The Florida Board of Governors voted Friday to ask the state attorney general to weigh in on the Florida Atlantic University presidential search, which has been suspended for alleged anomalies.
The board voted to seek a legal opinion on the use of a survey that sought demographic information about applicants, including questions on sexual orientation and gender identity. The voluntary survey was conducted by AGB Search, the firm hired to find FAU’s next president.
Specifically, the board is asking the attorney general to weigh in on whether the use of the survey—which was not factored into the selection of finalists—failed to comply with state public records laws, according to a description of the agenda item in board documents.
State University System chancellor Ray Rodrigues, a DeSantis ally and former GOP lawmaker, objected to the use of the survey in FAU’s search and an informal straw poll to rank candidates. University officials and AGB Search have both defended the integrity of the search.
The University of Iowa’s Iowa GROW program supports student employees’ learning outside the classroom with intentional conversations with staff supervisors.
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Many students learn valuable on-the-job experience as employees of their institution, but connecting their work to future goals and classroom outcomes can be a challenge for higher education practitioners. A recent survey of hiring managers found 52 percent believe experience is the most important factor in hiring decisions for recent graduates, making it more critical to connect co-curricular and curricular learning.
The University of Iowa launched a program in 2009 to support students in identifying their workforce skills developed on campus in student employment. Iowa GROW—short for “guided reflection on work”—is a trademarked intervention adopted and adapted by hundreds of other institutions to help students make meaningful connections between their jobs and learning through regular conversations with supervisors.
The conversations help students build confidence in their co-curricular learning and connect job functions with their desired career after graduation while creating mentoring relationships with older adults at the college.
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What’s the need: Student employees are sometimes able to identify the “real world” skills they learn on the job like time management, conflict resolution and balancing priorities. However, research shows students have a harder time connecting their jobs to their classroom learning. Supervisors can help bridge the knowledge gap between schoolwork and other work.
The University of Iowa’s division of student life wanted to enhance student employees’ experiences within the department, and Sarah Hansen, associate vice president of student life, so staffers dug into the research to find what would be meaningful and doable within the campus context.
How it works: In an Iowa GROW conversation, supervisors pose four questions to employees:
How is this job fitting in with your academics?
What are you learning here that’s helping you in school?
What are you learning in class that you can apply here at work?
Can you give me a couple of examples of things you’ve learned here that you think you’ll use in your chosen profession?
“They are really specific—they’re focused on transfer of learning across contexts, so back and forth between work and academics because we [division of student life staff] are here to support the academic experience,” Hansen says. The questions also tie into transferrable skills and NACE’s career competencies.
Supervisors have guided conversations with students twice during each semester that they’re employed and can adapt or add questions based on the student’s length of employment or year in college. For example, a supervisor might ask a senior what their role has taught them about workplace culture that will help them in selecting a full-time position after graduation.
Time is always a concern for supervisors, but the intervention is structured so it can happen without much disruption during the workday (like at a produce prep section or while sorting papers) or in a small group setting with multiple students. There’s also a QuickStart version of the Iowa GROW questions to help a supervisor get more comfortable talking with a student about their skills and life goals.
The interventions were designed to be doable and meaningful within the context of the institution, Hansen explains. Many institutions host professional development workshops or sessions for employees, but Iowa’s goal was to embed metacognition into the experience rather than teach specific skills.
The outcomes: Students participating in Iowa GROW conversations have been more likely to believe their employment gave them career-related skills and helped them gain problem-solving abilities, communication skills and general work habits.
For example, in a 2021 survey, 91 percent of student employees who participated in GROW believed their job helped improve verbal communication skills, but only 83 percent of non-GROW employees said the same. Most student employees on campus participate in GROW conversations, but the fluidity of student employment timelines and supervisor turnover makes it difficult to capture all students, Hansen explains.
Student employees at Iowa have retained at a higher rate than their peers since 2012, particularly among underrepresented racial or ethnic minorities and first-generation students. The intervention develops relationships between supervisors and students, creating a sense of accountability and responsibility within students’ roles and creating a mini mentorship.
“It has all of the elements of good mentoring in that it’s context specific, it’s ongoing, it’s meaningful, and so we may not call it that, but it really is,” Hansen says.
Campus partners have also been onboard with the program, looking at the data and their own goals of student learning, Hansen says.
Looking ahead: Since 2009, Iowa GROW has expanded to include the majority of student employees on campus at the University of Iowa, training and retraining supervisors as needed to hold conversations.
Over the years, Iowa GROW has been used and adapted at various institutions. The program fits in most contexts, regardless of size, location or student population, Hansen says.
Terri Schnelle serves as the director of projects and partnerships, managing the day-to-day work of supporting other institutions in GROW and developing additional resources.
Iowa is also adapting the program to better equip supervisors for GROW conversations. With rising concerns around student mental health, program leaders hope to better guide and support staff as they engage in difficult topics with their employees.
If your student success program has a unique feature or twist, we’d like to know about it. Click here to submit.
When Katrina McChesney received an email from an Australian university she had “never heard of” about free research master’s and doctoral degrees for Antipodean citizens, she assumed it was a scam.
At the time, the Kiwi teacher was working on an educational reform project in the Middle East. An academic back home reassured her that it was a legitimate proposal. She gave little thought to whether she really wanted a Ph.D., let alone which university or supervisor would be best. “I just fell into it.”
She started a master’s program and, when things went well, switched to a Ph.D. “I was enrolled at an Australian university, but I lived in the Middle East for the first half and then moved back here to New Zealand,” said McChesney, now a senior lecturer in education at the University of Waikato. “I lived in 11 houses in two hemispheres. I had a baby in the middle of it. The first time I went to my university was to graduate.”
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This scenario is not all that unusual, according to the preliminary findings of an international research project into the experiences of doctoral candidates who study by distance.
A survey conducted by McChesney and colleagues in England, South Africa and Australia elicited responses from 521 current and former Ph.D. students in 42 countries. It revealed a hodgepodge of approaches, from partly online study a stone’s throw from the host university to fully remote learning on the other side of the planet.
While three-quarters of respondents had undertaken three-fifths or more of their studies off campus, one-sixth had been off campus for the entirety of their programs. And while 84 percent had studied in the same countries as their universities, 10 percent had spent the whole time abroad.
Most respondents came from social science disciplines and particularly education, reflecting the researchers’ professional networks but possibly also a comparative dearth of distance doctoral students in laboratory-based courses. Nevertheless, about one-fifth of responses came from people in the sciences.
McChesney said the figures—set to be published in full next year—reflect the heterogeneity of a largely overlooked cohort. “Institutional understandings of who distance doctoral students are, and what they need, are a bit out of date. They’re kind of invisible in the statistics. We haven’t been able to find any reported data.”
While the pandemic forced people off campus, distance doctorates were “not a new post-COVID thing.” A subset of Ph.D. candidates had “always” studied remotely because of work obligations, caretaking responsibilities or sheer distance from their universities. “We know that people do doctorates from prison. Doctorates are being done [in] places like Antarctica. I have this hunch, which I am yet to prove, that somebody must have worked on their doctorate from space,” McChesney said.
COVID triggered new practices in any number of workplaces. “That’s happening for doctoral students, too, but it’s happening quietly because doctoral students are independent and … do their own thing.” But universities were struggling to recognize the phenomenon, hampered by “institutional inertia” and a sense that “doctoral programs have always looked a particular way.”
“Until now, most of the responsibility has sat with students. It’s on you to make it work. Universities have said, ‘Here are the ways you can communicate with us and access our services.’ There hasn’t been that sense of, ‘We as an institution are responsible to make sure our provision serves all of you,’” McChesney said.
McChesney did not choose her supervisor, and her Ph.D. topic “emerged by accident” as an extension of her work at the time. As it happened, “my supervisor was wonderful … but she was really all that the university offered me.”
The university promoted itself as a specialist in distance doctoral education. “Occasionally a librarian would scan a chapter if it wasn’t digitally available. But really, I spent most of my doctorate getting increasingly annoyed at … emails advertising these wonderful networking events, professional development opportunities, workshops, speakers, seminars—all of which required you to be on campus in [another] country.”
Despite such frustrations, the survey elicited many positive stories. “A lot of doctoral students became distant students by accident, because of COVID, and found that it was really great for them.” McChesney said her team rejected the “deficit discourse” of distance study as a “second-best” option. “We think it should be tackled from an inclusion and equity lens in terms of good institutional provision,” she said.
“Financial constraints … caring responsibilities, health and mobility, anxiety, trauma—all of those sorts of experiences are perhaps particularly highly represented in an off-campus cohort. Universities … wanting to be part of the equity drive in higher education can’t [overlook] off-campus students.
“Offering a really strong distance doctorate pathway [has] got to be a good marketing opportunity. There are students out there who want to do doctorates. Be the best at looking after them, and students will come.”
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear,” wrote H. P. Lovecraft in the 1920s, “and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Readers of his treatise Supernatural Horror in Literature were assured that “few psychologists [would] dispute” his claim, although he cited no research to back it up.
Yet this was not mere carelessness. Lovecraft’s speculations were in line with ideas about “the primitive mind” found in the scholarship of the day. Early humankind’s uncomprehending terror of a threat-filled world inspired superstition and religion (more or less synonymous terms in this boilerplate evolutionary narrative). But our species’ advantage in the struggle for survival was the ability to gather and transmit knowledge, however slowly, and thereby develop a degree of understanding and control over natural phenomena. Civilization was a relatively secure island of rational order, of understanding and control over natural phenomena, inconceivable to our cave-dwelling ancestors.
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Lovecraft, in defending what he called “a literature of cosmic fear,” accepted this grand narrative in principle while also insisting that the island was a tiny speck in a universe unimpressed by its sovereignty. “Minds sensitive to hereditary impulse,” he wrote with his characteristic eldritch flourishes, “will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globes in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”
I take it that Arash Javanbakht, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist and director of the Stress, Trauma and Anxiety Research Clinic at Wayne State University School of Medicine, is holding the fort on that tiny island. His book Afraid: Understanding the Purpose of Fear and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety (Rowman & Littlefield) opens by acknowledging fear as “one of the most deeply rooted biological mechanisms that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years in the brains and bodies of animals and humans with one key mission: to increase our chance of survival.” It is hardwired into human physiology in ways it is sometimes possible to override but never to turn off for good. (At least not deliberately: damage to the brain can destroy the capacity for fear, at great danger to the organism.)
But dismissing fear as primitive or celebrating its inescapability are about equally far from his approach. The laboratory and clinical research that Javanbakht discusses is marshaled to understand and mitigate the dangerous aspects of human fearfulness. Real, raw fear “regresses us to a more primitive, rigid, and less flexible level,” he writes, “and rigidity is generally the opposite of creativity.” That said, our capacity to find entertainment in imaginary horrors is a sort of evolutionary luxury—an exercise of the power to feel in control, that “may also put fears and anxieties of modern life into context.”
The author goes over the relevant physiological basics, particularly the role of neurotransmitters and the grounding of what he calls “the fear system” in regions of the brain (the amygdala and hippocampus in particular). The sympathetic and parasympathetic neurons “both have extensive reach to most important organs, and often function opposite to each other in each of these organs.” Responding to perceived threats outside the body, the sympathetic nervous system narrows the behavioral options to fight, flight, or freezing in place, so as not to draw attention. The parasympathetic nervous system “organizes the internal maintenance and metabolic behaviors such as activities of the gastrointestinal system, bladder, and salivation,” all of them “energy-consuming functions that are not a priority during a life-threatening situation when it is better to direct energy, oxygen, and blood away from them.” The parasympathetic system is also involved in shutting down the fight-or-flight response; this causes freezing or fainting. (The evolutionary advantage of fainting is hard to imagine, and it goes unexplored.)
Some fear responses may have a genetic component, as suggested by a study in which 8- to 14-month-old infants were shown mixed pairs of pictures of snakes, frogs and flowers. Their attention went most quickly to the snakes; likewise, they responded more quickly to an angry human face than to a happy one. More interesting, I think, are Javanbakht’s reports on learned fear, including forms that might be called contagious. Pregnant rats given an electrical shock when exposed to the smell of peppermint understandably became fearful of its scent. They were exposed to peppermint again later, while tending to their offspring; the latter had an avoidance reaction to the smell despite never having been shocked. A variety of other experiments show what sound like fear reactions communicated nonverbally between human subjects.
What Lovecraft called “fear of the unknown,” Javanbakht defines, rather, as anxiety—with fear, in the strict sense, being a reaction to known (or at least distinctly perceived) external threats. “Anxiety, on the other hand,” he explains, “is a response to an unknown and vague threat, often has an internal source, and involves a diffuse sense of apprehension.” This distinction in place, the author goes on to pair them together, often enough, as if varieties of a common dynamic; the neurotransmitters involved overlap. And both fear and anxiety have a close and tangled relationship (sometimes as causes and sometimes as responses) to aggression and violence.
Little surprise that Javanbakht finds numerous occasions to connect his field of expertise to recent developments in news from around the world. In particular, the evidence of intergenerational transmissions of fear, anxiety and trauma make for unhappy implications. Yet the author’s tone is almost always energetic, even jaunty. Perhaps that is easier than dwelling at length on the implications of what he’s describing.
Scott McLemee is Inside Higher Ed’s “Intellectual Affairs” columnist. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca magazine and a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education before joining Inside Higher Ed in 2005.
Did you know that 37 percent of the Harvard Class of 2025 attended private schools or that the figure at Princeton was 40 percent, at Brown, 41 percent, and at Dartmouth, 44 percent?
Note: Those figures don’t include the 10 to 30 percent of Ivy Leaguers who are international students, many of whom also attended pricey private schools.
To put those figures in context, nationwide, just 10 percent of high school students attend private schools.
In 2021, The Atlantic calculated that “Dalton has sent about a third of its graduates to the Ivy League. Ditto the Spence School. Harvard-Westlake, in Los Angeles, sent 45 kids to Harvard alone. Noble and Greenough School, in Massachusetts, did even better: 50 kids went on to Harvard.”
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The article’s author noted that “Among the top 25 feeders to Princeton, only three are public schools where 15 percent or more of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch,” and that a Lawrenceville School graduate was seven times more likely to go to Princeton than a student from New York City’s ultraselective Stuyvesant High School, where 45 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Over half of the low-income Black students at elite colleges attended top private schools.
The Wall Street Journal describes a major contributor to the prep-school bias: “‘aristocratic’ sports recruits feed pipeline between private schools and Ivy League”: “About two-thirds of athletes on Ivy League rosters [are] in so-called aristocratic sports such as crew and lacrosse” or squash or water polo.
Just in case you took the Labor Day weekend off, there were a lot of interesting news stories that you may have missed.
For example, an accreditor approved a bachelor’s degree program that requires as few as 90 credit hours. This decision raises a lot of questions that Robert Kelchen, among the most perceptive and thoughtful commentators on the higher education scene, comments on his website. Here are some of the questions he raises:
Will other accreditors be pressured to follow suit?
Will the Biden administration’s Education Department step in?
How will this affect transfer students or the cross-subsidies that departments depend on?
Will the effect be confined to adult-serving institutions?
As someone who graduated in three years, thanks to AP courses, and who spent my third year full-time on an independent research project, I should be the last to criticize a more compressed pathway to a degree. But I had a level of faculty mentoring and research funding that few students receive today.
Three-year degrees can save families thousands of dollars. But it’s hard for me not to see this as a giant leap toward a devalued degree. At one end, we’re witnessing the growth of dual-degree/early-college courses of uncertain quality taught by instructors without a terminal degree. Now it will be increasingly possible to graduate with fewer electives.
I view this as a logical, inevitable outgrowth of a cafeteria approach to a college curriculum. After all, if a degree consists of a random collection of courses without any logic or coherence, why shouldn’t some classes be jettisoned?
The New York Times featured two articles that speak to a number of hot-button issues that grow out of the increasing diversity of today’s student body and the shifts in students’ and parental expectations about colleges’ responsibilities, campus concerns about legal liability, evolving cultural norms and shifting power dynamics among students, administrators and faculty.
One piece, a classic example of late-summer clickbait, looks at how college dining halls are responding to a surge in students with food allergies and requests for special diets for religious, dietary or health reasons.
That piece focuses, predictably, on name-brand institutions, and the readers’ comments are fascinating if not surprising. Many readers are dismissive, decrying coddled, entitled students and citing this as a contributor to the high price of a college education. Others emphasize the dangers posed by food allergies and colleges’ legal and moral obligation to accommodate students’ diverse needs, especially at institutions where meal plans are mandatory and dorm kitchens are unavailable.
What the article doesn’t discuss is the trend at many schools—including my own—to rely increasingly heavily on various fast food outlets to feed students. This trend, in my view, combines the worst of all worlds: campus commercialization; high-fat meals low in nutrients and almost totally lacking in fruit, vegetables and fiber; and the elimination of the dining halls where diverse students socialized and interacted.
The second piece reports on a shift in Yale’s mental health policies that had previously required students struggling with suicidal thoughts or clinical depression to withdraw without a guarantee of readmission and with the loss of their campus health insurance. This shift makes a lot of sense to me.
Unfortunately, this piece doesn’t really grapple with profoundly thorny issues that campuses face involving confidentiality, due process, notification, reporting requirements and access to support services. For example, what are colleges’ responsibilities to roommates, residence advisers or faculty when a student is experiencing a severe mental health crisis? Can colleges compel a student to undergo treatment as a condition of enrollment? How can a campus determine if a student’s behavior puts others at risk?
Then, there was an articleInside Higher Ed published from Times Higher Education about how wealthier universities in Australia are thriving while other institutions falter. A similar piece could, of course, have been written about the United States, where we are also seeing a flight toward more prestigious, better resourced institutions with higher graduation rates, which is intensifying higher ed’s stratification.
One result: many regional comprehensives—the four-year institutions that serve the most diverse and disadvantaged student bodies—are experiencing declining enrollment even as many flagship campuses enroll their largest entering classes ever. The divide in resources, students’ academic qualifications, faculty salaries, breadth of programming and student access to academic support services, cutting-edge technologies and mentored research opportunities, internships and other high-impact practices is widening.
Another result: many community colleges rely, more and more heavily, on early-college/dual-degree courses as a source of revenue and enrollment. Currently, high schoolers make up a fifth of community college students.
Jeffrey Selingo reports that while over 85 percent of students at private nonprofit colleges receive financial aid (largely because of discounting), the figure at public institutions is about 69 percent, with nearly a third of students paying full freight, which means, of course, that many families are highly sensitive to any increase in tuition and fees.
At the institutions where I taught, administered or studied, here are the most recent figures for the average net cost of attendance per year, including grants and scholarships.
Houston $13,798
Hunter $2,124
Oberlin $34,498
Texas $17,519
Yale $16,341
A very striking range, wouldn’t you say? And the range depends heavily not only on institutional resources but on state and local-level public policy decisions.
Then, there was a fascinating piece by Joshua Kim on Boston University’s $24,000 online M.B.A. program. As a program alumna explained, “the program was created in response to what he called ‘artificial scarcity.’ There is no reason low-cost, high-quality online degree programs cannot be done by the world’s most elite schools at scale.” The interviewee goes on:
“The reason these types of programs aren’t more ubiquitous is due to fear—fear of brand dilution, fear of enrollment cannibalization or just higher ed’s recalcitrance to innovate and change—and in response I ask this: Who are we hurting most by this artificial scarcity? The working mom who cannot take two years out of the workforce to go back to school? The international student who for personal matters cannot relocate to the U.S.? The first-generation student who doesn’t want to take out more loans for graduate school?”
Bravo to BU for rising to the occasion.
May other institutions, including my own, take similar steps to broaden access to a meaningful credential and institute—or better yet, require—immersive, highly interactive pedagogies in online courses that incorporate team-based simulations and project-based learning and that act like a true learning community.
Let me conclude with one last article that you might have missed. In an essay entitled “Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That?” Paul Tough, the author, most recently, of The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us, argues that “the new economics of higher ed make going to college a risky bet.”
As I read his article, I kept wanting to shout out: we mustn’t be overly nostalgic about the “good old days.” There wasn’t a magical past, say, in the 1950s or earlier, when college wasn’t socially and economically class related. We need to remember how uncommon college attendance was just six decades ago, when just 64 percent of young people graduated from high school and 45 percent of those enrolled in college and fewer than 8 percent of Americans had a college degree. Back then, even going to a state institution was often a stretch. It certainly was for my parents.
(As my “Higher Ed Gamma” partner, Michael Rutter, points out, higher ed attracts a lot of articles like Tough’s that resemble those you might read in Rolling Stone about the post-Napster collapse of the music business … and how in the “good old days” artists made money, concerts were cheaper, fans were better and the music was much, much better and non–Auto-Tuned. But don’t fool yourself. It doesn’t take much digging to discover that the music industry back then was often corrupt, sexist and exploitative of artists who had little recourse when their talent was abused.)
To be sure, our current system of paying for a college education is broken, and like so many things in this country, higher ed has suffered from utter underinvestment in infrastructure, political maneuvering and neoliberal corruption of college’s mission and purpose.
There’s an odd tendency in Tough’s essay and his recent book to imply that colleges set out to exacerbate inequality. In fact, the rise of inequality in this society has been going on for decades, and even as the stratification of higher education reflects that reality, colleges have also fought against that trend, even though this has been an impossible battle for them to win.
It’s certainly the case that the elites have not done nearly enough to advance economic equality—and should be held to account. But we mustn’t forget that the United States, more than almost any other country, has made college for all not just an ideal, but to a striking extent, a reality.
Societies including Britain, India and South Korea and many others do in fact have educational systems that truly are about class structure or tracking as early as the end of primary school or the outcome of a single high-stakes test. Yes, Canada has an admirable model, but it also has a tiny population, less than that of California.
American colleges and universities have never been what Tough calls “deliberate actors” able to shape their destiny without being buffeted by the economy or legislation or other variables. What our campuses can—and must—do is act more like a collective entity and do everything possible to press this society to truly make a high-quality college education available to all. That means that every student should have affordable access to a teacher-scholar, high-impact practices and strong systems of wraparound supports.
The college-for-all ideal has, without a doubt, made teaching tougher. Today’s students are much more willing to voice their concerns and assert their rights. They’re more demanding, and a few are willing to punish faculty on teaching evaluations when their requests aren’t fulfilled or their grades sufficiently high.
Administrators do, at times, undermine professorial authority and fail to defend academic freedom and require instructors to alter the fundamental nature and even the rigor of our classes (for example, by eliminating breakout sections in large lecture courses). Some accreditors are failing to resist legislative pressure to degrade the quality of a college education.
The challenges we face are the inevitable outgrowth of a change that we should all applaud: a shift in the ethos of higher ed away from an education of an elite to an education accessible to all, irrespective of their family background, financial resources and special needs. That’s higher education’s democratic ideal.
Fulfilling that democratic mission will not be easy. But if we don’t strive to realize that goal, we betray our campuses’ public responsibilities and purpose.
Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
In the dozen years we have co-edited the journalARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, we have read many external reports supplied by colleagues in our discipline. We have also written peer reviews for other journals ourselves. Throughout those experiences, we have been struck by a peculiar challenge presented by the reader report: the challenge of audience.
Peer reviews are commissioned and read by editors, but they are also sent to the author of the piece being reviewed. Because journal editors are the ones who request reader reports, it’s natural to assume they are the primary audience for your review. However, we would like to propose that you think of the author as your primary audience and write your report accordingly.
Why do we recommend this approach? It allows journals to act more like mentors than gatekeepers. If a reviewer imagines they are writing for the journal editor, they compose according to what they imagine the journal editor needs: a judgment about the quality of the article, including an answer to the big question of whether they should publish it or not. If the journal editor is your audience, it might be a virtue if your report is brief (journal editors are busy) or written in conceptual shorthand (you are, after all, writing to an expert in the field). Nor is it a problem if you choose to write caustically (you can all share the joke of what this author thought was publishable).
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At the same time, however, these qualities make a report not very useful or possibly even hurtful to the author of the submission. If, in contrast, the reviewer thinks they are writing primarily for the author, they will likely spend more time explaining what they see as the article’s strengths and weaknesses, shaping their explanations to what they think the author can absorb. It’s also much harder—although, of course, not impossible—to be dismissive.
Including the positive, shaping your suggestions to meet the writer where they are, adopting an encouraging tone—this all probably sounds familiar. A second reason we advocate that a reviewer write primarily to the author is because it enables the reviewer to take advantage of something they know a lot about: how to comment on students’ work. Everything you already know as a teacher about how to write helpful comments to students about their papers is relevant to the work you perform as a reviewer of journal articles. If you are recommending the journal reject an article—comparable to assigning a bad grade—it’s important to be encouraging, to identify strengths of the work as well as limitations, to give advice about how to improve the work and to think of an article as a work in progress. As with student papers, it’s also important to avoid overwhelming the author with recommendations.
Yet there’s one habit of mind we can slip into when giving feedback that isn’t always helpful to the author of the article you’re reviewing, who is after all a colleague and not a student: the sense that you know more than the author. You might be an expert in the field and well published yourself, but that knowledge of the discipline and how to write about it can turn into a liability if it encourages a patronizing tone. It can also be a problem if it makes you reject an article that productively and insightfully challenges your field’s paradigms or values.
For example, the article might focus on material that hasn’t been conventionally analyzed, or it might analyze familiar material in new ways. Rejecting this kind of article is one way that reviewers unwittingly disadvantage younger voices and minoritized authors who want to question the way things have always been done. Not every article that challenges a discipline is doing it well, but some of them are—and those kinds of challenging articles can have a huge impact by taking the field in new and productive directions. In other words, we think it’s important for reviewers to approach articles with the attitude that authors can teach them something, rather than the other way around.
General Suggestions
We recommend that you offer the author suggestions for improvement, whether you think that person can revise and resubmit or that the article has too far to go to be publishable at this time. Unless an article is nearly ready for publication, aim for a length of one to two single-spaced pages. A shorter report won’t offer the detail that an author is likely to find valuable in revising either for the present journal or another one. For the editor, a short report will also be unhelpful in reaching and conveying the decision about why an article was rejected or how the author needs to revise to get the article published.
That said, too long a report might indicate that a reviewer has lost sight of the big picture. In addition, the common advice to limit your suggestions to two or three larger conceptual or structural issues when providing feedback to students applies here, too: the author of an article likely can’t address more than that without writing an entirely new article. However, do point out things like factual errors and other smaller, nongrammatical problems you see.
You might be wondering whether our advice to offer the authors suggestions for improvement might be confusing for authors (and editors) whose articles you are recommending the editors reject. We assure you that rarely happens. We recommend including your final recommendation in your report, but even if you don’t, both author and editor can infer from the kind of recommendations you’re providing how far it is from being publishable at this time. A suggestion to integrate the work of one relevant scholar is very different from a suggestion that an author choose a scholarly conversation to engage with. If you’re still worried, many journals offer separate locations for indicating your final decision and writing comments that are for the editor’s eyes only.
This worry—that authors might be too encouraged—reveals how journals have traditionally functioned as gatekeepers. Certainly, one of the functions of a journal is to provide strong scholarship that will move a field forward. But to return to a point we made above, like many other journal editors, we want our journal to have another function: to serve as a site for the mentoring and nurturing of scholars, especially beginning or minoritized ones. Scholars will not submit just one article to one journal in their career; they will continue, if all goes well, to produce scholarship and develop as writers and thinkers. Similarly, the article you feel should be rejected will likely, if its author receives the right kind of feedback, be revised and sent to another journal—or if abandoned, the author will use your advice to shape their next article. We are all evolving writers, but our evolution can slow or even stop if we receive feedback that is caustic or points out only how we failed. The best feedback suggests a path forward as a writer and scholar.
A Reader Report Template
While we don’t think it’s the only way to write a report, we’d like to describe here some ways to give specific feedback in yours. Start with a one-paragraph summary of the essay’s argument, its contribution or potential contribution to scholarly discussions on the topic(s) and its other strengths. That achieves several things. It shows to the author that you understand what they’re saying, have read the essay carefully and recognize the contribution the author is making or hoping to make. If, in the author’s view, that paragraph does not do a good job summarizing the argument, it should indicate to them that they haven’t been as clear as they hoped. Such an opening establishes your authority and ethos to both the author and editor: it shows that you have read the article carefully, know the field and are generous as well as rigorous.
Alternatively, you might start with your overall recommendation (publish, decline the article or require revisions) and the main reasons behind it. Like the thesis in a student essay, the recommendation and main reasons serve to introduce and organize the details explained in the rest of the report.
If the article is not a straight acceptance, spend the body of the report on two or three higher-level recommendations, as well as any smaller suggestions you have. If you feel the author needs to integrate particular scholarship, it’s very helpful to name the titles you want them to consult.
Do not copyedit the article—among other problems, it will eat up a tremendous amount of your time. Rather, use your report to help the author clarify the stakes of the argument, strengthen the recognition and treatment of other relevant scholarship on the topic, and improve the support for the essay’s claims, the article’s structure and the ideas and concepts they (could) develop or apply.
The only reason to suggest line edits is if you see errors or gaffes you think a copy editor might not notice. To both author and journal editor, an excessive focus on minutiae suggests the reviewer has lost sight of the forest for the trees. Line edits come later in the process—after the article has been accepted but before it has been published.
If you opened your report with a summary of the essay, you might end the report with a recap of your recommendations for revision, although that’s not essential. Authors are likely to read reports several times, so restatement is probably unnecessary. The same is true for editors. Instead, you might close the report with your overall recommendation: accept, reject or revise and resubmit.
If instead you opened your report with your overall recommendation and the main reasons for it, no conclusion is necessary, although you might end on an encouraging note: what you learned from the essay, the importance of the topic and your eagerness to see the essay, a revised version or future work in print.
A Note to Authors
Heeding our own advice to write with authors primarily in mind, we’d like to end by suggesting to authors that thinking about reader reports in the way we have described might provide some emotional buffering against unkind reports. That unkind review might still contain useful advice about how to revise your essay, and we recommend taking that advice seriously, but you should also know that the writer of the report was likely thinking primarily about the editor when writing that review and not the author.
At many journals, including ours, such a report will raise red flags for the editor and might constitute the rare case when we do not send it to the author. We hope that this article will help prevent such reports in the first place.
Michael Tavel Clarke is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary in Canada, where he specializes in U.S. literature and culture since the Civil War. He is the author of These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America, 1865–1930 (Michigan UniversityPress, 2007) and co-editor of Scale in Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He co-edits ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Faye Halpern. Faye Halpern is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. As well as co-editing ARIEL with Michael Tavel Clarke, she co-edits the book series The Theory and Practice of Narrative from The Ohio State University Press.
The University of Utah has launched an investigation of its highly acclaimed women’s gymnastics program following allegations of verbal and emotional abuse of team gymnasts by head coach Tom Farden.
The university has turned to the Kansas City, Mo.–based law firm Husch Blackwell to conduct the review, according to The Deseret News. Current and former athletes, their parents, and Utah gymnastics staffers have been interviewed as part of the investigation.
The former student athletes, who spoke to The Deseret News on the condition of anonymity, are not alleging sexual abuse. They say Farden subjected them to verbal degradation and public shaming at practices and meets, isolating gymnasts from family and pressuring them to refrain from outside communication, and physical intimidation, including throwing objects in the gym and forcefully handling equipment.
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The Deseret News said Farden declined to comment about the allegations.
One former gymnast told The Deseret News that Farden was only focused on winning.
“I felt like I was a thing, a business asset,” she said. “If you’re doing stuff that doesn’t look good for this business that he’s running, then he thinks you’re irrelevant.”
Other athletes as well as former coaches, however, defended Farden and praised his approach.
“He is as professional as they come and he is one of the best coaches out there in the sport of women’s gymnastics,” said Megan Marsden, Farden’s former co–head coach. “He’s one of the best technical coaches and he cares about the athletes.”
An Oregon jury awarded nearly $4 million to a former Pacific University student who accused the institution of mishandling allegations of sexual assault against him, The Oregonian reported.
The university suspended Peter Steele, a doctoral student in psychology, in 2020 after a female student alleged that he physically and sexually assaulted her. Steele said their relationship was consensual.
Steele and his accuser settled competing claims against one another before his lawsuit against Pacific went to trial. He accused the university of failing to follow proper procedures in suspending and later expelling him over the allegations.
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A jury found that Pacific had not acted fairly or reasonably toward Steele and had deliberately caused him emotional distress. On other counts, however, the university prevailed; the jury found that Pacific had neither violated Title IX nor breached its contract with Steele.
“At every step in this situation, we followed our policies and procedures, and we did not discriminate on any basis,” Pacific spokesperson Blake Timm told The Oregonian, noting that the university was considering an appeal.
KC Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College who studies due process in campus sexual misconduct cases, told the news site the $4 million jury award is the largest he’s seen for a student accused of sexual assault.
“Both the size of the jury’s verdict and the fact that there was actually a trial was really, really unusual in this particular area of law and policy,” Johnson said.
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 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.
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.
Brian Ralston at his graduation from USC’s graduate certificate program in music scoring for motion pictures and television in 2002.
Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles
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.”
Figure 16 from the lawsuit shows a letter from the University of Southern California welcoming recent graduates into the USC Alumni Association, which is “free, automatic and lasts forever.”
Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles
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.”
A nursing student at Hodges in a promotional photo on the university’s website
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.
A nursing student at Hodges in a promotional photo on the university’s website.
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:
“Art has the power to hold our attention, draw us away from ourselves and keep us looking closely at something we don’t entirely understand. Learning to explore something unfamiliar and ambiguous, by wielding our imagination and curiosity, is like developing a kind of muscle, which could prove useful to other aspects of our lives.”
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.
Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
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