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  • DOJ Sues Harvard

    DOJ Sues Harvard

    The Trump administration filed a lawsuit Friday accusing Harvard University of failing to comply with a federal investigation into whether its admissions processes are discriminatory.

    The federal government alleged in a court filing that the Ivy League university has unlawfully withheld “information necessary to determine whether Harvard, which has a recent history of racial discrimination, is continuing to discriminate in its admissions process.” The Trump administration alleged in the lawsuit that Harvard “has slow-walked the pace of [document] production and refused to provide pertinent documents relating to applicant-level admissions decisions.”

    The Trump administration said in the filing that it brought legal action “solely to compel Harvard to produce documents relating to any consideration of race in admission” and is not accusing Harvard of discriminatory conduct, seeking monetary damages or the revocation of its federal funding.

    “The Justice Department will not allow universities to flout our nation’s federal civil rights laws by refusing to provide the information required for our review,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a DOJ news release. “Providing requested data is a basic expectation of any credible compliance process, and refusal to cooperate creates concerns about university practices. If Harvard has stopped discriminating, it should happily share the data necessary to prove it.”

    A Harvard spokesperson denied claims of wrongdoing in an emailed statement.

    “Harvard has been responding to the government’s inquiries in good faith and continues to be willing to engage with the government according to the process required by law,” they wrote to Inside Higher Ed. “The University will continue to defend itself against these retaliatory actions which have been initiated simply because Harvard refused to surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights in response to unlawful government overreach.”

    Friday’s lawsuit is the latest salvo from the Trump administration in a nearly yearlong fight with Harvard that has included efforts to cut off $2.2 billion in federal research funding and to prevent it from hosting international students. Harvard has managed to successfully fend off those efforts and sued the Trump administration last April. Harvard won that legal battle with the federal government last fall but remains in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, as the president and others have accused Harvard of permitting antisemitism, among other allegations.

    Despite Harvard’s legal victory, rumors of a settlement have persisted for months. Any such deal would follow similar agreements struck with the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Brown University, the University of Virginia, Cornell University and Northwestern University. 

    However, while a deal has supposedly been in the works for months, Harvard reportedly has been resistant to pay a fine as part of any such settlement. Earlier this month The New York Times reported that the federal government had dropped its request for a fine as part of the settlement, only to be immediately countered by Trump, who demanded Harvard pay $1 billion.

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  • The High Court rules on EHRC’s guidance on single-sex

    The High Court rules on EHRC’s guidance on single-sex

    Back in May last year, I suggested that universities might usefully consult on how they’d handle single-sex provision in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling in For Women Scotland on the meaning of “woman” in the Equality Act 2010.

    The sector’s dominant posture at the time was a collective “we’re waiting for the guidance” – and we still are.

    The EHRC’s statutory Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations – the document that is supposed to translate the Supreme Court’s ruling into practical direction for employers and service providers – remains on the Minister for Women and Equalities’ desk, where it has been since September 2025.

    What has arrived is a High Court ruling on the EHRC’s interim update – the stopgap document it published in April 2025, revised opaquely in June, and then removed from its website in October in what it described as an attempt to “encourage” the Minister to approve the Code.

    The interim update set out what the Commission thought the ruling meant for single-sex facilities – primarily toilets, changing rooms and washing facilities – in both workplaces and public-facing services.

    Its core propositions were that single-sex facilities must be genuinely single-sex by biological sex, that admitting trans women to women’s facilities would mean they were no longer single-sex and would have to be open to all men, and that where possible mixed-sex facilities should be provided alongside single-sex ones.

    Three anonymous trans claimants – each of whom had been told by their employers, within weeks of the guidance being published, to stop using the toilets matching their lived gender – challenged the guidance as unlawful.

    The judge (Mr Justice Swift) found the interim guidance was a lawful and broadly accurate statement of the law and rejected all three grounds of challenge from the individual claimants.

    But within that headline, the detail matters – not least because the legal principles extend well beyond toilets to every women-only service, group, role and activity that a university or SU might provide, from women’s officer positions and self-defence classes to counselling services, support groups and sports teams.

    Workplace facilities – form versus substance

    The most emphatic part of the judgment concerns the 1992 Workplace Regulations.

    The claimants had argued that those regulations only require employers to provide separate rooms with signs saying “men” and “women” – not to actually restrict who uses them.

    The judge rejected that firmly, saying the argument “places form over substance” and ignores the “obvious purpose” of the regulations – “the provision of private space for each sex for reasons of conventional decency”.

    He confirmed that “man” and “woman” in the regulations mean biological man and biological woman, and that:

    an employer would not comply with the obligation under regulation 20 … if he permitted the room for women to be used by some men and vice versa

    On the “policing” concern – that employers would need to station someone at the toilet door – the judge was dismissive. An employer who “in good faith adopted and applied a policy” that female toilets were for biological women and male ones for biological men:

    …would do what is required. The employees concerned would know what was expected of them.

    The idea that compliance requires monitoring each person each day, he said, reveals:

    …a ‘logic’ so strict that it is divorced from reality.

    He also explicitly declined to follow the Edinburgh Employment Tribunal’s reasoning in Kelly v Leonardo, which had described a biological sex interpretation as “unworkable”.

    For universities, many of whose toilet blocks serve staff and students simultaneously – making them both workplace facilities under the 1992 Regulations and services under Part 3 of the Equality Act – the dual status is the practical complicator.

    A facility that has to comply with the workplace regs as an employer obligation may also need to work as student-facing provision where the legal framework and expectations may differ.

    But it’s not just the workplace regs

    The more triumphalist commentary from Sex Matters et al already risks missing something important at paragraph 42, where the judge is clear – even where an employer provides single-sex facilities as required by the workplace regulations:

    …the consequence will not be that a transsexual person is required to use the lavatory that corresponds to biological sex.

    Why? Schedule 22 of the Equality Act provides a defence for employers complying with the workplace regulations – but only against sex discrimination and pregnancy/maternity claims. It doesn’t cover gender reassignment discrimination.

    So a university can’t just point to the workplace regs as a complete answer to a trans employee’s claim. It must also ensure its provision is not discriminatory on grounds of gender reassignment – which in practice means providing additional gender-neutral or individual-use facilities.

    The judge endorsed EHRC’s position that expecting trans people simply to use the facility matching their biological sex, with no alternative, would not be proportionate and would amount to gender reassignment discrimination.

    That principle – proportionality, and the obligation to think about what happens to the people you’re excluding – extends beyond toilets. If a university restricts a women’s staff network, a women’s mentoring programme, a women-only counselling service, or a women’s rep role to biological women and makes no alternative provision for trans staff or students, the same proportionality test under paragraph 28 of Schedule 3 is likely to kick in.

    The service provision nuance

    Meanwhile, the point that GLP is leading on in its public response is also more nuanced than the messaging suggests.

    The EHRC’s interim guidance said flatly that if trans women are permitted to use a single-sex female facility, all biological males must be permitted to use it. The logic is that you can’t exclude some men while admitting others without discriminating on grounds of sex. The same logic would apply to any single-sex service – a women’s support group, a women’s changing room, a women-only event.

    The judge didn’t fully endorse this. He said whether a man excluded from a “trans-inclusive” women’s service would succeed in a direct sex discrimination claim depends on the facts – specifically, whether the different treatment is also less favourable treatment.

    He drew on Smith v Safeway, where different hair-length rules for men and women were held to be different but not less favourable treatment, and said there would be “scope for a strong argument” that a trans-inclusive policy could similarly involve different but not less favourable treatment – at least where the provision is otherwise broadly equivalent.

    But he also said the EHRC’s more cautious position “rests on factual premises that are permissible” and that the court “should hesitate before concluding that the guidance as issued was unlawful”.

    In other words, the EHRC wasn’t wrong – but the position is more fact-dependent than the interim guidance suggested. GLP’s case update claims the ruling means “service providers may lawfully allow trans women to use women’s facilities without being forced to open them to cis men” and that the draft Code of Practice will need rewriting.

    That’s a reasonable but optimistic reading – and it depends on the exact wording of the draft Code, which of course hasn’t been published.

    The death of the shifting comparator

    This bit matters for how universities and SUs might structure women’s representation. In Croft v Royal Mail (2003), one Court of Appeal judge had suggested that at some point during transition, the appropriate legal comparator should shift – so that eventually a trans woman would be compared with other women, and excluding her from women’s provision would need to be justified on that basis.

    The judge said this reasoning “cannot survive the reasoning in For Women Scotland”. There is no stage of transition at which the law treats a trans woman as equivalent to a biological woman for Equality Act purposes.

    For anyone with women’s officer roles, women’s societies, Athena Swan structures, or women’s networks that were premised – even implicitly – on the idea that trans women who had progressed sufficiently in transition should be treated as women under the EA, that premise is gone.

    The “gossip” point

    The three claimants raised concerns that being forced to use gender-neutral facilities would out them as trans. The judge acknowledged these were “sincerely held” but said:

    ..it ought rarely, if ever, be the case that a person using a unisex lavatory rather than an available single-sex one will ever be a matter of comment by others…

    He went on to argue that workplace gossip is something everyone can expect to bear “from time to time”.

    GLP has been vocal in response – it argues that the judgment reveals judges who:

    …assume they understand the reality of what it is to be trans in a transphobic world.

    The outing risk extends well beyond toilets. If a trans woman who has been attending a women’s staff network or accessing a women’s counselling service in a university for years is suddenly excluded, the visibility of that change is far greater – and the consequences in a small department or research group potentially more acute – than someone switching which toilet they use.

    Whether courts will take the same view of outing risk in those contexts is unclear, and the appeal is likely to test this point.

    The floor, the ceiling, and common sense

    Another passage universities might pay close attention to comes at paragraphs 25-27. The judge notes that neither the Equality Act nor the workplace regulations provide:

    …a comprehensive code on when or in what form lavatories or other facilities must be provided or who may or must use them.

    But both provide:

    …a floor for provision of facilities. But neither provides a ceiling.

    He describes as “fanciful” the idea that these laws “seek to regulate every possibility that can arise, day-to-day,” and observes that talk of a “right” to use a particular lavatory is, if intended as a legal right, “a bizarre turn of phrase.”

    Then:

    Those who provide facilities whether to the public or to their employees should comply with the law but also be guided by common sense and benevolence rather than allow themselves to be blinkered by unyielding ideologies.

    It’s a caution against rigid approaches from either direction, in a case both sides have framed as existential – and a description of what universities have largely muddled along with, given the absence of statutory guidance has made it so hard to do with confidence.

    What happens now

    Everything still hinges on the Code of Practice. Under sections 14-15 of the Equality Act 2006, the EHRC can only issue it with the Secretary of State’s approval, and it must then be laid before Parliament.

    The Good Law Project (GLP) argues the judgment forces a rewrite. Sex Matters wants it laid “without further delay.” The Minister for Women and Equalities – who, notably, intervened in this case without backing the EHRC’s position on service provision, and whose submissions the judge found “not easy to follow” – could approve it, send it back, or sit on it. We don’t know the draft’s exact wording, and we don’t know what the Minister will do.

    GLP has announced it will appeal, with a focus on workplace provisions and the outing risk, and has indicated willingness to go to Luxembourg or Strasbourg. That could extend the timeline considerably. The Kelly v Leonardo ET decision may also be appealed, though the judge’s emphatic rejection of its reasoning makes that a harder road.

    Meanwhile, the judge described the EHRC’s own process – revising the interim update without flagging changes, then taking it down to pressure the Minister – as “very unsatisfactory”.

    The sector has now been navigating these issues for nearly a year without statutory guidance. Universities and their SUs that have been waiting for the guidance before making decisions on facilities, services, groups, roles and events are running out of road – and may need to make those decisions based on their own reading of the legal framework, in the knowledge that the position may yet shift.

    Neither the ruling, nor the Code when it arrives, will tell any individual university what to do about its specific toilet block, its women’s officer role, its changing rooms, its counselling services, or its sports provision. The obligation to make those decisions proportionately, thoughtfully, and with what the judge called “common sense and benevolence” still falls on the sector.

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  • Realising the educational potential of mass higher education

    Realising the educational potential of mass higher education

    Author:
    Paul Ashwin

    Published:

    This blog was kindly authored by Paul Ashwin, Lancaster University. It is based on a new Open Access book Realising the Educational Potential of Mass Higher Education which was written by an international team of Paul Ashwin, Mags Blackie, Jenni Case, Jan McArthur, Nicole Pitterson, Reneé Smit, Ashish Agrawal, Kayleigh Rosewell, Alaa Abdalla and Benjamin Goldschneider. It can be downloaded here

    There is an increasing disillusionment with mass higher education from both sides of the political spectrum. From the political left, there is a sense of the betrayal of higher education’s promise. This is ascribed to the corporatisation of universities, with a lower quality education offered to students and institutions more focused on prestige and money than speaking truth to power in the face of human atrocities and the devastation of the planet. From the political right, higher education is seen as uninterested in advocating for freedom of speech, having been taken over by a left-wing elite who do not provide anything of educational value to students.

    Whilst coming from different directions these perspectives share the common concern that, in the move to mass higher education, educational rigour has been lost. As a greater number and variety of students have access to higher education, it is claimed that more and more students who are not interested in learning, are studying in impoverished educational institutions, that are not interested in educating them. There are increasingly urgent questions raised about why university degrees demand that students study over several years, in special institutions, taught by expensive teachers who are committed to sustained scholarship in their subject areas. 

    Does higher education transform students?

    Often, the response to these kinds of questions is to argue for the transformative power of higher education. Yet whilst the process of transformation may seem plausible in the arts, humanities and social sciences, does it meaningfully describe how students benefit from studying more fact-based STEM subjects, which are seen as crucial to the global economy? We tried to answer this question through a seven-year longitudinal international research project involving students studying undergraduate degrees in chemistry or chemical engineering in England, South Africa and the USA. These students were from six universities with different levels of prestige, and we followed them from their first undergraduate year for up to four years after graduation.

    We found that the educational potential of these STEM-based degrees lay in the ways that they brought students into relationship to knowledge, that changed their way of engaging with the world. This involved degree programmes taking students inside knowledge so that they could understand how it was relevant for their engagement with the world. Importantly, the knowledge that students engaged with did not consist of single, coherent, authoritative, flat and fixed pieces of knowledge. They were bodies of knowledge that had a structure, and it was this structure that allowed students and graduates to use this knowledge in a variety of contexts

    For students to develop these relationships with structured bodies of knowledge and to go inside knowledge, they needed to understand their study of their subjects as an educational process. If students saw their study of their degree only in instrumental terms, they tended not to see these bodies of knowledge from the inside and were less able to use the knowledge from their degrees in a variety of contexts once they had graduated.  

    So what?

    If this is the case for supposedly fact-based subjects, it seems likely that it will also be the case across higher education. Understanding the educational potential of higher education in this way helps to answer the urgent questions prompted by the disillusionment with mass higher education.

    This is because giving students access to these structured bodies of knowledge is dependent on the programmatic nature of higher education and students being engaged with these bodies of knowledge over an extended period. It requires educational institutions to create the conditions in which this can happen. This is why students need to intensively study systematic degree programmes over several years in special institutions with teachers who have living relationships to knowledge they are teaching. This education cannot be offered by stacking micro-credentials like Lego bricks with no attention given to who is learning them and how they can be sequenced to support particular students to develop understanding.   

    In the face of disillusionment with mass higher education, it takes a great deal of confidence and nerve for universities to modestly assert the value of engaging students with structured of bodies of knowledge. Yet this is where the educational potential of mass higher education lies. Universities are staffed by the most highly educated people in the world; if we cannot meet the challenge of explaining this to wider society, then how much is our belief in the power of knowledge and education actually worth?

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  • One Nation, One Subscription: why it matters for India’s researchers

    One Nation, One Subscription: why it matters for India’s researchers

    by Satveer Singh Nehra, Saloni Chaudhary, and Kanchan Nagpal

    India’s One Nation, One Subscription (ONOS) scheme is one of the most ambitious initiatives in reshaping global access to scholarly knowledge. Approved as a central scheme in November 2024 and rolled out from January 2025, ONOS promises nationwide access to around 13,000 international journals from 30 major publishers for publicly funded higher education and research institutions. Our study aimed to critically examine the potential of this new scheme in transforming India’s research landscape, alongside the challenges involved in its implementation and the opportunities for global accessibility that lie ahead. This blog post abridges the key findings of our study, published in Policy Reviews in Higher Education and highlights how ONOS can foster inclusive growth and research activities.

    While India is among the largest producers of scientific and engineering papers globally, its academic institutions have historically faced significant barriers to accessing high-impact international journals due to restrictive paywalls and exorbitant subscription costs. While premier institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) possess the financial capacity to procure these expensive databases, a vast majority of universities and colleges struggle to provide even rudimentary access to cutting-edge research. This groundbreaking policy seeks to bridge the urban-rural knowledge divide, reduce institutional costs, and position India as a global research leader by integrating paywalled content into the country’s academic mainstream.

    The ONOS initiative is a central scheme formally approved by the Union Cabinet on November 25, 2024. It is administered under the supervision of the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India (PIB, 2025). Implementation of the first phase commenced on 1 January 2025. The scheme is executed by the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET), an Inter-University Centre of the University Grants Commission (UGC), which manages the subscriptions via a centralised portal.

    The financial commitment to this initiative is substantial, with an allocation of approximately ₹6,000 crore ($715 million) for the calendar years 2025, 2026, and 2027. Additionally, the policy includes a central fund of ₹150 crore ($16.9 million) per annum to support authors in paying Article Processing Charges (APCs) for publishing in selected high-quality Open Access journals, thereby aiding researchers who previously had to pay these high costs themselves.

    The scale of ONOS is vast, comprising agreements with 30 leading international publishers, including major entities such as Wiley, Springer Nature, Elsevier ScienceDirect, IEEE, and the American Chemical Society. Through these agreements, approximately 13,000 e-journals across 27 subject categories, ranging from STEM to humanities and social sciences, are made available to institutions. Currently, the initiative encompasses over 6,500 research and development institutes, as well as central and state government universities and colleges. The access mechanism utilises the ONOS portal, where users can access resources on campus via institutional IPs or off campus using the Indian Access Management Federation (INFED) for authentication.

    ONOS as a catalyst for NEP 2020

    The ONOS initiative is not an isolated measure but a strategic enabler of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which envisions transforming India into a global knowledge superpower. The NEP 2020 prioritises universal access to quality education and the fostering of a vibrant research ecosystem (Ullah, 2024). By centralising subscriptions and removing paywalls, ONOS directly supports the NEP’s equity mandate, ensuring that students in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities have access to the same prestigious scholarly journals as those in elite institutions.

    Furthermore, the NEP emphasises multidisciplinary learning, encouraging students to break existing boundaries between disciplines (Kasturirangan, 2019). ONOS supports this pedagogical shift by providing access to a diverse array of multidisciplinary resources, allowing, for instance, engineering students to access social science literature. This aligns with the establishment of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), which aims to foster an innovative culture across Indian universities and research laboratories through financial assistance. The primary impact of ONOS is the democratisation of information, potentially benefiting nearly 1.8 crore (18 million) students, faculty, and researchers. By negotiating collective licenses, the government aims to resolve accessibility issues while ensuring compliance with copyright laws (Nithila Kovai, 2025).

    Prior to ONOS, the country’s collective expenditure on academic journals was estimated at over ₹1,500 crore annually. Through bulk licensing, ONOS aims to reduce these national expenditures on journal access by 30–40% (Chakraborty et al, 2020). By ensuring immediate dissemination of global research to the wider community, the initiative is expected to boost India’s research productivity and citation rates, thereby enhancing the nation’s visibility in the global academic discourse.

    Consequently, ONOS is viewed as a well-thought-out investment in India’s research capacities, designed to create a level playing field for innovation nationwide through enhanced digital infrastructure.

    Possible roadblocks

    Despite its transformative potential, the ONOS initiative faces significant challenges in implementation. A primary concern is the “digital divide” and infrastructure gaps. Over 70% of rural Indian colleges lack reliable internet access, which severely limits the reach of this digital-first scheme. Without robust digital infrastructure and literacy training, the benefits of ONOS may remain concentrated in urban centres, undermining its goal of inclusivity.

    Financial sustainability is another critical issue. Unlike global open-access initiatives such as the EU’s “Plan S“, which mandate freely available research, ONOS relies on a recurring subscription model. Critics argue that this perpetuates dependency on commercial publishers and may strain public finances during economic downturns. There is also concern regarding the dominance of Western publishers, whose profit margins can reach 35–40% (Fazackerley, 2023), potentially reinforcing a system where public funds subsidise corporate profits (Olsson et al, 2020). Furthermore, the current focus is predominantly on STEM disciplines, with insufficient coverage for social sciences, humanities, and regional language scholarship.

    Institutional eligibility also remains a point of contention. There is ambiguity regarding the inclusion of private higher education institutions, which enrol over half of India’s students. Excluding these institutions would significantly diminish the scheme’s impact and reinforce inequities in scholarly access.

    Concluding Remarks

    India’s One Nation One Subscription initiative represents a bold paradigm shift in research policy, moving from fragmented, institution-based access to a unified national entitlement. By guaranteeing access to over 13,000 global journals for millions of users, it promises to catalyse a transformation in the country’s research ecosystem and support the ambitious goals of NEP 2020. However, for ONOS to truly democratise knowledge, it must navigate the challenges of digital infrastructure in rural areas, ensure sustainable funding, and eventually evolve towards a hybrid model that strengthens India’s domestic open-access publishing capabilities alongside these international subscriptions. Success will depend on overcoming publisher resistance, ensuring inclusive coverage across all disciplines and institutional types, and integrating this access with robust support for the dissemination of indigenous research.

    Satveer Singh Nehra is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Library and Information Science, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune. His doctoral research focuses on Open Research Data and Research Data Management, emphasising the need for a national policy framework to strengthen open science initiatives in India. In addition to his primary research area, he actively explores emerging fields such as Digital Humanities and the application of Artificial Intelligence in library environments.

    Dr Saloni Chaudhary is an academic and researcher dedicated to the evolving landscape of Library and Information Science. She currently serves as an Assistant Librarian at the University of Delhi and holds a PhD in Library and Information Science from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Scientometrics, Digital Literacy, and Digital Humanities, where she explores the impact of digital advancements on knowledge systems.

    Dr Kanchan Nagpal is a library and information science professional and works as an Assistant Librarian at the India International Centre.  She holds a PhD degree in Library and Information Science. She is a council member of the Indian Library Association. 

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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  • To Reach Students, College Marketers Prioritize AI Visibility

    To Reach Students, College Marketers Prioritize AI Visibility

    When Abby Isle’s daughter, now a senior in high school, began looking into colleges in late 2024, she had no dearth of information; she had toured colleges across America and Isle had bought her all the requisite guides.

    But parsing that information was difficult. Isle, who has worked in technology for nearly three decades, decided to turn to ChatGPT for advice, telling the artificial intelligence tool what her daughter had liked and disliked about different institutions and the “vibe” she was looking for in her future college.

    “The AI tools were able to help us say, ‘If those are your priorities … here are the schools that best fit that,’” Isle said. Most of the colleges her daughter was looking at were highly selective; ChatGPT helped direct the family toward schools with higher admit rates that still matched her criteria.

    Her daughter ultimately got into Northwestern University, where she had applied early decision—in part, Isle said, at ChatGPT’s encouragement.

    It was only a matter of time before large language models began serving as a college adviser. AI has become central to many young people’s search habits; a survey by the software company Adobe found that 28 percent of Gen Z users launch a search for information by prompting an AI chatbot like ChatGPT. Unsurprisingly, that includes turning to such platforms to ask questions about the college search process; a forthcoming survey from the education consulting firm EAB conducted last November shows that almost half of high school students said they were using AI in their college search process.

    Optimizing for AI

    The way users engage with AI is significantly different from how they use search engines. For one thing, they are likely to ask longer and more specific questions of an AI bot than they would type into a search engine.

    EAB’s report found that students tend to ask AI to make lists (such as a list of nursing programs in California, for example), to help them manage deadlines and application requirements, and to help them compare different schools. Users on social media have also described asking AI to evaluate their chances of getting into specific selective colleges.

    And while the end goal of a Google search is to get a user to click on a relevant link, AI platforms strive to keep the user on the site and engaging with the bot.

    “There are no blue links. They’re not clicking onto websites and finding discovery elsewhere. It’s all happening with just conversations within the LLM,” said Alexa Poulin, chief digital officer at Carnegie Higher Education, a consulting firm. “That’s a massive shift, both in the information that students can gather and how they’re gathering, but also in behavior … they’re relying on AI to surface those answers versus doing their own discovery of going to multiple websites.”

    Poulin said it’s imperative that colleges and universities work to ensure their information is easily and accurately pulled up by AI tools—a practice known as answer engine optimization (AEO) or generative engine optimization (GEO)—which is similar to yet distinct from search engine optimization, or SEO.

    One important element of AEO is ensuring that the content available on a university’s website is up-to-date and accurate; AI can pull from old webpages that students probably wouldn’t find if they were doing their own searches, said Michael Koppenheffer, vice president of marketing, analytics and AI strategy for EAB’s Enroll360 division. Comprehensive and clear information is important, too, because AI tends to hallucinate when it needs to make inferences or fill in blanks. And institutions can also employ strategies to “tell the chatbots where to look and what information is more important,” he said.

    Consultancies and educational technology firms are latching onto universities’ need for AI-optimized websites, with many now advertising AEO services. Still, it’s an imprecise science, and the same inquiry might bring up different results at different moments. Each response from generative AI is crafted in real time and therefore is influenced by a variety of factors.

    “AIs are basically giant probability machines; you never know for sure what they’re going to say, and none of us can completely control what ChatGPT will say in response to a question,” Koppenheffer said. “That is both great in some perspectives, that you’re always going to get a certain amount of free agency, but also a little scary. But [there’s] nothing we can do about that. That is kind of a starting premise.”

    Student Inquiries

    The questions students ask of AI range widely, from broad inquiries about where they should go to college to hyperspecific questions about the financial aid, programs or campus of a specific institution.

    That means colleges aren’t focused solely on ensuring the information that comes up about their institution is accurate; they also must strive for “AI visibility,” a term that refers to how likely it is that a particular brand or organization will appear in AI searches.

    Chris Gage, Belmont University’s vice president for enrollment services, said Belmont hopes to reach students looking for Christian colleges in the South. But when Inside Higher Ed assumed the persona of a prospective student and asked ChatGPT to recommend such colleges, the AI didn’t recommend Belmont—even when the “student” clarified they wanted to study music business, Belmont’s top major.

    “That’s a surprise,” Gage said. “If you’re the prospective student searching for music business, then hopefully … Belmont would certainly come up. It’s our largest academic program.”

    However, Belmont’s marketing team has gotten better results in its own experiments with the tool, Gage noted. And when Inside Higher Ed posed the same question to Claude, another generative AI tool, it asked follow-up questions about major, institution size and Christian denomination. Inside Higher Ed selected answers that fit Belmont’s profile, and Claude suggested Belmont as one of a handful of options.

    Gage noted that the university’s marketing team has identified a number of deficits in its AI visibility, such as the fact that its materials use the terms “Christian” and “Christ-centered” interchangeably. That may make it less likely to appear in a search where a student uses just one of those two terms.

    Rebecca Shineman, executive director of marketing at York College in Pennsylvania, said that her institution—which is also a midsize private college—is trying to take a realistic approach to AI visibility. Institutional leaders know York can’t appear in every search, but they hope it will pop up in searches by students who are looking for the affordability and strong job outcomes that the college “is proud to excel at,” she said.

    “We want to make sure from a strategy standpoint that when they’re asking these questions, we’re able to surface and ultimately that our value and story come through clearly and accurately,” she said.

    When the AI was asked specific questions about Belmont, including what the “vibe” of the campus is like and what scholarships are available to music business majors, it returned responses that were accurate and comprehensive, Gage said. He was not bothered by an answer drawn from a Reddit post about how Belmont is “not a big party school,” he said.

    “I think there’s always a space for a student’s authentic voice online; we want students to know the authentic Belmont, so certainly there are missional initiatives for the university that we’re going to communicate … but there’s also the lived experience for roughly 9,000 students, and that’s going to be 9,000 unique stories,” he said.

    Despite the accuracy of the answers in this trial, critics note that the information coming from generative AI tools is often incorrect. Research released last fall by the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC found that AI tools made significant errors in 45 percent of responses.

    ‘A Little Bit of Tension’

    College access leaders see both pros and cons to students using generative AI in the college search process.

    Bill DeBaun, senior director of data and strategic initiatives with the National College Attainment Network, which represents college access organizations, said “there is a little bit of tension” in students using AI to stand in for college advisers, “because the college access field is deeply interpersonal. The bedrock of what NCAN members have historically done with students is asking students and families to put their trust in advisers and college access programs to provide reliable information and to help navigate a process that is difficult, foreign, uncertain for a lot of students and families.”

    Keeping that interpersonal element alive in the age of AI is crucial, DeBaun said. At the same time, he can see AI being useful to college advisers and prospective students for its ability to parse large datasets quickly, meaning the tools can lead students to institutions or scholarships a given adviser may not be familiar with.

    One college access organization, College Possible, is already utilizing AI in this way. The nonprofit developed its own AI tool—trained on an internal database rather than pulling from across the internet—that can answer student questions when a counselor is not available.

    Shineman of York College said that she sees it as inevitable that students will use AI in the college search process, so colleges are responsible for accommodating that as best they can.

    “We always talk a lot about meeting our students where they are. That can take shape in a lot of different ways,” she said. “I think today, that means including AI-powered search.”

    Isle said that while she sees the benefit of college counselors, parents are best equipped to help their children with the college decision-making process because they know them best. As she sees it, AI is one way to ensure parents have enough information to then guide their children through the college search.

    “I don’t have all the background on all of this, but my advantage [in] helping my kids with this stuff is I know my kid,” she said. “It helps me do the research to have a more informed opinion.”

    (This story has been updated to correct York’s name to York College, not University.)

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  • Don’t Record What You Don’t Want to Have to Watch

    Don’t Record What You Don’t Want to Have to Watch

    So the leadership of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has decided that it can record any professor’s class at any time for any reason, or no reason, as long as the provost and general counsel sign off on it. 

    It’s a spectacularly bad idea, and not only for the obvious reasons.

    I assume that it’s intended to provide ammunition to go after disfavored faculty and/or to instill such a chill on campus that nobody would dare to say anything provocative in the first place. Whether those motivations are locally held or are meant to keep the university below the radar of certain culture warriors, I don’t know. The effects are the same either way, and they’re devastating to the mission of a university. Any professor who teaches anything that makes someone uncomfortable will have a sword of Damocles hanging over them.

    That’s (what should be) the obvious part.

    The less obvious part is the sudden explosion of the scope of conduct for which administrators have to answer. They’ve put themselves on the hook for every statement in every class on campus.

    The campus may have hundreds or thousands of cameras and classes, but very few provosts. Leaving aside the moral and legal issues, there’s an effort issue. Playing Big Brother would get tiring quickly. Any provost with enough time to review the videos of hundreds of classes isn’t doing their job.

    Lacking the capacity—whether technical or legal—to monitor everything gets you off the hook for monitoring everything. This is not to be taken lightly.

    One of the seldom-noted benefits of a high-trust environment is that it allows leaders to focus on structural issues, rather than trying to micromanage every little interaction. High trust is an enormous time saver, and it does wonders for performance. Anyone who has worked under a micromanager knows how quickly acts of subtle sabotage—such as malicious compliance—become appealing. Heaven help the college in which malicious compliance becomes a cultural norm.

    Trust isn’t a blank check, of course, and it isn’t only violated from above. Every so often over the course of my career, I’ve received credible reports of deeply disturbing performance or conduct. There are processes for addressing those. Sometimes they have even involved off-cycle class observations. But those observations were not secret, and they had legible prompts. They were in response to specific, credible, relevant information about specific people, and they were confined to those specific people. For example, many years ago at a prior institution, I got reports of a professor showing up to class drunk. The reports turned out to be true. That led to one of the more memorable confrontations of my career, but it had to be done. I didn’t, and don’t, consider that a violation of academic freedom.

    When classes go well, professors establish climates of trust with their students. Comments that make sense within that climate may seem upsetting out of context. A brief clip of role-play offered without explanation could be deeply misleading. I’m particularly aware of that as someone who has taught courses on the history of political thought. To make different schools of thought intelligible to students, I’ve role-played monarchists, Platonists, Hobbesians, libertarians, fascists, Marxists, liberals, anarchists and conservatives, among others. (I never made a convincing fascist, which I think is to my credit.) It’s a useful teaching technique. If you just took a clip of a few minutes of one of those, you could draw all manner of false conclusions about both me and my class.

    More basically, you never know what’s going to offend someone. If any offended person is capable of forcing review of hours of video, there will be no end to it. I’ve had students offended by Swift’s “Modest Proposal” because they didn’t grasp the concept of satire. And some students actually enjoy claiming offense, whether to forward a political agenda or just to watch chaos unfold. Encouraging that behavior, and chilling honest inquiry, is likely to set off a downward spiral.

    The provost at UNC Chapel Hill has put himself on the hook to answer to everyone who claims offense at anything on campus. That’s an untenable position. There’s a reason that a century’s worth of jurisprudence rejected the “heckler’s veto” standard of free speech, and it was right to do so. Academic freedom protects the students and faculty, yes, but it also protects the administration from falling into a death spiral of surveillance, distrust and paranoia. My free advice to a colleague from afar: Don’t do it. It will not end well.

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  • Some Unbelievable Higher Ed News

    Some Unbelievable Higher Ed News

    Back in December, I wrote a post titled “What Are We Even Doing Here?” in which I discussed some of the head-scratching moves among some higher ed institutions, moves that seemed so at odds with the purported mission of higher ed that you couldn’t help but wonder if these schools were just planning on punting on the mission altogether.

    I didn’t plan on this being a series, but in perusing Inside Higher Ed’s news stories on a daily basis—as I do—my frequent reaction to some of these stories is, “That’s nuts!”

    “Nuts” as in cuckoo, bonkers, batshit, the kind of thing that if we pause and think for even a moment is entirely inconsistent with colleges and universities doing the work most of us believe they’re meant to do.

    The sheer number of these insults to common sense has the potential to numb us to how nuts these things are, but I’m here to say, this stuff is nuts!

    Let’s not lose sight of this fact.

    “Florida Introduces ‘Sanitized’ Sociology Textbook,” by Kathryn Palmer

    As part of Ron DeSantis’s war on diversity, faculty at Florida International University are required to adopt an open-source textbook that “now makes only cursory mentions of important sociological concepts regarding race, gender, sexuality and other topics that have drawn Republican ire.”

    The textbook is the by-product of a process that involved faculty from across different public institutions in Florida as part of a “working group” tasked to create a textbook that would pass political muster and prevent the deletion of sociology as a core general education requirement. I understand why faculty may have thought this was a needle they could thread, but the end result is disastrous and shows how accommodating fanatics means you’re never going to run out of inches (or feet or miles) that they insist you have to give.

    How nuts is this? Extremely, extremely nuts. This is often framed as part of a culture war battle—e.g., DeSantis’s “war on woke”—but that is not what is happening here. A partisan project to direct the course materials that are allowed to be used is not just a violation of academic freedom rights, but an assault on core democratic values.

    “Tenure Eliminated at Oklahoma Colleges,” by Emma Whitford

    Via executive order, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt “decreed the end of tenure” for faculty at regional public and community colleges.

    This is a kind of kill strike for what was previously a slow death through increased adjunctification over time. It’s a declaration that precariously employed, vulnerable faculty are meant to be controlled, rather than being given the freedom to do their jobs to the best of their ability. It is a dark vision for how education works and how people are incentivized to do their best work.

    It’s pretty darn nuts, but it’s a kind of nuttiness that we’ve almost become inured to because it’s so pervasive.

    To fully appreciate how nuts this is, I’ll point you to the work of my Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom colleague Isaac Kamola, who did an annotation of Governor Stitt’s executive order, identifying the doublespeak at work.

    “‘A Barrage of Bills’ Would Overhaul Higher Ed in Iowa—If They Actually Pass,” by Ryan Quinn

    The degree of bonkersness is contingent on whether or not these bills pass, but if they do, whoa, nelly … totally nuts!

    I encourage you to read the article to appreciate the full scope of what’s happening here, but in essence it is an attempt to reorder higher education in the state through legislative fiat by taking wild swings at adopting pet initiatives that will be both unworkable, and, if implemented, will hamstring institutions in ways that will ultimately punish students.

    Perhaps this is the goal, but consider just one bill from the long list: “Make universities liable for 10 percent of students’ defaulted loans.” This so-called accountability measure is, in reality, a short route to ceasing to admit low-income students who are at much higher financial risk over all.

    State legislatures have an important role to play in creating the conditions that allow public institutions to thrive. Iowa’s Legislature is taking that responsibility and substituting half-baked YOLO schemes for what needs to be thoughtful oversight.

    Nuts!

    “Texas A&M Closes Women’s and Gender Studies Programs,” by Kathryn Palmer, and “Plato Censored as Texas A&M Carries Out Course Review,” by Emma Whitford

    These are just the latest incidents at Texas A&M, following last semester’s firing of instructor Melissa McCoul for the sin of doing her job, an incident that also took out the university president. Texas A&M has become something other than a university as we traditionally consider the category.

    The people in charge there, including the state’s politicians who are hell-bent on destroying the prestige of their existing universities, have gone completely nuts.

    “UNC Administrators Can Now Secretly Record Faculty,” by Emma Whitford

    I can’t think of a more conducive atmosphere for intellectual exchange than knowing that at any time your administration can be taping you without your knowledge or permission, can you?

    The guideline that this can be done for “any lawful purpose” essentially allows any surveillance outside of the campus bathrooms.

    This is part of a larger program of signaling that professors are to mind their p’s and q’s, as a previous decision declared that course syllabi will be considered public records and a revision to UNC’s own guidelines for academic freedom now says that material “clearly unrelated to the course description” is prohibited.

    My guess is that many will resign themselves to this new reality and try to keep their heads down so they can continue to do some semblance of their work, but we should not lose sight of how nuts this is.

    These events, as well as the ones I rounded up in the previous post, point to a reality I think we’re going to have to deal with—that there is no past version of public higher education to go back to should we break the fever of Trump and the state-level versions like Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida.

    In truth, that past some believe we should return to never existed, or if it did, it’s been hollowed out for many years. These folks have just come around to raze the empty structures.

    Fortunately, there are groups forming that are starting to organize around the challenges we’re facing. I like to think one I’m involved with as a fellow, the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, is operating in this spirit. If you’re interested in this work, CDAF is currently soliciting applications for its next group of fellows.

    There’s additional good news on this front following the announcement of the launch for the Alliance for Higher Education, a national coalition organized to protect essential freedoms from government interference.

    We don’t have to let the bonkers stuff keep happening. There is a future where we have the freedoms and support we need for higher ed institutions, and the people who intersect with them, to thrive.

    Part of securing that future is maintaining the ability to say loudly and clearly when something is nuts.

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  • Autism, Equity and the Faculty Hiring Process (opinion)

    Autism, Equity and the Faculty Hiring Process (opinion)

    In the academic job market, campus visits are framed as opportunities to showcase scholarship, teaching and collegiality. In practice, however, they often function as multiday social auditions where candidates are expected to move seamlessly from formal presentations to dinners, hallway conversations and spontaneous small talk, all while conveying confidence and intellectual brilliance. For most, these rituals are exhausting but manageable. For autistic scholars, they can be insurmountable barriers.

    As an autistic academic, I have experienced firsthand how hiring practices tend to conflate intellectual ability with social performance. What is measured in these high-stakes encounters is not only one’s capacity to research, teach or mentor, but also one’s ability to follow unspoken social rules and perform normative versions of likability. However, there are strategies and accommodations that universities could put in place to ensure a more equitable process for neurodivergent candidates.

    The Campus Visit as a Social Test

    In general, autistic candidates are disadvantaged by standard interview formats, which, as Christopher E. Whelpley and Cynthia P. May write, tend to “focus on interview skills, appearance, and social interactions rather than on the skills needed for a given position.” Since autistic people’s social abilities and conversational patterns do not align with neurotypical criteria, they can seem rude or uninterested during conversations even when they are focused and engaged. Socialization can be extremely difficult for autistic people, from finding the right way to express their ideas to understanding when it is their turn to speak.

    Campus visits often resemble extended job interviews in which everything is subject to evaluation. From the formal job talk to the casual coffee chat, candidates are expected to embody a polished, spontaneous professionalism. Yet these situations privilege people who excel at social presentation and penalize those for whom such constant interaction is arduous and draining.

    Research confirms this. Sandra C. Jones notes that autistic academics often struggle with the hidden social demands of professional life: “Understanding and following social rules, interpreting others’ actions and reactions, masking autistic behaviors, and combining ‘professional’ and ‘personal’ interactions are effortful activities for many autistic people.” In hiring contexts, where competition is fierce, these challenges become magnified.

    Should I stop talking or should I keep going? Have I really answered this committee member’s question? Am I making too much eye contact, which could be seen as intimidating, or too little, which could come across as rude? These are the questions that I obsessed over during my first campus visit, since the “natural” flow of neurotypical conversations was a mystery to me (and still is to this day).

    “Fitting in” for people whose natural tendencies differ from social norms requires strong impression-management skills, which most autistic people lack. Therefore, we usually tend to mask. We try to mimic nonautistic people’s behaviors and speech patterns, but this is both exhausting and, more often than not, unconvincing. In such conditions, it is not the quality of the candidate’s research or teaching that is being assessed, but their ability to decode invisible rules and follow them under pressure.

    The Importance of Self-Narration

    Academic interviews almost always include open-ended questions with little to no structure, such as “Tell us about yourself,” “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” or “What can you bring to our department?” Neurotypical candidates usually know how to use these questions as a chance to sell themselves; as Katie Maras, et al. write, “Autistic candidates, however, find it difficult to interpret these sorts of questions, hindering their ability to formulate and recall a relevant and appropriately detailed response that conveys their best attributes and most relevant experience.”

    The struggle that autistic people encounter when trying to narrate their own lived experiences is well documented. As Tilait Tanweer et al. put it, “Children and adults with autism have difficulties in recalling events and facts from their personal life,” and, when they do, their storytelling is seen as less coherent and less captivating. The requirement to be able to organize information that is already present in the candidate’s application materials on the spot seems redundant and does not serve any purpose other than, again, forcing the person to conform to neurotypical conversational standards.

    For allistic candidates, vague and open-ended prompts are opportunities to shine. They instinctively know that they are an invitation to employ impression-management tactics that cast them in the best possible light. When asked to talk about themselves, they will try to strike a balance between objective facts and the strategic framing of their professional experiences. They will naturally know what information is relevant and what details could bore their listeners. On the contrary, autistic candidates may find these questions intimidating, because being too concise can seem underwhelming, while too much detail can make one appear boring or arrogant.

    The candidate’s experiences and achievements are already there, in the curriculum vitae and the dossier, so there is technically no reason to ask them to repeat this information. Refraining from asking questions that simply ask candidates to restate facts in the dossier, or making sure that this type of question is formulated in a way that indicates the specific nature of the information being sought, would allow autistic scholars to develop their thought in a way that is appropriate and satisfactory, thus lessening the perceived qualitative and quantitative gap between neurotypical candidates’ answers and theirs.

    In Defense of Written Formats

    From articles to book proposals and grant applications, scholars are constantly required to express their thoughts, ideas and results in written form. However, despite the centrality of writing in academic life, campus visits are almost entirely oral and conversational.

    The job talk or presentation must be done in person and synchronously. The interview portion is done orally and requires candidates to talk about themselves and their research in a natural and relatively informal manner. The various lunches, dinners and spontaneous exchanges with potential colleagues and students are all designed to test the collegiality and sociability of candidates in contexts that range from very formal to casual. Yet the teaching demonstration is probably the only portion of campus visits where oral expression is justified and indispensable.

    In a study conducted by Philippa L. Howard and Felicity Sedgewick on autistic people’s preferred modes of communication, they found that “many participants said they had difficulties with the speed of verbal communication, and so using the written form gave them ‘time to process’ what was said to them, their reaction and their response.” This aligns with previous research, which has constantly shown that autistic people tend to prefer written communication to verbal modes of interaction. Personally, I know I can write a compelling grant proposal, but in a 20-minute Q&A, my answers may come across as flat or convoluted.

    Not only do written formats give autistic people the time to think about their answers and the tone that they want to adopt, but they also reduce “the difficulties autistic people may face in interpreting verbal and non-verbal cues during interactions,” as Órla Walsh et al. put it. The asynchronous and mediated nature of written communication makes it less likely that autistic candidates will be deemed unlikable, rude or awkward by hiring committees. Candidates can focus on clarity, accuracy and substance, qualities that should matter most in academic evaluation.

    Given that application materials already provide hiring committees with detailed insights into a candidate’s skills, the additional demand of a marathon interview seems less like a fair assessment than an unnecessary social filter. In a study of autistic candidates’ experiences of job interviews by Mikaela Finn et al., “Participants suggested changes to the interview structure, including providing the questions … or information on structure … beforehand and being able to ‘write down the answers’ to questions rather than ‘verbalizing’ information.” This type of accommodation could make hiring practices in academia much more equitable without compromising their integrity.

    What Inclusion Could Look Like

    Hiring committees often justify the social intensity of campus visits as a way to assess fit. But fit often functions as a proxy for personality, likability or sociability, which are all qualities that are defined according to neurotypical norms. If universities are serious about equity, they need to rethink what they are measuring. Concrete steps could include providing interview questions in advance, allowing written or asynchronous responses, and reducing the emphasis on social events during campus visits.

    Academic hiring, as it stands, is not a neutral process. It is a social test designed by and for neurotypical people, which systematically disadvantages autistic candidates. By conflating sociability with hireability, committees risk excluding brilliant scholars whose only failing is not knowing how to play by unwritten rules. As I see it, the academy should be in the business of hiring those who can research, teach and think in transformative ways, whether they have mastered small talk and eye contact or not.

    Gabriel Proulx is an assistant professor of French at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada.

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  • Who is stifling whose free speech here?

    Who is stifling whose free speech here?

    This blog was kindly authored by Rose Stephenson, Director of Policy and Strategy at the Higher Education Policy Institute.

    If you haven’t heard the latest in the free speech wars, let me give you the lowdown. Sarah Pochin, Reform MP for Runcorn and Helsby and Jack Anderton, a Reform Party Advisor, requested that the Debating and Political Society at the University of Bangor host them for a question-and-answer session as part of Anderton’s ‘New Dawn Tour’.

    The Debating Society turned them down – more on that in a moment. First, in true debating style, let’s have a Point of Order.

    Pochin and Anderton were not ‘banned’ or ‘no-platformed’. They had asked a society to host them, and the society said no. I could email all the university debating societies in the UK and request that they host me to give a Q&A on whatever particular soapbox I am standing on that week (I have many). They are not violating my right to free speech by turning me down; they might simply have more interesting things to do than to listen to me.

    However, as a result, the Telegraph quotes Pochin as saying: ‘So much for Free Speech. How can Bangor University’s debating society be afraid of debate?’ and Anderton as stating that the society was not ‘interested in debating’.

    I had a look at the Debating Society’s website to see if they are indeed not interested in debating. Debates from the last semester include the following:

    • this house would stop apologising for colonialism;
    • this house would abolish the Human Rights Act;
    • this house believes the Tradwife is feminism’s final boss (fascinating!); and
    • this house believes the government has no right to censor pornography.

    This seems like a fairly robust interest across several complex topics.

    Where this becomes a free speech issue is that the Debating Society put out a rather strong statement turning down the request from Anderton and Pochin, which said:

    The Debating & Political Society received a request from Jack Anderton and Sarah Pochin MP of Reform UK to attend Bangor University and give a Q&A to students. In line with our values, this request was refused. We stand by this decision as a committee. We have zero tolerance for any form of racism, transphobia, or homophobia displayed by the members of Reform UK. Their approach to the lives of others is antithetical to the values of welcoming and fair debate that our society has upheld for 177 years. We are proud to be the first of the debating unions to take a stand against Reform UK. We strongly implore our fellow societies to join us in keeping hate out of our universities.

    So, they didn’t turn Reform down simply because they weren’t interested; they turned them down due to a clash of values. Let’s remember that this is the debating society’s committee, likely a handful of students, who set out their strong feelings about Reform on Instagram.

    Zia Yusuf, Reform’s Head of Policy responded by writing on X:

    Bangor University* have banned Reform and called us racist, transphobic and homophobic. Bangor receives £30 million in state funding a year, much of which comes from Reform-voting taxpayers. I am sure they won’t mind losing every penny of state funding under a Reform government. After all, they wouldn’t want a racist’s money, would they?

    *it wasn’t the university, it was the committee of one society of the students’ union.

    Perhaps I am being naive here. But, if Reform really, really, really believed in promoting free speech at universities, they might have replied to state that their offer continues to stand to the Debating Society and that they hope to engage in the future. Instead, they threatened to withdraw public funding from the only university in north-west Wales and one of the region’s biggest employers.

    Yes, the students have a strong opinion here. But surely that opinion itself should be protected as a form of free speech? If public figures have the right to say offensive and harmful things, surely people listening have the right to state that they find these to be offensive and harmful. Instead of taking an approach to work with the society, Reform has dropped an anvil of a threat on the heads of a handful of students.

    Pochin continues to have a significant national platform, and Anderton is on tour and according to his website will be visiting The University of Edinburgh , Lancaster University, The University of Cambridge , The University of Exeter, Durham University, and the University of York.

    To be clear, when I visit and speak to universities, I am advocating, in the strongest possible terms, that colleagues engage with their local Reform party members and councillors. Further, I explain that they must consider the 27% of the population who hold a medium-level qualification (A-Level or equivalent) and voted for Reform in the last election. To what extent does this group of voters feel like university is a place for them?

    I’ve also written extensively on the topic of free speech in universities, and you can find my blogs here. In particular, I have written about the role universities have in promoting free speech:

    If we truly want to promote free speech, we have to teach the skills of unlearning: curiosity, open-mindedness, resilience and tolerance. This isn’t to say that all students should change their minds or perceptions. This might happen, but what we also need to develop is the curiosity to understand why someone thinks or believes differently from us. What led them to this belief? Why is it important to them? And, in turn, why do we hold the belief that we do? What led us to that viewpoint and why is it important to us?

    And yes, there may well be a place for this at Bangor University. However, I will continue to defend the students’ right to say that something is racist if they believe that this is the case.

    So, in this latest episode of the culture wars, there are three important takeaways for me:

    1. You have the right to free speech, but you don’t have the right to force people to listen.
    2. You have the right to free speech (within the law) that may be offensive and harmful, and others have the equivalent right to speak out against this. Free speech is a two-way street.
    3. There is plenty of work to be done in universities to develop curiosity and open engagement with challenging ideas. Perhaps it would be helpful if our politicians also demonstrated these attributes.

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  • Discovering the Continuum of Active Learning through Junior Faculty Group Research Pilot Study – Faculty Focus

    Discovering the Continuum of Active Learning through Junior Faculty Group Research Pilot Study – Faculty Focus

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