Tag: Higher

A few articles and postings I’ve noticed lately take it as a given that life in the highly industrialized countries transformed in some deep but tangible way circa 2010—within a year or two, at most, on either side. Quite a few disrupted norms and forced readjustments in ordinary life either began then or followed in its wake. Three developments, in particular, define that period. One was the global financial crisis of 2008. Another, the increasing variety and ubiquity of mobile devices. And finally there was the arrival of social media as a factor in public life, soon to exude the subtle authority of an 800-pound gorilla.

Cause and effect among these factors interlocked in ways that make sense with hindsight. For example, it was clear by 2010 that ebooks were being taken up by non-technophile readers. This came after years of dire musings within the publishing industry, which had endured much “consolidation,” as the euphemism puts it, stemming from the recession. Was the change in reading patterns a cause or an effect of growing reliance on mobile screens? Both, probably. Likewise with the mutual exchange of influence between mobile devices and social media.

And so it became possible, and ever more routine, to produce, share and consume content of almost any sort (instantaneously, or just about) with no restraint and seldom much accountability. The potential for unfettered creativity proved enormous, as did the potential for incessant self-aggrandizement and gutless malevolence. Strangely, this no longer seems strange.

“I did not decide in 2009 to prioritize screen time over live relationships,” writes Gaia Bernstein in Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies (Cambridge University Press). The indicated year, which falls within the epochal-shift pocket, was when the author and her friends, family and colleagues started relying on smartphones and social media to stay in touch. (The author is a professor of law at Seton Hall University.)

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“I did it gradually, and at least initially, through a series of specific decisions,” she explains. “But over time, I ended up spending an alarming part of my waking hours online. Technology makes us especially vulnerable to finding ourselves in unanticipated places. Once we get used to technology it often becomes invisible … This is particularly true for digital technologies, where much more is hidden than is seen.”

The hidden element referred to here is not a device’s hardware but, rather, the behavioral engineering incorporated into social apps, in particular. They are designed to absorb as much of a user’s time, attention and personal information as possible by delivering an addictive little surge of neurochemical gratification when the user checks the app and finds notifications. The impulse to reach for the device is cultivated through such standard features as “pull to refresh.” Pulverizing the individual’s attention span to sell off the fragments is the core of the business model. This is not speculation. Whistle-blowers from the tech industry have documented as much in recent years.

Bernstein cites a national survey from 2019 showing that children between 8 and 12 years old “spent, on average, five hours on screens per day, while teens spent on average seven and a half hours” (not counting time spent on schoolwork). That lines up with another 2018 study’s finding that 45 percent of teenagers said they were online “almost constantly.” The impact of the pandemic on screen time was unsurprising: researchers determined that “the percentage of kids of all ages spending more than four hours daily nearly doubled.”

The cumulative impact of heavy screen usage includes “significant increases” in “anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide,” particularly among girls. In a study at the University of Pennsylvania, one group of students “limit[ed] Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat use to ten minutes, per platform, per day,” while another consumed social media in their normal manner. After three weeks, those with a restricted intake “showed significant reduction in loneliness and depression … as compared to the control group.”

Bernstein notes that an internal review by Facebook “showed that ‘problematic use’ affects 12.5 percent of Facebook users.” Curious what qualified as “problematic use,” I found a report from 2021 explaining that it covered “compulsive use … that impacts their sleep, work, parenting or relationships.” While Facebook implemented some of the recommendations made by its team focused on “user well-being,” perhaps the most decisive action it took was shutting that team down.

In 2017, Bernstein started lecturing to groups of concerned parents on the benefits of digital connection and the risks of its overuse, advising them on ways to limit kids’ time online. Efforts to do so rarely had the desired effect, or not for long. Parental-control passwords are, it seems, made to be broken. In discussion periods, much frustration came to the surface—as well as a lot of self-blame, as if inculcating sound digital hygiene were a parental responsibility that people felt they were failing to perform.

Some of the self-blame probably also derived from parents’ struggles to get a handle on their own time online. The author is candid about her own susceptibility to the lure of social media, and makes a few references to the struggle for balance in her own life.

But Unwired is neither a screen-junkie confessional nor a recovery handbook. Bernstein regards framing the issue as ultimately one of self-control as part of the problem. So is the fatalistic strain of technological determinism that treats the impact of a given invention as more or less inevitable.

What we have with social media, she argues, is akin to the effects of smoking or of trans fat in food. These are now understood to be matters of public health, but for decades the respective industries had a vested interest in subsidizing bogus controversy, in the case of tobacco, or ignoring the issue for as long as possible, as food manufacturers did with evidence that trans fats increased the risk of heart attack, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.

An oft-repeated sentence from Upton Sinclair seems germane: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” And even if he does understand it, the salary will remain a priority. Documents showed that Big Tobacco not only long knew its product damaged users’ health but was, as media outlets reported in the 1990s and as the industry has since admitted, adjusting nicotine levels in cigarettes to make them more addictive. (Getting new smokers hooked as fast as possible made sense, given that longtime users tended to die off at disproportionately high rates.)

Bernstein points to the troves of information made public by Silicon Valley whistle-blowers over the past few years to argue that time has come for legislation or litigation, or both, to mitigate social media’s damage to public well-being. The message of Unwired is, in short, that we need fewer digital detox workshops and—à la tobacco—a lot more class action lawsuits. There’s more to her argument about strategy and tactics, of course, but that would fit on a bumper sticker, which is a relevant consideration.

“With all we now know,” we read in the book’s opening pages, “it seems increasingly unlikely that we would have opted for all of this, had we known this information [about social media toxicity] around 2009, when we had the opportunity to choose.” Probably not, but the thought experiment is hard to conduct, in part because it is difficult to imagine who, or what institution, could have framed the question or enforced the decision.

The same consideration applies to making social media socially accountable. Bernstein is shrewd about the political maneuvers and public relations options available to industries challenged for doing harm to the general welfare. At the same time, she shows that imposing some control or countermeasures—no-smoking areas, for example, or food packaging that gives nutritional information—has been possible in the past, and might be in the future.

It’s worth a try, or a whole series of tries. But that will mean somehow defending public health or the common good when large swathes of the population doubt either one exists.

The University of Miami promotes graduation among undergraduate students by providing financial and personalized support to create the most expeditious path to graduation.

University leaders created ’Canes Complete (with a nod to students as Hurricanes) to help students facing unique challenges return to college and finish their bachelor’s degrees. Since the program launch, more than 100 students have graduated, improving the institution’s graduation rates.

What’s the need: A recent report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found the population of students who stopped out of college without completing grew by 1.4 million learners between July 2020 and July 2021, an increase of 3.6 percent compared to the year prior.

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At the University of Miami, administrators noticed a trend among students who were near graduation who would stop out due to a variety of personal or financial reasons, says John Haller, vice president of enrollment management. As a result, the university began outreach to eligible students, regardless of enrollment status, to move them back toward degree completion.

The initiative started in 2012 and became a formalized program in 2015, says Darby Plummer, executive director of student success and first-year foundations.

How it works: Outreach is done in various ways. Some students receive a mailed brochure to their permanent address, which links to a webpage with additional information and a form to submit for more information. Three times a year, staff in the Cane Success Center reach out to eligible students via emails, phone calls and texts to share program opportunities.

Once in the program, students and staff work together to figure out the quickest, least expensive path to degree completion, Plummer says. This path development takes place through in-depth interviews with the students as staff evaluate their ability to return to campus, financial resources and the student’s desired academic path to completion.

Students in ’Canes Complete often take one of three forks to finishing: completing their original program of study, completing a bachelor of general studies or just tying up loose ends.

Sometimes the final step to a degree doesn’t require the student to return to campus or complete an additional course, but it does require processing transfer credits, finishing a pending grade change or wrapping up an incomplete course.

If a student needs to finish one or several classes, they can take those online or in person, depending on where the student is located.

The bachelor of general studies program can be completed online or through Saturday courses and is offered at a lower tuition rate than on-campus classes, making it more accessible for students with more than one term left. The B.G.S. program allows students to create an individualized area of concentration that is most interesting or relevant to their studies.

“In all cases, the Cane Success Center will support the student in addressing any other challenges that could interfere with their degree completion—such as applying for financial assistance or finding accommodations,” Plummer says.

The logistics: ’Canes Complete helps to tear down existing barriers on the road to degree completion and also meet student where they are.

If personal finances are a barrier to finishing, ’Canes Complete provides grant funding for students within 15 credits of degree completion.

A present hurdle for ’Canes Complete is working with students with a past-due balance who cannot be readmitted or re-enroll. U Miami doesn’t have a process to forgive previous debt to the institution, and many students cannot produce those funds on their own.

Most often, staff have a challenge encouraging a student to return to the institution for personal reasons or students don’t see the return on investment, Plummer explains.

“It is hard to develop a plan that works for students who no longer live in the area or who now have work or family obligations, [or] getting students to re-engage when their current job doesn’t seem to require that they complete their degree—creating that sense of urgency and value in the degree can be an uphill battle sometimes,” Plummer explains.

The impact: Since 2012, 169 students have graduated through ’Canes Complete support, improving Miami’s six-year graduation rate by around 1.5 percentage points each year, Haller says.

One graduate of ’Canes Complete recently reached back out to Plummer, sharing his plans to go to medical school. That student is just one indication, Plummer adds, of the long-term impact an initiative like this can have on a student’s trajectory in higher education.

Note: This article has been updated from an earlier version to correctly identify the University of Miami.

This story was submitted to us by a reader just like you! Share your student success initiatives with us here.

I’ve long believed that student engagement is the necessary precursor to all learning. 

Sure, you can get students to complete academic work via external motivators like grades or the more nebulous indefinite delayed benefit of climbing the successive rungs of the credentialing ladder, but these are not necessarily the best ways to get students learning.

One of the core elements of engagement is “autonomy,” essentially giving students some element of choice and freedom in the doing of the assignment. The biggest problem with the writing instruction students tend to have received prior to college is that it is highly prescriptive, as they are coached to pass assessments judged on surface-level criteria, rather than given the opportunity to deeply engage with the challenges of writing.

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The thing to keep in mind about freedom, though, is that in many cases it’s just another word for having no idea what you’re supposed to be doing. If you want a student to be frozen, unable to produce a piece of writing, just tell them they can write whatever they want.

But how can you privilege freedom in a way that allows students to also take advantage of the benefits of autonomy?

The key is providing structure that allows that freedom to be unleashed.

How to do this can get complicated, particularly if you have specific learning objectives in mind. (This is one of the reasons I worked to corral my learning objectives into a framework that could contain multitudes, what I call “the writer’s practice.”)

Thinking about these challenges reminded me of an earlier period of my life where I was desperate to help total strangers with whom I would barely interact write funny stuff so I could have enough material to publish on the website I was editorially overseeing.

I took over the editorship of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency in July of 2003, sort of by accident when McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers called me and asked if I could “help out” with the site for an unspecified period of time. I was provided significant autonomy in what I wanted to do provided what I published was up to snuff and fit with the overall ethos of the organization. 

At the time, the site was not featuring short humor exclusively, but it was a plurality of the material for sure, and to me in those earlier days of the Internet, humor seemed like the best route for drawing audience. It was also the area I felt the most confident in terms of my editorial judgment.

I set a goal of publishing two to three new pieces of humor per day. While McSweeney’s (under my far superior successor editor Chris Monks) is now flooded with more good submissions than it could ever hope to publish, in those earlier days this was not the case.

Writing a fully-realized short humor piece from an original premise is not easy. It is easier for some people, and seemingly impossible for others, but having read literally tens of thousands of submissions and done my share of trying to write these things, given the blank space of total freedom to try to be funny on the page is much more likely to end in failure than success.

Really, it doesn’t end anywhere because in most cases, the writer doesn’t even make it to the starting line.

So, needing funny things to put up on a website that’s trying to make people chuckle, I realized that I had to give people a couple of playgrounds to work within to provide the necessary structure that would allow them to be funny and free. 

One no-brainer was to break out the many lists that had already been published on the site into its own section and encourage more submissions. Reading even just the titles of the lists could nudge potential contributors toward trying their hands at the form by thinking of a humorous juxtaposition and then seeing what came next.

“Are You Playing Dungeons & Dragons or Doing Your Taxes?”

“Eight Wilderness Survival Tips for Adjunct Writing Instructors”

“The Nine Circles of Renovation Hell”

So, that was good, but not sufficient. I needed other forms that anyone could try. Then inspiration struck.

One day, while eating a plum I experienced my usual frustration with the truly appalling size of the pit relative to the fruit pulp. I imagined what it would be like if rather than a (probably) ancient fruit, I pretended that plums were some kind of new product that I could review and suggest improvements for future models.

That became the first of what I called “Reviews of New Food.”

Because I couldn’t launch a new section with just one piece of content, I also wrote up my take on something called “Uh-Oh Oreos” which had vanilla cookies and chocolate cream. 

I’m pretty sure the third, unbylined review of new food we published on “Mountain Dew type 3: Live-Wire Orange” was by Dave himself. It sounds like him anyway.

Once I had the examples, the submissions started to come in. As I scroll through the archives in a march down memory lane, I see a mix of people who would go on to be professional comedy writers with others who – at least if Google is accurate – have never published another piece of publicly available writing.

That might be my favorite byproduct of my moment of inspiration. I think one of the reasons that the McSweeney’s website has managed to solider on – and is currently thriving – over the last twenty-five years is that it has always created a sense of community and belonging between the publication and the audience. Providing the simple structure was a way to give a swath of the audience that would perhaps never try their hand at writing otherwise, an entry point into being a direct contributor.

Under the proper conditions with structure and examples, anyone can be a writer.

This ethos quite easily carries over to the classroom. One of the first things I try to point out to all students, regardless of the success (or lack thereof) they have had with writing in school contexts previously is that they likely write all the time and are probably pretty effective at communicating in writing in other contexts.

Having reached agreement that they have had previous success at writing, it is then a matter of giving them the next experience which seems explicable and doable. In my first-year writing course, this happens to be a review (though a serious one) which provides students with clear objectives and structure while also giving them freedom to write about anything they want to review.

Over the years I often got the balance wrong, either too much freedom/insufficient structure or too much structure that began to feel prescriptive, but once I knew that trying to balance these things was the key to getting students engaged, at least I had a specific problem to solve.

It wasn’t until many years later that I realized when it came to my teaching, I’d given myself the same thing I’d been trying to provide students, sufficient structure to make sense of a difficult challenge.

Students at the University of California at Berkeley are rallying to save the anthropology library and are now occupying the library full-time to do so, The New York Times reported.

The university plans to close the library and move its holdings to storage or another, larger library.

The fight is “about fundamentally writing a different story about what education is, what the university is for,” said Jesús Gutiérrez, a graduate student who works at the library and is writing a dissertation about folk art forms of the African diaspora.

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Berkeley administrators say they can’t afford small departmental libraries. “We are aware of the protest and are monitoring the situation,” the university said in a statement. “Regarding the anthropology library’s closure, we, too, wish the library could remain open, but that is not an option at this point.”

A roof collapsed at an off-campus home near Ohio State University Saturday night. Fourteen people believed to be students were hospitalized, CNN reported.

“It appears that the roof was overloaded with students—we’ve heard numbers between 15 and 45 students on a rooftop that was not designed to have anybody on it, and it gave way,” Columbus fire chief Steve Martin said.

Ohio State said that the university has “been monitoring this serious situation closely and assisting first responders in any way possible. Our thoughts are with the individuals who were present and their friends and family.”

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Guest Post by David Eubanks, Furman University

I am not proud of the fact that early in my career I thought giving Fs in Calculus 1 made me a good teacher: every zero plopped into the course average signaled the rigors of college math. Now that my role has changed to institutional research, I spend much of my time analyzing student success.  The importance of grading practices and GPA is everywhere I look: graduation rates and learning,  teacher qualities and learning, instructional quality and learning, selection of majors, and sense of belonging in college. Given the stakes, it’s fair to ask what is our justification for the peculiar letter grade of F? Why do we skip over “E” just to emphasize failure, and then—adding injury to insult—average a zero into the all-important GPA? What purpose does this serve to the student, the university, or the world outside? I’ll offer some reasons and considerations.

1. Failure is a warning to the world. Students who have failed in the past are likely to do so again in the future, so the F is advertising a deficit in personality or academic ability that is our duty to report on transcripts. 

Sure, but Fs are like Dostoevsky’s unhappy families: they’re all different. A student who stops attending to take care of a sick parent is different from a student who is working two jobs to pay for school, or one who was unlucky or unwise with course selections and ended up with a too-difficult schedule. Or one who just missed the withdrawal date. And that’s different from a student who was only admitted for tuition dollars, not because they had a chance academically. 

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As someone who works with educational data and thinks a lot about reliability and validity of measures, the predictivity argument is weak, and needs empirical support to be taken seriously. But let’s assume that Fs are fairly given and valid indicators of future success. This still leaves us with a philosophical burden. 

Doesn’t schooling entail the possibility of making mistakes that can be forgiven? Don’t we encourage students to be curious, to take chances so they can more freely explore their intellectual horizons? How does that peacefully coexist with “but you may be forever marked as a failure?”  By comparison, shoplifting convictions may be expunged to give someone a chance in life to overcome a youthful indiscretion. What if every failed job application or paper rejected from a journal incurred a mighty F on your vita? Even if it was predictive, would that be fair? 

2. The student didn’t learn anything. We use transcripts to advertise the skills and knowledge gained by students. What are we to do if they didn’t demonstrate any such gains?

I didn’t take any college courses on American Poetry (my loss: I enjoyed a MOOC on the subject years later), but my transcript doesn’t indicate this deficit with an F for that course, or any of the thousands of other courses I didn’t take. Transcripts don’t exist to say what we didn’t learn, but what we did learn. We could simply not list the course a student received an F in, or transmute it into a W without losing any information. 

3. An F sends a clear message to the student. The severe consequences of an F motivate students to work harder and therefore learn more. 

An F tanks a GPA, which can put a student in peril of academic sanctions, not qualifying for a desired major, losing financial aid, having to repeat a course, and so on. So the cost of failure is high. Is it high enough? Maybe an F should result in immediate expulsion. That would motivate the students even more, right? Exactly how severe should the consequences of failure be so that our standards aren’t allowed to slip due to unmotivated students? 

Given the high cost of college and the high opportunity costs of being out of the labor market for years, a grade of W is already severe enough. A couple of these may mean an extra semester to finish. Do we really need to add a permanent signal of moral failure to the scales? This is measurable, if you want to test it, and the stakes are high, so I think students would be justified in asking for an empirical demonstration of the motivational effects of F-giving. Note that there is good evidence that the rigor of grading matters, but rigorous grading can exist without the F. 

4. Surely cheaters deserve an F. In cases of academic dishonesty, an F serves as suitable punishment as well as a permanent mark of sin.

If you want to give an F for cheating, go right ahead, but note that the course isn’t the issue. Cheating in chemistry isn’t morally different from cheating in English. So rather than a course grade, a declaration of the finding is more appropriate (“The student was found to have committed plagiarism”).  If Fs signal cheating some of the time, how is the reader of a transcript to distinguish between dishonesty and the many other reasons a student could receive an F? Rather this confusion, it would be better to cleanly separate the business of rating course mastery from moral judgments by removing grades from consideration. It makes sense that a student should have to repeat a course if they cheated, but the connection to grades is unsustainable. Consider a student found to have cheated in a one-credit class, who then receives an F, and a different student in a five-credit class in the same situation. The GPA consequences are five times as much for the second student. Is the magnitude of moral failure proportional to course credits? 

5. Some students just aren’t going to make it. Many students must retain full-time status to receive financial aid. If they can’t withdraw because of the credit threshold, we don’t have any other options than an F for failure. 

This is unfortunately a significant reason why we give Fs, but the moral failure is ours, not the students. If we admit them to the university, are we not obligated to provide a path for them to succeed? Why then are the most vulnerable ones–the students who are already financially and academically stressed, the ones most likely to need to withdraw–why are they put in the position of having to trade GPA for cash? If we really care about equity of outcomes, we could do worse than starting with this problem.

—

It’s probably impossible to change the grading system in the short term, with all its cultural inertia and algorithms within administrative software. However, this is an issue where individual choices can make significant differences. Give students every chance to withdraw if they are in peril; make the last date as late as possible or bend the rules. For students who can’t withdraw without losing full-time status, there are other workarounds, like a pass/fail class that can be added near the end of the term.  Even better, create class schedules for at-risk students with some forgiveness built in. 

If none of this convinces you, ask the Institutional Research office to analyze what types of students are most likely to receive Fs. See if the answer is acceptable. 

—

David Eubanks is Assistant Vice President for Institutional Effectiveness at Furman University, where he works with faculty and administrators on internal research projects. He holds a PhD in mathematics from Southern Illinois University, and has served variously as a faculty member and administrator at four private colleges, starting in 1991. Research interests include the reliability of measurement and causal inference from nominal data. He writes sci-fi novels in his spare time.

Navarro College is facing a federal lawsuit by a woman who says the head cheerleading coach tried to cover up a sexual assault, NBC Dallas reported. The cheerleading team was made famous by the Netflix documentary Cheer.

The suit charges that a male cheerleader sexually assaulted a female cheerleader in the fall of 2021.

The lawsuit further alleges that head coach Monica Aldama promised to help advance the cheer career of the plaintiff—if she remained quiet about the alleged assault.

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“Defendants permitted a campus condition rife with sexual assault and lacking the basic standards of support for victims as required by state and federal law,” the lawsuit said.

Navarro denied the charges in the suit. In a statement to NBC Dallas, it said, “The safety and welfare of students is always of utmost priority. Navarro College prohibits sexual harassment and sexual misconduct against all students and is deeply committed to providing an educational environment free from sex discrimination and sexual assault.”

Two former professors have filed a suit to block the sale of some art by Valparaiso University, ARTnews reported.

The two professors who sued are Richard Brauer, the museum’s first director and its namesake, and Philipp Brockington, a former professor at Valparaiso’s law school who has an endowment in his name at the museum.

The fight involves the controversial planned sale of three valuable works of art from the museum’s permanent collection. The paintings—by Georgia O’Keeffe, Frederic E. Church and Childe Hassam—are estimated to be worth a collective $20 million.

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The university says it needs to sell the paintings to refurbish the freshman dormitories.

But the professors and many others say the sale would violate rules on deaccessioning.

The faculty at West Texas A&M University has voted no confidence in President Walter Wendler, The Texas Tribune reported. The vote was 179 to 82.

The vote was prompted by Wendler’s decision to bar a drag show on campus, for which he has been criticized and sued.

Wendler said at the time that drag shows “stereotype women in cartoon-like extremes for the amusement of others and discriminate against womanhood.”

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The resolution announcing the no confidence vote said that banning the show was just one example of “divisive, misogynistic, homophobic and non-inclusive rhetoric that stands in stark contrast with the core values of the university.”

A spokesperson for the Texas A&M University system, of which West Texas A&M is a part, declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Americans of both political parties believe that college students should hear from people with a diverse range of opinions, according to a poll conducted by HarrisX for The Deseret News.

Colleges should invite speakers with a range of views, said 86 percent of Democrats and 85 percent of Republicans.

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On the question of whether students should listen to controversial speakers with diverse viewpoints, a majority of Democrats, 59 percent, agreed. Among Republicans, 73 percent also agreed.

There was wide support for some activities to protest speakers with whom students disagree, such as petitions or rallies.

But most Americans believe that students who interrupt speakers (78 percent) or shout them down (79 percent) should be disciplined.

The board of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Education announced Thursday that Felecia Nave, who has been president of Alcorn State University since 2019, is no longer in that role.

The board appointed Ontario S. Wooden, who currently serves as provost, to begin serving as interim president.

The change is effective immediately. The board did not say why, or whether Nave agreed with the change. “The board wishes Dr. Nave well as she pursues new opportunities,” said the statement announcing her replacement.

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Mississippi Today reported that in October 2021, students held a protest in which they called for Nave to resign. “She has continuously shown a lack of empathy, transparency, and communication,” said a letter from the student government to the board.

A group of alumni, Alcornites for Change, issued a report last year on numerous problems at the historically Black university.

A small group of Goddard College staff is ending its nearly monthlong strike today, after the union reached a tentative agreement with the Vermont institution that includes raises.

Danielle Kutner, co-chair of the Goddard College Staff Union, said the union also fought off management’s planned incorporation of a “management rights” clause.

She said that, if that had been included in the contract, the union would have been reduced to bargaining over “how to mitigate impact of [a] policy as opposed to the policy itself.”

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“Given the prior experience, it’s really important to Goddard as an institution and the people who choose to work at Goddard that things remain democratic,” said Kutner, who is the college’s student life manager and interim community life coordinator.

The tentative agreement, which union members must now vote on, is for a one-year contract with 5.75 percent raises for those making under $20 an hour and 3 percent raises for those making over that.

“We got everybody close to $20 an hour, if not at $20,” Kutner said. She said the union has 25 to 30 regular dues-paying members.

Goddard president Dan Hocoy said, “We really believe not only in fair wages but a livable wage, especially for those making under $20 an hour. So we’re very happy to provide those salary increases, you know, given that the inflation is at 40-year highs.”

Hocoy also said all college employees are getting an extra week of vacation “in light of all the stress that has been incurred by everyone working so hard at the college, both during the strike and just generally.”

“It was difficult to see our community split like that,” he said. “So I’m quite delighted we were able to come to an agreement with the UAW staff union, and I’m grateful for the collaborative spirit I’ve seen in ratifying this agreement between the college and the union, and I believe we can now work together in a similar collaborative fashion.”

An administrative law judge has given two Emporia State University professors their jobs back, The Kansas Reflector reports.

Neither the university nor the professors, Amanda Miracle and Rob Catlett, responded to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Thursday.

In September, the university laid off 33 faculty members, including numerous tenured professors.

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Jennifer Barton, the administrative law judge who handled the two professors’ appeals, wrote that the university’s open-ended language made it impossible to tell why they were terminated, the Reflector reported.

“The most important consequence of ESU’s omission is that it undermines the already limited appeal rights reserved for the employee, almost to the point of nonexistence,” Barton wrote, according to the Reflector.

University of Arkansas system trustees appear divided on a plan to purchase the University of Phoenix, The Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette reported.

The trustees discussed the plan at a meeting Wednesday. One trustee asked for a delay in the scheduled vote on the deal on Monday.

“This is the first deal I’ve received a lot of important information, [and] on a deal this big, I need time to digest it,” said trustee Steve Cox. “Let us consider this, [because] I hate to be rushed.”

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Trustee Ted Dickey spoke in favor of the deal.

“If we’re not willing to disrupt our own business, someone else” will, Dickey said. An affiliation with Phoenix would help the Arkansas system appeal to a new audience and create cash flow.

“This is a sustainable model,” Dickey said. “Raising tuition every year is a broken, non-sustainable model.”

Trustee Kelly Eichler agreed. An affiliation with Phoenix “seems like a lifeline to us,” she said.

That lackluster “reputation” Phoenix has to some is “hard to shake,” however, said trustee Sheffield Nelson. “I think the best thing to do is stay clear of it.”

It’s “hard for me to understand why this is an outstanding deal for” the system, as it feels as though “we’re losing focus on the state of Arkansas,” said board chairman Morril Harriman.

The union representing police officers at Duquesne University reached an agreement with the institution Tuesday to end a strike that started Monday, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

No details were released on the agreement, which must be approved by the union’s members. But issues that led to the strike included wages, retirement, health care and seniority.

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Members were expected to be at work today.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Educational Testing Service are teaming up to develop a new way to evaluate competency-based learning.

The two organizations announced today that they are partnering to create a set of tools designed to assess the qualitative skills that many of today’s employers consider most important—such as creative thinking, work ethic and ability to collaborate.

The organizers assert that such tools could potentially be better indicators of a student’s future success than the traditional Carnegie unit, or credit hour, the measure first introduced in 1906 that correlates proficiency in a subject with the amount of time spent studying it. The new tools would also allow students to account for learning completed outside of the classroom, such as at a job or internship.

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The initiative comes at a time when traditional testing is under increased scrutiny, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with fewer and fewer colleges requiring applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores. The exams have also been criticized for being racially biased against Black test takers and weak predictors of student success.

ETS, a major testing organization responsible for exams including the GRE, Praxis and TOEFL, is moving away from its focus on testing to become a “data insights” company, Tim Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation, said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed. The new competency-based initiative could help ETS fill the testing void.

The project will initially be focused on high school and middle school, Knowles said. But he believes the assessments will ultimately have valuable applications for higher education: not only could they be utilized as a metric in the college admissions process, but they could also eventually be translated into college credits—in much the same way AP exam scores are—that guide course placements for students and determine how quickly they progress through a curriculum.

Knowles also suggested that such assessments could potentially stand in for a college degree, at least in terms of demonstrating competency when applying for jobs.

Higher education’s “real existential threat is whether there are pathways to purposeful careers that don’t depend on a degree,” he said. “And, frankly, if you get the assessment architecture right and you can actually assess whether people know and can do particular things, then where they learned them is totally irrelevant.”

He acknowledged such a shift will take time.

“That won’t be driven by this particular initiative,” he said. “But that’s what I think is the thing that the future could bring that will be very disruptive to the current model.”

New Life for an Old Idea

Conversations about how institutions—both at the K-12 and postsecondary levels—could better assess learning have been ongoing for decades; some institutions have already begun using competency-based evaluations in specific programs. The American Association of Colleges and Universities introduced VALUE rubrics in 2009, which, according to its website, are utilized by 2,700 colleges and universities worldwide. The rubrics are designed to help educators “evaluate student performance reliably and verifiably across sixteen broad, cross-cutting learning outcomes.”

According to Charla Long at the Competency-Based Education Network, fields like teaching and nursing also utilize such assessments in various capacities, such as to evaluate nursing students’ compassion.

Long believes the joint ETS–Carnegie Foundation project is a significant opportunity for the two influential institutions to help legitimize and scale the work already being done in the field of competency-based assessment.

“Them getting into this will be game-changing,” she said. “We just want it to be informed by the great innovations that are already underway.”

Some critics, however, argue that focusing on competency-based methods of measuring learning fails to recognize how existing college systems and assignments impart those same skills; in other words, it doesn’t acknowledge the ways that learning subjects like history, chemistry or Spanish through traditional methods can help students become successful communicators, critical thinkers and collaborators, among other things.

“The purpose of high school, one of its primary purposes, is to educate citizens, and the education of citizens means providing them access to a liberal education,” said Johann Neem, a history professor at Western Washington University and the author of What’s the Point of College? (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).

If competency-based assessments become central to students’ education, “we may actually have less well-prepared citizens,” he argued. “We may lose track of the fundamental purpose of public education, which is the education of citizens. The education of workers is a secondary purpose.”

Neem also said that by requiring students to take such assessments, institutions would limit the freedom of teachers and professors to determine learning outcomes in their own courses—though Knowles argues that they would only give teachers additional, valuable tools for supporting their students’ progress.

Over all, Knowles said, educators and state leaders are enthusiastic about competency-based assessments and have indicated that they will embrace such assessments once they exist.

“I don’t see any constituency, whether it’s K-12 educators, state officials, leaders or employers, whatever their partisan sort of footing may be, I don’t see any of them pushing back or leaning back,” he said. “At the root of it is we’re trying to set young people up with the skills they need for success, whether they go right into the workforce after high school, or they go to college and then go to the workforce. People are aligned around that.”

First Steps

The preliminary phase of the project involves answering a deceptively simple question: What skills should institutions focus on assessing? That requires deciding on skills that both predict future success and can be validly and reliably measured, Knowles said. They hope to identify these skills within the next four to six weeks.

From there, researchers will investigate how to actually measure those abilities.

“A key part of the research effort is to develop a comprehensive skills framework, identifying and defining the key future skills that matter for work, life, and education. The skills will go beyond traditional cognitive skills to include affective and behavioral skills,” Amit Sevak, the president and CEO of ETS, told Inside Higher Ed in an email. “We will start with a short list of skills related to how learners reason, create, collaborate, and persevere, among others. Given ETS’s position as the world’s leading assessment and measurement organization, the framework will also feature discussions of innovative assessment approaches to measuring learning and experiences gained from both in school instruction and out of school experiences.”

The Carnegie Foundation and ETS are hoping the project will culminate in a multistate pilot program, starting in about a year. During the pilot, the project leaders will work with educators and other stakeholders to observe assessments in action and evaluate their fairness and precision in capturing learned skills, as well as the way different classroom conditions impact the results and more.

While it is unclear what these potential assessment approaches will look like, Sevak noted that they will be “very different from the standardized tests we know today,” focused more on measuring progress than assigning a numerical score.

According to Long, this view is aligned with existing work in the realm of competency-based assessment; she said that traditional standardized tests rarely show off a student’s actual capabilities.

She used the example of a teaching candidate: if asked on a multiple-choice quiz how they would manage a pupil who was behaving badly, most education students would choose the correct answer—they would speak calmly to the child about their behavior. But that doesn’t show whether they could actually keep their cool under pressure in the same way a simulation might, Long said.

“We would lean heavily toward performance-based demonstrations of the competency,” she said. “We would want to put them in the situation and watch them do it.”

Faculty members at Eastern Illinois University voted to suspend their strike, as of 8 this morning, according to their union, University Professionals of Illinois.

However, the offer was not endorsed by the union’s bargaining team, because “the administration did not offer union members a chance to do work that was missed during the strike.” This type of provision is “a common piece of end-of-strike agreements,” the union said.

A vote on the agreement will take place next week.

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Faculty strikes continue at Chicago State and Governors State Universities, and at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, Camden and Newark.

In 1969, I was 11 years old, and I remember wanting to jump off a dock in the Thousand Islands where my parents and I vacationed one Labor Day weekend. It was so hot. I did not have my bathing suit on, just a top and shorts, and my mom said, “Take off your shirt and jump.” I couldn’t do it. I had already internalized a self-consciousness about my physical being. I had just started to develop. Already I had the awareness that something was happening to alter my perceptions of how to look, act and be at this otherwise tender age, especially with boys, some of whom had been my friends as long as I could remember. And with those perceptions, with that self-consciousness, came a sense of embarrassment and even something akin to shame.

Reading about the adverse experience of vulnerable young women and social networking, I am not sure much has changed. Society continues to set young women into various degrees of anxiety about body image. What intrigues me about these discussions, however, is how much we do not talk about those social influences that exist outside and apart from technology. Larger social forces set the context of unanswered questions and unaddressed concerns for young women. The sites exacerbate body image anxieties, but they do not create them. Technology, whether it is social networking or AI, becomes the target for a very complex mix of societal dynamics.

No doubt, technology plays a role. When the Meta whistle-blower Frances Haugen described in testimony before Congress how Mark Zuckerberg blew her off when she explained that Instagram acted in deleterious ways toward vulnerable teenage girls, I was as disgusted as I was not surprised by his failure to respond. The possessor of a preternatural teenage mentality himself, he could not be expected to think differently. For all his Caesar Augustus self-image, Mark Zuckerberg is a standard product of his adolescent male upbringing in a society that still, many decades later, has done very little to make teenage years for young women easy. Before we start setting rules that might truly impede innovation and handicap our ability to compete globally, let us be sure we know what influences are causes, in what contributing degree or kind and what are the concomitant effects on vulnerable young women and in some cases young men too.

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I am not optimistic. If on matters of technology-influenced concerns, say the most benign of them all—a national data breach law—we cannot get federal consensus in Congress, can you imagine how anyone would be willing to take on the complexities of male and female teen-age socialization? I can hear the corporate campaign money members of Congress now: “What had you done to do deserve … a school shooting, a drug or alcohol dependency, an eating disorder, suicidal ideation, a teen-age pregnancy or responsibility for one?” The list goes on and on …

I am all for personal responsibility, but we now live in a society that has become increasingly allergic to sociological dynamics. Those dynamics are too hard to look at. They bring up too many ghosts. They expose feelings and behaviors that bring us sadness, disgust and regret. Better not to look. Just find the villain and knock him/her/it off. Critical race theory. Transgender adolescents. New technology. I am old enough now to remember how Bush père used Willie Horton and race in the 1988 presidential campaign, Bush Junior pounced on gays in 2004, and of course Trump used migrants in 2016. My bet is that we will hear a whole lot less about the issues that animate media today after the election in 2024. They will not be resolved. They simply will not be pumped up like helium balloons rising for distinctly political purposes.

Technological issues, too, will remain. I will be curious to watch how hypocritical we will, or will not, be to attack with vitriol the CEO of a foreign-owned and wildly successful social networking site for all the world to see when so much of our own U.S. terrain grossly fails privacy and security controls. Or what, exactly, will be done about section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Even though simple reform is available. A content moderation policy for every platform without substance except due process (i.e. consistency) and user means of communicating with platforms to address harms such as nonconsensual disclosure is all that is necessary. Still, Congress will do nothing. Too much money breathes into our representatives’ coffers from Big Tech that wants no regulation whatsoever, even lightweight and common-sense fixes.

I am intrigued by the targeting of technology, especially social networking and now AI, by politicians and commentators alike. In 2017, through the University of Massachusetts Bepress Scholar Works, I published a book about information technology in higher education. The title is Humanity’s Canvas. As we did with the internet, we are now doing with social networking and AI: throwing our humanity on a canvas and then we are shocked at what we see. In fact, we are so shocked that we must find villains to explain it.

We need to hold the mirror up to ourselves. If we do, we may see a very different picture. And might we also enjoy the benefit of that exercise. After a quarter century of “technology exceptionalism,” we may place technology in its property place. It plays a significant role, one that should be addressed as neither hero nor villain, but like so many other social, market and legal factors, the subject of much-needed public policy.

Texas senators are advancing three bills that would end tenure for future professors; ban what the legislation defines as diversity, equity and inclusion activities; and force colleges and universities to fire professors who “attempt to compel a student” to adopt a belief that any “social, political or religious belief is inherently superior to any other.”

All three only affect public institutions.

That third bill, Senate Bill 16, passed the Senate 18 to 12 Wednesday and is now in the House of Representatives. All Democrats voted against it, all present Republicans voted for it and one Republican senator, Phil King, was absent.

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The other two bills, Senate Bill 17, on DEI, and 18, banning tenure, have already passed the Senate Education Committee.

None of the bills’ original lead sponsors returned requests for comment Thursday. The Texas Tribune, which has been reporting on the bills, said the University of Texas at Austin didn’t respond to a question about its interpretation of the legislation’s impact if it passes.

Florida has garnered much attention for Republicans’ targeting of DEI there, but Texas’s recent legislation reinforces that another large Southern state is putting it in the crosshairs.

Antonio Ingram, assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said, “It’s important to look at these bills in the context of what they would be doing as a trifecta.” He called them an attack on “multiracial democracy” in a state that has become majority minority.

He also noted the severity of the bills’ punishments.

SB 16’s required firing for attempts to “compel” beliefs would be despite tenure for any newly contracted professors—and SB 18 would bar tenure for professors anyway if they don’t have it by Sept. 1, 2023. SB 17, which bars what the legislation defines as DEI programming and training, would render a university ineligible for state money for a whole fiscal year if the state auditor determined it had “spent state money in violation.”

Senate Bill 16 includes this:

It then says,

If an institution of higher education determines that a faculty member of the institution has violated this section, the institution shall discharge the faculty member.

“It could be you have a student who is disgruntled with their grade,” Ingram said. “And they report to, you know, their school, ‘My professor is compelling me to believe certain topics, I want to bring a grievance.’ The only remedy for violating Senate Bill 16 is termination. There are no progressive penalties.”

Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said “removing tenure is an extraordinary penalty.”

“I think that there’s little doubt that the state can take measures to protect freedom of conscience, but they should be listening to stakeholders to do it carefully, with proportional consequences,” Cohn said. He said “reasonable people” could disagree on whether SB 16’s consequence, and it being a one-strike offense, is proportional.

He said SB 16 would be strengthened if lawmakers changed it to say, more specifically, that professors couldn’t compel students to “personally express” a belief that those students don’t hold.

SB 18 is the simplest bill, saying, “An institution of higher education may not grant an employee of the institution tenure or any type of permanent employment status” after Sept. 1.

It would allow universities to establish “an alternate system of tiered employment status for faculty members, provided that the system clearly defines each position and requires each faculty member to undergo an annual performance evaluation.” It doesn’t specify further how that could work.

Cohn urged the rejection of this legislation.

“I think the state should be extremely hesitant to end tenure moving forward,” he said. “You know, academic freedom is the lifeblood of higher education, and institutions of higher education can’t thrive in an environment where faculty don’t have strong academic freedom rights. FIRE has never taken the position that tenure is the only way to protect faculty’s academic freedom, but the state hasn’t proposed anything else to fill the void.”

“They’re just revoking tenure,” he said. “And in our experience, tenure has been one of the most important tools to defend the free speech and academic freedom rights of faculty who have disfavored views. And legislators who are concerned about the shrinking number of conservative voices in the academy should be wary about stripping one of the most effective protections that has prevented the academy from screening out dissenters.”

Jeff Blodgett, president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors, said, “Tenure is critical for preserving academic freedom, and the one mistake that some of the legislators make … is that they seem to think that faculty are not evaluated every year, and they are.”

Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow in higher education reform at the Heritage Foundation, has supported SB 18. He said Thursday that “tenure is this awful cliff” that effectively limits academic freedom.

He provided his testimony in support of SB 18 late last month to senators.

“Tenure is a make-or-break, all-or-nothing decision made first of all by their colleagues in their academic department,” Kissel said of junior faculty members. “If a junior scholar fails to earn tenure within about seven years, he is normally expected to leave the institution. As a result, junior faculty walk on eggshells for years. If they are too successful, they risk the jealousy of colleagues. If they are too innovative in their scholarship, they risk alienating their colleagues. If they are too outspoken about anything, or if they do not mimic their colleagues’ political and social views, junior faculty risk alienating the people who are going to vote on their future.”

SB 17 would ban “influencing hiring or employment practices at the institution with respect to race, sex, color or ethnicity, other than through the use of color-blind and sex-neutral hiring processes in accordance with any applicable state and federal antidiscrimination laws.”

It would also ban “promoting differential treatment of or providing special benefits to individuals on the basis of race, color or ethnicity” and “conducting trainings, programs or activities designed or implemented in reference to race, color, ethnicity, gender identity or sexual orientation, other than trainings, programs or activities developed by an attorney and approved in writing by the institution ’s general counsel and the office of the attorney general for the sole purpose of ensuring compliance with any applicable court order or state or federal law.”

That bill generally says the ban doesn’t apply if federal law requires something.

“DEI fundamentally has a remedial aspect,” Ingram said.

He said the University of Texas at Austin “didn’t let in Black undergraduate students until the 1950s, and so when you have that legacy of … state-sponsored exclusions, of course there are still gross disparities in Black and brown faculty on campus today, and in order to remediate those disparities you have to be intentional.”

Cohn said FIRE is generally neutral on that bill. He said it supports a section banning soliciting DEI statements in hiring.

“I think the state would be better off talking about, you know, how they should avoid compelling applicants or faculty who are up for promotion from being compelled to issue statements on any” political or ideological subject, he said.

“What you don’t want in your legislation is to fight political litmus tests by imposing your own, signaling … one and only one point of view,” he said.

Fifty faculty members at Harvard University have created the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.

In an op-ed in The Boston Globe, Steven Pinker and Bertha Madras detail the attacks on academic freedom nationally and note that Harvard has not been immune. Pinker is Johnstone Professor in the Department of Psychology. Madras is professor of psychobiology at Harvard Medical School.

“The embattled ideal of academic freedom is not just a matter of the individual rights of professors and students. It’s baked into the mission of a university, which is to seek and share the truth—veritas, as our university, Harvard, boasts on its seal,” they said.

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“The reason that a truth-seeking institution must sanctify free expression is straightforward. No one is infallible or omniscient. Mortal humans begin in ignorance of everything and are saddled with cognitive biases that make the search for knowledge arduous,” they added. “These include overconfidence in their own rectitude, a preference for confirmatory over disconfirmatory evidence, and a drive to prove that their own alliance is smarter and nobler than their rivals. The only way that our species has managed to learn and progress is by a process of conjecture and refutation: Some people venture ideas, others probe whether they are sound, and in the long run the better ideas prevail.”

What will the new group do? “Naturally, since we are professors, we plan to sponsor workshops, lectures, and courses on the topic of academic freedom. We also intend to inform new faculty about Harvard’s commitments to free speech and the resources available to them when it is threatened. We will encourage the adoption and enforcement of policies that protect academic freedom. When an individual is threatened or slandered for a scholarly opinion, which can be emotionally devastating, we will lend our personal and professional support.”

“Harvard is just one university, but it is the nation’s oldest and most famous, and for better or worse, the outside world takes note of what happens here. We hope the effects will spread outside our formerly ivy-covered walls and encourage faculty and students elsewhere to rise up. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and if we don’t defend academic freedom, we should not be surprised when politicians try to do it for us or a disgusted citizenry writes us off.”