A new report from the Common App found major racial disparities in persistence rates for students who enter college pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering, mathematics or medicine.
Just over half of all college applicants express interest in a STEMM field before entering college—except for Asian American students, 72 percent of whom are interested in STEMM. But while more than half of white and Asian students pursuing STEMM obtain a degree in their chosen field within six years, only one-third of first-generation and Latino students who pursue STEMM, and 28 percent of Black or African American students, persist to earn a degree.
The disparities go beyond race. While 54 percent of continuing-generation STEMM students earn a degree in their chosen field, only 34 percent of first-gen students do so. And 51 percent of STEMM-interested students from above the median household income earn a degree in their field, compared to 38 percent of students from below median income levels.
“Our research finds many more talented STEMM aspirants from underrepresented backgrounds applying for college than completing it,” the report concludes.
The study also found that more female STEMM students switch their degree paths (18 percent) than male students (14 percent), though they complete STEMM degrees at similar rates.
Stanford University backed off a plan, almost four years in the making, to buy the Notre Dame de Namur University campus in nearby Belmont, Calif., the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
“The university arrived at this decision after evaluating many factors, some of which could not be anticipated when Stanford first entered into an option purchase agreement with NDNU almost four years ago,” Stanford officials wrote in a Tuesday statement announcing the decision.
Officials added that as the university was “exploring possible academic uses for a Stanford Belmont campus,” it became clear “that identifying and establishing those uses for a potential Belmont campus will take significantly longer than we initially planned.”
Administrators also seemed to hint at potential financial concerns, as President Donald Trump has sought—unsuccessfully, so far—to cap reimbursements for indirect research costs funded by the National Institutes of Health, which experts have warned will harm research universities.
“The landscape for research universities has changed considerably since Stanford entered into the option purchase agreement with NDNU,” Stanford officials wrote. “These changes are resulting in greater uncertainties and a different set of institutional and financial challenges for Stanford.”
In their own statement, NDNU officials noted the university would continue to seek a buyer and expressed disappointment that the sale had fallen through.
Notre Dame de Namur has sought to sell the Belmont campus near Palo Alto since it shrank its offerings and moved a number of its programs online in 2021 amid financial challenges that pushed it to the brink of closure. Now the private Roman Catholic institution is focused on graduate education and offers a mix of in-person, hybrid and online programs.
Officials had expected the sale of the Belmont campus to provide a financial boon.
“Our focus remains on finding a buyer who will preserve and honor the historical significance of this beautiful campus and continue to serve the community-oriented mission that has long been a cornerstone of Notre Dame de Namur University,” NDNU president Beth Martin wrote.
Local lawmakers walked out of a meeting with University of Pennsylvania officials on Tuesday due to what they said was insufficient support for diversity, equity and inclusion, WHYY reported.
Pennsylvania state senator Art Haywood and state representative Napoleon Nelson, both Democrats, reportedly walked out of the meeting after a Penn official referred to diversity as a “lightning rod.”
The meeting, which included several elected state and city officials, became contentious, with lawmakers pressing Penn to hold its ground against the Trump administration’s executive actions on DEI, according to WHYY.
Penn has since removed webpages about its DEI initiatives and updated its nondiscrimination policies, despite swirling legal questions and a nationwide injunction handed down last week that blocked the Trump administration’s plans to crack down on college DEI efforts.
University officials denied backtracking on Penn’s commitment to DEI, according to lawmakers’ accounts of the meeting.
A university spokesperson told the Philadelphia radio station that Penn remains “committed to nondiscrimination in all of our operations and policies” and said the institution appreciated the concerns raised.
Lawmakers indicated that they would continue to press Penn on its commitment to DEI; several provided fiery statements to WHYY casting the university’s response as weak.
“Penn has made a cowardly move, rushing to heed dog-whistle demands from a feckless federal leadership and dismantle their programs that welcome students and workers from an expansive range of backgrounds,” state senator Nikil Saval, a Democrat, told the radio station.
In a time of skyrocketing paper and postage costs, alumni magazines are paradoxically enjoying a renaissance. After cutting back—or cutting down—print issues during the pandemic, many institutions are now pushing for expanded page counts, more copies, better photography, multimedia extras and more institutional support.
Why?
Because audiences appreciate the thought-provoking content and the tangible, premium reminder of the enduring connection with their alma mater. In a 2024 CASE readership survey, 68 percent of TCU Magazine’s readers reported spending 30 minutes or more with every issue. Almost half reported that the magazine was a go-to source for continuing education.
Journalists are pouring their passion and experience into institutional magazines because higher education shines glimmers of hope into an increasingly dark world. They highlight purpose-driven students who will tackle the problems of the future and brilliant faculty whose research is providing innovative solutions to the planet’s most pressing challenges.
Our readership analytics at TCU Magazine have long shown a strong audience appetite for well-researched and carefully written and edited feature stories about forward momentum and its relationship to education. Since 2015, our overall page views have experienced an astounding 1,300 percent growth. That number sounds outlandish, but I can assure you it is accurate.
Our alumni, parents, donors and internal stakeholders are and always have been the primary audiences. But they aren’t the only people who want to know about the students, faculty, staff and initiatives that thrive on our campus. TCU Magazine’s stories are crafted to be relevant far beyond our campus community and long after the initial date of publication.
In 2021, when all the rules were being rewritten, we proposed a partnership with our colleagues in marketing. We suggested a trial run of using existing magazine stories as peer marketing material, promoting those features to internet users who live in the proximity of the country’s top 150 colleges and universities. The goal was for other professionals in higher education to learn about TCU beyond our exceptional student experience and athletic success.
TCU’s marketing director agreed that long-form content could run alongside more traditional digital marketing materials. Why not? Serving stories about improving teacher retirement plans; developing free, open-source digital mapping tools; or better understanding mutations in the BRCA gene benefit us and all manner of readers.
Audiences learn something new and interesting about how research is shaping the future, and we achieve our goal of enhancing TCU’s academic reputation.
Win-win.
Together, we built a partnership with a digital marketing agency based in Fort Worth. With their expert guidance, we got a crash course in the differences between Google Display Network and SEM keywords, Demand Gen ad placements, bidding strategies, and the wisdom of narrowing ad placements in social media feeds.
We launched our first joint academic content campaign in April 2021 with a modest investment. The results were promising: In two months, we got the TCU initials in front of more than six million people around the country and enticed 87,000 of those people to click on the ad and come to the website to read the story.
Best of all, these were what we refer to as quality clicks, because the average reader spent almost two minutes on one of our stories, far above the internet’s long-form content average of less than 40 seconds. That small trial convinced our divisional leaders that magazine material could be marketing gold.
We didn’t need to reinvent the wheel or invest in outside development of marketing-specific content because we had a treasure trove already flowing from a steady creative stream inside our office.
We expanded the efforts in 2022, sharing new stories with 10.5 million pairs of eyes and bringing 116,000 more people to our site to learn about TCU research. That year, we got an email from Puerto Rico about French professor Benjamin Ireland’s research reuniting families torn apart during forced internment during World War II. “I am not sure why Facebook ‘promoted’ your article to me this morning,” the effusive author shared, “but something made me click to read more.”
We’ve continued to grow these campaigns. Though our mission at the magazine is and always will be to serve the TCU community first, we now factor in whether a proposed story might have a broader impact or might help us tell a more expansive tale about how the type of ethical leadership that flourishes here and makes the world a better place.
My opinion is that these campaigns have worked because they’re a perfect merger of marketing and communication. We’re doing what magazine writers and editors have always done—telling authentic stories about real people doing purpose-driven work.
What’s not to like?
Caroline Collier is director of editorial services at Texas Christian University and editor of TCU Magazine.
Lately, I have been experiencing anger, occasionally edging toward rage (depending on my mood) when I open a new document in MSWord and I see the ghostly prompt urging me to use its Copilot generative AI tool.
I do not want to use this tool. I especially do not want to use this tool to start a draft of a document, because writing the first draft under the power of my own thoughts is the key to ultimately producing something someone else might want to read, and outcome on which my living depends, but it’s also, the point of all writing ever, in any context, as far as I’m concerned.
I am persuaded by Marc Watkins’s framing of “AI is unavoidable, not inevitable” for no other reason than the tech companies will not allow us to avoid their generative AI offerings. We can’t get away from this stuff if we want to, and boy, do I really want to.
But just because it is unavoidable and must be acknowledged and, in its way, dealt with, does not mean we are required to use or experiment with it. Over the period of writing More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, and now spending a month or so promoting and talking about the book in various venues, I grow more and more convinced that if this technology is to have utility in helping students learn—and I mean learn, not merely do school—this utility is likely to be specialized and narrow and the product of deep thought and careful exploration and step-by-step iteration.
Instead, we’re on the receiving end of a fire hose spraying, This is the future!
Is it, really?
One of the reasons we’re being told it’s the future is because at this time, generative AI has no strong business rationale. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who admitted in a podcast interview that generative AI applications have had no meaningful effect on GDP, suggesting they are not amazing engines of increased productivity.
Tech watcher Ed Zitron has been saying for months that there is no “AI revolution” and that we’re heading toward the bursting of a bubble that will at least rival the 2008 downturn caused by the subprime mortgage crisis.
So, while there is reason to believe that we are experiencing a bubble that is inevitably going to burst, as we imagine what our institutional and individual relationships should be with this technology, I think it’s useful to see what the people who are—literally—invested in AI envision for our futures. If they are right, and AI is inevitable, what awaits us?
Let’s check in with the people directly funding and developing AI technology what they foresee for the educators of the United States.
@elonmusk/X
That is the man who is apparently running—and running roughshod over—the United States government suggesting that AI-assisted education is superior to what teachers deliver. Now, we know this is not true. We know it will never be true—that is, unless what counts as outcomes is defined down to what AI-assisted education can deliver.
“But to be clear, the ‘better outcomes’ that Silicon Valley shit-posters Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk fantasize about in the image above do not involve the quality of education—of learning or teaching or schooling. (You’re not fooled that they do, right?) They aren’t talking about improved test scores or stronger college admissions or nicer job prospects for graduates or well-compensated teachers or happier, healthier kids or any such metric. Rather, this is a call for AI to facilitate the destruction of the teaching profession, one that is, at the K-12 level comprised predominantly of women (and, in the U.S., is the largest union) and at the university level—in their imaginations, at least—is comprised predominantly of ‘woke.’”
It is hard to know what to do about a technology that some intend to leverage to destroy your profession and harm the constituents your profession is meant to serve. More Than Words is not a book that argues we must resist this technology at all costs, but again, these people want to destroy me, you, us.
ChatGPT and its ilk haven’t even been around for all that long, and we already see the consequences of voluntary deskilling. Futurism reports, “Young coders are using AI for everything, giving ‘blank stares’ when asked how programs actually work.”
Namanyay Goel, a veteran coder who has been observing the AI-wielding coders who can’t actually code, says, “The foundational knowledge that used to come from struggling through problems is just … missing.” This is output divorced from process, a pattern that is already endemic to our transactional model of schooling, but which AI now supercharges.
There is no role for educational institutions in the world where we allow this sort of thing to substitute for knowledge and learning. That may be the least of our problems should the full deskilling result. (See the film Idiocracy for that particular flavor of dystopia.)
When Microsoft shoves its AI tools in the face of a student with less time, less freedom, less confidence and more incentive to use it, what are we giving them to make them want to resist, to commit to their learning, to become something other than a meat puppet plugging syntax into a machine with the machine spewing more syntax out?
At this point, where is the evidence the companies do not wish us harm?
New research suggests that the Department of Government Efficiency has been making inaccurate claims about the extent of its savings from cuts to the Department of Education.
DOGE previously posted on X that it ended 89 contracts from the Education Department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, worth $881 million. But an analysis released Wednesday by the left-wing think tank New America found that these contracts were worth about $676 million—roughly $200 million less than DOGE claimed. DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” website, where it tracks its cuts, later suggested the savings from 104 Education Department contracts came out to a more modest $500 million.
New America also asserted that DOGE is losing money, given that the government had already spent almost $400 million on the now-terminated Institute of Education Sciences contracts, meaning those funds have gone to waste.
“Research cannot be undone, and statistics cannot be uncollected. Instead, they will likely sit on a computer somewhere untouched,” New America researchers wrote in a blog post about their findings.
In a separate analysis shared last week, the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, also called into question DOGE’s claims about its Education Department cuts.
Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at AEI, compared DOGE’s contract values with the department’s listed values and found they “seldom matched” and DOGE’s values were “always higher,” among other problems with DOGE’s data.
“DOGE has an unprecedented opportunity to cut waste and bloat,” Malkus said in a post about his research. “However, the sloppy work shown so far should give pause to even its most sympathetic defenders.”
On Valentine’s Day, the Trump administration surprised schools and colleges with its newest attack on DEI and student body diversity. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released a Dear Colleague letter that warned schools and colleges that they may lose federal funding if they discriminate on the basis of race.
This letter revealed novel, unsupported legal theories regarding the application of federal civil rights laws to schools and colleges. In fact, OCR’s letter sweeps so broadly that it claims to prohibit certain considerations of race that remain perfectly legal under well-established legal doctrine.
While the threat of losing federal funding has been a facet of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act since its passage in 1964, the letter specifically takes aim at DEI programming as well as the use of “race as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring, training, and other institutional programming.”
Although the letter includes some correct statements of nondiscrimination law, OCR makes assertions that are troubling and unsupported by sound legal reasoning. As part of the team that wrote OCR’s guidance on this very issue in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, I am disturbed by how politics is driving policy guidance that will hurt educational institutions and students from kindergarten through college.
In describing the scope of SFFA, OCR’s latest guidance attempts to smuggle in a legal standard that appears nowhere in the court’s opinion. The letter states, “Relying on non-racial information as a proxy for race, and making decisions based on that information, violates the law … It would, for instance, be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.”
Here, OCR baselessly claims that not only can colleges not consider race as a factor in admissions, they also cannot make race-neutral changes to admissions policies that help increase student body diversity—such as eliminating standardized testing. That claim falls firmly outside not only the bounds of SFFA but also the decades of Supreme Court case law that precede it.
In Grutter (2003), Justice Sandra Day O’Connor considers whether the University of Michigan Law School could use a lottery system for admissions. In Fisher (2016), Justice Anthony Kennedy implicitly approves of the Texas top 10 percent plan, perhaps the most well-known race-neutral strategy to increase racial diversity. And in SFFA (2023), the plaintiff’s briefs themselves include endorsements of possible race-neutral alternatives Harvard could have legally pursued such as adopting socioeconomic preferences in admissions.
Yet in its most recent letter, OCR attempts quite the head fake in its declaration that SFFA dictates that schools and colleges must abandon race-neutral strategies meant to increase student body diversity. While in reality SFFA says nothing about the permissibility of these race-neutral strategies, a separate line of cases tackles these legal questions head-on—and contradicts the Trump administration’s unfounded guidance.
In Coalition for TJ, Boston Parent Coalition and other recent cases, groups similar to Students for Fair Admissions have challenged changes to admissions policies of prestigious, selective high schools that were adopted in part to increase student body diversity. In some cases, the schools reconfigured weighting for standardized tests; in others, schools guaranteed that each feeding middle school gets a certain number of seats. In all of the cases, the school districts won. The position now advanced by OCR in its recent letter has failed to find footing in two courts of appeal. And just last year, the Supreme Court declined to further review the decisions in TJ and Boston.
What OCR attempts to do with its letter is extraordinary. It tries to advance a legal theory with support from a Supreme Court case that says nothing about the matter. At the same time, OCR ignores recent judicial opinions in cases that directly address this question.
Regardless of how legally infirm OCR’s proclamations are, schools and colleges will likely feel forced to comply. This could mean that the threat alone will lead schools and colleges to cut efforts to legally pursue racially diverse student bodies and racially inclusive campus environments. As a result, our nation’s classrooms and campuses will unfortunately look less like the communities that they sit in and serve, all because of shoddy policymaking and legal sleight of hand.
Ray Li is a civil rights attorney focusing on education policy. He recently left the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights after serving as a career attorney from 2021 to 2025. In that role, he worked on more than a dozen policy documents for OCR, including guidance issued after the Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA. He also served as OCR’s lead staff attorney on appellate and Supreme Court litigation matters, including for the SFFA, Coalition for TJ and Boston Parent Coalition cases. Prior to joining OCR, he advised schools, colleges and universities on legal regulatory issues, including civil rights issues, at Hogan Lovells’ education practice.
Mary Curnock Cook CBE chairs the Emerge/Jisc HE Edtech Advisory Board, and Bess Brennan is Chief of University Partnerships with Cadmus. Cadmus is running a series of collaborative roundtables with UK university leaders about the challenges and opportunities of generative AI in higher education.
Yesterday, Wednesday 26th February, HEPI and Kortext published the Student Generative AI Survey 2025: you can read that here.
Clarity and consistency – that’s what students want. Amid all the noise around Generative AI and assessment integrity, students are hugely concerned about the risk of inadvertent academic misconduct due to misunderstandings within their institutions around student use of GenAI.
That was the message coming loud and clear from the HE leaders at Cadmus’ latest invite-only roundtable, which included contributions from LSE, King’s College London, University of Exeter, Maynooth University and the QAA.
As Eve Alcock, Director of Public Affairs at QAA, put it:
‘Where there’s lack of clarity and uncertainty, student anxiety goes up enormously because they want to do what’s right. They want to engage in their assessments and their learning honestly. And, without clarity, they can’t be sure that they are doing that.‘
Leaders shared examples of good practice around how universities are working in partnership with students to understand how they are using GenAI, as well as their concerns and what faculty and leadership need to know to encourage greater clarity and consistency.
LSE: Student use of AI
At LSE, student use of GenAI has been the focus of a major research project, GENIAL. It’s a cross-departmental initiative to explore the students’ perceptions and experiences of GenAI in their own learning process.
According to Professor Emma McCoy, Vice President and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Education), AI is being used widely by LSE students on the courses covered by the project, and they are specifically using it to enhance their learning.
However, there were risks when AI was brought into modules as part of the project: when it was introduced too early, some students lacked the foundational skills to use it effectively. Those who relied on it heavily in the formative stages generally didn’t do so well in the summative. Using AI tools sped up coding for debugging in data science courses, for example, but there were also examples of AI getting it wrong early on and students taking a wild goose chase because they lacked the foundational skills to recognise the initial errors. In addition, despite banning uploads, students uploaded a variety of copyrighted materials.
While LSE has comprehensive policies around when and how students can use GenAI tools and how it should be acknowledged, only a predicted 40% acknowledged AI use in formative assessments in the project. In any case, such policies may become quickly redundant in any university, warned Professor McCoy:
‘We’re already seeing AI tools being embedded across most platforms so it’s going to be almost impossible for people to distinguish whether they’ve actually used AI themselves or not.‘
Maynooth University: Co-creating for clarity
For Maynooth University in Ireland, the starting point has been the principle that AI is for “everyone but not everything”. Leaders were aware that students were feeling nervous and uncertain about what they could use legitimately, with contradictory guidance sometimes being given about the use of tools with embedded AI functionality, such as Grammarly.
Students were also concerned about a perceived lack of transparency around the use of AI. They felt they were being asked to put great effort into demonstrating that they were not using AI in their work but their openness wasn’t necessarily being reciprocated by the academic staff.
Maynooth’s answer was to set up an expert and genuinely cross-disciplinary AI advisory group to work on complementary student and staff guidelines. Crucially, they brought on board a large group of students to work on the project. From undergraduates through to PhD students and across faculties, students worked in sprint relays on the guidelines, building the “confidence to be able to contribute to this work alongside their academic colleagues to try and remove some of the hierarchies that were sometimes in place,” said Professor Tim Thompson, Vice-President (Students and Learning).
One result was greater clarity around when GenAI use is permitted, with a co-created policy setting out parameters from no GenAI permitted through to mandated GenAI use and referencing.
University of Exeter: Incubating innovation
At the University of Exeter, new guidelines similarly describe every assessment as either AI integrated, where GenAI is a significant part of the assessment, AI supported, where ethical use of GenAI is accepted along with appropriate transparency, or AI prohibited. Alongside clear calls for students to be open about their GenAI use is a push for staff to also show best practice and be transparent with students if they are using GenAI to monitor or assess their work.
To that end, Exeter is supporting staff to pick up the challenge of integrating GenAI into learning and teaching to better understand the ways in which students are accessing these tools. Exeter’s Education Incubator offers opportunities for staff to explore pedagogic innovation in partnership with students, with the intention of scaling up successful interventions. Projects include rethinking historical skills assessment with LLMs in Classics and Ancient History and student-led hackathons on detecting bias in AIs.
While recognising the opportunities offered by AI for democratising access to learning, with innovations such as 24/7 coaching, Professor Tim Quine, Vice-President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor Education and Student Experience, also highlighted the danger of ever-widening digital divides:
‘There is a significant risk that AI will open up gaps in access to support where privileged students can access premium products that are inaccessible to others, while universities are struggling to navigate the legal, ethical and IP issues associated with institutional AI-supportive technologies, even if we’ve got the budgets to put those technologies in place.‘
King’s College London: rethinking assessment
‘No one wants more assessment!‘ declared Professor Samantha Smidt, Academic Director, King’s College London.
‘Talking to staff and to students about assessment, they’re asking for things to be different, to be more meaningful and rewarding, but nobody’s saying we don’t have enough of it.’
King’s has grasped the opportunity to rethink assessment in a holistic way as a result of, but not limited to, the AI imperative. Aware that students are keen for credit-focused work to be transparently comparable across modules, and for marks to be comparable across markers, King’s has been working on culture change, socialising ideas around a new approach to assessment.
Professional development opportunities – and, importantly, funding, for staff to explore areas of interest within a new assessment framework, TASK – have been allied with student partnership work. Pilots are trialling programmatic assessment across 10 programmes, focusing on assessment timings, tariffs, a shift to more formative assessment and a drive to reduce turnaround times.
In the loop
AI policy in HE is an increasingly complex area, with staff AI literacy requiring as much attention as student use of GenAI tools. In such a fast-developing field, where AI is going to become ever more woven into the fabric of the everyday technology used in academic work, engaging staff and students with emerging issues is critical.
‘The thing we hear time and time again is to keep partnering with and learning from students as a continuous process,‘ urged QAA’s Eve Alcock:
Some AI policies will have been in place for a year, two years now, which is brilliant, but are they still working? Is there a need to evolve them? Making sure that students are fully within that loop is incredibly important.
The most obvious way that a university expresses what it values is what it chooses to pay for.
At an institution level this might be about which kinds of jobs in which kinds of areas are funded. At a more personal level value is made clear by how people get in and get on in an institution.
Promotion
In reviewing promotion criteria of a number of universities, where it is not behind a login of some kind, one theme comes out time and time again. Promotion isn’t solely based on being consistently good at one thing. Promotion is about being able to be good at lots of things at once.
Whether this is the hope that academics can be good researchers, teachers, and administrators all at once. The desire to find managers that can manage people as well as projects. And the forever quest for professional services that have innovative approaches of some kind.
It isn’t fair to single out specific institutions as this is a sector wide phenomena but consider some of the language in the follow promotion criteria:
For a Grade 7 Assistant Professor “Evidence will be required of the ability to innovate and plan, and to execute plans competently”
For a Grade 9 lecturer role “Contributes to the planning, design and development of objectives and material, identifying areas for improvement and innovation.”
For a Grade 6 professional services role “You are involved in decisions that have an ongoing impact beyond your immediate team”
The job evaluation criteria for professional service staff “Will the role holder play an active part of any networks (connecting regularly with groups outside their team)? If so, please outline what these networks are, whether the role holder would be expected to establish the network, and the input they are expected to have”
The thread between these criteria is the implication that doing a defined job to an agreed standard isn’t enough. Promotions, particularly to high grades, depend on creating new practices, integrating with other teams, and making an impact beyond the confines of a role. It is the things which aren’t in the job description, because the nature of innovation means they cannot be, that are as valuable as the actual job description.
Innovation may be the goal but it comes at a cost.
Consistency
Every promotion criteria is a choice on what an institution values. The consistent message is that value is not purely about executing a single role consistently well. The choice that many universities have made is that there is value in working vertically, developing new practice within a role, and working horizontally, developing and sharing expertise across teams and departments.
This choice means that there is less emphasis on maintenance and delivery. The slow grind of keeping the place running and doing a set of discreet things well over and over again.
The result of this choice is that roles where there is less autonomy may be at a disadvantage. This is not to say there is not a role for innovation in all jobs but that innovation is structurally easier in some jobs than others. Take for example the jobs which are purely focussed on creating and interpreting new knowledge. In a previous role as a senior policy advisor I had great latitude to pursue institutional projects, look into problems and suggest new ways of working, and as a bonus my boss was the Vice Chancellor. It would have been an enormous failure of mine to have not been innovative.
Conversely, the people our institutions rely on that work on the reception desks, maintain buildings, clean the offices, and do the things that actually make the entire place stay open clearly have less freedom to innovate in their work. They are managed on their ability to deliver a distinct service but promotion is often dependent on being able to move beyond maintaining performance. There therefore opens a gap in the possibility of getting promoted between those who work primarily in maintaining the institution and those who think about what the institution might do. This does not seem like an ideal incentive for institutions that rely on lots of people turning up, doing a defined role well, and being motivated to do so.
Innovation for the sake of it
The underpinning assumption is that innovation for its own sake is a good thing. There is even a league table for the most innovative universities in the world.
This is because the university bureaucracy demands feeding with new ideas. It is a more machine. It needs more papers, more ideas, more meetings, more service innovation, more approaches, more evaluation, and ultimately more with less. The current more is innovating in service delivery with less resource to do it. It is rare to see a university with few ideas. It is much more common to see an institution with too few people to deliver them.
The prizing of the new is tempting because it’s interesting but it’s a tool for a limited set of purposes. Innovation is the tool through which new ideas, services, processes, and products can emerge. Maintenance, the kind of reusing, fixing, and keeping things consistent, is the tool to ensure the good keeps going. They both have their place but one is not more inherently valuable than the other.
Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility. Innovation-speak worships at the altar of change, but it rarely asks who benefits, to what end? A focus on maintenance provides opportunities to ask questions about what we really want out of technologies. What do we really care about? What kind of society do we want to live in? Will this help get us there?
To believe entirely in innovation as an unalloyed good is to fundamentally believe that newness is better. It is by extension a surrender of agency to say the promise of the future is better than the material of the present. Once the innovation happens more maintenance is needed. Once innovation overtakes maintenance, leaving no capacity to keep the new thing working, the realm of innovation for innovation sake is entered.
However, the alternative is not to go entirely the other way and focus on consolidation. As Russell and Vinsel point out in their own country
What a shame it would be if American society matured to the point where the shallowness of the innovation concept became clear, but the most prominent response was an equally superficial fascination with golf balls, refrigerators, and remote controls.
It is a question of balance and in a multi-layered bureaucracy like a university it requires balance across numerous domains.
At a human level, there should be clear progression pathways for people that want to be experts and keeping things going. The reward does not have to be management responsibility (why make people who are good at delivering do less delivery?) but recognition of their domain specialisms.
Culturally, it is about language that reflects the shared contribution of skills toward a common goal. And institutionally, it is a question of how maintenance becomes a key strategy component, and is therefore recognised. For example, the extent to which sustainability strategies are built on innovative idea vs the extent to which they are about keeping the old going.
Our institutions depend on the people that literally keep the lights on, the machines working, and the services delivered. Let’s let the maintainers maintain and reward them for doing so. Let’s also keep innovating, maybe just not on everything all of the time.
Facing a climate and ecological polycrisis, human society needs to make a transition to restore life on earth to a sustainable footing.
This is particularly true for those parts of the world sufficiently prosperous to have well-developed higher education systems, both because there is capacity and because the causes and effects of the crisis are uneven.
Education for this purpose is variously called “education for sustainable development”, “teaching the crisis”, “climate and sustainability education” and other alternatives. There are good conversations to be had about the relative merits of these terms – what they invite, what they close off – but those are for a different piece. For this one we can go with EfS – education for sustainability.
For those unconvinced
In addressing the question of how higher education curricula can accelerate this transition, it helps to engage with the reservations. While many professionally oriented degrees already have some variant of sustainability in the criteria set by their accrediting body, it tends to be the harder, purer disciplines that pose the toughest questions about EfS.
One position is that, as a matter of academic freedom, sustainability should not be imposed on higher education curricula. It’s true that coercion sits problematically with the kind of criticality and individual judgement higher learning demands. Yet students are already implicitly treated as prospective custodians of their discipline, and while on the surface this can look very diverse, there is a common basis of consistent reasoning, intellectual humility, collective endeavour, ethical practice, and academic integrity.
It seems a small step to include the kind of integrative, future-oriented learning that characterises EfS – especially given that EfS exists to preserve and uphold the existing values. To underline this point, see the revised QAA Subject Benchmark statements, which begin to distinguish what EfS could be for different subject areas.
Another concern is that there is no space for EfS in a given curriculum. It’s true that EfS needs thinking through to make it relevant to disciplinary teaching and learning. It’s also true that all curricula are all more or less time sensitive and are developed by module and programme leaders drawing on their evolving expertise and foresight. A case in point is the medical degree, perhaps the most pressured of all curricula.
The General Medical Council takes a position that Education for Sustainable Healthcare and the concept of Planetary Health are key to addressing the greatest threats to health we face, and consequently medical curricula are integrating these.
Somebody else’s problem
The assumption that somebody else should do the EfS is common. It often comes from a place of humility and self-doubt – a belief that there are colleagues better qualified to lead this work, with better-suited modules. But in a modularised system this is a trap that needs to be sidestepped. EfS is most meaningful when integrated rather than adjunct, and strongest when it connects deeply with the disciplines students have signed up to study; it belongs in the core of a curriculum at each level. Viewed in this way, supporting core module leaders to develop themselves to teach the climate and environmental crisis through the lens of their discipline, along with ways students and graduates can contribute to addressing it, does not seem much different from any other continuous self-development a disciplinary expert and educator would undertake.
Another reservation is that students of a given subject or discipline don’t need sustainability as part of that education. In response to that, an appeal: the polycrisis is existential and it needs you.
This makes sense if we recognise climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse and all that follows from those as a “wicked” (nexus) problem that cannot be addressed by one discipline alone, but needs a plurality of perspectives within and beyond academia.
For example, the modelling that informs the planetary boundaries framework depends on mathematicians, who in turn depend on scientific researchers collecting data out in the field, who in turn use bespoke equipment and software created by engineers with particular cases in mind. The modelling needs visualisation by scientific communication specialists, and it needs the kind of readiness abundant in arts and humanities to imagine and inculcate the social transformation implied. The transformation requires specialists in economics, law and policy, and the creativity of business and management. The impetus for all of this is health, and its dependency on our life support, a stable planet. So, education for sustainability doesn’t take students away from their discipline but draws deeply on it. This ability and intent to bring their disciplinary learning to the world beyond academia is what any academic hopes their students will do.
Beyond the UN goals
In some quarters there is a perception of EfS as teaching about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and this is a misunderstanding which partly explains the reservations about disciplinary fit above. A simple explanation for why the SDGs on their own have not successfully averted the polycrisis is that they are in considerable tension with each other and require trade-offs. Education for Sustainability is an action-oriented education focused on empowering students to navigate these competing goods, cognisant that the basis for all of them is a habitable planet. It recognises that being able to mobilise knowledge does not necessarily follow from knowing alone.
Hence the EfS emphasis on holistic thinking that recognises disciplinary boundaries and is curious beyond them, dialogue towards a shared, multifaceted understanding of the problem at hand, and the ability to contribute the most relevant of one’s own disciplinary perspectives and methods, in negotiation with others, to arrive at a collective plan of action which deals justly with conflicts of interests.
This kind of education has always been valuable. In current times, where collective human behaviour is key to averting hunger, forced migration and conflict, it is not only valuable but urgent.
