He was part of a 126-member UK delegation to India led by UK Prime Minister Starmer, which included entrepreneurs, cultural leaders, and university VCs, to celebrate the landmark trade deal between the two countries.
“The presence of all nine UK universities with a Letter of Intent (LoI) or Letter of Acceptance (LoA) is a major achievement for the UK HE sector, surpassing approvals from all other countries,” said Atherton, in a chat with The PIE News.
“UK universities have embraced the new regulations and India has embraced UK universities. All nine universities met with Prime Minsters Modi and Starmer during their joint press [conference], which celebrated the campuses and highlighted their contribution to the growth and development of higher education in India.”
Though Starmer has insisted that visa routes for Indian workers and students are not part of the broader trade deal, expanding overseas offerings for students to study in India was a key aim of the trip.
Major UK universities, including Coventry, Queen’s University Belfast, Surrey, Bristol, York, Aberdeen, Lancaster, and Liverpool, are set to launch campuses by 2026 across GIFT City, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. Southampton is the only functional campus so far, opening in August with 120 students in its inaugural cohort.
The presence of all nine UK universities with a LoI or LoA is a major achievement for the UK HE sector, surpassing approvals from all other countries Andrew Atherton, University of Southampton
India’s growing demand for higher education, projected at 70 million places by 2035, presents opportunities for UK institutions, particularly as cautious immigration policies shape study abroad choices among Indian students.
Both countries are also set to deepen education ties through the Vision 2035 framework, with an annual ministerial dialogue to review qualification recognition and promote knowledge-sharing via platforms like the UK’s Education World Forum and India’s National Education Policy (NEP).
The University Grants Commission (UGC), India’s higher education regulator, introduced relaxed rules in 2023 for foreign universities to open branch campuses in India. While initial interest was slow, many institutions are now actively exploring opportunities, according to Atherton.
“When the NEP first talked about international campuses in India there was some debate and activism about whether international universities would apply,” said Atherton.
“With nine from the UK and three from Australia and one from the US, the policy has proven its ability to engorge international universities to set up campuses in India.”
What’s driving Indian, international students to Ireland?
In a chat with The PIE News, Wendy Dsouza, senior VP, Enterprise Ireland, and Anam Hamid, South Asia advisor, Education in Ireland, discuss rising undergraduate demand, industry-led learning, emerging disciplines, and Ireland’s appeal as an English-speaking study hub in Europe.
by Mehreen Ashraf, Eimear Nolan, Manual F Ramirez, Gazi Islam and Dirk Lindebaum
Walk into almost any university today, and you can be sure to encounter the topic of AI and how it affects higher education (HE). AI applications, especially large language models (LLM), have become part of everyday academic life, being used for drafting outlines, summarising readings, and even helping students to ‘think’. For some, the emergence of LLMs is a revolution that makes learning more efficient and accessible. For others, it signals something far more unsettling: a shift in how and by whom knowledge is controlled. This latter point is the focus of our new article published in Organization Studies.
At the heart of our article is a shift in what is referred to epistemic (or knowledge) governance: the way in which knowledge is created, organised, and legitimised in HE. In plain terms, epistemic governance is about who gets to decide what counts as credible, whose voices are heard, and how the rules of knowing are set. Universities have historically been central to epistemic governance through peer review, academic freedom, teaching, and the public mission of scholarship. But as AI tools become deeply embedded in teaching and research, those rules are being rewritten not by educators or policymakers, but by the companies that own the technology.
From epistemic agents to epistemic consumers
Universities, academics, and students have traditionally been epistemic agents: active producers and interpreters of knowledge. They ask questions, test ideas, and challenge assumptions. But when we rely on AI systems to generate or validate content, we risk shifting from being agents of knowledge to consumers of knowledge. Technology takes on the heavy cognitive work: it finds sources, summarises arguments, and even produces prose that sounds academic. However, this efficiency comes at the cost of profound changes in the nature of intellectual work.
Students who rely on AI to tidy up their essays, or generate references, will learn less about the process of critically evaluating sources, connecting ideas and constructing arguments, which are essential for reasoning through complex problems. Academics who let AI draft research sections, or feed decision letters and reviewer reports into AI with the request that AI produces a ‘revision strategy’, might save time but lose the slow, reflective process that leads to original thought, while undercutting their own agency in the process. And institutions that embed AI into learning systems hand part of their epistemic governance – their authority to define what knowledge is and how it is judged – to private corporations.
This is not about individual laziness; it is structural. As Shoshana Zuboff argued in The age of surveillance capitalism, digital infrastructures do not just collect information, they reorganise how we value and act upon it. When universities become dependent on tools owned by big tech, they enter an ecosystem where the incentives are commercial, not educational.
Big tech and the politics of knowing
The idea that universities might lose control of knowledge sounds abstract, but it is already visible. Jisc’s 2024 framework on AI in tertiary education warns that institutions must not ‘outsource their intellectual labour to unaccountable systems,’ yet that outsourcing is happening quietly. Many UK universities, including the University of Oxford, have signed up to corporate AI platforms to be used by staff and students alike. This, in turn, facilitates the collection of data on learning behaviours that can be fed back into proprietary models.
This data loop gives big tech enormous influence over what is known and how it is known. A company’s algorithm can shape how research is accessed, which papers surface first, or which ‘learning outcomes’ appear most efficient to achieve. That’s epistemic governance in action: the invisible scaffolding that structures knowledge behind the scenes. At the same time, it is easy to see why AI technologies appeal to universities under pressure. AI tools promise speed, standardisation, lower costs, and measurable performance, all seductive in a sector struggling with staff shortages and audit culture. But those same features risk hollowing out the human side of scholarship: interpretation, dissent, and moral reasoning. The risk is not that AI will replace academics but that it will change them, turning universities from communities of inquiry into systems of verification.
The Humboldtian ideal and why it is still relevant
The modern research university was shaped by the 19th-century thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt, who imagined higher education as a public good, a space where teaching and research were united in the pursuit of understanding. The goal was not efficiency: it was freedom. Freedom to think, to question, to fail, and to imagine differently.
That ideal has never been perfectly achieved, but it remains a vital counterweight to market-driven logics that render AI a natural way forward in HE. When HE serves as a place of critical inquiry, it nourishes democracy itself. When it becomes a service industry optimised by algorithms, it risks producing what Žižek once called ‘humans who talk like chatbots’: fluent, but shallow.
The drift toward organised immaturity
Scholars like Andreas Scherer and colleagues describe this shift as organised immaturity: a condition where sociotechnical systems prompt us to stop thinking for ourselves. While AI tools appear to liberate us from labour, what is happening is that they are actually narrowing the space for judgment and doubt.
In HE, that immaturity shows up when students skip the reading because ‘ChatGPT can summarise it’, or when lecturers rely on AI slides rather than designing lessons for their own cohort. Each act seems harmless; but collectively, they erode our epistemic agency. The more we delegate cognition to systems optimised for efficiency, the less we cultivate the messy, reflective habits that sustain democratic thinking. Immanuel Kant once defined immaturity as ‘the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.’ In the age of AI, that ‘other’ may well be an algorithm trained on millions of data points, but answerable to no one.
Reclaiming epistemic agency
So how can higher education reclaim its epistemic agency? The answer lies not only in rejecting AI but also in rethinking our possible relationships with it. Universities need to treat generative tools as objects of inquiry, not an invisible infrastructure. That means embedding critical digital literacy across curricula: not simply training students to use AI responsibly, but teaching them to question how it works, whose knowledge it privileges, and whose it leaves out.
In classrooms, educators could experiment with comparative exercises: have students write an essay on their own, then analyse an AI version of the same task. What’s missing? What assumptions are built in? How were students changed when the AI wrote the essay for them and when they wrote them themselves? As the Russell Group’s 2024 AI principles note, ‘critical engagement must remain at the heart of learning.’
In research, academics too must realise that their unique perspectives, disciplinary judgement, and interpretive voices matter, perhaps now more than ever, in a system where AI’s homogenisation of knowledge looms. We need to understand that the more we subscribe to values of optimisation and efficiency as preferred ways of doing academic work, the more natural the penetration of AI into HE will unfold.
Institutionally, universities might consider building open, transparent AI systems through consortia, rather than depending entirely on proprietary tools. This isn’t just about ethics; it’s about governance and ensuring that epistemic authority remains a public, democratic responsibility.
Why this matters to you
Epistemic governance and epistemic agency may sound like abstract academic terms, but they refer to something fundamental: the ability of societies and citizens (not just ‘workers’) to think for themselves when/if universities lose control over how knowledge is created, validated and shared. When that happens, we risk not just changing education but weakening democracy. As journalist George Monbiot recently wrote, ‘you cannot speak truth to power if power controls your words.’ The same is true for HE. We cannot speak truth to power if power now writes our essays, marks our assignments, and curates our reading lists.
Mehreen Ashraf is an Assistant Professor at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, United Kingdom.
Eimear Nolan is an Associate Professor in International Business at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
Manuel F Ramirez is Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of Liverpool Management School, UK.
Gazi Islam is Professor of People, Organizations and Society at Grenoble Ecole de Management, France.
Dirk Lindebaum is Professor of Management and Organisation at the School of Management, University of Bath.
Welcome to The Fifteen, a global round-up of the stories animating higher education institutions and systems around the globe. Let’s get to it.
The biggest story in world higher education this past couple of weeks has certainly been “The Compact”, a deal offered by the Trump administration on October 1 to nine large research institutions (some public, some private). Apparently inspired by the work of Trumpian billionaire Marc Rowan, the proposed deal would see institutions agree to hand control of admissions to the Trump administration, transform or abolish institutional units the disparage or belittle Conservative ideas (not defined), abolish any use of race or gender criteria in hiring, adopt a standard of “institutional neutrality” which prevent all employees from speaking in public about “societal and political events”, fight against grade inflation, freeze tuition for five years, provide free tuition in the sciences if their endowment is over $2M/student, limit foreign enrolment to 15% of the student body, all in return for…something? The Compact isn’t clear, but it certainly suggests that universities’ existence as tax-exempt entities, their ability to receive research funding, recruit foreign students, and eligibility for student aid programs will all be harmed if they don’t sign the deal. The excellent Brendan Cantwell of Michigan State University described the deal as “rotten”, the Dean of Law at Berkeley Erwin Chereminsky called it “extortion”, while UCLA professor Joseph Fishkin noted that it’s an attempt to “replace the law with the deal”. At the time of writing, none of the nine institutions had accepted the offer, though one (MIT) had outright rejected it. In response to MIT’s rejection, Trump made an open offer to all institutions to sign the Compact. Republican legislatures in some states are likely to push their state-run institutions to sign the deal; meanwhile the Democratic governor of California and the Democratic legislature of Virginia have both signaled financial consequences to universities in their state that do sign on to the compact.
Back in 1999, former Prime Minister Tony Blair committed the UK to a goal of 50% of young people being able to access university. Current Prime Minster Keir Starmer has backed away from that goal, saying the target is “not right for our times”. He wants a new target which involves more students in skilled vocational programs (which is interesting because that sector is even more poorly-funded than universities).
India continues to open up to global branch campuses. Last week, it announced approvals for another nine UK institutions to open in the country as well as another three from Australia. Canada, as usual, is nowhere to be seen because – in our typical fleece-addled way – we expect everyone to come to us.
Vietnam is continuing to go full speed on modernizing its university system. The Politburo recently asked the Ministry of Education to draw up plans to create three to five “world class” institutions, and over 140 institutions have been put on notice that they may end up being merged to create a system of fewer, stronger universities.
Down in Australia, the University of Sydney has become the first major research-intensive university in the world to have a student body which is 51% international students. I’m sure this will have no effect on the ongoing debate about student visas.
This chart showing monthly academic salaries across Africa has been circulating quite a bit in Nigeria this past few weeks. It appears to stem from this story from a Nigeria Tribune journalist, and it looks right-ish to me, though I suspect it is not including various forms of allowances and per diems that would tend to equalize the results a bit, or making distinctions between public and private institutions. With the academic staff union gearing up for yet another strike, the finding that Nigeria is dead last in salaries is grist for the mill.
Nature published a special issue on universities. Parts of it are free online, but you may find it worthwhile to spend the $30 for the full issue (it’s good!)
As reported in previous editions of The Fifteen, Hong Kong is going ahead with raising the permissible “non-local” portion of the student body to 50%. There have been two developments in this story in the past couple of weeks. First, the government is making it clear that it does not want the new numbers to come entirely from the mainland (we’ll see how the mainland feels about that soon, I guess). Second, the government is actually planning an entirely new “University Town” to accommodate the new influx. Meanwhile, Hong Kong is celebrating being the only city in the world with five universities in the Times Higher Education ranking’s top 100.
Two countries are experimenting with new degree lengths. Turkey is now permitting universities to offer three-year Bachelor’s degrees, but only to “academically elite”, which I assume means some kind of advanced placement system. Meanwhile, in Japan, there is a move to approve five year joint Bachelor’s-Master’s degrees.
Saudi Arabia has a rich cultural history but when it comes to education; it has tended (like most Arab countries) to focus more heavily on science and engineering. Now, however, it is opening a new University of the Arts in Riyadh. It is starting out just in the fields of music, film and performing arts, but has plans to expand into architecture, culinary arts, heritage studies, cultural management, literature, and fashion.
The Times Higher Education had a piece on Chinese study abroad numbers collapsing by 2040, posing “an existential threat to institutions worldwide”. It’s an odd piece. Yes, since 2018 births in China have been plummeting, meaning collapse in overall youth (18-21) numbers sometime around 2036-38. But current youth numbers are well below where they were 20 years ago, and yet, studying abroad is much more common. Demography is not destiny.
This one is from earlier this summer when the blog was on hiatus, but I thought it was worth resurfacing. Somebody in Beijing decided to make some money by selling bottled water allegedly from Weiming Lake on the Beida campus. “Gazing at the water daily can boost morale, enhance intelligence and significantly increase emotional intelligence,” the sellers said, transparently capitalizing on students’/parents’ anxieties during the gaokao season.
And that’s the mid-October edition of the Fifteen. See you back here on Hallowe’en for the next edition.
The blog is off next week, but you can still join Tiffany MacLennan for Focus Friday on October 24 (they’ll be chatting about international student enrolment).
About one in four teachers say their schools don’t give students zeroes. And nearly all of them hate it.
The collection of practices known as equitable grading, which includes not giving students zeroes, not taking off points for lateness, and letting students retake tests, has spread in the aftermath of the pandemic. But it wasn’t known how widespread the practices were.
A new nationally representative survey released Wednesday finds equitable grading practices are fairly common, though nowhere near universal. More than half of K-12 teachers said their school or district used at least one equitable grading practice.
The most common practice — and the one that drew the most heated opposition in the fall 2024 survey — is not giving students zeroes for missing assignments or failed tests. Just over a quarter of teachers said their school or district has a no-zeroes policy.
Around 3 in 10 teachers said their school or district allowed students to retake tests without penalty, and a similar share said they did not deduct points when students turned in work late. About 1 in 10 teachers said they were not permitted to factor class participation or homework into students’ final grades.
Only 6% of teachers said their school used four or more equitable grading practices.
That was surprising to Adam Tyner, who co-authored the new report for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, in partnership with the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. He expected more schools would be following a “whole package” of grading reforms supported by advocates like former teacher and education consultant Joe Feldman, who wrote the influential book “Grading for Equity.”
Proponents of equitable grading say it’s important for students to be able to show what they know over time, and that just a few zeroes averaged into a grade can make it difficult for students to ever catch up. When students don’t see a path to passing a class, it can make them less motivated or stop trying altogether.
Eight in 10 teachers said giving students partial credit for assignments they didn’t turn in was harmful to student engagement. Opposition to no-zeroes policies came from teachers of various racial backgrounds, experience levels, and who worked with different demographics of students.
No-zeroes policies can take various forms but often mean that the lowest possible grade is a 50 on a 100-point scale. Some schools use software that will automatically convert lower grades to a 50, one teacher wrote on the survey.
Schools that enrolled mostly students of color were more likely to have no-zeroes policies, the survey found. And middle schools were more likely than high schools and elementary schools to have no-zeroes policies, no-late-penalty policies, and retake policies.
Researchers weren’t sure why those policies popped up more in middle schools.
But Katherine Holden, a former middle school principal in Oregon’s Ashland School District who trains school districts on equitable grading practices, has some guesses.
High schools may be more worried that changing their grading practices will make it harder for students to get into college, Holden said — a misconception in her eyes. And districts may see middle schoolers as especially likely to benefit from things like clear grading rubrics and multiple chances to show what they know, as they are still developing their organization and time-management skills.
In the open-ended section of the survey, several teachers expressed concerns that no-zeroes policies were unfair and contributed to low student motivation.
“Students are now doing below-average work or no work at all and are walking out with a C or B,” one teacher told researchers.
“Most teachers can’t stand the ‘gifty fifty,’” said another.
More than half of teachers said letting students turn in work late without any penalty was harmful to student engagement.
“[The policy] removes the incentive for students to ever turn work in on time, and then it becomes difficult to pass back graded work because of cheating,” one teacher said.
But teachers were more evenly divided on whether allowing students to retake tests was harmful or not.
“Allowing retakes without penalty encourages a growth mindset, but it also promotes avoidance and procrastination,” one teacher said.
Another said teachers end up grading almost every assignment more than once because students have no reason to give their best effort the first time.
The report’s authors recommend getting rid of blanket policies in favor of letting individual teachers make those calls. Research has shown that other grading reforms, such as grading written assignments anonymously or using grading rubrics, can reduce bias.
Still, teachers don’t agree on the best approach to grading. In the survey, 58% of teachers said it was more important to have clear schoolwide policies to ensure fair student grading — though the question didn’t indicate what that policy should look like — while the rest preferred using their professional judgment.
“There are ways to combat bias, there are ways to make grading more fair, and we’re not against any of that,” Tyner said. “What we’re really concerned about is when we’re lowering standards, or lowering expectations. … Accountability is always a balancing act.”
Nicole Paxton, the principal of Mountain Vista Community School, a K-8 school in Colorado’s Harrison School District 2, has seen that balancing act in action.
Her district adopted a policy a few years ago that requires teachers to grade students on a 50-100 scale. Students get at least a 50% if they turn in work, but they get a “missing” grade if they don’t do the assignment. Middle and high schoolers are allowed to make up missing or incomplete assignments. But it has to be done within the same quarter, and teachers can deduct up to 10% for late assignments.
Paxton thinks the policy was the right move for her district. She says she’s seen it motivate kids who are struggling to keep trying, when before they stopped doing their work because they didn’t think they could ever bounce back from a few zeroes.
“As adults, in the real world, we get to show what we know and learn in our careers,” Paxton said. “And I think that kids are able to do that in our building, too.”
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
They can be a useful sources when you’re trying to find out what needs to happen or why something is happening. When your story relates to solutions to development or climate change in a specific country or region, find experts from that country or region, as they have a better understanding of the situation on the ground.
Don’t grab just anyone.
Journalists often find themselves short on time and under tight deadlines. They can easily fall into the trap of grabbing sources who will get back to them quickly, or turning to sources eager for the publicity or the attention that being quoted in a news story will get them.
The result is that journalists often ignore the many people with important stories to tell or information to impart: groundbreaking scientists, people experiencing the damaging effects of climate change every day, individuals and groups working on systemic and just solutions.
The perspectives that we find in the media are therefore limited. The problem here is that the sources can then shape the story and that many perspectives go unheard. Bear that in mind that when you go looking for your sources.
And remember: there is a big difference between a stakeholder and an expert. While an expert can help you identify a problem and explain its causes and effects, a stakeholder gives you the first person accounts and the emotions — anger, fear, pain, frustration — that make a story compelling and urgent. The first person accounts are what will connect with readers or listeners.
If you only have stakeholders, you won’t give your readers a sense of scale or the context needed to understand the problem and figure out how to solve it. But if you only have experts, the story will feel cold and readers won’t connect to it. When you’re telling a story about the climate crisis, for example, you need experts to tell your audience what is happening and what we can do and you need humans on the ground to tell your audience why it matters.
Where to start looking for people
It can be tricky to find stakeholders. People who are victims of some problem might not advertise themselves as such. Here are some ways to find them:
Start with people you already know. They might have relatives, friends and colleagues who you can ask. Those people have relatives, friends and colleagues. Through your own personal network you have access to many, many different people. Let everyone know the story you are working on and the types of people you are looking for.
You will find people in surprising places: Cafes, markets, doctors offices and schools. But they won’t come to you if they don’t know you want to speak to them. And don’t forget the power of social media. Just one person you know who has 2,000 social media friends can reach a lot of people you might not know.
The leaders in your local church, mosque or community center know a lot of people. School organizations are great networking places. So are trade groups, environmental and social advocacy groups and labor unions.
Visit places where people live and gather. There is nothing as good as face to face interactions.
Search out the comments sections of news articles. People often post about their own experiences at the end of articles. Sometimes you might be able to contact them through those comment chats.
The best stories reflect multiple perspectives and include both people’s emotions and opinions and information from experts. The ability to find and talk to these people is the best part of being a journalist.
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After pleading guilty to hacking and extorting from ed tech giant PowerSchool, 19-year-old Matthew Lane was sentenced Tuesday to four years in prison and nearly $14.1 million in restitution.
The Massachusetts college student was accused of using an employee’s credentials to gain unauthorized access to the cloud-based K-12 software provider’s network in September 2024 and extorting $2.85 million in Bitcoin from the company in December 2024, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts said in May. PowerSchool wasn’t initially identified in legal documents, but was later confirmed to have been the victim.
Since PowerSchool began notifying districts of a data breach in January 2025, it’s been revealed that sensitive data was leaked for more than 60 million students and 10 million teachers. A court filing said Lane’s access to this student and teacher data included names, email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, medical information, residential addresses, parent and guardian information and passwords.
Lane allegedly told PowerSchool that if it didn’t hand over the nearly $2.85 million ransom, he would leak the stolen information “worldwide.”
The breach shocked district leaders, as it seemed that PowerSchool had been doing all the right things to keep its data secure, said Doug Levin, co-founder and national director of the K12 Security Information eXchange, a national K-12 cybersecurity nonprofit. For instance, he said, PowerSchool had conducted audits and assured that its networks storing school districts’ information were secure before the 2024 data breach.
The company even publicly touted the importance of K-12 cybersecurity at the White House, he said.
PowerSchool is still facing multiple lawsuits that claim the company was negligent during the cyberattack and failed to provide timely notice to impacted users.
A PowerSchool spokesperson told K-12 Dive in a Thursday statement that the company “appreciates the efforts of the prosecutors and law enforcement who brought this individual to justice.” Since the data breach, the company said, it has strengthened its systems by adding more security layers and implementing time-based access controls.
Can’t put the genie back in the bottle
Although Lane has been held accountable for the PowerSchool cyberattack and sentenced to prison, “the damage is done” from the leak of the school districts’ sensitive data, Levin said. “There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.”
K-12 cybersecurity remains “an ongoing problem,” and cyberattacks against schools won’t stop just because someone was held accountable for the PowerSchool incident, Levin said.
Between July 2023 and December 2024, 82% of K-12 schools said they had experienced a cyber incident, according to a March report from the nonprofit Center for Internet Security.
As trust eroded, conversations shifted to ed tech
The PowerSchool data breach “fundamentally shook” school systems’ trust in big ed tech vendors, Levin said.
Before that incident, he said, a lot of the conversations in K-12 cybersecurity focused on how schools could better protect themselves through efforts like strengthening firewalls and implementing multifactor authentication.
While those are important strategies, the reality is that schools rely on a large number of vendors that hold their sensitive information. “Schools are only as strong as their weakest link,” Levin said, “and if it turns out the weakest link is a vendor, as we’ve seen in these cases, it causes folks to rethink what it means to be cybersecure.”
More questioning on districts’ data retention policies
In the PowerSchool case, some of the exposed data taken from school districts was decades old. That, Levin said, suggests that keeping data for extended periods of time may present an unacceptable level of risk — especially when there’s no way to reach people whose data may have been leaked.
As a result, K-12 leaders are talking more about how and whether to minimize the data collected — and how long to hold onto sensitive information.
At a minimum, Levin said, schools should consider ways to delete and archive older sensitive information — or at least prevent it from remaining available on the internet — to reduce risk to their community members.
At the federal level, Levin said, it appears officials have “dramatically pulled back support for schools and cybersecurity.” The White House and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have shifted a lot more of the burden for cybersecurity to states and localities, including schools, he said.
As the federal government steps back, states are taking more responsibility by, for example, requiring schools to report cybersecurity incidents within a certain time frame or by establishing cybersecurity standards, Levin said.
The good news, Levin added, is that “in many cases, we’re starting to see that states recognize this is an issue that they need to lean in on. And they need to ensure that public agencies are doing their part, but also that vendors and other suppliers to public agencies are just as critical … that they do their part as well.”
Elon University’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors is seeking more faculty involvement in the merger process as the institution looks to take overQueens University of Charlotte.
In a statement Wednesday, the group described faculty as being blindsided by the merger announcement in September and left out of the planning process. They called for faculty to elect representatives on integration teams and for officials to formally include of the universities’ faculty councils in merger advising.
The Elon AAUP also said faculty should have a role in deciding whether to formally approve the merger. The two private nonprofits expect their boards to approve final parameters in November.
Dive Insight:
Elon and Queens, about 115 miles away from each other in North Carolina, said last month that their combination “creates new advantages of scale, bringing together resources, faculty expertise, research capacity and student services across both universities.”
They also said their merger would accelerate the creation of new programs meant to address the Charlotte area’s workforce needs, such as a growing shortage of nurse practitioners, physician assistants and lawyers and a rising demand for graduate offerings.
Since that announcement, Elon has said hundreds of employees, students and other stakeholders have attended town hall events about the combination and listening sessions and that officials are using their feedback to shape the plan. It has also seen public pushback from faculty, students and alumni.
Faculty feedback has been “important to the extensive work of a team with representatives of both campuses discussing questions related to the academics, operations, and programming of a merged institution,” the university said Thursday in an emailed statement.
But the university’s AAUP chapter said faculty need a larger, more formal role in the process.
“Shared governance is not a courtesy; it is a cornerstone of higher education and a safeguard for academic quality,” the faculty group said in its statement, which was published by Elon’s student news organization. “It only functions when faculty are partners in major institutional decisions.”
The chapter said officials didn’t consult with Elon’s academic council before the merger announcement. That’s despite stipulations in the university’s faculty handbook for the council to “advise the President on the setting of priorities and the planning of long-range goals for the University.”
Going forward, Elon’s AAUP called for a “meaningful” advisory role for the full council and its Queens counterpart on the combination.They acknowledged scheduled meetings that included the chairs of those bodies, but the Elon AAUP pushed for the full involvement of the councils.
With a fleshed-out merger plan still to be approved, the Elon AAUP is pressing for faculty to have a say in the ultimate decision.
“If faculty will be called upon to help make the merger a success, then faculty should be included in the decision of both institutions to move forward with the merger,” the group said.
In its Thursday statement, the university said, “There have been, and will continue to be, opportunities for Elon faculty, in their individual capacities and through involvement with Elon’s Academic Council, to participate in strategic conversations as work progresses toward a final decision by the boards of trustees of Elon and Queens.”
Elon is the larger institution of the two, with 7,207 students in fall 2023, an increase of 3.1% from 2018. Queen’s fall 2023 headcount of 1,846 students was a27.2% decline from five years earlier.
Elon is also on firmer financial footing. It had $1.2 billion in assets in fiscal 2024, more than three times that of Queens.That year, Elon logged a $70.4 million operating surplus while Queens reported an $8.7 million deficit.However, in a FAQ page on the merger, the universities said that the combination plan is “not driven by crisis.”
Last week I and several colleagues visited a local technical high school to see what kind of dual-enrollment courses we could offer there. The school was leaps and bounds beyond what technical high schools were known for when I was a student: It had an impressive range of programs, new facilities, dedicated staff and some very poised students. I’d be proud to have them here.
That said, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern that hasn’t changed over the decades: gender segregation by field remains robust.
The electronics lab and the computer gaming lab were full of young men. The allied health area was almost entirely young women. When I asked the admins there whether that was typical of what they’ve seen, they responded that it was.
This week I dropped by a continuing-education conference that the college hosts for dental hygienists. I noticed that the attendees were nearly all women. A woman who runs a complementary program and was in attendance told me that over 98 percent of the dental hygienists in our state are women. Strikingly, she noted that the few men in the field have a terrible time getting hired; dentists are afraid that patients will mistake male hygienists for dentists.
This, in 2025.
In each case, the organizers were fully aware of the gender split. They certainly didn’t encourage it and, in some cases, tried actively to counter it. That has been true for years. Yet the patterns persist; if anything, they seem to be strengthening in certain occupational areas.
It’s not news that women have been graduating college at higher rates than men for several decades now. But if you looked only at HVAC and cybersecurity programs, you wouldn’t know it. Conversely, if you looked only at allied health programs, you’d wonder how the percentage of men even hits double digits. The disjuncture between greater integration in certain professional fields and markedly persistent segregation in others is striking.
Honestly, if you had asked me 30 years ago, I would have expected to see much more integration by now. Maybe not parity, but something far closer to it than what we have now. And the fact that the patterns exist among current high school students suggests that it isn’t just a matter of one generation slowly replacing another.
My own bias is that, generally speaking, more integration is better. That means more women in welding and more men in nursing. That’s because defaulting to individual choice as an explanation doesn’t take account of the conditions in which those choices are made. Whether your preferred metaphor is critical mass or a tipping point, there’s often a threshold of representation beneath which folks who might otherwise have wanted to be there will feel unwelcome. That threshold is usually well below absolute parity, but above being the “only.”
Having enough people like you—however defined—in the field can make the option seem more welcoming.
So, no, I don’t believe in trying to engineer absolute parity in all things. People have free will, and an occupational draft isn’t likely to lead anywhere good. But surely we can make headway toward making more choices more welcoming for more types of people. We know that having too much sameness in a group leads to groupthink and that groups with multiple perspectives tend to make better decisions. The same can be said of professions. I didn’t think we’d still be making those points in 2025, but here we are.
