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  • Education Department cancels $350M in contracts, grants

    Education Department cancels $350M in contracts, grants

    Last week, the department canceled nearly $900 million in contracts at the Institute for Education Sciences.

    J. David Ake/Getty Images

    The U.S. Education Department has canceled 10 contracts with Regional Educational Laboratories totaling $336 million and a further $33 million of grants to Equity Assistance Centers.

    The decision, announced Friday, appears to be another example of Elon Musk’s U.S. Department of Government Efficiency slashing the department’s activities and of anti–diversity, equity and inclusion activist Christopher Rufo’s continuing influence. The cuts also seem to part of the Trump administration’s crusade against programs that could be considered DEI-related, but it’s unclear what all the canceled contracts and grants were actually for.

    Regional Educational Laboratories, or RELs, have been around for more than a half century. Among other things, they contribute “research on how experiences within the nation’s education system differ by context and student group, thereby impacting outcomes,” according to the website of the Institute of Education Sciences, which administers the 10 RELs.

    On Feb. 10, the Trump administration said it canceled nearly $900 million in Institute of Education Sciences contracts. Then, on Thursday night—in a news release titled “U.S. Department of Education Cancels Additional $350 Million in Woke Spending”—the department announced the severing of the REL contracts.

    “Review of the contracts uncovered wasteful and ideologically driven spending not in the interest of students and taxpayers,” the department said. It said REL Midwest “has been advising schools in Ohio to undertake ‘equity audits’ and equity conversations.”

    But the release didn’t say how much REL Midwest was receiving for that work or further explain what the other canceled contracts were for. The department said in an email Friday that no further information was “cleared for release.”

    President Trump has said he plans to close the Education Department, but the release suggested that these contract cancellations might not be part of a permanent reduction in spending. “The department plans to enter into new contracts that will satisfy the statutory requirements, improve student learning and better serve school districts, state departments of education and other education stakeholders,” the release said.

    The release also said the department “terminated grants to four Equity Assistance Centers totaling $33 million, which supported divisive training in DEI, critical race theory and gender identity for state and local education agencies as well as school boards.” It didn’t hint at restoring this funding.

    The Equity Assistance Centers were originally referred to as the Desegregation Assistance Centers program, according to the Education Department, and help to ensure “that all students have equitable access to learning opportunities, regardless of their child’s race, sex, national origin, or religion.”

    On Thursday afternoon, Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, posted on X a few examples of what he had telegraphed as “a trove of insane videos, slides and documents from the Department of Education. The whole department functions like a Ponzi scheme for left-wing ideologies.”

    Then, roughly three hours before the department announced the cuts, he posted, “I’m hearing murmurs that the @DOGE team is following my posts about the Department of Education.” About an hour before the announcement, he posted that the department’s “DOGE team has terminated $350 million in federal contracts to the DOE’s ‘regional education laboratories’ and ‘equity assistance centers.’ We expose corruption on X, then DOGE wipes it out in D.C.”

    Rufo didn’t return requests for comment Friday. The Knowledge Alliance, a coalition advancing research that’s critical to solving education problems, said in a news release Friday that the REL contract cancellations continue “the unprecedented assault on learning and evaluation in the U.S. education system.”

    “RELs provide research and technical assistance that is tailored to specific states and communities, helping schools and districts tackle the most pressing challenges they face,” the Knowledge Alliance release said. “Working in close partnership with educators, school leaders and policymakers, RELs help design and implement approaches that meaningfully improve outcomes for everyone in our school communities.”

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  • Florida ends in-state tuition for undocumented students

    Florida ends in-state tuition for undocumented students

    Florida state lawmakers voted on Thursday to get rid of in-state tuition for undocumented students as part of a sweeping immigration bill, The Miami Herald reported.

    Previously, undocumented students who attended high school in the state for at least three consecutive years and enrolled in college within two years of graduating could receive a waiver to pay in-state tuition rates. Now their tuition costs will go up significantly, a particular challenge given that these students can’t receive federal student aid.

    Democratic lawmakers attempted to amend the bill so that undocumented students currently enrolled at public universities could pay in-state rates for the next four years, but the amendment failed in the state Senate.  

    “We wanted to repeal in-state tuition and focus on Floridians,” Governor Ron DeSantis said at a news conference Thursday.

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  • Advice on cultivating an interdisciplinary mindset (opinion)

    Advice on cultivating an interdisciplinary mindset (opinion)

    Graduate students often begin their programs immediately after earning an undergraduate degree. Your excitement over a field—whether it was kindled by reading great books, paying attention to current events, the charisma of inspiring faculty members or attraction to the ideas presented in a course—gets you started on a career track that leads through graduate school. It may therefore feel a little late to start thinking about what you would like to do with your life midway through your graduate program. But in fact, it is an excellent time.

    People are attracted to research for many reasons, including a fascination with problem-solving, puzzles and ideas; a desire to change the future of some problem impacting the human condition; interest in creating and running a research team; or simply an attraction to Sciencia gratia scientiae—knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

    As a Ph.D. student, your research may be focused on the discovery of new principles, or you may focus on the application of existing ideas to solve practical problems. For example, you might focus on influencing policy around polyfactorial problems like poverty or climate impact, designing and testing public health interventions, or defining and implementing best practices in a given field or occupation.

    As you move through graduate school, the real-world problems you are most enthusiastic about may begin to feel out of reach. Research that focuses your thinking on application of existing knowledge to bigger-picture problems may leave you disappointed that you are not out on the frontiers, developing new knowledge. At the same time, your peers who have committed to studying the tiny details of an aspect of a problem may wish they could have more of a personal stake in solving its macroscopic elements, making human lives better and influencing policy makers’ decisions.

    Free Your Mind

    All this raises an intriguing question: How do you build yourself into a scholar who understands a problem at many levels, from atomic to planetary, from femtosecond to geological time scales? Is it even possible—or seemly—for a graduate student to try? Of course it is! You do not have to do every type of work that touches your interests, but it is rewarding to learn about how others are thinking about the things you think about.

    To understand this, try this exercise with your own work. What do we not know about your problem of interest? It does not matter if you work on malaria, Jane Austen or the root causes of poverty. The question works no matter where your interests lie. If you start jotting down answers to that question, you should be able to fill a page with unknowns in less time than it takes you to read this week’s “Carpe Careers” in Inside Higher Ed.

    Stow your list away for a while, for any duration from lunchtime to a month. Later, take it out and reconsider it. Make a page with three sections and separate the mysteries into:

    • Things that you don’t know but believe you can reason your way to a useful hypothesis about;
    • Things that you don’t know, but that are probably in your field’s literature;
    • Things that you don’t know and suspect nobody knows.

    All three of these are interesting lists. You should keep the first one close to you so that you can think about it often. Treat this list like a game. When you would otherwise be playing with your phone, pull out an interesting question and spend a few minutes thinking about how you might solve it, whether with an elegant experiment, brute force or clever analogy. It does not matter much whether you actually pursue any of the ideas that come from list one. Finding ways to solve problems is a core part of your graduate training. Building confidence that many different problems are within your scholarly grasp is invaluable.

    Take your second list to the library or a quiet corner and poke at your field’s literature, and then at the broader literature to see what other people have done. Be expansive as you look. If you work on, say, how vibrio bacteria sense the environment, you already keep up with the cholera literature. But what can you learn about how climate impacts the vibrios by looking for cholera in literature? How many novels have cholera as a plot element? When were they written and who was their audience? What does that literature tell you about who was affected by the disease, and where, and when, and why? What does history tell you about the times the books were written and the times that they portray? What was plumbing like in those times and places, or public sanitation? Do you have enough coffee to think deeper about your interests? Do you have enough time? It is well worth the effort, and helps you get to the fun part: list three.

    Enter the Matrix

    You do not have to be an expert in everything connected to your work. You can gain immeasurably more by becoming part of the vast interconnected thinking that surrounds us all. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,” says the poorly sourced refrigerator magnet quote. To develop traveling companions, develop connections with people who, like you, have interests connected to what you study.

    Promoting interdisciplinary research is important to those who take on complex problems ranging from climate change to human psychology. The logistics of stimulating interdisciplinary research are tough because different fields use different languages to describe problems that they may have in common. Those who think about connected ideas are often not only in different disciplines but in different places, whether that means in different colleges, schools and centers within a university or in different types of institutions beyond academe. Try to count the fields that are interested in poverty, from anthropology to architecture. Think of where people practice those fields: in universities, governments, civil society, international organizations, religious groups and more.

    As a graduate student, you may not have time to find all those whose insights might be valuable to you. But interdisciplinarity is increasingly important to academic institutions. Yours likely has a number of interdisciplinary centers. Find a list of them and take an afternoon to look them up. If there are several centers near you, it is likely that at least one crosses into your area of interest. Sign up for their Listserv and go to their seminars. Put the limits of your field and your position aside. You are not just a grad student or just a relatively new scholar in your discipline. You are a big thinker interested in big problems. Go forward as an equal and make some new connections. It might change your scholarly life.

    Victoria McGovern is the chief strategy officer of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a nonprofit funder with a mission to nurture a diverse group of leaders in biomedical sciences to improve human health through education and research. Victoria is a member of the Graduate Career Consortium, an organization providing an international voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders.

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  • A West Virginia HBCU reviews programs after anti-DEI order

    A West Virginia HBCU reviews programs after anti-DEI order

    West Virginia State University has been tasked with reviewing its programs and practices after the state’s governor issued an executive order against diversity, equity and inclusion. While other public institutions in the state have to do the same, West Virginia State University is in a somewhat unique position: It’s a public, historically Black institution with a predominantly white student body. The university serves all, but diversity and inclusion are part of its founding mission.

    Higher ed experts say that while few public HBCUs are openly discussing the issue, West Virginia State isn’t the only such institution that’s undergoing this kind of review process as DEI bans proliferate. Some argue that subjecting HBCUs to these reviews is counterintuitive in light of their historic mission, raising questions about how such institutions will fare in the current state and federal policy landscape.

    West Virginia State launched its review after Governor Patrick Morrisey last month banned state institutions from using “state funds, property, or resources” to “grant or support DEI staff positions, procedures or programs.” He also prohibited mandating DEI statements or any training or programming that “promotes or encourages the granting of preferences based on one person’s particular race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an advocacy organization for free speech rights, castigated the executive order as overly broad and warned it could limit what’s taught in West Virginia classrooms.

    The executive order also required “all cabinet secretaries and department heads under the authority of the Governor” to complete a report within 30 days, identifying any positions, procedures or programs based in “theories of DEI.”

    In response, West Virginia State University, along with other public universities in the state, submitted a letter outlining diversity-related positions, programs and activities, said Ericke Cage, the university’s president.

    “If there are concerns raised by the governor’s office … then we need to work to negotiate possible resolutions,” Cage said, though he expects it won’t come to that.

    In the letter, the university’s general counsel, Alice R. Faucett, argued that a comprehensive review found no evidence the university engages in or supports “preferential treatment” based on DEI principles.

    At the same time, the response readily acknowledged the university’s history and mission as an HBCU.

    “All procedural practices and programs at WVSU are designed to foster an inclusive and equitable environment,” Faucett wrote. They also “promote fairness and equal access while ensuring no group receives preferential treatment. The University remains dedicated to serving all members of the community, particularly those who have been historically marginalized, as part of its longstanding mission.”

    The letter highlighted some practices and policies that reflect the university’s “commitment to diversity, inclusion and compliance with state directives.” They included annual Title IX trainings, services for sexual assault survivors, campus presentations on human rights law and email messages recognizing Black History Month, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Women’s History Month and other observances.

    Faucett’s response also noted that the university receives some federal grants and privately funded scholarships with “DEI components,” without offering further detail.

    Felecia Commodore, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said other public universities have taken a similar approach to DEI bans, arguing to state lawmakers that “there’s nothing to reorganize, because we’re not doing what you’re saying.”

    ‘Baked Into Who We Are’

    Though such DEI reviews might seem fraught for an HBCU, Cage believes the university is likely to come out unscathed—and it may even fare better under the governor’s scrutiny than its non-HBCU counterparts. He noted that West Virginia State doesn’t have a DEI office or specific DEI personnel, a detail also highlighted in the university’s response document.

    “When it comes to diversity and inclusiveness, that’s really baked into who we are as an institution as part of our DNA,” Cage said. “At our very core, we are all about being a highly inclusive institution where any student, regardless of their background, can come and get a good-quality education.”

    He also emphasized that WVSU’s student population is majority white. University data from fall 2024 shows white students made up about 72 percent of the roughly 3,200 enrollees, while Black students composed about 10 percent, making it hard to argue the HBCU favors one racial group over another. Nationwide, non-Black students made up 24 percent of enrollment at HBCUs in 2020, compared to 15 percent in 1976, a trend that’s sparked discussion within some of these institutions about how to preserve HBCUs’ legacy while attracting and serving an increasingly broad range of students.

    Commodore pointed out that, in fact, “HBCUs were some of the only institutions that never had race-based admissions.” HBCUs were founded after the abolition of slavery to educate Black Americans at a time when such students weren’t welcome at other higher education institutions.

    For a while, non-Black students “chose not to go to them, but [HBCUs] have been inclusive since their inception,” she said. “If the aim of these reviews of DEI is to ensure that institutions are not discriminating because of race or gender or sex, to ensure that people are not being prioritized or excluded … actually, HBCUs were the model for that.”

    Given that history, Cage theorized HBCUs may not be heavily affected by DEI bans for the same reasons he’s hopeful for his own institution: Diversity and inclusion are intrinsic to how these institutions operate, not housed in a particular office or center. At the same time, they serve all students. Non-HBCUs, on the other hand, have made changes over the years, building up supports and services for students of color, which are now at risk.

    For “predominantly white institutions [that] have not traditionally or historically had that focus on inclusivity, I think it will be a challenge,” Cage said. “It is important for institutions to be welcoming, to provide support systems for diverse students,” and DEI programs were intended to make sure students from underrepresented backgrounds “felt that they were part of the university community.”

    Some non-HBCUs in the state are scrambling to make changes to comply with the executive order. The state flagship, West Virginia University, just a few hours away from WVSU, reported in late January that it would shut down its Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in response to the executive order, a move the governor celebrated as a “win.”

    “This is just the beginning of our effort to root out DEI,” Morrisey said in a video announcement about the division’s demise. “That’s going to happen more and more in the weeks and months ahead.”

    Concerns Remain

    Shaun Harper, University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California and an opinion contributor to Inside Higher Ed, said it’s become “incredibly pervasive” for public HBCUs to have to conduct reviews of their DEI work as state-level DEI bans spread—even if many HBCU leaders aren’t discussing the issue publicly.

    And such reviews are extra burdensome for HBCUs, he argued.

    “If a predominantly white institution gets that same request, it’s likely a lot easier for them to list their culture centers, their Office of Multicultural Affairs, perhaps the office of the chief diversity officer,” said Harper, who also serves as USC’s Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership. For HBCUs, it’s “impossible, in fact, to catalog everything that would otherwise qualify in any other context as DEI” because most have majority-Black student populations and gear their programming and services toward their student bodies.

    “It’s really onerous for presidents and their cabinet members and others on their campuses to even attempt to complete this exercise,” Harper added. “It requires enormous sums of their time.”

    Harper doesn’t believe state lawmakers are gunning for HBCUs with anti-DEI bans; it’s more likely they thought very little about how hard it would be for them to list their diversity efforts, he said. Nonetheless, the bans make some public HBCU leaders fear for their state funding if they don’t comply, or if their DEI reviews fail to appease state lawmakers when many don’t have funding to spare.

    Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, said part of the challenge with many DEI bans is their “vagueness” and the “chaos” that can create for higher ed institutions.

    The wording of some laws and executive orders calls into question, what can an HBCU do “to acknowledge, teach, celebrate, promote, its roots?” she said. “Is celebrating a national holiday”—like Martin Luther King Jr. Day—“is that acceptable?”

    Cage said he hasn’t ruled out that some of WVSU’s programs could be at risk—including federal grants with DEI components or privately funded scholarships for students from certain racial backgrounds or geographic areas—as a result either of the governor’s executive order or President Donald Trump’s efforts to root out federal funding for DEI.

    “If those privately funded scholarships are put in jeopardy, or if federal grants are eliminated, there will be a direct impact on our ability to support our students or to advance research and innovation on our campus,” he said. “Our students come to us with a thirst for knowledge, but they also come to us with not a lot of financial resources. I can’t tell you where we would come up with the resources to fill that gap.”

    While the university is reviewing its academic programs as well, Cage said any changes to curricula or academic programming would fly in the face of the university’s accreditation standards, which require a commitment to academic freedom.

    “When it comes to academic freedom and integrity, those are things that we really need to hold the line on,” he said.

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  • UTSA launches first-year seminar for veteran students

    UTSA launches first-year seminar for veteran students

    The transition to college is a challenge for many students as they navigate the bureaucracy of higher education, build community and discern their goals and plans after graduation.

    For student veterans, an added challenge can be having too many choices.

    “The beauty of the military is they tell you what your path is in life and where you’re going to be assigned, what your job is gonna be,” says Brian Rendell, senior director of academic credentialing, leadership development and marketable skills at University College, part of the University of Texas at San Antonio. “Once you leave that, it’s an open book.”

    A new course offering at UTSA helps individuals with military service experience adjust to their life at the university and connect with peers who have similar backgrounds. The course, launched this calendar year, fulfills a general education requirement and provides personalized assistance with obtaining credit for prior learning.

    What’s the need: UTSA, located in San Antonio, known as “Military City USA,” Rendell jokes, serves a large number of military-affiliated learners, including offering a robust ROTC program and enrolling dozens of student veterans.

    Veterans, compared to their peers, are often older and have complex life experiences.

    Student veterans at UTSA shared with campus leaders that they didn’t always feel connected with their peers who came straight out of high school, which pushed administrators to consider other ways to create community for military-affiliated learners.

    The course is also designed to help consider their military training from an asset-based perspective.

    “What a lot of veterans don’t realize is the military teaches you so many skills,” Rendell says, including teamwork, discipline and hard work, which can assist in academic pursuits. While some careers have a direct application into postmilitary life, such as pilots, “there’s no tank drivers in the civilian world,” so helping students see where their skills and talents could assist them in the future requires some individual attention.

    How it works: The course, part of the Academic Instruction and Strategies (AIS) program, provides support and community for veterans for their academic and personal achievement.

    UTSA enrolls a large population of military-affiliated students, including ROTC cadets and veterans.

    AIS is required for all incoming students with fewer than 30 credits, and the initial Air Force pilot cohort fell within this category, though the course may be open to additional learners in the future, Rendell says.

    All AIS courses address academic skills and career planning, but unique to student veterans is one-on-one support from staff to evaluate their past experiences and military training to see where to award credit for prior learning.

    The in-person course is exclusively being taught by faculty and staff who are former service members themselves. Rendell, a retired Air Force colonel, is teaching the pilot cohort and has found his shared experiences help break down barriers.

    “I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how honest these students have been about the struggles they’ve had in the military or just in life,” Rendell says.

    Rendell invited representatives from the Veterans Association and the Student Veteran Association to speak in class, helping build connections across the institution and beyond.

    Looking ahead: The initial cohort of AIS student veterans includes five learners, but Rendell anticipates course enrollment to grow quickly due to the university’s large number of military-affiliated students.

    Next fall, he anticipates two to three sections of a veterans-only AIS with 20 to 30 learners per class.

    Campus leaders will track qualitative feedback from veterans to gauge the impact of the program, as well as CPL awarded to veterans, as measures of success.

    UTSA currently has a Center for Military Affiliated Students, which helps with onboarding and financial aid, and is launching a living-learning community on campus for ROTC participants to further connect students physically.

    If your student success program has a unique feature or twist, we’d like to know about it. Click here to submit.

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  • Why are campuses quiet as democracy is in crisis? (opinion)

    Why are campuses quiet as democracy is in crisis? (opinion)

    A close friend who works at a nearby college asked me why, in 2025, there haven’t been student protests of the kind that we saw during the Vietnam War and after the killing of George Floyd.

    She questioned why campuses seem eerily quiescent as events in Washington, D.C., threaten values essential to the health of higher education, values like diversity, freedom of speech and a commitment to the greater good. We also wondered why most higher education leaders are choosing silence over speech.

    Deans and presidents seem more invested in strategizing about how to respond to executive orders and developing contingency plans to cope with funding cuts than in exerting moral leadership and mounting public criticism of attacks on democratic norms and higher education.

    My students have their own lists of preoccupations. Some are directly threatened and live in fear; some see nothing special about the present moment. “It is just more of the same,” one of them told me.

    And many faculty feel especially vulnerable because of who they are or what they teach. They, too, are staying on the sidelines.

    All of us may be tempted by what a student quoted by the Yale Daily News calls “a quiet acceptance and a quiet grief.” None of us may see a clear path forward; after all, the president won a plurality of the votes in November. How can we save democracy from and for the people themselves?

    I do not mean to judge the goodwill or integrity of anyone in our colleges and universities. There, as elsewhere, people are trying their best to figure out how to live and work under suddenly changed circumstances.

    No choice will be right for everyone, and we need empathy for those who decide to stay out of the fray. But if all of us stay on the sidelines, the collective silence of higher education at a time when democracy is in crisis will not be judged kindly when the history of our era is written.

    Let’s start by considering the role of college and university presidents in times of national crisis. In the past, some have seen themselves as leaders not just of their institutions but, like the clergy and presidents of philanthropic foundations, of civil society.

    Channeling Alexis de Tocqueville, Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld explains that “the voice of leaders in civil society help[s] certify truth,” creating “priceless ‘social capital’ or community trust.” He asks, “If college presidents get a pass, then why shouldn’t all institutional leaders in democratic society shirk their duties?”

    In the 1960s and ’70s, some prominent college presidents refused to take a pass. The University of Notre Dame’s Theodore Hesburgh became a leading voice in the Black civil rights struggle. Amherst College president John William Ward not only spoke out publicly against the Vietnam War, he even undertook an act of civil disobedience to protest it.

    A half century earlier, another Amherst president, Alexander Meiklejohn, embraced the opportunity afforded by his position to speak to a nation trying to recover from World War I and figure out how to deal with mass immigration and the arrival of new ethnic groups.

    At a time of national turmoil, he asked Americans some hard questions: “Are we determined to exalt our culture, to make it sovereign over others, to keep them down, to have them in control? Or will we let our culture take its chance on equal terms … Which shall it be—an Anglo-Saxon aristocracy of culture or a Democracy?”

    Those questions have special resonance in the present moment.

    But, especially after Oct. 7, college presidents have embraced institutional neutrality on controversial social and political issues. That makes sense.

    Yet institutional neutrality does not mean they need to be silent “on the issues of the day when they are relevant to the core mission of our institutions,” to quote Wesleyan University president Michael S. Roth. And, as Sonnenfeld notes, even the University of Chicago’s justly famous 1967 Kalven report, which first urged institutional neutrality, “actually encouraged institutional voice to address situations which ‘threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.’”

    Do attacks on diversity, on international students and faculty, and on the rule of law and democracy itself “threaten the very mission of the university”? If they don’t, I do not know what would.

    As Wesleyan’s Roth reminds his colleagues, “College presidents are not just neutral bureaucrats or referees among competing protesters, faculty and donors.” Roth urges them to speak out.

    But, so far, few others have done so, preferring to keep a low profile.

    The silence of college leaders is matched by the absence of student protests on most of their campuses. Recall that in 2016, when President Trump was first elected, “On many campuses, protests exploded late into election night and lasted several days.”

    Nothing like that is occurring now, even as the Trump administration is carrying out mass deportations, threatening people who protest on college campuses, attacking DEI, calling for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, ending life-saving foreign aid programs and trampling the norms of constitutional democracy.

    Mass protests on campuses can be traced back to 1936, when, as Patricia Smith explains, “college students from coast to coast refused to attend classes to express their opposition to the rise of fascism in Europe and to advocate against the U.S. involvement in foreign wars.”

    They were followed by the University of California at Berkeley’s free speech movement in the 1960s and protests against the Vietnam War, including those that occurred after fatal shootings of student protesters at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard. There were anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s, and, more recently, students across the country organized protests against police brutality and racism after George Floyd’s death and against Israel’s military actions in Gaza in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

    Though there have been small protests on a few college campuses, nothing like what occurred in response to those events has transpired in 2025.

    Students may have learned a bitter lesson from the crackdowns on protesters engaged in pro-Palestinian activism. And many of them are deeply disillusioned with our democratic institutions. They care more about social justice than preserving democracy and the rule of law.

    Students may not be following events in the nation’s capital or grasping the significance of those events and what they mean for them and their futures.

    It is the job of those of us who teach at colleges and universities to help them see what is happening. This is no time for business as usual. Our students need to understand why democracy matters and how their lives and the lives of their families will be changed if American democracy dies.

    Ultimately, we should remember that the costs of silence may be as great as the costs of speaking out.

    M. Gessen gets it right when they say, “A couple of weeks into Trump’s second term, it can feel as if we are already living in an irreversibly changed country.” Perhaps we are, but Gessen warns that there is worse to come: “Once an autocracy gains power, it will come for many of the people who quite rationally tried to safeguard themselves.”

    Gessen asks us to remember that “The autocracies of the 20th century relied on mass terror. Those of the 21st often don’t need to; their subjects comply willingly.”

    At present, college and university presidents, students and faculty must care about more than protecting ourselves and our institutions. We must speak out and bear witness to what Gessen describes and warn our fellow citizens against compliance.

    This will not be easy at a time when higher education has lost some luster in the public’s eyes. But we have no choice. We have to try.

    Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.

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  • Social media can benefit college students with disabilities

    Social media can benefit college students with disabilities

    College students often have a complicated relationship with social media, with a large number of learners active on multiple social media platforms but also aware of the negative mental health consequences social media can have.

    Teens receive hundreds of notifications on their phones every day, with over half of one study’s participants receiving more than 237 notifications per day. Nearly one in five teens say they’re on YouTube or TikTok almost constantly, according to a 2023 survey from Pew Research.

    A May 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed found one-third of respondents indicated social media was one of the biggest drivers of what many call the college mental health crisis.

    A recent study authored by a group of researchers from Michigan State University and published in the Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education evaluates how students with disabilities interact on social media and build social capital.

    Researchers found disabled students—including those with autism, anxiety, attention-deficit and/or hyperactivity disorder—were more likely to seek out new relationships and engage in active social media posting, which can advance connectedness and relationships among learners.

    The background: While social media can offer users social supports, such as promoting a sense of belonging during times of transition or crisis, it also poses risks for young people, including cyberbullying and online harassment, according to the study.

    Previous studies show youth with disabilities experience higher rates of cyberbullying compared to their peers, but students with disabilities are also more likely to report they receive social support through social media, which could be tied to the social isolation they can experience in person.

    Existing literature often focuses on the negative effects of social media for young adults with disabilities, but it is not known if there are differences between the experiences of those with and without disabilities and their social media habits.

    “Understanding different learners’ experiences with social media could help college faculty, special education professionals, and counselors not only consider using social media to create more welcoming and supportive learning environments but also how they might play a role in building individual learner’s capacity for positive digital participation,” researchers wrote.

    Methodology: Researchers conducted a survey of college undergraduates in the U.S. with and without disabilities in fall 2021, collecting data on social media use, social capital and psychological well-being. In total, 147 students responded to the survey.

    From this sample, researchers selected five individuals with and five individuals without disabilities to participate in semistructured interviews. Participants were matched based on social media habits and demographic factors, such as gender.

    Results: Through postsurvey interviews with 10 students, researchers learned that while both groups of students engage on social media for personal entertainment and to stay connected with people in their social circles, students with disabilities were more likely to say they used social media to initiate and grow relationships.

    All five participants without disabilities used Snapchat to interact with friends or keep in touch with loved ones in an informal manner, and all participants used Instagram to stay up-to-date with their peers.

    Among the five participants with disabilities, students reported using more social media platforms individually, and these learners were more likely to use TikTok (which in fall 2021 first hit one billion monthly active users compared to Instagram’s then-two billion users) compared to their peers. Students reported using TikTok for watching videos, sharing humor with their friends or participating in larger community building, including professional learning networks or cosplaying.

    Students without disabilities were more likely to say social media made no difference on their relationships or that it positively impacted their relationships by allowing them to stay in touch over geographical distances or other barriers.

    Similarly, all students with disabilities said social media assisted with their relationships, allowing them to connect with new people, expand their community and help manage their disabilities by connecting with others.

    Some respondents with disabilities said they felt more confident to engage with strangers in a safe way online and that social media was an avenue to find like-minded people they wouldn’t ordinarily interact with, allowing them to build new relationships. This was a unique trend to students with disabilities; those without were more likely to say they use social media to engage with people they already had relationships with.

    Students with disabilities may have greater challenges with in-person socialization, which researchers theorize makes social media particularly important for these learners, who also said they’re more likely to post on social media versus passively scroll.

    Interacting with others in the disability community and breaking stigma around disability was another theme in conversations with disabled students. These interactions could be with peers who share their disability or from medical professionals or support groups who provide new information.

    One limitation to the research was social desirability bias, or respondents’ tendency to answer questions in a way that would please researchers, meaning students underreport undesirable behaviors. The sample included only female and nonbinary students, which creates further limitations to the data.

    Put in practice: Researchers offered some suggestions for how educators can utilize this data to create a more inclusive learning environment, including:

    • Integrating social media into the classroom. While some digital learning platforms have forums for community building, such as a discussion board, these platforms can be less accessible than traditional social media platforms.
    • Facilitating personalized learning environments. Higher education leaders can consider ways to use social media to create formal and informal learning experiences in and around courses. These learning environments can also include methods for peer communication and connection, helping make learning more collaborative.
    • Engaging on social media themselves. Self-disclosure by professors can help build relationships in the classroom and enhance learning, but instructors must weigh safety, privacy and other legal boundaries in their social media usage. This could be one way to model positive social media usage for students, including how to have productive interactions with others.

    In the future, researchers see opportunities for analysis of design, implementation and evaluation of social media interventions for connection among students with disabilities, such as peer mentoring programs, online support groups or digital storytelling. There should also be consideration of the long-term effects of social media use on students’ mental health and well-being.

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  • The Timpson university – HEPI

    The Timpson university – HEPI

    • By Richard Brabner, Executive chair of the UPP Foundation and Director of ESG at UPP.
    • Richard is a guest on today’s My Imaginary University podcast with Paul Greatrix, in which he cites James Timpson as one of the inspirations behind his imaginary university. To coincide with the podcast, Richard has penned a review of James Timpson’s book, The Happy Index: Lessons in Upside-Down Management.

    You’re not supposed to have heroes at 40, or at least not admit to as much in the august pages of the HEPI blog. But here’s my confession. I have two and they are both called James.

    The first – James (Jimmy) Anderson, England’s greatest living sportsperson – isn’t relevant for the blog (although surely he deserves recognition from our great universities in the North West?). Instead this blog is about the other James – James Timpson – until recently CEO of Timpson Group and now Lord Timpson, Minister of State for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending.

    James Timpson is best known for the recruitment of former prisoners, with ex-offenders comprising around 10% of his company’s workforce at any one time. As his journey of employing ex-offenders developed, it led him to become a national figure – championing not just jobs for ex-offenders but prison reform. In 2016, he became the chairman of the Prison Reform Trust, founded the Employment Advisory Board network across the prison estate and, after the general election, became one of the Government’s most eye-catching appointments as the Minister of State responsible for all of this.

    It is his approach as a CEO, though, which offers an interesting perspective for higher education leaders. Not only is the business known for its recruitment policies but for many other progressive measures. He wouldn’t describe it as such, but James Timpson is a business leader known for putting social purpose into action.

    He would steer clear from using the term social value, or the increasingly common ‘purpose-led business’, because he finds corporate jargon maddening. This is one of the many lessons he shares in his book, which offers advice to leaders and would-be leaders on how to create a thriving organisation ‘that puts people first.’ The book – published before he became a Minister – is structured in eight chapters (or, as he calls them, lessons) with various interesting observations included in each. For this blog, however, I have pulled out three key themes which permeate through the book and are highly relevant to our sector.

    1. Happy colleagues = happy students

    University-employee relations are often fraught with tensions and have been riddled with industrial action in recent years – so could a key-cutting business offer a better way forward?  

    We’ve seen the transformative power of treating colleagues with kindness and respect, which then extends to how teams interact with customers. It’s a virtuous circle that can make our shops, and indeed all places of customer service, better for everyone involved.

    The quote above might come across a stating the bleeding obvious or even a little saccharine without the rest of the chapter it is written in, but it is important to put cynicism aside here, because throughout the book – and I would argue its number one focus – is to foster the right colleague experience.

    The idea of focussing on the colleague experience in an era of redundancies and ‘cost transformation’ may be too culturally difficult or simply inauthentic for our sector. But I would argue that the present circumstances make it even more important. At the heart of Timpson’s approach is a very human and empathetic one which respects colleagues’ individual circumstances rather than one which relies on policies and processes.

    Timpson has a Director of Happiness (again, please hold off on your cynicism) whose job revolves around providing support to colleagues confronting crises or challenges in their professional or personal lives. This person helps organise funerals, helps colleagues find somewhere to live and can even unlock financial support when necessary. Whether it is physical fitness, financial wellbeing or mental health, Timpson also offers a comprehensive package of welfare support for employees. Shouldn’t we do this too?

    Strong workplace benefits add to the positive colleague experience. This is not unusual for universities; academics and professional services tend to have great annual leave entitlements and exceptional pensions (compared to the private sector), but again, what comes through from reading The Happy Index is the human and empathetic element to their approach. They offer extra days off for milestones – a grandchild’s birthday or a school concert. They provide chauffeur-driven cars for an employee’s wedding, and they own 19 holiday homes dotted across the UK for Timpson’s colleagues to use for free.

    Much of this approach isn’t new or revolutionary, there are clear similarities with the 19th century quaker businesses, or Percival Perry’s policy of ‘high wages, reduced hours, and extensive corporate welfare’[1] for running Ford’s first factories in the UK. Yet, in an era of private equity financialisation, it is all too rare in the modern age. When Governments talk about universities learning from the private sector it is the likes of Timpson they should be referring to.

    2. Focus and simplicity

    Timpson’s human approach to the colleague experience is aided by simplicity – a value which cuts across the eight lessons in the book. When he writes about data, he says that leaders can become overly reliant on it and lose sight of what really matters. There are only four pieces of data James Timpson really cares about. Daily sales figures, customer service scores, cash flow – and what he describes as The Happy Index. This is a survey they regularly run and track with all colleagues, which asks one simple question: ‘On a scale of 1-10, how happy are you with the support you get from your team?’.

    If Timpson is right in his view that ‘the way colleagues feel reflects the way our customers will feel’, wouldn’t it be fascinating to see if this correlates to higher education? Perhaps universities could post this question each Friday via an app (not dissimilar to innovations like Teacher Tapp) to track colleague satisfaction and then correlate it with student experience data.

    Another relevant piece of advice is to avoid ‘entrepreneuritis’. Timpson says this is an area he struggles with as it is common for entrepreneurs to think they can venture into any business and make it thrive. Yet the pitfalls are as large as the opportunities. This reminded me of much of the evidence for the UPP Foundation Civic University Commission, where we found a huge amount of positive activity, but rarely was it strategic and connected to the needs of the city or region.

    The civic arena won’t be the only part of the university where our sector has to grapple with entrepreneuritis, but fortunately, Timpson offers some common-sense advice for how to test whether diversification is worth the investment, time and effort, based on three questions:

    Will it benefit the company, will the company fit into our culture, and is it going to be more work than it’s worth?

    All of these can be adapted for higher education.

    3. Giving back to get more

    The third theme brings us back to what Timpson is best known for. A ‘Timpson University’ would really lean into progressive recruitment for both academics and professional services colleagues, as well as adopt some of the most creative and impactful social value programmes in the private and public sectors. This shouldn’t be regarded as an act of charity. This is very much enlightened self-interest – James Timpson says that ‘returning citizens are often the most dedicated, honest and hardworking colleagues we can find’. A recruitment policy for colleagues which looks at supporting the most disadvantaged – ex-offenders, people who have suffered homelessness or who are care-experienced; alongside local recruitment (as some universities already do), which targets the poorest neighbourhoods in the region, could be transformational. The additional opportunity for a university, unlike a shoe repair shop, is the symbiotic relationship this approach could have with its widening participation strategy.

    Many universities have programmes to support disadvantaged people into employment, but I’m not sure any are as sophisticated or impressive as Timpson’s. There are clearly challenges, but the book is at its best when it details the journey the business has been through and some of the ways to successfully manage ex-offenders – unsurprisingly, the human approach and a culture which embraces kindness and the support and guidance of colleagues is critical.

    James Timpson’s book is a fascinating insight into running a successful business the right way. It really does show the art of the possible in terms of doing good while making a profit. But there are three weaknesses in a largely excellent read. Pulled together from a collection of Sunday Times articles, at times it can suffer from a lack of coherence. It is quite amusing, for example, to read about the importance of returning to the office on page 160 while finding out about the long-term potential of remote work on page 166. There’s also a little too much positive spin throughout the book. In the section about entrepreneuritis and diversifying income streams all of his examples ended up being successful. It would have been an even better read if he offered examples of real failure. I would have also liked to read more about his views on how the nature of business ownership impacts social value, something which should be explored in greater depth.  

    These are minor criticisms, however. The book offers excellent advice for leaders in any sector – even our universities – on the way to run a successful organisation in the 21st Century.

    [1] Kit Kowol: Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War

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  • Motivational Force: Building a Foundation for Student Success – Faculty Focus

    Motivational Force: Building a Foundation for Student Success – Faculty Focus

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  • Workers are cannibalised by the capitalist class (Nancy Fraser)

    Workers are cannibalised by the capitalist class (Nancy Fraser)

    The world is facing multiple crises simultaneously: Climate change, the rise of authoritarian movements, and the exploitation of labor from the Global South, among others. Professor of philosophy and politics at the New School, Nancy Fraser, says “it can’t be a coincidence” – at the root of it all is capitalism.

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