WASHINGTON, Feb. 6, 2026 — For almost a year, the Federal Trade Commission has unconstitutionally used its broad regulatory powers to attack NewsGuard, a private news organization, because it doesn’t like its news ratings.
Now, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of the company to protect NewsGuard’s First Amendment rights and remind the federal government it has no business using its power to censor journalism whose reporting it opposes.
“NewsGuard’s rating service is quintessential journalistic activity protected by the First Amendment,” FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere said, “and the Supreme Court has unanimously affirmed that the government has no legitimate role in saying what counts as the right balance of private expression — to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks is biased.”
Since its founding in 2018 by veteran journalists L. Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and Steven Brill, the founder of The American Lawyer and Court TV, NewsGuard has published ratings of the reliability of news websites based on fully disclosed journalistic criteria. These criteria include whether news sites verify their information, regularly correct errors, and disclose ownership and financing, among other transparency metrics. NewsGuard’s services are used by consumers and businesses alike, including advertisers, to weigh the credibility of news platforms where their ads may appear.
Websites across the political spectrum earning low scores have objected to their ratings. In recent years, some conservative websites earning lower scores than their conservative competitors have sought government censorship of the ratings.
FIRE’s lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, lays out three ways in which the federal government violated the company’s First Amendment rights:
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson and the agency engaged in unconstitutional retaliation against NewsGuard based on its perceived viewpoints.
The government violated the First and Fourth Amendments by an unjustified and overly burdensome civil investigation into the company’s operations.
The FTC unconstitutionally targeted NewsGuard for its First Amendment activity, including by conditioning a merger last fall between advertising companies Omnicom and IPG on a prohibition against the new conglomerate using news rating services when determining where to buy ads — drafted and amended to ensure the ban would prohibit access to NewsGuard’s ratings.
FIRE is seeking an injunction to stop the FTC’s excessive investigation into NewsGuard’s practices and to stop the government from enforcing the merger condition.
“Disagreement over news coverage is precisely the kind of expression the First Amendment protects,” Corn-Revere said. “If the government, regardless of the party in charge, can use its levers of power to punish an organization over its coverage, there’s no reason it can’t do the same to pursue other news organizations that it disfavors.”
NewsGuard’s statement on today’s filing is availablehere.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought — the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates Americans about the importance of these inalienable rights, promotes a culture of respect for these rights, and provides the means to preserve them.
CONTACT: Karl de Vries, Director of Media Relations, FIRE: 215-717-3473; [email protected]
A year ago I wrote a blog post inviting the SRHE community to reflect on what it means to be political for today’s students. That piece was a thought experiment exploring political agency beyond traditional notions of student activism or protest. I now want to extend this thinking by considering whether student-as-consumer complaints can also be understood as a form of political agency.
Consumerism has increasingly invaded new sectors of society, including higher education. In the UK, consumer rights and relationships are actively promoted through higher education policy, which frames students as consumers and universities as providers. The Office for Students, the main regulator in England, encourages students to understand their consumer rights with statements such as: ‘Knowing your consumer rights should help you to be protected if things go wrong on your course’. Although the phrase “things going wrong” remains ambiguous, universities must comply with consumer protection law by providing accurate, up-to-date information about their offerings and maintaining internal complaints and appeals processes for students who wish to raise concerns about their experience. These processes are broadly similar across institutions, typically moving from informal resolution to formal complaints, and, if unresolved, escalation to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) – the body responsible for reviewing unsettled student complaints in England and Wales.
While it may be a ‘chicken and egg’ question as to whether the rise in complaints or the introduction of formal procedures came first, what is clear is that student complaints have grown significantly. Although university-level complaint data is confidential, we know that the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) received 3,613 complaints in 2024 – an increase of over 130% compared to 2016. The financial implications are notable: £677,785 was awarded to students following a “Justified” decision, and an additional £1,809,805 was offered as part of settlements in 2024. It is reasonable to assume that university-managed complaints have experienced a similar surge.
This peak in complaints and related institutional procedures raises an important question: should we view complaints not merely as an inconvenience or evidence of institutional shortcomings, but as a process that activates certain forms of agency within the student experience? Specifically, could this agency represent a new form of political agency in a context where students may be reluctant to engage in traditional activism for fear of jeopardising their academic success and financial investment?
Most student complaints originate – at least from the perspective of those making them – in response to perceived institutional failure or wrongdoing. Complaints are therefore generally directed against some form of injustice. While students can raise concerns about a wide range of issues, the OIA statistics indicate that service-related complaints, eg poor teaching quality, undelivered services, or misleading marketing, account for roughly one third of all cases handled by the OIA.
Courage
Like any form of political action, making a complaint requires considerable courage and perseverance. Sara Ahmed’s work highlights how raising a complaint can make the complainant vulnerable, positioning them as the locus of an institutional problem. Similar ideas resonate with Foucault’s notion of parrhesia – truth-telling as a courageous act that is both risky and potentially transformative for the individual.
Social spillovers
Although a student complaint is typically an individual act, it carries an element of publicness. Complaints can create opportunities for students to engage with their broader social context and advocate for fairness in higher education. This ethical stance may ripple outward, influencing others and contributing to wider institutional change; for example, when a single complaint leads to policy or practice reforms.
While we may debate whether student complaints are a ‘necessary evil’ in market-driven higher education, I invite readers to consider whether raising a complaint might also be a courageous and transformative experience for our students. If we allow ourselves to think this way, complaints could become an important lens for understanding how today’s students exercise their political agency.
Raaper, R (2024). Student Identity and Political Agency. Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights Oxon: Routledge
Professor Rille Raaper is in the School of Education at Durham University. Rille’s research interests lie in the sociology of higher education with a particular focus on student identity, experience and political agency in a variety of higher education settings. Her research is primarily concerned with how universities organise their work in competitive higher education markets, and the implications market forces have on current and future students. The two particular strands of Rille’s research relate to: a) student identity and experience in consumerist higher education; b) student agency, citizenship and political activism. [email protected]
Texas A&M University’s move last week to close its women’s and gender studies program is highlighting the longstanding vulnerabilities of a field that grew out of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s and raising questions about its future.
While faculty and free expression advocates decried the decision as Texas’s latest assault on academic freedom, conservative pundits praised the program’s demise—as well as the elimination of six additional classes—after a course review found them misaligned with a new system board policy limiting classroom discussions of “race or gender ideology.”
“Texas A & M’s re-examination of its core curriculum and degree programs charts the path forward for other universities that want to ensure their degree programs are high-quality, value-neutral, transparent, and cost-efficient,” Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president and legal fellow at the right-wing organization Defending Education, told Fox News Monday. “Others should follow the university’s example.”
But Texas A&M, which also cited low enrollment as a driver of the women’s and gender studies program’s closure, is already following a trend that started years ago. Since 2023, a spate of other universities—including New College of Florida, Wichita State University and Towson University—have also shuttered their women’s and gender studies programs and departments.
All of these closures have left scholars “saddened, frightened, and enraged about the current state of the field,” according to a 2025 statement from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), “[W]e must not despair. We must resist.”
But given the intensified financial and political pressures to root out all diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that universities across the country are under, women’s and gender studies scholars expect the interdisciplinary field—and other affinity studies—to face even more scrutiny and program closures in coming years. However, that pressure likely won’t be enough to entirely dismantle the field, which has influenced many other fields over the past 55-plus years.
“What we are experiencing now is an alarming, but not surprising, escalation of nefarious maneuvers meant to repress our reach and impact such as demonizing our field and our scholar-practitioners, distorting our theories, and banning the use of inclusive language to defund our research,” Jessica N. Pabón, president of NWSA, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed.
Scholars believe much of that backlash stems from the field’s aim to interrogate the gender and sexuality norms that the Trump administration and its allies are trying to mandate through policies that stifle academic research and classroom discussion about women and the LGBTQ+ community.
“Our field poses questions and produces knowledge that directly challenges systems of power that rely on the subjugation and exploitation of some to the benefit of the most privileged in society,” Pabón said. “Our scholarship is meant to inform and empower the populations that those in power (i.e., the ones attacking our field) control, discipline, and punish for questioning the social order, the status quo.”
It’s not possible to put this cat back in the bag. We’re never going to get rid of the study of gender. It’s just too integrated into many things—and women won’t have it.”
Joan Wolf, an associate professor in the sociology department at Texas A&M
A History of Critiques, Attacks
Attacks on scholarship about women, gender and sexuality are nothing new.
In 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler ascended to power in Germany, the Nazis looted and burned the entire contents of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. In the 21st century, numerous other countries, including Russia, Brazil and Hungary, have taken up the anti-gender studies torch. For instance, in 2018 the Hungarian government withdrew accreditation from gender studies programs, with one official remarking that it “has no business [being taught] in universities,” because it is “an ideology not a science.”
And as American politics has drifted further to the right in recent years, the discipline has become a favorite target of right-wing criticism here.
Even before the second Trump administration issued executive orders broadly banning DEI and “gender ideology” in higher education, Republican lawmakers in Wyomingand Floridahad already attempted to defund women’s and gender studies programs, accusing them of indoctrinating students and questioning the degree’s worth. In 2023, New College’s board of trustees voted to eliminate the gender studies program after Christopher Rufo, a New College of Florida trustee and vocal DEI opponent declared, “There is great historical precedent for abolishing programs that stray from their scholarly mission in favor of ideological activism.”
The gender studies program at New College began in 1995.
Independent Picture Service/Universal Images Group/Universal Images Group Editorial/Getty Images
One year later, Florida governor Ron DeSantis ordered the state to study the return on investment of remaining gender studies programs and other majors, such as nursing, computer science and finance, asserting that “It’s not fair [that] the taxpayer,” referencing truck drivers specifically, should pay for student loans “for someone’s degree in gender studies.” (According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, graduates of cultural and gender studies programs earn a median annual income of $63,000 compared to a $66,000 median for all graduates with a bachelor’s degree.)
But skepticism about the value of women’s and gender studies predates the Trump administration.
“We are accustomed to this false idea that studying gender or studying sexuality in an inclusive and intersectional manner is not ‘real’ research,” Pabón said. “We’ve received this critique from many of our academic peers for the entirety of our existence, a sentiment that comes from the eugenicism and biological essentialism that have kept women, gender expansive folks, disabled, and racially minoritized folks outside of the classroom, textbooks, and canons of intellectual work.”
Challenging those sentiments is what spurred the creation of the field more than 50 years ago as more and more women gained access to higher education, entering graduate programs and getting hired as faculty.
“When they got into these positions, they began to ask questions about the history of women,” said Carrie Baker, chair of the women, gender, and sexuality program at Smith College. “They asked ‘Where are the women in literature? Where are the women writers? Where are women in history?’”
“The influence of Women’s Studies has touched almost every traditional academic field,” Baker said. For example, “the fact that we now do medical studies on women at all is due to [those critiques].”
Knowledge is a tricky thing to control. You can refuse to fund certain types of research and can cancel classes, and people will find alternative ways to share and make new knowledge.”
Amy Reid, program director of PEN America’s Freedom to Learn initiative
‘More Necessary Now’
And despite the recent criticism, enrollment in women’s and gender studies courses was on the rise as of 2023, the latest year for which data is available.
“Women’s and gender studies is more necessary now than ever to understand what’s going on,” said Baker, adding that enrollment in her courses doubled after Trump was elected. “The policies of the Trump administration hurt women and those hurt women are going to need us. … Going backward on gender issues is going to put a lot of women in bad situations.”
However, enrollment numbers in most of these programs still look small compared to more mainstream majors. And many universities have cited low enrollment as the reason given for closing women’s and gender studies programs; Texas A&M, for instance, noted that its program has just 25 majors and 31 minors enrolled prior to announcing plans to wind it down last Friday.
“One of the biggest reasons why we have low enrollment is that we have no resources and students don’t even know we exist,” said Joan Wolf, an associate professor in the sociology department at Texas A&M who has taught women’s and gender studies courses there for decades. “We’re not going to have as many majors as something like psychology, but that’s never been the case.”
Often, women’s and gender studies exists as a program, not a department, as is the case at Texas A&M. That typically means faculty have shared appointments in other departments, leaving programs with small budgets and reduced ability to advocate for more resources. Nonetheless, the classes they offer help to round out students’ education.
“The big service women’s and gender studies do is in the minors,” Wolf said. “I’ve had students pursuing careers in marriage counseling, gynecology and business who want to understand the social dimensions of gender.”
The Texas A&M program cuts follow a new policy that restricts the teaching of race and gender.
Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
However, eliminating the women’s and gender studies program at Texas A&M or elsewhere won’t stop students and faculty from considering gender in their scholarly work and beyond.
“It’s not possible to put this cat back in the bag,” Wolf said. “We’re never going to get rid of the study of gender. It’s just too integrated into many things—and women won’t have it.”
But the field’s success in influencing so many other fields, doesn’t justify dismantling it either, said Amy Reid, program director of PEN America’s Freedom to Learn initiative and former director of the now-defunct gender studies program at New College of Florida.
“Gender Studies, women’s and gender studies, have a methodology that is distinct from the methodology of other disciplines,” she said. “It allows people to expand beyond the disciplinary bounds of any one field, and that creative synthetic process is important for students who are trying to learn.”
And that’s also the value-add of other interdisciplinary fields—such as Black studies, Indigenous Studies and Middle Eastern studies—which like women’s and gender studies, sprang from the entry of nonwhite scholars to the professoriate in the mid-20th century after racial segregation was outlawed.
While the professoriate has become more diverse in terms of gender, race and ethnicity, those gains are “connected to the devaluing of higher education as a field,” Reid said. “When higher education was the domain of white men, it was seen as more prestigious; as women and people of color have gotten footholds in higher education, lo and behold, the salaries have gone down and the sector is more vulnerable to attack.”
Reid suspects many of those other affinity fields will also face increased threats and criticisms—if they aren’t already—amid federal and state crackdowns on university curricula. As of last week, the University of Iowa is still reviewing low-enrollment majors, including African American studies and gender, women’s and sexuality studies, for potential elimination or consolidation.
“We are going to see more closures over the next number of years, and we’re going to continue to see our students across the country paying the price,” she said. “But knowledge is a tricky thing to control. You can refuse to fund certain types of research and can cancel classes, and people will find alternative ways to share and make new knowledge.”
Faculty must sign the memo by Feb. 10, but no one will be punished if they decline to do so.
JasonDoiy/iStock/Getty Images
Faculty members in the University of Houston’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Science were asked to sign a three-page memo pledging not to “indoctrinate” their students, the Houston Chronicle reported.
In a November email to faculty, Houston president Renu Khator wrote that the university’s responsibility is to “give [students] the ability to form their own opinions, not to force a particular one on them. Our guiding principle is to teach them, not to indoctrinate them.” The recent memo, sent by college dean Daniel O’Connor, asks faculty to “document compliance” with Khator’s note. It’s a way to ensure all faculty members are compliant with Texas’s Senate Bill 37, O’Conner told associate English professor María González in a meeting. The law mandates regular reviews of core undergraduate curriculum but does not address indoctrination or what material can or cannot be taught.
By Feb. 10, faculty must signal their agreement with the following five statements: “A primary purpose of higher education is to enhance critical thinking;” “Our responsibility is to give students the ability to form their own opinions, not to indoctrinate them;” “I understand the definition and attributes of critical thinking;” “I design my courses and course materials to be consistent with the definition and attributes of critical thinking;” and “I use methods of instruction that are intended to enhance students’ critical thinking.”
Faculty immediately pushed back. The University of Houston American Association of University Professors chapter encouraged faculty members to use proposed “conscientious objector” language in response, which states, in part: “The premise of this assertion is a straw man, and I am concerned that my signing of this letter could serve as some admission of guilt concerning these false accusations. As such, I request that you accept this letter, in which I am asserting that I have never engaged in indoctrination and that I take offense, as a scholar, at such insinuations.”
González said O’Conner told her that “no punitive actions will be directed at anyone” who doesn’t sign the acknowledgement form, but that he will have to review the syllabi of any faculty member who doesn’t sign the form. González refused to sign the acknowledgement or even click the link, she said.
Three more U.K. universities have confirmed they are not taking subscriptions to Elsevier journals, with one Russell Group institution hitting out at the “financially unsustainable” terms of the nationally agreed deal.
In a statement published Jan. 27, the University of Sheffield revealed it was signing up to three-year deals with Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, Wiley and Sage but was walking away from an offer by Elsevier, the world’s biggest academic publisher.
“Unfortunately, the Elsevier deal continues to be financially unsustainable and we will not be in a position to subscribe to this deal,” it explained.
Both institutions added they would take up deals with the four other main publishers.
Sheffield and Surrey were among three U.K. universities to terminate their previous deal with Elsevier at the start of 2025. The third institution— the University of York—has not yet commented publicly on whether it is taking up Elsevier’s revised offer for 2026 onwards, but its library site indicates researchers do not have access to the publisher’s titles.
In December, the sector IT body Jisc, which has been leading talks with the “big five” academic publishers on behalf of the U.K. sector, announced it had concluded negotiations after nine months of talks. While many universities, including the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh and Oxford, have confirmed they are taking up all the deals, some institutions have chosen to reject the offer from Elsevier, which publishes Cell and The Lancet, on cost grounds.
According to Sheffield’s statement, its decision to opt out of the Elsevier deal reflects “proposals agreed with the University Executive Board to significantly reduce library spending on resources over a three-year period in response both to financial pressures and ongoing concerns about the sustainability of the commercial scientific publishing model.”
“The main focus for the start of 2026 has been on the largest ‘big deals’ (including Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley) which expired in December 2025,” it continued, adding it “reviews all subscriptions for value for money on an annual basis.”
A Lancaster University spokesperson said: “While agreements with Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis and Wiley for 2026 onwards are in place following Jisc negotiations, [the university’s] deal with Elsevier has not been renewed.”
Universities had been seeking price reductions of between 5 and 15 percent on the $152 million spent annually with these five publishing houses when their deals expired at the end of 2025.
In a statement, Elsevier said it was “delighted to see a high level of participation in our agreement across the sector, while recognizing that financial pressures mean a handful of institutions will need to work with us individually to assess their options.”
“Together with Jisc, we continue to advance open access in ways that are sustainable and equitable, while ensuring U.K. researchers have access to trusted, high-quality content and innovative tools that support discovery and societal impact,” it added.
Green River College trustees announced this week they voted to terminate President Suzanne Johnson’s contract following a budget crisis that prompted campus wide cuts, KUOW reported.
The college’s budget deficit climbed to a projected $14.2 million last year, prompting Johnson to call for a hiring freeze and 5 percent cuts across every division, though a spokesperson told the NPR affiliate that Green River has since achieved a balanced budget. But Johnson was ousted amid the fallout when the board terminated her contract ahead of a scheduled no-confidence vote.
Faculty quoted in the report argued she was too slow to act on financial challenges and not transparent enough about the college’s budget squeeze.
The radio station noted that the Board of Trustees did not specify why Johnson’s contract was terminated and credited her with increasing bachelor’s degree offerings and enrollment at the public community college in Washington state, which she led for nearly a decade. Trustees praised her for leading the college through the coronavirus pandemic with “a steady hand while consistently demonstrating compassion, understanding, and care for our campus community.”
The board appointed vice president of college relations, George Frasier, as interim president.
I’ve spent much of my career working as a college administrator. I’ve held senior roles, carried expansive portfolios, and had titles that critics of higher education increasingly cite as evidence of “administrative bloat.” I understand why those titles and the organizational charts behind them can feel alienating to faculty. They can reinforce an unhealthy sense of “us versus them” on campus.
But after years inside those roles, I’ve come to believe that title inflation is not the core problem it’s often made out to be. It’s visible. It’s frustrating. And it’s easy to blame. However, focusing solely on titles risks mistaking a symptom for the disease, and in the process, leaving the real cause of administrative overload unexamined.
That’s why Austin Sarat’s recent Inside Higher Ed essay asking, “How Many Vice Presidents Does a College Need?” resonated with me, even as I think it ultimately misdiagnoses the challenge. Sarat is right to be uneasy about what he calls the “vice presidentialization” of higher education. Titles matter. Hierarchies matter. And the proliferation of vice presidents deserves scrutiny.
But the growth of administrative titles is not what is hollowing out institutional capacity or widening the divide between faculty and administrators. It is what happens when leadership repeatedly avoids the more challenging work of setting priorities and enforcing limits.
Criticism of administrative growth in higher education is not new, and it is not entirely unfounded. Colleges and universities have undeniably expanded their administrative functions over time. But the ideas behind many of those roles are sound and, in many cases, essential. Retention matters. Financial aid matters. Student support, compliance and data matter. Investing in these functions improves student success. The problem begins with what happens after those roles are created.
Over time, administrators are assigned work that is only loosely connected or not connected at all to the responsibilities their titles suggest. Priorities proliferate. New initiatives emerge. New reporting requirements arrive from accreditors, legislators, donors and boards. Crises, real and perceived, demand immediate attention. Almost nothing is ever taken away. Each new priority is layered on top of existing work, often without clarity about duration, ownership or trade-offs. Vice presidents effectively become executives’ administrative assistants.
To understand an institution’s true priorities, don’t start with the strategic plan. Look instead at how administrators are actually spending their time. What you’ll often find is that people hired to do one essential job are doing five or six others instead. Much of that work is not merely peripheral; it is squarely outside the scope of the role. This is not a failure of individual administrators. It is a failure of organizational discipline.
I know many of the people filling these roles. I have been one of them. They are not avoiding faculty or students. They would love to spend some time in a classroom. They are not ignoring phone calls and emails out of indifference. Most of them are in it for the right reasons: the students and the national imperative of postsecondary attainment. If they are rarely in their offices at all, it is because they are being pulled into meetings, task forces and crisis response for issues far removed from their core responsibilities. Many work nights and weekends, skip vacations and still fall behind, not because they lack commitment but because the system virtually guarantees overload.
This is where Sarat’s critique falls short. It’s not that administrators take their titles too seriously. It’s that institutions take on too many priorities without making corresponding choices about what not to do. And while many of those initiatives might be “good,” too many of them fall outside the core scope of educating students. The result is not just administrative strain, but less institutional attention devoted to teaching and learning itself.
Our colleges and universities are under greater and more varied pressure than ever. They are being squeezed from every direction: demographic decline, rising costs, declining public investment, growing accountability demands and increasingly diverse student needs have made it impossible to continue operating as if capacity were unlimited. Yet too often, institutional “strategy” still amounts to adding priorities rather than choosing among them. What this moment demands instead is institutional redesign, a deliberate rethinking of structures, roles and work so that colleges and universities can focus on what matters most for today’s students.
Real strategy is not about what initiatives institutions adopt, but what they deliberately decide not to do. In a moment when today’s students need clearer pathways, stronger support and better outcomes, institutions do not have the luxury of letting work continue to creep in unchecked, or of trying to be all things to all people. When leaders avoid making those choices, the pressure doesn’t disappear. They push it downward and outward until adding people and titles becomes the default way to cope.
Eventually, something must give. When a vice president reaches the limit of what one person can reasonably manage, institutions rarely narrow the role or clarify boundaries. Instead, they add another layer: an associate vice president, an assistant vice president. Titles proliferate not because administrators crave status, but because institutions use people and titles as workarounds for unresolved leadership failures.
Ironically, this is precisely what deepens the divide Sarat worries about. When administrators are stretched impossibly thin, they become less present, less responsive and less connected to academic life. Faculty experience this as indifference or bureaucratic arrogance. In truth, it is structural misalignment. The distance is real, but it is produced by overload, not hierarchy.
Which is why the solution cannot simply be fewer vice presidents or humbler titles. It must start with presidents, boards and faculty leaders willing to exercise real leadership discipline. That means distinguishing between core academic work and aspirational initiatives. It means abandoning programs and committees as readily as launching them. And it means acknowledging an essential truth that higher education often avoids: Adding priorities without subtracting others is not strategic ambition—it is organizational debt.
The best administration is often invisible, not because it lacks value, but because it is doing its job so well that teaching and learning can take center stage. Centering students and their education should mean fewer symbolic fights over titles and more honest conversations about priorities, capacity and trade-offs.
Sarat is right to warn against importing corporate hierarchy into higher education. However, to address administrative bloat seriously, we must look beyond the organizational chart. The real question is not how many vice presidents a college needs. It is the number of priorities an institution is willing to abandon to serve its academic mission effectively. This is a test of leadership and discipline. We need to do a better job ensuring that our institutions are designed around teaching our students rather than running an ever-expanding business enterprise.
PJ Woolston is director of strategic insights for Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all.
This blog was kindly authored by Dr Emma Ransome, Academic Lead for Teaching and Learning at Birmingham City University.
Assessment is fast becoming a central focus in the higher education debate as we move into an era of generative AI, but too often institutions are responding through compliance and risk-management actions rather than fundamental pedagogical reform. Tightened regulations, expanded scrutiny and mechanistic controls may reassure quality assurance systems, but they run the risk of diluting genuine transformation and placing unsustainable pressure on staff and students alike.
Assessment is not simply a procedural hurdle; it is a pivotal experience that shapes what students learn, how they engage with content and what universities and employers prioritise as valuable knowledge and skills. If reform is driven through compliance, we will miss opportunities to align assessments with the learning needs of a graduate entering the gen-AI era.
Generative AI as a lens on existing assessment practices
Tools such as ChatGPT pose real questions for assessment validity and integrity, but they also expose long-standing systemic tensions. The UK Quality Assurance Agency’s sector guidance on generative AI highlights that assessment practices developed under traditional paradigms are under strain in a world where students can access powerful text-generating tools online.
The QAA’s advice emphasises that institutions need sustainable assessment strategies that move beyond detection alone and calls for principled redesign rather than reactive policies. Increasingly, generative AI is being referred to as a ‘wicked problem’, one not amenable to simple fixes like prohibition, but requiring institutional permission to innovate, iterate and even compromise in assessment design.
The costs of compliance-based reform
A compliance-based reaction carries serious consequences, such as intensifying the workload of staff increasingly burdened with policing practices, interpreting ambiguous guidance and moderated contested outcomes. All of this adds to existing pressures on academic workload, without improving learning or outcomes for students. Despite there being tools to detect AI use, they are often unreliable and ethically complex, reinforcing mistrust and confusion between staff and students, rather than pedagogic clarity.
Where punitive policies are implemented, student engagement may be reduced or redirected towards risk avoidance, but this does little to support meaningful learning or support students in developing their own academic judgement. Given that graduates will enter a workforce in which generative AI is increasingly embedded, universities have a responsibility to support students in developing the critical, ethical and reflective judgement needed to use such tools well, rather than encouraging avoidance.
Finally, the risk to institutional reputation is heightened, increasing media coverage and regulator warnings are prompting calls for redesign rather than doubling down on detection regimes. However, to protect reputations, this needs to be meaningful, not simply substituting written assessments with oral presentations or similar surface level changes that ultimately reproduce the same underlying problems in a different format. Universities need to revisit the purpose, design and resourcing of assessment, rather than treating redesign as a technical fix for reputational anxiety.
Why this is really an institutional problem
Generative AI hasn’t created assessment problems – it has exposed them. Traditional formats such as essays, timed exams or standardised tasks have long been outdated and have never been aligned to key capabilities such as critical thinking, synthesis or ethical judgement. What AI amplifies is the misalignment between assessment and design and learning purpose.
The Australian Assessment Reform for the Age of Artificial Intelligence report highlights that existing challenges in assessment predate AI, but AI has sharpened the urgency to rethink practice rather than simply resisting technological change. Redesign strategies that integrate AI to support learning, depend less on the technology itself and more on how assessment purpose, workload and governance are aligned to enable meaningful use.
Toward trust-based reform
Universities must embrace trust-based assessment reform; this does not mean ignoring ethical concerns, but embedding purpose, capacity and alignment into assessment practices. Trust based reform entails:
Assessment as learning: Designing tasks that require students to make decisions, justify reasoning, and demonstrate understanding in ways that cannot be outsourced to a tool
Clarity and collaboration with students: Policies that make expectations clear and involve students in co-creating norms surrounding AI use
Institutional support for staff: Recognising that redesigning assessment is skilled work that requires time, development and supportive governance
A provocation to sit with
Institutions are at a point where choices about assessment reform will define the future of higher education. If reform remains dominated by compliance and risk-aversion, institutions may succeed in preserving existing structures, but potentially at the cost of staff wellbeing, student trust and genuine educational purpose. Alternatively, if institutions leverage AI as a catalyst for rethinking why and how we assess, we can move towards systems that are coherent, sustainable and aligned with the true values and purpose of higher education.
The use of EDI data in REF submissions has been on many minds.
Working with EDI data is, broadly speaking, a good idea. But we have every chance of getting it wrong, from missing opportunities to causing serious harm, in REF and beyond.
Given my work in a sector that is world-leading on EDI data – the UK film and TV industry – I have had questions galore land in my inbox. So I wanted to share some lessons from film and TV that I hope will be useful for higher education.
D-Data
We typically use the term EDI data to mean quantitative statistics about identity characteristics protected under the 2010 Equality Act, especially, gender/sex, disability and race. That is not a bad start. But not all protected characteristics are (equally) relevant to getting high-quality talent, creativity, skill and curiosity into our sector.
For instance, I’ve yet to see anyone claim that marital status (a protected characteristic) matters but there is plenty of evidence that caring responsibilities (not a protected characteristic) do. If we look only at protected characteristics, which is typically what higher education institutions have in their HR database, we likely miss a big part of the stories we could tell.
Statistics show how an identity characteristic is distributed in a group or cohort. Knowing how identities vary in a group is useful. But identity statistics alone do not tell us anything about equality, equity or inclusion. They don’t tell us about people’s experiences or about who does or doesn’t get opportunity and resources. In other words, identity statistics can only ever be indicators of the “D” in EDI.
I will use the term “diversity data” for quantitative information about individual characteristics that are relevant to inclusion, opportunity, advancement and outcomes.
What do the numbers mean?
Since the 2010 Equality Act it has become standard practice in the UK to collect and monitor diversity data. We routinely look at identity statistics for staff, students, audiences etc. In both higher education and film and TV, funding is often tied to the submission of diversity data. Admittedly, some diversity targets in UK film and TV make the NIHR’s previous Athena SWAN requirement look like a hurdle next to a pole vault bar. But certainly, in the TV workforce, participation is slowly becoming more equitable.
It’s no mean feat to compile diversity data. But using it is more complex than we admit. The underlying idea of diversity statistics is “representation”: we want to know whether individuals with a characteristic are appropriately represented. On their own, identity statistics do not answer such questions. To assess whether a group is appropriately represented, we need a benchmark and a purpose .
Benchmarking
Choosing meaningful benchmarks is key. The most widely used benchmarks are Office for National Statistics data on the UK population or UK labour force. The underlying rationale goes like this: If the diversity of your staff differs from the demographic profile of the labour force, individuals from certain groups might face systematic challenges and unfair barriers to getting hired by you.
However, workforce profiles vary considerably by UK nations and regions. For instance, a share of 30 per cent Black and minoritised ethnic research and research enabling staff might roughly mirror the regional labour force in London or the Midlands but not in North England, Wales or Scotland. But is the correct benchmark really a higher education institution’s regional labour market anyway? Or should it be the national or UK labour market? Or even an international one? Arguments for meaningful benchmarks need to be made on a case-by-case basis
Importantly, our benchmarks need to fit the purpose of our data collection. If, for instance, that purpose were to “ensure our staff profile mirrors that of the regional workforce, so that, as an institution with civic responsibilities, we can support regional talent and skill to thrive” regional statistics can be a meaningful benchmark. But if we wanted to increase the proportion of women professors in an engineering faculty, tracking gender data for that faculty over time or comparing it to gender data from other institutions’ engineering faculties or from large industry employers could be more meaningful.
Without knowing the purpose of diversity data collection, it is impossible to assess whether meaningful measures and benchmarks have been chosen and progress has been made. Percentage figures on their own do not carry meaning and are impossible to assess.
Handle with care
Collecting, processing, managing and reporting diversity data is subject to legal protection (General Data Protection Regulation). In addition, diversity data should always be based on information provided by individuals about themselves. It is not acceptable to assess, for instance, the gender or race composition of a research unit on the basis of perceived gender or race. To cut a long Critical Data Studies lecture short, we cannot just look around the room and count who we think is Black, disabled or gay, and then put that information into a REF environment statement. Just… don’t.
We often overlook that diversity data makes not only those staff who provide information about their identity characteristics vulnerable, but also those who handle it. Information about our colleagues’ identity characteristics stays with us beyond REF and may make us think something like: “I won’t suggest he apply for this role; it’s too demanding for someone who is disabled.” Which is not considerate, it’s discrimination. And if we are found to have excluded, or discriminated against, another person, our health and well-being, career, reputation or material circumstances will likely be negatively affected.
REF should never expose colleagues who otherwise do not handle non-anonymised diversity data to information about their colleagues’ identities. No one who is preparing a UoA submission, and who doesn’t routinely have access to non-anonymised diversity data, should be put at the risk of looking at anything other than properly anonymised summary statistics, with small numbers redacted, for instance following HESA guidelines.
The D, the E and the I
One more learning to share before I get constructive. This one is about the link between the D in EDI, and the E and I. Diversity data can be hugely valuable in our quest for healthy research environments and for recruiting and retaining creative, innovative talent. It can usefully draw attention to processes or practices that might be problematic. If, for instance, the share of disabled staff at professorial/leadership level is considerably lower than at lower grades, our promotions process might make it disproportionately more difficult for disabled people to advance into leadership roles. And that would certainly be worth investigating.
However, “good” diversity data is not a robust indicator of good and inclusive practice. The identity stats for a research unit can “look ok” but staff may still not be appropriately included in decisions on a research project, or may be discriminated against in the author sequence for a publication. Too strong a focus on diversity statistics can itself cause problems. Aiming to meet a percentage target for individuals from particular groups can lead to “diversity hires” and to the stigmatisation of staff perceived to have been recruited for their identity characteristics rather than their skills, expertise and experience. Which would be anything but a healthy research environment.
Diversity (the stats part) and inclusion (the lived reality part) do go together like a horse and carriage in the sense that they often show up next to each other. But unlike what Frank Sinatra claims about love and marriage, you can have one without the other. Which is especially problematic if you have “good” diversity data without inclusive behaviour.
Next steps
So yes, it’s complicated. But it’s also not that difficult. The most important EDI data lesson from UK film and TV is second nature to everyone involved in research: define your purpose and question, and then figure out which data relates to it. You might even find that a simpler, tightly focused data set is more robust, appropriate and convincing than throwing a lot of quantitative evidence onto the table (pun intended).
Here’s a few tips to take away and use in your own work:
Provide context, show your workings: Don’t just include identity stats, explain what you take them to mean, how you use them, what you compare them to.
Think beyond diversity data: Rather than using information about staff’s identities, is there other data you can use – project evaluations, research culture surveys, staff consultations? Data that speaks to the I, or even the E, in EDI?
Protect everyone involved. Diversity data is for life (and about lives), not just for REF.
It is not yet clear what, if any, (diversity) data will be required or optional for REF submissions. But we always have more choice than we think – about the questions we ask, and the data we choose to answer them with. REF is one of the many moments we get to make those choices. We should welcome them, consciously and constructively, and not default to merely reactive counting exercises.
Last week’s postcard of a vice chancellor’s robes gave us a chance to look at leadership job titles in higher education. This week a cracker of a postcard lets us do the same for academic organisational structures.
In the olden days it was easy – universities had academic departments. And sometimes they were grouped into faculties. Now it can be more complex: you’ve still got departments and faculties, but there are also schools and colleges, and centres and units, and sometimes institutes too. What’s going on?
Department S
Let’s start with the basics. A department tends to be an organisational unit of a university – with its own head, space and governance structure – which comprises all of and only the academic staff in the discipline for which it is named. There’s an epistemic component to it: it is meant to be all and only the people in a discipline because they and only they can have a truly informed opinion on the content of that discipline. That is, what should be taught in courses in that discipline, what counts as a degree, what research should be given priority, who should be appointed to join that disciplinary community as a colleague, and so on.
Departments are not only comprised of disciplines with simple names, like physics, chemistry or history. My undergraduate degree was in a department of philosophy, logic and scientific method, for example. The key thing is that it was all of the people who were in that community – academics, postgrads, undergraduates, hangers on – and that was a disciplinary community that the college had chosen to have. It didn’t have a physics department – that’s fine – but if it had, it would only have had physicists in it, and it would have had all of the physicists in it.
School for scandal
Next up, in a notional hierarchy, is a school. Schools contain subjects which aren’t the same but which do have a similarity on some sort of measure. So it might be a school of social sciences. Or a school of allied health. Or a school of business and law. Sometimes schools are a genuine attempt to encourage interdisciplinarity, with subject specialists allowed to mingle freely within the school, and have all sorts of conversations. And sometimes schools have actual departments in them, and they’re really just a way of consolidating all of your heads of departments into one easy-to-manage dean.
Losing your faculties
A still higher niche in the pantheon is the faculty. Faculties are (usually) groupings of cognate subjects which are bigger than schools. So you might (in a very big university) have a faculty which has in it schools, which in turn have departments. Or you might have a faculty which has departments in it. Or maybe a faculty which doesn’t have any organisational units within it, and is the core level of academic organisation. And of course, it can mean very different things too. The faculty can refer simply to the academic staff of an institution. In France, for a while, the faculty was a national, supra-university organisational unit, as we saw in this postcard of the Sorbonne.
Electoral college
And then, of course, there’s the college. This has many meanings. In Oxford and Cambridge, colleges are core to the whole operation, providing residence, tutorial support, and employing academic staff (who also, normally, have a university post too). In London the university is made up of colleges, but in this case they are all fully-fledged and autonomous institutions in their own right. (And to confuse matters further, the University of London’s colleges used to be called schools before the 1994 statute changes.) In Durham colleges do some of this but staff are university staff. (I think!). And in York, Lancaster and Kent too colleges provide a focus for residence, social life and support. And then you have colleges as a bigger version of a faculty, for instance at Cardiff and Birmingham. Often colleges like this are based around the REF groups, and were designed to enable fine-tuning of submissions; unsurprisingly it tends to be the research-intensive universities which go in for this kind of thing.
Division of labour
You might also come across a division. This can again mean different things. At Oxford, a division is like a college at Cardiff and Birmingham, or a faculty elsewhere: it’s a high level grouping of subjects. Division is also used within medical schools with a meaning like department: my guess is that this is to avoid confusion with hospital departments which often exist in the same buildings (hospitals!) as academic medical units. Which is good: if you’re trying to get well, the last thing you need is to inadvertently find yourself in an academic meeting rather than a hospital consulting room.
More research needed
And now we get onto three terms which are often associated with research: institute, centre and unit.
Institutes tend to be largest in scale of these three, and sometimes are free-standing. Think, for example, of the Institute of Cancer Research, which is a college of the University of London. Or the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, which used to be the free-standing Institute of Psychiatry. But, confusingly, institute also has currency within education as a discipline. For example, there are institutes of education at Reading and Worcester universities, where they seem to be the title given to an academic school; and at University of Liverpool, where the institute of education offers only postgraduate taught and research degrees.
Research centres tend to be research teams funded by a specific grant for a specific purpose, or be time limited for some reason, but be larger than simply funding a researched to do some research. And this gives them momentum which means that they become established units in their own right, but always having to secure future funding via grants. An example might be STICERD at the LSE, which has been in existence since 1978, which is nearly 50 years. Not bad for a research project.
And then research units tend to be like centres but a bit smaller, or with a shorter lifetime, or a more specific purpose. A research unit might just have one principal investigator (PI) – the academic in whose name the research funding is granted – whereas a centre or institute would have several.
And then finally research groups – see for example Imperial’s list of research groups – which, generally, are collections of researchers in the same field pursuing the same sort of questions at the same institution. They might be recorded on a university’s finance system as a cost centre, but they less often have a formal place in institutional governance. It’s a handy label to help understand the knowledge creation and exploration in a university. And sometimes it’s all about the big researcher – Professor Bloggs’ lab, for example.
So, there’s a run through. One thing I guarantee is that you will be able to find a counter-example to everything that I have written here. None of the words here – department, school, faculty, college, institute, division, centre, unit, group – has a legally protected meaning. The University of Cambridge, for example, has six schools. And within some schools are faculties and centres, whist other schools have within them departments, centres, units and institutes.
Universities are like Humpty Dumpty in their naming conventions:
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
This is from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, by the way. It is worth remembering that Carroll was an Oxford academic. Did the university’s bewildering terminology influence Humpty Dumpty, or vice versa?
Dreamscape
Here’s a jigsaw of the card. It was posted on 23 July 1967 to an address in London. I think it describes a dream, but you decide:
I had let some smoky basement rooms to the Rolling Stones for £15. People were dancing in them. I wondered whether all that hashish would be good for them. The Stones arrived in a Land Rover. They put on Beatles jackets and took no notice of my remonstrations. You were very thin because one of them was leaving you. They laughed and played cards all night, standing up. You never opened your mouth. You did not seem to notice me. I woke with a splitting headache – all those fumes I suppose. M
And here’s an image of the text of the card. You may be able to make more sense of the line “you were very thin because one of them was leaving you”, some of the words which gave me trouble.
