Tag: Scholarship & Research

The University of California Is Reversing Course on Its ‘Data Science’ Admissions Standard

A University of California academic-governance panel has voted to undo a controversial admissions standard that professors fear is not preparing students for college-level math, just as it is on the cusp of being written into statewide policy for high schools.

On Friday, a systemwide faculty committee that oversees admission policies voted to stop high-school data-science courses from counting toward the UC’s math requirement, according to an email obtained by The Chronicle. Since this policy was adopted in 2020, faculty members across California have expressed concern that the UC system is rubber-stamping courses that bill themselves as “data science” but that do not impart the algebra needed to major in data science or other science, engineering, math, and technology majors, as The Chronicle reported last week.

The governance panel — called the Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (Boars) — seems to have delivered a major setback to these popular courses. “Introduction to Data Science” is taught at some 165 high schools across California, claims to have been taken by 42,200 students to date, and was developed at the University of California at Los Angeles by Robert L. Gould, a statistics instructor.

Another course, “Explorations in Data Science,” is taught at more than 105 schools in the state and has been taken by more than 160,000 students, according to Jo Boaler, a Stanford professor of mathematics education who helped develop the course at Youcubed, a Stanford research center. Gould and Boaler have said that their classes teach the useful skill of crunching real-world data, and engage students who might otherwise drop out of math and won’t need calculus in their careers.

But on Friday, Boars, which consists of representatives from each UC campus, voted unanimously to drop data science from its math admissions standards, two people who were present told The Chronicle.

“Those courses, especially ‘Introduction to Data Science’ and Youcubed, should not have been approved as an advanced math course or a replacement for algebra II,” said one attendee, who requested anonymity to discuss the confidential deliberations. They said that none of the members tried to defend the policy.

The UC director of undergraduate admissions confirmed the vote in an internal email obtained by The Chronicle. She also wrote that Boars will establish an advisory group this fall “to address definitions of ‘advanced math.’”

The vote throws into question California’s math framework, which gives guidance to the state’s K-12 schools about how to teach math. After being in the works for three contentious years, the third and latest version was released on June 26. It currently encourages high schools to consider offering data science — and cites the UC’s data-science policy as evidence that the UC system will “value a range of mathematics courses as pathways to college.”

The California Board of Education is scheduled to vote on the framework on Wednesday morning. In a public comment submitted late last week, Barbara Knowlton, the Boars chair, indicated that her group was having “significant discussion” about whether the currently approved data-science courses would continue to count.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Boars vote to ditch the policy had not been announced. On Monday night, Knowlton told members that she did not think that the group had the authority to implement the vote. “I do not think we have the power to do this,” she wrote in an email obtained by The Chronicle.

Neither Knowlton nor a spokesperson for the UC president’s office returned requests for comment by publication time.

A spokeswoman for California’s Board of Education said it was aware of the panel’s vote. “Given the decision, the Board would consider amendments to the framework during deliberations on Wednesday to ensure framework language is correctly aligned with the UC system,” the spokeswoman, Janet Weeks, said by email.

Traditionally, the UC system requires applicants to take at least three years of high-school math, including algebra II. Its current troubles began in 2020, when it expanded its definition of acceptable advanced-math courses.

In May of that year, an advisory group of mathematicians and statisticians, convened by the UC administration, recommended allowing data science and other courses to count toward the math requirement. One of the advisers was Gould, the UCLA statistician who’d led the development of “Introduction to Data Science.” That October, the Boars members unanimously adopted the proposal.

At the time, Gould called the decision “a great relief.” “There are enough old guards out there in the UC math system that a serious challenge to revising the policy was a real possibility,” he wrote to colleagues on October 3, 2020, in an email obtained by a private citizen through a public-records request. “In fact, in our ad-hoc committee, some of the mathematicians expressed concerns that some colleague[s] would not be happy with the change.”

He also raised the question of whether Boars could revise the policy or whether the UC Academic Senate needed to vote to make it official (which, to date, it has not). “I believe that the plan is to move ahead as if BOARS has the right, and see if it is challenged, since the attempts at researching this were ambiguous,” Gould wrote.

Reached for comment on Tuesday, Gould said by email that Boars “has always had that right as far as I know.” He said that his message from 2020 was “expressing my ignorance of what happens once the ad-hoc committee makes its recommendation.”

He also said that it was not a conflict of interest for him to serve on a committee that recommended green-lighting courses like his. “It worries me when decisions are made about statistics courses without input from statisticians, just as it would worry me if a decision were made about a geometry course and only statisticians were on the committee,” he wrote. “So it seems appropriate to me that a faculty member who writes statistics and data science curriculum would be asked to weigh in with his experiences.” He said that he has been paid for the courses through grants proposed by him and awarded to UCLA, as well as by an external funding agency for work related to the grants.

When it unveiled the policy, Boars said that data-science classes must still “build upon” concepts from algebra II and be designed for juniors and seniors. But “Introduction to Data Science” and “Explorations in Data Science,” which are both UC-approved, teach only concepts from algebra II that overlap with statistics, and “Introduction to Data Science” can be taken in the first half of high school, according to critics who call the curricula more akin to “data literacy.” Skipping or delaying algebra II, they say, threatens the likelihood that college freshmen, including those from underrepresented backgrounds, will enter calculus-ready, as quantitative majors across the UC system require. (Ryan King, a UC spokesperson, previously told The Chronicle that “many” applicants are still taking algebra II in addition to courses like data science.)

Hundreds of professors in California have signed an open letter that protests promoting data science as an alternative to algebra II. And over the past year, Boars and UC leadership have been fielding concerns from representatives on behalf of the Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Irvine campuses; Riverside’s math department; Santa Barbara’s computer science, mechanical engineering, and physics departments; and a group of Black UC faculty in STEM fields. California State University’s Academic Senate also sent in resolutions passed earlier this year. It called “Introduction to Data Science” “inadequate preparation for college and career readiness” and also said that it would no longer automatically accept UC-approved advanced-math courses, as it had traditionally done.

As recently as May, the UC system was promoting the Youcubed data-science course to high-school administrators.

Gould, who has defended his course as “considerably more complex and ‘advanced’ than algebra II,” said that he was disappointed to learn of the Boars vote.

“I fear that a pathway to college for the many who fail Algebra II or who know that they are not interested in STEM might have been shut,” he wrote.

A spokesman for Boaler, who helped create “Explorations in Data Science,” did not return a request for comment by publication time.

Stephanie M. Lee

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July 11, 2023
A Weird Research-Misconduct Scandal About Dishonesty Just Got Weirder

Almost two years ago, a famous study about a clever way to prompt honest behavior was retracted due to an ironic revelation: It relied on fraudulent data. But The Chronicle has learned of yet another twist in the story.

According to one of the authors, Harvard University found that the study contained even more fraudulent data than previously revealed and it’s now asking the journal to note this new information. The finding is part of an investigation into a series of papers that Harvard has been conducting for more than a year, the author said.

Details about the reported fabrications are unclear. Francesca Gino, a world-renowned Harvard Business School professor who studies dishonesty, and is a co-author on the disputed study, is now on administrative leave, according to her faculty page. Gino did not return a request for comment.

The head-spinning saga began in 2012, when a team of five researchers claimed that three experiments they’d done separately, and combined into one paper, showed that when people signed an honesty pledge at the beginning of a form, versus the end, they were less likely to cheat on the form. This intuitive-sounding conclusion turned heads at government agencies and companies.

But by 2020, it was falling apart. The researchers, plus two others, reported in a new paper that they were unable to replicate the effect after running essentially larger versions of experiments Nos. 1 and 2, which involved university students and employees filling out tax forms in a lab. Max H. Bazerman, a Harvard Business School professor, has said that the two experiments were written up by him, Gino, and Lisa Shu, then of Northwestern University.

Scientific findings often fail to replicate for all kinds of reasons, not necessarily because they were fabricated. But in the summer of 2021, a trio of data detectives wrote on their blog that a close examination pointed to fraud in experiment No. 3, which, unlike the others, was based on auto-insurance customer data.

That experiment had been handled by two other authors: Nina Mazar, formerly of the University of Toronto, and Dan Ariely, a Duke University professor. The source of that fraud remains unclear. In 2021, Ariely told BuzzFeed News that he was the only author in touch with the insurance company that provided the data, but he denied fabricating it. At the same time, he gave conflicting answers about the origins of the data file that was the basis for the analysis. BuzzFeed News reported that the insurer was The Hartford, which confirmed doing a “small project” with Ariely but was unable to locate any data resulting from it.

It was yet another blow to the field of behavioral economics — which in the 2000s and 2010s churned out headline-grabbing strategies to subtly influence people’s behavior for the better, and has since walked back many of them. In September 2021, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences retracted the 2012 paper. But that, it turned out, was not quite the end.

The alleged new problems involve experiment No. 1 — one of the two conducted in a lab with students. Bazerman told The Chronicle that on Tuesday, Harvard informed him that it believed fabricated data for this experiment made it invalid. According to Bazerman, Harvard provided a 14-page document with what he described as “compelling evidence” of data alterations. Their analysis found that somebody had accessed a database and added and altered data in the file, he said. “I did not have anything to do with the fabrication,” he told The Chronicle.

According to Bazerman, Harvard is recommending to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that it update the study’s retraction notice to reflect its new concerns. (A journal spokesperson said, “We are looking into the matter.” A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment.)

The irony of this being a story about data fraud in a paper on inducing honesty is not lost on me.

Bazerman declined to discuss his co-authors. But in his book Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop, published in November, the Harvard professor reflected on the debacle of the 2012 study. How was it, he mused, that experiments Nos. 1 and 2 had both ended up being irreproducible?

“In retrospect, Gino reported that her lab manager at her prior university managed data collection for the two laboratory experiments in the 2012 paper,” Bazerman wrote in a chapter about the risks of putting trust in relationships. “Thus, none of the authors, including me, provided sufficient supervision of these experiments. In addition, as I review emails from 2011 containing the dialogue between coauthors of the 2012 paper, I see concerns raised about the methods. I failed to actively engage and deferred to the decisions of my colleagues, and that failure makes me complicit.”

He added, “The irony of this being a story about data fraud in a paper on inducing honesty is not lost on me.”

Bazerman told The Chronicle that his understanding is that the 2012 paper is one of four papers “of significant concern” to Harvard. He declined to identify the other three, but said he was not a co-author on them.

Gino joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 2010 after stints at the University of North Carolina and Carnegie Mellon University. She shot to academic stardom with her prolific, buzzy research on decision-making, leadership, and workplace behavior — including dishonesty and unethical behavior.

Her expertise has made her in demand as a consultant and speaker to some of the world’s biggest companies and institutions — Bacardi, Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Disney, Goldman Sachs, Honeywell, Novartis, Procter & Gamble, and the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy — and as a source to media outlets from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal, according to her website. She has co-authored more than 135 academic articles and written books including 2018’s Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life. She’s also been named one of the world’s 40 best business-school professors under 40 and 50 most influential management thinkers.

And as of recently, her role at Harvard is unclear. Within the last month, her faculty website was updated to say that she is on administrative leave, according to screenshots captured by the Wayback Machine. The Harvard spokesperson declined to comment on Gino’s status.

Shu, the third collaborator on the experiment in question, did not return a request for comment.

Stephanie M. Lee

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June 16, 2023
‘It Feels Like Things Are Breaking Open’: High Publishing Charges Spur Neuroscientists to Start Their Own Journal

The editors of a prominent neuroscience journal are sending a clear message to their publisher — and, they hope, to the broader academic-publishing community — by resigning en masse to begin a new journal in protest of what they say are “unethical and unsustainable” publishing fees.

More than 40 handling editors, associate editors, senior editors, and editors in chief for NeuroImage and its companion journal NeuroImage: Reports, which are published by Elsevier, on Monday announced they were leaving their positions to assume similar roles at the newly formed Imaging Neuroscience, which will be published by the nonprofit MIT Press. They plan for the new journal to eclipse NeuroImage in standing, saying the fact that the entire editorial staff is making the shift will ensure the new journal’s quality.

The high-profile move is the latest chapter in the long-unfolding battle over who pays and who benefits in the academic-publishing world. The departure from a well-regarded journal, and the plan to mount direct competition to it, also highlight the complex ecosystem that surrounds journals’ prestige and impact — and the interplay of a publisher’s reach and scale with the academic bona fides of the scholars who run a title.

The NeuroImage saga began in June 2022, when editors formally asked Elsevier, the Dutch publishing company that has put out the journal since its inception in 1992, to lower the article-processing charge — the amount authors must pay to publish their work in NeuroImage — to under $2,000, the resigning editors wrote in their announcement. The current charge is $3,450, a price they say is prohibitive to many scholars, particularly those with funding restrictions or who work in countries with less well-resourced research institutions.

In March, with no reduction having been offered, the NeuroImage team threw down a gauntlet: Lower the processing charge, or all of us will resign. That threat became reality this week, when the entire team — from handling editors to the editor in chief — officially left the journal. Elsevier representatives, they wrote, told them that the article-processing charge, or APC, wouldn’t be lowered “because they believe that market forces support the current APC.”

In a statement, Elsevier said it was “disappointed” in the editorial board’s decision and that it had “engaged constructively” in recent years to turn the journal open access, making it free to read. The company has tapped interim editors and plans to establish a permanent team of both in-house and external editors to keep publishing.

While the outgoing editors won’t handle any new submissions to NeuroImage, they plan to work until the end of 2023 on papers that have already been submitted to that journal. They hope to be ready to accept submissions to Imaging Neuroscience by mid-July. That’s when they plan to pick up right where they left off, said Shella D. Keilholz, a professor at Georgia Tech and Emory Universitywho was a senior editor of the journal. “I think that we can basically keep NeuroImage going, just with a different name,” Keilholz said. “The journal that Elsevier continues to run, they may call it NeuroImage, but it’s not going to be NeuroImage anymore.”

High Costs

The scholars’ exodus from NeuroImage shines a spotlight on the economics of academic publishing and the open-access movement. A key factor, if not the central one, is the article-processing charge, which publishing companies say is necessary for covering costs. As a one-time fee paid by a scholar or her institution prior to an article’s publication, a processing charge covers expenses incurred to copy edit, produce, and publish an article. The charges vary by discipline and publisher, but in many cases they have gradually risen over the years, as with NeuroImage. (The journal became fully open access in 2020, with an APC of $3,000; the price was hiked twice to reach its current rate of $3,450.)

Elsevier said in a statement that its policy is to set its processing charge at a rate that is competitively below the market average, relative to a journal’s quality. “The fee that has been set for NeuroImage is below that of the nearest comparable journal in its field,” Elsevier’s statement read. That comparison was based on comparative journals’ field-weighted citation index, though an Elsevier spokesperson could not immediately identify NeuroImage‘s “nearest comparable journal.” The journal Nature Neuroscience, which is published by Springer Nature, charges $11,690; Human Brain Mapping, a Wiley publication, charges $3,850.

We’re taking a risk because we’re disrupting this journal that we all love.

But journal editors don’t earn much to do their work, and peer reviewers evaluate papers for free, which the NeuroImage editors said contributes to an unfairly large profit margin for publishing companies. Further complicating the matter is the role of public money, said Kristen M. Kennedy, an associate professor in the behavioral-sciences department at the University of Texas at Dallas and a former senior editor of NeuroImage. Citizens’ tax money supports the work of scientists through grants from agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. As scholars, “we’re having to pay to do the science, but then we’re having to pay a third party who didn’t have anything to do with the science to disseminate the information, and they’re for-profit,” Kennedy said. “The taxpayers who’ve paid for the grant money to exist, if they want to read the outcome of that science, they then have to pay again, because all of our publications are put behind a paywall behind these major publishing houses.”

This was part of the rationale behind the Biden administration’s decision last summer to issue guidance that federally funded research should be made freely and immediately available to the public.

A New Leading Journal?

As the scholars behind the new journal get started, they have several advantages, beginning with prominence. NeuroImage, they say, has a longstanding reputation as the field’s leading journal, with both the highest impact factor and the most papers published each year in the discipline. If early online reception is any indication, they’ll have support for their departure: Many academics responded to the announcement by promising to send their work to Imaging Neuroscience, and more than 850 scholars have volunteered as peer reviewers for the new journal. Some have told the editors that they plan to retract their in-progress submissions at NeuroImage or will wait to submit their work until Imaging Neuroscience is ready to receive it. That, the editors said, includes early-career researchers who’ve promised to ask their principal investigators to submit work to the new journal.

A lower article-processing charge is another possible advantage. The final price is yet to be announced, but the editors hope it will be less than half of the current price at NeuroImage, and they’ve said the processing charge will be waived entirely for scholars at institutions in low- and middle-income countries. Cindy Lustig, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a former senior editor at NeuroImage, said that she and her colleagues frequently heard complaints about the journal’s high processing charge. That’s why, she said, they were both “obligated and empowered” to make the shift. “We were,” she said, “big enough and respected enough to do it right.” For a smaller or less well-known journal, an exodus from the publisher would be a more difficult — if not disastrous — endeavor.

The cohesion among the now-former NeuroImage team was another plus. To marshal more than three-dozen scholars to an unanimous decision — for which Lustig credited the editor in chief, Stephen Smith of the University of Oxford — was unusual. At another journal, Kennedy imagined, “maybe their editor in chief might go to them and say, ‘Hey, we want to defect. Are you with me?’ And they might get some murmurs and a couple of yeses, who knows? But our journal is so well-honed, and we’ve just worked so well with each other for so long.”

Even for a group of well-known and collegial scholars, starting a new journal can be a tricky proposition. While they’ve found an alternative publisher, they still need to land on a processing charge that’s both equitable and sustainable and set up shop under a new name, then hope that their peers in the field follow through on their promises to send their work to the new publication. “We’re taking a risk because we’re disrupting this journal that we all love, but it’s riskier to do nothing and to wait and watch these prices continue to go up,” Keilholz said.

The founders of Imaging Neuroscience are keenly aware of the implications that their decision to leave NeuroImage could have for the discipline. For many early-career researchers, Lustig said, getting their first paper published in NeuroImage was a major career milestone, a sign that “‘OK, I can breathe now; I’m going to get a job,’” she said. As the shift plays out, it’s possible that NeuroImage‘s reputation will decline, while it could take several years for Imaging Neuroscience to accumulate the metrics that are traditionally considered hallmarks of success. (The Journal Citation Reports, for example, only measures impact factor after a journal has been indexed for two years.)

We feel that the era of extreme levels of profit made by some publishers is coming to an end.

Will the new journal succeed in its goal to “replace NeuroImage as our field’s leading journal,” as the editors wrote in their announcement? Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, a professor at the library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that depends on how the new journal is measured — and whether the editors’ aim is to topple their old journal. “I think they could very well build this into a top journal in the field,” she said. “Whether that will mean that Elsevier’s journal falls, that’s a different question.”

A Difficult Journey

While the scholars’ decision to leave Elsevier’s publication to start their own journal is unusual, it’s not unprecedented. According to one list, several-dozen journals have made “declarations of independence” in the last quarter-century. These predecessors’ experiences are instructive.

Shortly after the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or Sparc, formed in 1998, it started an effort called Declaring Independence to encourage journals’ editorial boards to walk away from commercial publishers. While a dozen or so journals did so at the time, Sparc later tabled the effort. “What we saw was it’s really hard to make that scale into a widespread solution or strategy,” Heather Joseph, the executive director, said. “It’s very labor-intensive to do this on a one-off, journal-by-journal basis.”

As open access has taken root, Joseph said, authors who find themselves saddled with high processing charges have begun asking more questions about the model. “It feels,” she said, “like things are breaking open.” The former NeuroImage editors nodded to the same sentiment in their announcement: “Although we appreciate that commercial publishers need to make some profit, we feel that the era of extreme levels of profit made by some publishers is coming to an end.”

Johan Rooryck, the executive director of the open-access project Coalition S, said the journey the Imaging Neuroscience team is about to embark on is a difficult one. There’s no infrastructure to draw on in doing so, a gap he’s working to address. Rooryck wants to create a “one-stop shop” where scholars can find those resources “without having to worry about the money, about the guidelines, about the submission system.” He envisions a platform that would allow prospective editorial teams to “pluck off elements from the shelf to set up their own journal in a few days.”

But in the absence of such a system, he doesn’t see a wave of editorial defections in the coming months. “I don’t expect it to happen to hundreds or thousands of journals overnight. It happens now, and then that garners a lot of attention, and then we wait for the next one,” he said.

Hinchliffe agreed. Without a place for a journal to go — like MIT Press for Imaging Neuroscience — editors’ aspirations of breaking free from the corporate restraints of a major publisher aren’t realistic. Even outlets like MIT Press, which has a strong open-access track record, don’t have infinite resources to establish new journals. “That’s the capacity question. It’s not researcher interest in different models, it’s the availability of opportunity to work in those other models,” she said. “So how many journals can these alternative places take up? I don’t have an answer. I can only observe that they don’t do too many at a time.”

MIT Press, for one, starts one or two new journals each year, said Nick Lindsay, its director of journals and open access. “We don’t have the capacity to be able to take on many, many new titles a year, so we have to be judicious about what we do.” But, Lindsay added, the press is looking forward to working with the Imaging Neuroscience team, which he called a “natural fit.” “They know very clearly what they want to do and what they want to accomplish, and given their experience, they know how to go about doing it,” he said.

In their unanimous decision to move, and in their broad community support, the Imaging Neuroscience team has already cleared the biggest hurdle, Rooryck said. “If the entire community moves, then what you have is an empty vessel. That empty vessel then is filled by whatever is left, so to speak, by people who are desperate to publish in a journal with an impact factor.”

He would know: Along with his role at Coalition S, Rooryck is the editor in chief of Glossa, a linguistics journal he helped launch in 2015 after he and the other editors at Lingua, an Elsevier publication, resigned. The Glossa transition — along with a similar move in 2019 that saw the team behind Elsevier’s Journal of Informetrics break away to form Quantitative Science Studies — has been held up as an example for Imaging Neuroscience to follow. (Glossa, though, does not charge an article-processing charge, while Imaging Neuroscience will.) “It’s basically like a family buying a new car,” Rooryck said. “You ditch the old car; you buy a new car. What’s important? It’s the family that moves in that car. You’re not looking at any way at the vehicle.”

The family in Rooryck’s metaphorical car — the editors at Imaging Neuroscience — are betting on the strength of that comparison. They’re hoping the reputation they’ve built as a collective will travel with them; that reputation, Kennedy said, is the reason behind NeuroImage‘s success. “That’s how the journal gets to the top of the ranks. It has very good scientists who submit papers to it, and it has a very, very good editorial board that selects from those the best, most sound, most impactful papers to publish,” she said. “That’s all us.”

Megan Zahneis

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April 21, 2023
What Does It Take to Be a ‘Minority-Serving Institution’?

A group of researchers has recommended a new classification system for minority-serving institutions that they hope will ultimately direct more money to colleges that are serving minority students well, and not just enrolling them in large numbers.

The MSI Data Project, the researchers said in a news release Sunday, is a response to “inaccurate and inconsistent data used to identify minority-serving institutions (MSIs) for funding and analysis.”

“Our hope is … for MSI leaders, advocates, and policymakers to use this body of research, as well as our data dashboards, to make better informed decisions that promote equitable educational outcomes for students,” said Mike Hoa Nguyen, the principal investigator and an assistant professor of education at New York University.

The data project, launched this month, examines 11 categories of minority-serving institutions. It includes dashboards that detail individual campuses’ eligibility for federal funds, institutional characteristics, enrollment, and graduation metrics over a five-year period, from 2017 to 2021.

For instance, the dashboard shows, 219 Hispanic-serving institutions received funding from the U.S. Department of Education in 2021, but 462 were eligible for such money. Colleges still have to apply for competitive grants from a limited pool of money. Some applied and were denied, while other colleges may not have even known they were eligible.

The researchers hope their recommendations will spur changes in how colleges are designated as MSIs and clear up confusion about who should be able to claim that status, and the federal money that can come with it.

In an accompanying article in Educational Researcher, titled “What Counts as a Minority-Serving Institution?” Nguyen and two of the project’s co-creators raise the concern that federal money isn’t necessarily going to the most deserving institutions.

“For example, perhaps an institution, not identified as an MSI under the federal statute, is found to serve students of color much better than those that are identified. Such findings could offer important suggestions for policy changes. Additionally, if institutions are receiving federal MSI funds but are not serving students of color well, this would be an important consideration to amend practices and policies so that federal funding is used in the manner in which it was intended.”

“The MSI landscape is so unbelievably complex, in the way all 11 designations were created over a long period of time, using a patchwork legislative process,” Nguyen said in an interview. By getting everyone “speaking the same language” in how they examine minority-serving institutions, “our hope is that we can find out how well those students are being served” by the federal money set aside and where equity gaps exist.

Nguyen’s fellow authors were Joseph J. Ramirez, an institutional research and assessment associate at the California Institute of Technology, and Sophia Laderman, an associate vice president at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO).

About one in five postsecondary institutions are eligible for federal money as MSIs, but more than half of all undergraduate students of color attend these colleges, the authors wrote. President Biden has pledged significant increases in the amount of money directed toward minority-serving institutions.

Researchers, including Gina Ann Garcia, an associate professor of educational foundations, organizations, and policy at the University of Pittsburgh, have pointed out that the nation’s demographic changes have resulted in hundreds of campuses being designated as Hispanic serving based on numbers alone. The data-project researchers acknowledge that some colleges engage in “the strategic manipulation of enrollment trends in order to meet eligibility requirements.”

Hispanic-serving institutions, which were first designated by the federal government in 1994, are among the minority-serving institutions that get that designation based on share of enrollment. For HSIs, the threshold is 25 percent of the undergraduate population.

By contrast, Historically Black and Tribal-Serving colleges achieve that designation based on their histories and missions. Colleges that weren’t designated in those categories can’t join their ranks, regardless of their own changing demographics. That has caused longstanding tensions between Historically Black and predominantly Black institutions over who should have access to the federal money set aside for minority-serving institutions.

Among the minority-serving institutions the database tracks are those representing Hispanic students, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, both tribal and non-tribally-controlled Native American colleges, and colleges that are either Historically Black or predominantly Black.

Many colleges are designated in more than one category, but they may only be able to receive funding under one. Designating their multiple identities is important, the authors write, because it “recognizes the diversity and complexity of the institution, and does not render invisible the students of color who attend that institution.”

Katherine Mangan

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March 20, 2023
What Does a Healthy Campus Actually Look Like? A New Study Offers Ideas.

Small campus interventions — like adding hydration stations and making healthy foods more visible — can make a big difference in how students, faculty, and staff feel about well-being at their college, according to a new study.

Conducted at the University of California at Riverside, the study examined how health factors into university policy and how health-promotion programs contribute to campus culture. UC-Riverside is part of the Healthy Campus Network, an alliance of the UC system’s 10 institutions that’s focused on improving physical and mental health on each campus.

Eighteen focus groups of UC-Riverside students, faculty, and staff participated in the study in 2018, 2019, and 2020. As part of the research, Healthy Campus created some new health interventions and sought to raise awareness of existing efforts.

Participants were increasingly aware of health-promotion efforts on campus as the study progressed, according to the focus groups. In the last two years of the study, participants talked more about broader, institution-wide health policies, rather than specific programs.

Faculty and staff reported feeling left out of campus health services, researchers said. They could name many resources available to students, like the food pantry and recreation center, but they were unaware of what was available to employees. Those perceptions improved by the end of the study.

“There was this lack of, I would say, care about this other population of communities that exist on campus,” said Evelyn Vázquez, one of the authors of the paper. Vázquez is an assistant researcher in the department of social medicine, population, and public health at UC-Riverside’s School of Medicine.

Julie Chobdee, another one of the authors, said the infrastructure built as a part of the Healthy Campus project made them a hub for faculty and staff wellness on campus. Chobdee is now associate director of the employee health and well-being program at the University of Southern California’s WorkWell Center.

Additionally, first-generation students were sharing their increased knowledge of health services with their families, helping them to access mental-health care and more, Vázquez said.

The study also found that small environmental changes, like refurbishing stairwells and putting up nonsmoking signage, improved people’s perceptions of how committed their university was to health promotion.

One staff member praised stairwell improvements like better lighting and fresh paint, as well as signs encouraging people to take the stairs instead of the elevator. And even if someone needed to take the elevator on a given day, the staff member said, there were posters offering brief instructions on deep breathing.

Two staff members said their offices had added wellness activities into their training programs, citing that integration as evidence of a top-down commitment to better health. Walking meetings were also identified as a positive step.

Seeing campus leaders participate in health-promotion activities demonstrated that well-being was a genuine priority for the university, according to those interviewed.

Faculty members, meanwhile, could help students by doing something as simple as providing a link to mental-health services, said Ann Marie Cheney, another author of the paper and lead designer of the study.

Cheney, an associate professor in the department of social medicine, population, and public health at Riverside’s medical school, said her research made clear that students viewed faculty as access points for other services on campus, even if faculty did not consider the well-being of students as part of their role.

Cheney and Chobdee were formerly co-leaders of Healthy Campus at UC-Riverside, which involved nine subcommittees of students, faculty, and staff, overseen by a large advisory board. Chobdee hopes to build a similar program in her role at USC. Cheney and Vázquez have both transitioned out of the project.

Despite the positive findings from the study, Healthy Campus is in a period of flux, Cheney said. UC leaders have not been able to find a new crop of people who have a strong vision for the project and can bring together campus stakeholders, she said.

Cheney said more investment from university leadership would have helped the team plan a sustainable future. When she was involved, it was volunteer work, she said. She hopes the study can “spark a light” and garner more attention from the university’s administration.

Overall, the study shows that empowerment is key to creating a healthy campus community, Cheney said.

“Why I think Healthy Campus was so successful at our university is because we identified grass-roots leaders who were interested in creating healthier environments, and we supported their ideas,” she said.

Kate Marijolovic

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March 13, 2023
Which Universities Spent the Most Money on Research Last Year?

Academic institutions spent $89.9 billion on research and development in the 2021 fiscal year, up 4 percent from the year before.

Nearly all of the $3.4-billion increase in research spending was funded by the federal government, according to a report on the National Science Foundation’s newly released Higher Education Research and Development survey.

As in previous years, universities that had at least $1 billion in research and development expenditures in the 2021 fiscal year dominated the top 30 institutions that reported the highest spending totals. No longer in that top group is the University of California at Berkeley. New to the top 30: Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which moved from 31 to 24 after accounting changes that contributed to a $115-million increase in spending, the report says.

Federally supported research and development rose 6.6 percent in the 2021 fiscal year to $49 billion, and now accounts for 55 percent of research funding at all universities. The next largest source of research-and-development funds, 25 percent, came from institutions themselves, for a total of $459 million. That’s a 2.1-percent increase from 2020.

The foundation collected data for the survey from 910 institutions that award bachelor’s degrees or higher and that spent at least $150,000 on research and development in the 2021 fiscal year. The survey is sponsored by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.

Here’s a closer look at the data:

Audrey Williams June

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December 20, 2022
How the Largest Higher-Ed Strike in U.S. History Blew Up Finals

Inside a campus coffee shop at the University of California at Los Angeles, students were hunched over laptops on white plastic tables, armed with cups of coffee. The students didn’t react to the cries and chants happening outside, largely drowned out by chatter and music streaming through AirPods. Finals were coming up, and students were starting to cram.

Steps away from the cafe, a group of 50 UCLA workers and faculty members walked in circles and carried picket signs around the university’s iconic inverted stone fountain. Around 1 p.m., they resumed their chants — calls for higher wages and better benefits.

A three-week-long strike by graduate students, postdocs, and researchers has profoundly disrupted life at one of the nation’s most prominent university systems. Now finals are here, and with no teaching assistants on the job, there’s widespread confusion among students and professors on how to proceed.

Students and professors say the campus feels emptier than usual. Since Thanksgiving, some have left entirely and not returned, due to modified and canceled classes and exams. Those who have stayed stuck around for a reason: Their classes are forging ahead.

With the end of the term approaching, faculty members say they’re struggling to fulfill obligations to their undergraduate students. Undergraduate students are concerned with how the strike will impact their grades — and wondering whether they’ll even get grades in the end. All are worried about how long the strike will last.

The UC system reached a tentative agreement with postdocs and academic researchers this week, agreeing to wage increases that the union says reflect the cost of living in one of the most expensive states in the country. But graduate students are still negotiating, and postdocs and researchers are continuing to strike with them.

The university has repeatedly emphasized that it expects faculty members to meet teaching and research responsibilities and ensure the continuity of instruction for students. A Wednesday letter from the UC system’s provost suggested alternate ways that faculty can show support for the strike. Colleges often respond to striking instructors by criticizing how work stoppages harm undergraduates’ learning.

People across the UC system have different perspectives on the strike and whom to blame for the ensuing chaos. But just about everyone feels conflicted in one way or another.

Peyton Quijano, a third-year biology major at UC-Santa Cruz, says she’s caught between wanting to support her TAs and being frustrated by yet another disruption to her studies. She says she understands why the strike has to happen. She’s also paying for her education and wants to get the most out of it.

“I just didn’t think the strike was going to go on this long,” Quijano said.

At UCLA, life hasn’t stopped. It’s just slowed way down.

Grading has been backed up, particularly for large lecture classes. Some students have had finals canceled or made optional. Other courses are operating as usual — save for the echoes of strike chants seeping into classrooms.

A spokesperson for UCLA didn’t respond to a question about how many classes had been canceled or affected by the strike.

Students who have returned to campus are there because their instruction is continuing — either modified or business as usual. By midafternoon on Thursday, nearly every desk was full inside UCLA’s main library.

Dylan Winward, a first-year student at UCLA, said one of his finals was made optional only five days before his exam was set to take place.

Over the last three weeks, Winward and his friends had been completing lectures and assignments from The Hill, a student hub for dorms, dining, and student services on UCLA’s campus. Winward and many of his friends said on Thursday that they were returning to the main campus for the first time since the strike began.

Although students said they sympathize with the TAs and others who are on strike, some are also concerned about grades. “I’ll be really upset if I put in all this work for finals and get nothing back,” said first-year student Sydney Roberts.

It feels a lot like when we were taking classes during the pandemic.

Jacob Castaneda, a third-year political science student who transferred to UCLA this semester, said his course load hasn’t been impacted. His final exams and essays are proceeding as usual. For his three lecture classes, each of which typically have TA-led discussions, his professors have committed to getting grades in on time.

For Mauve Spillard, a fourth-year comparative literature student, one of her professors who usually works with a TA has said grades will be turned in late.

Trent Brown, a first-year American literature undergraduate student, hasn’t had any classes or finals canceled since the strike began. But Brown is worried that delayed grading could affect students trying to apply for honors or other programs.

At UC-Santa Cruz, Quijano said her classes were canceled or moved online during the first two weeks of the strike; by late last week, some were back to in-person. She said her professors respect the cause of the striking workers, but they said they need to continue lessons for students to be able to complete the course.

But Quijano is struggling to get answers to her questions about the material without the help of TAs, and her labs have been canceled. Instead of conducting her own experiments, she has to write a paper based on a photo of the results she would have gotten.

“It feels a lot like when we were taking classes during the pandemic,” she said.

Much like during the pandemic, faculty members have had to make contingency plans.

Anna J. Markowitz, an assistant professor of education at UCLA, spent the weekend before the strike recording videos of lectures for her undergraduate Introduction to Quantitative Methods class. The next day, she stopped teaching.

Markowitz’s classes enroll 40 students, and she works with two graduate students. One of them runs the coding lab portion of Markowitz’s undergraduate course and grades all student assignments — work that has now been left ungraded. Markowitz said she will not submit grades or hold a formal final during the strike. For students who want to test their knowledge, she will release an optional exam, but it will not be graded.

I couldn’t look my students in the face and not fully support their right to strike.

As a graduate student at Georgetown University more than a decade ago, Markowitz said she earned the same wage as her graduate students make now: $25,000 for a three-quarter academic year. They are paid for part-time work capped at 20 hours a week, she said, but many graduate students work more.

“Knowing what my students make and knowing how bad I’ve been feeling about that for a long time, I couldn’t look my students in the face and not fully support their right to strike,” Markowitz said of her decision to not cross the picket line.

Markowitz is among 1,000 faculty who have pledged not to teach or submit grades until the strike ends. For some professors, it’s an act of solidarity. Others say that without the help of teaching assistants, it would be impossible to complete grading for classes with hundreds of students — no matter their personal positions on the strike.

David Shorter, a professor of world arts and cultures at UCLA, stopped teaching in solidarity with the graduate-student employees. He’s still holding listening sessions for his students, many of whom aren’t receiving clear directives from their professors or the university about how to exist amid the strike, he said.

Shorter is teaching three classes this quarter and doesn’t know how he’ll grade 300 papers before the end of the term, even if the deadline to submit grades is extended to January. He’d usually have the help of six TAs.

He stopped teaching his classes, one of which is an 80-person lecture, when the strike began. Nearly 25 percent of his students haven’t even returned to campus since Thanksgiving. And a lot of courses for the next term, he said, don’t even have TAs assigned yet.

While Shorter’s classrooms sat empty, a 300-person life sciences lecture at UCLA was nearly full on Thursday. Students were wrapped up in last-day-of-class chatter as the professor continued to make announcements about review sessions, about practice-exam questions, about their final — yes, there would be a final.

The professor went around the room as students were tasked with answering a practice question. Murmuring picked up among the students. They graphed their guesses and checked their responses with one another. The strike hadn’t changed much for these students, beyond canceling their TA-led discussion sections.

The Academic Senate at UCLA has released guidance suggesting that professors could shorten final exams or make them multiple choice, to ease the grading burden.

There have been a handful of incidents where strikers have interrupted midterm exams, said Winward, the first-year student; he reported on them for the campus newspaper, the Daily Bruin. He said some students are concerned about such disruptions happening again during finals week.

The University of California system views its graduate students like most colleges do: Their employment is “strictly part time,” and campus policy prevents them from working more than 20 hours per week. Meeting some of the students’ demands, university officials say, would cause an “unprecedented” and “unpredictable” financial impact.

The university has proposed paying TAs between $25,000 and $31,000 per year, and graduate-student researchers between $28,000 and $47,000 per year, for part-time work — which officials say would make UC graduate students the highest compensated among public institutions in the Association of American Universities. The union has called for a minimum salary of $54,000.

Another sticking point is housing costs. University officials have stressed that UC-owned housing for graduate students is already 20 to 25 percent below market rates. Tying raises to housing costs, as the union has called for, could cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to the university.

We’re eager to get back to work. We just want to make sure we are living and working in dignified conditions.

UC officials said they had reached agreements with other employee unions in the past year, demonstrating their “flexibility and a genuine willingness to compromise.” The university has proposed working with a private mediator to resolve differences, which the union doesn’t support.

Meanwhile, on most campuses, the deadline to submit final grades this fall has been extended — but only by a few days. And there’s little consistency across campuses.

Faculty members are also struggling to figure out what legal rights they have to participate in a sympathy strike.

A Wednesday letter from Michael T. Brown, the UC-system provost, stated that if faculty members choose not to hold classes or submit grades during the strike, the “university in turn may withhold their compensation.” If faculty members participate in a “partial strike,” where they don’t submit grades but continue to do research, they could also risk disciplinary action.

The letter said that faculty have the responsibility to maintain course and curricular requirements, including “the timely awarding and submission of grades.” The Council of UC Faculty Associations called the letter “misleading.”

For some faculty members, the university is making a frustrating, if not impossible, ask — especially after the pandemic left them feeling burned out and exhausted.

“Most of us are confused, if not stressed, because we just spent three years being very agile for our employers due to COVID,” Shorter said. “And now the expectation is that we would spend our holiday breaks or winter breaks grading hundreds of papers for a situation we did not create.”

The faculty associations’ council also released a Google form for professors to fill out if they expect not to be able to submit final grades without the help of TAs. As of Friday, the group said the total number of expected missing grades was 23,000.

Bernard Remollino, a graduate-student researcher and teaching assistant at UCLA, said what’s happening across UC campuses now sends a critical message: The university works because of its academic student workers. The question of when their work will proceed is up to the UC system, he said.

“We’re eager to get back to work,” Remollino said. “We just want to make sure we are living and working in dignified conditions. And that’s it.”

Grace Mayer and Carolyn Kuimelis

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December 2, 2022
Stanford Is Investigating Its Own President Over Research-Misconduct Allegations

Stanford University’s Board of Trustees is overseeing an investigation into the university’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, over allegations that neurobiology papers that he co-authored contain multiple manipulated images, a university spokeswoman told The Chronicle on Tuesday night.

The announcement of the inquiry followed a report earlier Tuesday in The Stanford Daily about concerns relating to images in at least four papers of Tessier-Lavigne’s — two of which listed him as senior author — that date back to at least 2001. Concerns about these papers, along with others, have been publicly raised for years by, among others, Elisabeth Bik, an independent scientific-misconduct investigator, on PubPeer, a website where people point out anomalies about research, and the Daily reported that it had corroborated her suspicions with two other misconduct experts.

The Daily confirmed that at least one journal, The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Journal, was reviewing a 2008 study that lists Tessier-Lavigne, a decorated neuroscientist, as one of its 11 authors. Three other papers of his that contain “serious problems,” Bik told the student newspaper, were published in Science and Nature. A Stanford spokeswoman, Dee Mostofi, acknowledged to the Daily that there were “issues” in the papers, but said that Tessier-Lavigne “was not involved in any way in the generation or presentation of the panels that have been queried” in two of the papers, including the one being reviewed by EMBO. The issues in the other two “do not affect the data, results, or interpretation of the papers,” Mostofi told the Daily.

But on Tuesday night, the university said it would undertake its own inquiry. It will “assess the allegations presented in The Stanford Daily, consistent with its normal rigorous approach by which allegations of research misconduct are reviewed and investigated,” Mostofi said in an email to The Chronicle, citing the university handbook’s guidance.

“In the case of the papers in question that list President Tessier-Lavigne as an author, the process will be overseen by the Board of Trustees,” Mostofi added.

The situation is highly unusual, given that Tessier-Lavigne, who was named Stanford’s president in 2016, is a member of the board now charged with investigating him. Mostofi said that Tessier-Lavigne “will not be involved in the Board of Trustees’ oversight of the review.”

In a statement provided by Stanford, Tessier-Lavigne said, “Scientific integrity is of the utmost importance both to the university and to me personally. I support this process and will fully cooperate with it, and I appreciate the oversight by the Board of Trustees.”

Mostofi did not answer questions about how long the investigation was expected to take or if Stanford was coordinating or cooperating with EMBO’s investigation.

The university had told the Daily that in 2015, Tessier-Lavigne had submitted corrections for two papers to Science that were not published, but did not explain at the time why that was the case. On Wednesday morning, Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of Science, confirmed to The Chronicle that Tessier-Lavigne had prepared corrections for both papers but “due to an error on our part,” Science never posted them.

“We regret this error, apologize to the scientific community, and will be sharing our next steps as they relate to these two papers as soon as possible,” Thorp said by email.

Bik, one of the watchdogs who raised concerns about the papers, told The Chronicle that she was encouraged to learn that both Tessier-Lavigne and Stanford appeared to be taking the situation seriously.

“Somebody needs to investigate who was making these figures or making these errors,” she said. “It might not be him, but his name is on the papers.”

Stephanie M. Lee

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November 29, 2022
This Professor Joined a Sorority. Now She’s Written a Book About the Enduring Appeal of Greek Life.

When Jana Mathews became an assistant professor of English at Rollins College, she initially struggled to connect with her students. As a specialist in medieval literature, which wasn’t the most popular subject on campus, Mathews figured she’d need to make extra effort to develop a recruitment pipeline and ensure that students took her classes.

So she did something unconventional: She joined a sorority.

“It was totally bizarre,” Mathews said. She had grown up as a devout Mormon and attended Brigham Young University as an undergraduate, so she knew next to nothing about Greek life.

Mathews fully embraced the sorority-rush process, participating in new-member rituals and forging a close bond with her “big.” Between 2011 and 2018, she served as a faculty adviser for two sororities and a fraternity at Rollins.

Mathews connected with students in ways she could never have imagined. As a chapter adviser, she built such a high level of trust with the students that some would show up on her doorstep when they were in crisis.

Now Mathews has written a book: The Benefits of Friends: Inside the Complicated World of Today’s Sororities and Fraternities (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). It’s a study of the close same-sex friendships that are a central part of sorority and fraternity membership.

Mathews didn’t want to make an argument for whether to abolish Greek-life organizations, as some have recently called for. She instead dove deeply into how fraternity and sorority relationships can uplift students while also perpetuating harm — with the goal of prompting a more informed conversation about the future of the groups.

Mathews, now a full professor at Rollins, spoke recently with The Chronicle about how powerful friendships contribute to the enduring appeal of fraternities and sororities, how those relationships influence campus social life, and whether the benefits of Greek life outweigh the downsides. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why is this kind of a study important for understanding Greek life?

We tend to think of white fraternities and sororities as kind of R-rated Boy and Girl Scout troops — that their influence on individual lives and broader culture begins and ends on the college campus. And actually what I hope to show is that these organizations are powerful social influencers that impact the way we think about foundational relationships and what it means to be a friend. What does a family look like? How should I treat my brother and sister? What does it mean to call someone who’s not related to me a brother or a sister?

The other thing that interested me was the unsatisfactory answer that I kept getting to the big question that we always ask about these organizations: Should they stay or should they go? We have to understand first: What do they do? Why are they so pervasive in popular culture, in the face of such enduring controversy? And how do they operate? Once we get at those questions, then I think we’re better prepared to engage in a nuanced conversation about whether they should stay or go. And more importantly, we have some of the tools that can equip us to act on some of those ideas.

When you first began interacting with Greek life at Rollins, what notions about the organizations did you have? How did that change over time?

My exposure was about what a person who was from another country might have. I had seen Legally Blonde, and I knew they lived in houses, and I knew all the stereotypes about them being big drinkers and partiers. That was the extent.

But they populated my classes. At the time, 35 percent of Rollins’s student body was part of the Greek life system. I teach medieval literature, which doesn’t exactly appeal to the masses. I was really yearning for ways to connect with my students. The common denominator that linked many of them together was their fraternity and sorority experience.

As I went through the initiation process and the shadowing process and then serving as their adviser, I learned that these organizations are really critical to the lives and happiness of many of these students, but are also a source of tremendous angst and anxiety and tension and heartbreak.

Greek-life organizations have long been a venue for intimate friendships. Is there something distinct about the kinds of bonds that are being formed today?

Same-sex platonic relationships have always been critically important. They were formative in the frontier era of our nation’s founding, and they date back to Greek and Roman mythology — this is nothing new.

What’s changing is the fact that women and men are staying single for longer periods than they were in the past. People are getting married later and living longer. At critical stages of their life — in their 20s and 30s, and also the end of life — people are single. Those bonds become really critical in understanding the composition of society at large. Platonic friends mean more than they did in the past.

Fraternity men told you that they engineer a gender imbalance at their parties. The result is hookup culture. Is that problematic?

We have more women going to college than men. That’s not going to be reversing itself anytime soon. Men are finding ways to capitalize on that and pursue their romantic interests, and heterosexual women are put in a position where they have to combat that. Fraternities and sororities will call themselves lots of different things, but they’re primarily social clubs. Part of the social experience if you’re a college student is romance and dating and sex. These groups inherently play a critical role in how that culture operates on a college campus. It’s neither good nor bad.

But what has been underappreciated to this point is the ways in which the sex-ratio imbalance on college campuses works to foster a hookup culture, and then how, in turn, women are working against that — how they’re trying to hold their own.

When I talked to women and men, men were much more ready to admit what exactly they were doing. “We are creating a scenario where there are fewer men than women.” Women were not as conscious about what they were doing. I would say: If you look around, what do you notice about the demographics? It would take several steps for them to say: There are twice as many of us as men. Then they would articulate what they were doing in response. It was less strategic.

When they did figure it out — what sororities absolutely do is negotiate and build teams that can help their own members compete and try to get teams of guys. The way to do that is to block other sororities out.

Another dynamic you explored was the role of LGBTQ members in facilitating connections between straight men and women. Can you talk about that?

Homophobia is still rife within the college environment and in society at large. But what we are seeing is that more chapters are seeing LGBTQ students as assets. Fraternities see them not as threats to their masculinity, but as partners. Some gay men affectionately refer to themselves as the hot girls’ best friends. They have this gaggle of girls that they’re all really good friends with, but they’re not romantic competitors to fraternity men.

For the gay member, it enables him to gain access to this space and this group of male friends. On the surface, it’s a wonderful thing. The dark side of it is, fraternities are putting LGBTQ members in a position where they’re asking them to bring in women and that serves as their primary purpose. The level of self acceptance is conditional; there’s no reciprocity. You could never bring a gay date to a dance, or bring a man home into the fraternity house, or publicly display any kind of affection.

You talked about how close fraternity or sorority friendships influence what happens after an alleged sexual assault. You wrote, “When things do go slightly or horribly awry, the metaphor of family becomes even more dysfunctional than it already is.” What did you mean by that?

When a sexual assault occurs, often the only people to know in the beginning are the sorority woman’s friends. The reason I found that they were reluctant to report or do anything about it was because their experience with Title IX and the legal system, from watching it happen to other friends, didn’t bring about the resolution they wanted. They believed going in that there would be no apologies, only excuses.

So instead of blaming the person who committed the harm or anyone else, they often turned on their friends. They blamed their friends for not protecting them, for letting them drink too much, for leaving them alone. That sounds really problematic, and it is. But they did that out of self protection. They knew that they could pass blame onto their friends, and that they were going to get an apology. They knew that at the end of that exchange, that friend was going to hug them and tend to their needs — that there was going to be this resolution.

There has been increasing scrutiny of sexual assault in fraternities. Is there something inherent about Greek-life organizations that creates that culture? Or is it just one manifestation of a broader culture?

To put every fraternity chapter in the same category and say that they all promote rape culture is a gross exaggeration. But that’s the perception of the culture, broadly defined, and the fraternity and sorority community has not taken that seriously. So they’re holding the line again and again, saying, “This is just a few bad apples,” and in doing so are missing opportunities to have an important conversation about sex — one we should also be having in society at large.

Having worked with a fraternity comprised of wonderful gentlemen — they are spectacular on a one-on-one basis. When you put them in a group, they often don’t bring out the best in one another. I would say the same of sorority women. Part of that is a developmental issue. Fraternity men, from what I observed, are a bunch of 18- to 22-year-olds who are posturing and trying to figure out who they are, so they lean into the easiest, most dominant version of who they think they should be, and that is often a crude, sexist jerk. Sororities do that too; they can be catty, nasty, and mean. I’m not excusing the behavior, but part of it is caused by the sheer number of young people who are together with no different perspectives or experiences to check them.

Do the benefits of Greek life outweigh the problems?

If you think about higher ed across the globe, every other country is able to function without sororities and fraternities. The idea that we need them, that it’s an essential part of our educational identity, feels problematic. There are other ways you can accrue the same benefits without being part of a fraternity or sorority.

But maybe, arguably, the biggest benefit that fraternities and sororities provide is that they provide scapegoats for colleges. We like to say that all of the bad behavior — the misogyny, the racism — is concentrated in these little pockets, and it’s only a small percent of our population that says and does these horrible things. We have to know that that’s not true. Fraternities and sororities provide convenient ways for colleges to not have to deal with the pervasive issues that affect all campuses and all populations.

Sarah Brown

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October 24, 2022
How Regional Public Colleges Benefit Their Communities

Many regional public colleges were hit hard by the pandemic. At a few such institutions, enrollment declines and financial distress have been so serious that questions have emerged about their relevance and longevity.

But these colleges serve a crucial population: low-income students. And they serve as economic engines in their regions.

Those are the key findings of new research by two economists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who explored the benefits of these institutions for their local communities. The researchers found that regional public colleges improve educational attainment and economic outcomes for residents in their area.

The study was an extension of previous research conducted by Russell Weinstein, an assistant professor of labor and employment relations and of economics, and two co-authors, Greg Howard, also an assistant professor of economics at Illinois, and Yuhao Yang, an economics graduate student. The latest paper was written by Weinstein and Howard.

The researchers compared counties that had state-funded mental asylums with counties that had “normal schools” — colleges established in the late-19th and early-20th centuries by the state government to educate schoolteachers. In the mid-20th century, many of these normal schools were converted into regional universities. As for the asylums, many became psychiatric hospitals or rehabilitative facilities.

The researchers found that children who grew up in counties with the regional public colleges received more education and experienced better economic and social outcomes than did children in counties that had the former state-funded mental asylums. Children who came from lower-income families were most positively affected by the regional public institutions.

The research found that living in proximity to these universities led to increases in high-school graduation rates among residents, as well as to improvements in other economic factors, including employment, household income, marriage rates, and geographic mobility.

The Chronicle spoke on Thursday with Weinstein about the implications of his research , and what leaders of these universities can learn from his findings. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In your research, you compared counties with “normal schools” to counties with state-funded mental asylums to determine the impact of regional public universities on local residents. How did you and your co-author determine this approach?

We started reading about the history of universities and how it was determined where universities were located.

Oftentimes state legislatures were deciding about where to locate schools at the same time as they were deciding where to locate these asylums.

Some counties effectively randomly got a normal school, and some counties effectively didn’t get a normal school. But they got a different state institution: an insane asylum. What determines whether they got one or the other seemed like it was often due to political deals, and it could have ended up the other way around as well.

Your research finds that living in counties with regional public universities leads to positive effects for residents. How did you attribute these effects to the colleges?

On a wide range of economic and social-mobility indicators, we see that these regional public universities are affecting the people who grow up next to them.

If we want to know the effect of regional public universities on their local market, we want to know what economic mobility of people in the county would have looked like if the county never got the university. What is that counterfactual?

We argue that we can learn this counterfactual by comparing the counties that got these insane asylums instead of the normal schools, because these counties looked remarkably similar before these institutions were assigned. It’s just that one got an institution that randomly turned into a regional public university.

What do your research findings say about the role of regional public colleges compared with that of other types of colleges?

The people who grow up in a county with a regional public university, instead of one of these other private, smaller, more expensive universities, we see that they’re more likely to get a college degree and have all these other economic, social, and mobility effects.

We’re not making an argument that the colleges in these asylum counties are representative of all private universities. But we do see that growing up next to a regional public university has these positive mobility effects relative to growing up next to the other colleges, which are less likely to be public, and are more expensive and smaller.

This research helps demonstrate the importance of regional public universities. How can leaders at these colleges use these findings to make the case for more state funding?

The central mission of regional public universities, since the time that they were established, has been to increase access to higher education for people who live nearby.

Our research shows that regional public universities are doing this. They are increasing access to higher education, and all kinds of other economic and social-mobility effects for people who grow up next to them.

There are lots of other ways that regional public universities might contribute to the state, and to their local markets. We’re quantifying one of those ways, and there are also lots of trade-offs involved in any funding decision. So we hope our research is useful to leaders in quantifying this one key benefit, and that it’s useful for policy makers in thinking about these trade-offs, for funding.

What else should leaders at regional public universities take away from this work?

We still see a gap in the likelihood of obtaining a college degree for people growing up in a county with a regional public university versus not growing up in a county with such a college. It’s important to know that there does seem to be this friction in college attendance based on geography. It’s important to understand why that is.

Once people have a good understanding of what the reasons are that are leading to this gap, then university leaders can start to think about policies that might help people in those farther areas.

Some public regional colleges have experienced major enrollment declines. Do we need as many public regional colleges as we have now?

These universities are educating a really large fraction of college students. Regional public universities are anchor institutions in their local markets. They’re helping their local economy a tremendous amount. They’re also engines of economic mobility.

Those arguments have already been out there and discussed. Our key contribution is to provide causal evidence that regional public universities are having these specific effects and that those benefits should be useful when thinking about the costs and benefits of funding these institutions.

How does this new research build upon research you’ve done before? How does it cover new ground or add evidence to established research?

Our previous research showed that regional public universities make their local economies more resilient to negative economic shocks.

Our main contribution with this paper is providing causal evidence for the effects these universities have on their local communities. That’s been a challenge in the literature, to attribute causality to the regional university. This causal evidence is just so important for policy makers when determining funding for universities, and for understanding what would happen if funding were to change in this market.

Grace Mayer

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October 20, 2022