Category: Featured

  • We need to recognise the importance of maintenance too

    We need to recognise the importance of maintenance too

    The most obvious way that a university expresses what it values is what it chooses to pay for.

    At an institution level this might be about which kinds of jobs in which kinds of areas are funded. At a more personal level value is made clear by how people get in and get on in an institution.

    Promotion

    In reviewing promotion criteria of a number of universities, where it is not behind a login of some kind, one theme comes out time and time again. Promotion isn’t solely based on being consistently good at one thing. Promotion is about being able to be good at lots of things at once.

    Whether this is the hope that academics can be good researchers, teachers, and administrators all at once. The desire to find managers that can manage people as well as projects. And the forever quest for professional services that have innovative approaches of some kind.

    It isn’t fair to single out specific institutions as this is a sector wide phenomena but consider some of the language in the follow promotion criteria:

    • For a Grade 7 Assistant Professor “Evidence will be required of the ability to innovate and plan, and to execute plans competently”
    • For a Grade 9 lecturer role “Contributes to the planning, design and development of objectives and material, identifying areas for improvement and innovation.”
    • For a Grade 6 professional services role “You are involved in decisions that have an ongoing impact beyond your immediate team”
    • The job evaluation criteria for professional service staff “Will the role holder play an active part of any networks (connecting regularly with groups outside their team)? If so, please outline what these networks are, whether the role holder would be expected to establish the network, and the input they are expected to have”

    The thread between these criteria is the implication that doing a defined job to an agreed standard isn’t enough. Promotions, particularly to high grades, depend on creating new practices, integrating with other teams, and making an impact beyond the confines of a role. It is the things which aren’t in the job description, because the nature of innovation means they cannot be, that are as valuable as the actual job description.

    Innovation may be the goal but it comes at a cost.

    Consistency

    Every promotion criteria is a choice on what an institution values. The consistent message is that value is not purely about executing a single role consistently well. The choice that many universities have made is that there is value in working vertically, developing new practice within a role, and working horizontally, developing and sharing expertise across teams and departments.

    This choice means that there is less emphasis on maintenance and delivery. The slow grind of keeping the place running and doing a set of discreet things well over and over again.

    The result of this choice is that roles where there is less autonomy may be at a disadvantage. This is not to say there is not a role for innovation in all jobs but that innovation is structurally easier in some jobs than others. Take for example the jobs which are purely focussed on creating and interpreting new knowledge. In a previous role as a senior policy advisor I had great latitude to pursue institutional projects, look into problems and suggest new ways of working, and as a bonus my boss was the Vice Chancellor. It would have been an enormous failure of mine to have not been innovative.

    Conversely, the people our institutions rely on that work on the reception desks, maintain buildings, clean the offices, and do the things that actually make the entire place stay open clearly have less freedom to innovate in their work. They are managed on their ability to deliver a distinct service but promotion is often dependent on being able to move beyond maintaining performance. There therefore opens a gap in the possibility of getting promoted between those who work primarily in maintaining the institution and those who think about what the institution might do. This does not seem like an ideal incentive for institutions that rely on lots of people turning up, doing a defined role well, and being motivated to do so.

    Innovation for the sake of it

    The underpinning assumption is that innovation for its own sake is a good thing. There is even a league table for the most innovative universities in the world.

    This is because the university bureaucracy demands feeding with new ideas. It is a more machine. It needs more papers, more ideas, more meetings, more service innovation, more approaches, more evaluation, and ultimately more with less. The current more is innovating in service delivery with less resource to do it. It is rare to see a university with few ideas. It is much more common to see an institution with too few people to deliver them.

    The prizing of the new is tempting because it’s interesting but it’s a tool for a limited set of purposes. Innovation is the tool through which new ideas, services, processes, and products can emerge. Maintenance, the kind of reusing, fixing, and keeping things consistent, is the tool to ensure the good keeps going. They both have their place but one is not more inherently valuable than the other.

    In their influential essay on the topic Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel write that:

    Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility. Innovation-speak worships at the altar of change, but it rarely asks who benefits, to what end? A focus on maintenance provides opportunities to ask questions about what we really want out of technologies. What do we really care about? What kind of society do we want to live in? Will this help get us there?

    To believe entirely in innovation as an unalloyed good is to fundamentally believe that newness is better. It is by extension a surrender of agency to say the promise of the future is better than the material of the present. Once the innovation happens more maintenance is needed. Once innovation overtakes maintenance, leaving no capacity to keep the new thing working,  the realm of innovation for innovation sake is entered.

    However, the alternative is not to go entirely the other way and focus on consolidation. As Russell and Vinsel point out in their own country

    What a shame it would be if American society matured to the point where the shallowness of the innovation concept became clear, but the most prominent response was an equally superficial fascination with golf balls, refrigerators, and remote controls.

    It is a question of balance and in a multi-layered bureaucracy like a university it requires balance across numerous domains.

    At a human level, there should be clear progression pathways for people that want to be experts and keeping things going. The reward does not have to be management responsibility (why make people who are good at delivering do less delivery?) but recognition of their domain specialisms.

    Culturally, it is about language that reflects the shared contribution of skills toward a common goal. And institutionally, it is a question of how maintenance becomes a key strategy component, and is therefore recognised. For example, the extent to which sustainability strategies are built on innovative idea vs the extent to which they are about keeping the old going.

    Our institutions depend on the people that literally keep the lights on, the machines working, and the services delivered. Let’s let the maintainers maintain and reward them for doing so. Let’s also keep innovating, maybe just not on everything all of the time.

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  • The polycrisis needs you | Wonkhe

    The polycrisis needs you | Wonkhe

    Facing a climate and ecological polycrisis, human society needs to make a transition to restore life on earth to a sustainable footing.

    This is particularly true for those parts of the world sufficiently prosperous to have well-developed higher education systems, both because there is capacity and because the causes and effects of the crisis are uneven.

    Education for this purpose is variously called “education for sustainable development”, “teaching the crisis”, “climate and sustainability education” and other alternatives. There are good conversations to be had about the relative merits of these terms – what they invite, what they close off – but those are for a different piece. For this one we can go with EfS – education for sustainability.

    For those unconvinced

    In addressing the question of how higher education curricula can accelerate this transition, it helps to engage with the reservations. While many professionally oriented degrees already have some variant of sustainability in the criteria set by their accrediting body, it tends to be the harder, purer disciplines that pose the toughest questions about EfS.

    One position is that, as a matter of academic freedom, sustainability should not be imposed on higher education curricula. It’s true that coercion sits problematically with the kind of criticality and individual judgement higher learning demands. Yet students are already implicitly treated as prospective custodians of their discipline, and while on the surface this can look very diverse, there is a common basis of consistent reasoning, intellectual humility, collective endeavour, ethical practice, and academic integrity.

    It seems a small step to include the kind of integrative, future-oriented learning that characterises EfS – especially given that EfS exists to preserve and uphold the existing values. To underline this point, see the revised QAA Subject Benchmark statements, which begin to distinguish what EfS could be for different subject areas.

    Another concern is that there is no space for EfS in a given curriculum. It’s true that EfS needs thinking through to make it relevant to disciplinary teaching and learning. It’s also true that all curricula are all more or less time sensitive and are developed by module and programme leaders drawing on their evolving expertise and foresight. A case in point is the medical degree, perhaps the most pressured of all curricula.

    The General Medical Council takes a position that Education for Sustainable Healthcare and the concept of Planetary Health are key to addressing the greatest threats to health we face, and consequently medical curricula are integrating these.

    Somebody else’s problem

    The assumption that somebody else should do the EfS is common. It often comes from a place of humility and self-doubt – a belief that there are colleagues better qualified to lead this work, with better-suited modules. But in a modularised system this is a trap that needs to be sidestepped. EfS is most meaningful when integrated rather than adjunct, and strongest when it connects deeply with the disciplines students have signed up to study; it belongs in the core of a curriculum at each level. Viewed in this way, supporting core module leaders to develop themselves to teach the climate and environmental crisis through the lens of their discipline, along with ways students and graduates can contribute to addressing it, does not seem much different from any other continuous self-development a disciplinary expert and educator would undertake.

    Another reservation is that students of a given subject or discipline don’t need sustainability as part of that education. In response to that, an appeal: the polycrisis is existential and it needs you.

    This makes sense if we recognise climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse and all that follows from those as a “wicked” (nexus) problem that cannot be addressed by one discipline alone, but needs a plurality of perspectives within and beyond academia.

    For example, the modelling that informs the planetary boundaries framework depends on mathematicians, who in turn depend on scientific researchers collecting data out in the field, who in turn use bespoke equipment and software created by engineers with particular cases in mind. The modelling needs visualisation by scientific communication specialists, and it needs the kind of readiness abundant in arts and humanities to imagine and inculcate the social transformation implied. The transformation requires specialists in economics, law and policy, and the creativity of business and management. The impetus for all of this is health, and its dependency on our life support, a stable planet. So, education for sustainability doesn’t take students away from their discipline but draws deeply on it. This ability and intent to bring their disciplinary learning to the world beyond academia is what any academic hopes their students will do.

    Beyond the UN goals

    In some quarters there is a perception of EfS as teaching about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and this is a misunderstanding which partly explains the reservations about disciplinary fit above. A simple explanation for why the SDGs on their own have not successfully averted the polycrisis is that they are in considerable tension with each other and require trade-offs. Education for Sustainability is an action-oriented education focused on empowering students to navigate these competing goods, cognisant that the basis for all of them is a habitable planet. It recognises that being able to mobilise knowledge does not necessarily follow from knowing alone.

    Hence the EfS emphasis on holistic thinking that recognises disciplinary boundaries and is curious beyond them, dialogue towards a shared, multifaceted understanding of the problem at hand, and the ability to contribute the most relevant of one’s own disciplinary perspectives and methods, in negotiation with others, to arrive at a collective plan of action which deals justly with conflicts of interests.

    This kind of education has always been valuable. In current times, where collective human behaviour is key to averting hunger, forced migration and conflict, it is not only valuable but urgent.

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  • Liberty University must face former trans worker’s discrimination claim, judge rules

    Liberty University must face former trans worker’s discrimination claim, judge rules

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    A worker who was fired by Liberty University for disclosing her transgender status and announcing her intention to transition may proceed with her employment discrimination case against the institution, a Virginia district court judge ruled Feb. 21 (Zinski v. Liberty University). 

    The case involved a worker who was hired in February 2023 as an IT apprentice at the university’s IT help desk. She received positive performance reviews until July of that year, when she emailed Liberty’s HR department, explaining that she was a transgender woman, had been undergoing hormone replacement therapy and would be legally changing her name, according to court documents. An HR representative promised to follow up with her.

    Shortly thereafter, after hearing nothing, the worker reached out again and was scheduled for a meeting later the same day. She was presented with a letter terminating her employment and explaining that her decision to transition violated Liberty’s religious beliefs and its Doctrinal Statement. 

    In response to the worker’s lawsuit, Liberty University argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (among other laws) allow religious employers to discriminate on the basis of religion, contending that the worker’s firing was religion-based rather than sex-based in discriminatory nature. 

    While Judge Norman Moon appreciated that the case presents a “novel question of law in the Fourth Circuit,” he ultimately found current case law didn’t fully or clearly support the university’s argument. 

    “If discharge based upon transgender status is sex discrimination under Title VII generally, it follows that the same should be true for religious employers, who, it has been shown, were not granted an exception from the prohibition against sex discrimination,” Judge Moon said in his order denying the university’s motion to dismiss the case. “They have been entitled to discriminate on the basis of religion but on no other grounds.”

    Judge Moon pointed out that “no source of law … answers the question before us,” but “we find that a decision to the contrary would portend far-reaching and detrimental consequences for our system of civil law and the separation between church and state.”

    “This case — and the law it implicates — points to the delicate balance between two competing and laudable objectives: eradicating discrimination in employment, on the one hand, and affording religious institutions the freedom to cultivate a workforce that conforms to its doctrinal principles, on the other,” Moon wrote. “We find that our holding today — that religious institutions cannot discriminate on the basis of sex, even if motivated by religion — most appropriately maintains this balance.”

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  • Gov. Hochul orders CUNY to remove Palestine scholar job post

    Gov. Hochul orders CUNY to remove Palestine scholar job post

    New York governor Kathy Hochul took an unusual interest in the hiring practices of the City University of New York on Tuesday when she ordered the public system to take down a job posting for a professorship in Palestinian studies at Hunter College.

    CUNY quickly complied, and faculty at Hunter are up in arms over what they call a brazen intrusion into academic affairs from a powerful state lawmaker.

    The job posting was for “a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality.”

    “We are open to diverse theoretical and methodological approaches,” the posting continued.

    In a statement Tuesday night, Hochul said the posting’s use of the words “settler colonialism,” “genocide” and “apartheid” amounted to antisemitic attacks and ordered CUNY to “immediately remove” the posting.

    A few hours later, CUNY complied, and system chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez echoed Hochul’s criticisms of the posting.

    “We find this language divisive, polarizing and inappropriate and strongly agree with Governor Hochul’s direction to remove this posting, which we have ensured Hunter College has since done,” he wrote in a statement.

    Hochul also directed the university system to launch an investigation at Hunter “to ensure that antisemitic theories are not promoted in the classroom.” Matos Rodríguez appeared to imply the system would follow that order as well, saying, “CUNY will continue working with the Governor and other stakeholders to tackle antisemitism on our campuses.”

    A CUNY spokesperson declined to say whether the system would launch a probe into the posting at Hunter but wrote in an email that “each college is responsible for its own faculty job posting.”

    Hochul’s order came after pro-Israel activists, including a former CUNY trustee and current professor, publicly voiced concerns about the posting.

    “To make a Palestinian Studies course completely about alleged Jewish crimes is akin to courses offered in the Nazi era which ascribed all the world’s crimes to the Jews,” Jeffrey Weisenfeld, who served as a CUNY trustee for 15 years, told The New York Post.

    Faculty at Hunter are livid about the decision, according to multiple professors who spoke with Inside Higher Ed both on the record and on background. They say it’s a concerning capitulation to political pressure from an institution they long believed to be staunchly independent.

    One longtime Hunter and CUNY Graduate Center professor, who spoke with Inside Higher Ed on the condition of anonymity out of fear for their job, said faculty across the system were “outraged at this craven act by our governor and our chancellor.”

    “It shows that [Matos Rodríguez] has no commitment to academic freedom or moral compass that would allow him to stand up at this moment of political repression,” they said.

    CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress, the union representing more than 30,000 faculty and staff members across the system’s 25 campuses, wrote a letter to Matos Rodriguez on Wednesday evening condemning the posting removal and calling on leadership to reverse their decision.

    “An elected official dictating what topics may be taught at a public college is a line that should not be crossed,” the letter reads. “The ‘divisive concepts’ standard for universities is something devised in Florida that shouldn’t be exported to New York. What’s needed are inclusive ways of teaching, not canceling concepts and areas of study.”

    It was unclear Wednesday whether the job posting would be edited and reposted or if the opening would be eliminated. A CUNY spokesperson declined to respond to questions about the job’s future, but the anonymous faculty member said they believed Hunter officials were revising the post, intending to relist it.

    The anonymous professor said they were worried that Hunter president Nancy Cantor, who took on the role last August after leading Rutgers University–Newark for a decade, could face severe scrutiny after the posting.

    “We fully support this initiative by our president to make this Palestinian studies cluster hire,” the anonymous professor said. “I’m very worried about Nancy Cantor’s tenure at Hunter. I think this is part of a campaign by the far right to get rid of Félix [Matos Rodríguez], and it would not surprise me in the least if he threw Nancy Cantor under the bus to save his own skin.”

    Heba Gowayed, an associate professor of sociology at Hunter, said she was shocked that Hochul had made the job posting a priority, especially as threats to academic freedom and attacks on higher education from Republicans are intensifying.

    “This is an unprecedented overstep in authority, but instead of coming from Republicans, it’s coming from a Democrat in one of the bluest states in the country,” she said. “They’re the ones that are supposed to be fighting to protect academic freedom. This is a tremendous abdication of that responsibility.”

    ‘A Climate of Fear’

    The anonymous professor said their colleagues are grappling with contending emotions: rage and fear. There’s a great appetite to speak up, they said, but they also feel it’s more dangerous than ever, even for tenured faculty.

    “People are worried across the board,” they said. “That is the kind of climate of fear that this sort of action creates.”

    It’s not the first time CUNY has responded to pressure from pro-Israel activist groups in faculty workforce decisions. Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, CUNY institutions have declined to renew contracts for two vocally pro-Palestinian professors: Danny Shaw at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who says he was the target of a pro-Israel pressure campaign to get him fired after 18 years of teaching, and lecturer Lisa Hofman-Kuroda at Hunter, who was reported for pro-Palestinian social media posts.

    Shaw, who is currently suing CUNY for breach of contract, told Inside Higher Ed that the decision to remove the job posting did not surprise him.

    “This is McCarthyism 2.0,” he said. “Administrators won’t protect us. It’s been made pretty clear that at the end of the day, it’s either their necks on the chopping block or ours.”

    Last spring, when the student-led pro-Palestinian encampment protests spread from Columbia University across town to the City College of New York, CUNY leadership drew criticism for calling the New York Police Department to disperse students. Gowayed said that decision shocked faculty across the system, who took pride in their institution’s progressive reputation and history of academic integrity.

    Even then, she said she was “disturbed that they have let it get to this higher level of censoring faculty for a completely legitimate job posting.”

    The Palestinian studies position was one of two Hunter planned to hire, and Gowayed said faculty and leadership at Hunter had been supportive of the plans to expand their research and teaching capacity in an area of growing interest.

    “Whatever your feelings on Palestine, this is a research area in a widely recognized field of scholarship on genocide and apartheid,” Gowayed said. “These are well-established fields, whether you’re studying the Belgian Congo or Rwanda or Palestine, and the posting wasn’t even saying what approach the faculty should take … The reaction to this posting is so discrepant from the actual academic integrity of the job search.”

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  • Fighting for science, research—and cures (AFT Higher Education)

    Fighting for science, research—and cures (AFT Higher Education)

    Hands off our research! Hands off our healthcare! Hands off our jobs! The message rang out loud and clear at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., Feb. 25, where scientists, researchers and other higher education workers rallied against the cuts the Trump administration has been making to medical research. It’s just one way AFT members are pushing back against attacks that harm not just researchers but the millions of Americans who rely on their work for cures and treatments for everything from cancer to diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

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  • Struggling soup kitchens and hospitals in Sudan face uncertainty amid U.S. aid freeze (CBS News)

    Struggling soup kitchens and hospitals in Sudan face uncertainty amid U.S. aid freeze (CBS News)

    When President Trump ordered a 90-day freeze on foreign aid, no one felt the impact more than the people of Sudan. Two years of civil war has left more than 25 million Sudanese starving in what is the largest humanitarian crisis the world has ever seen. Debora Patta reports.

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  • Teachers’ union sues to block Trump admin’s DEI guidance

    Teachers’ union sues to block Trump admin’s DEI guidance

    The lawsuit comes after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from carrying out parts of two executive orders cracking down on diversity, equity and inclusion.

    Pete Kiehart/The Washington Post/Getty Images

    A coalition of educators and sociologists is challenging the Department of Education and its unprecedented Dear Colleague letter—which declared all race-conscious student programming illegal—in a lawsuit filed late Tuesday evening.

    The American Federation of Teachers and the American Sociological Association argue in the complaint, which was submitted to a Maryland federal court, that following the letter’s dictates “will do a disservice to students and ultimately the nation by weakening schools as portals to opportunity.”

    “This vague and clearly unconstitutional memo is a grave attack on students, our profession and knowledge itself … It would hamper efforts to extend access to education, and dash the promise of equal opportunity for all, a central tenet of the United States since its founding,” AFT president Randi Weingarten said in a statement. “It would upend campus life.”

    The expected legal challenge came just three days before a Feb. 28 compliance deadline. The four-page guidance document says that colleges and universities must rescind any race-based policies, activities and resources by the end of the day or risk investigation and the loss of federal funding.

    The department justifies its demands through a new interpretation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned the consideration of race in college admissions. Although the Supreme Court’s decision applied specifically to admissions, the Trump administration believes it extends to all race-conscious activities.

    On Friday, a judge from the same federal court in Maryland issued a temporary injunction in a separate lawsuit that blocked parts of President Trump’s antidiversity executive orders.

    But higher education legal experts say that the Dear Colleague letter and the executive orders, though similar, are independent levers, so the injunction doesn’t affect the department’s guidance. The Education Department has also said it is still moving forward with its interpretation of the law and the deadline stands.

    So now all eyes are on this most recent court case, as higher education leaders wait to see if the judge will issue a second injunction and block the guidance.

    “The Department of Education’s new policy, reflected in the February ‘Dear Colleague’ letter, seeks to undermine our nation’s educational institutions and is an unlawful attempt to impose this administration’s particular views,” said Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, the legal group representing the plaintiffs. “We will continue to pursue every legal opportunity to oppose and stop harmful attacks on freedom of expression and on the values like inclusion, diversity and belonging that make us all and our nation stronger.”

    In the meantime, higher education advocacy groups are urging colleges and universities to stay calm and not overreact to the Dear Colleague letter.

    On Tuesday the American Council on Education sent a letter to Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary of civil rights, requesting that he “rescind the DCL” and work with higher education institutions to ensure a clearer understanding of the letter before setting a new compliance deadline.

    “Over the last two years, our colleges and universities have worked hard to assess and modify, as appropriate, policies and practices in light of the decision in the SFFA case and applicable civil rights laws,” ACE president Ted Mitchell wrote. “It is unreasonable for the department to require institutions to appropriately respond to this extremely broad reinterpretation of federal law in a mere two weeks and in the absence of necessary guidance.”

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  • This town fought residents over political yard signs — now it’s paying the price

    This town fought residents over political yard signs — now it’s paying the price

    Imagine putting a political sign in your yard, only to have your town threaten to fine you $1,000 a day for not following arbitrary size and placement rules.

    That’s exactly what happened to four residents of Lodi, New Jersey. But with the help of FIRE Legal Network attorney Randall Peach and his colleagues at the law firm Woolson Anderson Peach, they fought back — suing Lodi for violating their First Amendment rights.

    Like many places, Lodi regulates yard signs on private property, but its rules blatantly violate the First Amendment by singling out “political” signs — regulating how tall, wide, and close to the property line such signs can be, as well as whether they are up during the “correct” time of year.

    Making matters worse, three violations could land you in jail. Meanwhile, your neighbor could have an even bigger sign, right next to the property line, and never take it down — so long as it’s not “political.”

    The First Amendment protects your right to speak, especially on your own property. 

    That is unconstitutional, end of story.  The Supreme Court made that crystal clear in Reed v. Town of Gilbert, ruling that when sign regulations are based on what the sign says, the government must prove it has a compelling interest and use the least restrictive means to advance it. Lodi’s rules fail that test.

    Local governments often try to justify such restrictions with vague claims about aesthetics or traffic safety — but courts have never considered those interests compelling. And even if they were, it would be nonsensical to claim those concerns are advanced by restricting only “political” signs.

    Worse yet, the residents claimed in their lawsuit that Lodi initially only cracked down on signs supporting certain candidates. It was not until the four residents documented over 50 violations that local officials started applying the (still unconstitutional) rule more consistently. But even then, officials only issued eight summonses — after the election — and they were aimed at campaigns rather than other residents.

    Because of the lawsuit, Lodi settled for $75,000 and agreed to stop enforcing the restrictions on “political” signs. Lodi is also revising the ordinance to remove its discrimination against “political” content. But as FIRE has warned various towns before, even content-neutral restrictions, such as capping the number of signs residents can display or when they can do so, can violate basic constitutional rights.

    Here’s the bottom line. The First Amendment protects your right to speak, especially on your own property. As such, the government can’t come in and silence you just because it doesn’t like what you’re saying. And it certainly can’t do so for totally arbitrary reasons.

    FIRE defends the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought — no matter their views. FIRE’s proven approach to advocacy has vindicated the rights of thousands of Americans through targeted media campaigns, correspondence with officials, open records requests, litigation, and other advocacy tactics. If you think your rights have been violated, submit your case to FIRE today. 

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  • Resilience and Psychological Safety: Navigating Uncertainty

    Resilience and Psychological Safety: Navigating Uncertainty

    by Julie Burrell | February 26, 2025

    The first two months of 2025 have brought no shortage of change and uncertainty to higher ed institutions. Amid that uncertainty, you may find yourself not only navigating a wave of new compliance requirements, but also supporting employees who are feeling overwhelmed or worried. When change is happening at a rapid pace, it can be challenging to think strategically about how to manage emotional responses to change.

    However, two approaches you probably honed during the COVID-19 pandemic — fostering resilience and psychological safety — can be particularly useful in times like these.

    Resilience is a set of tools we use to regulate our response to stress. It’s what allows us to survive during moments of crisis and learn to grow. Psychological safety is a management approach that allows employees to thrive and adapt to stressful situations. We feel psychologically safe when we’re able to take risks knowing we’ll be supported.

    Combined, these workplace strategies tap into emotional resources we already have and can further develop and strengthen.

    Strengthening Internal Resilience

    You may never have stopped to reflect on how you endured the pandemic, but it likely took a great deal of resilience. Learning to survive, and even flourish, in tough times calls for a store of personal resilience, which the American Psychological Association defines as “successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility.”

    Some people just appear to be more naturally resilient than others. Maybe they seem tougher or more inclined to go with the flow. But resilience isn’t an innate trait we’re born with. It’s a skill that can be learned and practiced.

    In her Resilience in the Workplace webinar, Maureen De Armond, chief human resources officer at Des Moines University Medicine and Health Sciences, identified the four key factors that make up resilience:

    1. Identifying your purpose and values
    2. Gaining confidence
    3. Seeking support from your networks
    4. Learning adaptability

    A Quick Resilience Exercise on Personal Values

    Even a 15-minute resilience-building exercise can be effective, such as this brief reflection shared in the webinar.

    First, write down a list of five answers to the question, “why is it worth it to persevere and get through this challenging time?” For example, do you want to model certain behavior for your children? Do you want to be compassionate to your coworkers? Do you want to steward your team through change? Do you want to support your friends and family?

    Second, figure out the why behind each of these five answers by identifying the value behind each. Values can include achievement, compassion, economic security, humor, leadership, passion, etc. (Here’s a handy checklist.)

    Finally, be proactive about reminding yourself of these values:

    • Display photos that represent your values so that you see them every day — a loved one, beloved pet, a favorite spot on a hike, a trip you’re planning, an inspirational public figure.
    • Place quotes that illustrate these values around your workspace.
    • Craft an inspiration board, either on a digital whiteboard or as a physical craft, that contains photos, symbols, images and words that demonstrate your values.
    • Get out of your office and take a walk. Especially if you work on campus, this can be a reminder of your community and of the student population the higher ed workforce serves.

    Think of these proactive reminders as a “battery pack,” De Armond says, that will give you a boost or a nudge to get out of a negative head space. Helping employees tap into and strengthen their own resilience will equip them for whatever lies ahead.

    The Role of Psychological Safety in Managing Uncertainty

    While it’s natural for people to seek safety and solace in a time of upheaval, psychological safety isn’t about providing comfort or promoting kindness, as important as these are. Rather, it’s about candor, trust and accountability among teams. It allows team members to speak up about mistakes (including their own), tolerate risk, and embrace discomfort and change.

    Amy Edmonson, an expert on team psychological safety in the workplace, defines psychological safety as “the shared belief that’s it’s okay to take risks, express ideas and concerns, speak up with questions, and admit mistakes without fear of negative consequences.”

    For example, what happens when a team member goes to their supervisor with a question, admits a mistake, or notices a colleague’s error? If that supervisor gets angry or becomes dismissive, the employee may stay quiet in the future and even cover up mistakes to avoid that reaction again. But if the supervisor adopts some of the tips below, the team feels safe enough to take risks and can weather storms as a group.

    Recommendations to Increase Psychological Safety

    • Encourage people to come to you with problems and thank them for doing so. Also ask, “how can I help?”
    • Adopt a learning mindset. In the example above, an angry or dismissive supervisor also missed the chance to ask, “what did you learn?” As psychological safety experts know, “organizations characterized by a learning orientation focus on curiosity and continuous improvement, and they make it safe for organizational members to admit what they do not know or perhaps got wrong.” If you have a Learning and Development team, they can offer practices for adopting a learning mindset.
    • Listen rather than talk. Leaders are expected to have all the answers, but unless immediate action is needed, pausing and getting all the facts, and listening to feelings, can be an important leadership tool. Reflective listening — repeating or paraphrasing what’s said or reflecting a feeling that’s expressed — is a particularly useful skill for creating trust.
    • Say, “I don’t know.” Leaders modeling psychological safety admit when they don’t know something, allowing others in their organization to adopt a curious mindset. This is what Brené Brown calls “the courage to not know.”
    • Celebrate small wins. Appreciating your employees matters now more than ever.
    • Take care of yourself and your team. HR is often expected, fairly or not, to manage tension and conflicting emotions. How are you showing up for yourself and your team?

    For more tips on increasing psychological safety, see the article Why Psychological Safety Matters Now More Than Ever by Allison M. Vaillancourt, vice president and senior consultant at Segal.

    Finally, Give Grace

    Giving grace to others during stressful and uncertain times can be a small but critical daily practice, one that builds compassion and trust. But we need to extend that same grace to ourselves. Set boundaries, take breaks, practice going slow, and share the load.

    Related CUPA-HR Resources

    Resilience in the Workplace — This CUPA-HR webinar, recorded in 2021, was designed to serve as resilience training for attendees, as well as a model that could easily be replicated at your institution for HR teams and other employees.

    Why Psychological Safety Matters Now More Than Ever — This article offers practical advice for increasing psychological safety, specifically for the higher ed workplace.

    Recent Executive Orders and Higher Ed HR’s Role in Creating and Sustaining an Inclusive Campus Community — A message from CUPA-HR President and CEO Andy Brantley.

    Mental Health Toolkit — This HR toolkit includes resources on sustaining mental health programs on campus and addressing problems like burnout.

    The Great Pivot from Resilience to Adaptability — This article explains how to move from resilience to adaptability and, ultimately, growth in challenging times for higher education.

    Managing Stress and Self-Care: “No” Is a Complete Sentence — This highly rated webinar shows how and why setting boundaries is critical to thriving.

    Trauma-Informed Leadership for Higher Education — This webinar explores how to develop a supportive leadership style and how to create a culture where team members can depend on each other for support during times of hardship.



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  • Alex Kozinski on JD Vance’s censorship speech — First Amendment News 459

    Alex Kozinski on JD Vance’s censorship speech — First Amendment News 459

    The Wall Street Journal recently published an op-ed by former Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski in which he, among other things, praises Vice President JD Vance’s recent speech in Munich about the evils of censorship in Europe — which included references to Kozinski’s birthplace, Romania. 

    Judge Alex Kozinski

    True to form, the Kozinski article was bold in ways certain to provoke criticism. Below are a few “fair use” excerpts:

    JD Vance’s speech to the Munich Security Conference . . . mentioned the Romanian election twice and held it up as a cautionary tale of what can happen to societies that seek to coerce rather than persuade, suppress rather than debate.

    Could American elections be canceled next? Some states came close in 2024 by attempting to remove from their ballots the candidate who eventually won the presidency. There was no uproar; the Supreme Court had to intervene. . . If enough panic is stirred up, canceling elections isn’t inconceivable.

    Our legacy media have greeted Mr. Vance’s speech largely with disdain and horror. They are wrong. The speech is epic. It reminds Europeans and Americans that the values of the Enlightenment, as captured in our Constitution—not least the right to think, speak and debate freely—are the glue that binds us together. If we don’t defend those values, there isn’t much left worth defending. 

    Related

    Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced today that the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana granted his motion to block top officials in the federal government from continuing to violate the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans. The judge’s ruling is 155 pages long and includes 721 footnotes.

    The judge had harsh words for the federal officials. He noted that this is “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” that the Biden administration has “blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech,” and that the Biden administration “almost exclusively targeted conservative speech.”

    Attorney General Bailey’s motion for preliminary injunction, which he filed with Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, highlighted over 1,400 facts from more than 20,000 pages of evidence exposing the vast censorship enterprise coordinated across multiples [SIC] agencies within the federal government. [reversed on standing grounds in Murthy v. Missouri (2024)] 

    SCOTUS denies review in ‘buffer zone’ abortion clinic protest cases 

    The case is Coalition Life v. City of Carbondale (Paul Clement, counsel for Petitioner). Earlier this week the Court denied review, with Justice Thomas dissenting (and with Justice Alito voting to grant certiorari). In this case, the Justices were invited to reconsider and reverse Hill v. Colorado. 

    Clarence Thomas official SCOTUS portrait

    Justice Clarence Thomas

    Below are a few excerpts from Justice Thomas’ dissent:

    It is unclear what, if anything, is left of Hill. As lower courts have aptly observed, Hill is “incompatible” with our more recent First Amendment precedents. Price v. Chicago, 915 F. 3d 1107, 1117 (CA7 2019) (opinion of Sykes, J., joined by Barrett, J.). Start with McCullen v. Coakley, 573 U. S. 464 (2014). There, this Court unanimously held unconstitutional a Massachusetts law that prohibited anyone from entering a 35-foot buffer zone around an abortion facility. Id., at 471– 472, 497. In doing so, the Court determined that the law was content neutral because—rather than targeting certain kinds of speech such as protest, education, and counseling—the law prohibited virtually any speech within the buffer zone. Id., at 479. The Court made clear, however, that the law “would be content based if it required ‘enforcement authorities’ to ‘examine the content of the message’” to determine whether the law applied. Ibid. That position is irreconcilable with Hill, which the Court did not even bother to cite.

    Hill is likewise at odds with Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 576 U. S. 155 (2015). Reed involved a First Amendment challenge to a town’s sign code that regulated various categories of signs based on “the type of information they convey.” Id., at 159. Relying on Hill, the Ninth Circuit concluded that the sign code was content neutral, reasoning that the town “‘did not adopt its regulation of speech because it disagreed with the message conveyed’” and its “‘interests in regulat[ing] temporary signs are unrelated to the content of the sign.’” 576 U. S., at 162. That court then applied a lower level of scrutiny and upheld the code. Ibid. We reversed, holding that a speech regulation is content based—and thus “presumptively unconstitutional”—if it “draws distinctions based on the message a speaker conveys.” Id., at 163.

    Our post-Reed decisions have firmly established Hill’s diminished status. In City of Austin, for example, the majority ran as far as it could from Hill, even though Hill was the one “case that could possibly validate the majority’s aberrant analysis” on the constitutionality of restrictions on bill-board advertising. 596 U. S., at 86, 102 (opinion of THOMAS, J.). The majority nonetheless insisted that any alleged similarity was “a straw man,” rejecting the notion that its opinion had “‘resuscitat[ed]’” Hill, and reminding readers that it did “not cite” the decision at all. 596 U. S., at 76. Our latest word on Hill—expressed in a majority opinion joined by five Members of this Court—is that the decision “distorted [our] First Amendment doctrines.” Dobbs, 597 U. S., at 287, and n. 65. If Hill’s foundation was “deeply shaken” before Dobbs, see Price, 915 F. 3d, at 1119, the Dobbs decision razed it.

    [ . . . ]

    Hill has been seriously undermined, if not completely eroded, and our refusal to provide clarity is an abdication of our judicial duty.

    The Court also denied review in Turco v. City of Englewood, New Jersey (another abortion “buffer zone” case) (Justices Thomas and Alito voted to grant the petition).

    Defendants’ motion to dismiss complaint in Iowa pollster ‘fraud’ case

    Iowa pollster Ann Selzer with a Des Moines Register headline and Donald Trump silhouette in the background

    The plaintiffs “can no more sue a newspaper pollster for diverted resources than a farmer could sue a TV weatherman for crop damage due to unexpected frost.”

    Below are a few excerpts from the motion to dismiss in Trump v. Selzer (US Dist. Ct., S. Dist., Iowa, Case 4:24-cv-00449-RGE-WPK: Feb. 21) (Robert Corn-Revere, lead counsel for Defendants):

    FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere

    Robert Corn-Revere, lead counsel for Defendants.

    Introduction 

    Plaintiffs’ claims are barred by the First Amendment and the Court should dismiss them with prejudice. In the United States there is no such thing as a claim for “fraudulent news.” No court in any jurisdiction has ever held such a cause of action might be valid, and few plaintiffs have ever attempted to bring such outlandish claims. Those who have were promptly dismissed. [citations]

    There is good reason for this. History’s judgment repudiated the 1798 Sedition Act which prohibited “false, scandalous and malicious . . . writings against the government of the United States” or its president, and that fraught episode “first crystallized a national awareness of the central meaning of the First Amendment.” N.Y. Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 273 (1964). Since then, courts at all levels have confirmed our “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,” id. at 270, holding that speech is presumptively protected unless it falls within one of a few limited and narrowly defined categories. United States v. Stevens, 559 U.S. 460, 468–70 (2010). Those categories do not include a general exception for “false speech,” United States v. Alvarez, 567 U.S. 709, 722 (2012). 

    Plaintiffs seek to illegitimately expand them to include “fake news,” a tag line that may play well for some on the campaign trail but has no place in America’s constitutional jurisprudence. In this regard, civil damages, no less than criminal sanctions, cannot lie against protected speech. Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. 443 (2011); Sullivan, 376 U.S. at 277. 

    Even if such a cause of action existed, the Amended Complaint is fatally flawed on every level: Plaintiffs fail at the threshold to allege any recoverable damages, and do not state plausible claims, either on the law or on the facts as alleged. No court has ever accepted claims like these, and this Court should not be the first. 

    [ . . . ]

    Plaintiffs Illegitimately Seek to Create a New First Amendment Exception. 

    Mr. Trump and his co-plaintiffs assume “false news” falls outside the First Amendment’s protection, but over 200 years of American free speech law and practice prove otherwise. 

    “Authoritative interpretations of the First Amendment guarantees have consistently refused to recognize an exception for any test of truth—whether administered by judges, juries, or administrative officials—and especially one that puts the burden of proving truth on the speaker.” Id. at 271. 

    As the Supreme Court recently explained, “[o]ur constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.” Alvarez, 567 U.S. at 723. 

    “From 1791 to the present . . . the First Amendment has permitted restrictions upon the content of speech in a few limited areas, and has never include[d] a freedom to disregard these traditional limitations.” Stevens, 559 U.S. at 468 (cleaned up). These “historic and traditional categories long familiar to the bar” include obscenity, child pornography, defamation, fraud, incitement, fighting words, and speech integral to criminal activity. Id. (cleaned up) (collecting cases). Former Justice Souter observed that “[r]eviewing speech regulations under fairly strict categorical rules keeps the starch in the standards for those moments when the daily politics cries loudest for limiting what may be said.” Denver Area Educ. Telecomms. Consortium, Inc. v. FCC, 518 U.S. 727, 774 (1996) (Souter, J., concurring). Consequently, the Court steadfastly resists efforts to increase or expand the boundaries of these categories as “startling and dangerous” and has rejected any “freewheeling authority to declare new categories of speech outside the scope of the First Amendment.” Stevens, 559 U.S. at 470, 472. 

    Plaintiffs try to shoehorn their claims into an existing category by calling the Iowa Poll “fake” and asserting actionable “fraud” occurred. But “in the famous words of Inigo Montoya from the movie The Princess Bride, ‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.’” [citation] As a matter of basic law, Plaintiffs’ allegations about polls and news stories they dislike have nothing to do with fraud. [reference] I.B. They also sprinkle the complaint with loose talk of “election interference,” [citation], although they stop short of including a separate claim on that basis, perhaps out of awareness that “no court has held that a scheme to rig an election itself constitutes money or property fraud.” [citation] 

    Categories of unprotected speech are defined by precise legal tests, and Plaintiffs cannot stretch those boundaries to serve a political narrative. The Supreme Court routinely rejects attempts to broaden those limits based on assertions that the speech at issue is somehow “like” a recognized exception. See, e.g., Stevens, 559 U.S. at 470–71 (Other “descriptions are just that— descriptive. They do not set forth a test that may be applied as a general matter . . . .”); Brown v. Ent. Merchs. Ass’n, 564 U.S. 786, 793–96 (2011) (rejecting “attempt to shoehorn speech about violence into obscenity,” citing a lack of “longstanding tradition in this country” restricting such speech); Hustler Mag., Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46, 55–56 (1988) (rejecting bid to leave “outrageous” speech unprotected because it “does not seem to us to be governed by any exception to the . . . First Amendment”); Alvarez, 567 U.S. at 721–22 (“The Government has not demonstrated that false statements . . . should constitute a new category of unprotected speech” based on a “tradition of proscription.”) (quotation omitted). 

    Because the categories are governed by history and tradition, the Plaintiffs could not have chosen a worse candidate for inclusion than “fake news.” America’s first experience with prohibiting false news — the Sedition Act of 1798 — expired under its own terms, and all fines assessed under that misbegotten law were remitted. President Thomas Jefferson denounced it as an unconstitutional “nullity, as absolute and palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.” Sullivan, 376 U.S. at 272–76. While the Supreme Court never adjudicated the Sedition Act’s attempt to punish “false” writings about public officials, “the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history,” defined “the central meaning of the First Amendment,” id., and conditioned “the fabric of jurisprudence woven across the years.” [citation] 

    Plaintiffs’ quest to punish “fake news” not only ignores this history, it also fumbles the conceptual basis for unprotected speech categories, which the Court first described as speech “of slight social value.” Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568, 572 (1942). Here, Plaintiffs seek to create a new First Amendment exception for speech that has always received the highest level of constitutional protection — political speech and commentary. In a word, it just doesn’t fit. 

    The Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed that the First Amendment “‘has its fullest and most urgent application’ to speech uttered during a campaign for political office.” Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310, 339 (2010) (citation omitted). Speech about the political process is “at the core of our First Amendment freedoms,” Republican Party of Minn. v. White, 536 U.S. 765, 774 (2002), because a “major purpose” of the First Amendment was to protect “free discussion of . . . candidates.” Mills v. Alabama, 384 U.S. 214, 218 (1966). Accordingly, the “First Amendment affords the broadest protection” to “[d]iscussion of public issues and debate on” the political process. McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm’n, 514 U.S. 334, 346 (1995) (citation omitted). Political polling is “speech protected by the First Amendment” both because it “requires a discussion between pollster and voter” and the resulting poll itself “is speech.” [citation]

    The First Amendment accords speech in this area wide berth because “erroneous statement[s] [are] inevitable in free debate, and [they] must be protected if the freedoms of expression are to have the breathing space that they need to survive.” Sullivan, 376 U.S. at 271– 72 (cleaned up). Efforts to regulate “truth” in political commentary are thus presumptively unconstitutional and subject to strict scrutiny. [citations] Bottom line, political polls and news reports are not the stuff of which First Amendment exceptions are made. 

    Related

    The Associated Press sues Trump administration 

    The Associated Press sued three Trump administration officials Friday over access to presidential events, citing freedom of speech in asking a federal judge to stop the 10-day blocking of its journalists.

    [ . . . ]

    The AP says its case is about an unconstitutional effort by the White House to control speech — in this case refusing to change its style from the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” as President Donald Trump did last month with an executive order. “The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government,” the AP said in its lawsuit, which names White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles, Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

    Emergency hearing request and motion in opposition 

    Related

    Executive Watch


    WATCH VIDEO: Trump escalates attacks on the free press

    Forthcoming scholarly article: Lakier & Douek on stalking and the First Amendment

    Professors Genevieve Lakier (left) and Evelyn Douek (right)

    Professors Genevieve Lakier (left) and Evelyn Douek (right)

    In Counterman v. Colorado, the Supreme Court decided an imaginary case. It held that Billy Ray Counterman’s conviction could not stand because it did not meet the First Amendment requirements for prosecutions based on threats. But this is puzzling because Counterman was not in fact convicted for making threats. He was convicted of stalking, under a law that does not require that the defendant threaten anyone in order to be guilty of the crime. 

    This Article argues that the Supreme Court’s confusion about the most basic facts of the case was not an aberration but instead reflects broader pathologies in First Amendment jurisprudence. These pathologies are a consequence of the impoverished view of the First Amendment’s boundaries depicted in the Court’s recent decisions, which suggest that the First Amendment’s doctrinal terrain can be described by a simple list of historically unprotected categories. 

    This thin account of the First Amendment, and the doctrinal distortions it creates, are not inevitable, however. The Article argues for an alternative, more multi-dimensional approach to the question of the First Amendment’s boundaries — one that rests on a richer understanding of the traditions of speech regulation in the United States — and sketches out its implications for the law of stalking and, potentially, many other areas of free speech law. Courts do not need to deny the facts of the cases they adjudicate to craft a First Amendment jurisprudence that is doctrinally coherent, historically informed, and normatively desirable. 

    ‘So to Speak’ podcast: Corn-Revere and London on censorship at home and abroad


    From JD Vance’s free speech critique of Europe to the Trump administration barring the Associated Press from the Oval Office, free speech news is buzzing. General Counsel Ronnie London and Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere unpack the latest developments.

    More in the News

    2024-2025 SCOTUS term: Free expression and related cases

    Cases decided 

    • Villarreal v. Alaniz (Petition granted. Judgment vacated and case remanded for further consideration in light of Gonzalez v. Trevino, 602 U. S. ___ (2024) (per curiam))
    • Murphy v. Schmitt (“The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted. The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit for further consideration in light of Gonzalez v. Trevino, 602 U. S. ___ (2024) (per curiam).”)
    • TikTok Inc. and ByteDance Ltd v. Garland (The challenged provisions of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act do not violate petitioners’ First Amendment rights.)

    Review granted

    Pending petitions 

    Petitions denied

    Last scheduled FAN

    This article is part of First Amendment News, an editorially independent publication edited by Ronald K. L. Collins and hosted by FIRE as part of our mission to educate the public about First Amendment issues. The opinions expressed are those of the article’s author(s) and may not reflect the opinions of FIRE or Mr. Collins.

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