Public universities don’t get to pick which political viewpoints are safe to express. But administrators at two major universities are trying to do just that.
At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, administrators treated the College Republicans’ pro-ICE political message like a civil rights violation. After the Illini Republicans — a registered student organization — posted a Instagram graphic supporting immigration enforcement on Jan. 28, UIUC announced the Title VI Office would conduct a review.
At Penn State, an anti-ICE poster discovered outside the student center on Jan. 29 sparked heated reactions across the ideological spectrum. When some people raised the call to identify and punish whoever created the poster, Penn State responded by condemning it and announcing that University Police and Public Safety were investigating.
These incidents are two sides of the same coin: administrators using official investigations to police protected political speech, in this case, on opposing sides of the immigration debate.
Launching or announcing an investigation sends a clear warning to students: express the wrong opinion and you could be punished. That chills speech campus-wide and violates the First Amendment obligations public universities are required to uphold.
You don’t need to sympathize with either political stance taken — pro-ICE or anti-ICE — to defend the principles at stake. Political advocacy is at the core of the First Amendment, especially at a public university. America’s most pressing issues should be debated, not investigated into silence.
Join us in telling UIUC and Penn State to drop their sham investigations and reaffirm their commitments to upholding free expression — even when it’s controversial or unpopular.
Free speech makes free people — no matter what side you’re on.
In its many diverse forms – including degree study, credit earning, branch campuses, and others – mobility remains a major aspect of international higher education. But mobility patterns are shifting. While the South-North movement remains primary at the world level, new patterns and modes are emerging. This blog describes these new patterns and their rationales. It is based on our chapter ‘International student mobility in a changing global environment: key issues and trends’, in: Simon Marginson, Catherine Montgomery, Alain Courtois and Ravinder Sidhu (eds), The Future of Cross Border Academic Mobilities and Immobilities: Power, Knowledge and Agency, published by Bloomsbury.
Notably, student and scholar mobility has become a mass enterprise, with more than six million students studying outside their countries in 2021 (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2024). But, although global student mobility is a significant factor and at the core of internationalisation efforts, it is limited to a small and mainly elite sector of the global student population. Six million global students represent a small proportion of the 254 million students pursuing higher education worldwide. Nevertheless, the mobility of learners, teachers, and scholars has always been a key dimension of higher education.
‘Internationally mobile students’ often refers to degree-mobile students who move to a foreign country for educational purposes and receive a foreign tertiary/higher education degree on a student visa. The predominant pattern of degree mobility at the world level has been from the Global South to the Global North, although there is also significant degree mobility within the Global North, in particular within Europe, and from the United States to Europe, as well as the reverse. Initially, the South to North flow consisted largely of small numbers of elites from colonies to the imperial countries. This movement increased significantly after independence, for example, students travelling to the UK and France. This kind of mobility also extended to other key Anglophone countries, including the United States, Canada, and Australia, which have maintained a dominant destination position. On the supply side, the fastest growth in outgoing students has been from Global South countries. From 1995 to 2010, the main sending countries worldwide were China, India, and Malaysia.
Shifting mobility patterns
While South-to-North and, to some extent, North-to-North mobility remain numerically dominant, there is a trend towards multipolarity and intra-regional student mobility. According to Van Mol et al (in E Recchi and M Safi (eds), (2024) Handbook of Human Mobility and Migration(pp 128–47). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishers), the past fifteen years have witnessed a challenge to the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon and Western countries, with new educational hubs gaining prominence. A more diverse set of countries now exerts greater relative influence in the overall student mobility network.
In particular, intra-regional mobility is growing in the South, from low-income towards middle-income countries. For China, the top senders are neighbours South Korea, Thailand, and Pakistan. For Russia, the top senders are nearby Kazakhstan, China, and Uzbekistan. Likewise, South Korea and Japan have become top study destinations for students from Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia. For Argentina, all the top sending countries are also from South America: Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Paraguay, and Bolivia. Interestingly, some of the sending countries present themselves as new destinations, for instance, Kazakhstan and Vietnam. What drives these changes?
Macro-level drivers for international mobility
In the dynamic landscape of international higher education, macro-level factors, beyond the control of individual countries, higher education institutions (HEIs), and students, wield significant influence in changing mobility patterns. In many sending countries, the enhancement in higher education quality, along with economic development, plays an important role. For example, in East Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, the national higher education systems have now achieved excellent quality and become attractive study destinations for international students. And other countries follow.
Economic and financial considerations
Another global factor shaping the mobility landscape is the increasing commodification of education. Anglophone high-income countries have particularly benefited financially from this market. For example, in the academic year 2022–3, over one million international students at US colleges and universities contributed more than $40 billion to the US economy and supported more than 368,000 jobs (NAFSA, 2023). For the UK, the figure for the total economic contribution was £41.9 billion in the 2021/2 academic year (Higher Education Policy Institute, 2023).
At the same time, high living and tuition costs, coupled with increased xenophobia and visa and other restrictions in the Global North, have driven many students from the South to pursue education in non-Western nations where tuition and living costs are less expensive. These economic pull factors make the emerging study destinations attractive to many international students, especially those from middle-income and lower-income families.
Soft power and cultural influences
Many countries and institutions prioritise international student recruitment as a key target in their strategies for the internationalisation of higher education because of the value they place on securing soft power, cross-border cultural influence, and improved university rankings.
At the national level, countries utilise strategic policies and national agencies to promote international student recruitment and subsidize inbound mobility. Activities and initiatives involve various national actors that aim to build a comprehensive ecosystem in supporting immigration regulation, university cooperation, language training, and scholarships. Examples include the Indian government, which launched the Study in India flagship project in 2018 in collaboration with various government departments to enhance its global identity through international education initiatives. Similarly, the Education Plan in China’s Belt and Road Initiative showcases the political and diplomatic motivations behind its internationalisation strategy and international student recruitment.
Demographic change, labour market, and migration
For many countries in the Global North, significant demographic decline and the need for skilled labour have made it challenging to find sufficient talent domestically. Attracting talented international students, faculty, and professionals, as well as encouraging student retention, are often crucial strategies for higher education in high-income and middle-income countries.
Important in the above-mentioned factors are the many ways in which migration and student mobility cross over. Education functions as a significant migration doorway for a large minority of students moving from the Global South to the Anglophone countries. Tensions and controversies arise regarding international students’ post-study options, labour market needs, and immigration policies.
Complex and multilayered
In the words of Van Mol et al (2024, p141), international student mobility is ‘complex and multilayered’. It is influenced by a variety of changing contexts and related push and pull factors. There is no such archetype as ‘the international student’, as there are different forms of student, stakeholder roles, and motivations for mobility. In degree mobility, one can observe a gradual shift from a predominantly South-North movement towards a more diverse movement, with dominant sending countries, particularly in Asia, increasingly becoming receiving countries.
Revenue generation remains a dominant pull factor in the Anglophone higher education sector. Another key consideration is increasing the stay rate of international students so as to better meet skilled labour needs.
At the same time, geopolitical tensions, national security concerns, and nationalist anti-immigration sentiments and policies are becoming important obstacles to international student mobility. While international students and the revenues they generate are important in a few countries, perhaps more important to the global economy as a whole are patterns of high-skilled immigration related to student mobility. These patterns contribute to inequalities, impact remittances, influence scientific collaboration, and affect many other factors in numerous countries.
As countries navigate these complex dynamics, the strategic management of international student flows and integration of skilled graduates into the labour market will be crucial for maximising the benefits of global education and fostering international collaboration. Ultimately, understanding the evolving nature of international student mobility is essential for policymakers and educators who seek to enhance the internationalisation of higher education and address the broader challenges and opportunities it presents.
Hans de Wit is Emeritus Professor and Distinguished Fellow of the ‘Center for International Higher Education’ (CIHE) at Boston College. He is IAU Senior Fellow in the International Association of Universities (IAU) and Co-Editor of Policy Reviews in Higher Education (SRHE).
Philip G Altbach is Research Professor and Distinguished Fellow at the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, where from 1994 to 2015 he was the Monan University Professor.
Lizhou Wang is an Assistant Professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University, Japan. Lizhou conducts research on the internationalisation of higher education, including international mobility and research collaboration.
When I saw the Association of American Universities’ rejection of the White House’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” I knew that the institutions invited to join the agreement were likely to reject it, too. At a time when organizational communication seems to be the province of PR firms, it is still true that a missive from a group representing some of our country’s most prestigious research institutions carries substantial weight in U.S. higher education.
What I also saw in just 26 words—“We have significant concerns, however, about any compact or policy that could damage, compromise, or depart from our nation’s competitive, merit-based system of research grant funding”—was how different this august body’s response to efforts at censorship in academia today is compared to its actions during the Red Scares.
The joint statement between the American Association of University Professors and what is now the American Association of Colleges and Universities on academic freedom in the 1940s remains the touchstone of faculty and researchers’ rights in our institutions (even though the AAUP generally didn’t come to the aid of targeted professors during the Red Scares). What gets less attention is the role of the AAU in America’s history of academic censorship.
The AAU is an “elite organization that has served as a strong voice for … elite universities’ interests,” Timothy Cain, professor of higher education at the University of Georgia and expert on academic freedom, told me recently. “At times [the AAU has worked] in a productive way to facilitate issues for the entirety of higher ed.” At other times, though, it has prioritized the success and welfare of its member institutions, referred to on its website as “America’s leading research universities.”
Now, I don’t pay attention to powerful organizations because I think they are the “best.” For the same reason, I don’t pay attention to Harvard because I think it is filled with the “brightest” students or “smartest” faculty. I pay attention to these institutions because they are influential. They have been given the opportunity to accrue substantial wealth, property and connections. I abhor the tendency to discuss these places as if they are inherently better than other institutions. But I equally disagree with the notion that one should simply ignore them.
Powerful institutions can survive the consequences of sacrificing funding to defy pressure tactics. The financial fallout of such decisions could leave others destroyed. Their influence means they play an outsize role in setting the trajectory for all U.S. institutions. That’s why Marc Rowan, one of the billionaires rumored to be helping the federal government craft higher education censorship policies, implied last fall that one only needs to change five institutions to reshape the entire system of U.S. higher education. These dynamics are why the AAU’s role in the second Red Scare matters so much.
In 1953, the AAU weighed in on how the academic community should think about academic freedom in light of the second Red Scare. Its statement, “The Rights and Responsibilities of Universities and Their Faculties,” explicitly noted that “Since present membership in the Communist Party requires the acceptance of [certain] principles and methods, such membership extinguishes the right to a university position.”
It’s certainly true that in the middle of the 20th century people eagerly criticized Communism. It wasn’t just the AAU that condemned association with the party—the American Civil Liberties Union expelled a board member because she was a Communist. In its 1951–52 annual report, the Guggenheim Foundation warned that being a member of a group “which does their thinking for them or which indicates what their conclusions must be or ought to be” would get no help from the organization. “Without qualification, we know that this condition of un-freedom of mind includes all those who have membership in the Communist Party,” it said.
Organizations felt comfortable creating these types of edicts—and generally got away with it—given that large swaths of the U.S. public, and therefore also academics, held hostile views of Communism. The most vexing challenge for the AAU was how to address the issue of faculty potentially using the Fifth Amendment to avoid the severe punishments that came with disclosing their political beliefs.
At the same time, many people didn’t understand what rights were protected by this amendment. Fifteen different versions of Law & Order didn’t exist at this time to help educate the populace that “No person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” University administrators struggled to interpret this concept. Institutions, such as Rutgers University, even created special committees of faculty who spent substantial time educating themselves on what the Fifth Amendment was and how it worked, with the overall goal of understanding how the university should view employees who invoked it.
The AAU navigated this challenge by stating that “invocation of the Fifth Amendment places upon a professor a heavy burden of proof of his fitness to hold a teaching position and lays upon his university an obligation to reexamine his qualifications for membership in its society.” Basically, according to the AAU at the time, an academic was not honest if they pleaded the Fifth, and dishonest people could not be professors. Ipso facto, if you pleaded the Fifth, you were demonstrably not fit to be a professor and your employer was obligated to investigate whether you should continue to be employed. The AAU was, again, not alone in targeting people who used their Fifth Amendment rights. A striking example is The New York Timesfiring anyone on the news team who took the Fifth.
Archives of documents from the time show that college leadership was enamored with the AAU statement. It gave them guidance for how to navigate employees who invoked their Fifth Amendment right during official hearings.
The faculty responses were more varied. Minutes from the October 1953 AAU meeting note that “faculties were inclined to place undue emphasis upon the paragraphs dealing with the Fifth Amendment.” (I wonder why …) A substantial contingent of the faculty was concerned by what it would mean to be considered “dishonest” and “unworthy to be a professor” based solely on asserting one’s Fifth Amendment rights.
Marc Rowan wasn’t wrong in his observation that only a handful of universities can determine the direction of American higher education. We have ample historical examples to show this isn’t a modern phenomenon. Joy Williamson’s Jim Crow Campus details the ways that white Southern universities from the 1950s to the 1970s shifted their policies surrounding academic freedom and the treatment of Black people in order to be considered “world-class institutions.” It’s not surprising, then, that during the second Red Scare a large portion of the sector used the AAU statement as cover for investigating alleged Communists on their campuses.
The AAU has not promoted Red Scare–like political repression in our current moment of rising academic censorship. The organization’s default response to the attacks on its members has instead been to generally take cover under an implicit commitment to neutrality (its response to the compact not withstanding). While not as direct of an attack on academic freedom as its actions in the ’50s, the AAU’s conspicuous silence could allow institutions and governments to ramp up censorship with little pushback.
For example, Texas A&M University remains a member in good standing of the AAU, even though it recently fired a faculty member in a manner that the university’s Academic Freedom Council determined violated the person’s academic freedom and, as I noted in my last column, censored several courses. While Texas A&M is perhaps the most extreme example, it is not the only AAU member to have taken overtsteps to restrict the freedom of speech and expression. As university leadership signals a willingness to purge and sanction political dissidents, the question remains what powerful organizations like the AAU will do. As the historian Howard Zinn opined, you can’t be neutral on a moving train.
In Jim Crow Campus, Williamsonnotes that it took sanctions from a series of organizations and accreditors, among other actions, to force white Southern universities to racially integrate. It’s unlikely that simply retreating into the illusion of safety through silence and “institutional neutrality” will overcome the authoritarian forces threatening academic freedom today. The AAUP, learning from its mistakes during the Red Scares, has been a leader in the current fight for the freedom of inquiry. The AAU once used its power to strengthen academic censorship. Now is the time for it to wield its power to dismantle it—and protect the ability to freely teach and conduct research.
The AAU claims to be comprised of America’s leading research universities. And indeed, its institutions have been the leaders among a major segment of the country’s higher education system for more than a century. But if the member presidents choose the guise of institutional neutrality as a way to gain political cover, they may now be leading higher ed toward greater authoritarianism.
Dominique J. Baker is an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware. You can follow her on Bluesky at @bakerdphd.bsky.social.
In a video posted to social media on Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said his department will discontinue all graduate-level professional military training, fellowships and certificate programs for active-duty service members at Harvard University starting in the 2026–27 school year.
Currently enrolled service members will be allowed to finish their courses, he said.
“For too long this department has sent our best and brightest officers to Harvard hoping the university would better understand and appreciate our warrior class,” Hegseth said. “Instead too many of our officers came back looking too much like Harvard. Heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks.”
This is the latest move in the Trump administration’s effort to bring Harvard to heel and comes three days after the president demanded $1 billion from the university. His Truth Social post appeared six hours after The New York Times reported the government had backed off its demands for a financial penalty in its negotiations with the institution.
Hegseth did not specify which programs would lose DoD support, but Harvard offers a number of fellowships for active-duty military, including the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs National Security Fellowship in which, according toThe New York Times, 12 officers were enrolled this year.
The Harvard Kennedy School’s American Service Fellowship, launched last July, is available to active-duty military. Meanwhile, the website for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership Military and Veteran Graduate Fellowship program says it is not accepting applications for the 2026–27 academic year.
Hegseth also said that in two weeks the Pentagon will evaluate all existing graduate programs for active-duty service members at all Ivy League universities and “other civilian universities,” without clarifying which ones.
“The goal is to determine whether or not they actually deliver cost-effective strategic education for future senior leaders when compared to, say, public universities and our military graduate programs,” he said.
The scene is familiar to anyone working in a contemporary university: A department chair sits in front of a glowing screen, tasked with drafting a strategic plan, a tenure evaluation or a grant proposal. The cursor blinks. The exhaustion is palpable. It is not physical fatigue, but a particular kind of epistemic weariness. After a moment’s hesitation, the chair opens a generative AI tool, pastes in a handful of bullet points and asks for a draft aligned with the institution’s core values and strategic priorities.
Seconds later, the text appears. It is fluent, coherent and perfectly calibrated to the administrative register. The chair makes a few cosmetic edits and submits the document. The task is complete. The institution is satisfied.
Yet something fundamental has been lost.
Current anxieties about artificial intelligence in higher education focus overwhelmingly on students. Faculty worry that AI tools will allow undergraduates to bypass the struggle of learning by producing essays without understanding. This concern is not misplaced, but it obscures a more consequential transformation occurring on the other side of the classroom. The deeper risk is not that students will fake their way to degrees. The risk is that faculty and administrators are increasingly adopting a form of synthetic authority that preserves institutional power while hollowing out the intellectual substance that once justified it.
Historically, academic expertise was defined by asymmetry and risk. As sociologist Andrew Abbott has shown, professions established authority by claiming jurisdiction over domains of uncertain knowledge. To be an expert was to exercise judgment under conditions where outcomes were not guaranteed and error was possible. Academic authority rested on the willingness to stake one’s reputation on a particular interpretation, argument or decision. Whether defending a controversial thesis, publishing an unpopular finding or denying tenure to a colleague, judgment was personal and accountable.
That linkage between authority and epistemic risk is now eroding. In the contemporary university, authority is migrating away from individual scholars and toward the infrastructural systems that mediate academic life. Metrics, rankings, assessment frameworks and compliance protocols increasingly determine what counts as legitimate knowledge and successful performance. Generative AI accelerates this shift by offering a new form of fluency that satisfies institutional demands without requiring deep engagement with substance.
When faculty use AI tools to generate syllabi, summarize literature or draft administrative language, they are not merely saving time. They are participating in a regime of synthetic fluency, producing outputs that conform to procedural expectations of coherence, tone and completeness. The resulting documents look authoritative, but their authority derives from stylistic alignment rather than epistemic depth. The expert becomes a relay point through which institutional legitimacy flows, rather than a source from which it originates.
This transformation is inseparable from what Michael Power famously described as the “audit society.” In audit-driven systems, organizations prioritize the production of evidence that proper processes have been followed over the substantive quality of outcomes. The verification of procedure replaces the verification of truth. What matters is not whether something is well understood, but whether it is demonstrably compliant.
Artificial intelligence is uniquely suited to this environment. It excels at producing legible artifacts. It can generate learning outcomes, diversity statements, policy rationales and strategic narratives that meet every formal requirement. As a result, universities now operate under a paradox of plausibility. Their documents have never been more polished, their policies never more comprehensive and their visions never more internally consistent. At the same time, the collective epistemic clarity of the institution is weakening.
Consider the contemporary grant application. Once framed as an opportunity to advance a distinctive hypothesis, it increasingly functions as a test of one’s ability to navigate highly specific stylistic, conceptual and rhetorical constraints imposed by funding bodies. Success depends less on the originality of an idea than on its alignment with predefined categories, keywords and evaluative rubrics. AI tools can optimize this alignment with remarkable efficiency. Authority flows to those who master the infrastructure, not necessarily to those who deepen understanding.
The consequences of this shift are not merely institutional. They are deeply personal. Across higher education, faculty report unprecedented levels of burnout, cynicism and disengagement. These symptoms cannot be explained solely by workload, funding cuts or administrative bloat. There is a moral and epistemic dimension to this fatigue.
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han has described the modern individual as an “achievement-subject,” compelled to constant self-optimization and performance. In academia, this pressure manifests as the demand to be perpetually productive, visible and impactful. When faculty meet these demands through synthetic fluency, allowing algorithms to smooth their prose, organize their thinking and generate compliant outputs, a subtle estrangement sets in. One continues to perform authority without fully inhabiting it.
The professor who relies on AI-generated lesson plans may feel detached from the classroom. The administrator who delegates policy drafting to language models may feel disconnected from the governance they oversee. Titles, publications and decisions remain, but the lived experience of judgment and responsibility thins. Authority persists outwardly while eroding inwardly.
If the academic profession is to survive as more than an interface layer for algorithmic systems, it must confront this transformation directly. Policing student plagiarism will not address the deeper problem. The challenge lies in our own practices and incentives.
Synthetic authority is seductive because it promises efficiency. It offers relief from administrative overload and the anxiety of the blank page. Yet the friction it removes was often where genuine thinking occurred. The difficulty of articulating a complex argument, the discomfort of making a defensible but contestable judgment and the slowness of writing were not incidental burdens. They were constitutive of expertise.
Resisting the hollowing out of academic authority requires a renewed commitment to friction. Universities must defend spaces where inefficiency is not a failure, but a condition for judgment. This means questioning metrics that demand constant output, valuing intellectual risk over procedural smoothness and tolerating forms of work that resist easy audit.
The danger is not that artificial intelligence will replace professors. The danger is that it will enable universities to function without anyone needing to understand, judge or take responsibility. Authority has become increasingly synthetic. Faculty must now decide whether they are content to serve as its relay, or whether they are willing to reclaim the difficult, imperfect work of being experts again.
Åke Elden is a behavioral scientist and research adviser at NLA University College in Norway with a Ph.D. in psychology and a background spanning technology management and clinical research. His work explores how human behavior and meaning are reshaped by digital and algorithmic systems, drawing on mimetic theory and broader questions of cultural and ontological change.
U.S. president Donald Trump shared a racist video on his Truth Social account in which former American president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama were depicted as apes. I was unsurprised, yet nonetheless disgusted. U.S. senator Jon Ossoff also found the video unacceptable. He said during a rally in Atlanta that Donald Trump was “posting about the Obamas like a Klansman.”
There is a chance that not many Americans understand what Ossoff meant by that.
I do not make excuses for people who say and do racist things. I do, however, assume some level of what I call “educational responsibility” for such actions. By this, I mean that I ask myself and other colleagues questions like, “Where in the K–12 curriculum and in college classrooms do we explicitly teach students why that statement or behavior is racist?”
It is plausible that older Americans who were once youngsters never learned anything at home, in schools or anyplace else about the history of Black people being associated with monkeys and apes, and why it is beyond problematic. Abby Phillip, host of CNN NewsNight, offered a clear explanation on her show following the Trump incident.
I have higher expectations for a U.S. president. But for others, I accept some portion of the blame on behalf of educators who presume that students were perhaps taught about these topics at home and already know better. We should stop making such assumptions. Doing so makes us complicit when current and former students of ours engage in outrageously racist acts.
James Bridgeforth, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware, is one of my former Ph.D. advisees. In 2019, he and I wrote an Education Week article about a photo that emerged of four elementary school teachers in Los Angeles County holding a noose on campus. They were smiling. The principal was their photographer. As indicated in our article title, James and I were not surprised. We were neither excusing nor normalizing this behavior. However, we both had tracked educator-involved racist incidents for years. We had seen similar and worse situations. James subsequently handcrafted a database of more than 500 educator-involved racist incidents occurring in K–12 schools spanning every geographic region of the country.
Beyond the regularity of racial absurdity, there was another reason why the California teachers noose incident did not surprise James or me: our recognition that explicit teaching and learning about nooses occurs far too infrequently in K–12 schools and in university-based teacher-preparation programs. Is it possible that the four teachers and their principal never learned anything at all in their formal schooling experiences about nooses as a tool used to terrorize Black people in America? It is not only conceivable, but highly likely. Such topics are not traceable in K–12 and postsecondary curricula. Honestly, they probably never have been.
Illiteracy about this and a range of other racial topics is guaranteed to worsen as books are banned in our nation’s K–12 schools. The teaching of racial topics has been outlawed or whitewashed at many educational institutions, including colleges and universities. How and where, then, will students learn that posting a video that depicts Black people as apes is racist? They will grow up to become teachers and school administrators, CEOs, elected officials, and leaders in other industries who unknowingly do and say racist things.
The blame will not be entirely theirs. We, educators, will be partly responsible. The politicians who refused to let us teach full truths about America’s racial past and present also will be culpable. College and university presidents and governing board members who failed to do more in defense of academic freedom and the freedom to learn also will be liable.
I go on record here with these two declarations: Associating Black people with apes is racist, and educators must assume greater responsibility for ensuring that today’s students do not become tomorrow’s adults who engage in racist behaviors because we failed to teach them better.
“I didn’t make a mistake,” Trump told a reporter who asked him about the Obama apes Truth Social post. Tim Scott, our nation’s lone Black Republican senator, posted on X, “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.” Other GOP leaders have condemned Trump’s post. They and the rest of us will likely have to keep denouncing and apologizing for people doing racist things in our country until we, educators, are allowed to teach them better.
Shaun Harper is University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership. His most recent book is titled Let’s Talk About DEI: Productive Disagreements About America’s Most Polarizing Topics.
I showed my class a three‑minute clip of Ben Shapiro. It went about as you’d expect. I am an assistant professor of higher education, and I teach an undergraduate course called Embracing Diversity. I have taught this course for four consecutive semesters, during a period when the very ideas we examine (diversity, inequality, critical race theory and systemic racism) have been publicly demonized, politicized and, in some states, explicitly banned.
On a recent afternoon, after introducing students to the tenets of critical race theory, I played a short video of Shapiro, a conservative commentator and podcast host, explaining his critique of critical race theory and whether or not it should be taught in schools. Before the clip ended, the room filled with laughter. Students mocked his cadence and pitch. Someone compared him to a cartoon character. Students joked about his voice and his delivery. Someone said he sounded like a South Park character. Another compared him to a fast‑talking podcast host on 1.5-times speed. The laughter built on itself, crowding out any serious engagement with what he was actually saying.
I stopped the video.
What happened next is the part that has stayed with me, not because it was unprecedented, but because it exposed something we rarely name in spaces like this. Not because the moment was especially surprising (it wasn’t, at least not to me), but because of how quickly a class devoted to dialogue, equity and inclusion slid into dismissal, caricature and harm. We had not engaged Shapiro’s argument at all.
While the moment was lighthearted on the surface, it revealed something deeper: how quickly humor can become a substitute for thinking. I also understand why some readers may already be uneasy with my decision to bring Shapiro into a diversity classroom. His name alone carries political freight. For some, platforming him at all feels irresponsible.
I felt that tension myself before pressing play. But I did it anyway.
Why Bring a Contradicting Voice Into This Space?
In courses on diversity, power and inequality, we often expose students to marginalized voices that have been historically excluded from dominant narratives. That work matters. But if we stop there—if we never ask students to seriously engage ideas they find troubling, reactionary or even offensive—we risk teaching a form of moral comfort rather than intellectual rigor.
Shapiro is not a fringe figure. His arguments about race, merit and education circulate widely in public discourse and shape how many people, including students’ parents, community members, donors and policymakers, understand these issues. Pretending those arguments don’t exist does not make them disappear. It just ensures that students encounter them elsewhere, without guidance, context or accountability.
My goal was not persuasion. It was practice, especially at a time when many educators are teaching under heightened scrutiny, wondering which examples might invite backlash or misinterpretation. Can we listen carefully to a viewpoint we dislike without reducing the speaker to a meme? Can we distinguish between critiquing an argument and dismissing a person? Can we name what we disagree with, and why, without retreating into ridicule?
Judging by the initial reaction, the answer was no. And that failure was not especially about my students; it was about the quiet assumptions embedded in how many of us teach these courses, myself included.
Rewinding the Tape
After stopping the video, I named what I was seeing. We were responding to tone, reputation and identity, not substance. I asked the class to sit with the discomfort of that realization. Then I played the clip again, this time with a different task: summarize his argument as accurately as possible, as if his remarks were a reading assigned for discussion.
The room changed.
Students shifted in their seats. Some looked frustrated. Others looked uneasy. A few were visibly annoyed that I was asking them to slow down and listen. But they did it. They identified his central claims, his assumptions about race and individualism, and the evidence he did (and did not) use. Only after that did we move to critique.
The critiques were sharper the second time around. They were also more precise. Instead of “he’s ridiculous,” students said things like, “This argument ignores structural inequality,” or “He treats race as irrelevant without explaining why disparities persist.” Disagreement did not disappear. It deepened.
What the Discomfort Revealed
In student reflections weeks later, many returned to that class session unprompted. I was struck by how often they framed it not as a debate about Shapiro, but as a mirror held up to their own habits as listeners, learners and consumers of information. Several described it as a turning point, not because they suddenly respected Shapiro’s views, but because they recognized how easily they had substituted mockery for analysis. A few wrote that they were unsettled by how quickly they had joined in.
That discomfort mattered—not because it produced a dramatic conversion, but because it disrupted a shared sense of moral and intellectual ease.
Higher education often talks about preparing students for a pluralistic democracy, but we sometimes underestimate how hard that actually is. Listening across differences is not intuitive. It requires restraint, humility and a willingness to be uncomfortable—especially when the other voice is loud, confident and already coded as “the enemy.”
If we do not create structured opportunities to practice that skill, students will default to what social media teaches best: dismissing and dehumanizing. In that sense, the moment was less a student misstep than a pedagogical mirror.
A Note on Risk, and a Note to Fellow Educators
Some will argue that there are limits to which voices belong in our classrooms. They are right. Not every perspective deserves equal time, and harm must always be named and addressed. But avoiding contradiction altogether comes with its own risks. It can produce students who know what they oppose, but not how to engage.
Bringing a controversial figure into a diversity classroom is not a neutral act. It requires careful framing, clear boundaries and a willingness to intervene when things go wrong (as they did for me). It also requires accepting that the class may not go smoothly and that you may feel exposed, criticized or unsure in the moment.
I was also aware, even in the moment, that sharing this experience, especially now, could draw attention to me, my classroom or my course. That risk is real, and it is not evenly distributed across faculty.
That day, I felt it.
But if our goal is to help students think critically rather than reflexively, to argue rather than ridicule and to hold their values with confidence rather than fragility, then leaning into that discomfort may be necessary.
Not because Shapiro needed to be heard—but because our students needed to learn how to listen.
Musbah Shaheen is an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He researches, teaches and writes about the impact of college on attitudes across social identities.
The blog below on international education and the student experience was kindly authored by Marie Taillard, Dean of ESCP Business School’s London campus and L’OréalProfessor of Creativity Marketing.
The UK’s recent International Education Strategy sends an important signal that international education is being treated as an asset for growth, influence and long-term global partnerships. This shift away from an immigration-led lens is significant. However, the biggest impact of the strategy will not be seen in export targets or recruitment figures, but in the opportunities for sustainable international engagement with talented individuals. This will depend on how seriously institutions take ensuring that the students who come to the UK to study have a successful experience.
We need to be more precise in how we discuss the value of international students. Too often, the conversation focuses on mobility or the short-term economic benefit of student spending. If the UK is serious about maintaining its global competitiveness, a positive and rewarding experience for international students has to sit at the heart of institutional thinking. In simple words, long-term institutional value is created through exceptional student experience. Where this experience is weak, reputational, academic and economic value will eventually suffer. Where it is strong, particularly within internationally diverse cohorts, its impact grows over time.
International students as co-creators of the learning environment
International students are frequently discussed in operational terms: as fee payers, short-term spenders, or future ‘agents of influence’ once they return home. While these outcomes are undoubtedly important, they overlook a more immediate reality.
International students help to develop the multicultural mindset that benefits UK society and business. In business education, this is essential. They bring different educational backgrounds, professional experiences and ways of thinking into the classroom. That diversity changes how discussions unfold, how business problems are approached and how students learn from one another.
In addition, when international students work on projects with partner organisations, they bring insights shaped by different markets and cultural contexts. This is increasingly valuable for UK businesses operating internationally or exporting goods and services. International students can be an important asset to this system.
Experience, not exposure
The planned reduction of the post-study visa to 18 months raises a difficult but necessary question. How do we ensure that international students can still gain lasting value from a UK education within a shorter timeframe?
One response is to stop treating outcomes as something that happens after graduation and start embedding them within the learning experience itself. This requires closer collaboration with industry when programmes are designed. It also means giving students structured opportunities to work on real projects, engage with applied research and test ideas in entrepreneurial settings while they are studying.
In our case, as a UK-based charity with full UK degree-awarding powers, we take our responsibility to contribute to the UK economy seriously. Embedding consultancy projects, internships, and other forms of work-based learning into the curriculum provides these structured opportunities while actively supporting our local business and social communities.
There is a clear mutual benefit here. International students gain insight into the UK labour market and UK cultural and business practices, and practical experience that they can draw on later, whether they stay in the UK or not. At the same time, businesses benefit from access to highly skilled students who bring international perspectives and up-to-date knowledge. Within a shorter post-study window, this kind of integration becomes even more important.
Rethinking what ‘international experience’ really means
The strategy also points towards expanding the delivery of UK education beyond national borders. From experience, this can be both challenging and very rewarding. Multicampus models such as ours offer a particularly effective way of approaching international education.
Studying across several countries as part of a single programme exposes students to different regulatory systems, cultural and business practices and social contexts, while maintaining consistent academic standards. Learning in Paris, London, Berlin or Madrid, for example, allows students to see how ideas around markets, sustainability, technological innovation or governance play out differently across Europe. That understanding is hard to develop from one location alone.
This approach fits well with the strategy’s focus on transnational education and long-term partnerships, but it also reframes international education more fundamentally. It shifts the emphasis away from students travelling to a destination towards how they learn to operate across systems, adapt, and work with multiple perspectives. Employers increasingly look for that capability, regardless of where graduates eventually build their careers.
From strategy to reality
The International Education Strategy sets out an ambitious and largely welcome direction for the UK. It recognises education as part of a broader economic, cultural and diplomatic agenda. Whether it succeeds will depend on how far institutions are supported in focusing on depth and quality rather than volume, and on experience rather than simple exposure.
International education creates its greatest value when student experience is at the forefront of all your operations and decisions. When that happens, graduates remain connected to the UK not because of policy design, but because their education has influenced how they think and work. This is the kind of international education worth sustaining that will allow the UK to remain relevant in a competitive global landscape.
Accelerated degree apprenticeships are level 6 degree apprenticeships completed more quickly, usually 18 months or 2 years, because the apprentice already has a level 5 qualification or apprenticeship, or equivalent work-based experience.
Like level 6 top-up years that lead to a degree, they are generally delivered by universities or other providers with degree awarding powers. But unlike a level 6 top-up year, the cost of the degree qualification is borne by the apprentice’s employer or the government.
Given policy developments around apprenticeship units and changes to assessment, the rise in higher technical qualifications at levels 4 and 5, and a push for a joined-up skills system in the post-16 white paper, you might expect these to be a growth area.
Established routes
During 2025, we investigated the potential for accelerated degree apprenticeships to grow, particularly within an Institute of Technology structure whereby employers, colleges and one or more universities have an established relationship. This work was funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation as part of its programme of work to strengthen higher technical education in England. We spoke to a range of providers, mostly universities, and one large employer, and presented findings to the Institute of Technology Network, which itself is supported by Gatsby.
We found that there are some clearly established accelerated degree apprenticeships. For example, individuals who have completed a nursing associate apprenticeship or foundation degree were likely candidates for the registered nurse accelerated degree apprenticeship, as the shortened time requirement allowed the NHS to more quickly meet workforce shortages.
Another established route was an accelerated option for the chartered manager degree apprenticeship, where individuals typically had experiential learning they could evidence at levels 4 and 5, that could be recognised by apprenticeship training providers (including universities).
There was also evidence of more local arrangements, for example, where a college offering level 4 and 5 programmes in engineering reached out to the local university to meet the needs of a large employer keen to find a way to offer a degree apprenticeship, whilst retaining the existing level 4 and 5 programmes (HNC and HND). This kind of arrangement was helping the employer and other, smaller local employers to retain talented staff, by offering them the opportunity to obtain a degree, while developing higher skills necessary in the workforce for the businesses.
Recognition issues
There were significant challenges to developing the programmes, however, and these inevitably contributed to the small numbers we were able to identity.
Some of these challenges hold for universities offering apprenticeships more generally, around logistics and the different requirements of delivering apprenticeships compared to traditional undergraduate programmes.
However, the recognition of prior learning was a key challenge specific to accelerated degree apprenticeship programmes. This is necessary in all programmes, but easiest where qualifications or apprenticeships at level 4 or 5 map directly onto the requirements of the apprenticeship.
Problems arise even for these situations though, as different training providers deliver these qualifications or apprenticeships in different ways, using for example different kinds of software or terminology depending on the sector. For programmes where recognition of prior learning was almost entirely focused on experiential learning through work, the requirements of assessing each potential apprentice were high, especially when they came from a range of different companies.
One university talked us through their process, which involved written evidence, interviews and assessments with the potential apprentice, and a corroborating interview with the current and/or previous line manager to confirm the evidence. While any apprentice must be assessed to ensure they are on an appropriate programme, the recognition of prior learning for an accelerated programme was an especially time-consuming process – and of course, essential. The investment of time was a noted barrier for some providers in offering accelerated degree apprenticeships.
Going for growth?
The key to making the programmes work, was existing relationships with both training providers for level 4 and 5 programmes, usually local colleges, and with employers. Understanding what individuals were going to present with in terms of qualification, and the curriculum at the local college, made the recognition of prior learning much easier. The colleges were able to tell learners about the opportunity of the accelerated degree apprenticeship, helping to increase demand, including where potential apprentices were able to present the idea to their employer, as well as where employers were keen to offer this to their staff.
In apprenticeships in general, being confident about the likely future cohort from employers is crucial. One university told us about a full degree apprenticeship where they had the curriculum designed and internal approval, before going back to the employer who had initially committed to a sustainable cohort, only to be told there was a recruitment freeze, and they were no longer able to offer the apprenticeship. For accelerated programmes, having at least a handful of interested employers, often with apprentices who have the same previous qualifications from local colleges, was an ideal situation, and gave a much greater degree of security for providers. Where there was potential for significant variation in cohort sizes, one university, that were already running a similar undergraduate programme, combined the cohorts for the majority of the programme, with only limited additional delivery to the smaller accelerated degree apprenticeship cohort.
In funding terms, accelerated degree apprenticeships were generally a helpful way for institutions to diversify their income, but there were challenges around the cost of end point assessment (EPA), particularly in non-integrated degree apprenticeships where the university was not the end point assessment organisation. Where the EPA cost could be 20 per cent of a whole degree apprenticeship, and entirely borne in the accelerated programme, it would be a significant portion of the funding available for the apprenticeship. Changes to apprenticeship assessment in 2025 may solve this issue – but are being introduced in phases, and will be guided by the occupational standard, any safety requirements, and employer need.
So, despite a clear opportunity to provide pathways to degrees for individuals with level 4 and 5 qualifications, the barriers of not having strong existing relationships with colleges and employers, the potential burden of recognition of prior learning, and in some cases, the disproportionate cost of assessment, mean that accelerated degree apprenticeships are currently rare.
But, with a renewed focus on a joined-up skills system in the recent post-16 white paper, including references to universities building on specialist areas, might universities start to introduce these programmes in areas where they already have strengths?
The full report – A Pathway to Accelerated Degree Apprenticeships – is available here.
‘Shirley zips into her skin-tight school uniform, which on the outside looks something like a ski suit. The lining of the suit in fact contains cabling that makes the suit a communication system and there are pressure pads where the suit touches skin that give a sense of touch. Next, she sits astride something that is a bit like a motorbike, except that it has no wheels and is attached firmly to the floor. Her feet fit on to something similar to a brake and accelerator and her gloved hands hold onto handlebars. She shouts, “I’m off to school, Dad.” Her father, who is taking time out from his teleworking, begins to remind her that the family are going teleshopping in the virtual city later in the day, but it is too late, his daughter has already donned her school helmet. She is no longer in the real world of her real home, she is in the virtual world of her virtual school.’
Thirty years ago, for many, this was the future of education. The authors presented a radical future for training and education inspired by emerging technologies and the promise of ubiquitous connectivity. It looked forward to a world of education that made full use of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). It did ask serious questions about how society would be affected and how the majority of students would be trained in these new technologies and new pedagogies. How would Shirley develop as an individual, given that her interactions with teachers and fellow students were all virtual?
In May 2019, I was invited to deliver a presentation at anAR/VR Conference in Auckland. I re-read Tiffin and Rajasingham’s book. My presentation was ‘Designing Learning Making use of AR/VR’. In short, my pitch to the “we are within a year or two…” crowd was that the technology already exists. What was lacking were meaningful, scalable user cases. This is still my concern. What is AR/VR actually good for?
The technology is here … somewhere
Ongoing technical advances in AR and VR continue to nudge higher education from passive consumption toward the promise of immersive, high-stakes experiential learning. More importantly, educational designers have stopped promising a ‘Shirley-like’ experience and are working to meet specific learning outcomes.
That is not to say that many institutions in the Occidental world still have their virtual learning labs with areas for tethered high-performance simulation, untethered mobile exploration, and collaborative “Mixed Reality” (MR) hubs. Equipped with high-fidelity Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs), such as the Apple Vision Pro or HTC Vive Pro Eye, which often include integrated eye-tracking for behavioural research, there are VR-ready workstationswith NVIDIA RTX GPUs or wearable Backpack PCs for untethered movement. All of which is a significant investment.
Justifiable in computing, animation, or physical movement contexts, certainly. But difficult to justify for the purpose of designing learning experiences across a range of disciplines.
User-Cases
There are, of course, some fairly self-evident user cases for which these labs develop learning experiences. VR (and to a lesser extent AR) has been developed in the medicine and nursing programmes to provide “low-risk simulations,” where students practice surgical procedures or volatile chemical experiments repeatedly without the associated material costs or physical dangers. AR is used for “real-time project overlays,” enabling students in Architecture and Engineering to visualise Building Information Modelling (BIM) data directly on physical construction sites.
One should remain cautious about the limits of the apparent immersion and its claims to represent experiential learning. While hardware manufacturers and VR/AR design agencies claim improvements in retention of up to 75% compared to traditional lectures (ClassVR, n.d.), evidence for specific, measurable skills is harder to find. Depending on the skills and abilities one seeks to develop in a student, there are certainly better ways to do so than in a traditional teacher-led classroom setting. But fieldwork, real-world work-based exposure, and even well-crafted educational videos are also likely to be better than ‘sit-and-listen’ contexts.
I am particularly dubious of contexts in which there is no haptic response, given that very few benefit from Shirley’s haptic suit.
The evidence for effective AR/VR training experiences comes primarily from large manufacturers that need staff to be familiar with expensive machinery before they are introduced to hands-on training. Knowing which widget goes into which do-dah saves time during mentored training. But there is still the need to know whether a screw is tightened correctly, can you feel it slip into the groove, or do you feel the tension? As Boeing is finding. (Perkins & Salomon, 1989)
I am not averse to AR/VR developments in higher education. Still, departments need to think carefully about where limited resources are allocated and which skills and abilities are genuinely being developed and assessed. More of that on Friday’s Subscriber’s post on Substack
For a contemporary review of the current state of AR/VR, explore the blogs on Treeview Studio (Torrendell, 2026).
