Tag: Events

Florida State University has fired Eric Stewart, a professor of criminology, for “extreme negligence” in research, The Tallahassee Democrat reported.

The charges against Stewart followed a full investigation into his research.

A letter to Stewart from James Clark, the provost, said, “You demonstrated extreme negligence in basic data management, resulting in an unprecedented number of articles retracted, numerous other articles now in question, with the presence of no backup of the data for the publications in question.”

Justin Pickett, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Albany, of the State University of New York, said Stewart allegedly made racism seem more common than it is through his data and surveys that altered sample sizes in five co-authored research papers where he was responsible for data and analyses.

Repeated attempts to reach Stewart for comment were unsuccessful. But he denied any fraud and instead said that the problems resulted from “analysis errors that included coding mistakes and transcription errors,” according to withdrawal letters he wrote to the journals that published the studies.

In a response to the intent-to-terminate letter in March, Stewart stated that the investigation and process to terminate him were “arbitrary, capricious and discriminatory in nature.”

The University of Minnesota–Twin Cities will no longer consider applicants’ ties to alumni in admissions decisions, The Star Tribune reported.

The decision came in “an exceptionally deep review of our context factors,” said Keri Risic, executive director of admissions. The university will also no longer favor applicants who are the children of faculty members.

“It was not adding additional insight into enrolling academically prepared students,” Risic said.

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Across higher education, Black and Latino men are underrepresented in the classroom and less likely than their peers to complete a degree. In response, campus leaders are promoting stronger pipelines from high school to college graduation to support men through their degree progression.

A new partnership between College for Every Student (CFES) Brilliant Pathways and the University of Vermont will prepare students for the workforce as they work toward a college degree. Young Men of Talent will launch in fall 2023, aiding 100 college Black and Latino men in the first seven years.

“YMT centers on the fundamental challenge that Black and Latino males are falling further and further behind their peers in terms of education and opportunity,” says Jon Reidel, director of communications for CFES Brilliant Pathways. “We need to help others understand the magnitude of this crisis and the need to deploy resources and develop strategies to level the playing field.”

The program’s primary goal is to ensure every student graduates and launches into a career in their desired field.

What’s the need: In January, CFES chief executive Rick Dalton took a sabbatical to investigate gender imbalance at the University of Vermont, where the student population is 33 percent male, seven percentage points lower than the national average.

After interviewing 120 faculty members, staffers, students and local campus community and business leaders, Dalton established YMT to address gender inequality with a non-cost-exorbitant or complex solution.

CFES established a task force made up of business, government and academic officials to guide program development and secure funds. UVM leaders, including President Suresh Garimella, Provost Patricia Prelock and Vice Provost of Enrollment Management Jay Jacobs, also supported program development.

How it works: CFES will partner with high schools to run programming around college and career preparation. From this group, UVM and CFES leaders will identify program participants, drawing on feedback from leaders at the high schools and the YMT task force, Reidel says.

During the pilot, YMT will support 100 students at UVM: 20 in fall 2023, 40 in fall 2024 and 40 in fall 2025. The pilot will run for seven years, assisting participants through graduation.

Each student will join a career development cluster based on industry aspirations, such as health care, teaching, technology or entrepreneurship. An industry professional will lead the cluster, serve as a mentor to participants and facilitate regular in-person and virtual meetings with cohort members.

“There will be five to six career clusters to start based on workforce needs, emerging careers and interests of students,” Reidel says. “There will be four students per cluster in year one, with an expansion to roughly 12 clusters as the program expands.”

YMT participants will also complete training modules by CFES to support their success at UVM and prepare them for the workforce, as well as fulfill a paid internship, assisted by their cluster leader.

Black and Latino male students who are currently enrolled undergo training at UVM and work with faculty to serve as peer mentors to program participants. Professors will also provide academic support, counseling and other services to YMT participants.

The university president and provost will also hold regular meals with YMT students throughout the year.

Next steps: Beyond graduation and career placement, UVM’s research office is developing program performance indicators around happiness as well as involvement in the university and community.

“The YMT program will partner with UVM’s Office of Research, which will collect and organize data on the program that we will use to guide the program’s evolution as we adapt and expand upon the strategies identified as most effective,” Reidel says.

Over the next five years, CFES hopes to launch another 10 YMT programs at colleges across the U.S.

“We have a lot of college partnerships across the Northeast, and beyond that we will continue to consult with throughout the first year,” Reidel says. “We want to base it heavily on need and fit.”

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A federal suit filed by 11 former faculty members at Emporia State University charges that they lost their jobs because they had tenure, The Kansas Reflector reported.

The suit is against top administrators and members of the Kansas Board of Regents.

“These defendants saw tenure as an impediment to terminating tenured faculty who were ‘problematic’ concerning issues disfavored by the ESU administration,” the lawsuit says. “These issues included being members or former members of the faculty senate committee, being perceived to or having friction with the administration, policy sticklers, liberals, advocates, unionizers, and department or campus leaders.”

Emporia State has said the faculty members, and others, lost their jobs for financial reasons.

The University of Idaho will not demolish the house where four of its students were killed in November until this October.

Scott Green, president of the university, announced the delay Wednesday.

“We know that every action and decision around this horrific incident is painful and invokes emotions. That is why every decision we have made this far is with the families of the victims and our students in mind,” Green said. “While we look forward to removing this grim reminder of this tragedy, we feel holding until October is the right thing to do.”

Crews began the preliminary work in recent weeks.

Both the prosecution and defense in the upcoming murder trial of Bryan Kohberger, who is accused of the killings, have said they do not object to the demolition.

Writing in The New York Times last month, Sara J. Winston, the coordinator of the photography program at Bard College, described the upheaval of having various unpleasant bodily sensations diagnosed as symptoms of multiple sclerosis. She soon began a course of treatment that sounds effective and encouraging, but the condition itself is chronic. Even in remission, the illness sets the pace of her life, requiring her to travel every 28 days to receive infusions. 

Accompanying the essay are Winston’s photographs of her visits to the clinic: part of a series of portraits of the artist as a young patient. Each of us “exists on a spectrum of illness,” she writes, “often dipping in and out of it,” but also prone to avoiding the topic. But “in a culture where it is taboo to talk about being sick … the taboo can allow shame to fester among those who are chronically ill.” Her creative work might be called therapeutically shameless—a public acknowledgment that her own well-being is precarious and contingent. Losing access to ongoing care would place her, she writes, “at risk of severe disability.”

Winston has allies on the other side of the seemingly impenetrable barrier between “the two cultures,” with the arts and humanities on one side and the sciences on the other.

The contributors to Uncharted: How Scientists Navigate Their Own Health, Research, and Experiences of Bias—a collection of 32 personal essays edited by Skylar Bayer and Gabi Serrato Marks, published by Columbia University Press—come from an array of STEM fields and write about their firsthand experiences of chronic illness or disability. While one contributor estimates that people with disabilities represent 20 percent of the world’s population, they are, the editors say, “highly underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”

The editors note their surprise at finding “how many authors (including ourselves) had shared common experiences despite having vastly different diagnoses.” Winston’s observation in her Times piece about how the taboo on candor “allow[s] shame to fester” is echoed by a number of contributors. As a graduate student in geology, Jenn Pickering kept her diabetes a secret from her peers, dreading that someone might think she’d only been accepted into her program by “help[ing] the university attain some disability quota.” She experienced a potentially fatal “severe hypoglycemic event” while in transit to Bangladesh on a research expedition. “I remember fumbling desperately with a brownie wrapped in an impenetrable plastic wrapper,” she writes, “probably cursing at it while somebody or everybody noticed and stared.” Extracting it, Pickering “dutifully chewed [the brownie] like a robot, my mouth dry, no joy in the experience because my taste buds had been cut off by my brain minutes before to preserve more important bodily functions like breathing and circulating blood.”

Crisis averted, Pickering and her colleagues pursue their research. And with time and experience, she learns to live with her condition—to manage it without feeling compromised in the eyes of her colleagues. She is able to refer to shame in the past tense. Various contributors express an aversion to being called “brave” or a “warrior” or to “overcoming” their disability. Such expressions tacitly accept what the editors call “the typical deficit-focused narrative of disability” and, however well-meaning, do little to allay feelings of stigmatization beyond covering them with a saccharine glaze. The editors prefer to frame the personal essays in their collections as narratives of “driving ourselves forward as whole people, including our disabilities.”

One of the memorable instances of this is Daisy Shearer’s account of her autistic nervous system’s navigation of the route between her front door and her physics laboratory. The sidewalks and railway train are a blooming, buzzing confusion even on an ordinary day, or especially then.

“My brain is in overdrive,” she writes, “trying to process everything, desperately attempting to predict everyone’s movement to make sure I don’t bump into anyone and cause an unexpected sensory experience that I know could push me into a meltdown or shutdown. My brain craves certainty and control, so being around so many people can be a challenge unless I’m very focused on my objective.” At the end of her quest is “a split-coil superconducting solenoid with optical access from all four sides … basically a huge magnet that you can shoot lasers into.” Her first encounter with it (“so many knobs and valves and gauges to keep track of”) was terrifying, but familiarity led not just to confidence but what sounds like a kind of affection for the device.

The inner drama in a large majority of these personal essays unfolds in a higher ed environment, often experienced as a zone of conflict. Seldom are academic institutions or their personnel depicted as any more welcoming than the Americans With Disabilities Act makes absolutely mandatory. And sometimes less, as emerges from Alma C. Schrage’s memoir of her conference-going and research fieldwork as a young, deaf biologist (one of the two or three best pieces in the volume, in my opinion).

Attending her first academic conference as an undergraduate leaves her unable to “read or look at a screen because of eyestrain from lipreading,” despite sitting on the front row of every session she attends. Shortly before another conference, she writes, “the hosting university realizes that I am a student visiting from another institution, and it immediately retracts its previous offer of providing interpreters.” This second conference tale has a better outcome: a conference organizer (“a leading scientist in our field”) rallies together a team of volunteer note takers.

“Her action means a lot,” writes Schrage. “My advisors and hearing mentors always treated accommodations as something they could not be bothered with beyond sending a couple of emails or turning on captions. When these failed, they shrugged and gave up, leaving me to struggle on my own.” Other essayists write about the toll of ruthless professionalization on their colleagues’ capacity for meaningful empathy—a topic Schrage does not pursue, but which certainly comes to mind in reading her narrative.

Alternating with Schrage’s conference experiences are short accounts of remote fieldwork with her colleagues, in small groups. “In a matter of weeks, my coworkers gradually adjust to my deaf tempo; sometimes grudgingly, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes intentionally, they become aware of communicating with someone whose perception of the environment is different from theirs.”

A Columbia University free speech group sued Texas governor Greg Abbott and other officials Thursday, contending that the ban on using TikTok on state devices and networks is an attack on academic freedom.

Calling the ban “unconstitutional,” the lawsuit said that the Texas restriction on the app, which applies to public universities, is “seriously impeding” faculty research on TikTok. The ban prevents faculty from using the app in class, either to teach about TikTok itself or use app content to teach other subjects, the lawsuit said.

The Knight First Amendment Institute filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, a group of researchers and academics that advocates for studying the impact of technology on society. Texas is among more than two dozen states that have banned TikTok on official devices.

“This ban is an assault on academic freedom, and it’s compromising vital research,” said Ramya Krishnan, senior staff attorney at the Knight institute, in an interview with Inside Higher Ed. She added that the popular platform’s reach, spanning over 115 million Americans and two-thirds of American teens, makes it imperative to study.

“It’s incredibly important that researchers are able to study the platform and inform the public how this platform is impacting public discourse and society more generally,” she said.

How do we teach media literacy for an app we’re not allowed to use?”

—Jacqueline Ryan Vickery

The lawsuit points specifically to the example of Jacqueline Ryan Vickery, a University of North Texas professor who had to suspend and alter her research projects because of the ban. Vickery is the director of research for UNT’s Youth Media Lab and studies how young people use social media for informal learning, activism and self-expression.

Vickery said she was in the midst of two research papers focused on TikTok—one studying the intersection of the app and school shootings and the other focused on generational identity—when the ban forced her to stop her work.

“I don’t think a lot of people recognize when this ban went into place it’s not just accessing an app you use for entertainment, but it shut down ways we teach,” Vickery said in an interview.

She previously utilized TikTok to teach students about misinformation and media literacy and to compare community guidelines and standards to other apps.

“How do we teach media literacy for an app we’re not allowed to use?” she said, adding it has “left students on their own to navigate.”

The lawsuit was filed against multiple Texas officials, including Abbott, University of North Texas chancellor Michael Williams and the nine members of UNT’s Board of Regents.

Citing concerns about cybersecurity and privacy, a growing number of governments around the world have banned TikTok. Congress and more than half of U.S. states have banned the app from official devices.

Government officials, including FBI director Chris Wray, have voiced concerns about TikTok’s parent company, China-based ByteDance, and its access to user data. TikTok has insisted it does not give U.S. data to the Chinese government.

The Texas governor first issued an executive order banning TikTok among state employees in December 2022, prohibiting the app’s download onto any state-issued device. In January, Abbott issued a ban on the app on campus Wi-Fi networks. Abbott signed the ban into law in June.

“The security risks associated with the use of TikTok on devices used to conduct the important business of our state must not be underestimated or ignored,” Abbott said in a February statement. Abbott’s office declined to comment to Inside Higher Ed about the lawsuit.

But Krishnan, the attorney at the First Amendment institute, said faculty research could help alleviate security concerns.

“This is impeding faculty from pursuing research that relates to TikTok,” she said. That includes “research that would help us better understand and respond to the privacy and security risk Texas purports to address though the ban.”

The lawsuit suggested a compromise could be made by giving faculty that specifically study TikTok dedicated laptops and Wi-Fi networks to access the app. It also suggested passing privacy legislation restricting TikTok from gathering users’ information.

Montana was the first state to ban TikTok entirely, a restriction set to go into effect in 2024. On July 5, TikTok asked a U.S. judge to file a preliminary injunction to block the ban.

Krishnan said she hopes the lawsuit against Texas, which she calls an “unprecedented move,” sets a standard for other states that have also enacted bans on college campuses.

“The hope out of this litigation is we want to ensure whatever state employee bans there are include adequate breathing space for teaching and research on TikTok,” she said.

She added she is not against some restrictions for state employees that deal with sensitive information, “but this ban sweeps far more broadly.”

It’s well documented that nonprofit organizations have seen a sharp decline in donor counts in the past decade.

Higher education has not been spared. “‘Donors down, dollars up’ is a key trend in our philanthropic world right now,” Brian Gawor, vice president of research at the enrollment management company Ruffalo Noel Levitz, wrote in March.

The traditional logic of leadership at nonprofit organizations is that communications, events, education and volunteering—usually listed in that order, of increasing importance—form the basis of a sound donor pipeline. While donor dollars are easiest to measure, often more enigmatic to fundraisers are the numbers behind those earlier engagements and what is making them shift.

Mailchimp and Zoom and their like have enabled colleges to produce no shortage of the first three engagement types (communications, events, short-form courses). But the most psychologically profound and potentially impactful channel—volunteering—has always proven harder to scale effectively.

Now, new research from the University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute reveals that nonprofit volunteerism has not rebounded post-pandemic, as organizations report difficulties recruiting volunteers and decreased volunteer workloads, even as demand for their services has increased.

While it’s universally acknowledged now that technological advances in customer and constituent management have given the for-profit world enormous marketing leverage over the nonprofit world (e.g. Salesforce.com came first, Salesforce.org for nonprofits years later), not enough attention is being paid to the technological changes disrupting routine volunteerism. I suspect that these technological changes may be behind drops in donor numbers.

The changes are both obvious and subtle.

Look, for instance, at the typical college advancement office’s student caller program. Not only have call-completion rates dropped precipitously since the advent of smartphones and robocalls, phone carriers are bundling nonprofit outreach calls as spam, the same catchall term they apply to credit card scams. For alumni interested in volunteering as callers, this conundrum certainly makes the proposition less appealing.

Look, also, at college admissions. The near ubiquity of software solutions integrated into admissions and advancement shops large and small is bound to have serious impact on volunteer structures and functions moving forward. Take the traditional role of alumni admissions interview volunteers, which COVID certainly forced into a virtual space in 2020.

Even in the decade before 2020, admissions volunteers I knew and worked with often questioned the weight of their input in the face of big data analysis. And as growing awareness of and training about implicit bias made admissions directors rightly squirmy about alums’ opinions of a candidate’s fit, software solutions also filled the void of anxiety.

“We are with you every step of the way,” one vendor promises, “from collecting and centralizing (or consolidating) impactful data to analyzing it to translating it into strategic decisions that move the needle.”

Admissions volunteers used to do some of that work.

At Emory University, the admissions office decided in 2022 to redirect its alumni volunteer corps of interviewers towards another role: supporting newly admitted students. Why the change?

“An evaluative alumni interview in the college admissions process is often considered a micro-barrier,” Emory explains in a FAQ on its website. “By providing a safe and low-risk environment for admitted students to explore the Emory experience through casual alumni conversations, we have removed a micro-barrier in the admissions process, supporting a more equitable process.”

The big question will be whether Emory’s former alumni gatekeepers will continue their volunteerism in service to a stronger yield—and whether software algorithms will do a better job at breaking down microbarriers to admission.

Colgate University and other institutions have also limited the weight of alumni interviews. On its advancement site, Colgate alums are told that “volunteers will connect with prospective students virtually through Colgate Admission Conversations, formerly referred to as interviews. These conversations are an informal way for students to learn more.” The conversations “are not evaluative and not required for admission.”

Another threatened role: chapter leaders.

Alumni clubs and chapters based on identity, geography or affinity have long been the tentpoles for convening a university’s population. For large universities, volunteer efforts to lead and coordinate such gatherings were a boon to advancement efforts, with events and volunteerism typically centered around university priorities, philanthropy or revenue driven by corporate sponsorships.

But witness a tool like Facebook’s birthday fundraisers, offered to users as a way to connect their philanthropic leanings to their cause activism from the comfort of their couch. Presuming the universities are liked by alums in a given region, what need do constituents have to attend local fundraisers for their alma maters anymore? The fundraisers (also offered on Instagram) do all the work for you: create the fundraiser landing page, conduct drip marketing outreach to your friends and deliver the proceeds to the university.

Finally, into this post-pandemic landscape, enter ChatGPT. We are only beginning to understand the disruptions smart AI bots like it may have on typical volunteer roles and spaces.

Consider these conversations I had:

• “I need to write a letter to my Harvard classmates from the Class of 1973 asking them to give to Harvard,” I told ChatGPT. It wrote me a flawless letter using many of the same prosaic tricks a class gift officer will deploy: “As we look back on our time at Harvard, I want to ask for your support in giving back to the university that gave us so much,” it wrote. “Your gift, no matter the size, will make a significant impact on the university … I encourage you to consider making a gift to Harvard in honor of our 50th reunion.”
• Then I asked this: “A student from my alma mater (NYU Stern) asked me for advice about interviewing at my company because I’m a corporate ambassador. Please write a response to her for me.” ChatGPT answered with a bulleted list of advice containing these items followed by techniques to approach each: research the company, review the job description carefully, practice with common interview questions, highlight your skills and experiences, ask questions, be professional and follow up. The message ended with “Go Bobcats!”
• “I need to collect class notes from Penn State classmates from the Class of 1998 for the alumni magazine,” I told ChatGPT. Fortunately, the role of class secretary is still beyond its scope—for now. Check with the alumni association, it said, or on social media, or with the university archives office.

For the first two roles above, do your alumni volunteers do better? And if not, are there more meaningful, human volunteer roles they can take? Because I don’t see much of a future in these roles.

On a positive note, I see two ways AI and algorithms might enhance volunteerism and volunteer recruitment moving forward.

1. Transparency for boards: At the highest levels of volunteerism for a nonprofit or university, volunteers are being treated to deeper dives into data than ever thought possible, along with ever more transparent insights into gaps in the nonprofit’s effectiveness or impact. Board members I’ve spoken with who have a keen appetite for data and data science love this new age of Tableau, PowerPoints and big data.
2. Volunteer rankings: At the entry level of volunteerism for a nonprofit or college, the rank-and-file constituents are getting affirmed, stewarded and rewarded with “top fan” badges from social media, often with little or no effort required by paid staff. Long before I got an appreciation pin from the Girl Scouts of the USA, I earned a “top contributor” badge from my local council’s Facebook page (don’t tell Facebook that most of my contributions were newbie troop leader questions).

Volunteering to help a cause has never been easier in history, and raw volunteer counts for many nonprofits and universities are higher than ever thanks to COVID-era trends like virtual and microvolunteering. But the traditional logic of the landscape for donors and dollars for nonprofits is clearly in flux, as are conversations about the meaningfulness and nature of work. Consequently, it’s a great time for any nonprofit to audit and address its current product line of volunteer roles.

Three private universities in California universities acknowledged to the state that in recent years they admitted some legacy students who did not meet their minimum admissions requirements, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The institutions are Pepperdine University, the University of Southern California and Vanguard University. Other private colleges, all complying with a new state law requiring them to report on legacy admits, said they did not admit anyone who failed minimum requirements. (Legacy students are the children or relatives of alumni.)

USC reported offering admission to eight students over the course of four years who were related to donors or alumni but didn’t meet admission requirements, the Chronicle reported. Two students admitted to USC in the 2021–22 academic year did not meet the university’s minimum math requirement; two others did not submit proof they graduated from high school. One of the students was a Syrian refugee and Southern Cal said, “we have no reason to believe that she did not graduate.”

Pepperdine reported to the state that it offered admission to fewer than 10 legacy students who did not meet the university’s standards in each of the 2020–21 and 2021–22 academic years. A spokesperson said one student was admitted each year.

Vanguard reported fewer than 10 such students admitted in three of the past four academic years.

USC noted in its reports that students with ties to donors or alumni are given a “special interest tag” on their applications, and the “existence of a tag does not guarantee an applicant’s admission, nor does it shift an applicant to a fast-track admission process. Students whose files include a special interest tag are evaluated through the same rigorous process as untagged applicants.”

Every time I hang out with Melissa Kane, I learn something. Recently, she and I spent time together at an Ivy+ Leaders in Online Learning meeting at Penn. Melissa graciously agreed to answer my questions about her role at Brown and her career path and to share her thoughts about navigating an alternative-academic (alt-ac) career.

Q: Tell us about your role as senior associate director for online program development at Brown. What are the big projects you are working on that you are most excited about?

A: I lead a team of learning designers, educational media producers and learning technologists, and we have been fortunate to partner with the School of Professional Studies and the School of Public Health at Brown on the design and development of Brown’s first fully-online graduate degree program—an online master of public health. The element that energizes me most about this work is related to the program goals of providing a quality—and distinctly Brown—learning experience to a diverse, global audience at scale.

From a learning experience design perspective, this is a meaty challenge! It requires strategic decision-making around humanistic design that is inclusive to an international audience while also planning for large enrollment. I’m fortunate to be surrounded by a team of folks at the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning who care deeply about inclusive design, and so we spend a lot of time brainstorming, problem-solving and iterating on our ideas. It’s all grounded in theory, but it’s driven by innovation. It’s really fun work.

Q: What educational and professional path have you followed in your career?

A: Like so many in this field, I’ve had a meandering professional pathway. I started my postbachelor’s career putting my communications degree to work in a midmarket TV news station in central N.Y. I worked the night newscast, and I remember having to substitute teach during the day to make ends meet. The challenges that came with substitute teaching ended up serving as a catalyst for me, and within a year at the TV studio, I was pursuing my master’s degree in secondary education and curriculum and instruction.

I eventually left TV news for the K-12 classroom, and this was potentially the most influential experience that positioned me well for the work I’m doing now with developing online graduate degree programs at Brown. I spent about a decade teaching English language arts in a public school, and many of my students were multilingual, first generation or had special needs. I saw firsthand the benefits that came with showing empathy for students’ individual needs and planning intentionally to reduce learning barriers.

I carried these tenets over to my work in higher education at Johnson & Wales University when I first transitioned from K-12. Many years later, when I was conducting research on design thinking process models for my dissertation for my doctorate of education, I was able to see so clearly the connection between human-centered design in professional design fields and its application to learning design. This sparked my interest and research in learning experience design, which I’ve carried into my various roles at Brown, from instructional designer to associate director of instructional design and now to my senior associate director role.

Q: What advice do you have for others aspiring to navigate their own alt-ac career within our higher ed ecosystem?

A: Don’t underestimate the value of varied experiences, and listen to the spark that drives you professionally. Sometimes we get stuck in the vision of our careers we thought we wanted, and that can make us lose sight of the opportunities that lie before us, or it can cause us to ignore the growth our experiences have afforded us. This happened to me at one point in my career, I admit—way back when I was a classroom teacher and could only ever envision myself in a K-12 vertical.

It was through exploring my drivers, taking risks, rolling up my sleeves in the work and leveraging my knowledge gained from my academic and professional experiences that I was able to attain a professional role that both excites me and in which I believe I can make a difference. I think anyone pursuing an alt-ac career should first engage in some reflective work around what it is in their professional world that drives them—specifically. For example, ask yourself what it is about the role that gets you excited to do the work. Think back to your past experiences and ask yourself the same question. Write it all down. Then, when you have a good idea of the work that drives you, and the type of impact you want to make on this world and with whom, go in search of opportunities that speak to that.

Elizabeth Tsurkov, a graduate student at Princeton University, is being held captive by a Shiite militia after she was abducted in Baghdad, The Washington Post reported.

She has been missing since March, but the office of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the circumstance of her disappearance Wednesday. Netanyahu said she is still alive.

She is an Israeli-Russian dual citizen who was doing research in Baghdad for her doctoral dissertation. She was traveling with her Russian passport.

“Elizabeth is a valued member of the Princeton University community,” said Michael Hotchkiss, a spokesman for Princeton. “We are deeply concerned for her safety and well-being, and we are eager for her to be able to rejoin her family and resume her studies.”

It’s rare that a day goes by in which burnout among academics doesn’t come up in personal conversations or news reports in some way. Regularly, I recognize feelings of burnout within myself, even as a white cis woman who left a faculty position and can set my own schedule. And I regularly talk with others in higher education who are cycling through exhaustion, weariness, frustration and disappointment—if not deeper hurts.

And while burnout became a more familiar topic in the news media and otherwise during the height of COVID, and was exacerbated by it, these conditions didn’t begin with the pandemic and far exceed it. Perhaps it comes as no surprise, then, that burnout remains a central focus of the coaching work I do with academics. Many recent articles address burnout in one way or another: from discussions of burnout among health-care faculty, DEI staff and people working in community colleges to advice for educators to balance self-care with accountability.

As I shared in a previous essay, “Honoring Ourselves and Each Other Through Burnout,” burnout is more than an individual experience: “Despite being personally experienced, burnout is collectively constructed through dehumanizing systems. It cumulates as institutions and interactions signal disregard and disrespect.” The language of “burnout” is a shorthand for being “burned up” by systemic injustice, including the accumulation of everyday microaggressions, presumed incompetence and other characteristics of white supremacy culture—all of which run throughout higher education.

Burnout is also never just about burnout. Collectively and individually, our nervous systems are overtaxed by continuous crises and denial of how much violence we’re facing. Intervening into burnout, therefore, can involve actions like blocking institutional harm or moving from denial to recognition. It can also involve a lot of self-inquiry and self-work.

In order to navigate and intervene into dehumanizing systems, interventions will often require us to engage in career discernment. We may face questions of what’s in and out of our hands, where and when we can make changes, when instead we need to walk away—and why. Interventions often invite curiosity about commitments, habits and practices. They can highlight unmet needs, hurts and longings. And they can teach the wisdom that the absence of a strong yes is actually a no.

The more I learn about burnout, the more I realize how much hurt and wrongdoing underlie burnout and, therefore, how many multidirectional interventions are needed. Luckily, we can learn from how other academics are intervening into burnout. Examples of interventions can expand our sense of what’s possible.

A Continuing Need

Early in the pandemic, I really thought—well, hoped—that we collectively would shift our commitments away from going, going, going and the constant capitalist productivity pressures of “more, better, faster”—the very pressures that underlie racial capitalism and white supremacy culture. I hoped that we in higher education would scale back and allow for more spaciousness—that we’d release expectations to overextend ourselves and let go of the ever-accumulating must-dos.

Now, more than three years later, I still deeply desire change. But I’m also grieving (again) just how little has shifted and how much more exhausted, overstretched and worn thin we are today.

Certainly, we need significant and structural change. We need large-scale and long-haul interventions. We need more than individual solutions. And we are still living and working in systems that are eating away at us in the here and now, in our everyday lives.  

So, how do we honor ourselves and each other through burnout?

In the rest of this article, I will offer examples of creative interventions that I am witnessing. These examples are gifted to me through coaching, so I write with deep gratitude for people who are trying different ways of being, doing, feeling, thinking, relating and imagining in higher education.

I am often asked exactly how to intervene into burnout, and I can give no one-size-fits-all answer. Instead, I find that we need many examples to spark many creative interventions. We need to ask many questions to push our creative imaginations.

So much advice on burnout suggests scaling back and saying no. And saying no can be a powerful action when we are positioned to do this for ourselves and for others, especially as a form of blocking harm. But what does it look like to say no in ways that aren’t purely individual—in ways that create space for others to say no, too? In ways that push for institutional change? In ways that shift from burning up/out toward seeking collective liberation?

What I notice about the examples in this essay is that they engage the feminist ethic of both-and: both releasing attachment to “the ways things are done” and building capacity for new ways. I have organized them into three groups: the first aligned with the advice to scale back, the second focused on changing daily rhythms and pacing, and the third working toward deeper, structural changes. Together, they invite a broader sense of what’s possible.

1. Questioning norms, scaling back and disrupting “the way things are done.” Some examples:
   • Proposing to the department, “We’ve always done this program annually, but could we move to a biannual cycle instead?” Or asking, “Is this program one of our core commitments? What would happen, really, if we stopped doing it?”
   • Teaching fewer courses, teaching in scaled-back ways and teaching not individually but as part of collaborative groups.
   • Shortening orientation from a full week to two days and shifting the focus from administrative to-dos toward relationship-building (thereby, strengthening how people can connect with each other as a teaching team, graduate cohort or other group).
   • Reducing the frequency of teaching observations and having conversations about teaching instead of writing observation reports.
   • Producing one-paragraph instead of one-page administrative write-ups.
2. Interrupting the regular rhythm of being always on by being truly away. Some examples:
   • Dropping everything for a few days of an impromptu writing retreat or wellness days.
   • Insisting on having days of the week without any meetings or on-call obligations.
   • Planning days throughout the semester for students to work on their own.
   • Scaling back on conference participation and conference organizing, which can allow time for more conversations about what really inspires rather than drains energy.
   • Scheduling regular times to check in with one’s capacity, energy level, sensations and emotions—sometimes to reset expectations, make decisions and say yes/no, and sometimes just to navigate the day, reconnect with the body and breathe through what’s hard.
3. Following what inspires, building relationally and doing deeper self-work. Some examples:
   • Approaching self-care as reparenting, especially unlearning patterns of rushing and overextending, releasing perfectionism and people-pleasing, and changing other long-held habits and practices.
   • Seeking the support of coaches, counselors, spiritual directors, acupuncturists and other healers.
   • Working with affinity groups and colleagues who organize and advocate for recognizing each other, building solidarity and mobilizing a critical mass to create changes on the campus.
   • Speaking more candidly in committee meetings and other spaces about what pulls against commitments, asking what matters and why.
   • Making bigger changes, too: moving from full-time to half-time, taking paid and unpaid leave, retiring early, changing fields, starting businesses.

More Questions Must Be Asked

What I notice when considering these examples is that they draw on people’s creativity and resources, including time, energy, money, attention, affiliation, imagination and more. Some are only possible when conditions are so bad that it becomes intolerable not to speak up, to say no or to intervene in some other way. Other interventions would be feasible if collective bargaining or organizing structures were in place at the institution.

All the examples point toward the need for additional structural interventions. None is enough on its own. And each holds the potential for other interventions to emerge—for other people to speak up, question more, scale back further, release expectations and rewrite what’s possible from here. Too often, we fail to remember that giving ourselves permission can extend permission to others as well. By disrupting “the way things are done,” we can encourage other disruptions. By saying, “Let’s not do this,” we can invite others to say no, too. By speaking into the too much, always on and overextended nature of higher education, we can build language for blocking harm and build toward more humane and compassionate higher education.

We can ask many more questions, such as:

• What interventions might we make that build possibilities?
• When might we bring attention to conditions that are burning people up?
• How might we honor experiences of burnout—for ourselves and each other?
• How might we hold the both-and approach of both relieving pressure now and pressing for bigger changes?

My hope is that reading these examples may inspire many more interventions, particularly toward institutional accountability and change. Because, truly, so many are needed.

As individuals, we may ask what’s in our hands and act on those answers. But, again, this is not enough. Collectively, it feels as if we are near a breaking point. So many of us are leaving higher education. We are raging and grieving in the process, longing for education to be life-giving instead of life-denying. If burnout is signaling untenable conditions, then is it not time to listen to the underlying messages? Is it not time to ask what changes must be made?

In asking these questions, many people are my teachers, and I’m so grateful to be learning from colleagues through and beyond coaching. May we continue learning with and from each other toward building a sense of what’s possible, toward intervening into the collective experience of burnout.

I didn’t get Scott’s permission before writing this.

That’s not unusual; I never have.

He has been the kind of editor that writers dream of having: supportive, encouraging and willing to point out when I’ve misconstrued something. Once, when I asked what the rules were, he said, “Just don’t libel anybody.” Fair enough.

We “met” before we ever met. I had started this blog on my own, on the old Blogspot site, in 2004, and started posting most weekdays in 2005 just to see if I could. In 2007 he reached out to me to let me know that he liked what I was doing and to see if I’d be interested in having Inside Higher Ed run it. I said yes, and here we are.

It was probably another year or so before we met in person at a conference in Philadelphia. Since then we’ve crossed paths at various conferences. Once I even invited him to be the convocation speaker at Brookdale, and he took me up on it. The venue wasn’t ideal, but the folks who could hear him were duly impressed. I was just grateful that he made the trip.

Over time, I found out a few things we had in common. Most notably, we both grew up in the Rochester, N.Y., area, Scott in Brighton and me in Brockport and later Fairport. People from there know the feeling of living in the shadow of other places. Among those with ambition, it can lead to a certain restlessness that can manifest in taking chances, like starting an online industry journal or writing for years from the trenches under a pseudonym.

Scott helped connect me with the folks at Wiley who published my book. (Come to think of it, it could use an updated edition. Hmm …) Once, when I was still writing under the Dean Dad pseudonym, he had me call in to a conference presentation and present by phone. I couldn’t help but think of the beginning of episodes of the old Charlie’s Angels series, with everyone gathered around a speakerphone. It was kind of silly, but great fun. I don’t know a lot of editors who would do that, but Scott did. It was his idea.

I’m grateful to Scott for taking a chance on something that had never been done before in quite this way and for sticking with it.

He emailed me a few weeks ago to let me know this was coming. I responded thusly:

“NOOOOO!!!!!”

I stand by it.

Best wishes, Scott. Thank you for taking the chance and for such steadfast support. One Monroe County expat to another, I tip my cap.

Jerome (Jay) Langguth, interim vice president for academic affairs at Thomas More University, in Kentucky, has been appointed vice president and chief academic officer there.

Ming-Tung (Mike) Lee, interim president of Sonoma State University, in California, has been named to the job on a permanent basis.

Daniel Norton, director of the Center for International Education at the University of Southern Mississippi, has been chosen as president of Principia College, in Illinois.

Stephen Perez, interim provost and vice president of academic affairs at California State University, Chico, has been appointed president there.

Alan Sams, dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences at Oregon State University, has been selected as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Texas A&M University.

Laura B. Schellenberger, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Culver-Stockton College, in Missouri, has been named president there.

J. Luke Wood, vice president for student affairs and campus diversity and chief diversity officer at San Diego State University, in California, has been chosen as president of California State University, Sacramento.

The University of Cincinnati reprimanded a faculty member after she gave a student a zero on an assignment for describing cisgender female athletes as “biological women,” The Cincinnati Enquirer reports.

Per the reprimand last month, Melanie Nipper, the adjunct instructor, must complete training about the university’s free speech policy and submit her syllabi to her department head, the newspaper reported. She didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment Wednesday.

A student in Nipper’s Gender in Popular Culture class had complained about the grade on TikTok; Nipper said she offered to let the student resubmit the work, the newspaper reported.

In an email, the university told Inside Higher Ed that “As a matter of practice, we don’t comment on personnel issues.”