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Tag: The Chronicle of Higher Education

  • Bots Are Grabbing Students’ Personal Data When They Complete Assignments

    Bots Are Grabbing Students’ Personal Data When They Complete Assignments

    Carson Blaisdell sat stunned by the survey on the desktop screen in front of him.

    The list of true/false questions posed to the 31-year-old were intimate: Did he have more than one sexual partner? Did he use a latex condom, or oil-based lubricants? Did he use alcohol in “sexual situations”? Had he been vaccinated for Hepatitis B, or HPV? Did he regularly perform genital self-examinations?

    It read like a health-clinic intake form. But it wasn’t. It was an assignment for a gen-ed health-and-fitness class he was taking asynchronously online through Bowling Green State University in the fall of 2022 — using McGraw Hill Connect courseware.

    “It wasn’t enjoyable. It made me constantly want to lie,” said Blaisdell, who’s in the university’s commercial-aviation program. Blaisdell, who sent various screenshots to The Chronicle, guesstimated upward of 80 percent of the assignments in that class asked similarly personal questions, and included risk assessments for alcohol-use disorder, mental-health disorders, and skin cancer. None, to his surprise, offered any assurances as to how such sensitive information would be handled.

    “Whatever I put in,” he recalled thinking, “nobody’s going to take care of the information.”

    Millions of learners purchase courseware products like Connect, Pearson MyLab, and Cengage MindTap every year to gain access to integral parts of their college courses, including eBooks, homework assignments, exams, and study tools. But as widespread as courseware has become, safeguards to protect student data privacy are riddled with cracks — a weakness that plagues many educational technologies used in colleges.

    The risk to students when instructors adopt one-stop learning platforms. Read more here.

    The way many students sign up for courseware, to begin with, creates a gray area within the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act — the decades-old federal law known as Ferpa — which governs third-party use of student data. Publishers’ privacy notices, which outline when and how that information is used, are often full of vague and jargon-filled language that make them hard to understand. The hidden world of web tracking, too, is so esoteric that companies with access to student data may, in fact, disclose private details unintentionally.

    All of those cracks, privacy advocates say, leave students vulnerable to having their data used and shared in ways they have no knowledge of, or control over.

    Institutions aren’t “letting the wolf into the henhouse”; instead, “we’re letting the hens out into a forest of wolves,” said Billy Meinke, an open educational resources technologist with the Outreach College at the University of Hawaii-Manoa who’s done research on publisher misuse of student data.

    Such concerns may well have merit: In an analysis of two student courseware accounts, The Chronicle identified instances of student data-sharing that conflicted with, or raised questions about, the practices relayed in publishers’ privacy notices. Most notably, in a review of Pearson MyLab, personally identifiable information, such as a student’s name and email, were sent to Google Analytics, along with notifications of what the student was reading and highlighting in their eBook.

    For some, living under the microscope of entities like Google may seem like an inescapable trade-off for using the internet. A social contract of sorts. (The Chronicle also uses Google products; you can read about that in our privacy policy.) But privacy advocates draw a hard line between someone who is surfing the web and a student who is paying to get an education.

    “We behave differently if we know we’re being watched. We get timid, we get shy, we spend a lot of our cognition on what people are going to think. … That’s not what we want” in higher ed, said Dorothea Salo, a teaching faculty member at University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Information School. This is especially the case in today’s political climate, where exploring topics like gender identity and abortion can put people in danger.

    On principle, too, Salo sees it as colleges’ job to protect students from harm. Publishing companies aren’t impervious to data breaches; for example, McGraw Hill suffered a breach, reported in 2022, that compromised hundreds of thousands of students’ email addresses and grades. (A spokesperson for the company wrote in an email that the vulnerability was quickly remediated, and that “there was no unauthorized access” or exfiltration of the data found.)

    “We are supposed to be looking after the well-being and welfare of our students,” Salo said. “That definitely includes taking care of them in ways that would not occur to them.”

    At the moment many students agree to an arrangement with a publisher, their college is notably absent.

    In the majority of cases where an instructor — even a group of instructors — adopt a courseware product for their classes, there’s no signed contract or memorandum of understanding. And except in scenarios where an instructor has laid out an alternative, students either have to check the box agreeing to the publisher’s privacy notice and terms of service, or not take the class.

    “You’re basically compelling students as part of the curriculum to establish a data relationship with a third-party vendor” in which they have no leverage to negotiate better privacy protections, said Mark Williams, a partner with the law firm Fagen Friedman & Fulfrost LLP who specializes in tech procurement and student data privacy. “I’ve got a lot of problems with that approach.”

    Blue and green-hued illustration depicting “web-crawlers” crawling out of a computer screen while scanning and collecting data.

    Sam Green for The Chronicle

    While not all publisher privacy notices are created equal in their scope and detail, they typically offer only a small window into how these companies — and the often nebulous groups of “affiliates” they work with — collect, handle, and share data as students use their products. (Data-privacy advocates acknowledge that this practice is not unique to publishers.)

    The language, as Williams put it, can be “pretty plain vanilla,” and ambiguous. Take phrasing around personally identifiable information, often referred to as PII.

    “We will … process your PII to meet our legitimate interests, for example to improve the quality of services and products,” McGraw Hill’s end-user privacy notice reads. Andy Bloom, chief privacy officer at McGraw Hill, clarified that processing means “anything that you can really do” with data, including collection, handling, storage, and use.

    That’s “a place where I need to change” the notice “to make it better,” he said.

    In Pearson’s digital-learning-services privacy notice, too, its proffered definition of PII — ”information personally identifiable to a particular User” — is striking in its brevity, given the increasingly deft and unconventional strategies tech companies use to identify individuals online, wrote Pegah Parsi, chief privacy officer at the University of California at San Diego, in an email.

    Most new laws she’s observed, in any sector, count PII as information that could be “reasonably associated with” individuals, too, as well as those in their households, she wrote.

    Advocates also noted language in the notices that read like loopholes, or that appeared to omit critical details. A notable one involved the sale of PII. Pearson’s notice says that the company “does not sell or rent User Personal Information collected or processed through the Services,” while McGraw Hill’s notice states, “We will not sell PII to other organizations.”

    You’re basically compelling students as part of the curriculum to establish a data relationship with a third-party vendor.

    Does “sell” refer only to monetary exchanges? Does that mean that data the publishers have deemed to be de-identified can be sold, without restriction?

    A spokesperson for Pearson wrote that its privacy notice applies “the appropriate definitions for the jurisdictions in which our products are sold.” It did not respond to The Chronicle’s questions about specific statements in the notice. Bloom, at McGraw Hill, said that exchanging data falls under the “sell” umbrella, and emphasized that the company “does not use end-user data for anything other than educational purposes.”

    Referring to Blaisdell’s doubts around whether his sensitive information is being protected, a McGraw Hill spokesperson wrote in a statement that instructors using Connect “can choose a ‘privacy option’ on assignments such as these, which give students the ability to opt out of their responses being stored. They can also choose a ‘responses saved’ option so responses are saved in aggregate for the instructor.” The spokesperson added that the company employs “sophisticated, cryptographic encryption” for data it stores.

    Cengage has perhaps one of the more transparent privacy notices; it details different categories of PII collected depending on the product or service, for example. The Chronicle was unable, however, to identify in the notice any restrictions Cengage has in place for other third parties who have access to students’ PII through its products.

    The Chronicle asked Cengage for clarification, but didn’t receive a response. (The company is facing a recent lawsuit that, while not courseware related, claims the publisher’s online videos send visitors’ personal information and video-watching behavior to Google.)

    One might think state and federal laws would offer clarity. Not necessarily.

    To be sure, there are some consumer-privacy laws that extend into higher ed. Vendors have to comply with the international General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) if serving a student who, while enrolled in a U.S. college, resides in the European Union, where privacy laws are stricter. A handful of U.S. states also have active comprehensive privacy laws, including California, which requires vendors to — among other things — publicly share categories of customer information they’ve sold or shared in the last 12 months.

    Those laws, however, are not universal protections for all U.S. college-goers.

    For the most part, state legislative agendas concerning data privacy often focus solely on elementary and secondary education. According to the nonprofit Data Quality Campaign, just two of the 15 state-level privacy bills it monitored during the 2022 legislative session included provisions that applied to postsecondary students and institutions.

    Federal law has its own limitations. Ferpa was enacted in 1974, predating even the earliest versions of the internet. One of its key purposes is to regulate how third parties use student data as they perform services for an institution that receives federal aid. Traditionally — and especially in cases where a formal contract is involved — these third parties operate under the “school official” exception, allowing them access to students’ PII and education records in the absence of direct consent from each student. This access comes with guardrails, including conditions for when PII can be disclosed to additional parties, and how to handle de-identified data.

    But what if the institution isn’t really involved? In many cases, individual instructors adopt and assign courseware to students without a formal approval process — not because they don’t care about protecting students, Salo said, but because data privacy may just not be on their radars. Regardless, that approach raises questions about control: Once students set up an account with the publisher, is data subsequently provided still data that the university “maintains”? Who decides the ground rules, in the absence of a contract?

    For Parsi, at UC-San Diego, there’s the rub. Ed-tech vendors, like courseware providers, “are in a strange place where multiple laws apply, and not all of them very clearly,” she said. “People just don’t quite know, and I don’t think it’s about turning a blind eye to it. It just … doesn’t come up.”

    That doesn’t mean some vendors are flagrantly skirting federal law, noted Williams, the data-privacy lawyer. Rather, in the absence of clarity, some vendors may think they don’t need to hold themselves to the “school official” exception. Rather, they may consider themselves as having met the “consent” threshold within Ferpa when a student checks the box of a click-through agreement. In that case, the law is significantly less clear on what guardrails apply.

    Students in those scenarios “have the least amount of protections,” he said. “College administrations need to get their head more into the game. … They need to be a more robust presence in arranging contracts with these vendors that protect students, and don’t leave them to the murky provisions of Ferpa. That’s how I look at it.”

    Bloom, at McGraw Hill, said contract or not, the company considers itself a “school official” under Ferpa (he referred The Chronicle to its terms of service). Even so, its read on one provision, in particular, made Williams pause, and highlighted how companies and individuals alike may be interpreting the law differently.

    Asked how long McGraw Hill retains users’ PII before deleting it, Bloom stated that, under Ferpa, the company can never delete data without a student’s or college’s explicit request. When it comes to students’ data, “the institution is the controller,” Bloom said.

    Williams fundamentally disagrees. “If the question is whether a vendor is required to delete data after its use is no longer required … my answer is yes,” he said. “You don’t get to keep the data forever until someone tells you to get rid of it.”

    Pearson and Cengage did not respond to specific questions about how they define themselves under Ferpa. Pearson’s privacy notice does say it complies with “applicable provisions” of Ferpa “as a school official.” Cengage’s notice refers to operating in ways “required” or “permitted” by law.


    For the reasons above, it’s easy for student-data collection and use to feel like a black box.

    To look inside, The Chronicle gained access to two student accounts: one via Pearson MyLab, the other McGraw Hill Connect. The goal was to see what data was being shared with companies other than the publishers, and whether that reality aligned with what the publishers described in their privacy notices.

    Using free Chrome developer tools in consultation with web-tracking experts, a Chronicle reporter analyzed changes to network activity as she navigated around the courseware products and performed actions a student might normally while taking a course. On one of the platforms, doing so appeared to confirm cases of data-sharing beyond what the publisher promised its users.

    Every time the reporter logged in to Pearson MyLab and reached the course home page, web page details that included the user’s first and last name, along with the name of the college where the user was enrolled, were sent to Google Analytics. Whenever she viewed the account details page, Google Analytics got the user’s email address.

    This contradicted Pearson’s privacy notice, which says that web-analytics services like Google Analytics only “collect and report information on an anonymous basis.” Pearson last year reported about 5.5 million units sold across three main courseware products, which includes MyLab.

    The Chronicle also recorded other cases of data disclosure that could theoretically be used to help a company like Google build a unique user profile. For one, among the personally identifiable data sent to Google Analytics was a unique, eight-digit user ID that the reporter observed on a handful of different pages within MyLab. As the reporter interacted with the Pearson eBook, too, Google Analytics gleaned the name of the book and chapter she was reading — even the blocks of text she highlighted, and the exact time that she did so.

    rule line
    rule line

    Presented with these finding, a Pearson spokesperson replied in a statement: “Pearson uses a variety of tools provided by third parties, with privacy protections in place, for the purposes of improving and personalizing the product experience for students. In customizing our users’ experiences within MyLab, we inadvertently captured certain personal information using Google Analytics tools, one of the third-party tools we use to help us build better user experiences. The information was collected for Pearson’s purposes only, and we prohibit Google from using this information for their own purposes. The information collected was first and last name, email address, and institution name. We have deleted this information, and it is no longer captured.”

    A review of a Connect class yielded fewer questions. Visits to the homepage and the “Results” page, which tracks the student’s grades, disclosed to Google Analytics the name of the upper-level course linked to the account, the course semester, and the specific course section the student was in. The reporter also noted, as with Pearson MyLab, the presence of an eight-digit user ID that popped up on some pages, including the eBook.

    McGraw Hill’s end-user privacy notice acknowledges that other third parties “collect information automatically from you” through their own tracking mechanisms. But there’s a stated purpose: “To enable the functions of the digital learning system, as well as customize, maintain, and improve our digital learning systems.” Asked how the information above met those standards, a spokesperson wrote in an email that the company uses Google Analytics as a “user behavior measurement system,” and that being able to differentiate between a course and section “provides us with the information required to make specific product decisions for improving student outcomes,” such as content or assessment updates.

    The spokesperson added that the eight-digit user ID is “a custom generated value provided by McGraw Hill to Google Analytics” and “is not associated within any other data that would connect the information to other records.”

    In both McGraw Hill Connect and Pearson MyLab, The Chronicle found no evidence of students’ grades, answers to assignments and assessments, or any unique written material, including messages sent to instructors, being shared with Google or any other third party. Still, privacy experts are wary. Priyanjana Bengani, a computational-journalism fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism who reviewed the reporter’s analysis, said such findings underscore how murky the world of data privacy and web tracking is, and the need for both colleges and publishers to take it seriously.

    “Even if it’s not intentional,” she said, “doesn’t mean it’s OK.”

    “People are pretty flippant about privacy these days,” Bengani added. “I think it would behoove everyone to just be a little more careful about use of data.”

    Even with current systemic weaknesses, data-privacy measures aren’t a lost cause, advocates say. There are things institutions — and individuals — can do.

    Some institutions require faculty members to follow a process when adopting courseware for a class.

    Sheri Prupis, director of teaching and learning technologies in the Virginia Community Colleges system office, said there’s a systemwide “lock” in the learning-management system that prevents individual faculty members from integrating a new tool, including an unevaluated courseware product, without supervisor approval. In order for the lock to be lifted, and the tool integrated, the vendor must pass an industry-known risk assessment. The questionnaire asks, among other things, whether the vendor performs security assessments of the third-party companies that it shares data with, and for an explanation of why it shares institution data with each of those companies to begin with.

    “As an administrator, it’s not up to me to say what [faculty] use — except when it comes to background safety,” Prupis said.

    Meinke, at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, also pointed to his institution’s creation of an executive policy in 2021 that details data-protection requirements for third-party vendors — even those operating without a university contract. The policy explicitly notes its applicability “to any formal or informal agreements made by faculty that require students to purchase products directly from Third Party Vendors.”

    While he hasn’t observed the institution being particularly aggressive around compliance, Meinke said there are resources online to help faculty members comply. There’s a Google form for instructors to submit tools to Information Technology Services for review, for example, and a spreadsheet that lists all of the third-party tools and platforms that ITS has reviewed previously.

    Salo, at UW-Madison, doesn’t fault already-overburdened faculty members for not being data-privacy mavens. Still, she encourages them to learn — and employ — some best practices where they can: Having an ad blocker installed on their browser to get in the habit of thinking about, and checking for, tracking activity. Always at least skimming companies’ privacy notices, and asking clarifying questions. Finding, and leaning on, colleagues who specialize in data privacy and security.

    “I would love to make myself obsolete as a higher-education data-privacy person,” Salo said. “I hate having to worry. But I do have to worry.”

    Taylor Swaak

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  • After a Professor’s Killing, a University Asked Its Campus About Safety. Here’s What People Said.

    After a Professor’s Killing, a University Asked Its Campus About Safety. Here’s What People Said.

    “Should have canceled football.” “Evacuation was disorganized.” “I was terrified I would not be able to leave campus and go home.” “Do not add more police.”

    Those were some of the responses to a survey conducted by the University of Arizona last fall. They reveal the safety concerns and priorities of students, faculty, and staff soon after the killing of a professor on campus last year.

    The university sent the survey to all students, faculty, and staff on October 17, 2022, less than two weeks after Thomas Meixner, a professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences, was shot and killed while walking to his office. A former graduate student, Murad Dervish, was arrested and charged with his murder.

    The survey asked for community members’ “thoughts, concerns, and suggestions regarding campus safety.”

    “Each comment will be read, and every suggestion will be considered,” President Robert C. Robbins wrote in an email to the campus.

    The Chronicle obtained a document summarizing the survey responses with a public-records request. The university declined to provide the full survey responses, writing that “disclosure of these records is contrary to the best interests of the state.” The summary includes some quotes taken directly from the survey, which drew nearly 1,200 responses. The university enrolls 51,000 students and employs 16,000 faculty and staff members.

    Students, faculty, and staff didn’t know what to do. Lockdown or evacuate? Was it safe on campus or not?

    The 13-page summary illustrates the state of campus safety today, when shootings are a constant concern, and even though 16 years have passed since a mass shooting took 33 lives at Virginia Tech, students, faculty, and staff are begging their institutions to do more to keep them safe. The University of Arizona has indeed made many changes in the months since the killing, some of which mirror ideas recommended in the survey.

    The fearful tenor of many people’s responses, painting a picture of a campus reeling from trauma, also serves as a grim reminder of the high stakes facing colleges to get campus safety right.

    Changes Made

    The document captures frustration that the university hadn’t done more to prevent the shooting, and that officials had failed to communicate effectively with the campus before, during, and after the incident.

    “Students, faculty, and staff didn’t know what to do,” one comment reads. “Lockdown or evacuate? Was it safe on campus or not? Need better communication and clearer instructions.”

    Several comments describe the harrowing experience of waiting for information as the situation unfolded.

    “After the shots were fired, we were in the building for over 40 minutes waiting for police to come and escort us out (still not knowing from the rooms what had happened, who was shot, or where Dervish was),” one comment says. According to the official timeline, shots were fired at about 2:04 p.m. at the John W. Harshbarger Building, and it was evacuated by 2:43 p.m.

    Steve Patterson, the university’s interim chief safety officer, emphasized that the survey had been conducted at a time when emotions were fresh for the community.

    “You can almost feel the anxiety in that,” Patterson said.

    Still, faculty, staff, and students have continued to raise similar complaints. In February, an ad-hoc faculty committee released a draft report that said the university had “consciously and consistently” ignored the community’s safety concerns.

    The suspect, Dervish, had threatened Meixner and other faculty members in the department of hydrology and atmospheric sciences for more than a year. Faculty members felt that the administration had failed to respond adequately to their cries for help, prioritizing the suspect’s privacy over campus safety, until tragedy struck.

    In March, a university-commissioned report by the PAX Group, a consulting firm, found that campus officials had missed many opportunities to intervene before Dervish allegedly killed the professor. The report cited a dysfunctional threat-assessment process and poor communication across departments. Robbins, the president, accepted responsibility for the mistakes. The PAX Group recommended 33 steps to improve campus safety that are now being put into place.

    Phil Andrew, principal of the PAX Group, said the survey’s feedback had served as a helpful jumping-off point for interviewing people across campus. And now, the university says, many of the survey respondents’ suggestions are coming to fruition.

    In addition to comments about the crisis response, participants in the survey suggested a host of changes related to threat assessment, violence prevention and training, and post-incident support.

    Those include mandatory background checks for graduate workers, tighter security in buildings where there are known threats, trauma kits in campus buildings, required active-shooter training for faculty and students, campuswide notification about “threatening individuals,” and increased mental-health support for employees and students.

    The university is in the process of installing locks on classroom doors, creating keyless access to buildings, and standardizing emergency alerts. Officials automatically enrolled all students and employees in the emergency-alert system, and expanded the university’s criminal-background-check process to include graduate assistants.

    Some of the suggestions, Patterson said, are good ideas that simply haven’t been assessed yet.

    “In the next two to three years,” Patterson said, “I want UA to be considered the benchmark when it comes to safety on college campuses.”

    The Catalyst

    Arizona is not alone in making sweeping campus-safety changes. Colleges increasingly must think through how to prevent and respond to gun violence.

    “Colleges and universities have demonstrated a commitment to campus safety, to listening, to concentrating on it, to spending time and resources, to hosting conferences, to improving systems,” said Joseph Storch, senior director of compliance and innovation solutions at Grand River Solutions, a consulting firm, “that is likely unmatched in any other industry.”

    But it often takes a tragedy to bring about widespread change. The vulnerabilities in an institution’s security apparatus may not become clear until they’re exploited.

    In March, Michigan State University, where a mass shooting killed three students a month earlier, expanded the hours that keycard access is required to enter most buildings on campus. The university is also in the process of adding locks to more than 1,300 classroom doors.

    A new Virginia law requires public colleges’ threat-assessment teams to obtain the criminal histories and health records of people determined to pose threats to others, and to notify the campus police, the local police, and local prosecutors of any threats.

    The law was spurred by a November shooting at the University of Virginia that left three students dead. The suspect had apparently slipped through the cracks of the university’s threat-assessment process.

    Threat-assessment teams themselves spread across higher education following the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech. In that case, the student gunman’s mental-health issues had concerned some people on campus, but that information wasn’t shared.

    As Arizona overhauls its protocols, Hilary A. Houlette, a doctoral student in higher education at the university, said she hoped it would keep accessibility in mind for issues like building evacuations and alerts.

    In the next two to three years, I want UA to be considered the benchmark when it comes to safety on college campuses.

    “What are the considerations for folks who use a mobility device?” Houlette said. “We need to be thoughtful about the needs of different communities.”

    One persistent challenge is that people on a campus don’t always agree on the best course of action. Often those disagreements hinge on conflicting definitions of safety.

    In the Arizona survey, some call for more police patrols, but one asks that the police presence not be increased, over concerns about racial bias. (A university spokeswoman told The Chronicle there are no plans to increase police patrols.)

    Other institutions have also been grappling with that tension recently, as they try to secure their campuses against gun violence. George Washington University’s police department, for example, is arming some officers this fall for the first time, despite student concerns about brutality.

    That police departments often fail to respond appropriately to credible threats — as was the case with the University of Arizona Police Department, according to the PAX Group report — makes community members only more fearful that someone could come onto campus with the intention of committing violence, said William Pelfrey Jr., a professor in Virginia Commonwealth University’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs who studies public safety.

    “If we look back over the history of campus, university, and high-school shootings,” Pelfrey said, “there’s a lot of evidence pointing to the shooter as a problematic actor … as a dangerous person, as somebody who represents a valid threat that law enforcement should take seriously.”

    High Stakes

    Like George Washington University, some institutions that haven’t faced tragedies of their own are looking to other campuses’ security failures and making changes.

    The University of Minnesota may restrict access to 70 public buildings in an effort to make the Twin Cities campus safer. In a Board of Regents meeting on Wednesday, a senior administrator said other campuses’ recent experiences with violence had influenced the university’s thinking.

    The Michigan State shooting “sort of tells us to close as many buildings as we can from outsiders,” said Myron Frans, the Minnesota system’s senior vice president for finance and operations, according to Minnesota Public Radio. “And on the other hand, it’s a public university, and we want access — we want people there.”

    Restricting access to an ID card for students, faculty, and staff would cut off the campus in some ways.

    The 70 buildings would be those with “limited need for public use,” MPR reported.

    It’s a tough balance to strike. Reading over the Arizona survey responses, Pelfrey said security-card access to every building would be “almost untenable” because some campus buildings, like libraries, are intended to be “quasi-public.”

    “Restricting access to an ID card for students, faculty, and staff would cut off the campus in some ways,” Pelfrey said, and would contradict part of a public university’s mission.

    Patterson, Arizona’s interim safety chief, said keyless access is being installed in all “major” buildings on campus. But becoming an entirely closed campus is not on the table.

    “The University of Arizona is an open campus and will always be an open campus,” Patterson said. “With that, does that pose some challenges? Sure. But we’re working through those.”

    Leila Hudson, chair of the university’s Faculty Senate, said campus safety is in a better place now than it was before the killing.

    “There’s still more work to be done,” she said. “And honestly, I don’t think that our continuing vulnerabilities are that different from those in any other large, open, inclusive campus. And we’re probably now better than some.”

    Kate Hidalgo Bellows

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  • After Supreme Court Ruling, DEI Work Gets More Challenging and Crucial, Experts Say

    After Supreme Court Ruling, DEI Work Gets More Challenging and Crucial, Experts Say

    In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision last week outlawing race-conscious admissions, college administrators who work in diversity, equity, and inclusion say that their efforts to recruit and retain a diverse student body, and to help students of color feel a sense of belonging, are even more critical now that colleges will not be allowed to consider race as a factor in admissions.

    While some administrators said they may have to tweak some of their tactics, several interviewed by The Chronicle said their work could become even more challenging if the number of students of color on campus shrinks, as experts expect.

    The Supreme Court ruling also comes at a time when conservative politicians in many states have attacked colleges’ work in diversity, equity, and inclusion; The Chronicle is tracking 38 bills that were introduced in 21 state legislatures this year to restrict DEI efforts in higher education. So far, six of the bills have been signed into law, with some restricting specific diversity strategies, such as the use of diversity statements, while others, including one in Texas, ban diversity offices and staff at public institutions altogether.

    According to a Chronicle analysis, at selective institutions that admit less than 25 percent of applicants, underrepresented-minority students make up 29.6 percent of enrollments; at less-selective institutions, such students compose 40.9 percent of the enrollment.

    Since last fall, James A. Felton III, vice president for inclusive excellence at the College of New Jersey, has been meeting with an informal working group, including the public college’s vice president for enrollment management, director of admissions, legal counsel, and provost, to discuss how a Supreme Court ruling against race-conscious admissions might affect the campus.

    The group has discussed the potential impact of such a ruling on its high-demand programs and whether the college — which is a selective institution that did consider race in admissions — might be able to expand its reach into geographic markets it hasn’t traditionally targeted, for example.

    Now that the Supreme Court has ruled against race-conscious admissions, the group will take some time to digest the decision and weigh it against the college’s current programs, initiatives, and policies before creating an action plan in time for the fall’s recruitment season, Felton said.

    For example, some of the college’s scholarship and grant programs assess students holistically, and may consider a student’s race and background. But the college does not expect changes in the programs.

    “I don’t think it, for me, will have a major bearing on the vision and the mission and goals of our institution, as well as higher education over all,” Felton said, noting that New Jersey has not enacted any anti-DEI legislation. “I think the Supreme Court decision just compels institutions to consider new and strategic ways to approach the work.”

    But Felton expects the ruling will shrink the number of Black and Latino students on campus, which means the scope and scale of programs the college can offer, all of which are open to people of all backgrounds, will also probably decline.

    The California Precedent

    John B. King Jr., chancellor of the State University of New York system, said the role of chief diversity officer had become even more important in light of the Supreme Court ruling. Chief diversity officers will need to work with campus leaders to forge a path forward that is consistent with the law but also honors a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, King said.

    “If you look at what happened in California and in Michigan,” King said, “one of the challenges when the tool of race-conscious admissions was removed is that you had a precipitous drop in the presence of students of color, and that makes it that much harder to create a climate of belonging.”

    California’s voters banned race-conscious admissions at public universities in 1996 through a ballot measure, Proposition 209, so Kathleen Wong(Lau), university diversity officer at California State University-East Bay, has been working without race-conscious admissions for years. Despite spending more than a half-billion dollars on race-neutral alternatives to diversify campuses, the University of California system has struggled to recover Black and Hispanic enrollment, particularly at its most selective institutions. “I’ll be frank,” Wong(Lau) said. “Holistic evaluations have been able to repair some of the loss. It has not been able to completely bring us back up to the point where we were allowed to use race as one of the criteria.”

    Wong(Lau) said that senior diversity officers in California had focused on retention and climate, which she believes are not affected by the Supreme Court ruling, but that those efforts can go only so far when the sheer number of students of color in American higher ed remains minuscule. Black students at some public colleges in California can go an entire week without seeing another Black student, Wong(Lau) said, a situation that can make it difficult to create a climate where students really feel as if they belong.

    Michael Benitez is vice president for diversity and inclusion at Metropolitan State University of Denver, which, as an open-access institution, is not directly affected by the end of race-conscious admissions. But he worries that prospective students could interpret the Supreme Court ruling to mean that they are not welcome on certain campuses.

    “It’s not entirely on the school, but it certainly creates a feeling of perhaps not belonging, or I’m not wanted there, or I’m not going to make it there, or there’s little chance I’m going to get in, and I think so much of it is based on a misperception more than anything else,” Benitez said. As a result, he said, colleges will need to work harder now to communicate to students and families that diversity is still important on their campuses, and that students will have the support and resources they need to succeed.

    Caroline Laguerre-Brown, a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, expects to see colleges focus more on recruiting.

    “I think that universities are going to start spending a lot more time engaging in pipeline activity … designed to generate that diverse candidate pool,” said Laguerre-Brown, who also serves as vice provost for diversity, equity, and community engagement at George Washington University. “I think a lot of us will be strategizing about ways to reach communities that we haven’t reached in the past to try to encourage … that more-diverse, more-rich candidate pool.”

    Adrienne Lu

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  • Prison Education Just Got a Whole Lot Bigger. Here Are 3 Key Questions About What’s Next.

    Prison Education Just Got a Whole Lot Bigger. Here Are 3 Key Questions About What’s Next.

    The U.S. government reinstated access to federal financial aid for hundreds of thousands of incarcerated students over the weekend as a decades-old ban was officially lifted, opening the door to a more robust future for prison education.

    Students incarcerated in federal or state penal institutions were ineligible for Pell Grants, the primary federal aid program for low-income students, for nearly 30 years. That ban can be traced to the 1994 crime bill, which caused most prison higher-ed programs to shutter.

    On Saturday, more than 760,000 incarcerated students became eligible for Pell Grants, according to the U.S. Department of Education, and applications began to be accepted on Monday.

    Jason Bell, director of San Francisco State University’s Project Rebound, a program focused on supporting formerly incarcerated students across the California State University system, called the restoration of Pell eligibility “beautiful.”

    Bell, who was a student in Project Rebound after he was released from incarceration, said the prior ban on eligibility had made it much harder to pursue a degree. “It was really difficult to get any higher education behind the wall,” Bell said. “It was a much rougher time for folks living in the incarceration system during that period.”

    In recent years, a pilot program called Second Chance Pell has tested the reinstatement of eligibility for the grants. Programs like the Transforming Outcomes Project, a four-year-degree program administered through California’s Folsom State Prison and Mule Creek State Prison, worked with incarcerated people who received the grants.

    David Zuckerman, interim director of the project, which is operated by California State University at Sacramento, said getting the initial group of incarcerated students into the financial-aid system required adaptation. (More than 40,000 students now benefit from Second Chance Pell, according to federal officials.)

    “Pell was not designed for incarcerated students,” he said. “When it works, it’s phenomenal because it allows an indigent, incarcerated person to get a university education, and that’s fantastic.”

    As Pell eligibility opens up more opportunities for incarcerated students, The Chronicle spoke with several experts about three key questions facing colleges as they try to move into prison education.

    How will the students get advising and other academic support?

    Attending college comes with a fair share of bureaucratic snafus. While students on campus can pop into an adviser’s office, incarcerated students don’t have that option. They have little to no internet access and little money.

    Zuckerman said employing counselors just for incarcerated students, available either online or inside a prison, can make the difference.

    “You need someone in financial aid who’s dedicated to these programs and educated in the ins and outs of prison education,” Zuckerman said. “And not just in terms of policy, but in terms of day-to-day practice that you’re going to run up against.”

    Incarcerated students often don’t have access to documents or to means of payment that staff members might need to remove a financial-aid hold, for example. So having people on staff who can help navigate course schedules, order transcripts, or inquire about financial-aid holds can be key.

    Margaret diZerega, managing director of initiatives at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on decriminalization, agreed.

    “It’s important,” she said, “that colleges think about the prison program like they would any other satellite campus.”

    How will students complete their work with limited internet access?

    At Sacramento State, students in Zuckerman’s program, which is known as Topss, can take upper-division communication-studies classes. They’re identical to the ones taught on campus, he said, but the incarcerated students have only a narrow window of time for academics.

    The students attend class for three hours after their daily work shifts, but while in their cells, they have no Wi-Fi. They are given laptops and can use Canvas, a course-management program for students to submit assignments online. But because of their curfew, they have to “cram everything into a few hours.”

    In spite of those limitations, the instructor in the class last fall saw his incarcerated students score an average of 20 points higher than the on-campus students, Zuckerman said.

    “They’re blowing everybody aside,” he said. “They’re zooming past everybody, and it’s not because they’re in prison and all they do is sit around and study. That’s not the case. Most of the Topss students work 40 hours a week inside the prisons.”

    How will more such partnerships start?

    Effectively educating incarcerated students requires more staff time, and colleges might look for the most efficient way to provide it.

    One important idea, Zuckerman said, was designating a staff member to help those students in the registrar’s office.

    DiZerega added that college staff members should also tour a prison in advance to talk to prospective students to lay a foundation for a program. That includes conversations about how a course is to be taught, online or in person; the type of technology offered to students; and their access to library resources and academic journals.

    “Having those kinds of upfront conversations can be helpful to set those expectations and figure out where the areas are that [we] need to work through as a corrections department and college as they enter a partnership,” diZerega said.

    And while access to Pell Grants will provide more opportunities to create prison-education programs, Bell said colleges and universities need to have good intentions.

    “Some of these folks are chasing dollars, and they have no intention of welcoming folks to their campuses,” Bell said. “That bothers me.” If that’s a college’s intention, he continued, “I think we’re failing in that sense.”

    Colleges should minimize bureaucratic obstacles, Bell said, and hiring formerly incarcerated people into programs can help do that.

    “When we have these discussions, having formerly incarcerated folks with that experience and hiring between the wall as well as on these college campuses — invite them to those discussions,” he said. “That is the key of learning from the pitfalls, as well as the successes, and that’s how we make it happen correctly.”

    Emma Hall

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  • The Supreme Court’s Admissions Ruling Mainly Affects Selective Colleges. They’re a Tiny Slice of Higher Ed.

    The Supreme Court’s Admissions Ruling Mainly Affects Selective Colleges. They’re a Tiny Slice of Higher Ed.

    The lawsuits that ultimately led to the Supreme Court’s long-awaited decision on race-conscious admissions centered on two colleges where most prospective students who apply won’t get in.

    At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, just two in 10 applicants were admitted for the fall of 2021, according to the most recent federal data. The odds of enrolling at Harvard were even slimmer: The Ivy League institution had an admission rate of 4 percent.

    Institutions like them — selective enough to need to use race as a factor in admissions to diversify their student bodies — have garnered outsize attention in the long-running debate over affirmative action’s role in higher education. That’s in part because the road to high-level positions in government and industry often includes a stop at a highly selective institution. One example: Five out of six living U.S. presidents earned undergraduate degrees at colleges that admit less than 15 percent of applicants.

    Still, in the landscape of colleges and universities, highly selective institutions are far outnumbered by those with much higher acceptance rates. Most students never participate in an admissions process that considers race in the manner of UNC and Harvard. Although it’s hard to say definitively which colleges use race in some way when making admissions decisions, selectivity is a useful lens through which to view the practice’s real reach, as the following data visualization shows.

    Methodology

    This analysis considered more than 3,000 degree-granting institutions in the United States that participate in the Title IV student-aid program. The percentages by race include the total minus students who identified as nonresidents or of unknown race. “Underrepresented minority” is the sum of students who are American Indian/Alaska Native, Black, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and two or more races. Only institutions that received more than 50 applications for first-time, first-year students for 2021-22 and had 150 or more undergraduates in the fall of 2021 are included. The percentages may not add up to 100 percent because of rounding.

    Audrey Williams June and Jacquelyn Elias

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  • This Professor Criticized Diversity Statements. Did It Cost Him a Job Offer?

    This Professor Criticized Diversity Statements. Did It Cost Him a Job Offer?

    A psychologist spoke out this week about what critics see as a job offer gone awry over an ideological spat about diversity statements.

    Yoel Inbar, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, was up for a job at the University of California at Los Angeles. But the psychology department there decided not to proceed after more than 60 graduate students in the department signed an open letter urging the university not to hire him.

    At issue, the students wrote, were Inbar’s comments on his podcast expressing skepticism about the use of diversity statements in hiring, as well as about other efforts intended to make the academy more inclusive.

    In the letter, which circulated on Twitter, the students wrote that Inbar’s hiring “would threaten ongoing efforts to protect and uplift individuals of marginalized backgrounds” and that Inbar “prioritizes advocating for those he classifies as political minorities in academia” over fostering inclusivity. In a meeting with graduate students, the letter continues, Inbar’s answers to questions about diversity, equity, and inclusion were in some cases “outright disconcerting.” (Inbar shared his account on a podcast episode released on Tuesday, and spoke with The Chronicle on Wednesday.)

    Days after the letter came out, the psychology-department chair emailed Inbar to say she wouldn’t be extending him a job offer, following the recommendation of an ad hoc committee.

    “There is no doubt that unusual events occurred surrounding your visit,” Annette L. Stanton wrote to Inbar, who shared a copy of the email with The Chronicle. “After much consideration and consultation, I believe that following the department’s standard process spanning more than two decades is the right way to go. That said, I’m disappointed with the outcome.” (Stanton told The Chronicle on Wednesday that she was in a meeting and not immediately available for comment; the three members of the ad hoc committee did not return requests for comment. Efforts to reach several of the graduate-student signatories on Wednesday were also unsuccessful.)

    There is no doubt that unusual events occurred surrounding your visit.

    While the students’ concerns extended to a broader critique of Inbar’s sensitivity to DEI issues, his comments about diversity statements were what initially gave them pause, and what has dominated the debate online.

    The situation illustrates how diversity statements have become a live wire nationally, with several university systems and states banning their use in hiring over concerns about their legality or potential use as a “political litmus test.” One professor sued the University of California system last month, saying a requirement that he submit a diversity statement for consideration for a job in the Santa Cruz campus’s psychology department violated his First Amendment rights. (The professor, John D. Haltigan, coincidentally, was formerly employed at the University of Toronto, but left because his grant funding had run out.)

    The Inbar case is also rich with drama: A scholar of moral judgments and the psychology of political affiliation is questioned — publicly, by graduate students — about his own commitment to the DEI values they hold dear. Much of the story has played out in podcast episodes Inbar recorded nearly five years apart: one in which he posed questions about the utility of diversity statements in hiring, and another, released this week, in which he shares his view of what happened at UCLA.

    “It’s funny because from a research perspective, I understand a lot of what’s going on here,” Inbar, who co-authored a 2012 paper in which he asked psychology professors whether they would discriminate in hiring based on a candidate’s political views, told The Chronicle. “I understand how people feel that they have to protect a certain set of moral values and that they don’t want people around who threaten them. I would just say, often those moral instincts can mislead us into rushing to judgment.”

    What Happened?

    Behind the scenes, Inbar’s potential hiring had rocked the department.

    A group of graduate students had emailed the department’s entire faculty to argue against it, Stanton wrote in a February email to the department explaining the situation. (Stanton forwarded that note to Inbar, who shared it with The Chronicle.) Airing such grievances publicly, Stanton wrote, marked “a significant and problematic departure from our typical searches.”

    Then there was the matter of the podcast Inbar co-hosts, Two Psychologists Four Beers, which was repeatedly cited by the graduate students in their open letter opposing Inbar’s hiring. Because the podcast episodes weren’t part of Inbar’s formal application materials, Stanton and other administrators asked UCLA’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion whether the search committee was allowed to mention them in interviewing Inbar, according to emails reviewed by The Chronicle. No, the UCLA office said: The search committee’s interview questions had to be limited to a candidate’s submitted materials, though other faculty members could bring up other topics.

    So members of the department’s diversity-issues committee instead asked Inbar about the podcast material, which Stanton wrote in the email was “consistent with their standard process this year of being free to ask follow-up questions of candidates, as long as the restrictions all faculty follow during interviews aren’t violated.”

    The goals are good, but I don’t know if the diversity statements necessarily accomplish the goals.

    The story began, Inbar said Tuesday on the podcast Very Bad Wizards, when his partner received a job offer from the UCLA psychology department. When she inquired about the possibility of bringing Inbar on as a partner hire, the department was receptive, Inbar said. During a campus visit in late January, faculty members seemed enthusiastic about him as a candidate.

    But he told the hosts of Very Bad Wizards that his meeting with the diversity-issues committee was one of several “strange things” that happened while he was on campus. At the end of the meeting, in which the committee asked standard questions about his approach to diversity in his teaching and research, Inbar said he had been asked about a December 2018 episode of Two Psychologists Four Beers.

    In that episode, Inbar said that diversity statements “sort of seem like administrator virtue-signaling,” questioned how they would be used in a hiring process, and suggested “it’s not clear that they lead to better outcomes for underrepresented groups.”

    The committee asked: Was he prepared to defend those comments now?

    “To be honest, I wasn’t, because this episode is like, four and a half years old,” Inbar said on Very Bad Wizards. But he explained his current stance: “The very short version is, I think that the goals are good, but I don’t know if the diversity statements necessarily accomplish the goals.” (One host of Very Bad Wizards, David A. Pizarro, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, said he’d let Inbar’s comments on the podcast speak for themselves.)

    The UCLA faculty members “seemed satisfied” with Inbar’s answer, he said. “Then one of them said, kind of almost apologetically, ‘Well, you know, we have some very passionate graduate students here, which is great, but what would you say to them if they were upset about this?’” Inbar said he didn’t know what he’d say beyond explaining his views, as he had to the committee.

    Then Inbar met with some of the graduate students. Both parties recalled the meeting as unusual. The students wrote in their letter that Inbar had told them that his “work does not really deal with identity,” which they found problematic. Inbar studies morality and political ideology, the students wrote, so “it was deeply troubling to hear that he does not believe identity (i.e., individual background as it pertains to race, gender, sexuality, class, or ability) has bearing on these research questions.”

    But Inbar said the graduate students had never asked him directly about the podcast episodes mentioned in their letter. “To be honest, it wasn’t entirely clear what they were getting at” in the meeting, Inbar told The Chronicle; if they had asked more-direct questions about, for instance, his approach to mentoring students from diverse backgrounds, he said he could have answered them.

    The department’s graduate students didn’t all share the same view of the matter. A handful of students drafted a response to the first letter, defending the nuance of Inbar’s comments and calling for further conversation among themselves. Inbar shared a copy of that letter with The Chronicle.

    ‘Just Stay Out of It’

    Stanton, the department chair, told faculty members that she had tried to play the situation by the book, according to the emails shared with The Chronicle. As is standard procedure for potential partner hires, Stanton convened an ad hoc committee to make a recommendation on whether to hire Inbar. The members of that committee — Benjamin R. Karney, Carolyn Parkinson, and Hal E. Hershfield — opted not to recommend Inbar’s hiring.

    Whether to give a candidate a green light rests entirely with that committee, Stanton wrote in an email. But because of the unusual circumstances in Inbar’s case, she said she’d considered a few alternatives — a “do-over” interview or a faculty vote on Inbar’s case, for example — before ultimately deciding to let the committee’s decision stand.

    She did, however, ask the committee to write an internal report explaining its decision, which she described as an unusual step.

    Inbar told The Chronicle that the report had not been shared with him. Meanwhile, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has requested from UCLA documents related to Inbar’s case, including the committee’s report; the university denied that request in March and an appeal this month. Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy at FIRE, told The Chronicle that her organization is preparing a second appeal, arguing that the records are a matter of public interest.

    They can hold faculty to viewpoint-neutral type of criteria, … but they can’t say, ‘If you don’t pledge allegiance to our particular view on diversity, you can’t have a job.’

    “What we suspect may be happening here is that because Professor Inbar allegedly did not parrot the correct views on DEI and some students objected to that, he may have been discriminated against because of his views in the hiring process,” Morey said. That’s not allowed at a public university, she said: “They can hold faculty to viewpoint-neutral type of criteria, objective standards, but they can’t say, ‘If you don’t pledge allegiance to our particular view on diversity, you can’t have a job.’”

    On Tuesday, during the Very Bad Wizards episode, Inbar said the graduate students who opposed his hiring had missed the nuance in his remarks about diversity statements.

    “You can pull out selective quotes that make me sound like I’m a rabid anti-diversity-statement person, which I’m really not,” Inbar said. His main concern is with their effectiveness, he said: “What you want is somebody who’s going to be able to teach and to mentor people from diverse backgrounds. But what you get is somebody writing about what they believe, and perhaps what they’ve done to demonstrate that.”

    In their open letter, the students also contested Inbar’s comments in a more-recent Two Psychologists episode about how the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the field’s professional organization, uses DEI criteria to evaluate submissions. He also took a public stance against Georgia’s anti-abortion law. Inbar said on Two Psychologists that, while he considers himself “pro-choice,” he believed it wasn’t the organization’s place to take sides: “When we align ourselves with a political side or faction, it’s bad for our science.”

    To the students, Inbar’s remarks about the professional society were more evidence he wouldn’t be a good fit. “Time and time again in these episodes, he fails to reflect on how these issues structurally affect marginalized individuals,” they wrote.

    Meanwhile, Inbar is not asking for sympathy. His partner received a one-year extension of her job offer from UCLA, which he told The Chronicle was “spectacular,” and the couple may consider moving to Los Angeles if Inbar can find a job in the area. “I don’t want people to cry over this for me,” he said on Very Bad Wizards.

    In the past, he added, he’s urged faculty members to speak up about potentially controversial topics they believe in. His recent experience has changed his mind.

    “Is there a cost to opening your mouth about this stuff? Absolutely, there is,” he said. “Would I advise a junior person to take any sort of heterodox position on this publicly? Absolutely not, because you only need to piss off a few people. It just takes one or two to sink you. Just stay out of it.”

    Megan Zahneis

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  • ‘Sadly, It’s a Club’: What Michigan State Leaders Learned Responding to a Mass Shooting

    ‘Sadly, It’s a Club’: What Michigan State Leaders Learned Responding to a Mass Shooting

    After a shooting spree at Michigan State University last week left three students dead and five critically injured, campus leaders had some major responsibilities: help their community process grief and regain a sense of safety on campus, facilitate a return to the classroom, communicate new developments to the public, and examine what could be done to improve campus security. It’s a set of duties that has become familiar to the leaders of other institutions that have experienced tragedies on and around their campuses, especially in an era when mass shootings take place almost every day.

    On Sunday, Michigan State’s interim president, interim provost, and chief of police answered questions from The Chronicle about how they see their roles in the midst of this tragedy and the kinds of support they have received from other college leaders. They also discussed the return to the classroom and measures they’re taking to improve campus safety. The interim president, Teresa K. Woodruff, and interim provost, Thomas D. Jeitschko, ascended to those posts last fall after the president at the time, Samuel L. Stanley, resigned amid a dispute with the Board of Trustees. Woodruff was the provost at the time, and Jeitschko was the senior associate provost.

    The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    As you know, a portion of our audience is other leaders. If the unthinkable happens, as it did in this case, what should they expect? How can they learn from Michigan State’s experience?

    Teresa K. Woodruff, interim president: Well, I wish no leader or no person ever has to stand in front of that bank of microphones, ever. It’s a circumstance that one never wishes to be there. And I hope no one is. As I think about the last however many hours we’ve been going through this, I believe we’ve tried to link arms, to make sure that everybody is staying closer. Sometimes the instinct is to pull apart. But I think leadership asks us to link arms to come together.

    For many students, one of the worst parts about this tragedy is that Michigan State’s campus used to be a sanctuary, a place that they felt safe. And some students have told me that it no longer feels that way. How do you restore students, staff, and faculty’s sense of comfort on campus?

    Woodruff: Today we had … about 20,000 people across campus. And as you went around this beautiful campus, people were coming back into the community, and one of our graduate students organized a grass-roots effort to bring people into the heart of the campus. Basically, it was a moment to say, “We’re taking our campus back. This is our campus. This is who we are.”

    It is natural that we all have a sense of unsettledness. The unsettledness, I think, can be warded off by being together. So it is that linking arms again, that bringing together, that coming together. I don’t think it happens all at once, but I think it happens by steps and by measures of being together. And in that way, I think we’ll take back our campus.

    I want to talk a little bit about the “No Media” signs. Students and others have complained about journalists’ invading their privacy. How are you dealing as a campus with the intense media scrutiny?

    Woodruff: I’ve talked directly to some of the media, and in fact with our students. Our student-body president asked me about the invasiveness of the media. Emily Guerrant [vice president and university spokesperson] immediately launched into action, and we have buttons for students to be able to wear. I directly talked with some of our media folks who were being very invasive, and students yesterday talked with me about how their privacy and their moments of grief were really being interrupted.

    And we’ve thanked the media. I thanked the media directly for their work, particularly as they were the ones that released the image of the individual involved in this case [the gunman]. And very quickly, we were able to identify and complete, and that ending took place. And there is a role for our media. But I think what we need is care and compassion from everyone to know that these are students who are regaining their lives. These are faculty who are beginning to think about how to teach in this context. And these are employees. I think the emotions of grief that sometimes are repeated over and over on the media — that’s not the message. We’re trying to help all of our community by having that symbol that says, “Maybe I respect the media, but media is not for me today.”

    How have the leaders of other colleges provided their support? Do you have any examples?

    The academy comes together to grieve, but also to support.

    Woodruff: Sadly, it’s a club. The mayor of Highland Park [the Illinois town where a mass shooting last year killed seven people and injured dozens] was the first to reach out to me, Nancy Rotering … When she was going through the issues in Highland Park, she is part of a group of mayors who have developed a number of resources that have also been adopted in higher ed. Nancy is one that I really appreciated in those early moments when she was giving me advice … she was seeing into my future, and that was helpful.

    The presidents of the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech have been very helpful, as have been many of the folks on their staffs, with senior executives across Michigan State. They’ve been very generous reaching out, but I would say we’ve had — I think it’s not hyperbole to say — hundreds, if not a thousand, leaders from literally across the AAU [Association of American Universities], of course the Big Ten, but across all of higher education reach out, not just here but around the globe. The academy comes together to grieve, but also to support.

    What advice did the mayor of Highland Park give you?

    Woodruff: The first piece of advice she said is that anger comes later. When you first step to the podium, compassion, followed by anger. Anger will come, but make it about compassion first.

    Did you take into account what other universities that have experienced violence on campus did in terms of resuming classes? What informed this decision?

    Thomas D. Jeitschko, interim provost: We talked to some mental-health experts in these areas. We actually invited someone who was an expert in how to teach the day after any type of traumatic event, who provided tremendous resources. We’ve collected a lot of other resources as well, to support faculty and others to try to figure out how to manage this. I got outreach from the University of Virginia provost, and he connected me with other people, so we were able to make connections across the academic side with counterparts, and they provided a write-up of things we should consider. I spoke extensively also to the provost at the University of Idaho.

    Both of them actually said that many students — and that’s also the experience we have here — really were feeling strongly that they want to come back, they want to be in this community. There are others that have strong trepidation around that and are worried about it — partly, I think, because they think this would just be a resumption of normal, and pushing aside everything, and trying to force the issue of moving forward, which I think is a perception, and I hope that that will have been cleared up.

    That’s what I heard when I wrote a story about this issue. And some of the learning researchers I talked to said that there’s a concern that being alone could foster some worse mental-health impacts. Is that part of the thinking?

    Jeitschko: I think that’s generally true, and I think it’s in our almost immediate post-Covid aftermath especially true. One of our associate provosts, the associate provost for undergraduate education, has shared that there have been some parents that had reached out who said, “Earlier this week, our students were in lockdown for four hours, and that was very traumatic. You cannot put them in lockdown for the next weeks. They have to come back.”

    That’s an interesting comparison. What do you tell students or faculty members who say they’re traumatized to come back to the classroom?

    Jeitschko: I’ve had conversations and email exchanges with individual students, and have been able to allay their fears, and they are more comfortable now. I have a faculty member who has just reached out that I will respond to them. One thing that we said is we understand that everybody is in their own individual pace around this, and if there are extenuating circumstances, we will work with them individually, what their needs are. In a community this large with a shooting this dramatic and brutal, there will be some for whom coming back might not be an option for a while, and we will work around that. And there might be some faculty members who are also affected in this manner.

    There’s been some conversation about students not feeling safe on such an open or public campus. Are there moves to close it off at all? What is the thinking around those issues?

    Marlon C. Lynch, chief of police: We are a large public university — 400-plus buildings, 5,200 acres. And we don’t have gates and walls and fences. That’s just not who we are. We’re a destination for not just our Spartan community, but the neighboring communities and the state of Michigan. And so we’re welcoming in that sense. I don’t foresee us closing off campus. What I think we will do — what I know that we will do because we’ve already begun the process of establishing communication with our community — [is] to step through what we want to do together. How do we want our culture and who we are to be impacted, knowing that we have to do something differently?

    We initiated in the fall centralizing our security systems that will allow police and public safety to monitor all the security systems on campus from one location and operations center. That will then allow us to have real-time monitoring of those systems as well. That’s one component to that. The other piece to it is that we’re actually completing an RFP [request for proposals] process for new platforms for access-control management as well as video-management systems. That will be done in March. That will give us some additional capabilities with building-access options and how you manage it. We have several different types of buildings on campus: residence halls, a union, classroom buildings, research facilities. So there’s not one approach for every single building.

    Kate Hidalgo Bellows

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  • DeSantis Asked Florida Universities to Detail Their Diversity Spending. Here’s How They Answered.

    DeSantis Asked Florida Universities to Detail Their Diversity Spending. Here’s How They Answered.

    In late December, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office asked Florida’s public colleges and universities to detail their spending on diversity, equity, inclusion, and critical race theory, sending institutions into a hurried accounting of programs and classes that might qualify. Now the numbers have been submitted. Among the four-year universities, all reported amounts for those activities that came to 1 percent or less of their budgets.

    Through a public-records request, The Chronicle obtained data that the State University System of Florida sent to the Republican governor’s office. They include activities at the 12 public, four-year universities in Florida. They list individual programs, offices, and courses, and the staffing and funding for each. Examples ranged from entire diversity offices to small student programs, like a “Friendsgiving” for international students. Efforts aimed at increasing the diversity of the faculty or the student body were common.

    DeSantis’s request represented the latest escalation in the governor’s campaign against what he sees as liberal bias in higher education. He recently sent a request for information to the universities on students seeking gender-affirming health care. Earlier this month, he announced a new slate of trustees at New College of Florida as part of an effort to transform the system’s small liberal-arts college into the “Hillsdale of the South.”

    The governor’s diversity-funding request alarmed some Florida faculty members who view DeSantis as a hostile actor bent on restricting instruction related to race on college campuses through his championing of HB 7, known as the “Stop WOKE” Act. Amanda J. Phalin, chair of the University of Florida’s Faculty Senate, said in a written statement that, “in the absence of transparency,” the diversity-spending directive sends a “chilling message that anyone who engages with topics that elected officials deem controversial is not welcome in the state of Florida.”

    The total amounts the universities said they had spent on diversity-related programming ranged from as little as $8,400 (as reported by Florida Polytechnic University, which enrolls about 1,500 undergraduates) to $8.7 million (reported by the University of South Florida, with a student body of around 50,000). For 10 of the 12 universities, the amounts represented a fraction of 1 percent of their estimated expenditures in 2022-23. Florida A&M, the system’s only historically Black university, reported spending about 1 percent of its budget on relevant activities, as did the University of North Florida. On average, the universities reported that three-quarters of their diversity spending came from state funds.

    Exactly what programs and activities universities reported ran the gamut. Florida A&M included its Centers for Disability Access and Resources and for Environmental Equity and Justice, and did not mention any courses. The University of West Florida was more specific in its response, even reporting the $4,800 it spent on phones and office supplies to support its diversity programs and the $100 it spent on World Religion Day.

    Of the two days of orientation programming, “40 minutes could be considered DEI,” Florida State University reported.

    The University of Florida, the state’s flagship, reported its chief diversity officer; programs aimed at improving the diversity of students and employees in different departments; and a few programs described as fostering more-inclusive environments. It reported 10 courses out of a catalog of thousands.

    The universities also reported an array of training, such as the University of Florida’s “Gators Together Diversity and Inclusion Training Program,” an elective program for employees, and the University of South Florida business college’s online certificate in “DE&I in the Workplace.” Some institutions reported student programs. Florida State University reported the “Power of We,” a student-run initiative that “fosters civil discourse.”

    The chancellor of the State University System of Florida, in communicating DeSantis’s wishes to the university presidents, had also asked for lists of relevant required courses. If they reported any, the universities listed, at most, a few dozen courses. Often they sent in exact course ID numbers. The courses span many subject areas, including theater appreciation and religious intolerance in America.

    The Chronicle also obtained many responses from Florida’s 28 state and community colleges. In one of them, a president expressed support for DeSantis, presaging an extraordinary joint letter a week later in which he and his colleagues pledged not to support any program that “compels belief in critical race theory.”

    “Frankly, I applaud the Governor’s Office for investigating how higher education institutions spend their state appropriations,” G. Devin Stephenson, president of Northwest Florida State College, wrote in an email to Kathy Hebda, chancellor of the Florida College System, on January 11. “I believe taxpayer dollars allocated to NWFSC must be spent to maximize quality of life for all students, their families, and people of Northwest Florida.” Stephenson then angled for more money for his college, writing that its funding was “out of balance with comparable peer institutions.”

    Francie Diep and Emma Pettit

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  • The Academic-Freedom Controversy That Won’t Die

    The Academic-Freedom Controversy That Won’t Die

    More than three months after an art-history lecturer at Hamline University showed a painting of the Prophet Muhammad in an online class, spurring controversy on her campus and across the country, the furor has only grown. Academic-freedom groups, scholars, pundits, and many others have opined publicly on the saga.

    Another group joined the conversation on Friday. Hamline administrators, who have previously shared information mostly through written statements, granted an interview to The Chronicle. In it they defended their handling of the controversy, in which Erika López Prater, the lecturer, saw her contract go unrenewed after the course ended.

    Many academics and academic-freedom groups have criticized Hamline leaders for their treatment of López Prater, and for statements the institution’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, has made about the need to balance academic freedom with concerns for student safety and well-being. PEN America called it “one of the most egregious violations of academic freedom in recent memory.” Meanwhile, the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has applauded the university.

    Hamline administrators told The Chronicle on Friday that what happened in the art-history class, and their view of teaching depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, had been inaccurately reported.

    But their comments raised more questions about the series of events that continues to roil the small campus.

    In early October, López Prater showed two artistic depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, dating to the 14th and 16th centuries, in an online session of a class on global art history. Knowing that many Muslim people object to any visual representation of the Prophet, López Prater has said she included a warning about the images both on the course syllabus and orally in the class itself before showing the pictures.

    “In my syllabus, I did note that I would be showing both representational and nonrepresentational images of holy figures such as the Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ and the Buddha,” she said in a recent online panel. “And during my class, I did give my students a heads-up that I was about to show an image of the Prophet Muhammad.”

    But Marcela Kostihova, dean of Hamline’s College of Liberal Arts, said on Friday that was not true. “The images were already on screen from the moment that the lecture began,” she said in a video call with The Chronicle.

    “Hamline University absolutely supports the teaching of this material,” she said, as Miller, the president, nodded along. There were “many [other] ways” in which López Prater could have taught the painting that Hamline leadership would have found acceptable, Kostihova said.

    The Chronicle provided this version of events to David Redden, a lawyer for López Prater, but neither responded in time for publication. Hamline administrators have a student’s recording of the class and cited it to support their claims about López Prater, but declined to provide a copy of it to The Chronicle.

    The Oracle, Hamline’s student newspaper, obtained a video of the same class last year, but appeared to differ in reporting what it showed: “The professor gives a content warning and describes the nature of the depictions to be shown and reflects on their controversial nature for more than two minutes before advancing to the slides in question.”

    Aram Wedatalla, president of the campus Muslim Students Association and a student in López Prater’s class, objected to the instructor’s use of the painting and complained to her after the class, and later to Hamline leaders. López Prater apologized two days later for causing the student “emotional agitation,” according to The Oracle.

    In a recent news conference hosted by the Minnesota chapter of CAIR, Wedatalla said she was still pained by the incident. “It hurts and it breaks my heart to stand here to tell people and to beg people to understand me, to feel what I feel,” she said, through tears.

    The sharpest criticism of Hamline has stemmed from its decision not to renew López Prater’s teaching contract, apparently as a result of the incident.

    For López Prater, the connection between the class session and the nonrenewal seemed concrete. In the online panel, she recalled discussing with her department chair in late September a course on contemporary art that she could teach in the spring. “They were very excited to have me back,” she said. Then came the October 6 class, and a change in her chair’s attitude. “By mid- to late October,” she recalled, “my chair told me that my services were no longer needed for the spring. And she expressed this with rather vague wording.”

    A Hamline administrator wasn’t quite as vague. On November 7, David Everett, vice president for inclusive excellence, wrote an email to the campus in which he, without referring to López Prater by name, called the incident Islamophobic. The Oracle quoted Everett as saying, “In lieu of this incident, it was decided it was best that this faculty member was no longer part of the Hamline community.”

    Miller and other administrators have said plainly that they disagree with how López Prater handled the class. Miller was one signer on an email that said “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.”

    But Hamline’s leaders said on Friday that López Prater had not lost her job as a result of the decision to show a depiction of the Prophet. When asked whether it was true that the incident was unrelated to the nonrenewal, as the administrators appeared to be claiming on Friday, Miller replied, “That’s correct.” She then referenced “other things that were a factor in making the decision not to offer a letter of reappointment for the spring.”

    Kostihova, the dean, alleged that after López Prater failed to provide a true warning about the image — a claim that is in dispute — the instructor also didn’t acknowledge that fact, and was insensitive in how she responded to Wedatalla.

    After the interview concluded, The Chronicle reached out to Hamline to further specify what factors led to the instructor’s nonrenewal, but that request was not answered by Friday evening.

    The Hamline administration may think there are acceptable ways to teach ancient paintings of the Prophet Muhammad, which are historically significant, but it’s unclear whether some members of the Muslim community in the Twin Cities would agree.

    During the CAIR chapter’s news conference, Jaylani Hussein, its executive director, called the issue of whether López Prater had provided adequate warning “a side conversation.” Given the history of hate groups’ using images of the Prophet Muhammad to insult Muslims, all displays of the Prophet are “intended to communicate hate,” reads a statement on the Minnesota chapter’s website.

    The national organization has a different view. On Friday it released a statement in which it said, in part: “Although we strongly discourage showing visual depictions of the Prophet, we recognize that professors who analyze ancient paintings for an academic purpose are not the same as Islamophobes who show such images to cause offense. Based on what we know up to this point, we see no evidence that former Hamline University Adjunct Professor Erika López Prater acted with Islamophobic intent or engaged in conduct that meets our definition of Islamophobia.”

    As Hamline continues to make headlines, current and former students and employees worry about the potential lasting effects on how others view the college. “Watching how this incident has unfolded,” said Linda N. Hanson, who preceded Miller as president, “began to give me grave concern about the reputation of the school.”

    Francie Diep

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  • After Three and a Half Weeks, New School Strike Ends With Tentative Agreement

    After Three and a Half Weeks, New School Strike Ends With Tentative Agreement

    Nearly 1,800 part-time faculty members who have been on strike since November 16 will return to work at the New School following the announcement on Saturday night that negotiators had reached a tentative collective-bargaining agreement.

    “This is a strong, fair five-year contract that increases compensation significantly, protects health-care benefits, and ensures that part-time faculty are paid for additional work done outside the classroom to support our students,” a joint statement by the New York City university and the union says.

    The leadership of the union, ACT-UAW Local 7902, will unanimously recommend that its members vote to ratify the deal, with a vote expected to take place in the next few days. “In the meantime, the union has ended the strike, and all university classes and events will resume, as scheduled, effective immediately,” according to the statement.

    On Thursday the university issued a statement saying it had taken “the extraordinary step to agree to all of the union’s compensation demands, with the addition of an administrative-services fee to compensate part-time faculty for their work outside the classroom.” The New School had announced on Wednesday it would stop paying and making retirement and health-care contributions to the striking workers.

    The university has not yet said publicly how it will pay for the raises. The New School’s president, Dwight A. McBride, said in an interview on Sunday that the agreement would require financial sacrifices. “Today, we celebrate and are thrilled that the strike is over and that we are back to work, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say the contract is a significant financial stress for the university” over the next five years, he said. Although projections are still being calculated, he estimated the New School could face “somewhere in the order of around $20 million a year that we’ll have to make up.” He said it would be “a challenge and a stretch, but one that is important in this moment in terms of recognizing the work of our part-time faculty.”

    Asked whether tuition increases were likely, McBride said that “all options” for cutting costs and increasing revenue would have to be on the table.

    In a statement late Saturday, the union said the contract included “substantial raises,” with the largest going to faculty members currently being paid at the lowest rates.

    Lee-Sean Huang, who teaches part time at the New School’s Parsons School of Design, said in an interview on Sunday that his pay, for a 45-hour seminar he taught this fall, would increase from $127 to $136 per contact hour — a 7-percent increase. “I’m feeling really good about it,” he said of the tentative agreement, although he said the raises would not make up for the 18-percent hit the union said its members had suffered in real earnings due to inflation since their last pay raise, in 2018.

    The contract also would strengthen job security and offer paid family leave and a professional-development fund, the union said. And it apparently would resolve what had become the major sticking point in the negotiations late last week, by addressing concerns that some people might lose health-care coverage and others could see their rates soar.

    The tentative contract, the union said, includes “expanded health-care eligibility to faculty teaching one course, no hikes to our out-of-pocket health-insurance costs, and caps to annual premium increases.”

    Part-time workers make up more than 80 percent of the teaching faculty at the private liberal-arts university. As the strike dragged into its fourth week, with classes canceled and grades up in the air, a group of angry parents threatened to file a class-action lawsuit against the New School and to withhold tuition payments.

    Total costs for full-time new undergraduates who live on campus amounted to about $79,000 last academic year, up 7 percent from the previous year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The cost, which included some $52,000 in tuition and fees, was significantly less for students with scholarships.

    ‘Back to Our Mission’

    Many full-time faculty members had pledged to support their part-time colleagues by refusing to cross picket lines. The university told them last week that they’d have to start submitting weekly forms showing that they were fulfilling their teaching, research, and service responsibilities. Meanwhile, it indicated, in a post on Twitter, that it was considering hiring replacements for the striking workers if the walkout wasn’t resolved by the end of the year.

    “This is an excellent contract that demonstrates the deep respect we have for all the contributions of our part-time faculty at the New School, as well as one that sets new standards for part-time faculty nationwide,” the university’s statement on Thursday said. “We want nothing more than to get back to our mission of teaching, learning, and creating.”

    In the plan it outlined on Thursday, the New School said it was also providing a supplemental bonus of $2,100 for each member of the adjuncts’ union who taught during the pandemic. The university said it had also agreed to improvements in health insurance, retirement, and tuition benefits. And it said it was adding a new way for part-time faculty members to challenge disciplinary decisions stemming from internal sexual-harassment investigations.

    The union contends that it’s unfair for a single person, paid by the university, to make binding decisions in such cases without instructors’ having the opportunity to appeal to a neutral arbitrator. The details of the university’s new plan weren’t spelled out in its statement.

    There’s a lot of healing that’s going to have to happen in our community on all sides.

    The strike had gotten increasingly ugly last week, with reports of violent and racist threats’ being made on social media against university staff members and their families. The New School’s faculty, student, and staff senates issued a joint statement condemning the threats against “at-will employees who were just doing their jobs.” The union also condemned the threats, and the university released a statement saying it “shares the outrage and concern” and had notified law-enforcement and campus-safety officials.

    McBride, the president, said the social-media threats had been “soul-crushing” to the university leaders and staff members targeted. “No one should feel unsafe coming to their workplace,” he said. “On a personal note,” he said, “there’s a lot of healing that’s going to have to happen in our community on all sides — leadership, students, faculty — for us to effectively move together as a community.”

    Students who supported the striking workers staged a protest at the campus’s University Center after the New School said it would stop paying the strikers on Wednesday. The students had pledged to remain there until the university resumed paying the instructors and a fair contract was signed.

    Meanwhile, progress was reported in resolving strikes that have brought much of the teaching and research to a standstill across the University of California system in recent weeks. Members of UAW Local 5810, the union representing postdocs and academic researchers, announced on Saturday that their members had voted overwhelmingly to ratify five-year contracts that include significant pay raises.

    At the same time, negotiators have agreed to bring in a private mediator to try to resolve a continuing dispute involving thousands of graduate students who have been on strike since November 14. That strike has paralyzed the 10-campus system and thrown the end of the semester, including final exams and grading, into chaos.

    Katherine Mangan

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  • Whose Pandemic-Era Graduation Rates Beat, or Fell Below, the Average?

    Whose Pandemic-Era Graduation Rates Beat, or Fell Below, the Average?

    With the release of preliminary federal data in November, a clearer picture is starting to emerge of how two years of pandemic-era operations have affected colleges’ graduation rates.

    The Chronicle analyzed U.S. Department of Education data for more than 1,300 public and private four-year institutions and found that six-year graduation rates in 2020 and 2021 were 1.26 percent higher, on average, than they were in 2018 and 2019. That incremental rate of increase from year to year has been fairly consistent in recent decades.

    In the new data set, nearly 90 institutions had increases in graduation rates in 2020 and 2021 that were five percentage points or more above average relative to 2018 and 2019. More than 140 fell five or more points below average.

    Here are details on those institutions:

    Methodology: This analysis looked at degree-granting four-year institutions with Carnegie Classifications of doctoral, master’s, or baccalaureate. Only those institutions with a six-year cohort of 50 or more were included. Institutions were defined as degree-granting if they were eligible to participate in Title IV federal financial-aid programs and were within the United States.

    Nick Perez

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  • A New Push to Make Financial-Aid Offers More Transparent

    A New Push to Make Financial-Aid Offers More Transparent

    So how much does this cost?

    It’s a simple question people ask all time, whether they’re shopping for a winter coat or a Camry. But as many Americans know, it’s much more difficult to determine exactly how much money they’ll need to cover the costs of attending a particular college. For one thing, financial-aid offers are often downright confusing.

    A new national initiative intends to change that. On Tuesday the leaders of 10 higher-education associations plan to announce the formation of a task force that aims to enhance the “clarity, accuracy, and consistency” of financial-aid offers, the main tool colleges use to communicate eligibility for federal, state, and institutional financial-aid programs to students. M. Peter McPherson, president emeritus of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities and chairman of the task force, told The Chronicle that its members plan to develop a set of standards and principles for colleges.

    “This is a huge financial decision for families — they really need to understand what they’re getting into,” said McPherson, a former president of Michigan State University. “Millions of these aid offers go out every year. So it’s a big societal question whether the information is presented with clarity and accuracy, using words that people can understand.”

    In recent years, McPherson has examined financial-aid offers his grandchildren received. “By and large, I thought they did a good job,” he said of those offers. “But in some cases, they weren’t as complete as they could be. Like, what’s the estimated full cost of attendance? And what’s included in that? I don’t think this is ever going to be perfect for every student, but we can have some common language, definitions, and expectations of what should be included in a way that can make things easier for students to make comparisons.”

    This is a huge financial decision for families — they really need to understand what they’re getting into.

    Concern about the lack of clarity in financial-aid offers is nothing new. More than a decade ago, the Obama administration released a model financial-aid offer that colleges could use to provide prospective students with standardized information on their true costs of attendance, as well as any grants, loans, and other financing options, such as Work-Study or military benefits.

    But that initiative wasn’t a game-changer. And high-school counselors and college-access advocates continue to complain that the information institutions send to students is misleading and opaque at worst — and inconsistent at best.

    That inconsistency is the result of colleges’ relying on homegrown systems to crank out financial-aid offers year after year. “Over time, colleges have developed their own language or parlance, and it’s often very focused on the way that administrators think about financial aid,” said Justin Draeger, president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, which is part of the initiative. “So what you have are aid offers that are all over the place.” As a result, it’s often difficult for students to get a clear sense of how much they must pay to attend a particular college, making it a challenge to compare the offers they receive.

    Draeger described some typical concerns about aid offers. “One of the most common things we see is that they don’t contain the costs to the student or family. It’s ‘here’s how much financial aid you’re getting,’ but it’s devoid of the cost that they’ll be incurring. And that includes both billable direct expenses to the institution but also the nonbillable indirect expenses that schools use in constructing a cost of attendance for financial-aid purposes. Some families are just interested in how much they owe the school. Others will need financial aid to cover nonbillable expenses, like rent or transportation. Those costs are a really important piece of the financial-aid picture.”

    Another common issue: colleges “mislabeling” student loans. “That might mean not labeling loans as actual loans,” Draeger said. “Other times, it’s combining loans and grants when, really, those two things ought to be separated. We’ve found examples of colleges that have lumped all their financial aid into sort of one bucket.”

    Colleges aren’t trying to mislead students, Draeger said. But understaffing in financial-aid offices and the nonstop scramble to meet students’ needs while complying with federal regulations can leave a staff with little time or bandwidth to update its information system with consumer-friendly language, or to make sure its aid offers reflect the industry’s latest best practices.

    Draeger’s association has long pushed for greater standardization in aid offers. It has tested various templates with students and families to determine which ones seem most clear and effective. And the association’s Code of Conduct identifies basic components that every aid offer should include.

    The new initiative will expand on those efforts by bringing together college presidents, financial-aid leaders, and admissions officials. The task force’s members also include the American Council on Education, the American Association of Community Colleges, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, and the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

    That task force will be weighing questions about the precise wording of financial-aid offers. But Draeger sees something greater at stake.

    “In higher education, we are struggling with a public-trust issue, and we’re seeing that in poll after poll,” he said. “If we want to be trusted partners to students and families in furthering our educational and economic pursuits, then we have to be completely open and transparent. And I think colleges want to be open and transparent. This is just one area where we haven’t really focused enough resources and attention.”

    Eric Hoover

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  • A Free-Speech Survey in Wisconsin Was Delayed After a Chancellor Resigned. Now It’s Going Ahead.

    A Free-Speech Survey in Wisconsin Was Delayed After a Chancellor Resigned. Now It’s Going Ahead.

    The University of Wisconsin system on Monday will release a free-speech survey that was delayed last spring over political and procedural concerns.

    The survey, like similar ones that have been administered in Florida and North Carolina, will ask thousands of students across the system’s 13 campuses for their perspectives on “campus free expression, viewpoint diversity, and self-censorship,” according to its description. Originally scheduled for April, the survey was quickly walked back after some campus leaders expressed worry about its subject matter, and after the interim chancellor of one of the system’s campuses resigned in protest.

    The survey’s subject matter, and concerns that its results could be misused by Republican legislators, prompted multiple student-government leaders in the system, and the state chapter of the American Association of University Professors, to call for its delay or cancellation. Chronicle reporting in the spring indicated the survey may not have been approved by institutional review boards on all of the system’s campuses. And James P. Henderson, in a remarkable show of dissent from system leadership, cited the handling of the survey as a major reason for his sudden resignation as interim chancellor of the Whitewater campus, saying he and his fellow chancellors had not been given adequate input into it.

    The survey has evolved since the controversies of the spring, Jay O. Rothman, president of the system, said in an interview with The Chronicle on Friday. Rothman, who took office on June 1, said he fully supported the survey and “the opportunities around freedom of expression and civil dialogue are one of the reasons I took this job.” The survey, he added, incorporates feedback from campus chancellors, shared-governance leaders, and an advisory board.

    The survey will provide system leaders with statistically reliable information about what’s happening on its campuses, Rothman said. “We are trying to learn,” he said. “We want to know what the climate is, and then we can react to, What are some things that we can do to enhance the climate?”

    Rothman on Friday announced several other projects aimed at promoting civil dialogue, including the creation of the Wisconsin Institute for Citizenship and Civil Dialogue, which will coordinate efforts and may offer joint programs among research and policy centers across the system to bolster civil dialogue. The system will also convene a series of “peer-to-peer conversations on challenging topics,” in which Rothman will participate, and will sponsor the Wisconsin Civic Games for middle- and high-school students.

    Little Evidence

    The Wisconsin survey will join similar efforts in Florida and North Carolina to gauge students’ views on free speech and other hot-button topics. Florida last year enacted a law requiring an annual survey of public-university students and employees to assess the climate of intellectual diversity on their campuses. Only 2.4 percent of the more than 364,000 students who were sent the survey in April filled it out, however, and the response rate among faculty and staff members was 9.4 percent.

    United Faculty of Florida, the union representing professors, had encouraged students, instructors, and staff members to ignore the survey, saying it was not being administered in good faith and constituted an attempt by Republican legislators to bolster the claim that conservative students feel unwelcome in college classrooms. (A Republican state representative who sponsored the law mandating the survey told the Tallahassee Democrat that he had done so to allow future legislatures to “use that data as the basis to make a policy decision.”)

    A free-expression survey circulated to students in the University of North Carolina system last spring yielded a slightly more robust response, with 7.9 percent of students completing it. In that survey, researchers found “little evidence that faculty create a highly politicized atmosphere in UNC system classrooms.”

    They also found that most students’ ideological views hadn’t changed during their time in college. Respondents, particularly those who identified as conservative, were more likely to self-censor due to concern about how their peers would react than how their professors would.

    The questions in both surveys are similar to those that will appear in Wisconsin. Students will be asked whether they have felt pressured by professors to agree with a specific political or ideological opinion discussed in class; how open they are to considering viewpoints that differ from their own on subjects like abortion, gun control, immigration, police misconduct, and transgender issues; and whether controversial speakers on campus should be disinvited or protested against.

    The survey also will pose hypothetical scenarios — for example, an instructor criticizing an elected official on a personal Twitter account, or a group of students posting on social media that a student of a certain race or ethnicity isn’t welcome on campus — and ask whether students believe those scenarios would be protected under the First Amendment. Respondents will be asked what political party and ideologies they most identify with, though the survey notes that “you are not required to respond to any question you would rather not answer.”

    The survey will be conducted by the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service, a unit of the system, and the research team consists of four professors in the system. It will be sent to a random sample of students on each campus, with the goal of yielding about 500 responses per campus, and those who complete it will each receive a $10 electronic gift card. It will close on December 14, and results are slated to be reported early next year. A system spokesperson said that the data may be weighted based on response rates.

    Political Ties

    Funding for the survey comes from the Menard Center for the Study of Institutions and Innovation, and its political ties were a concern for some critics. While nonpartisan, the center is named for the Menard family, owners of the home-improvement store chain Menards, who donated $2.36 million in 2019 to expand it; John R. Menard Jr., the founder of Menards, has a long record of donating to conservative political candidates and organizations. And the Menard Center, which is based on the system’s Stout campus, was founded in 2017 with a donation from the Charles Koch Foundation.

    Even before it was officially delayed, the Wisconsin survey had come in for questioning, according to emails, text messages, and other materials obtained by The Chronicle through open-records requests. After being proposed in January, it was called off and restarted once, in March, because of chancellors’ objections. “Nobody is interested in doing this,” Rebecca M. Blank, then chancellor of the system’s flagship Madison campus, wrote to colleagues at the time. “So we’re off the hook on this.”

    But a day later, in the same email chain, Blank wrote that careful study of free-speech issues was warranted. “I do think we will be under some pressure … from System, from the Legislature, etc. … to be able to say we are DOING SOMETHING on this topic,” she wrote. “So being proactive in this is important. Far better that we have some plans in place than that we have to scramble and create something later this coming fall.”

    Blank may have been relieved to be “off the hook,” but other major stakeholders weren’t pleased with what at the time seemed to be the project’s cancellation. The director of the Menard Center, Timothy Shiell, who described himself to The Chronicle in the spring as “a liberal professor being funded by a conservative donor to run a nonpartisan center,” ascribed the decision to political optics in an email to a colleague. “By all appearances,” wrote Shiell, a professor of philosophy on the Stout campus, “the chancellors feared the results would be bad and the Legislature would pounce on it. God forbid we permit routine research on an issue of state, national, and even international importance.”

    Shiell said in an April interview with The Chronicle that he had wanted to collect data on students’ views of free speech for several years. While there’s no evidence that politicians were involved in the survey’s conception, Republican leaders in the state government took great interest in its fate and progress. Among them was State Rep. Dave Murphy, who is chair of the Assembly’s Committee on Colleges and Universities. Murphy wrote in an email to Michael J. Falbo, who served as interim president from March to the beginning of Rothman’s term, on June 1, that he was “deeply disturbed” by news that the survey was being canceled. “The members of my committee,” Murphy added, “would find the results of such a survey invaluable.”

    Murphy sent that email on March 30, and he copied Robin J. Vos, the powerful Republican speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly. Emails obtained by The Chronicle indicate that Murphy and Vos, along with a Republican state senator and two system regents, contacted Falbo to ask that he reconsider his decision.

    The next day, Falbo sent a copy of the planned survey to the chancellors, noting that he didn’t “find anything objectionable” in it, and met with them via Microsoft Teams to discuss it. Later that evening, the survey’s advisory board got emails saying the project was back on. (An attempt to contact Falbo on Friday was not immediately successful.)

    That didn’t sit well with Henderson, the Whitewater chancellor, who handed in his resignation on April 3. During the meeting between Falbo and the chancellors, “the overwhelming response was negative,” Henderson wrote to Edmund Manydeeds III, president of the system’s Board of Regents. At the end of the meeting, Henderson wrote, Falbo “dismissed our comments and said he was proceeding. And then a pandering email came out stating system support for the survey.”

    In a text to Renée M. Wachter, chancellor of the Superior campus, the day after his resignation, Henderson wrote: “I just was blown away when Mike told me we would be ‘ordered’ to administer that survey,” referring to Falbo. Wachter responded sympathetically, deeming the survey “a no-win situation.” Henderson lamented that people at the system level were “trying to force a political position on the campuses.”

    On April 7 the system announced it would delay the survey a second time, after days of internal deliberations among members of the research team. In one such message, on April 5, Geoffrey Peterson, a professor of political science on the Eau Claire campus, said the survey had become a “political football,” and advocated for a pause. “The perception that members of the Legislature strong-armed the system into distributing the survey, whether accurate or not, now defines the survey and clearly implies the survey is a partisan instrument,” Peterson wrote. “The truth is, the content of the survey is, for all intents and purposes, now irrelevant. What matters now is the perceptions that are rapidly forming about it, and those perceptions are diametrically opposed to the actual goals of the survey.”

    April Blesche-Rechek, a professor of psychology at Eau Claire and a member of the research team, suggested in the same email thread that concerns about campuses engaging in political indoctrination could be overblown. “Plenty of parents worry that their college kids are pressured to conform to a radical left ideological viewpoint. The frequency with which this actually is felt by students to occur, as well as the contexts in which it occurs if it ever does, may prove those assumptions wrong,” she wrote.

    For his part, Rothman on Friday said the only contact he’d had with state legislators about the survey was to inform them, at the start of his tenure, that the system would move forward with it.

    “The survey results will tell us one thing, but if we can’t have open and honest and fair discussions about really difficult issues — whether that’s religion, whether that’s abortion, whatever it happens to be — that’s a real challenge to our democracy,” Rothman said. “If the universities can’t be models of that, I’m not sure who’s going to be.”

    Megan Zahneis

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  • Ben Sasse’s Contract at Florida’s Flagship Has Lots of Perks. But Not Tenure.

    Ben Sasse’s Contract at Florida’s Flagship Has Lots of Perks. But Not Tenure.

    There are plenty of goodies in Ben Sasse’s new contract with the University of Florida, where the Republican senator from Nebraska is slated to start as president on February 6.

    With final approval from the State University System’s Board of Governors on Wednesday, Sasse secured a five-year deal that will pay him $1 million annually in base salary with opportunities for bonuses. Notably absent from the contract, however, is a relatively standard provision for incoming college presidents at major research universities: tenure upon appointment.

    Sasse, who is 50 years old and holds a Ph.D. in American history from Yale University, once led a small college in Nebraska and briefly taught. But he does not bring a traditional academic résumé to the table, and granting him instant tenure may well have stirred up further controversy around his appointment. He has already been met with protests and rancor from students, professors, and staff members, who question his qualifications and his politics.

    Under Sasse’s contract, he will be appointed as a full-time faculty member “upon the end of his service as president.” At that point, he will serve “in an appropriate rank and academic department” at an unspecified salary, the contract states. The appointment is “subject to approval” by the chair of UF’s board. There is no mention in the contract of whether the position will be tenured.

    A UF spokesman declined to elaborate on why Sasse’s contract is silent on the question of tenure, and Sasse’s lawyer did not respond to an email on Thursday. Nor did UF’s board chairman.

    Broadly speaking, tenure is academe’s most coveted status, offering effectively permanent appointments to faculty members with carefully vetted records of achievement in their fields. Tenure is perpetually under fire, often criticized as a system that protects underperforming professors. But it remains a hallmark of the academic enterprise, ideally forming a bulwark against encroachments on academic freedom and offering a license for scholars to pursue controversial or unpopular ideas.

    So what does it mean for Sasse to come into the UF presidency without tenure? For starters, it tempers for now what might have been a passionate discussion about whether the president of a top-ranked public research university would qualify for tenure there. It muddies the waters, too, about the strength of Sasse’s “retreat rights,” which can afford a college president a secure tenured appointment if things don’t work out in the C-suite. Symbolically it may say something, too. The contract sets Sasse for now outside the system of tenure — a system that Sasse has pledged to defend but that nonetheless remains a favorite punching bag for his political party.

    To hear it from UF faculty members, Sasse will come into the job, after resigning his Senate seat in January, as more of a mystery than his recent predecessors. Unlike someone who rose through the ranks of academe, earning tenure along the way, there is less of a presumption that Sasse supports and appreciates academic freedom and the role that tenure plays in protecting it. That’s one reason he has probably fielded more questions than most would-be college presidents about whether he believes in those fundamental tenets.

    Last week, during a public interview with UF’s Board of Trustees, Sasse described himself as “a zealous defender of and advocate for academic freedom,” and “a defender of tenure at a research institution.” There are principled reasons for embracing those values, but Sasse also flagged for the board a “more crass, calculating” imperative to do so.

    “We want the best faculty to want to stay at this place and be recruited to this place,” he said, “and that requires that we have academic freedom and tenure. And so I look forward to advocating for those positions.”

    Sasse’s stated support of tenure “at a research institution” suggests a bit of nuance on the topic. Under Sasse’s leadership, Midland University, a Lutheran college in Nebraska, replaced traditional tenure with three-year rolling contracts, a spokesman told The Chronicle.

    While principally known for his political profile, Sasse comes to UF with more academic experience than other career politicians who have assumed college presidencies in recent years. In addition to his Ph.D. at Yale, he holds a bachelor’s from Harvard University. For two years and 10 months, ending in early 2010, Sasse was an assistant professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, officials there said.

    It is reasonable to question how a self-styled “occasional professor” would fare under UF’s standard tenure evaluation. Paul A. Ortiz, a history professor at UF, said that Sasse would not meet the criteria for tenure at the university. What little faculty members know about Sasse’s academic record is thin, Ortiz said.

    “Tenure says, regardless of how good-looking Ben Sasse is, regardless of how transformative his vision is, ‘Where’s the beef?’” Ortiz said “‘Where’s the CV? Where’s the work record we can go and judge?’”

    Ortiz is chair of UF’s chapter of United Faculty of Florida, a union that represents faculty members and other employees.

    Beyond a short news release, UF has offered scant information about Sasse’s academic background. On Thursday, in response to a public-records request from The Chronicle, the university provided copies of his CV and a “profile.”

    Metrics for tenure evaluation, even for traditional academics, are sometimes the subject of intense debate. In 2019, Harvard denied tenure to Lorgia García-Peña, an associate professor of Romance languages and literatures who was widely respected in her field. The decision provoked discussions about whether universities undervalue emerging scholarship on race and ethnicity. In 2021 the Board of Trustees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was lambasted for failing to act on a recommendation that Nikole Hannah-Jones, developer of the 1619 Project, be granted tenure.

    Given his background, Sasse might logically be appointed to a faculty slot in the history department. But no one has discussed with the department’s chair the idea of appointing Sasse there with tenure.

    “Should such a request be made, we would, I presume, follow our normal procedure of appointing a faculty committee to review the candidate’s dossier and make a recommendation for the department’s consideration,” Jon F. Sensbach, chair of the department, said in an email to The Chronicle. “Any final determination is made by the Board of Trustees.”

    But faculty members haven’t had a strong say in whether recent UF presidents were given tenure. W. Kent Fuchs, UF’s current president, and J. Bernard Machen, his predecessor, were appointed as full professors with tenure in engineering and dentistry, respectively. Both came to the job after long careers in academe, and their appointments were spelled out in their contracts.

    “Faculty approval was not required previously or now,” Steve Orlando, a university spokesman, said in an email, “but we have always sought input from faculty, students, alumni, and others in presidential searches.”

    (The search committee that recommended Sasse held numerous listening sessions, but many on campus were furious that only one finalist was made public. In October the Faculty Senate voted no confidence in the search process.)

    UF’s appointment of a sitting U.S. senator as president comes at a time when faculty members have expressed concern about political interference in university affairs. In a recent high-profile case, professors objected to the fast-tracked tenured appointment of Joseph A. Ladapo, who was Gov. Ron DeSantis’s pick as the state’s surgeon general. Ladapo, who was previously an associate professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, has been criticized for his skepticism about Covid-19 vaccines.

    Sasse’s appointment invites comparisons with other politicians turned college presidents. On the question of tenure, two recent case studies suggest different approaches. Mitch Daniels, a former governor of Indiana and soon-to-be-departing president of Purdue University, does not have a tenured appointment or the promise of one when he steps down, a spokesman said. But John E. Thrasher, a former speaker of the Florida House, told The Chronicle that he had assumed the Florida State University presidency with tenure in the law school. (Thrasher is now president emeritus of Florida State.)

    Amanda J. Phalin, chair of UF’s Faculty Senate, said in an email to The Chronicle that she expects Sasse isn’t too concerned right now about a future role on the faculty.

    “I think the contract is appropriate,” Phalin wrote. “I know he’ll be focusing on the university as a whole, including zealously defending tenure at our institution.”

    As a senior lecturer in the department of management in UF’s college of business, Phalin is untenured and works on an annual contract. She is a voting member of UF’s Board of Trustees, and she joined the board last week in its unanimous decision to appoint Sasse as president. As a result of her vote, Phalin is facing a vote of no confidence in the Senate, which is slated to take up the resolution next week. The university’s student-body president, who also voted for Sasse as an ex officio member of the board, is facing calls for impeachment.

    Granting Sasse tenure would only have inflamed tensions, said Danaya C. Wright, chair-elect of the Faculty Senate. “It would just have added fuel to the fire had they given him tenure,” said Wright, a law professor. Doing so, she said, would have been “a slap in the face to the faculty who put in all that work” to earn tenure.

    With or without tenure, Sasse’s contract offers plentiful perks. If he hits established goals, his starting base salary of $1 million will increase by 4 percent each year. Under the contract, he will be provided with housing in the Dasburg President’s House, with “utilities (including internet service), housekeeping, home-office facilities, equipment and services, landscaping, maintenance, and grounds-keeping, security, repair and maintenance of The Dasburg House and facility.” During Sasse’s term as president, tuition will be waived for members of his “immediate family,” which “is defined as the parents, children, and grandchildren of Dr. Sasse.”

    Sasse’s contract does not say he will be granted tenure — but it also does not say he won’t.

    “The way this language is structured, this is a bit of an artful dodge,” said James H. Finkelstein, a professor emeritus of public policy at George Mason University. “While it doesn’t grant him tenure, it gives an enormous amount of discretion to the board chair in terms of how to resolve that issue, should that time come.”

    Finkelstein and Judith A. Wilde, a research professor in George Mason’s school of policy and government, have reviewed and analyzed more than 300 contracts for college presidents. After reviewing Sasse’s contract, both said they were struck by the power it invested in the board’s chair to make decisions independent of the full board. It falls to the chair, for example, to approve Sasse’s future faculty appointment and salary. (The full board would be “promptly notified.”)

    Another notable clause in the contract speaks to what might happen if Sasse resigned after some scandalous transgression. If the chair determined “in good faith” that Sasse was resigning for a reason that would have been fireable for cause, Sasse would be “deemed to have declined” a faculty post or any other employment at UF. That’s a lot of power for one board member, Wilde said.

    “Once again, it’s one person making a decision,” she said. “How does he actually get into the head of Dr. Sasse to know that that’s why he’s stepping down?”

    It is not difficult to envision a scenario in which a board chair explains to a president that he or she must resign or be fired by the board. But higher education is littered with examples in which a few board members applied that kind of pressure in private, only to invite explosive public disagreement on campus and among themselves. Some notable examples include the University of Virginia and, more recently, Michigan State University.

    UF’s current board chairman, Morteza (Mori) Hosseini, is considered a particularly powerful governing-board leader.

    By definition, a president’s contract envisions worst-case scenarios: resignation, termination, even death. Despite faculty misgivings about Sasse, professors say they want to see him do well. But the learning curve will be steep, said Ortiz, the history professor.

    “Ben Sasse is going to have to take 100-level courses to figure out how UF works,” Ortiz said. “In other words, he’s got to play catch-up. We all want him to succeed. I want Ben Sasse to succeed as president of the University of Florida because it matters to my students, it matters to faculty, it matters to staff. We don’t want him to crash and burn.”

    As for tenure, Ortiz said, he’s happy to tell the new president what it’s all about: “If he called me and said, ‘Paul, tell me how tenure works,’ I would say, ‘Yeah, let’s go get a cup of coffee.’”

    Jack Stripling

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  • As Race-Conscious Admissions Policies Go Before the Supreme Court, Here’s What 6 Experts Are Listening For

    As Race-Conscious Admissions Policies Go Before the Supreme Court, Here’s What 6 Experts Are Listening For

    The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on Monday in two cases that challenge colleges’ consideration of race in admissions decisions — one against Harvard College, the other against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The outcomes of the cases, which have been making their way through the court system since 2014, could decide the fate of race-conscious admissions in America. Legal observers believe that the now-conservative court may seize the opportunity to end the practice altogether.

    The Chronicle asked six legal and higher-education experts to share one key thing that they will be watching for during the arguments on Monday and to explain why that could be pivotal. These are not predictions but informed thoughts from people who have been watching the cases for about nine years.

    Liliana M. Garces, a professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin, who studies how legal and education systems shape educational opportunity.

    These cases represent a conflict in America over how to address racial discrimination and promote equal access and opportunity in higher education. I’ll be watching for how the justices debate this question as they consider how to interpret the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

    A special report on the imperiled future of race-conscious admissions.

    For 44 years, the court has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause to allow for a limited consideration of race in admissions so that postsecondary institutions can promote educational opportunity and maintain racially and ethnically diverse campuses that are critical for their educational mission and for sustaining the health of our democracy. That’s an approach that says: We promote equal access and address racial discrimination — not by ignoring race, but by understanding how it shapes educational opportunity. The plaintiffs in these cases are asking the justices to change that interpretation under the fallacy that being conscious of race in admissions is the same as racial discrimination.

    Research consistently shows that not being able to consider race as one of many factors in admissions exacerbates racial inequities and allows racial discrimination to persist. We address racial discrimination by acknowledging how race matters in a student’s life, not by ignoring that reality.

    OiYan Poon, a visiting professor of education at the University of Maryland at College Park and co-author of Rethinking College Admissions: Research-Based Practice and Policy.

    I will be listening for how the justices and attorneys talk about Asian Americans in relationship to other students and people. Ed Blum and SFFA [Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff] are banking on the justices and the public to believe racist stereotypes about Asian Americans, Native Americans, African Americans, and Latinx people. Some think of Asian Americans as stereotypically and universally hardworking and book-smart, and other students of color as not being intelligent and hardworking — all flattened and dehumanizing concepts of who people are. We are all complex individuals whose educational journeys have been shaped by different local, social, and economic contexts.

    Race-conscious holistic admissions practices allow admissions professionals to affirm individual students’ unique backgrounds and stories. Diversity matters to education and to a healthy democracy. Research has shown that Asian Americans benefit from race-conscious admissions and that the majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action and haven’t fallen for SFFA’s divisive rhetoric. Will education research and the majority perspective of Asian Americans matter to the justices?

    Joshua Dunn, a professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

    Of the two cases, I think Harvard has a better chance, although still a small one, of winning. To do that, they will have to peel off two conservative votes, so I’m going to closely watch how their counsel tries to persuade some of the conservative wing that they are not engaging in pernicious discrimination, or how even if that bloc has concerns about Harvard’s policies, that they should be more concerned about empowering greater federal control of private institutions. For the former, that will require them to, I think, do better than their briefs do at explaining why Asian American applicants consistently receive lower “personal ratings” compared with other groups.

    The court struck down Michigan’s undergraduate admissions program in Gratz v. Bollinger because it was too “automatic” in awarding points to applicants from historically underrepresented groups. The personal ratings will likely strike the conservatives as being suspiciously automatic. For the latter, Harvard could try to appeal to the longstanding worries of conservatives about the homogenizing and centralizing effects of imposing national policies on private institutions. This, however, would require them to make arguments uncomfortably similar to the original opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But in the end, it might be their best hope.

    Art Coleman, managing partner at EducationCounsel LLC and a former deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

    I’m very interested in whether any member of the court elevates the issue of what, precisely, is on the table as the court considers the big question presented in these cases: whether higher-education institutions can continue to “use race as a factor in admissions.” Specifically, there is a potentially important distinction to be made between considering the racial status of an applicant and their identity — an applicant’s authentic, lived experience and perspective, evident through holistic review. (Even SFFA has said that applicants should be able to describe their experience of “overcoming discrimination” to which they’ve been subject.) As many amici [the friend-of-the-court briefs] representing higher-education organizations and institutions have explained, it is impossible to credibly conduct an authentic, complete holistic review of an applicant (regardless of their race) if that applicant cannot tell their full story, which may include facets of their background and interests associated with or informed by their racial or ethnic identity.

    If this court is inclined to be directionally sympathetic to SFFA’s major ask — that it reverse decades of court precedent regarding the consideration of race in admissions to advance diversity interests — will there be limits and lines to be drawn that expressly preserve the integrity of holistic review, as described above, consistent with core, conservative constitutional principles?

    Kimberly West-Faulcon, a professor of law at the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, who researches constitutional law and antidiscrimination law.

    Since I do not expect many surprises in how the court splits on the constitutional interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause in the UNC case, I will be paying closest attention to whether the ruling in the SFFA v. Harvard case could further erode the efficacy of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which allows federal agencies to combat race discrimination by freezing federal funding to programs that exclude, deny benefits, or discriminate on the basis of race. Because I suspect there are several justices who wish to do to Title VI something similar to what the Supreme Court did in Shelby County v. Holder, when it gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, I will be paying particular attention to whether any of the right-leaning justices seem interested in reinterpreting Title VI in the Harvard case.

    If the court leaves Title VI untouched, the fallout of this case is a bit more contained to the realm of selective university admissions. If it reinterprets Title VI, I think the future anti-civil-rights consequences of the ruling will reach far beyond who gets selected to attend colleges like Harvard.

    LaWanda W.M. Ward, an assistant professor of education at Pennsylvania State University, who researches higher education, civil rights, and race and ethnicity.

    For my dissertation I used Critical Race Theory to guide a critical discourse analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments for Bakke, Gratz, Grutter, Fisher I, and Fisher II. So, I am very interested in which justices will pose questions to the student intervenors’ counsel and what will those questions entail.

    In the previous race-conscious-admissions cases before the Supreme Court, it denied student representation in the oral arguments. I think the students’ advocacy — that will include experiences of students of Asian heritage to maintain race-conscious admissions — could be compelling, especially to the conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was recently in higher education as a law professor. The court’s composition is different since it heard the Fisher cases, with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia — very vocal and on vastly different ends of the constitutional debate — no longer on the bench. I’m most curious as to how Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will ask questions regarding arguments for a race-evasive approach to race-conscious admissions, because in oral argument for Merrill v. Milligan she recently challenged the dominant race-evasive legal narrative that the Roberts Court has established regarding interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

    The University of Michigan oral arguments [in the Gratz and Grutter cases] occurred on April Fool’s Day in 2003, I hope Halloween — which I associate with Michael Myers — has no significance for the cases on Monday.

    Nell Gluckman and Eric Hoover

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