Category: Featured

  • Working-Class Wisdom in the Age of Neoliberalism and Trump

    Working-Class Wisdom in the Age of Neoliberalism and Trump

    In the United States of 2025—where neoliberal capitalism and creeping authoritarianism grind down the human spirit—there’s an urgent need for a way of thinking, surviving, and resisting that doesn’t come from think tanks or corporate wellness plans. Street Psychology is that way.

    This idea isn’t new. It’s an outbreak from earlier projects like Street Sociologist (2009–2012) and American Injustice (2009–2013), digital spaces that chronicled working-class survival under austerity, war, mass incarceration, student loan predation, and the Great Recession. Those projects documented both despair and resistance—voices from the margins that understood the system was not broken but operating as designed. Street Psychology is the next step in that lineage. It names the psychic toll of exploitation and dares to offer tools for survival drawn not from institutions, but from the people themselves.

    Street Psychology isn’t a licensed profession or clinical method. It’s a bottom-up philosophy. A way of being that honors grit, grief, memory, and movement. It draws from Black Psychology, Radical Social Work, and the unspoken survival strategies passed down through generations—especially those of the poor, the working class, the dispossessed.

    It tells us: you’re not crazy. You’re living in a society that has normalized cruelty.

    Life Under Pressure

    In today’s America, working people face a perfect storm. Medicaid cuts, climate shocks, unpayable debt, and housing crises are daily facts of life. The Trump regime, emboldened by a Supreme Court that erodes checks and balances, offers little more than political theater and corporate tax breaks. “Law and order” is back—but so are vigilante violence and state repression. In this environment, working-class people are expected to carry on as if nothing is wrong—grinding away at gig jobs, navigating broken transit systems, shouldering invisible pain.

    Street Psychology offers no false comfort. It teaches that burnout, anxiety, and despair are not personal failures—they are rational reactions to a system that exploits and isolates. It offers a politics of honesty.

    It reminds us that mental health cannot be separated from rent, food, dignity, and debt.

    Lessons from Horror and Triumph

    Street Psychology is grounded in history—not the history of presidents and generals, but the people’s history of how folks made it through.

    During the Great Depression, when one in four Americans was unemployed, it was mutual aid, union organizing, and government pressure from below that helped form the New Deal—not just FDR’s goodwill. Neighbors shared food. Workers seized factories. Families survived on ingenuity and grit. Street Psychology carries that memory.

    During World War II, ordinary people faced rations, displacement, and death on an unprecedented scale. But they also built community resilience. Black Americans moved north and west in the Great Migration, seeking both work and dignity. Women entered the workforce by the millions—not for empowerment branding, but to survive. Trauma was everywhere, but so was collective purpose. Street Psychology remembers that duality.

    And in the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the brutal convergence of economic inequality, medical neglect, and state failure. But we also saw mutual aid networks rise overnight. Grocery workers, nurses, delivery drivers, and custodians became the front line—not billionaires or generals. People created community fridges, distributed masks, and organized rent strikes. Even amid mass death and disinformation, something deeply human survived. Street Psychology draws its oxygen from these moments.

    It says: we’ve been through hell before—and we’ve learned how to survive together.

    Radical Roots and Collective Healing

    Street Psychology stands on the shoulders of Black radical thinkers like Dr. Na’im Akbar and Dr. Wade Nobles, who taught that psychological liberation requires historical truth and cultural self-determination. It borrows from the Radical Social Worker tradition that insists depression and addiction often emerge from exploitation, not deficiency.

    It echoes the voices of those doing hard, dirty, “bullshit jobs,” as David Graeber called them—people whose work is exhausting, precarious, and spiritually deadening. It respects those whose minds and bodies are tired because they’ve been used up. And it says plainly: this is not your fault.

    Healing begins with naming the madness.

    A People’s Practice

    Street Psychology thrives outside institutions. It happens in union halls, kitchens, church basements, food pantries, WhatsApp threads. It takes the form of eye contact, a ride to work, a bag of groceries, a story told without shame. It asks us not to fix ourselves to fit a broken world—but to remember we are not alone in our pain or our power.

    It teaches that even in a world of distraction and despair, we can practice presence and solidarity. We can re-learn how to listen, how to mourn, how to laugh in defiance.

    This psychology is not neutral. It does not pretend to be apolitical. It stands with those being crushed—by the debt collectors, the landlords, the ICE raids, the fascists in suits. It says: you matter. Your struggle matters. And you’re not the only one carrying this weight.

    A Call to Reclaim Our Minds

    Street Psychology is not a cure. It is not a self-help manual. It is a collective reckoning. A refusal to be shamed into silence or fragmented into diagnosis. It is the unlicensed, unpolished wisdom of people who’ve lived through hell and still show up for each other.

    In the age of Trump, AI surveillance, climate breakdown, and economic betrayal, this might be our best chance: to recover the human, to restore the political, and to reclaim the psychological as a shared terrain.

    Let’s build a new commons—not just of resources, but of understanding. Let’s build a psychology that is street-smart, justice-rooted, and history-aware.

    Sources & Influences:

    • Akbar, Na’im. Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery

    • Nobles, Wade. Seeking the Sakhu

    • Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs

    • Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed

    • Radical Social Worker Collective

    • Mutual Aid Disaster Relief

    • American Injustice (2009–2013) and Street Sociologist (2009–2012) blog archives

    • Historical memory from the Great Depression, WWII home front, and COVID-19 mutual aid networks

    • People’s CDC, APA, KFF data on structural causes of psychological distress

    Street Psychology lives in those who refuse to forget—and who refuse to give up. If you or your community are practicing this in any form, we want to hear from you.

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  • How important could one court be?

    How important could one court be?

     

    A polarized electorate

    The first Italo-American to serve on the Supreme Court, Scalia had been appointed by Ronald Reagan, a Republican president. Of the eight remaining justices, four were appointed by Republican presidents and four by Democrats.

    Both parties recognize that Scalia’s successor could tip the scales in close votes. Cases currently before the Court involve climate change, affirmative action, abortion, unions, immigrants and contraception — issues where the electorate is deeply divided.

    Although the Constitution stipulates that the president nominates Supreme Court justices, Republican candidates for the presidency have said the choice of Scalia’s successor should be left to whoever succeeds Barack Obama in the White House next January. Obama, a Democrat, has said he will send a nomination to the Senate in due course.

    That partisan split can be explained by the weight of the Court’s decisions and the polarization of the U.S. electorate.

    Whereas historically the two major parties have been able to agree, sometimes begrudgingly, on the choice of justices, the process has become far more partisan and divisive in recent decades.

    Unfavorable opinions

     The gaping ideological split in the current Congress and an increasingly vitriolic presidential campaign ensure a bitter fight in coming months.

    The political acrimony was reflected in a nationwide poll conducted last year by the Pew Research Center.

    Following recent Supreme Court rulings on Obamacare and same-sex marriage, unfavorable opinions of Court have reached a 30-year high, the survey found. And opinions about the court and its ideology have never been more politically divided.

    “Republicans’ views of the Supreme Court are now more negative than at any point in the past three decades,” it said. Little wonder that Republican presidential candidates are keen to put a conservative in the vacant seat.

    While the Supreme Court is an independent branch of government, its composition is not — and has never been — immune from politics. The nomination of justices is part of the system of checks and balances.

    But at the end of the day, the system requires the willingness of voters and their representatives to adhere to laws, executive orders and court rulings, however deep the political divide. If that faith ever crumbled, the U.S. experiment in democracy would be under threat.

     

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  • Higher Education Inquirer : Forgetting Henry George

    Higher Education Inquirer : Forgetting Henry George

    As American colleges and universities spiral deeper into debt, corporatization, and social irrelevance, it is worth asking not just what ideas dominate the landscape—but what ideas have been buried, neglected, or deliberately forgotten. Among the most significant casualties in our intellectual amnesia is Georgist economics, a once-influential school of thought that offered a radical, yet practical, alternative to both capitalism’s excesses and socialism’s centralization. And in today’s extractive academic economy—what Devarian Baldwin calls the “UniverCity”—its insights are more relevant than ever.

    The Ghost of Henry George

    Henry George, a 19th-century American political economist, is best known for his seminal work Progress and Poverty (1879), in which he argued that while technological and economic progress increased wealth, it also deepened inequality—primarily because the gains were siphoned off by landowners and monopolists. His solution was deceptively simple: tax the unearned income from land and natural monopolies, and use that revenue to fund public goods and social services.

    At one time, George’s ideas inspired political movements, policy debates, and even academic curricula. He was considered a serious rival to Karl Marx and a practical philosopher for American reformers, including the early labor movement. Cities like San Francisco saw brief experiments with land value taxation. But today, outside niche think tanks and the occasional urban planning circle, Georgism is a faint echo, barely audible in the halls of economic departments or public policy schools.

    The University and the Land

    If we look at contemporary higher education through a Georgist lens, what emerges is a sobering picture. Colleges and universities are not merely neutral grounds for the exchange of ideas—they are massive holders of land, beneficiaries of public subsidies, and agents of displacement. Institutions from NYU to the University of Chicago to Arizona State have used their nonprofit status and real estate portfolios to expand into communities, often gentrifying and pricing out working-class and BIPOC residents.

    At the same time, these same institutions profit from a credentialing economy built on a foundation of student loan debt. Over 43 million Americans collectively owe more than $1.6 trillion in federal student loans, an economy of indebtedness that props up tuition-driven institutional budgets while shackling generations of graduates. The very students who attend these universities, often in the hope of upward mobility, find themselves trapped in debt servitude—subsidizing administrative bloat, sports franchises, and real estate empires they will never own.

    This is where Devarian Baldwin’s work becomes critical. In In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, Baldwin exposes how universities have become “anchor institutions,” deeply embedded in the urban fabric—not just through education, but through policing, property development, hospital systems, and labor exploitation. These institutions accumulate wealth not by producing new knowledge, but by extracting rents—social, economic, and literal—from their surroundings.

    Baldwin and George, though a century apart, are speaking to the same fundamental economic injustice: wealth flowing upwards through property and privilege, at the expense of the many.

    Why Georgism Was Forgotten

    So why has Georgism disappeared from mainstream education? The answer lies partly in the success of those it sought to regulate. Landowners and financiers, who stood to lose the most from land value taxation, worked diligently to discredit George’s theories. Neoclassical economics, with its abstract models and marginal utility curves, became the dominant language—obscuring the real-world power dynamics of land and labor.

    Universities, especially elite ones, adopted this neoclassical framework, increasingly aligning their interests with those of capital. Philanthropic foundations and corporate donors funded economic departments and think tanks that promoted market fundamentalism. Over time, Georgism—radical yet rooted in common sense—was pushed out of the curriculum.

    This forgetting wasn’t accidental. It was ideological.

    A Forgotten Game with a Forgotten Message

    A striking example of Georgism’s cultural erasure lies in the very board game that has taught generations about capitalism: Monopoly. Originally created in the early 20th century by a woman named Elizabeth Magie, the game was first called The Landlord’s Game and was explicitly designed to illustrate Henry George’s ideas. Magie’s intent was pedagogical—she wanted players to see how land monopolies enriched a few while impoverishing others, and to promote George’s remedy of a single land tax.

    But over time, the game was appropriated and rebranded by Parker Brothers and later Hasbro, stripped of its Georgist message and recast as a celebration of ruthless accumulation. What began as a cautionary tale about inequality became a glorification of it—a metaphor for how George’s ideas were not just buried but inverted.

    In that sense, Monopoly is the perfect symbol for the American university: a system that once had the potential to democratize opportunity but now functions as a machine for privatizing wealth and socializing risk, leaving students and communities to pick up the tab.

    What Higher Education Could Learn—and Teach

    If the goal of higher education is to educate an informed, critical citizenry, then forgetting Georgist economics is not just an intellectual oversight—it’s a moral failure. Henry George offered a vision of society where value created by the community is returned to the community. In the age of student debt, university land grabs, and deepening inequality, this vision is urgently needed.

    Imagine a higher education system where public revenue from land values funds debt-free college. Imagine a world where students no longer mortgage their futures for degrees whose value is increasingly uncertain. Imagine colleges not as engines of gentrification but as stewards of local wealth, investing in community-owned housing and cooperatives. Imagine students learning about economics not just as math problems, but as moral questions about justice, equity, and the public good.

    Devarian Baldwin’s scholarship, much like George’s, invites us to interrogate power structures and imagine alternatives. It’s time for a revival of that imagination.

    Relearning the Unlearned

    Reclaiming Georgist economics in the academy would not be a return to some golden past, but a reckoning with the present. It would mean confronting the rentier logic at the heart of higher education—and the debt-based financing that sustains it—and reorienting our institutions toward justice and common prosperity.

    In a moment when so much of American higher ed is collapsing under its own contradictions, perhaps what’s needed is not another billion-dollar endowment or ed-tech unicorn, but an idea long buried: that land—and learning—should belong to the people.

    For the Higher Education Inquirer, this is part of an ongoing inquiry into the pasts we forget, the futures we imagine, and the power structures that shape both. 

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  • Florida university system’s board to vote on creation of accrediting agency

    Florida university system’s board to vote on creation of accrediting agency

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    Dive Brief: 

    • The State University System of Florida’s governing board plans to vote Friday to approve the creation of the Commission for Public Higher Education, a new accreditor formed by the state university system and five other Southern public higher education networks. 
    • The state’s Legislature has devoted $4 million to the Florida governing board to help with startup costs for the new accreditor, according to CPHE’s business plan. The accreditor expects the other five university systems to devote a similar level of resources to the effort. 
    • CPHE hopes to begin accrediting six institutions by June 2026 and to become recognized by the U.S. Department of Education by June 2028. Accreditors must operate for two years before the Education Department will recognize them. 

    Dive Insight: 

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the formation of the new accreditor for public colleges in late June, criticizing diversity, equity and inclusion standards at existing agencies and framing the effort as a way to focus more on student outcomes. 

    The new accreditor’s business plan echoes those aims. 

    “CPHE will laser-focus on student outcomes, streamline accreditation standards, focus on emerging educational models, modernize the accreditation process, maximize efficiency without sacrificing quality, and ensure no imposition of divisive ideological content on institutions,” it states. 

    Still, the new agency is a long way off from getting the Education Department’s recognition, which is required before its accreditation can grant colleges access to federal financial aid. The business plan notes that the Education Department usually takes at least two years to recognize a new accreditor after it submits its application, which it plans to submit in 2026. 

    The Education Department currently recognizes about two dozen institutional accreditors, according to a federal database. 

    Colleges that want to be accredited by CPHE will be able to retain their current agency while the new accreditor seeks the Education Department’s recognition, according to the business plan. Once it becomes federally recognized, colleges can make CPHE their primary accreditor and shed their other agency, if they wish.

    The founding members of the new accreditor are the State University System of Florida, the Texas A&M University System, the University System of Georgia, the University of North Carolina System, the University of South Carolina system and the University of Tennessee System. 

    Each system will appoint someone to sit on CPHE’s board of directors, which will establish accreditation standards and policies. 

    The new accreditor will also create a paid Interim Review Committee, which will conduct peer reviews of colleges and make recommendations to the board of directors about accreditation actions. The committee will report to CPHE’s board of directors and include academic experts, auditors and compliance officers. 

    The business plan credits recent federal policy changes for making it easier for colleges to jump to new accrediting agencies. 

    That includes a regulatory change during President Donald Trump’s first term that removed regional restrictions on the nation’s seven major accreditors, meaning they each can now represent colleges nationwide instead of only those located in their traditional geographic territories. 

    The business plan also points to May guidance from the Education Department to make it easier for colleges to switch accreditors and revoked more rigorous Biden-era policies on changing agencies. It also mentions a recent executive order from Trump that in part aims to streamline the process for recognizing new accrediting agencies. 

    The Education Department said it will decide on accreditation change requests within 30 days. If the agency doesn’t respond by that deadline, colleges will receive automatic approval unless they don’t meet the eligibility requirements. 

    One higher education expert has described the deadline as a “30-day rubber stamp,” arguing that it takes time and expertise to conduct such reviews. Yet the procedural changes are coming even as the Education Department attempts to shed roughly half of its staff. 

    Colleges will not be eligible to switch if they’ve faced accreditor sanctions within the last two years. However, they will be able to switch for a litany of other reasons, including objecting to their current accreditors’ standards. 

    Both Florida and North Carolina legislators have passed laws in recent years requiring public colleges to switch accreditors each cycle, which usually run between six to 10 years. The changes came after each state’s public university systems publicly spat with their accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. 

    SACSCOC accredits each college within the six founding members’ university systems. However, some institutions in Florida and Texas have begun the process of switching to new agencies, according to CPHE’s business plan.

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  • Higher Education Inquirer : Trump’s March Backward

    Higher Education Inquirer : Trump’s March Backward

    The United States is witnessing an alarming shift in the balance of power. Recent actions by the Supreme Court and Congress have effectively cleared the way for President Donald Trump to exercise authority in ways critics say resemble authoritarian rule.

    Central to this shift is the Supreme Court’s decision on July 8, 2025, to allow Trump’s mass federal layoffs to proceed. This ruling overturned a lower court’s injunction that had temporarily blocked the president’s executive order to slash tens of thousands of federal jobs. The layoffs target agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services, critical players in addressing climate change, public health, and education.

    The court’s decision was unsigned and passed 8–1, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting. Her dissent warned that the ruling emboldens the president to exceed constitutional limits without proper checks.

    Just weeks earlier, Congress passed what supporters called the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a sweeping budget package that enshrined Trump-era tax cuts, eliminated taxes on tips and Social Security income, and drastically reduced funding for social safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP. The bill also increased Pentagon spending by $125 billion. The legislation passed strictly along party lines, with no Democratic votes.

    The atmosphere of intensifying executive authority was underscored on June 14, 2025, when Trump staged a large-scale military parade in Washington, D.C., reminiscent of displays typically seen in authoritarian regimes. The parade featured tanks, fighter jets, and thousands of troops marching through the capital, a spectacle widely criticized as an exercise in pageantry and a troubling signal of militarism. In response, spontaneous “No Kings” protests erupted nationwide, with demonstrators rejecting what they saw as the cultivation of a personality cult and warning against the erosion of democratic norms.

    These domestic developments unfold against a backdrop of escalating global crises and geopolitical realignments. The Trump administration has maintained a confrontational stance toward China, imposing new tariffs that have intensified a growing economic cold war. This friction comes as the BRICS coalition — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — gains strength, seeking alternatives to the U.S.-dominated financial and diplomatic order.

    Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to supply arms and financial support to Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, while simultaneously imposing inconsistent policies that weaken its international credibility, especially regarding the unresolved Palestinian conflict.

    At home, the Trump administration’s deregulation of the cryptocurrency market has raised alarms. With minimal oversight, the growing crypto economy faces increased risks of fraud and instability, a symptom of the broader laissez-faire approach that favors corporate interests over public protections.

    Adding to domestic turmoil, Trump has controversially pardoned dozens of individuals convicted for their roles in the January 6 Capitol insurrection, framing them as “political prisoners.” Many have ties to extremist groups, and Trump has proposed hiring preferences for them within the federal government’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency, which is leading the controversial federal workforce layoffs.

    Legal experts and civil rights organizations argue these actions collectively undermine the constitutional principle of separation of powers. They say the administration’s use of executive orders and politically motivated pardons bypasses Congress and the courts, weakening democratic oversight.

    Congress’s role has also been questioned. By passing the partisan budget bill without bipartisan support, critics argue lawmakers have effectively rubber-stamped an agenda that dismantles government functions, cuts vital social programs, and expands military spending.

    The Supreme Court’s emergency ruling to lift the injunction against the layoffs further signals the judiciary’s retreat from its role as a check on executive power. By acting swiftly and without a full hearing, the court has allowed a significant reshaping of the federal workforce without thorough judicial review.

    Together, these developments mark a troubling trend toward the concentration of power in the executive branch. Observers warn that if left unchecked, these actions could erode the foundations of American democracy and weaken its position in an increasingly multipolar world.

    Sources

    San Francisco Chronicle, “Supreme Court clears way for Trump to resume mass federal layoffs” (July 8, 2025)

    https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/trump-mass-firings-20761715.php

    Associated Press, “Trump signs sweeping tax, spending bill on July 4” (July 4, 2025)

    https://apnews.com/article/3804df732e461a626fd8c2b43413c3f0

    Politico, “House Republicans pass ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ after weeks of division” (May 22, 2025)

    https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/22/house-republicans-pass-big-beautiful-bill-00364691

    Business Insider, “Supreme Court rules in favor of Trump’s federal layoffs” (July 8, 2025)

    https://www.businessinsider.com/supreme-court-ruling-trump-firings-federal-agencies-2025-7

    Washington Post, “Trump begins mass commutations for Jan. 6 rioters, defends actions as ‘justice reform’” (March 1, 2025)

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/01/trump-jan-6-pardons

    Medicare Rights Center, “Final House vote looms on devastating health and food assistance cuts” (July 3, 2025)

    https://www.medicarerights.org/medicare-watch/2025/07/03/final-house-vote-looms-on-devastating-health-and-food-assistance-cuts

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  • The Hidden Curriculum of Student Conduct Proceedings

    The Hidden Curriculum of Student Conduct Proceedings

    For first-generation students, the hidden curriculum—the unstated norms, policies and expectations students need to know in higher education—can be a barrier to participating in high-impact practices, leaving them in the dark about how to thrive in college.

    But new research aims to identify the lesser-known policies that disadvantage first-generation students and to make them more accessible. During a panel presentation at NASPA’s Student Success in Higher Education conference in June, Kristin Ridge, associate dean of students and community standards at the University of Rhode Island, discussed her doctoral research on first-generation students and how they interact with the student handbook and conduct spaces on campus.

    What’s the need: First-generation students make up 54 percent of all undergraduates in the U.S., or about 8.2 million students. But only one in four first-generation students graduates with a college degree, compared to nearly 60 percent of continuing-generation students.

    First-generation students are often diverse in their racial and ethnic backgrounds and come with a variety of strengths, which academic Tara Yosso describes as the cultural wealth model. But in some areas, including higher ed’s bureaucratic processes, first-gen students can lack family support and guidance to navigate certain situations, Ridge said. Her personal experience as a first-generation learner and a conduct officer pushed her to research the issue.

    “It really came to a head when I was dealing with two students who had a similar circumstance, and I felt like one had a better grasp of what was going on than the other one, and that was something that didn’t sit right with me,” Ridge said. “I felt like the behavior should be what I am addressing and what the students are learning from, not their previous family of origin or lived experience.”

    Conduct systems are complicated because they require a fluency to navigate the bureaucracy, Ridge said. Student handbooks are often written like legal documents, but the goal of disciplinary proceedings is for students to learn from their behavior. “If a student doesn’t understand the process or the process isn’t accessible to them, there are very real consequences that can interrupt their educational journey,” she added.

    Some states require conduct sanctions to be placed on a student’s transcript or a dean’s report for transfer application. These sanctions can result in debt, stranded credits or underemployment if students are unable to transfer or earn a degree.

    “Sometimes [continuing-generation] students who have parents or supporters can better understand what the implications of a sanction would be,” Ridge says. “Students who don’t have that extra informed support to lean on may unwittingly end up with a sanction that has more long-term impact than they realize.”

    First-generation students may also experience survivor’s or breakaway guilt for having made it to college, which can result in them being less likely to turn to their families for help if they break the student code of conduct or fear they will be expelled for their actions, Ridge said.

    Therefore, colleges and universities should seek to create environments that ensure all students are aware of conduct procedures, the content of the student handbook and how to receive support and advocacy from both the institution and their communities, Ridge said.

    Creating solutions: Some key questions conduct staff members can ask themselves, Ridge said, include:

    • Is the handbook easy to access, or is it hidden behind a login or pass code? If students or their family members or supporters have to navigate additional steps to read the student handbook, it limits transparency and opportunities for support.
    • Is content available in plain English or as an FAQ page? While institutions must outline some expectations in specific language for legal reasons, ensuring all students understand the processes increases transparency. “I like to say I want [students] to learn from the process, not feel like the process happened to them,” Ridge said.
    • Is the handbook available in other languages? Depending on the student population, offering the handbook in additional languages can address equity concerns about which families can support their students. Hispanic-serving institutions, for example, should offer the handbook in Spanish, Ridge said.
    • Who is advocating for students’ rights in conduct conversations? Some institutions offer students a conduct adviser, which Ridge says should be an opt-in rather than opt-out policy.
    • Is conduct addressed early in the student experience? Conduct is not a fun office; “no one’s going to put us on a parade float,” Ridge joked. That’s why it’s vital to ensure that students receive relevant information when they transition into the institution, such as during orientation. “My goal is for them to feel that they are holding accountability for their choices, that they understand and learn from the sanctions or the consequences, but I don’t want them to be stressed about the process,” Ridge said. Partnering with campus offices, such as TRIO or Disability Services, can also ensure all students are aware of conduct staff and the office is seen less as punitive.

    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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  • Keep in Mind That AI Is Multimodal Now

    Keep in Mind That AI Is Multimodal Now

    Remember in late 2022 when ChatGPT arrived on the international scene and you communicated with AI through a simple chat bot interface? It was remarkable that you could type in relatively short prompts and it would instantly type back directly to you—a machine with communication capability!

    For most of us, this remains the most common daily mode of accessing and utilizing AI. Many of us are using AI only as a replacement for Google Search. In fact, Google Search AI Overviews, are now a standard feature, which was announced last year for a significant portion of users and search queries. They appear at the top of the results, and only after allowing you to follow up with a deeper dive are you taken to the old list of responses. As of mid-June 2025, the rollout of AI Overviews has progressed to the point where these overviews are a common sight at the top of search results pages. Yet the whole world of communication is open now for most of the frontier models of AI—and with the new communication modes comes a whole world of possibilities.

    In order to more fully utilize the remarkable range of capabilities of AI today, we need to become comfortable with the many input and output modes that are available. From audio, voice, image and stunning video to massive formally formatted documents, spreadsheets, computer code, databases and more, the potential to input and output material is beyond what most of us take for granted. That is not to mention the emerging potential of embodied AI, which includes all of these capabilities in a humanoid form, as discussed in this column two weeks ago.

    So, what can AI do with images and videos? Of course, you can import images as still photographs and instruct AI to edit the photos, adding or deleting objects within the image. Many apps do this exceptionally well. This does raise questions about deepfakes, images that can be shared as if they were real, when actually they are altered by AI in an attempt to mislead the public. Most such images do carry a watermark that indicates the image was generated or altered by AI. However, there are watermark removers that will wash away those well-intended alerts.

    One example of using the image capability of AI is in the app PictureThis, which describes itself as a “botanist in your pocket.” As one would expect, you can upload a picture from your smartphone and it will identify the plant. It will also provide a diagnosis of any conditions or diseases that it can determine through the image, offer care suggestions such as optimal lighting and watering, point out toxicity to humans and pets, and provide tips on how to help your plant thrive. In education, we can utilize AI to provide these kinds of services to learners who simply take a snapshot of their work.

    We can build upon the PictureThis example to create a kind of “professor in your pocket” that offers enhanced responses to images that, for example, might include an attempt to solve a mathematical problem, develop a chemistry formula, create an outline for an essay and much more. The student may simply take a smartphone or screenshot of their work and share it with the app, which will respond with what may be right and wrong in the work as well as give ideas of further research and context that will be helpful.

    Many of us are in positions where we need to construct spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and more formal reports with cover pages, tables of contents, citations and references. AI stands ready to convert data, text and free-form writing into perfectly formatted final products. Use the upload icon that is commonly located near the prompt window in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or other leading models to upload your material for analysis or formatting. Gemini, a Google product, has direct connections with Google apps.

    Many of these features are available on the free tier of the products. Most major AI companies have a subscription tier for around $20 per month that provides limited access to higher levels of their products. In addition, there are business, enterprise, cloud and API levels that serve organizations and developers. As a senior fellow conducting research, I maintain a couple of subscriptions that enable me to seamlessly move through my work process from ideation to creation of content, then from content creation to enhancement of research inserting creative concepts and, finally, to develop a formal final report.

    Using the pro versions gives access to deep research tools in most cases. This mode provides far more “thinking” by the AI tool, which can provide more extensive web-based research, generate novel ideas and pursue alternative approaches with extensive documentation, analysis and graphical output in the form of tables, spreadsheets and charts. Using a combination of these approaches, one can assemble a thoughtful deep dive into a current or emerging topic.

    AI can also provide effective “brainstorming” that integrates deep insights into the topics being explored. One currently free tool is Stanford University’s Storm, a research prototype that supports interactive research and creative analyses. Storm assists with article creation and development and offers an intriguing roundtable conversation that enables several virtual and human participants to join in the brainstorming from distant locations.

    This has tremendous potential for sparking interactive debates and discussions among learners that can include AI-generated participants. I encourage faculty to consider using this tool as a developmental activity for learners to probe deeply into topics in your discipline as well as to provide experience in collaborative virtual discussions that presage experiences they may encounter when they enter or advance in the workforce.

    In general, we are underutilizing not only the analytical and composition capabilities of AI, but also the wealth of multimode capabilities of these tools. Depending upon your needs, we have both input and output capabilities in audio, video, images, spreadsheets, coding, graphics and multimedia combinations. The key to most effectively developing skill in the use of these tools is to incorporate their time-saving and illustrative capabilities into your daily work.

    So, if you are writing a paper and have some data to include, try out an AI app to generate a spreadsheet and choose the best chart to further clarify and emphasize trends. If you need a modest app to perform a repetitive function for yourself or for others, for example, generating mean, mode and standard deviation, you can be helped by describing the inputs/outputs to AI and prompt it to create the code for you. Perhaps you want to create a short video clip as a simulation of how a new process might work; AI can do that from a description of the scene that you provide. If you want to create a logo for a prospective project, initiative or other activity, AI will give you a variety of custom-created logos. In all cases, you can ask for revisions and alterations. Think of AI as your dedicated assistant who has multimedia skills and is eager to help you with these tasks. If you are not sure how to get started, of course, just ask AI.

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  • Essay on Faculty Engagement and Web Accessibility (opinion)

    Essay on Faculty Engagement and Web Accessibility (opinion)

    Inaccessible PDFs are a stubborn problem. How can we marshal the energy within our institutions to make digital course materials more accessible—one PDF, one class, one instructor at a time?

    Like many public higher education institutions, William & Mary is working to come into compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines by April 2026. These guidelines aim to ensure digital content is accessible for people who rely on screen readers and require that content be machine-readable.

    Amid a flurry of other broad institutional efforts to comply with the federal deadline, my colleague—coordinator of instruction for libraries Liz Bellamy—and I agreed to lead a series of workshops designed to help instructors improve the accessibility of their digital course materials. We’ve learned a lot along the way that we hope can be instructive to other institutions engaged in this important work.

    What We’ve Tried

    Our first big hurdle wasn’t technical—it was cultural, structural and organizational. At the same time various groups across campus were addressing digital accessibility, William & Mary had just moved our learning management system from Blackboard Learn to Blackboard Ultra, we were beginning the rollout of new campuswide enterprise software for several major institutional areas, the institution achieved R-1 status and everyone had so many questions about generative AI. Put plainly, instructors were overwhelmed, and inaccessible PDFs were only one of many competing priorities vying for their attention.

    To tackle the issue, a group of institutional leaders launched the “Strive for 85” campaign, encouraging instructors to raise their scores in Blackboard Ally, which provides automated feedback to instructors on the accessibility of their course materials, to 85 percent or higher. The idea was simple—make most course content accessible, starting with the most common problem: PDFs that are not machine-readable.

    We kicked things off at our August 2024 “Ready, Set, Teach!” event, offering workshops and consultations. Instructors learned how to find and use their Ally reports, scan and convert PDFs, and apply practical strategies to improve digital content accessibility. In the year that followed, we tried everything we could think of to keep the momentum going and move the needle on our institutional Ally score above the baseline. Despite our best efforts, some approaches fell flat:

    • Let’s try online workshops! Low engagement.
    • What about in-person sessions? Low attendance.
    • But what if we feed them lunch? Low attendance, now with a fridge full of leftovers.
    • OK, what if we reach out to department chairs and ask to speak in their department meetings? It turns out department meeting agendas are already pretty full; response rates were … low (n = 1).

    The truth is, instructors are busy. Accessibility often feels like one more thing on an already full plate. So far, our greatest success stories have come from one-on-one conversations and by identifying departmental champions—instructors who will model and advocate for accessible practices with discipline-specific solutions. (Consider the linguistics professor seeking an accurate 3-D model of the larynx collaborating with a health sciences colleague, who provided access to an interactive model from an online medical textbook—enhancing accessibility for students learning about speech production.)

    But these approaches require time and people power we don’t always have. Despite the challenges we’ve faced with scaling our efforts, when success happens, it can feel a little magical, like the time at the end of one of our highly attended workshops (n = 2) when a previously skeptical instructor reflected, “So, it sounds like accessibility is about more than students with disabilities. This can also help my other students.”

    What We’ve Learned

    Two ingredients seem essential:

    1. Activation energy: Instructors need a compelling reason to act, but they also need a small step to get started; otherwise, the work can feel overwhelming.

    Sometimes this comes in the form of an individual student disclosing their need for accessible content. But often, college students (especially first year or first generation) don’t disclose disabilities or feel empowered to advocate for themselves. For some instructors, seeing their score in Ally is enough of a motivation—they’re high achievers, and they don’t want a “low grade” on anything linked to their name. More often, though, we’ve seen instructors engage in this work because a colleague or department chair tells them they need to. Leveraging positive peer pressure, coupled with quick practical solutions to improve accessibility, seems to be an effective approach.

    1. Point-of-need support: Help must be timely, relevant and easy to access.

    When instructors feel overwhelmed by the mountain of accessibility recommendations in their Ally reports, they are often hesitant to even get started. We’ve found that personal conversations about student engagement and course content or design often provide an opening to talk about accessibility. And once the door is open, instructors are often very receptive to hearing about a few small changes they can make to improve the accessibility of their course content.

    Where Things Stand

    Now for the reality check. So far, our institutional Ally score has been fairly stagnant; we haven’t reached the 85 percent goal we set for ourselves. And even for seasoned educational developers, it can be discouraging to see so little change after so much effort. But new tools offer hope. Ally recently announced planned updates to allow professors to remediate previously inaccessible PDFs directly in Blackboard without having to navigate to another platform. If reliable, this could make remediation more manageable, providing a solution at the point of need and lowering the activation energy required to solve the problem.

    We’re also considering:

    • Focus groups to better understand what motivates instructors to engage in this work.
    • Exploring the effectiveness of pop-up notifications that appear with accessibility tips and reminders when instructors log in to Blackboard to raise awareness and make the most of point-of-need supports.
    • Defining “reasonable measures” for compliance, especially for disciplines with unique content needs (e.g., organic chemistry, modern languages and linguistics).

    Leading With Empathy

    One unintended consequence we’ve seen: Some instructors are choosing to stop uploading digital content altogether. Faced with the complexity of digital accessibility requirements, they’re opting out rather than adapting. Although this could help our institutional compliance score, it’s often a net loss for students and for learning, so we want to find a path forward that doesn’t force instructors to make this kind of choice.

    Accessibility is about equity, but it’s also about empathy. As we move toward 2026, we need to support—not scare—instructors into compliance. Every step we make toward increased accessibility helps our students. Every instructor champion working with their peers to find context-specific solutions helps further our institutional goals. Progress over perfection might be the only sustainable path forward.

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  • Don’t believe the hype: the Government and state school admissions to Oxford University

    Don’t believe the hype: the Government and state school admissions to Oxford University

    • HEPI Director, Nick Hillman, looks at the latest row on admissions to the University of Oxford.

    In a speech on Friday, the Minister for Skills, Baroness Smith, strongly chastised her alma mater, the University of Oxford, for taking a third of their entrants from the 6% of kids that go to private schools.

    In a section of the speech entitled ‘Challenging Oxford’, we were told the situation is ‘absurd’, ‘arcane’ and ‘can’t continue’:

    Oxford recently released their state school admissions data for 2024.

    And the results were poor.

    66.2% – the lowest entry rate since 2019.

    I want to be clear, speaking at an Oxford college today, that this is unacceptable.

    The university must do better.

    The independent sector educates around 6% of school children in the UK.

    But they make-up 33.8% of Oxford entrants.

    Do you really think you’re finding the cream of the crop, if a third of your students come from 6% of the population?

    It’s absurd.

    Arcane, even.

    And it can’t continue.

    It’s because I care about Oxford and I understand the difference that it can make to people’s lives that I’m challenging you to do better.  But it certainly isn’t only Oxford that has much further to go in ensuring access.

    This language reminded me of the Laura Spence affair, which produced so much heat and so little light in the Blair / Brown years and which may even have set back sensible conversations on broadening access to selective higher education.

    I wrote in a blog over the weekend that the Government are at risk of forgetting the benefit of education for education’s sake. That represents a political hole that Ministers should do everything to avoid as it could come to define them. Ill-thought through attacks on the most elite universities for their finely-grained admissions decisions represent a similar hole best avoided. Just imagine if the Minister had set out plans to tackle a really big access problem, like boys’ educational underachievement, instead. The Trump/Harvard spat is something any progressive government should seek to avoid, not copy.

    The latest chastisement is poorly formed for at least three specific reasons: the 6% is wrong in this context; the 33.8% number does not tell us what people tend to think it does; and Oxford’s current position of not closely monitoring the state/independent split is actually in line with the regulator’s guidance.

    1. 6% represents only half the proportion (12%) of school leavers educated at independent schools. In other words, the 6% number is a snapshot for the proportion of all young people in private schools right now; it tells us nothing about those at the end of their schooling and on the cusp of higher education.
    2. The 33.8% number is unhelpful because 20%+ of Oxford’s new undergraduates hail from overseas and they are entirely ignored in the calculation. If you include the (over) one in five Oxford undergraduate entrants educated overseas, the proportion of Oxford’s intake that is made up of UK private school kids falls from from something like one-third to more like one-quarter. This matters in part because the number of international students at Oxford has grown, meaning there are fewer places for home students of all backgrounds. In 2024, Oxford admitted 100 more undergraduate students than in 2006, but there were 250 more international students – and consequently fewer Brits. We seem to be obsessed with the backgrounds of home students and, because we want their money, entirely uninterested in the backgrounds of international students.
    3. The Office for Students dislikes the state/private metric. This is because of the differences within these two categories: in other words, there are high-performing state schools and less high-performing independent schools. Last year, when the University of Cambridge said they planned to move away from a simplistic state/independent school target, John Blake, the Director of Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students, confirmed to the BBC, ‘we do not require a target on the proportion of pupils from state schools entering a particular university.’ So universities have typically shied away from this measure in recent times. If Ministers think it is a key metric after all and if they really do wish to condemn individual institutions for their state/independent split, it would have made sense to have had a conversation with the Office for Students and to have encouraged them to put out new guidance first. At the moment, the Minister and the regulator are saying different things on an important issue of high media attention.

    Are independently educated pupils overrepresented at Oxbridge? Quite possibly, but the Minister’s stick/schtick, while at one with the Government’s wider negative approach to independent schools, seems a sub-optimal way to engineer a conversation on the issue. Perhaps Whitehall wanted a headline more than it wanted to get under the skin of the issue?

    we do not require a target on the proportion of pupils from state schools entering a particular university

    John Blake, Director for Fair access and participation

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  • 5 Steps to Update Assignments to Foster Critical Thinking and Authentic Learning in an AI Age – Faculty Focus

    5 Steps to Update Assignments to Foster Critical Thinking and Authentic Learning in an AI Age – Faculty Focus

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