill came on the heels of a 2020 change to federal regulations that eliminated the regional boundaries for accreditors, allowing colleges to join organizations beyond their physical location. Suddenly colleges could seek accreditors that might be a better fit, a move that seemed to appeal to Florida lawmakers when SACS raised questions about academic freedom. The changes also worried consumer advocates, who fretted that colleges might move not to seek a better fit but to find a more permissive accreditor.

Florida’s Accreditation Migration

Florida’s plan will see state colleges and universities switching accreditors in stages, beginning the process after their next fifth-year review or reaffirmation. According to the state’s lawsuit, more than half of the Florida’s public institutions will “change accreditors in the next two years.”

When Florida SouthWestern may begin its march away from SACS and to another accreditor is unclear. A Florida SouthWestern spokesperson said via email that the Department of Education notified the college on Aug. 18 that it could “pursue alternate institutional accreditation” and “the next steps are to review the application process and associated USDOE requirements related to changing our institutional accreditation.”

But Belle Wheelan, head of SACS, told Inside Higher Ed by email that she has “received no notification” from the Department of Education or the college itself on changing accrediting bodies.

For colleges and universities switching accreditors, there is a four-step process, as outlined at a Florida Board of Governors Meeting last August. First, institutions must receive approval from the Education Department to change accreditors—as Florida SouthWestern has done. After approval, colleges can apply to another accreditor but must maintain SACS accreditation. Once accepted by another accreditor, the college must notify the U.S. Department of Education. The final step is formal recognition from the federal agency on the accreditor change.

Florida’s 28 public two- and four-year colleges are overseen by the State Board of Education, while the 12-member State University System is under the Florida Board of Governors, but all 40 institutions will take part in a similar process when changing accrediting bodies, in accordance with the state law.

(The State Board of Education did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed. And spokesperson for the Higher Learning Commission, which may be the new accreditor of choice for many Florida institutions, said by email the application process is not public, offering little insight into where things stand for Florida’s public institutions.)

A Lengthy and Expensive Process

Much of the plan for switching accreditors remains unclear, but a few key details, including the target destination, were discussed in a presentation to Florida’s Board of Governors this month.

The desired landing place for Florida institutions appears to be HLC, the largest of the nation’s accrediting bodies with around 1,000 member institutions. Last year’s Board of Governors presentation also included financial projections with the cost of switching accreditors coming in at $11 to 13 million annually for its 12 universities. Maintaining accreditation is expected to cost around $250,000 a year. (Cost estimates were not provided in a similar presentation to the State Board of Education last August, which also placed the Higher Learning Commission atop a list of recommended accreditors.)

Experts note that accreditation processes are time- and labor-intensive, with heavy workloads for university staff members tasked with guiding institutions through the challenge of making the change from one organization to the other.

Paul Gaston III, an emeritus Trustees Professor at Kent State University who has written at length on accreditation, also questioned the merits of the lawsuit Florida filed against the Department of Education, particularly “the repeated claims that there is no accountability for accreditors.” Gaston suggested that this diminishes the role of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity in establishing standards for accreditors, which he said is quite demanding.

Gaston added that it is rare for colleges to change accreditors, due to the time and costs involved. “I haven’t seen a case made for changing accreditors on the basis of good governance,” he said.

Peter Ewell, president emeritus of National Center for Higher Education Management Systems and an expert on accreditation, says that changing accreditors will be a laborious process for staff members who must familiarize themselves with new standards.

“It’s definitely a burden that is essentially imposed on the institution,” Ewell said.

In addition to the application process for switching accreditors, colleges must also conduct a self-study and host a team from the potential accreditor. And regardless of the differences among accrediting bodies, experts note such organizations have lengthy and demanding processes.

Some accreditors, Gaston points out, have accelerated processes to welcome new members.

“The Higher Learning Commission, as of this summer, has what they are calling an accelerated process for the initial accreditation of institutions that are in good standing by a historically recognized regional accreditor,” Gaston said. “I expect to see others introduce a change like that.”

Ewell also notes that the Florida law that compels public institutions to change accreditors every 10 years hasn’t yet affected campuses like Florida State University or the University of Florida. And given the political power of the alumni base and the boards at both institutions, Ewell wonders if organized resistance at the strongest institutions could force a change to state law.

The real test case, he said, will be at Florida’s most prominent institutions.

“When you get to Florida State University or the University of Florida, there will probably be pushback. And it’s not clear to me that the sitting governor is going to win that one,” Ewell said. “That’s where the rubber is going to meet the road.”

Harvard University is reviewing an embattled business professor’s tenure for possible revocation.

Francesca Gino, a researcher of dishonesty, stands accused of manipulating data. Inside Higher Ed confirmed with Gino’s legal team Monday that the university sent her the tenure-review notice, but her legal team declined to share a copy of the full letter.

Harvard did not respond to requests for comment about its review of Gino’s tenure. Gino has been on administrative leave since at least June.

The Harvard Corporation, the university governing body, has the authority to revoke tenure, and can do so only for “grave misconduct or neglect of duty,” according to The New York Times. Harvard did not respond to a question asking if it has ever revoked a professor’s tenure before.

Earlier this month, Gino filed a defamation lawsuit against Harvard, the dean of its business school and three professors who write the blog Data Colada and used the platform to detail Gino’s alleged academic dishonesty. Gino is seeking apologies from the defendants and at least $25 million in damages.

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Who gets to claim alumni status at the University of Southern California and benefit from its powerful network?

For years, Brian Ralston, who earned a graduate certificate in music scoring for motion pictures and television from USC in 2002, thought he did.

After all, he’d attended a commencement ceremony wearing a hooded gown and cap just like the graduates of traditional master’s programs, and the university referred to his and other graduate certificate programs as a “degree” on its website. That “conferred degree from USC” was the only requirement for membership in the alumni association, according to an archived webpage from the early 2000s.

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And soon after graduating, Ralston received a letter from the alumni association’s associate vice president informing him that, as a graduate of USC, “you are now a member of the USC Alumni Association. Your membership is free, automatic and lasts forever!”

The membership, which Ralston had access to for many years, comes with numerous perks, including access to an exclusive online alumni directory containing contact information—searchable by name, degree, location, employment and involvement—for all USC alumni. It also gives graduates access to an online message board, where alumni post job and business opportunities, and a 10 percent discount at the campus bookstore, which sells pricey electronics.

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But in 2021, Ralston, who writes music for film and television, was talking to a colleague who graduated from the same certificate program and had tried, unsuccessfully, to use the alumni discount. They learned the university had updated its bylaws sometime in the 2010s—without notifying affected graduates—to no longer grant alumni status to graduate certificate holders who don’t otherwise have a traditional bachelor’s or graduate degree from USC.

“As such,” graduate certificate holders “are not entitled to various alumni benefits,” said Patrick E. Auerbach, USC’s associate senior vice president of alumni relations, in an email dated March 30, 2021.

“It was quite a shock,” Ralston said. “It felt like there was a promise and commitment made that they did not hold up.”

Ralston and his colleague were not the only ones whose alumni status was canceled without notice. Some 1,631 graduates of USC’s various certificate programs who graduated between 2000 and 2022 (and did not otherwise hold a traditional bachelor’s or graduate degree) also lost alumni status.

Ralston and the other affected graduates sent “a pre-suit demand letter” to USC on Feb. 23, 2022, “hoping to resolve this matter without litigation,” but USC did not restore their alumni status and benefits, according to the lawsuit.

The certificate holders filed a class action lawsuit against the USC Alumni Association and the university last year.

The dispute at USC comes at a time when certificate programs are ascendant at many colleges and universities—and one of the few areas of growth at a time of shrinking enrollment over all. The situation raises issues of whether colleges value some students and credentials less than others, even when those learners are paying tens of thousands of dollars for their educational experiences.

‘Have Its Cake and Eat It, Too’?

The complaint accuses USC and its alumni association of long-term false advertising and provides numerous pieces of evidence showing how the university “represented and advertised” that a graduate certificate “degree would include automatic lifetime membership in the USC Alumni Association with access to all Alumni Benefits.”

Those purported lifelong alumni benefits were major factors in Ralston’s decision to enroll in the certificate program back in 2001. He spent $26,356 on the one-year, full-time program, according to the complaint.

“A lot of people in the industry have gatekeepers,” Ralston said in an interview. But the USC alumni directory offers “more direct ways of communicating” with other USC graduates who have already found their footing in a particular field. “Being able to research potential collaborators and filmmakers who went to USC, especially during the times I went there, can be beneficial.”

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Ralston’s lawyers spent the past year negotiating a settlement with USC, and last week, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl accepted a filing for a settlement. A motion for preliminary approval of the proposed settlement is set for hearing on Oct. 11.

A USC spokesperson did not provide direct answers to questions about when and why the alumni association rescinded the memberships and instead pointed to the terms of the settlement, which is subject to court approval.

If the judge grants preliminary approval in October, Ralston and his co-plaintiffs would get their membership in the alumni association reinstated, and USC and its alumni association would have to pay up to $165,000 of the plaintiffs’ legal fees. The plaintiffs would also get a $50 coupon to the bookstore, which is enough to cover the price of a crewneck sweatshirt before taxes.

USC would also be required to correct its advertising to make clear what kind of benefits graduates of certificate programs can expect to receive, including whether they will become members of the alumni association upon graduation.

The university did not make clear if it intends to offer future graduate certificate holders alumni status.

Lizelle Brandt, the lead attorney representing Ralston and his co-plaintiffs, said she didn’t seek a higher-dollar settlement amount because “it was tough to quantify” the financial losses of losing alumni status.

She said one of the real values of settling this case is correcting USC’s attempt to “have its cake and eat it, too.”

The complaint details how USC stripped certificate program graduates of their alumni status while publicly claiming well-known certificate graduates—such as Ludwig Göransson, who won an Oscar for composing the score for the film Black Panther—as “alumni” online.

If USC’s graduate certificates “are going to be considered lesser programs because they want their alumni association to be exclusive, then why don’t they just create a USC extension?” Brandt said. She referred to the complaint’s comparison that both Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, grant certificates through extension schools and clearly indicate if graduates of those programs can expect to claim full alumni status.

“We’re guessing” USC doesn’t “because they still want to be able to charge full tuition,” Brandt said. But if USC discloses “that these are lesser programs and you won’t be part of this alumni association and have access to those benefits, would people still pay that same tuition instead of going to another certificate program somewhere else?”

According to the complaint, USC charged students enrolled in the scoring for motion pictures and television graduate certificate program (it has since been converted into a full-fledged master’s program) $49,464 for one year during the 2015–16 academic year. Full tuition that year for traditional undergraduate and graduate students was $49,464.

‘Messy Environment’

Certificate programs have been around for decades, but they have “become much more popular in terms of university offerings and student demand, and those two things are responding to each other,” said Sean R. Gallagher, a professor of educational policy at Northeastern University. “They’ve also become much more accessible due to the rise of online options over the last 25 years and especially the last 10 years.”

While there is some debate about their value, he noted that “the data seems to indicate that employers seem to very much value workers with higher education and people who have pursued graduate-level education or education beyond a bachelor’s.”

As many colleges and universities across the country grapple with a slide in overall enrollment, certificate programs are showing the strongest growth of any higher education sector, according to spring 2023 data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

But even as they gain popularity with students, the wide variation in selectivity, costs and services associated with certificate programs has created a “messy environment,” Gallagher said. “It’s really important for students to understand what they’re going to have access to … and that includes alumni networks.”

Lauren Rivera, a professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management whose research focuses on prestige in higher education, said, “For better or worse, many people look at the prestige of the school you attend as a reflection of your worth as a potential employee or member of society.”

As a result, universities “have a vested interest in preserving perceptions of their own status,” she said. Alumni groups, which are proven to boost entry into the job market, “also want to preserve their status to be able to convey to the world that they’re a rarefied group of people who are highly selected.”

And since “the notion of status is predicated on exclusion,” Rivera said, “it makes sense that USC would want to preserve the signaling power of their credential by, in some respects, gatekeeping who they do and don’t affiliate with.”

Hodges University, a small private nonprofit college in Florida, announced late Friday that it would stop enrolling students and close by the end of this academic year.

In a news release and a message to students on its home page, Hodges officials said that “due to financial challenges and declining enrollment numbers, we can no longer provide the quality educational programs that we have provided over the past 33 years.” 

Consultants and others who work with colleges on their finances have been predicting that numerous small colleges may announce closures late this summer and early in the fall as fall 2023 enrollment data come in.

The combination of suppressed enrollments, the expiration of federal recovery dollars that buttressed institutional budgets during the pandemic, and higher costs due to inflation may be too much for institutions on the edge, they’ve warned.

Officials at Hodges did not respond to requests from Inside Higher Ed for comment.

But publicly available documents from in the last few years suggest a set of developments that show a fairly typical pattern among enrollment-driven institutions: of a constant, and increasingly desperate, search for additional sources of revenue and financial lifelines.

Hodges, in Fort Myers, Fla., was founded in 1990 as International College but renamed after a private gift in 2007.

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Data that the college submitted to the U.S. Education Department before the pandemic showed it having more than 1,115 full-time-equivalent students in 2017-18. The college’s own data listed it as having a total of 638 enrolled students in 2021, with 338 on campus and 300 in online or self-paced programs.

The most recent data from the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics listed Hodges as having 443 students enrolled in 2022, offering credentials ranging from certificates to master’s degrees. That’s about a third as many as Hodges reported to the department for 2017-18.

A weekly newspaper in Naples, Fla., reported in 2021 that Hodges had bought a building in Naples in 2013 for $13 million, and transformed it into a science and technology building for the university’s campus there, about 40 miles to the south of its main campus in Fort Myers.

Another article in the Florida Weekly Naples Edition said that Hodges had sold the Naples campus to a local educational institution for $10 million. That suggests a sell-off of the institution’s assets to try to fund its core operation.

Hodges’ accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, placed the university on probation in December 2022 after a two-year monitoring period.

The accreditor’s disclosure statement said that it had placed Hodges on probation because the university fell short of its requirements and standards related to governing board characteristics and financial responsibility.

Last year, it began a new dental hygienist program, according to local news reports, in an apparent

Last year, it began a new dental hygienist program, according to local news reports, in an apparent—and ultimately unsuccessful, it seems—search for new students.

Hodges University, a small private nonprofit college in Florida, announced late Friday that it would stop enrolling degree-seeking students and close entirely by next August.  

In a news release and a message to students on its homepage, Hodges officials said that “due to financial challenges and declining enrollment numbers, we can no longer provide the quality educational programs that we have provided over the past 33 years.” 

Consultants and others who work with colleges on their finances have been predicting that numerous small colleges may announce closures late this summer and early in the fall as fall 2023 enrollment data come in.

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The combination of suppressed enrollments, the expiration of federal recovery dollars that buttressed institutional budgets during the pandemic and higher costs due to inflation may be too much for institutions on the edge, they’ve warned.

Hodges’s president, Charlene Wendel, who has been in the role only since last month, told the Fort Myers News-Press/Naples Daily News that the college had expected to enroll 76 new degree-seeking students this fall, but no longer will.

The institution will continue to enroll students in short-term programs such as English as a second language, and emergency medical technician training, but will otherwise focus on graduating “as many of our students as we can before closing,” she told the newspaper. Hodges will work with other institutions to help students transfer.

Wendel and other officials at Hodges did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment.

But publicly available documents from in the last few years suggest a set of developments that show a fairly typical pattern among enrollment-driven institutions: of a constant, and increasingly desperate, search for additional sources of revenue and financial lifelines.

Hodges, in Fort Myers, Fla., was founded in 1990 as International College but renamed after a private gift in 2007.

Data that the college submitted to the U.S. Education Department before the pandemic showed it having more than 1,115 full-time-equivalent students in 2017–18. The college’s own data listed it as having a total of 638 enrolled students in 2021, with 338 on campus and 300 in online or self-paced programs.

The most recent data from the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics listed Hodges as having 443 students enrolled in 2022, offering credentials ranging from certificates to master’s degrees. That’s about a third as many as Hodges reported to the department for 2017–18.

A weekly newspaper in Naples, Fla., reported in 2021 that Hodges had bought a building in Naples in 2013 for $13 million and transformed it into a science and technology building for the university’s campus there, about 40 miles to the south of its main campus in Fort Myers.

Another article in the Florida Weekly Naples edition said that Hodges had sold the Naples campus to a local educational institution for $10 million. That suggests a sell-off of the institution’s assets to try to fund its core operation.

Hodges’s accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, placed the university on probation in December 2022 after a two-year monitoring period.

The accreditor’s disclosure statement said it had placed Hodges on probation because the university fell short of its requirements and standards related to governing board characteristics and financial responsibility.

Last year, it began a new dental hygienist program, according to local news reports, in an apparent—and ultimately unsuccessful, it seems—search for new students.

Phyllis Curtis-Tweed, vice president for academic and student affairs at Bermuda College, has been appointed provost and vice president of academic affairs at Queensborough Community College, part of the City University of New York.

Jennifer J. Dugan, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pikeville, in Kentucky, has been chosen as provost at Muskingum University, in Ohio.

Kimberly Andrews Espy, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Texas at San Antonio, has been selected as president of Wayne State University, in Michigan.

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Glen McDonald, vice president of strategic initiatives and economic development at Gulf Coast State College, has been chosen as president there.

Ron K. Patterson, vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion and director of the Presidential Mentors Academy at the University of North Alabama, has been named president of Chadron State College, in Nebraska.

Milo Riverso, former president and CEO of STV Group Inc., an engineering firm in New York, has been appointed president of Manhattan College, also in New York.

Duke University graduate student workers have voted 1,000 to 131 to unionize, a huge reversal from a 2016–17 defeat.

The university said the new labor organization, representing more than 2,100 Ph.D. students with teaching or research appointments, will be the South’s first grad students’ union and Duke’s largest union.

Duke previously fought to stop this organization, but its provost said in a statement Tuesday that “We look forward to working with representatives from Southern Region Workers United on the shared goal of making the graduate experience at Duke the very best it can be.” The university didn’t return requests for further comment Wednesday.

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Matthew Thomas, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the English department, said the victorious Duke Graduate Students Union is affiliated with Southern Region Workers United and the Service Employees International Union. Thomas called it “sort of the product of a cumulative effort” of generations of Duke grad students who have moved on from the university.

Noting the lopsided vote margin, he said, “Having a strong mandate sets us up for success at the bargaining table, which we’re all very excited about moving in that direction.”

“We’re really proud of just being part of this larger union wave, but we’re especially proud of being an organizing force in the South,” he added.

Among the union’s demands will be at least a $40,000 annual stipend, up from $38,600, plus annual cost-of-living adjustments, Thomas said, alongside improved health-care support for grad students with dependents and third-party grievance procedures for gender- and race-based harassment and discrimination.

When I wrote a post asking about scholars studying the university as a workplace, the responses I received all pointed me to Kevin McClure. Kevin, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, is working on a book for Johns Hopkins University Press called The Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation.

Q: Tell us about the book you are writing. What are some of the themes you will explore?

A: The Caring University explores how we can reimagine the higher education workplace through the collective, proactive, ongoing pursuit of organization-level changes. The Great Resignation swept through higher education like wildfire, partly because colleges and universities have a poor track record of prioritizing employee well-being. This reputation for overlooking the employee experience was dry kindling for a higher education labor force whose pandemic experiences sparked new expectations of employers and workplaces. Workers are less willing to blame themselves for an inability to cope or rise above obstacles, instead feeling emboldened to ask how institutions are supporting them.

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The main argument of the book is that many of the problems of the higher education workplace are baked into the cultures and structures of colleges and universities at an organizational level. They reflect workplace norms around professionalism, values related to decision-making and beliefs about strategies worthy of investment. Problems become codified in the structures of organizations through policies and widely accepted practices that govern everyday working conditions, such as workload, hours, compensation, promotion and leave. If institutions are going to effectively serve students, meet contemporary and future challenges, and achieve lofty goals, they can’t lean on self-care or replacing disaffected employees. They need to address the cultures and structures that gave people reason to re-evaluate, resist and resign.

It is easy for books to proclaim the need for organizational change but harder to answer: Organizational change towards what? And how? In the book I detail and exemplify six organization-level changes that are designed to address both organizational cultures and structures: making the employee experience a strategic priority; creating working cultures and conditions for real (not ideal) workers; committing to professional growth and fair compensation; pursuing structural change for diversity, equity and inclusion; encouraging shared governance and collective action; and preparing leaders for the caring university. I draw on theories of organizational change in higher education to develop approaches under each of these changes that foster collaboration, build on existing expertise and promote organizational learning. And I make heavy use of narratives and examples so that it’s a research-based but readable resource.

The book’s central message for leaders isn’t “make employees happy or they’ll quit.” Rather, I show how paying attention to the employee experience, correcting problematic norms, investing in people and generally taking the well-being of staff and faculty seriously is the stuff of effective organizations. If you want to improve student success, demonstrate the value of higher education and unleash innovation, it all comes back to the conditions you set for employees.

Q: Where do scholars who study the university as a workplace congregate? What conferences do you attend, journals do you read and academic/professional associations do you participate in?

A: There is a strange belief that crops up from time to time that colleges and universities have not been subjected to scholarly analysis. This is simply untrue. A half century of organizational theory was built on the study of colleges and universities. Faculty from a wide array of disciplines have been studying academic culture for a century or more. The field of higher education and student affairs has almost single-handedly developed our understanding of the staff experience in higher education. This book is something of a love letter to my colleagues who have dedicated their lives to advancing our understanding of postsecondary education. It’s not an understatement to say the book wouldn’t exist without their labor.

If a reader wants to dive into this research, there’s no shortage of associations, journals and conferences. The Association for the Study of Higher Education, American Educational Research Association, Council for the Study of Community Colleges, ACPA-College Student Educators International and National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) are examples of national organizations. All of these operate scholarly journals that publish empirical research, including studies of the university as a workplace. Many of the “functional areas” of university life—from financial aid to fraternities and sororities and faculty development—also have their own associations, events and sometimes journals. I usually tell my students—and remind myself—that the likelihood that something in higher education hasn’t been studied is low. We may not always have definitive answers, but that’s life. We need to do our homework and read.

What I’m proposing here is that there is a lot of knowledge out there about higher education. Before a leader emails a consultant or reads Scott Galloway, they might poke around their own institution’s library or employee directory—chances are, they have in-house resources and experts. And the book tries to make the case that some of the changes to bring about the caring university are not new or radical. It’s often about taking stock of the strengths of organizations, empowering employees and putting into practice what we already know employees—and students—need.

Q: Where would you like to see other scholars who study the university as a workplace focus their research? What are some of the big questions around the intersection of higher education and employment that are getting too little scholarly attention?

A: Despite all the research I just noted, our data around higher education workers and their experience is fragmented and incomplete. Of the few national data sets on staff and faculty, most only provide a general picture of rank or salary. Some of the data is paywalled. Some of it uses outdated and exclusionary categories related to identities. Institutions don’t help much on this front. They often barely have enough staff to keep up with mandatory reporting. They might run an employee engagement survey every couple of years, but then some struggle to act on the data. When the Great Resignation hit higher education, many institutions didn’t have infrastructure in place to understand the employee experience. All that’s to say, there’s a space for improving data on higher education workers.

There are parts of the higher education labor force that haven’t been extensively studied. I’m thinking, in particular, about staff who aren’t in student affairs—they might be administrative support professionals or business managers or registrars. We’re talking about a lot of people who are central to the operations of colleges and universities whose voices are often overlooked. In my interviews with these staff members, I have repeatedly heard about the effects of budget cuts, downsizing, centralization and understaffing. An important question that’s emerged from these interviews is what level of staffing is sufficient in order to effectively—and humanely—run a college or university? My research points to many situations in which offices are simply too thinly staffed to meet expectations. It’s not good for students, it’s not good for institutional efficiency, it’s not good for risk management. There are ripple effects for organizational performance, and I’m not always sure leaders realize that.

Something I’m hoping to write about soon—and I welcome readers’ thoughts on this topic—is how to pursue organizational change from “middle management” positions. One of the most frequent questions I have received while doing this work goes something like this: “I’m a unit manager, and my supervisees are struggling. I’m trying to advocate for changes, but I’m hitting a wall with the leaders above me.” That wall might be barriers created by the organizational cultures and structures, or it might be a leader who just doesn’t see workplace problems because they’ve been privileged enough to avoid them. That’s a really frustrating space to be in, and I suspect that the inability to support supervisees and hitting that wall with leaders has pushed a number of talented emerging leaders away from higher education. Or it gives them reason to wonder if they want to advance into senior leadership, which is itself another big research topic that will need our attention.

In an effort to bring some semblance of order to this response, I’ll offer my perspective that I think our understanding of workplace problems in higher education is more developed than our sense of what strategies work or are worth exploring. In the book, I speak to both problems and solutions, but I often have to work much harder to find examples of good ideas in practice. There’s space for more detailed case studies of promising programs, evaluations of initiatives and analyses of leadership approaches. We need good ideas and we need platforms to amplify effective practices. One of my soapbox topics is that funders have demonstrated very little interest in financially supporting work focused on the well-being of staff and faculty.

There’s plenty of work to do, both in research and practice. There are many talented scholars and practitioners who are working hard to create a better higher education workplace. Hopefully, my book helps to shine a light on their contributions. But in many ways, the enthusiasm I saw from leaders about supporting employee well-being has waned. Change needs champions, and we’re going to need leaders and donors to step up and see how working conditions, organizational performance and outcomes are all intertwined.

A single shocking photograph can sway public opinion like nothing else.

A Buddhist monk calmly burning himself to death to protest the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government.

A 9-year-old girl, running naked and screaming in pain after a fiery napalm attack on her village.

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A stiff-armed South Vietnamese police chief about to shoot a bound Viet Cong prisoner in the head.

A 14-year-old screaming in agony as she kneels over a college student’s body, shot dead by a volley of gunfire from National Guardsmen.

These images are indelibly etched into our collective imagination. During the Vietnam era, a handful of photographs revealed the cruelty, inhumanity and perversity of the war.

In Iraq, a single indelible image—of a detainee standing atop a cardboard box, with a hood on his head and electrical wires extending from his hands—with its eerie resemblance to Christ on the cross, encapsulates the horror of the “enhanced interrogations” conducted by the U.S. government at Abu Ghraib prison.

We live in an image-saturated world. According to some estimates, the average American sees some 50,000 images every day. Indeed, most Americans see more images in a day than the number of words they read. Yet while every student is taught to read critically, few learn how to analyze photographic images.

A single photographic image has the power to alter the course of history and indelibly shape the way we visualize the past. The bodies of dozens of Confederate soldiers awaiting burial at Antietam. The migrant mother, brow furrowed, a baby wrapped in a sheet of coarse cloth on her lap, while two shabbily dressed older children stand at her side, faces hidden. A U.S. flag raised atop Mount Suribachi. Black children, protesting segregation, attacked by police dogs and blasts of water from fire hoses. In our mind’s eye, this is what the past looks like.

We are constantly told that our students are the most visually savvy generation in history. And there can be no doubt that they have been raised on visual images and take cellphone photos regularly. But most of my students are visually illiterate: they have no idea how to read or interpret a photograph. Many assume that photographs are literal, scientifically accurate copies of the external world.

It is a sad fact that most of our students lack the tools and language to deconstruct photographic images. We need to do more to teach visual literacy and to help our students understand that photographs are rich cultural texts suffused with meaning that have played a crucial role in shaping our perception of the past and presenting life in the present.

Oliver Wendell Holmes called the camera “the mirror with a memory.” He assumed, like many students do, that a snapshot is an accurate, totally objective reproduction of a moment in time.

This view is, of course, completely wrong. A photograph is a selective recording of a visual scene. Even a photojournalist is an artist and interpreter.

What the camera sees is shaped by the photographer who determines how a particular picture is composed, framed and cropped. Our students need to learn photography’s grammar: angle, balance, flatness and depth of field, focus, lighting, texture, and tone. They must also learn photography’s ideological functions: how an image might reflect the male gaze or how a casual family snapshot might screen out as much as it screens in.

Frederick Douglass, the celebrated fugitive slave and abolitionist and the single most photographed American of the 19th century, understood, as John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd and Celeste-Marie Bernier have shown, the explosive power of portraiture to deconstruct racist imagery and lay bare slavery’s true horror.

Martha Sandweiss reveals how 19th-century photographs of the Old West didn’t just record that region’s way of life; these images played a critical role in constructing the mythic West of the imagination that bore only a scant resemblance to the actual Western frontier.

In his classic 1989 volume, Reading American Photographs, the great American studies scholar Alan Trachtenberg showed how photography shaped this country’s collective reality, giving expression to the nation’s mythologies, its ethos and its social and cultural identity. Yet he also revealed how photography served as this nation’s most powerful instrument of social reform. In the hands of photographers like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, socially conscious documentary photographs provoked shock and indignation, awoke empathy and raised the public’s consciousness in ways that words couldn’t.

Yet photojournalists, photographic documentarians and activist photographers co-existed with another current in photography: the photographer as artist. Alfred Stieglitz, the early-20th-century champion of nonrepresentational modern art, was his era’s the most vocal advocate for photography as a form of artistic expression. Still, there was, of course, a danger, evident in his own photographs, with their misty landscapes and sentimental imagery, that art photography would succumb to the picturesque, the romantic and the mawkish.

But in the hands of this country’s greatest photographic artists—Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Dorothea Lange, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Gordon Parks, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman and Edward Steichen, among others—photography became a form of art that went far beyond documentary photography, commercial photography or art or beauty photography.

Their works combined visual acuity and personal vision and addressed key issues in the American experience involving class, family, gender, mortality, race and racism and the legacies of this nation’s troubled, tumultuous history.

Several years ago, I had the great pleasure and honor of helping to bring Sally Mann, the pre-eminent photographer of my generation (along with Sally Gall, Vicki Goldberg, Cig Harvey, John Stauffer, Anne Wilkes Tucker and John Wood), to campus. This was just before Mann published her memoir Hold Still, and her talk, like her photographs, represented her attempt to come to terms with her complex personal history: her death-obsessed dad, a country doctor; the apparent murder-suicide of her husband’s parents; her children; her family’s Black housekeeper, cook and caregiver; the motley crew of miscreants who are her relatives and ancestors; and her experience growing up in the South with its haunted, cruel, bloodstained history.

A poet in words as well as images, Mann, “the Faulkner of photography’s southern milieu,” reflected deeply and self-critically upon her creative process, her aesthetic choices, her provocations, her understanding of photography as a craft and a science and the varied reception her art has received. In one of her many powerful insights, she spoke about a photograph’s ability to supersede pre-existing memories.

She, who is best known for her provocative images of her children, sometimes naked, also wrestled with a central ethical issue with this art form: given that photography is almost inevitably intrusive and intimate, how can a photographer respect a subject’s dignity and privacy?

At a time when so many of our students have become amateur photographers who regularly document their lives with images posted on TikTok and Instagram, doesn’t it make sense to do much more to introduce them to the history of photography, to photography as a form of artistic expression and as an instrument of cultural criticism and social analysis and to photography as a vehicle for self-understanding?

Just as text generators threaten to truncate the writing process, digital photography has already simplified image creation and editing—eliminating part of photography’s artistry. Since we no longer go through the process of developing a photograph in a darkroom—making a contact print of a negative, immersing the photographic paper into a chemical bath and fixing and drying the image—it has become easy to forget that a photograph is a construction, a composition and a collection of choices.

Sure, Photoshop allows us to meticulously manipulate an image, but most of this process can be done automatically without much conscious intervention. Just, I guess, as some students will use ChatGPT to write their papers.

Part of the purpose of a higher education is to make our students more self-conscious, mindful, reflective and intentional. A recent essay included words that all academics should take to heart: “When it comes to our complicated, undecipherable feelings, art prompts a self-understanding far beyond the wellness industry.”

That essay begins with Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and how the great Romantic poet “chooses not to seek an understanding of the urn in front of him through research or historical data; instead, he … asks question after question about the urn, not to uncover facts or ‘answers’, but rather to sustain his experience of wonder and curiosity.”

We inhabit a culture that considers it rude to stare. But photography quite purposely turns viewers into voyeurs. We gape, gaze and glower obsessively, whether the subject is sordid or pornographic, attractive or repellent. We look open-eyed and unflinchingly at every unvarnished detail—seeking some epiphany or insight.

We need to teach our students the art of looking: to look unstintingly, to interpret imaginatively, to question, interrogate and critique. But more than that, we need to show them how to grapple with complex, ambiguous visual images.

The “facile promise” of self-help literature is that it will enhance self-awareness; relieve anxiety, depression or trauma; and make us more effective in expressing our emotions and opinions. Yet I would argue that contemplating an artwork can do that and more. We need “more open-ended forms of understanding and reflection—self-help beyond the self.” That’s what we get when we mull over an iconic photograph.

Throughout this society’s history, many Americans have been uneasy with visual images, traceable, I suspect, to the Puritan taboo about graven images, icons and mirrors, reinforced, more recently, by the well-placed criticism of ogling and eyeballing. Historically, ours was a culture of words, not images.

Mass culture, especially the movies, challenged that tradition. Silent movies, in particular, are notable for their pictorialism: their scene’s incredible beauty, complexity of composition, artistry and tonality. When the movies turned to sound, that intricate pictorialism largely faded away.

Aparna Chivukula, who teaches at Bangalore’s Mount Carmel College, wrote this:

Her point is that in addition to teaching the observational and the analytic—to pay “attention to the attention to the form, title and other perceptible ‘clues’ in the work”—we should also teach our students how to engage in a personal dialogue with a creative work; to make associations, reflect on a work’s subjective meaning and impact, linger over its ambiguities and take part in what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls “patient reading”: suspending one’s self and seeking to understand the creative work on its own terms and build critical yet open empathy with something that lie beyond and outside us.

Colleges have an unmatched opportunity to teach our students the art of looking, of listening, of reading. Let’s not squander that possibility.

To the Editor:

I am writing in response to the recent article discussing the debate over who should be allowed to use the title “doctor” in the medical field (“Who Should Be Called a ‘Doctor’?,” Aug. 16). As a physician, I feel compelled to address some of the claims made by Jennifer Mensik Kennedy of the American Nurses Association.

Firstly, I have the utmost respect for nurse practitioners (NPs) and acknowledge the important role they play in our healthcare system. However, it is essential to clarify the significant differences in the education and training between physicians and NPs.

Ms. Mensik Kennedy’s assertion that there’s “not much difference” between the training primary care doctors and nurses receive in college is misleading. While both professions undergo intensive education, the depth, breadth, and duration of medical training for physicians far exceed that of NPs.

To provide a clearer perspective, some nurse practitioner programs can be completed in as little as one year of full-time graduate study, often entirely online, and require only 500 hours of clinical training in medicine. In stark contrast, medical students undergo four years of medical school, which involves both classroom instruction and clinical rotations across various specialties. This is followed by a minimum of three years of residency training, where they work up to 80 hours a week, gaining hands-on experience under the supervision of senior physicians. By the end of their training, physicians accumulate well over 10,000 clinical hours of clinical training in medicine. 

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The comparison between a neurologist and a family medicine physician, as mentioned by Ms. Mensik Kennedy, is also not entirely accurate. While the specialties differ, both types of physicians undergo the same foundational medical training, followed by several years-long residency programs specific to their chosen fields. The assertion that the training of a family medicine physician is comparable to that of a nurse practitioner ignores the many more years of training, extensive clinical exposure and depth of knowledge that family physicians must acquire in order to be board certified in family medicine.

In conclusion, while both physicians and NPs are essential pillars of our healthcare system, it is crucial to recognize and understand the differences in their training. Misrepresenting these differences does a disservice to both professions and, more importantly, to patients who deserve clarity when making informed decisions about their care.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. I hope this letter provides clarity to your readers and fosters a more informed discussion on the topic.

–Sean L. Wilkes, MD, MSc
Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist

Andrea Smith has been publicly criticized for her contested claims of Cherokee heritage for at least 15 years. Despite this, she remained employed as a prominent Native American studies scholar.

But the condemnations have led to a turning point. According to a “separation agreement and release of all claims” shared on social media Thursday, she is resigning from the University of California, Riverside, next August after 13 faculty members at Riverside alleged a year ago that she “made fraudulent claims to Native American identity in violation of the Faculty Code of Conduct provisions concerning academic integrity.”

The deal, signed by Smith in December and UC Riverside’s chancellor in January, says Smith will be eligible for retirement and the emeritus title, consistent with a policy that says every retiring professor or associate professor receives it. However, the document states, “Professor Smith agrees that her status as a professor emeritus will not be listed on the university directory information websites.” 

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The agreement says that the university, upon receiving the complaint, “engaged Professor Smith in discussions on informal resolution,” but did not launch a “formal university investigation” or make findings on the allegations. 

It says the deal’s purpose is to “avoid the substantial expense and inconvenience of further administrative or legal proceedings, to provide certainty to the parties for future planning purposes and to settle fully and finally all differences that may exist.” The university agreed to pay Smith’s attorney fees, up to $5,000.

“Professor Smith agrees to not make any affirmative claims of Native American heritage in connection with her university work for the duration of her university employment,” the document says. “However, if asked about her heritage in connection with her university work, professor Smith is permitted to disclose her opinion on her Native American heritage.”

Jacqueline Keeler—a journalist, author, Navajo nation citizen and descendant of the Yankton Sioux Tribe—shared the agreement on Instagram and X, formerly known as Twitter, on Thursday. The university provided a copy to Inside Higher Ed early Friday evening. 

“It is the ultimate form of colonization, where they actually become us instead of actually listening to us,” Keeler told Inside Higher Ed.

Gerald Clarke, a UC Riverside ethnic studies professor and member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians, said Friday that he was one of the complainants.

“We’ve lost so much over the last 500 years, you know, and our identity is maybe the most precious thing that we’ve had to help fuel our resistance and our ability to survive in this very day,” Clarke said. “And for other people to come and commandeer that, you know, it’s very disheartening.”

“As a member of my community, I have an obligation and responsibility to say something,” said Clarke, who stressed that he was speaking as an individual and not as a UC Riverside professor. “I have no choice in the matter—I owe that to my elders and my children to speak up,” he said. 

A UC Riverside spokesman wrote in an email that the “separation agreement will bring a negotiated end to Professor Smith’s employment with the university.” 

Smith didn’t respond to requests for comment Friday. In the document, the university agreed to “refrain from making any public announcement concerning Professor Smith’s retirement.”

There have been controversies at multiple universities around white professors claiming to be of some other racial or ethnic background. Keeler calls those who assume Native American identities for professional advancement “pretendians.”

“Academia is basically a pretendian factory,” Keeler said.

This spring, Elizabeth M. Hoover, an associate professor of environmental science, policy and management at UC Berkeley, admitted she’s white after a lifetime of claiming she was Native American. Hoover said she was shocked when research revealed her family’s stories were apparently not true.

Perhaps the most infamous white academic to claim another identity was Rachel Dolezal, the now-former leader of the Spokane, Wash., NAACP and now-former adjunct instructor of Africana studies at Eastern Washington University. She was exposed by her own parents for being white, not Black.

In 2015, The Daily Beast published an article on Smith headlined, “Meet the Native American Rachel Dolezal.”

Shortly after that story was published, Smith wrote on her blog that “I have always been, and will always be Cherokee. I have consistently identified myself based on what I knew to be true. My enrollment status [on the official list of Cherokee nation members] does not impact my Cherokee identity or my continued commitment to organizing for justice for Native communities.”

“It is my hope that more Indigenous peoples will answer the call to work for social justice without fear of being subjected to violent identity-policing,” she wrote. “I also hope the field of Native studies might attend to disagreement and difference in a manner that respects the dignity of all persons rather than through abusive social media campaigns.”

Smith helped organize the group INCITE, which described itself as “a network of radical feminists of color.” For many of her campus appearances, she was introduced in ways that explicitly called her Cherokee. There are also videos of her being introduced at conferences as a Cherokee.

Keeler criticized universities for their handling of “pretendians.”

“They don’t investigate it, they don’t do any scholarship or any really data-driven analysis,” she said. “They have basically hollowed out Native American studies to make space for fraud.”

More than half (54 percent) of 1,200 college students in a recent survey are not getting sufficient sleep—seven to nine hours per night, as recommended by the National Sleep Foundation. Findings from the survey, conducted by virtual health care provider TimelyCare, suggest that students who play sports are especially at risk of inadequate sleep, with 58 percent reporting getting six hours of sleep or fewer and 37 percent getting five or fewer.

Horacio de la Iglesia, a professor of biology at the University of Washington who studies sleep and circadian rhythms, tells Inside Higher Ed that traditional college-aged students actually need 8.5 hours of sleep per night—and that they typically get 1.5 hours less than that on weeknights.

“Young adults, like adolescents, have a biological clock that is delayed relative to older adults or young children and in general it takes them longer to feel the need for sleep at the end of the day,” de la Iglesia explains. “These factors, combined with the social interactions, freedom for bedtime choice, screen time, etcetera, delay their sleep onset, but they still need to wake up early to go to class.”

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Sixty percent of students cite getting more sleep as a health goal, based on the spring Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse Student Voice survey of 3,000 undergraduates. Yet even as students register concern about not getting enough sleep, de la Iglesia says most campuses are “very poor in their sleep educations.”

How are some institutions educating students about the benefits of shut-eye and encouraging them to get enough? Read on for ideas.

1. Online sleep education. de la Iglesia says some institutions have contracts with Sleep 101, a sleep education program developed by Brigham & Women’s Hospital’s Sleep Health Institute and Healthy Hours. It’s a 45-minute primer on sleep’s relationship with student physical and mental health and even academic and athletic performance. The program can be hosted on learning management systems and is based on current research.

Sleep 101 also covers driver safety vis-à-vis sleep, as well as safety in college settings such as the lab or social events.

2. Classroom-based interventions. One 2021 study looked at the effectiveness of sleep interventions in introductory psychology courses at a public university. Both an intervention and a control group of students completed a well-known sleep health questionnaire called RU-SATED at the beginning and again at the end of the semester. The intervention class also completed a self-determination activity focused on sleep health in the middle of the semester.

A quarter of the full student sample reported never or rarely getting healthy sleep on average. But the intervention class had significantly better sleep health across the semester and significantly better daytime alertness post-intervention. The study’s authors concluded that, given the popularly of Psych 101 courses, the class is a “promising avenue” for sleep health promotion among large numbers of students. Moreover, the authors wrote, adopting a self-determination framework as part of sleep health promotion “shows potential for creating a person-centered, strengths-based approach to health behavior change within this population.”

3. 7UP® for sleep. Joyce Hovermale, a student success coach at Washtenaw Community College in Michigan, says that she wanted to do something different to promote sleep among students when she realized many on her campus weren’t getting enough. So during a tabling event at the college’s fall Welcome Days event, Hovermale handed out cans of the drink 7UP®, along with sleep self-assessment materials, all to remind students to get at least seven hours per night and think about their sleep habits.

“It was kind of corny, but we all had a good laugh over it. More importantly, it was memorable,” she recalls. “I had an image of a 7UP® can on the material I handed out to reinforce our conversation from the tabling event.”

Hovermale adds that student activities staff members have since reached out to her to see if they could borrow her idea for one of their events on campus. “It’s catchy and can be shared in multiple formats.”

4. Nap maps, sleep kits, emails and an app. The University of Texas at Austin, among other institutions, maintains nap maps for students who need to catch some zzzs but can’t easily go home to rest just then. The university’s Longhorn Wellness Center also runs a Sleep Week awareness event each fall and offers students sleep kits throughout the year.

Johns Hopkins University offers free sleep kits through its Yawns Hopkins initiative. Hopkins and other institutions also employ the Refresh sleep program, which was developed at Stanford University and incorporates cognitive behavioral therapy strategies to promote better sleep. Participants get an educational email once per week for two months. Topics include the physiology of sleep, sleep hygiene strategies, relaxation and mindfulness strategies and tracking sleep.

Additionally, Yawns Hopkins recommends SleepMatters, a sleep module app created by sleep experts at Hopkins.

5. Wellness pop-ups. Amanda Ayers, director of health promotion at Harvard University’s Center for Wellness and Health Promotion, says she and colleagues offer Wellness Wagon campus pop-ups twice per week during the academic year, featuring health and well-being supplies including sleep kits (students get an eye mask, ear plugs, herbal teas and written tips for getting quality sleep). The pop-ups can appear at campus residence halls by request, as well. And a workshop called Counting Sheep for Better Sleep is available by request to anyone affiliated with Harvard. (One takeaway: Keep your bedroom like a cave, meaning cool, dark and quiet).

6. Focus on memory and harm reduction. Ayers’s team posts a social media message about sleep once per semester. Harvard’s homepage has spotlighted research on sleep, as well, although that campaign wasn’t geared just toward students. As for what really sticks out to students about the importance of sleep, Ayers says “understanding sleep’s impact on learning and memory resonates well.”

She adds this: “Our office takes a harm reduction approach, which means that we do not tell people what they should or shouldn’t do, but try to give them as much information as possible so they can make choices that will best fit into their own life.”

Tell us about a successful student health awareness campaign on your campus. Submit your story here.

At the very moment when historical clarity—which the recent Supreme Court decision contradicted—is urgently needed, John R. Thelin and Richard W. Trollinger Trollinger turn to clever but misleading rhetoric in their “Selective Admissions on Trial” (July 31).

To begin with basics, “selective admissions” were not on trial: the explicit use of race was. “Selective admissions” in its many forms remains legal. So-called “Legacy Admissions” as well as athletes and National Merit Semifinalists and Scholars are among the forms.

Thelin, a historian of higher education who mentions both “admissions policies” and “affirmative action” in his A History of American Higher Education (2^nd ed., 2011). should know the differences.

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But other significant issues must  be emphasized.

First, Harvard did not invent  “selective admissions.” No single university or college can claim credit for that. Harvard is not a singular example for other private or public universities. Equally selective universities have had similar and different practices both explicit and often unadmitted.

Thus, Harvard was neither a pioneer not an exemplar that was followed or copied as these authors assert with no evidence.

Second, between the now challenged in a lawsuit and heading to court “legacy admissions” and “admission by donation, “selective admissions” continue to ride high. The overarching category has never been “on trial.” Among prominent examples is Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s New York property developer father’s buying his unqualified son’s admission to Harvard with a several million dollars “gift” (just prior to  Kushner Senior entering prison).

Harvard’s “Plan” was much more self-promoting rhetoric than either “blueprint” or a model to follow for anyone to follow.

The case against Harvard purportedly for “discriminating” colloquially against “Asian American” applicants was initiated and led by Edward Blum’s Students for (Un)Fair Admissions. It was not first launched or relentlessly propelled by Asian American students or families themselves. That is part of Blum’s career-long subterfuge.

“Asian Americans” do not exist as a singular group. They range widely in ethnicity, family wealth, and other factors.

Finally, neither Blum nor his paid sociologist “researchers” in California have produced the data set that they claim sustains their assertions. Many public and private groups have asked for it. Its existence is questionable.

Right-wing provocateur, who is responsible for removing limits on campaign contributions, Blum now has set his sights on eliminating race-based affirmative action at national military academies.

Tragically, neither the present Supreme Court nor Thelin and Trollinger are interested in critical distinctions or basic facts.

–Harvey J. Graff
Professor Emeritus of English and History
Ohio State University

A rising demand for online courses in a post-pandemic world has colleges and universities re-evaluating their priorities, a new report suggests.

The annual “Changing Landscape of Online Education” report, released today, polled hundreds of chief online officers at higher education institutions and focuses on the state of online and hybrid leading in higher education. The eighth annual report was conducted by Quality Matters and Eduventures Research, a division of Encoura, a data science and analytics platform. It surveyed the chief online officers on what they experienced over the 2021–2022 academic year.

“The CHLOE 8 report captures the dynamic, uncertain moment after the ‘emergency remote learning’ of the pandemic,” said Richard Garrett, CHLOE co-director, in the report. “The crisis has faded but experience and expectations have changed.”

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While the demand for online education spiked in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, report researchers said they believe the demand has not yet reached its peak.

Student demand has risen over the last academic year, the report argues, noting that while overall enrollment numbers have largely dipped across the nation, online enrollments continue to grow. According to the report, 81 percent of the chief online officers surveyed said their institution had a decline or stagnation in enrollment, while 56 percent said they saw growth in online and hybrid programs.

But keeping up could be imperative for higher education institutions, especially with a looming enrollment cliff threatening to constrain revenues.

“For many institutions struggling with enrollment and revenue levels, success in building online capacity may spell the difference between viability and crisis in the next decade,” Ron Legon, CHLOE senior editor and executive director emeritus of Quality Matters, said in the report.

The biggest way universities are changing their approach is the amount of course offerings they have for online. According to the report, 66 percent of those surveyed are adding new online-only programs.

But the institutions may not be prepared for a large roll out. None of the universities surveyed had implemented any institution-wide adoption of technologies. Less than a quarter of the officials surveyed said a majority of their faculty (which they defined as 70 percent) has experience in designing online courses.

As the purse strings continue to tighten across higher education institutions, officials are struggling to find the resources to support a shift to more online-based learning, according to the report.

The report lays out several initiatives that need to occur:

• Incentivize and retrain the instructional workforce.
• Build an infrastructure to support the new learning environment.
• Ensure the new models can support and deliver on students’ expectations.

But institutions are adapting. Nearly half of the survey respondents say they are keeping up with the demand, although 10 percent of those respondents said it was a strain on resources. Only 3 percent of those surveyed said they do not see a demand, now or in the future, for online options.

“Reading between the lines, it is clear from their responses that many institutions are internally divided on strategic issues that hold the potential to fundamentally redefine them,” the report said.

Online programming has long appealed to adult students, which the report defines as those 25 years old and older. Nearly 25 percent of on-campus programs—or those that are face-to-face and attended at scheduled times—had a dip among the adult graduate demographic, while fully online programs saw a 32 percent growth in the same demographic.

While graduate student enrollment grew across the board in fully online programs, hybrid programs and on-campus programs, the fully online offering saw the largest jump, with a 37 percent increase.

Enrollment for on-campus academic programs fared the best with traditional-aged students, with 16 percent of on-campus programming seeing growth. However, both online and hybrid programs outpaced that, with 25 percent and 17 percent growth, respectively.

Almost all community college online officers (89 percent) said that online asynchronous courses are widely used for their traditional-age undergraduates, compared to 63 percent of those at public four-year institutions and 36 percent at private four-year institutions.

“Given their mission, their history of adaptability, and the leadership role they have played in the spread of online learning over the past 25 years, this is hardly surprising,” the report said of community colleges.

Baylor University is exempt from sexual harassment claims under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, following a decision by the Biden administration’s Department of Education to affirm the Baptist institution’s religious exemptions.

Title IX bans discrimination based on sex also requires colleges and universities to prevent and address sexual harassment. However, religious colleges and universities can seek an exemption if the requirements aren’t consistent with the organization that controls the institution.

The university argued in a letter to the department that civil rights complaints accusing Baylor of not responding to sexual harassment claims from an LGBTQ student should be dismissed because the requirements conflict with the institution’s religious tenets. Baylor officials told the department that it is exempt from any requirements under Title IX relating to sexual orientation or gender identity. 

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An advocacy group that tracks religious exemptions said the department’s decision to exempt Baylor from sexual harassment claims is the first of its kind, and that the move would endanger queer students at the university. The university said in a statement that the religious exemption “is being mischaracterized as a broad-based exception to sexual harassment policy within Title IX regulations.”

“Instead, Baylor is responding to current considerations by the U.S. Department of Education to move to an expanded definition of sexual harassment, which could infringe on Baylor’s rights under the U.S. Constitution, as well as Title IX, to conduct its affairs in a manner consistent with its religious beliefs,” Baylor spokeswoman Lori Fogleman said in the statement. “Baylor has taken and will continue to take meaningful steps to ensure members of the LGBTQ community are loved, cared for and protected as a part of the Baylor Family.”

Paul Southwick, director of the Religious Exemption Accountability Project (REAP), which also filed complaints with the department’s Office for Civil Rights over Baylor’s treatment of LGBTQ students, said student safety is at stake in this decision.

“The government is siding with religious exemption claims, even when student safety from harassment is involved and I think any reasonable person would say that goes way too far,” he said. 

Southwick clarified that it is not unusual or new for religious colleges to seek exemptions from federal regulations or laws; only the exemption from sexual harassment claims is unprecedented. The Religious Exemption Accountability Project has sued to block the federal government from allowing such exemptions from Title IX.

An Education Department spokesman directed Inside Higher Ed to the Office for Civil Rights’ letter to Baylor, affirming the university’s religious exemptions from Title IX. The letter, as typical with these types of responses, affirms that the department is granting the exemption, but does not explain its reasoning for granting it.

The Baylor LGBTQ student group shared news about the exemption and reminded students to be careful.

“We still exist and in community will continue to thrive,” the group wrote.

Veronica Penales, an LGBTQ+ student who graduated from Baylor this spring, said in a Title IX complaint in 2021 fileld by REAP that she faced harassment based on her sexual orientation while a student at Baylor. The harassment included being called a homophobic slur. Students also repeatedly posted sticky notes on her dorm room door that said “f-a-g.”

“They did it repeatedly, and she reported it to the university and they did not protect her,” Southwick said. “That’s essentially what they were trying to be immune from. Failure to respond to that kind of horrible harassment.”

Penales said in a statement provided by REAP that she was “saddened by Baylor’s lack of integrity and accountability to their students.”

“I know many will not feel safe returning to campus, and rightfully so,” the statement continued. “If Baylor believes it has a religious liberty right to allow us to be harassed, there truly are no protections left for us.”  

Baylor sought the exemption after the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights started investigating complaints, including Penales’, that accused the university of tolerating sexual harassment based on sexual orientation  or gender identity, denying recognition of an LGBTQ student group, and pressing university media to not report on LGBTQ events and protests in September and October 2021. (The complaints were filed in 2021, and the university granted the student group a charter in 2022.)

“Because each of Baylor’s rules and policies at issue derives from Baylor’s religious tenets as a Baptist university, Baylor’s enforcement of those rules and policies is fully exempt from any requirements under Title IX relating to sexual orientation or gender identity,” Baylor President Linda Livingstone wrote in a letter to OCR requesting the exemption.

The university wanted assurances that “Baylor could not be found in violation of Title IX on the ground that the belief in or practice of its religious tenets by the university or its students constitutes ‘unwelcome conduct,’” according to a footnote in the request.

Southwick said the department hasn’t yet decided whether to close its Title IX investigations into Baylor, and he’s not sure how the exemption will affect the complaint.

“This is unchartered territory when it comes to sexual harassment,” he said. “What I can tell you is that the Department of Education has never denied a religious exemption and when a school has asserted one, historically, for our complaints involving queer and trans students, they’ve always dismissed the investigations afterward.”

One Baylor graduate asked on X, the platform formally known as Twitter, “how many queer students will be harassed and abused at the hand of a ‘Christian’ university?” 

“Baylor doesn’t care,” the user wrote.

In the letter to the department, Livingston wrote that Baylor welcomes and supports all its students and employees who agree to abide by its religious tenets, including those who identify as LGBTQI+.

“The university does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity or expression per se, but it does regulate conduct that is inconsistent with the religious values and beliefs that are integral to its Christian faith and mission,” the letter says.

The Biden administration has told Baylor University that it may be exempt from federal rules relating to the harassment of students based on their LGBTQ+ status, if it can show that doing so conflicts with its religious tenets. But the Education Department has not yet granted Baylor’s request to dismiss complaints to the department from LGBTQ+ students that prompted the university to seek the exemption.

Title IX bans discrimination based on sex and requires colleges and universities to prevent and address sexual harassment. However, religious colleges and universities can seek an exemption if the requirements aren’t consistent with the religious tenets of the organization that controls the institution.

The university argued in a letter to the department in May that civil rights complaints accusing Baylor of, among other things, not responding to sexual harassment claims from an LGBTQ+ student should be dismissed because the requirements conflict with the institution’s religious tenets. Baylor officials told the department that it is exempt from any requirements under Title IX relating to sexual orientation or gender identity.

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An advocacy group that tracks religious exemptions asserted that the department’s decision to exempt Baylor from sexual harassment claims is the first of its kind, and that the move would endanger queer students at the university. The university said in a statement that the religious exemption “is being mischaracterized as a broad-based exception to sexual harassment policy within Title IX regulations.”

“Instead, Baylor is responding to current considerations by the U.S. Department of Education to move to an expanded definition of sexual harassment, which could infringe on Baylor’s rights under the U.S. Constitution, as well as Title IX, to conduct its affairs in a manner consistent with its religious beliefs,” Baylor spokeswoman Lori Fogleman said in the statement. “Baylor has taken and will continue to take meaningful steps to ensure members of the LGBTQ community are loved, cared for and protected as a part of the Baylor Family.”

Paul Southwick, director of the Religious Exemption Accountability Project (REAP), which also filed complaints with the department’s Office for Civil Rights over Baylor’s treatment of LGBTQ students, said student safety is at stake in this decision.

“The government is siding with religious exemption claims, even when student safety from harassment is involved and I think any reasonable person would say that goes way too far,” he said.

Southwick clarified that it is not unusual or new for religious colleges to seek exemptions from federal regulations or laws; only the exemption from sexual harassment claims is unprecedented. The Religious Exemption Accountability Project has sued to block the federal government from allowing such exemptions from Title IX.

An Education Department spokesman directed Inside Higher Ed to the Office for Civil Rights’ letter to Baylor, affirming the university’s religious exemptions from Title IX. The letter from Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights, affirms that the department is granting the exemption, but includes the qualifier (emphasis added) “to the extent that they are inconsistent with the University’s religious tenets.”

It adds: “Please note that this letter should not be construed to grant exemption from the requirements of Title IX and the regulations other than as stated above. In the event that OCR receives a complaint against your institution, we are obligated to determine initially whether the allegations fall within the exemption here recognized.”

Scott A. Roberts, a lawyer who specializes in Title IX for the Boston firm of Hirsch Roberts Weinstein, said it was important to note that Baylor did not claim—and the Education Department letter did not affirm—that preventing and addressing harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity does conflict with the university’s religious tenets.

“What I don’t see in the letter from Baylor is how addressing active harassment against LGBTQ+ students is contrary to or inconsistent with a religious tenet,” Roberts said. “Their policy and public statements acknowledge that these students exist, and that the university loves, supports and cares for them, They say, ‘we love, support and will protect you.’ So I don’t see how it would be inconsistent with their religious tenets to take action against somebody who harasses those students.”

Baylor sought the exemption after the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights started investigating complaints that accused the university of tolerating sexual harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity, denying recognition of an LGBTQ student group, and pressing university media to not report on LGBTQ events and protests in September and October 2021. (The complaints were filed in 2021, and the university granted the student group a charter in 2022.)

“Because each of Baylor’s rules and policies at issue derives from Baylor’s religious tenets as a Baptist university, Baylor’s enforcement of those rules and policies is fully exempt from any requirements under Title IX relating to sexual orientation or gender identity,” Baylor President Linda Livingstone wrote in a letter to OCR requesting the exemption.

The university wanted assurances that “Baylor could not be found in violation of Title IX on the grounds that the belief in or practice of its religious tenets by the university or its students constitutes ‘unwelcome conduct,’” according to a footnote in the request.

Veronica Penales, an LGBTQ+ student who graduated from Baylor this spring, said in a Title IX complaint in 2021 filed by the Religious Exemption Accountability Project that she faced harassment based on her sexual orientation while a student at Baylor. The harassment included being called a homophobic slur. Students also repeatedly posted sticky notes on her dorm room door that said “f-a-g.”

“They did it repeatedly, and she reported it to the university and they did not protect her,” said Southwick of REAP. “That’s essentially what they were trying to be immune from. Failure to respond to that kind of horrible harassment.”

Baylor’s letter in May, which prompted the Office for Civil Rights’ response last month, asked to have those complaints dismissed. Given the important qualifier in the Biden administration’s letter about requiring proof that protecting students from sexual harassment conflicts with the university’s religious tenets, dropping those complaints would be the true test that the government is giving Baylor latitude not to protect queer students from harassment, Roberts said.

“The proof will be in the pudding” when the department rules on the complaints, he said.

Southwick said he’s not sure how the exemption will affect the complaints.

“This is unchartered territory when it comes to sexual harassment,” he said. “What I can tell you is that the Department of Education has never denied a religious exemption and when a school has asserted one, historically, for our complaints involving queer and trans students, they’ve always dismissed the investigations afterward.”

Penales said in a statement provided by REAP that she was “saddened by Baylor’s lack of integrity and accountability to their students.”

“I know many will not feel safe returning to campus, and rightfully so,” the statement continued. “If Baylor believes it has a religious liberty right to allow us to be harassed, there truly are no protections left for us.”

The Baylor LGBTQ student group shared news about the exemption and reminded students to be careful.

“We still exist and in community will continue to thrive,” the group wrote.

One Baylor graduate asked on X, the platform formally known as Twitter, “how many queer students will be harassed and abused at the hand of a ‘Christian’ university?”

“Baylor doesn’t care,” the user wrote.

West Virginia University

Financially beleaguered West Virginia University is proposing to eliminate 9 percent of its majors and 7 percent of its faculty members at the flagship Morgantown campus, including the entirety of the department of world languages, literatures and linguistics, the university announced Friday afternoon.

“The university is reviewing plans to eliminate the language requirement for all majors [and] the university is exploring alternative methods of delivery such as a partnership with an online language app or online partnership with a fellow Big 12 university,” WVU said in its news release.

“It’s hard to imagine any university, anywhere in the world, not teaching world languages, let alone the state flagship, land-grant, R1 university in a state like West Virginia,” said Lisa Di Bartolomeo, a teaching professor of Russian studies at West Virginia, noting that the state has faced a brain drain for generations and has low “intercultural competencies.”

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Di Bartolomeo, who’s also a former Faculty Senate chair, former member of the university’s Board of Governors, and a former adviser to WVU President Gordon Gee, said “I think institutions everywhere are facing cuts, particularly in humanities disciplines, but these cuts go beyond what’s reasonable and straight into territory of absurdity.”

The proposed cuts also affect multiple non-humanities units, such as the School of Pharmacy and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. You can see the full list of proposed changes, by college and school, here.

The afternoon announcement came after X, formally known as Twitter, lit up throughout the day with tweets from faculty members and others as news of the cuts trickled out.  

“Within the preliminary recommendations, 32 of the 338 majors offered on the Morgantown campus have been recommended for discontinuation; 12 of those are undergraduate majors and 20 are graduate-level majors,” WVU said in its news release. “According to Fall 2023 enrollment numbers, this will affect 147 undergraduate students and 287 graduate students, representing approximately less than 2 percent of total student enrollment. The preliminary recommendations also included 169 potential faculty line reductions.”

In the release, Gee said that “While we view these preliminary recommendations for reductions and discontinuations as necessary, we are keenly aware of the people they will affect. We do not take that lightly. These faculty are our colleagues, our neighbors and our friends. These decisions are difficult to make.”

Faculty members must appeal the proposals by Aug. 18.

This is a developing story.

Weirdness is in the eye of the beholder and whether to avoid it or seek it out, a matter of sensibility. Next year is the centenary of the first Surrealist Manifesto, in which André Breton, the founder of the movement, declared war on “the reign of reason” and “the waking state”—instead celebrating “the incurable human restlessness” exemplified by a taste for the marvelous and the anomalous.

In going over the fall’s new titles from university presses, I keep noticing books that look promisingly weird. Some authors would undoubtedly bristle at the word “weird,” so let’s just categorize their subject matter as consisting of marvels and anomalies. Flagged here are some titles that caught my eye, described with quotations taken from the publishers’ listings. For restlessly curious readers only …

Appropriate as a starting point would be Eric Schwitzgebel’s The Weirdness of the World (Princeton University Press, January), a philosophical inquiry into the enigmatic status of consciousness in a universe it did not create … or did it?

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Could reality be a simulation? “Might virtually every action we perform cause virtually every possible type of future event, echoing down through the infinite future of an infinite universe?” Our powers of comprehension are mighty, but trip over themselves. The author’s “Universal Bizarreness” thesis maintains that “every possible theory of the relation of mind and cosmos defies common sense,” and is accompanied by the “Universal Dubiety” thesis that “no general theory of the relationship between mind and cosmos compels rational belief.”

More sanguine in its view of what humans can and do know, C. Renée James’s Things That Go Bump in the Universe: How Astronomers Decode Cosmic Chaos (Johns Hopkins University Press, November) nevertheless keeps the mind-boggling qualities of the universe always in view. It went through aeons of spasmatic transformation following its “violent birth” in the Big Bang, including “blasts, implosions, cosmic cannibalism, collisions, and countless other fleeting energetic events.” The author, an astronomer, shows how her international colleagues “are using pioneering research techniques to explore everything from the very first explosions in the universe to the dark energy that could destroy it all.”

Commanding dark energies was part of the skill set claimed by the cohort of Renaissance intellectuals analyzed by Anthony Grafton in Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa (Harvard University Press, December). The magus—a learned practitioner of ceremonial magic—had a first-hand acquaintance with angelic and demonic entities. It was a dangerous profession, infringing on religious authorities’ turf and easily tarred with charges of sorcery, but one in demand: the magus was part of “political and social milieus” that included “the circles of kings and princes.”

Magi “probed the limits of what was acceptable in a changing society, and promised new ways to explore the self and exploit the cosmos.” Grafton’s study is long-awaited: he mentioned working on it when I profiled him more than twenty years ago.

Among other services a magus might render to his royal patrons were espionage and cryptography—not forms of magic, but literally occult (i.e., secret or hidden) practices. Paola Bertucci’s In the Land of Marvels: Science, Fabricated Realities, and Industrial Espionage in the Age of the Grand Tour (Johns Hopkins University Press, October) investigates an 18th century French physicist’s involvement in an “ambitious intelligence gathering [operation] masked as scientific inquiry.”

When Jean-Antoine Nollet (the savant in question) travelled through Italy in 1749, the cover story was that he was investigating reports of miracle cures via electricity. In fact, he was on “an undercover mission commissioned by the French state to discover the secrets of Italian silk manufacture and possibly supplant its international success.” Once back home, Nollet wrote “a highly influential account of his philosophical battle with his Italian counterparts, discrediting them as misguided devotees of the marvelous.” It sounds like spy fiction: an agent sowing disinformation in the wake of committing industrial espionage.

The late Robert Anton Wilson wrote mind-bending books—most notably his fictional Illuminatus! trilogy—that occupied a large place in the American counterculture of the post-hippy era. Playing with conspiratorial thinking as a key to imagining alternate realities, he made it hard to tell just where satire left off and his actual beliefs began. Some hints might come from Gabriel Kennedy’s Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson (MIT Press, November), the first biography of a figure somehow both influential and marginal at the same time.

It will double as a survey of “the pulp venues, quack pamphlets, and oddball websites through which his work was usually distributed, allow[ing] him to quietly become one of the most prescient American writers of the 20th century, and one of the 21st’s most salient.”

One notably Robert Anton Wilson-esque new volume is Aeons without History/Thesis on the Metacartel (Urbanomic, distributed by MIT Press, November), which mimics a long-vanished pulp-publishing format: the two-books-in-one science fiction paperback. “A historian and a political economist investigate the occult forces that control history,” we’re promised.

Vincent Garton’s half, “Aeons Without History,” invokes the theoretical specter of a world “of stasis and directionless suspense … in which empires rot and prophecies fail,” of “gloom, distant yet uncomfortably familiar … in which time itself became directionless, seemingly reduced to ruin.”

The theoretical fiction of “a meta-historical conspiracy for our times” (a Wilsonian notion, if ever there was one!) is elaborated in Edmund Berger’s “Thesis on the Metacartel,” which imagines “technocratic planners outlin[ing] schemes for the centuries to come, acting in concert with countless spooks and hired agents who thrive in the secret anarchy of the world system.”

Rod Serling’s invitation to join him in another dimension is more evocative now of nostalgia than 21st-century dread, but David J. Brokaw’s Monsters on Maple Street: The Twilight Zone and the Postwar American Dream (University Press of Kentucky, August) underscores his challenge to the “idealized version of American life sustained by the nuclear family and bolstered by a booming consumer economy” projected by American entertainment in the early post-World War II period. Reframing “white American wish fulfillments as nightmares, rather than dreams,” Sterling and his collaborators used “science fiction, horror, and fantasy to challenge conventional thinking … around topics such as sexuality, technology, war, labor and the workplace, and white supremacy.”

Robin Roberts explores a three-dimensional, live-action sector of the Twilight Zone in City of the Undead: Voodoo, Ghosts, and Vampires of New Orleans (Louisiana State University Press, September). By virtue of its location “near the mouth of the Mississippi River,” New Orleans occupies “a liminal status between water and land,” with “its Old World architecture and lush, moss-covered oak trees lend[ing] it an eerie beauty.” It is also where “spiritual beliefs and practices from Native American, African, African American, Caribbean, and European cultures” have converged. Local traditions and mass-media narratives depict the city as home to Voodoo, ghosts, and vampires: “the paranormal gives voice to the voiceless, including victims of racism and oppression, thus encouraging the living not to repeat the injustices of the past.”

Finally, looking from earth to sky, we have Mark Littmann and Fred Espenak’s Totality: The Great North American Eclipse of 2024 (Oxford University Press, September)—a revised edition of a book originally appearing just ahead of the total eclipse of 2017. The focus now is on the one that will be visible (weather permitting) in Canada, Mexico and the United States on April 8, 2024.

Offering “information on how best to photograph and video record an eclipse, as well as abundant maps, diagrams, and charts, as well as covering the science, history, mythology, and folklore of eclipses,” it promises “to help readers understand and safely enjoy all aspects of solar eclipses.” For verily, on that day, the heavens will darken, and you might want a handbook.