Australian National University (ANU) staff feel “fundamentally disconnected” from the university’s leadership, a group of academics told a federal governance inquiry on Wednesday.
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Category: Politics
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Academics showcase alternative plan for ANU – Campus Review
Australian National University interim vice-chancellor Rebekah Brown (middle) and chancellor Julie Bishop (right). Picture: Martin Ollman.
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Consultant spend ‘relatively small,’ inquiry hears – Campus Review
Nous Group CEO Tim Orton. Picture: The Australian.
The head of consultant firm Nous Group told a federal inquiry into university governance that most institutions have hired his firm, spending just under $40 million total.
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The political centre of gravity continues to shift towards higher education sceptics
Declining trust in institutions is a defining trend of our times. Universities are certainly not immune to it, with the idea of the deteriorating “social licence to operate” of the university now a common item of discussion.
Some point to the negative press coverage universities have faced in recent years. However, our recent report by UCL Policy Lab and More in Common highlights that something more fundamental is going on in our politics that universities must grapple with: the political centre of gravity has moved towards voters who are more sceptical of universities.
Since 2016 it is well understood that political attention has shifted towards working class or “left-behind” voters (depending on your preferred characterisation) and to seats in the Midlands and northern England. These voters tend to be non-graduates and are now more commonly those seeing Reform as a potential answer to their frustrations. What our analysis found was a striking gap between how they view universities compared to the remainder of the country.
Gap analysis
Graduates are overwhelmingly positive about universities – 81 per cent say universities have a positive impact on the nation. Among non-graduates, that figure drops to just 55 per cent. This is reflected in the wider set of concerns non-graduates have about higher education. Non-graduates are more likely to believe universities only benefit those who attend them and that the system is rigged in favour of the rich and powerful. They are also less convinced that universities have become more accessible to working-class students over the past 30 years.
It is their concerns that are driving the fact that a majority of voters emphasise the importance of vocational education over degrees and are worried about there being too many “Mickey Mouse” courses (although even graduates agree on that later point). Fewer than half are even fully aware that universities conduct research.
The graduate gap is in part what creates the more direct political challenge universities face. Reform voters are markedly more sceptical of universities than any other voter group. Less than half believe universities are good for the country. More than a third think they only benefit attendees, and nearly one in ten believe they benefit no one at all. Reform voters overwhelmingly did not go to university. If a key battleground of British politics over the next four years is to be Labour vs Reform, universities will need to engage with these voters’ concerns if they going to find their place in the conversation.
Reaching the sceptics
This challenge is not insurmountable. There is as much to be positive about as concerned. Our polling showed the clear majority, 61 per cent, see universities as a positive influence, both nationally and locally and the cynicism regarding some aspects of what universities are delivering is not as dire as that faced by many other institutions. Despite their relative scepticism, 45 per cent of Reform voters still see universities as benefiting the country.
Those we spoke to in focus groups were not unpersuadable. We found some scepticism, but not hostility. Another recent report by More in Common and the UCL Policy Lab ranked universities as “medium-high” in terms of how trusted they are by voters. In the turbulent times we are in, that is not a bad position.
As well as outlining where the challenges lie, our report shows how universities might go about maintaining trust and reaching more sceptical voters. Three lessons stood out.
The first is addressing the sense that universities are not supporting the skills needs of the country. The biggest concern we found about universities is the declining perception of the value of a degree. Focus groups bore out what this meant – degrees not resulting in a good job. There are two arguments which played out in focus groups that might help convince sceptics. Either that more degrees have a clear path, like those for teachers, lawyers and doctors, or by explaining the value of a degree in broadening minds and “opening doors” – that is, leading to a good job that may not relate to the content studied. Regardless, the public want confidence that universities are training the next generation of skilled professionals.
The second is by demonstrating the value of research, and the innovation and civic engagement it allows, to those who do not attend university. On this point there is much potential. When asked, the public are highly supportive of universities’ role in R&D and see it as a core purpose. In focus group discussions, a sense emerged of the benefits of university research – seen as carried out with a long term and neutral perspective. Yet few raise research unprompted, and less than half of non-graduates in our poll were even fully aware that universities do research. Articulating this role and how it benefits lives is a clear imperative.
Third is the local role. We found many see universities as a source of local pride, with the idea that universities support local business – and make their areas more vibrant – resonating. At the same time there are concerns, for example around housing and anti-social behaviour. A focus on enhancing the former and acting as a good neighbour on the latter would therefore be advisable.
All this sits in a wider context of how the public sees universities, which was at the core of what we found. In the public imagination, universities are national institutions with clear responsibilities. Indeed, Reform voters are the most likely to say that universities should focus on their national responsibilities as opposed to their international connections. Showing how these responsibilities are being met – for the whole country, not just those who study for a degree – is how the sector can maintain public trust, and meet the political challenge it faces.
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Podcast: Access, governance, festival vibes
This week on the podcast, live from our Festival in London, we discuss access and social mobility as the Office for Students reshuffles its leadership, and the Sutton Trust publishes a new report that paints a sobering picture.
Plus we discuss university governance and our new paper for the Post-18 Project, and we capture the vibes from our event, from the best quotes to the big debates shaping the sector’s future.
With Alistair Jarvis, Chief Executive at Advance HE, Janet Lord, Deputy Pro Vice Chancellor for Education at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Michael Salmon, News Editor at Wonkhe – and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.
Sutton Trust: Degrees of Difference
OfS: Director for Fair Access and Participation steps down from regulator
Earning the license: How to reform university governance in the UK
You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, Deezer, RadioPublic, Podchaser, Castbox, Player FM, Stitcher, TuneIn, Luminary or via your favourite app with the RSS feed.
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A warm rapport with the “world’s coolest dictator”
The answer is not yet in. But since 2023, Bukele has doubled down on his project as the “world’s coolest dictator,” to quote a phrase he once used on his X profile. And he has won some high-profile admirers in the United States.
Bukele has repeatedly renewed his March 2022 state of emergency, which suspended constitutional guarantees and by definition is temporary. It has now been extended 39 times over three continuous years since inception. Bukele’s arrest tally, according to a report by human-rights watchdog Cristosal, is now up to at least 87,000 people — more than the death toll of the country’s 12-year civil war, which ended in 1992.
Bukele, who is still just 44, won re-election last year after sweeping aside term-limit restraints. A constitutional reform, approved by a pliant legislature, now empowers him to seek as many future terms as he wants.
A new kind of leader or more of the same?
Bukele’s embrace of digital public services, bitcoin and his tech-bro demeanor seems to suggest he wants to be thought of as a new, modern kind of leader. For all that, he is still following the path of many old-fashioned Latin American caudillos or strongmen before him.
State surveillance and pressure on human rights groups, corruption watchdogs and journalists have ramped up this year to such an extent that Cristosal has pulled its staff out of the country. Everyone, that is, except Ruth López, its lead anti-corruption investigator, who was arrested in May and is still being held on alleged embezzlement charges.
The Salvadoran Journalists Association has closed its offices too, and will operate from outside the country, following passage of a controversial “foreign agents” law in May which targets the finances of nongovernmental organizations receiving funds from abroad. Bukele’s government accuses many such groups of supporting MS-13. Since April 2023, the independent Salvadoran news outlet El Faro has been legally based in Costa Rica because of what it calls campaigns by the Bukele government to silence its voice.
“Autocrats don’t tolerate alternative narratives,” it said at the time. And still, the Trump administration likes what it sees.
Prisons and deportations
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on a February visit to El Salvador that Bukele had agreed to use his CECOT mega-prison to house criminals of any nationality deported from the United States — and even to take in convicted U.S. citizens and legal residents, too.
This proposed offshoring of part of the U.S. incarcerated population would be for a fee, Bukele clarified, that would help fund his own country’s prisons like the CECOT.
The United States then deported more than 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members as well as a group of alleged Salvadoran mareros to El Salvador. The Venezuelans were held at the CECOT until being sent home in a prisoner swap deal for a group of Americans held in Venezuela.
It would be illegal to deport a U.S. citizen for a crime, as Rubio seemed to acknowledge. “We have a constitution,” he observed. That didn’t stop Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from visiting the CECOT in person and using the social media platform X to threaten “criminal illegal aliens” in the United States with being sent there:
“I toured the CECOT, El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center,” she posted. “President Trump and I have a clear message to criminal illegal aliens: LEAVE NOW. If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadoran prison.”
A visit to the White House
Bukele got to make a coveted visit to the White House in April. Trump praised Bukele’s mass imprisonment program, suggesting it could hold U.S. citizens next. Trump was captured telling Bukele on a live feed this: “Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”
The question is, how much of that was just grandstanding?
Like Bukele, Trump has made clear his disdain for constitutional limitations on his power, used government resources to go after his enemies, derided the freedom of the press and talked up domestic security threats to justify heavy-handed, authoritarian policing. The United States has a stronger tradition of democracy than El Salvador, to be sure.
Checks and balances exist. But the strongman playbook does not have too many variations. Ask Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Vladimir Putin in Russia or Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.
It is not the first time El Salvador has darkly mirrored the fears and internal conflicts of the United States, be they about communism, immigrant crime or democracy. As I wrote in 2023, a straight line can be drawn from the Salvadoran military’s anticommunist violence against impoverished peasants in 1932 to the country’s bloody civil war, in which the United States backed a still atrocity-prone Salvadoran army against leftist rebels.
The line continues from that conflict to the emergence of MS-13, whose presence in the United States drives so much of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric today.
The birth of a global gang
MS-13 members are far from being innocent victims here, though Trump and his supporters have used their crimes to smear immigrants of all kinds. But it’s important to remember that the MS-13 gang, or mara, was formed by young Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles. As their home country spiraled toward civil war in the late 1970s, Salvadorans who fled to the United States found themselves threatened by Mexican and other gangs.
What started out as a weed-smoking, heavy-metal listening self-defense clique morphed in time into hardened criminals.
Their power grew when the U.S. government, making a highly visible statement about immigrant crime, deported members of MS-13 and other gangs to El Salvador in the mid 1990s, after the end of the civil war. Within a few years, the gangs ruled the Salvadoran streets. Violence soared in turf wars and government crackdowns. By 2015, gang-related violence made El Salvador the murder capital of the world.
From leading the world’s murder stats, it has now gone to leading the world’s incarceration stats under Bukele. El Salvador’s proportion of the population in prison is now three times that of the United States, which is no slouch when it comes to incarcerating its people (it ranks fifth).
Of course, Salvadorans are entitled to freely elect whomever they want as president, as are U.S. citizens. Both Bukele and Trump won their elections and are doing in office exactly what they said they would do. Yet populist authoritarians have a way of clinging to power and confusing their own needs and egos with the state.
They brook less contradiction and dissent over time. I, for one, hope the increasingly dystopian utopia Bukele is building in his homeland remains just a cautionary tale in El Salvador’s fraught and symbiotic relationship with the United States.
It should not be an inspiration.
Questions to consider:
1. Why might some a majority of people in a country accept rule by a dictator?
2. What is one example of the close relationship between El Salvador and the United States?
3. Do you think that eliminating basic judicial rights can be justified in fighting crime?
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Trump administration cuts canceled this college student’s career start in politics
This story was produced in partnership with Teen Vogue and reprinted with permission.
Christopher Cade wants to be president someday. His inspiration largely comes from family members, who have been involved in local politics and activism since long before he was born. But policies from the Trump administration and the Ohio Legislature are complicating his college experience — and his plans to become a politician.
Cade is a student at Ohio State University double-majoring in public policy analysis and political science with a focus on American political theory. He recalls his maternal grandmother, Maude Hill — who had a large hand in raising him — talking to him about her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. She also worked at Columbus, Ohio-based affordable housing development nonprofit, Homeport, and has gone to Capitol Hill to speak with the state delegation multiple times. His dad is the senior vice president of the housing choice voucher program at the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority, and his older brother has a degree in political science and is interested in social justice advocacy work, Cade said. Last fall, his first on campus, Cade began applying to opportunities to bolster his resume for a future career in politics.
The now 19-year-old secured an internship with the U.S. Department of Transportation and a work-study job on campus in the university’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion. But the federal opportunity was scrapped when the Trump administration imposed a hiring freeze and budget cuts. His campus job ended when the university announced it would “sunset” the diversity office in response to federal and state anti-diversity, equity and inclusion orders and actions, according to Cade.
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The work-study position was with the university’s Bell National Resource Center on the African American Male, which was founded to support Black men to stay in college. It’s a cause he was excited about.
“I would help order food or speak with students or do interviews,” said Cade. “I developed a good 20 different programs for the next year.”
In February, when the university announced it was closing the office, “I was like, ‘Well, so six months of work just for no reason,’” he said.
OSU President Ted Carter released a statement on Feb. 27 saying the closure of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion was a response to both state and federal actions regarding DEI in public education. The move eliminated 17 staff positions, not including student roles, the university said. Programming and services provided by the Office of Student Life’s Center for Belonging and Social Change were also scrapped.
The change came before the Trump administration’s initial deadline for complying with a memo that threatened to cut funding for public colleges and universities, as well as K-12 schools, that offer DEI programs and initiatives. In March, the administration announced that OSU was one of roughly 50 universities under federal investigation for allegedly discriminating against white and Asian students in graduate admissions. Additionally, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed legislation in March banning DEI programs in the state’s public colleges and universities. The legislation went into effect in June.
Before the DEI office closed, Cade said, “I felt so heard and seen.” He’d attended a private, predominantly white, Catholic high school, he said. “It was not a place that supported me culturally and helped me understand more about who I am and my Blackness,” he recalled. At the university, though, “the programming we had throughout the year [was] about how to change the narrative on who a Black man is and what it means when you go out here and interact with people.
“And then for them to close down all these programs, that essentially told me that I wasn’t cared about.”
After the February announcement, students pushed back, organizing protests and a sit-in at the student union. But eventually, those efforts quieted.
Cade says students felt like there was a “cloud of darkness” hanging over them. But he also thought of his Office of Diversity and Inclusion coworkers, some of whom had spent decades working there, helping students. In particular he thought of his former colleague Chila Thomas, who celebrated her fifth anniversary last year as the executive director of the Young Scholars Program. That program, which helps low-income aspiring first-generation college students get to and through college, was one of several of the office’s programs that will continue. The day after Carter’s announcement, she and others in the office spent time giving students space to talk through their feelings, despite the uncertainties surrounding their own employment, Cade said.
Since the university crackdown on DEI, Cade said he’s experienced more discomfort on campus, even outright racism. He says he was approached by a white person who said, “I’m so glad they’re getting rid of DEI” and spit on his shoe and used a racial slur.
“I don’t know how that could ever be acceptable to anyone, but that was [when] a flip switched in my head,” Cade said. “I couldn’t sit down and be sad and silent. I had to stand up and make change.”
In March, he traveled with other students to Washington, D.C., as part of the Undergraduate Student Government’s Governmental Relations Committee. They met with Ohio Rep. Troy Balderson and an aide, along with staffers from the offices of fellow Ohio lawmakers Sen. Bernie Moreno and Rep. Joyce Beatty, to discuss college affordability, DEI policies and the federal hiring freeze. Cade says he described how he was affected by the U.S. Department of Transportation canceling his internship.
In Carter’s announcement, he stated that all student employees would be “offered alternative jobs at the university,” but Cade said during a meeting with Office of Diversity and Inclusion student employees, an OSU dean clarified that they would have to apply for new opportunities. With the policy changes meaning there were fewer work-study roles and more students in need of jobs, Cade saw the market as increasingly competitive, and he began to job hunt elsewhere. This summer he secured work with the Ohio Department of Transportation as a communications and policy intern. In October he began an intake assistant role in the Office of Civil Rights Compliance at the university. (Ohio State Director of Media and PR Chris Booker told Teen Vogue that the school could not comment on the experiences of individual students but that “all student employees and graduate associates impacted by these program changes were offered the opportunity to pursue transitioning into alternative positions at the university, as well as support in navigating that change.”)
Although he was drawn to OSU for the John Glenn College of Public Affairs’ master’s program, Cade says he might have reconsidered schools had he known that the university would bend to lawmakers’ anti-DEI efforts. While he’s concerned about how education-related legislation and policies may continue to affect his college experience, he worries most about some of his peers. College is already so hard to navigate for so many young people, said Cade. “And this is just another thing that says, ‘Oh yeah, this isn’t for me.’”
This story was published in partnership with Teen Vogue.
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UTS academics pitch alternative to job cuts – Campus Review
The UTS Business School in Sydney.
The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) vice-chancellor has been asked whether he would consider an alternative restructure plan written by his own academics, at a NSW government hearing on Friday.
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Appointed council members defended at inquiry – Campus Review
UTS appointed council member Lisa O’Brien. Picture: Newswire.
Academics and businesspeople have given evidence to a NSW inquiry into university governance about the role appointed council members play in the management of institutions.
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Podcast: Banned algorithms, Schools curriculum, Wales student finance
This week on the podcast we examine the Office for Students’ (OfS) renewed scrutiny of degree classification algorithms and what it means for confidence in standards.
We explore the balance between institutional autonomy, transparency for students and employers, and the evidence regulators will expect.
Plus we discuss the government’s response to the Francis review of curriculum and assessment in England, and the Welsh government’s plan to lift the undergraduate fee cap in 2026–27 to align with England with a 2 per cent uplift to student support.
With Alex Stanley, Vice President for Higher Education of the National Union of Students, Michelle Morgan, Dean of Students at the University of East London, David Kernohan, Deputy Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Mark Leach, Editor-in-Chief at Wonkhe.
Algorithms aren’t the problem. It’s the classification system they support
The Office for Students steps on to shaky ground in an attempt to regulate academic standards
Universities in England can’t ignore the curriculum (and students) that are coming
Diamond’s a distant memory as Wales plays inflation games with fees and maintenance
What we still need to talk about when it comes to the LLE
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