Tag: Higher

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Continuing Need

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Questions Must Be Asked

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

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

We can ask many more questions, such as:

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

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

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

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

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

That’s not unusual; I never have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“NOOOOO!!!!!”

I stand by it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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An occasional correspondent writes,

Honestly, I’m heartened to hear that the senior leadership is as focused on quality as you say. That’s encouraging, and not universal.

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I’ll start by acknowledging that my management experience has been at undergraduate institutions, rather than research universities. I’m hoping that some of my wise and worldly readers will be able to chime in with relevant context.

The theory of shared governance is that various constituencies have different realms of expertise, so having each relevant group bring its perspective to the table is supposed to work as a form of quality control. It can also help generate support for the final outcome in a couple of ways: it offers a shared sense of ownership in the outcome, and it offers exposure to the context for the decision. Sometimes a given option is the least bad one available, but if you don’t know what else was available, it’s easy to attack as being, well, bad. Involving more people in the discussions early can help get past the tendency to postulate the perfect solution that presumes a different universe.

In practice, shared governance isn’t perfect. At one level, in the paragraph above, you can sometimes substitute “interest” for “perspective” and quickly see the issue. At another, sometimes everyone involved in a given discussion is missing key information or perspective, as in the case above.

One helpful approach is to set out decision rules that stand apart from any given case. For example, in any given year we’d get more requests for new faculty positions than the budget could support. That meant saying yes to some and no to others, which can be a fraught enterprise. To make the process fairer, we came up with several criteria that we’d use to rank requests against each other, and then tried to stick to them: overall program enrollment, direction of enrollment (climbing or falling), availability of adjuncts and programmatic accreditation requirements. They’re necessarily imperfect, but they offer a rational basis for choosing one request over another.

In the case above, though, the budgetary parameters were given; our job was to maximize the usefulness of what we had. Your case is more complicated.

My first recommendation would be to recruit someone from the financial side of the institution to join the discussion. OPM agreements have been known to go off the rails; if nothing else, it would be helpful to have their sense of the finances.

To the larger point, no, it’s not unusual for higher-level academic leaders to be relatively untrained in finance. There’s typically a separate side of the organization that specializes in that. Having worked at a for-profit many years ago, I can say that you don’t want finance folks making every academic decision, and I’ll just leave it at that.

Wise and worldly readers, what do you think? Is there a reasonably elegant way to get some folks with financial acumen to weigh in without causing undue conflict?

Have a question? Ask the Administrator at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.

The Supreme Court’s decision striking down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan is “devastating” for millions of borrowers and likely will further complicate plans to restart student loan payments in two months, advocates said.

“It is a dark day for 40 million student loan borrowers,” said Persis Yu, deputy executive director and managing counsel for the Student Borrower Protection Center, during a press conference Friday, reiterating that the court got it wrong.

The court’s conservative justices ruled in a 6-to-3 decision that the administration did not have the authority under the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES) Act of 2003 to forgive up to $20,000 for federal student loans for eligible Americans. That law allows the Education Department to waive or modify parts of the student loan program so that borrowers affected by war, military operation or national emergency—such as the coronavirus pandemic—don’t end up in a worse position financially.

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But, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote in the majority opinion, the debt-relief plan went beyond a modification or waiver. Instead, it would create a “novel and fundamentally different loan forgiveness program.”

“The secretary asserts that the HEROES Act grants him the authority to cancel $430 billion of student loan principal,” Roberts wrote. “It does not. We hold today that the act allows the Secretary to ‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, not to rewrite that statute from the ground up.”

The court’s decision comes nearly a year after Biden first announced his plans to forgive some student loans—a plan that was aimed at helping borrowers avoid default when payments resumed following a three-year pause. Restarting payments without canceling student loans first will be “catastrophic,” advocates for cancellation have said. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently said that millions of borrowers are at risk of defaulting.

About 26 million people applied and more than 16 million were approved for relief before a federal judge blocked the administration from moving forward with the plan.

Payments are set to restart in September, and advocates for debt relief and borrowers are urging the Biden administration to take action now to prevent a wave of defaults.

“In the face of the Supreme Court’s unjust decision, the responsibility to fight for student debt relief falls squarely on the president’s shoulders,” said Natalia Abrams, president and founder of the Student Debt Crisis Center. “This is a moment that demands swift action.”

President Biden said in a statement, “The fight is not over.”

“I will stop at nothing to find other ways to deliver relief to hard-working middle-class families,” the statement said. “My administration will continue to work to bring the promise of higher education to every American.”

Under Biden’s plan, announced last August, individuals who earn less than $125,000 a year would’ve seen their student loan balances drop by $10,000 while those who received Pell Grants in college would have seen an extra $10,000 in relief.

Heritage Foundation legal fellow Jack Fitzhenry and Lindsey Burke, director of Heritage’s Center for Education Policy, said in a joint statement that the court “rightly found that this was an issue for Congress, not the administrative bureaucracy, to decide.”

“If we want to help students deal with the increasing cost of getting a degree, giving a bailout to the very colleges and universities that hike prices is not the answer,” said the representatives of the right-leaning think tank. “Breaking up the monopoly of college accreditors and offering students more higher education options, while simultaneously cutting off the open spigot of federal higher education subsidies, is a start. Ultimately, students should be equipped with the knowledge and certainty that the student loans they take out can be repaid in future employment.”

The Court’s Decision

Six Republican attorneys general sued the Biden administration in September seeking to block the debt-relief plan. The attorneys from six states—Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina—alleged that the plan would harm state revenues and agencies that hold student loans.

“As someone who paid for my education in blood, sweat, and tears in service to my nation, I am extremely pleased with the Court’s ruling today,” Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey said in a statement. “The court recognized that Joe Biden’s plan to force farmers, schoolteachers, and truckers to pay the student loan debts of Ivy League graduates was a gross abuse of power and a slap in the face to every working American who didn’t attend college or who paid off their debts.”

A majority of justices agreed that the state of Missouri had standing to sue the administration because of potential harms to the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA), a federal loan servicer. About half of federal borrowers would have their loan balances wiped up under the debt-relief plan, which would cost MOHELA about $44 million a year in fees.

That loss in revenue was a financial harm to MOHELA.

“Today, we have concluded that an instrumentality created by Missouri, governed by Missouri, and answerable to Missouri is indeed part of Missouri; that the words ‘waive or modify’ do not mean ‘completely rewrite’; and that our precedent—old and new—requires that Congress speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy,” Roberts wrote.

Whether the plaintiffs had standing was a key issue discussed during oral arguments earlier this year and in many court filings. A separate lawsuit challenging the plan was tossed because the justices unanimously agreed that the two private plaintiffs lacked standing.

“From the first page to the last, today’s opinion departs from the demands of judicial restraint,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the dissenting opinion. “At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent.”

On the merits of the case, Roberts wrote that the statutory text of the HEROES Act alone precludes the debt-relief program.

“What the Secretary has actually done is draft a new section of the Education Act from scratch by ‘waiving’ provisions root and branch and then filling the empty space with radically new text,” he wrote. “The secretary’s comprehensive debt cancellation plan cannot fairly be called a waiver—it not only nullifies existing provisions, but augments and expands them dramatically.”

In reaching their decision, the justices also applied the major-questions doctrine to the case, which says in part that agencies need clear congressional authorization when carrying out policies that have economic and political significance. Whether the doctrine applied was another key issue raised at oral arguments and in court filings.

Roberts said the debt-relief plans’ economic and political significance “is staggering by any measure.”

“The dissent insists that ‘student loans are in the Secretary’s wheelhouse,’” Roberts wrote. “But in light of the sweeping and unprecedented impact of the Secretary’s loan forgiveness program, it would seem more accurate to describe the program as being in the ‘wheelhouse’ of the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations.”

Kagan wrote that the court overreached its role in the nation’s governance in striking down the debt-relief program by granting the states standing and then determining that the HEROES Act does not authorize the plan.

“Wielding its judicially manufactured heightened-specificity requirement, the Court refuses to acknowledge the plain words of the HEROES Act,” she wrote. “It declines to respect Congress’s decision to give broad emergency powers to the Secretary. It strikes down his lawful use of that authority to provide student-loan assistance. It does not let the political system, with its mechanisms of accountability, operate as normal. It makes itself the decisionmaker on, of all things, federal student-loan policy.”

Pressing Biden to Act

Yu, with the Student Borrower Protection Center, and other legal experts said during a press conference after the decision that the opinion did not affect other potential tools the administration could use to provide student loan forgiveness—such as the Higher Education Act of 1965.

“[Biden] has other tools, and he must use those other tools,” Yu said. “We are calling on the administration to immediately issue relief in order to deliver relief to the more than 16 million borrowers we already know qualify for this relief.”

Abby Shafroth, co-director of advocacy and director of the Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project at the National Consumer Law Center, called the decision heartbreaking.

“It’s wrong on the law, and more importantly, it threatens the financial security of millions of low-income Americans who are struggling with unaffordable student loan debt,” Shafroth said. “They were counting on this debt relief to be able to manage their payments when bills resumed in September for the first time in over three years.”

Shafroth said the decision was narrow in that it leaves open the possibility that the Biden administration could use other avenues to provide debt-relief.

“With a massive wave of defaults and financial distress at risk for borrowers without debt relief in September, it’s clear that every option must be on the table to ensure that Americans with student loan debt … can get the relief they need and can get it now,” she said.

Chavis Jones, associate counsel for the Lawyers’ Committee, said Black and brown borrowers will be hardest hit by the court’s decision.

“The fight for student debt relief continues, and we will not give up,” Jones said. “The letter of the law is clear: student debt relief is and always has been legal.”

Repayment Concerns

Regan Fitzgerald, manager for the Pew Charitable Trust’s project on student borrower success, said she’s worried about how the court’s decision will affect the return to repayment in a few months.

“This means that millions more borrowers than the department was expecting will be returning to repayment this fall,” she said.

Higher education experts and advocates have been worried for months about the department’s ability to turn payments back on following an unprecedented three-year pause. That effort has been further complicated by budget cuts at the Office of Federal Student Aid, which did not receive additional money from Congress for this fiscal year.

“We’re really concerned about the level of service that will be available, and that borrowers will be confused about when their loans are due, who their servicer is, how much they’re going to have to pay, how they can pay and what their options are to pay,” she said.

Fitzgerald said clear communication from the Education Department to borrowers and loan servicers will be crucial to making sure all parties understand the process and their options.

The department is currently working to finalize a more generous version of an income-driven repayment plan that would make payments more affordable for borrowers and provide more pathways to forgiveness.

Fitzgerald said rolling out that plan will be “a huge undertaking” for Federal Student Aid on top of resuming student loan payments.

Yu said that the administration’s plan to offer a more generous income-driven repayment program is not enough to address the student debt crisis.

“Income-driven repayment cannot be the plan to prevent tens of millions of borrowers from falling into financial distress,” she said. “The servicing system is not prepared to administer income-driven repayment for 43 million borrowers.”

Higher Ed’s Response

Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education, said the decision likely won’t have a direct impact on colleges and universities, though the fight over forgiveness highlighted the ongoing concerns about affordability of higher education.

“There’s so much frustration with the system,” he said. “While forgiveness wouldn’t have fixed that, it certainly would have helped a lot of people with the problems they are facing.”

He said the student loan system is broken and that a “comprehensive overhaul of how we pay for college” is needed.

That effort would take Congress working together, though, which Fansmith said would be very hard in the current political environment.

In recent weeks, congressional Republicans have proposed their own plans to reform the student loan system. Fansmith said the debate and movement has shown that this is an issue that people care deeply about.

“If that doesn’t drive you to take action, that’s a real missed opportunity,” Fansmith said.

Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said the decision will be “difficult—if not devastating—news” for student loan borrowers nationwide.

“And as we prepare for student loan payments to resume after more than three years, we must get on with the work of helping these same borrowers face the reality of student loan repayment,” he said in a statement. “Today’s Supreme Court decision only underscores the urgent need for student loan reform.”

That includes increasing the federal Pell Grant, which several other associations and institutions mentioned in their statements reacting to the decision.

The University of California system said in a statement that it was disappointed in the court’s decision.

“This historic relief program would have made a significant impact on the lives of college graduates, particularly for those from low-income backgrounds who are more likely to take on debt to complete their education,” the statement said. “It also harms society as a whole: Those with student loans are less likely to earn advanced degrees, purchase a home, start their own business or make other investments that benefit their communities.”

The system encouraged student loan borrowers to consider all their loan-repayment options through the Education Department.

“At the University of California, we are committed to helping students make payments more economical and less burdensome,” the statement said.

Dominic Quan Treseler, president of the California State Student Association, said in a statement that the decision “overlooks the crippling impact of student debt on millions of graduates and the wider implications it has on the socioeconomic fabric of our society.”

“Despite this setback, CSSA remains steadfast in our commitment to advocate for accessible and affordable higher education,” Treseler said. “This decision does not mark the end of our efforts; rather, it fuels our determination to push for systemic changes that will lead to a more equitable education system.”

The Kentucky Supreme Court has sided with students, allowing their suit to proceed. They are seeking more than $200 million from the University of Kentucky over its COVID-19 policies, The Louisville Courier Journal reported.

The students want a portion of their spring 2020 tuition and fees refunded because the university did not offer classes in person at that time.

The university maintains that it did not have a contract with the students.

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“In exchange for the payments of the tuition and fees, the students had a legitimate expectation to receive what they paid for,” the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled. The decision sends the case back to circuit court.

In a statement provided to the Courier Journal, a University of Kentucky spokesperson said the university’s actions during the pandemic “not only saved lives,” but also “followed the letter of the law.” He added, however, that the Supreme Court decision was limited. “The only issue here was whether immunity barred the students’ claim. It is not a decision on the merits.”

Fitch Ratings’ 2024 outlook for higher education enrollment is fairly bleak, according to data offered during an online presentation Thursday.

Emily Wadhwani, Fitch’s senior director for U.S. higher education, cited demographic declines as a primary factor, especially in the Northeast and Midwest; she said certain states, including Maine and Pennsylvania, have been particularly hard hit. She also said public doubt in the value proposition of a college degree was eating away at the remaining enrollment potential.

While higher ed’s economic outlook improved slightly since last year, Wadhwani said burgeoning expenses—in the form of rising labor costs as well as persistent inflation and the subsequent increase in utilities and materials costs—made enrollment struggles all the more damaging, especially for tuition-dependent private institutions. She also said stagnant or declining state support was making public institutions more reliant on enrollment increases, which were largely not materializing.

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The projections are in line with Fitch’s December report, which warned that higher ed’s economic standing was “deteriorating,” thanks in no small part to languid enrollment.

While the agency held relatively stable ratings for most institutions throughout the pandemic due largely to federal relief aid, Wadhwani said continued post-pandemic woes would likely lead to worse ratings for more institutions next year.

“The winner-take-all dynamic will become more pronounced,” she said. “We’re going to see more bifurcation between institutions, and that bifurcated area will likely widen.”

The institutions that have shown resilience or adaptability are those that recognized the need for “programmatic flexibility” and invested in specific offerings that could distinguish them in a crowded field, Wadhwani added. She said she expects more institutions to make “difficult choices” in the coming year, reorienting their budget priorities and cutting costs from areas that do not show returns.

Wadhwani also commented on the potential impact of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision on admissions, warning that the steep drop in underrepresented students in states that previously banned race-conscious admissions could be replicated on a national scale. But she noted that most institutions have been working “quietly and strategically” to revise their admissions policies and predicted that the overall effects of the affirmative action ban will be “muted.”

A professor and two students were stabbed Wednesday in a philosophy class on gender issues at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, the Associated Press reported.

A suspect in the stabbings is a member of the “university community,” a spokesman said. The suspect is being questioned.

The three who were stabbed were being treated at a hospital for what were described as non-life-threatening injuries.

Yusuf Kaymak, a student, told CTV News the attack happened in a gender studies class. “The guy basically walked in and asked the teacher if he was the professor; he said ‘yeah,’ then he pulled out a knife and after that, everybody just ran out,” Kaymak said.

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The ability to collect, organize, interrogate and make sense of data is an essential job skill in the 21st-century marketplace. A Harvard Business Review analytic services report notes that nearly 90 percent of organizations say success depends on data-driven decisions made by front-line employees. To ensure students can succeed in this market, colleges and universities of all types and sizes must move rapidly to build students’ data competencies.

Yet higher ed institutions are far from ready to help students level up their data skills. Too few faculty members, instructional staff and librarians have the necessary knowledge and skills to teach students these competencies. Even among those faculty and others who are ready, too often they still face barriers to accessing the tools and materials required to fully integrate data literacies into the curriculum.

At an institutional level, it is difficult to procure access to large-scale data sets, which often come with concerns over intellectual property rights, privacy issues and various data-extraction and delivery options. All these efforts—to learn, to train, to support and to create and update curricula—also require time.

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Some institutions are taking steps to address these challenges at the local level in order to help students build data skills. Universities are creating data majors within existing departments, while others—such as the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the University of Texas at San Antonio—have established entire schools of data science. This approach accelerates progress at these schools by adopting new courses and majors rather than retooling entrenched curricula.

Outside of creating a school or department, large institutions are setting up specialized institutes focused on teaching data literacy and working with research data, such as UNC at Chapel Hill’s Research Hub. At smaller institutions, existing staff are reskilling in areas such as Python, R, SQL and natural language processing so they can teach these skills as part of their courses. Still other colleges and universities are developing smaller departments and programs within their libraries, with data literacy acting as a natural extension of the information literacy courses traditionally taught by librarians.

This activity, while important, is uneven, and it risks leaving behind students at schools with fewer resources and missing opportunities to share services, like the aggregation of rights-cleared data sets, in ways that expedite progress.

Solutions exist that address these gaps. My organization, the nonprofit Ithaka, has developed Constellate, a free platform that helps faculty members easily and effectively teach students text analysis and data skills by integrating vast repositories of scholarly content, including from its peer services JSTOR and Portico, and open educational resources into a cloud-based lab.

This year, it also is continuing the Text Analysis Pedagogy (TAP) Institute, a program originally funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to train postsecondary educators to teach data and text analysis. The institute—open to faculty, librarians, staff and graduate students interested in teaching text analytics—trains participants in a monthlong series of courses focusing on data analytics, data visualization and machine learning. The goal is to train the trainers, empowering college educators to help students acquire marketable data skills.

Overwhelming interest in the TAP Institute shows the need for such skill development. In its first two years, it has trained more than 400 higher education faculty members, librarians, research staff and graduate students in humanities-focused text analysis. Before the 2022 institute, participants were asked if they were ready to teach text analysis, and 79 percent reported they were not. After the institute, this number fell to 27 percent. Similar interest in Constellate is coming from institutions of all sizes and resource levels in the United States and abroad.

Scaling affordable ways for schools to teach and for students to learn data competencies is essential. This type of educational training must be widespread to produce tomorrow’s workers and promote students’ success; it cannot be a privilege for students at the largest or most affluent institutions.

Constellate is one of a range of needed solutions being developed and tested to address this skill gap. Both the Carpentries and the Digital Humanities Research Institute aim to develop technical skills to support teaching and research. There have also been efforts to address the challenge of providing rights-cleared access to big data sets with support for text and data mining, like those offered by the recently retired CADRE Project.

Scaling affordable ways for schools to teach and for students to learn data competencies is essential. This type of educational training must be widespread to produce tomorrow’s workers and promote students’ success; it cannot be a privilege for students at the largest or most affluent institutions. And it should be part of the curriculum for all students, not just the data scientists. The future of data-driven careers is here, and higher education needs to be ready to help students succeed in this world.

a professor and two students were stabbed Wednesday in a philosophy class on gender issues at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, the Associated Press reported.

A suspect in the stabbings is a member of the “university community,” a spokesman said. The suspect is being questioned.

The three who were stabbed were being treated at a hospital for what were described as non-life-threatening injuries.

Yusuf Kaymak, a student, told CTV News the attack happened in a gender studies class. “The guy basically walked in and asked the teacher if he was the professor; he said ‘yeah,’ then he pulled out a knife and after that, everybody just ran out,” Kaymak said.

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The voice of a student from John Jay College in the City University of New York system opens this brief reflection on slow active learning. As educators at CUNY, we have heard similar voices many times, each offering a version of the same message: my educational journey is not clear. It is precarious. I see red flags.

And indeed, this is true for many college students in the United States today, including first-generation students, lower-income strivers, students who experience racial barriers and disabled students. Those students are asking, “How does higher education work? How do I fit into this thing called college? How does college fit within the trajectory of my life? How did I get here?”

Such questions point to the students’ desire for integration, their desire to better understand the relationship of college life to their life. Yet they suggest that education can interrupt or stymie the desire for wholeness rather than satisfy it. A survey published by the World Economic Forum revealed one of the top reasons students drop out is that they simply do not know why they are in college.

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In our experience as college instructors, we’ve found that the practice of writing their educational narratives is one way to help students turn their educational question marks into coordinates. Educational narratives promote slow active learning. Like narratives in literature that relate events and characters, active learning helps students to piece together their own educational moments, experiences and influences.

For all kinds of nontraditional students, their educational stories are not easy to tell or relate to. So much about education can seem random. Yet not piecing together their educational narratives makes students bystanders rather than active participants and authors of their own educational and life stories.

So how can classroom instructors help students write educational narratives that foster integration and orientation? And how can we do so in ways that do not smooth over or ignore students’ often broken trajectories, their doubts and questions, and their sense of educational disorientation?

We can ask a simple question: “How did you get here?” Note that this is an active learning exercise that faculty members in all types of disciplines can use early on as part of classroom introductions and then throughout the semester. The question lends itself to the work of creating complex educational narratives, because it asks several questions at once.

How Did You Get Here Today?

This seemingly mundane question makes students’ commutes to classes part of their educational journeys. It prompts students to think about their lived experiences of getting an education, which requires getting to an education. Drawing on the work of disability rights scholars, we know that overlapping systems need to function in tandem in order for many students to get here.

For example, public transportation systems such as New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA, must be working if our commuter students are to have any hope of getting to and then navigating public higher education systems like CUNY. Disabled students may also rely on working elevators or reliable paratransit, neither of which have a great track record.

When transportation fails or is delayed, educational progress can also stall. Making these kinds of connections between students’ experiences gives them a manageable way to begin to answer and conceptualize the larger question of “How did you get here?” It also provides an opportunity to work toward an anti-ableist pedagogy that recognizes our shared needs and invites conversation about the barriers present in the systems we depend on. When educational narratives become material histories of access and resource distribution, students learn to entangle the individual and the systemic in order to resist the allure of triumphalist student (and teacher) success stories.

How Did You Get Here, Into This Class?

This question asks students to narrate the process of class scheduling as part of their educational journeys. How did your class schedule get determined? Was the process transparent or opaque? Did you follow your work schedule or a formal degree plan? Did you consult an adviser or peers? Getting into a particular class is a question of systems, bureaucracies and the availability—or not—of information.

Unfortunately, this scheduling thread of the narrative can often seem like the major plot line of the college story, as though enrolling in the courses one needs to graduate is the most important graduation requirement. Certainly, understanding how to navigate one’s degree path is crucial to student progress. But the process of figuring out which classes will count and, in turn, advance one most quickly and cost-effectively toward graduation—a primary concern of poor and working-class students—ought not be the drama that our students report it to be in their educational narratives. Their negative, stressful experiences of course selection could be avoided with more robust advising, greater student-to-student engagement and improved technology.

Asking this second version of the question “How did you get here?” thus reveals two important findings. First, students retain quite vividly their feelings of frustration about how—or whether—they got into a class. Educational narratives take such affective experiences seriously, incorporating them as key data points.

And second, the question reveals that students are highly attuned to the work of avoiding classes that seem to obscure the path to graduation, classes such as queer studies or disability studies, our two areas of expertise. Educational narratives thus reveal the power of the recognizable and the normative to curtail discovery and the surprise of learning. Recovering the possibility of discovery and surprise can become a previously unthought educational goal for students who develop narratives of their journeys.

How Did You Get Here, to College—and This College?

This is the most straightforward formulation of the question—and the hardest to answer. It asks students, and also professors, to explicitly integrate the here of college with the there of their lives. That integration is, of course, the entire goal of education.

The goal is neither to “go away” to college (the traditional, residential college narrative) nor to “get through” college to earn a degree (the transactional, social mobility narrative). The goal, rather, is to integrate and sustain one’s education for life: on the job, at home, in the community. Such big questions often produce big question marks as answers. “I’m not completely sure how I got here,” many students say. To which the exercise of writing their educational narrative helps provide an answer: “OK, but try to tell us. Start with question No. 1: How did you get here today?”

A Continual Redrafting

These three questions produce a first draft of an educational narrative, a form of authorship that each student pieces together from sometimes disconnected or disorienting educational experiences. Yet educational narratives require revision as a class progresses, not least because in a peer-to-peer, active learning classroom, students have the pedagogical orientation and tools to produce a shared educational narrative. Students in one of our classes reflected this shift to collective narrativization and knowledge production:

In that this layered and now collective question “How did I/we get here?” needs to be ongoing, answered and answered again, it captures the necessarily recursive drafting and redrafting process of writing our educational narratives. In this sense, the continuing work of constructing integrated educational narratives produces slow active learning, a long-term project of making sense of education for life: “While we came to this class for many different reasons,” one class wrote in a collective voice, “we hope to take all that we learned here and apply it to our everyday lives and careers.”

Near the end of the semester, we can ask one final question that further shows that active learning is sometimes revealed only slowly, over time, even as active learning also often succeeds through immediate engagement. “To whom did you teach our class?” Notice that it’s now “our” class, not “this” class.

Students react to the question “To whom did you teach our class?” with authority and variety, reflecting their ability to internalize and extend classroom pedagogies. Reversing student and teacher roles, this question elicits responses including, “My peers outside of class,” “coworkers,” “parents and siblings,” “children,” “customers” and our favorite: “my professor.” It often reveals that our disoriented students, who sometimes can’t say quite how or why they got here, have in fact been teachers all along.

Like the best lessons, this is a lesson our students teach us, not the other way around. In writing their extended educational narratives, they show us that they are constantly teaching others in rooms their professors never see. They are actively engaged in the slow, integrative work of moving transformative pedagogy out there, beyond the classroom and walls of the academy and into the rest of their lives. Indeed, an educational narrative that students carry with them into their daily lives, communities and the world is an educational narrative that does not end.

The West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission this month granted reauthorization for every private college in the state to continue to operate and award degrees, except for one: Alderson Broaddus University, MetroNews reported.

The commission delayed a decision on Alderson Broaddus because of concerns about the university’s finances, said Sarah Armstrong Tucker, chancellor of the commission. The commission requested additional information about Alderson Broaddus.

Enrollment at the college is down to about 500 undergraduate and 170 graduate students.

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The university declined to answer specific questions about enrollment or finances.

But it released this statement: “In the general higher education landscape, enrollment numbers have been in decline at most colleges and universities. With a smaller pool of traditional college-aged students, the effects of the pandemic, and an emphasis on technical education, enrollments at four-year institutions have dropped. All colleges and universities, especially private institutions, have been impacted over the last several years.”

Higher education’s accreditation system violates the Constitution, Florida governor Ron DeSantis alleges in a new federal lawsuit against the Biden administration that’s aiming to strip accreditors of their authority.

“I will not allow Joe Biden’s Department of Education to defund America’s #1 higher education system all because we refuse to bow to unaccountable accreditors who think they should run Florida’s public universities,” DeSantis said in a statement.

Colleges and universities have to be accredited by an Education Department–recognized accreditor in order to receive federal student aid, according to U.S. law. In recent years, some institutional accreditors have spoken against state lawmakers’ efforts to reshape higher education and have become the target of criticism.

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“Accreditation standards are not advisory or optional,” the complaint says. “Rather, all postsecondary institutions must be accredited by a recognized accrediting agency to be eligible for any federal funding programs for higher education. Making matters worse, colleges and universities cannot freely choose their masters, as federal law requires them to show ‘reasonable cause’ to change accreditors.”

DeSantis has long focused on accreditation as a problem, and former president Trump has picked up on that line of criticism as part of his 2024 presidential campaign. Other conservative groups are also starting to focus on the role of accreditors.

“Governor DeSantis is now bringing his culture wars, like book bans, to the long-standing system that helps ensure students receive a quality college education,” the White House said in a statement. “This administration won’t allow it. We’re committed to ensuring all students receive a high-quality education, and will fight this latest effort by opponents to get in the way of that.”

Florida passed a law last year that required state colleges and universities to change accrediting agencies every 10 years. The complaint argues that the Education Department has issued guidance over the last year to make it more difficult for a Florida college or university to switch accreditors. The state wants a federal judge to at least toss out the guidance.

“Governor DeSantis and I believe a high-quality education should be held to the highest standards,” said Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, in a news release. “The University of Central Florida’s goal to become a preeminent university and join the American Association of Universities is better supported by joining The Higher Learning Commission.”

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges is currently the accreditor for Florida institutions.

A reader wrote in with a thoughtful response to the question of how to structure classes in light of ChatGPT and its variants:

This seems to be the direction things are going, at least for the moment. It’s a variation on using canned tomatoes in “homemade” spaghetti sauce. A purist might object that one is building on something already produced, but one person’s sauce will be very different from another’s even if they use the same canned base. Similarly, someone using an AI-generated essay as an outline or a prompt might well take it in an entirely different direction, to say nothing of whether they bother fact-checking. As I taught my students, editing is a skill in itself.

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On the other hand, that position may only be tenable while AI bots are still in the relatively crude, early phase. As they improve, they may get better at sounding human. As that happens, there may be less room for students (or others) to make the output their own. Some professors are already bringing back oral exams as ways to defeat write-o-matic devices. One history professor I know assigns her students to produce podcasts on given topics in lieu of a paper. She reports that they’re more fun to listen to and harder for students to fake.

I’m not a formal scholar of communications, but I’m fascinated by ever-more-complex technology pushing us consistently back toward the oral tradition. A hundred years from now, will formal writing be considered quaint? Perhaps a transitional technology that became irrelevant after the transition? I hope not—there’s something to be said for the sustained focus that writing both generates and demands—but the tendency is clear.

If that’s true, then one task for higher education might be to find ways to encourage deeper thinking other than through writing. Gamification leaps to mind, as do oral exams, projects, and debates. In the Socratic tradition, sustained oral questioning was considered the route to truth. That’s maddeningly hard to do well—witness the number of variations on “it is certainly so, Socrates” in the various Platonic dialogues—but when it works, it’s glorious.

As a fan of Susan Cain’s work, I’m compelled to note that writing as a medium is particularly suited to introverts. Introverts tend to prefer to mull things over before holding forth on them, and writing allows for that. Moving from a writing-centered culture back to one based on oral traditions may amplify the already-too-strong tendency in American culture toward rewarding bluster over substance. But if we can find other ways for smart introverts to make their contributions—and I’m sure that we can—we might be able to avoid inadvertently relegating some of our best minds to the margins.

Yes, of course, results matter. But the process of getting those results is supposed to be educative in itself. The point of assigning a paper isn’t the paper; it’s the struggle the student goes through in writing the paper. Take away the struggle, and you take away the point. Driving the length of a marathon is much easier than running it—I assume—but it isn’t quite the same thing.

Wise and worldly readers, have you found introvert-friendly ways to encourage more reflective participation beyond writing? I’d love to hear (via writing, ironically enough) via email at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com, on Twitter at @deandad or on Mastodon at @deandad at-sign masto (dot) ai.

A George Mason University professor last week lost his court argument that the institution disciplined him for sexual harassment based on anti-male bias.

“The university officials’ statements on which [Todd] Kashdan relies do not plausibly show anti-male bias or demonstrate that anti-male bias was a but-for motivating factor in GMU’s disciplinary actions against him,” wrote Judge Allison Jones Rushing on behalf of the unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

She wrote,

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George Mason’s punishment of Kashdan included a ban on “teaching graduate-level courses, mentoring new graduate students or hiring new graduate students as research assistants, all for a period of roughly two years,” the judge wrote. Kashdan remains a tenured professor.

“I am disheartened by the Fourth Circuit’s decision,” he said. “I filed the lawsuit in response to a lack of due process and false allegations of harassment, to attempt to fix a dysfunctional Title IX process in academia and to protect others facing similar injustices.  In my case, the harassment charge focused on group conversations in graduate-level classes and meetings.”

The Washington Post reported Thursday on Kashdan losing his appeal.

Most states were able to keep financial aid programs at public colleges intact during the pandemic, but they were not able to provide financial aid to undocumented students or make them eligible for in-state tuition.

These are among the findings of two new reports released Thursday by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

The reports use survey results to evaluate state tuition policies for undocumented students as well as the effects of the pandemic on state tuition and financial aid policies.

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Federal pandemic relief funds protected a vast majority of existing state financial aid programs, according to the report. Additionally, 14 states said the funds allowed them to expand existing programs and/or pilot new ones. Only two states, Nevada and Oregon, reported a reduction in financial aid budgets due to the pandemic, Jessica Colorado, a policy analyst at SHEEO and author of one the reports, said in a press release.

The survey results were not as positive when it came to undocumented students. Only about a quarter of states offer in-state tuition to undocumented students in both their two- and four-year institutions, and about half deem undocumented students ineligible for state financial aid, the survey responses showed.

The effects of state financial aid policies on undocumented students often mirror federal policies, but state grant and in-state tuition regulations still “vary widely across the U.S.,” Rachel Burns, who authored the other report and is also a policy analyst at SHEEO, said in the press release.

This spring, Major League Baseball banned the defensive shift, a tactic that lets teams respond instantly to batters’ tendencies by loading up one side of the infield to prevent hits. It’s a change that’s seeking to respond to a greater issue in the game—how to sort through an enormous trove of baseball data to gain a competitive edge.

Until recently, baseball traditionally has been ruled by so-called counting statistics. Players who led the league in home runs and strikeouts were seen as stars. But building analytics muscle has allowed teams to compile and analyze enormous amounts of data. Sophisticated calculations have created a wealth of situational information that helps managers decide which players to play and what adjustments to make.

Known as sabermetrics or “moneyball”—a term that comes from a book and movie of that name—empirical statistical modeling gives a much more complete and accurate picture of in-game success in baseball. It’s data that can be used in real time to affect the outcome of a single moment or even an entire game. This type of data has changed baseball—but is still too often missing from higher education.

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That’s because higher ed professionals measure student success with traditional counting statistics such as persistence and completion rates. These cumulative metrics are usually examined long after the end of the academic year and offer little chance to improve a learner’s likelihood of staying in school and graduating.

Higher education needs its own version of moneyball—a set of active, predictive and creative measures that can be deployed to improve student outcomes and fulfill their promise of student success. Postsecondary institutions must be able to collect and instantaneously analyze student progress data and have intentional plans for adjusting in the moment to the needs of their learners.

Every institutional leader would agree that going from matriculation to completion is critical, yet there are data indicating that colleges are moving in the opposite direction. A recent Ad Astra report reveals that college students took nearly 15 percent fewer credit hours in the fall 2021 semester than they did just two years earlier. Full-time students at the nation’s four-year public institutions are taking an average of 14.75 credit hours each semester. That means the typical student won’t be able to graduate in four years and will have to spend more time and money to finish a degree.

A Complete College America policy brief published in 2022 shows that the credential attainment of part-time learners lags far behind that of their full-time counterparts. Most institutions are ill equipped to serve part-time students, who make up 40 percent of the nation’s college enrollment. That presents significant equity challenges because part-time students are disproportionately students of color, ages 25 and older, and community college students.

To see trends as they develop, institutional leaders should:

• Use active measurements to augment existing data so they can understand what’s working and implement change at the learner level. They should focus on using data around course schedules and productive credit hours—classes that count toward an intended credential—to compare a learner’s actual progress toward a degree with their expected progress. When the metrics reveal students who aren’t making timely progress toward graduation, institutions can adjust course offerings quickly to improve student retention and degree completions.

A new Ad Astra research project that examined degree progress and completion data from four-year regional public institutions contains some promising findings. One university found that having students take one extra course per term that counts toward their degree increased graduation rates by 11 percent and retained students on average for 22 more credit hours.

• Commit to new advanced planning frameworks so institutions are prepared to address trends as they develop. This planning starts with insights that enable institutions to identify opportunities for accelerating student progress and predict the efficacy of those interventions on retention and graduation rates. By adopting predictive metrics, administrators will be able to determine the effectiveness of their forecasts and take further action to address any gaps that remain.
• Envision an ideal world where they have access to all relevant data and more precise measurements on which to base decisions. This creative mind-set encourages the identification of measures that align with an institution’s mission, measure progress on reform efforts that prioritize equitable student attainment and strive for a deep understanding of student success—much like the moneyball strategy that values a broader range of player skills that can be counted and rated. Adopting a sabermetrics approach enables institutions to measure exactly what matters so they can do more to help students achieve their full potential.

Postsecondary institutions will never be called on to decide whether to intentionally walk a hot hitter. But they do have access to significant amounts of data that can help more students graduate on time and reach their personal and career goals.

Higher education should augment existing statistics with new metrics that more objectively understand what works for their learners. A moneyball approach doesn’t change the goal of the game—institutions should still be measured by completion—but it creates more room for strategies that will make more learners into winners.

Legislators in Idaho are questioning a plan by the University of Idaho to create a nonprofit organization to manage the assets of the University of Phoenix, KTVB7 News reported.

“We see that this transaction has potential, but we also see that it has risk. And as elected representatives, we on this committee specifically have the duty of fiscal oversight of the taxpayers’ money,” said Representative Wendy Horman.

Horman is one of the leaders on Idaho’s budgeting committee, which met Friday to ask questions of the University of Idaho and board leaders.

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“We want to trust, but we must verify. And if we can’t verify, we can’t trust,” Horman said. “So, we want to ensure that this deal is constitutional, legal, financially sound and that Idaho taxpayers will not pay the price if the deal does go awry.”

A major concern is the nondisclosure agreements signed by those who were aware the deal was under consideration.

“I fully recognize that the way this transaction was conducted was not ideal and probably was not my preference. But as those of you who work in business know, sometimes we have to play the cards that were dealt and make compromises to reach agreements to get done,” said Scott Green, the university’s president. “This transaction came to us very recently. We quickly identified the transaction and we put together a team of the best and brightest experts out there.”