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Prof. says he was fired for email calling U.S. racist, fascist

After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, some faculty canceled classes to allow themselves and students time to process a result that shocked the media and academe.

Campus responses to Trump’s re-election in November seemed more muted. But at Millsaps College, a private Mississippi institution of roughly 600 students, James Bowley said he canceled his Abortion and Religions class meeting the day after the election.

Bowley, a tenured religious studies professor, told Inside Higher Ed the class had only three students, and he knew they were upset about Trump’s re-election. He said he sent them an email with the subject line “no class today” and one line of text: “need time to mourn and process this racist fascist country.”

For what he wrote in that email, Bowley said, the college swiftly barred him from campus and, on Tuesday, fired him—ending his more than 22 years of employment. He’s now fighting to get his job back and said he remains on the payroll while he appeals to the institution’s Board of Trustees.

“This seems to me like the very definition of censorship, and of course it will make every single faculty member fearful of the administration, fearful of sharing their own opinions,” Bowley said. “There are hundreds of historians who would say that the election was a victory for fascism and racism,” he added.

The college didn’t provide interviews Thursday and didn’t answer written questions. The situation appears to be another example of faculty members being punished for commenting on current events—but this time involving communication to a small group of students, according to Bowley. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech and academic freedom advocacy group, is pushing for Bowley’s reinstatement.

“This is absolutely absurd,” said Haley Gluhanich, a senior program officer in FIRE’s campus rights department. She said that when Bowley was initially suspended, “he was charged with an offense that does not exist in any of the handbooks, so they completely just made up a violation of policy.”

The Email Gets Out

Bowley said one of the students who received the email shared it on Instagram, approvingly, but another student whom he doesn’t know reported it to administrators. Bowley said he got a call from interim provost Stephanie Rolph on Nov. 7, the day after he sent the email, saying he was being placed on leave for it and banned from campus.

“I was shocked, I was dumbfounded, I just could not believe it,” Bowley said.

A copy of a letter from Rolph to Bowley, obtained by Inside Higher Ed, says this leave was “pending a review of the use of your Millsaps email account to share personal opinions with your students.” In the letter, Rolph told Bowley his email account access was cut off and further told him not to “engage with students.”

The suspension dragged on, Bowley said, and three weeks in he filed a grievance against Rolph—which led to a hearing. Then, on Dec. 27, a grievance panel composed of three faculty members ruled that Bowley should be reinstated, according to a copy of the ruling that FIRE provided.

“We recognize that Dr. Bowley has, on multiple occasions, shown poor judgment in his use of campus email,” the committee wrote. But during the hearing, Rolph couldn’t “identify a specific policy that Dr. Bowley violated,” they said. “No policy prohibiting the use of campus email to share personal opinions with students exists in either the Faculty Handbook or the Staff Handbook.”

The panel further recommended that “Rolph issue a formal apology to Dr. Bowley” and that Bowley “be compensated for the loss of income resulting from his removal from the winter study abroad course he had been scheduled to teach.” Bowley told Inside Higher Ed that was a course in Mexico for which he would’ve been paid more than $6,000 and would have had his travel expenses covered.

The panel also concluded that Bowley wasn’t “afforded due process.” It said Rolph had argued that the both the staff handbook and the faculty handbook applied to faculty. It also mentioned unresolved tension between the interim provost’s confidentiality claims and Bowley’s right to the hearing, saying the “interim provost can refuse to answer substantive questions pertaining to the grievance.” (Michael Pickard, chair of the grievance panel and vice president of the college’s Faculty Council, said he couldn’t comment Thursday. Rolph didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Millsaps president Frank Neville rejected the grievance panel’s report and then fired Bowley on Tuesday, according to Bowley.

Bowley and FIRE said there was an extra twist at the end: FIRE wrote on its website that Bowley was told in a meeting Tuesday that he was also fired for “not clarifying that his views were not that of the college’s. To be clear: The college fired Bowley for an offense … of which he wasn’t accused.”

“The FIRE article is riddled with inaccuracies,” wrote college spokesperson Joey Lee in an email to Inside Higher Ed. He did not specify what those inaccuracies were.

“Because Millsaps does not disclose information about individual employment matters for privacy and confidentiality reasons, the article is based on incomplete information,” he wrote.

‘A Bit Reckless’

Was Bowley fired for more than the email? The college won’t specify, and Bowley didn’t provide a copy of his termination letter.

David Wood, the Faculty Council president, told Inside Higher Ed he doesn’t exactly know why Bowley was fired, but he doesn’t think he should have been. Wood said he’s disappointed in the college administration and “the extreme nature of the punishment.” But he also said he’s disappointed in Bowley.

“This is partly on him as well,” Wood said.

Wood doesn’t believe academic freedom is under threat at Millsaps and thinks “everything was done legally and by our own rules at the college,” he said.

(After this article was initially published Friday, Wood added in an email that he believes the “initial suspension was unfair and unsubstantiated” and that Rolph “exercised very poor judgment in banning James without a hearing.” Wood wrote that he believes “the review continued and shifted because” Rolph “realized she was wrong and had to go fishing for other reasons to fire James. The rest of her investigation I believe was done according to the rules of the Faculty Handbook.”)

Asked whether college leaders were upset with Bowley for previous alleged transgressions, Wood said, “There’s a history there, I’ll just put it that way.”

“James has been a bit reckless in the past, but I do not believe that being terminated was the appropriate punishment,” Wood said. “James likes to push the envelope, let me just put it that way … he’s not going to steer away from controversial issues.”

Bowley, for his part, said that Rolph had verbally reprimanded him before for sharing with students and employees—through email—a brochure for a prayer vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza that used the term “genocide.”

But Bowley said the postelection email was the primary reason for his firing. Regarding any other accusations, he said, “The administration spent two months trying to find other things, and they allege that there were problems in my other class.”

One accusation leveled at him was “lack of awareness of the status of assignments and grades for a course,” he said. But he wasn’t allowed to appear before a committee to answer such charges, he said, or access his emails and other documents to defend himself.

He also said he’s protested the death penalty and celebrated the legalization of gay marriage and has ended up on the news for such demonstrations.

“The idea of me pushing the envelope is me being an activist,” Bowley said. “I am an activist and people know that.”

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January 17, 2025
Indiana governor issues executive order eliminating DEI

Indiana governor Mike Braun signed an executive order Wednesday eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion in all state agencies and replacing it with what he’s calling “MEI”—merit, excellence and innovation.

The order requires all executive branch state agencies to uphold the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard, which prohibited the consideration of race in college admissions, noting that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it” and that equal protection applies “without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality.”

Under the order, government offices cannot use state funds, property or resources to support DEI initiatives, require job candidates to issue DEI statements or “mandate any person to disclose their pronouns.” State agencies must review their individual programs and policies for compliance by April 30 and provide a written report to the governor by July 1.

The order also closes the government’s Office of the Chief Equity, Opportunity and Inclusion Officer, which was created in 2020 under Braun’s predecessor, Governor Eric Holcomb.

This makes Indiana the second state this year to eliminate DEI by executive order, following West Virginia.

Among the other executive orders Braun signed during his first week as governor was one requiring the state personnel office to review all job postings and eliminate degree requirements for positions where they’re not necessary.

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January 17, 2025
California colleges confront loss as Los Angeles burns

The past week has been a blur for Fred Farina, the California Institute of Technology’s chief innovation officer, who lost his home in the fires still tearing through Los Angeles.

“Things turned on a dime. One evening we were sitting in our living room and within 10 minutes we had to evacuate,” said Farina, who lived in Altadena, one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by the Eaton fire. “The loss of everything you have is hard to deal with.”

Farina is one of hundreds of faculty, staff and students from colleges and universities across Los Angeles who have been displaced by the wildfires.

While most institutions were spared burn damage to their physical plants, many spent the last week entrenched in immediate recovery efforts. Numerous colleges are raising money to help students and staff secure housing and other basic needs.

Others are opening shelters and food pantries. Pepperdine University’s law school is hosting free remote legal clinics to educate homeowners and lawyers about federal emergency assistance and related issues such as insurance, leases and mortgages. And the University of California, Los Angeles, opened space at its research park for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to use as a disaster recovery center for fire victims living on the city’s Westside.

Flexibility and Compassion

But beyond efforts to meet their communities’ most pressing needs, colleges in Los Angeles are also figuring out how to move forward and get through a semester already scarred by more than one of the most destructive fires in California history. The priority emerging for most college leaders is moving forward with flexibility and compassion.

“Words seem inadequate to capture the scale of the devastation,” said Thomas F. Rosenbaum, president of Caltech in Pasadena, near where the Eaton fire destroyed 1,400 homes. “The Caltech community has responded with compassion and generosity, seeking to help each other and working heroically to permit Caltech and [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory] to resume their fundamental missions of learning and discovery. We are in this for the long term, and the closeness of our community gives us hope for the future.”

The blaze didn’t reach the Caltech campus itself, but the institute estimates that more than 1,000 students and employees live in an evacuation zone. Of those, more than 90 employees have lost their homes, along with at least 200 employees—many of whom live in the decimated nearby enclave of Altadena—of the Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Lab.

Caltech was one of the many colleges in Southern California that closed down last week—in addition to Santa Monica College, Pasadena City College and Glendale Community College—as strong winds accelerated the Palisades and Eaton fires and displaced scores of people affiliated with those campuses.

Caltech resumed in-person classes Monday, and most other local colleges have done the same or are planning to in the coming days as the air quality continues to improve. But hundreds of students, staff and faculty are far from resuming life as it was before the fire.

“It’s pretty overwhelming, the things that have to be done to get back to a good situation,” said Farina, who is in the throes of dealing with insurance and disaster relief logistics after losing his home. “There’s so many decisions that have to be made so quickly.”

Although Farina is uncertain about when he’ll find permanent new housing for his family—apartments are scarce and rents have skyrocketed in the past week—Caltech helped him and many other employees secure a temporary place to live. So far, the Caltech and JPL Disaster Relief Fund has raised about $2 million, and the fund is giving that money to help displaced people meet their basic needs in the aftermath of the fires.

Numerous other L.A.-area colleges are also helping their students and employees get access to cash and safe housing, which have emerged as two of the most needed resources more than a week after the fires started.

At California State University at Los Angeles, at least 60 faculty, staff and students lost their homes, and college officials expects that number to grow. The university is raising money and offering basic needs support for those most affected, which includes grants for housing and food as well as adjustments to teaching and learning, as needed. Cal State LA President Berenecea Johnson Eanes said in a memo Wednesday that the institution “will continue to harness the healing power of our university for the long road to recovery.” (This paragraph was updated with information provided after publication.)

The L.A. Foundation for Los Angeles Community Colleges launched the L.A. Strong: Disaster Response Fund, which is raising money to give people financial assistance for housing, transportation, clothing, food and other basic needs.

“What’s most important right now is financial support,” said Alberto J. Román, chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District, who expected the first round of assistance to be distributed by the end of the week. “We consider these really unprecedented times with an impact, and that’s why we are compassionate and empathetic of individual situations.”

None of LACCD’s nine campuses sustained fire damage, and Román said he doesn’t believe any of the district’s more than 200,000 students and 9,000 employees were injured as a result of the disaster, either.

“The impact that we’ve had has been on folks who’ve been evacuated or lost their homes, road closures preventing people from coming to work or power outages and being without internet,” he said, noting that the colleges transitioned to remote work last week.

Although LACCD resumed in-person operations this week, Román said the district wants to be flexible with students and staff whose lives have been upended by the fires.

“It is important for us to continue instruction,” he said. “It’s a balance between health and safety and ensuring that students can finish their courses.”

Glendale Community College reopened for in-person classes Wednesday, though at least a dozen employees and 20 students lost their homes and dozens more had to evacuate. While officials continue to try and make contact with the 600 students who live in evacuation ZIP codes, the college is also offering extra paid leave for some employees, raising money, supplying students with laptops and helping people connect with other resources.

Smoke and fire could be seen from the Glendale Community College’s Verdugo campus last week.

Glendale Community College

Tzoler Oukayan, dean of student affairs at Glendale CC, said the college is allowing students to withdraw from their classes without facing a penalty.

“The challenge is that a lot of our students in these areas didn’t—and some still don’t—have power. Access to the internet and their classes has been very challenging,” she said. “It was important for us to open up campus and give people a place to just be.”

Empathy and compassion will also be a priority for Mount St. Mary’s University president Ann McElaney-Johnson when her campus reopens. As of Thursday, the university’s Chalon campus—which is about three miles from the burn path of the Palisades fire—was still under evacuation orders and four faculty members so far have lost their homes.

“The impact of the fire—once we’ve ascertained what it is—is going to be tremendous. So, we really want to make sure we’re caring for our community as we move forward,” McElaney-Johnson said, adding that the university is using money from its operations budget to provide staff and students with financial assistance. “We’ll pick up where we need to, but there will be special attention. Some of the plans for different projects can get put on hold. Right now, the only thing that really matters is the safety and well-being of this community.”

‘Healing More Than Academics’

That’s the approach California State University, Chico, took in 2018, when it reopened two weeks after the Camp fire destroyed the homes of more than 300 faculty, staff and students.

“We made sure that we had all of the exceptions and support systems in place to prioritize the people who were part of our community, to make sure our eye was on their long-term success,” said Ashley Gebb, executive director of communications at Chico State. “We were focused on healing more than academics. It was about how we could get students to the end of semester with their well-being as a priority.”

While Gebb said Chico State was “one of the first to have a community leveled by a fire like this,” the fires in Southern California this month have proven that catastrophes of this scale are becoming more common.

Meredith Leigh, climate programs manager for Second Nature, a nonprofit focused on higher education’s role in climate action, said it’s a signal that higher education institutions across the country should be prepared to navigate increasingly drastic events.

“While campuses across our network have taken steps to increase climate resilience and adaptation, the scale and impact of the current fires (as well as recent floods in the East) is novel in its intensity,” she said. “In this way, the biggest lesson for campuses across the nation is to shift the mental model for resiliency and emergency management—away from planning and implementation based on what has happened in the past, toward what are certain to be more frequent and intense events that previously seemed ‘unimaginable.’”

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January 17, 2025
Students feel “spammed” by “overload” of university emails

Students feel that they receive “too many emails” from their universities, and they find their institution’s communications “inconsistent, inauthentic and rather annoying,” according to researchers.

A new paper says that an “overload” of emails sent from universities to students means important emails are getting “buried” and that students simply disengage from their inboxes.

The article, based on interviews with students, senior academics and professional staff who typically distribute emails, found that students were more likely to read emails sent by course tutors, whereas they were likely to ignore mass emails sent from unknown senders.

“Students spoke positively about the messages that related to modules they were studying but were critical of the ‘dear student’ mass communications, which most described as ‘irrelevant’ and some described as ‘spam’,” says the paper published in Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education.

It found students were “remarkably consistent” when filtering their emails, explaining, “They read all the emails relating to their modules, then prioritized the rest using the name of the generator and the subject line. Messages from teaching staff were welcomed, but students rarely read messages from unknown generators, messages sent to all students or newsletters.”

Student services staff said they felt “uncomfortable [and] even guilty” about some of the messages they were asked to distribute, and one student told the researchers, “In my first year, like, there were so many emails being sent out that I basically just gave up.”

However, report co-author Judith Simpson, lecturer in material culture at the University of Leeds, told Times Higher Education that while institutions were “a long way away from optimal communication,” it was “important to note that we measured student perception of email.”

“Some students definitely feel as if they are being spammed, but we don’t actually know how many emails it takes to create that effect. A small number of emails asking you to do life admin might feel like a horrible burden if you haven’t done life admin before,” she said.

The article concedes that “universities are in a difficult situation” and that “students expect to be provided with necessary information but seem unprepared to read it.”

It argues that while this is an “eternal problem” and students failed to read paper handbooks in the pre-email era, “‘overload’ does seem to have been accentuated by the pandemic,” when universities “compensated” for the lack of in-person communication by “reaching out” to students via email. This often included important news, as well as information about “all the good things the university was doing” during this period to support students.

“Staff and students are less likely to meet on campus now that hybrid working is the norm, and the ‘email habits’ developed in the pandemic are still in operation,” the article says.

It suggests that to improve student engagement, universities should consider re-routing well-being messages through personal tutors, and that administrative staff should be introduced to students—virtually or in-person—to increase trust in communications.

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January 17, 2025
Rise in college applications driven by minority students

The number of first-year applicants this cycle is up 5 percent over January of last year, according to a new report from Common App, and overall applications rose 7 percent.

The growth was buoyed by a sharp uptick in underrepresented students: Latino applicants increased 13 percent, Black applicants by 12 percent and first-generation applicants by 14 percent. Asian applicants rose by 7 percent, while the number of white applicants didn’t change.

A Common App analysis also found that the number of applicants from low-income neighborhoods increased more than those from neighborhoods above the median income level—by 9 percent, compared to 4 percent. And the number of applicants who qualify for a fee waiver is up 10 percent so far.

Geographically, applicant trends seemed to follow broader demographic trends; they surged by 33 percent in the Southwest, with a 36 percent boost in Texas alone, while every other region remained relatively stable. The Western region saw applicants decline by 1 percent.

In general, students are applying to about the same number of schools as last year, with only a 2 percent increase in applications per student. Public institutions have received 11 percent more applications, while private ones have received 3 percent more.

For the first time since 2019, domestic applicant growth outpaced that of international applicants, with the former increasing by 5 percent and the latter slowing to 1 percent. Certain high-volume countries experienced steep declines: The number of applicants from Africa fell by 14 percent, and Ghana in particular saw a 36 percent decrease. Applicants from other increasingly popular source countries for international students surged; Bangladesh, for instance, saw 45 percent growth.

The number of applicants who submitted test scores was about even with the number who didn’t. For the past four years, since test-optional policies were implemented in 2020, no-score applicants have significantly outnumbered those who submitted scores, but institutions returning to test requirements may be swinging the pendulum back.

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January 17, 2025
Montana State president to lead APLU

The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities named Montana State University president Waded Cruzado as its next president, according to a Thursday news release.

Cruzado, who has served as chair of APLU’s Board of Directors since 2021, will formally step into the top job at APLU on July 1. Cruzado has led Montana State University since 2010, and last August that she would retire in June 2025.

She replaces outgoing president Mark Becker, who has led APLU since 2022.

“Throughout my life, the history and the impact of land-grant universities and public higher education have provided me, and countless students and families, with inspiration and a call to action. I’ve seen firsthand the life-changing opportunity our public universities provide to their students, their communities, the country, and the world,” Cruzado said in the news release.

Cruzado, who was a first-generation college student, is a native of Puerto Rico.

Gary May, chancellor of the University of California, Davis, who led the search committee that hired Cruzado, described her as “an exceptional leader who brings deep experience in successfully leading a public and land-grant university to impressive new heights.” May also noted her familiarity with the organization given her time as chair of APLU’s Board of Directors.

(The headline was corrected to reflect that Cruzado is retiring before going to APLU.)

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January 17, 2025
Review of Adamson’s “A Century of Tomorrows” (opinion)

The name of an ambition more than it is of a body of knowledge, the term “futurology” is attributed by one source on word origins to Aldous Huxley. The author of Brave New World is a plausible candidate, of course; he is credited with coining it in 1946. But a search of JSTOR turns up an article from three years earlier suggesting that Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West made him the pioneer of “what one may hope will sometime develop into a real science of ‘Futurology.’”

The author of that article was a political scientist and émigré from Nazi Germany named Ossip K. Flechtheim, then teaching at the historically Black Atlanta University; the article itself was published in a historically Black scholarly journal, Phylon. He soon decided that his idea’s time had come.

By 1945, writing in The Journal of Higher Education, Flechtheim advocated for futurology both as an emerging line of interdisciplinary scholarship and as a matter of urgent concern to “the present-day student, whose life-span may well stretch into the twenty-first century.” He was optimistic about futurology’s potential to advance knowledge: Maintaining that “a large number of scholars” concurred on “the major problems which humanity would face” in the coming decades, he announced that “predict[ing] the most probable trends is a task which we have the means to accomplish successfully today.”

But as Niels Bohr and/or Yogi Berra famously put it, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Flechtheim went on to publish landmark contributions to the incipient field of study, surely expecting that a proper social science of the future would be established by the turn of the millennium. But on this point, as in most cases, subsequent history only confirms the Bohr-Berra conundrum.

One rough metric of futurology’s public-intellectual salience over time is how often the word appears per year in publications stored in the Google Books database. The resulting graph shows barely any use of the term before about 1960. But with the new decade there is a sudden burst of activity: a period of steep acceleration lasting about two decades, then collapsing dramatically over the final years of the 20th century. The JSTOR search results show much the same pattern.

And so it is that Glenn Adamson’s A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present (Bloomsbury Publishing) approaches the subject with not so much skepticism about futurology’s prospects as a certain irony about its very status as a distinct kind of knowledge. The author, a curator and a historian, attaches Flechtheim’s neologism as a label to a kaleidoscopic array of efforts to anticipate the shape of things to come, whether by analyzing statistical trends, through artistic creativity or in experimentation with new ways of life. The book concentrates on the United States and the 20th century, but inevitably the larger world and earlier history shape the book, which also reflects some 21st-century pressures as well.

Plenty of science fiction novels have done better at imagining life in subsequent decades than think tank projections made in the same era. But comparing prognostications for relative accuracy is not Adamson’s real concern. Whatever means it may employ, the futurological imperative is always to respond to current reality—to its perceived failings or potentials, to the opportunities and terrors looming over the world or lurking just out of sight. Adamson writes that “every story about the future is also a demand to intervene in the present.” The forms of intervention considered include political movements, religious revivals, market research, scenarios for thermonuclear war, hippie communes, the insurance industry and time capsules assembled for future generations to ponder (to give an abbreviated list).

The future’s uncertainty provides a blank screen for projecting contemporary issues in reimagined form and the opportunity to imagine alternatives. (Or to imagine inevitabilities, whether of the encouraging or despairing kind.)

The author takes futurology to have emerged in the 19th century as a response to concerns previously the domain of religious traditions. Utopia and dystopia provide fairly obvious secular analogues to heaven and hell. But there is more to it than that. “For those who no longer saw the future as a matter of revealed truth,” Adamson writes, “new forms of authority stepped in to fill the gap. This is where the futurologists would come in. They would not only make claims about what lies ahead but also somehow persuade others of their ability to see it.”

The grounds for claiming such authority proliferated, as did the visions themselves, in ways resistant to linear narrative. Instead, the author pulls seemingly unconnected developments together into thematic clusters, rather like museum exhibits displayed in partly chronological and partly thematic order.

For example, the futurological cluster he calls the Machine includes the organization Technocracy, Inc., which in the early 1930s won a hearing for its plan to put the entire economy under the control of engineers who would end the waste, bottlenecks and underperformance that had, they purported, caused the Depression.

Enthusiasm for the Technocracy’s social blueprints was short-lived, but it expressed a wider trend. Futurologists of this ilk “set about creating self-correcting, self-regulating systems; conceptually speaking, they became machine builders.” Under this heading Adamson includes enthusiasts for “the Soviet experiment” (as non-Communist admirers liked to call it), but also the market-minded professionals involved in industrial design, especially for automobiles: “The advance planning of annual model changes was a way to humanize technology, while also setting the horizon of consumer expectation.”

Whereas the Machine-oriented visionaries of the early 20th century had specific goals for the future (and confidence about being able to meet them), a different attitude prevailed after World War II among those Adamson calls the Lab futurologists. The future was for them “something to be studied under laboratory conditions, with multiple scenarios measured and compared against one another.” Some of them had access to the enormous computers of the day, and the attention of people making decisions of the highest consequence.

“Prediction was becoming a much subtler art,” the author continues, “with one defining exception: the prediction of nuclear annihilation, a zero multiplier for all human hopes.”

Those who thought life in a Machine world sounded oppressive offered visions of the future as Garden, where a healthier balance between urban and rural life could prevail. A corresponding horror at Lab scenarios spawned what Adamson calls Party futurology. This started in Haight-Ashbury, fought back at the Stonewall and generated the radical feminist movement that still haunts some people’s nightmares.

Missing from my thumbnail sketch here is all the historical texture of the book (including a diverse group of figures, leading and otherwise) as well as its working out of connections among seemingly unrelated developments.

As mentioned, the book is centered on 20th-century America. Even so, “Flood,” the final chapter (not counting the conclusion), takes up forces that have continued to accumulate in the early millennium. Flood-era futurology is not defined either by climate change or digital hypersaturation of attention. The main element I’ll point out here is Adamson’s sense that futurology’s own future has been compromised by an excess of noise and meretricious pseudo-insight.

The floods of dubious information (from too many sources to evaluate) make it harder to establish reality in the present, much less to extrapolate from it. Filling the void is a churn of simulated thought the author calls Big Ideas. “By this,” he writes, “I mean a general prediction about culture at large that initially feels like an important insight, but is actually either so general as to be beyond dispute, or so vague as to be immune to disproof.” Much better, on the whole, is to study the record of futurology itself, with its history as a warning against secular fortune-telling.

Scott McLemee is Inside Higher Ed’s “Intellectual Affairs” columnist. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca magazine and a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education before joining Inside Higher Ed in 2005.

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January 17, 2025
Turbulent times require both immediate and long views

I don’t remember where I heard this bit of wisdom, if I read it in a book or someone else told it to me, but it’s something I’ve carried around for a while now: There’s always going to be a next, until there isn’t.

My interpretation is a kind of combination of “this too shall pass” with “time marches on,” along with a reminder of the certainty that at some point all things and all people cease to exist.

(I find that last bit sort of comforting, but maybe I’m weird that way.)

It comes in handy when thinking about both exciting and difficult times. What is happening in a moment is not eternal, and something else will be coming along. In order to make that next thing as positive and beneficial as possible, we have to deal with both the present and those possible futures.

I think this mindset might be helpful to anyone who is considering the coming couple of years for higher education and bracing for the possible impact of a presidential administration that appears hostile to the work of colleges and universities and intends to bring this perceived hostile group to heel. I’m concerned that many institutions are not considering that there’s always going to be a next, and short-term accommodations are going to result in long-term problems.

What comes next will be far worse than it needs to be.

It’s strange to think that institutions that are so well established with such long histories should act with such fragility in the face of present uncertainty, but there are signs of what scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder calls “obeying in advance” everywhere.

As reported by IHE’s Ryan Quinn, Texas A&M, along with other public higher ed institutions in the state, following threats ginned up by right-wing conservative billionaire-backed activist Christopher Rufo, has ended their participation in the PhD Project, a conference meant to help increase the number of doctoral students identifying as “Black, African American, Latino, Hispanic American, Native American or Canadian Indigenous.”

The institutions had previously participated for a number of years but have now rescinded their sponsorship because of Texas law SB 17, banning DEI programs at public universities. Texas governor Greg Abbott threatened to fire A&M president Mark Welsh. Welsh folded, issuing a statement that said, “While the proper process for reviewing and approving attendance at such events was followed, I don’t believe we fully considered the spirit of our state law in making the initial decision to participate. We need to be sure that attendance at those events is aligned with the very clear guidance we’ve been given by our governing bodies.”

The intention behind these attacks by Rufo and his backers is to, essentially, resegregate higher education under an entirely twisted definition of “fairness.” This point of view is ascendant, as multiple states have banned so-called DEI initiatives, and the rolling back of affirmative action in college admissions has already resulted in a decline in Black first-year students, something most pronounced at “elite” institutions.

So, this is now, but in acting this way now, what’s likely to be next? Will Texas A&M regress to a de facto policy of segregation? Is this healthy for the institution, for the state of Texas?

I grant that it is possible that a program of resegregation is consistent with the desires of a majority of the state’s citizens and the elected legislators are simply reflecting the desire of their constituency. If so, so be it … I guess. I wonder how long the institutions can last when it allows Chris Rufo or Elon Musk or Charlie Kirk or any other outside individual or group to dictate its policies. Is this a good precedent for whatever is next?

There’s going to be a next. What happens now will give shape to what that next might be. I worry that the folks making decisions believe there is only the now, not the next.

Thankfully, most of us do not have to make consequential decisions that impact many people working in large institutions, but we can use this framing in considering our individual fates as well.

In a couple of weeks my next book, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, will be in the world. I’ve invested a lot in this book, not just time and effort, but some measure of my hopes for my career and the impact my ideas may have on the world of writing and teaching writing.

It is a fraught thing to invest too much into something like a single book. Books fail to launch all the time, as I’ve experienced personally … more than once. Finding the balance between investing sufficient effort to take advantage of the now, while also recognizing that I will have to do something next, has been a bit tricky, but necessary.

Maybe what’s next will be closely related to the now: more speaking, more workshops related to my vision for teaching writing, a truly tangible impact on how we collectively discuss these issues after being more of a gadfly and voice in the woods. But also, maybe this is closer to the end of a cycle that started with a previous book.

To calm my worries, I spend time thinking about what would be next if 50 percent or even 90 percent of what I now do for my vocation and income dried up. This is what I did when it became clear that teaching off the tenure track was not going to continue to be a viable way forward—a process that has put me in this moment.

Imagining a next, I think I would call my local School of Rock and see if they needed someone to teach kids the drums, and I also would get to work on a novel that’s been rolling around my head. I picture that possible next, and while there is a sadness that what I’m hoping to achieve now did not come to fruition, I can also envision real pleasure in that other path.

To preserve their essential mission, institutions must be prepared for turbulence and change by knowing there will be a next. To survive in this time, individuals must both be present in the now and consider what might have to happen next.

Not easy, but always necessary.

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January 17, 2025
How five colleges recognize the National Day of Racial Healing
Racial healing circles, or opportunities for community members to share stories and connect on a human level, are common activities for the National Day of Racial Healing. This year is the ninth observance of the holiday.

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Over the past two decades, higher education has grown exceptionally diverse, enrolling students from all backgrounds and offering opportunities for education and career development for historically underserved populations.

This diversification of the students, staff and faculty who make up higher education also offers opportunities for institutions to promote justice and racial healing through intentional education and programming. One annual marker of this work is the National Day of Racial Healing.

The background: The National Day of Racial Healing was established by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation in 2017 as part of the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) initiative to bring people together and inspire action to build a more just and equitable world.

The day falls on the Tuesday after Martin Luther King Jr. Day and is marked by events and activities that promote racial healing. Racial healing, as defined by the foundation, is “the experience shared by people when they speak openly and hear the truth about past wrongs and the negative impacts created by individual and systemic racism,” according to the effort’s website.

On campus: The American Association of Colleges and Universities encourages institutions to “engage in activities, events or strategies to promote healing and foster engagement around the issues of racism, bias, inequity and injustice in our society,” according to a Dec. 18 press release. AAC&U partners with 72 institutions to establish TRHT Campus Centers, with the goal of developing 150 self-sustaining community-integrated centers.

Some ways institutions can do this is through organizing activities, inviting faculty to connect course material to racial healing during that week, coordinating events or sharing stories on social media, according to AAC&U.

Here’s how colleges and universities, many that host TRHT Campus Centers, plan to honor the National Day of Racial Healing.
- Baldwin Wallace University in Ohio will host two Jacket Circles for students to participate in storytelling and deep listening to build empathy and compassion. The University of Louisville, similarly, will host Cardinal Connection Circles.
- Emory University in Georgia will hold a three-day event, beginning on Jan. 21, that includes a keynote, lunch-and-learn panel discussion, racial healing circles, and a dinner experience.
- Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York system, will host its first National Day of Racial Healing this year, which includes healing circles, roundtable discussions and art-based initiatives.
- The TRHT Center at Northern Virginia Community College will partner with the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors to issue a formal proclamation in a public forum, acknowledging the importance of the day, a tradition for the two groups.
- The University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa will take a pause today to recognize the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom, as well as the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the National Day of Racial Healing. The event, Hawai‘i ku‘u home aloha, which “Hawai‘i my beloved home,” honors the past, present and future of the islands.
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January 17, 2025
Despite being global leader, UK cannot afford to rest on its laurels in digital, AI and green skills

By Matteo Quacquarelli, Vice President of Strategy and Analytics at QS Quacquarelli Symonds.

Across the globe, economies are grappling with skills and talent challenges. From talent saturation to workforce reskilling, each country is facing its own unique issues as it prepares for the evolution of the digital age.

The QS World Future Skills Index, just launched, offers a detailed breakdown of the globe’s higher education systems, their links with industries and how countries are preparing for the next industrial evolution. Using exclusive QS data, it identifies where economies and countries need to align their higher education outcomes with the needs of industry in three key areas – green, AI and digital.

The analysis delves into 81 economies and finds that UK higher education is currently one of the world’s best for cultivating students with the future skills business and industry are calling out for.

It measures four indicators linked to skills like AI proficiency, digital literacy and environmental sustainability that will form the bedrock of the industries of tomorrow.

Skills Fit measures how well countries are equipping graduates with the skills employers desire. In this, no country is currently better than the UK. Using data from both our own largest-of-its-kind QS Global Employer Survey and the World Bank Group, we identified that UK employers have the highest satisfaction rates with the skills graduates bring with them, anywhere in the world – but perhaps only for the time being.

Additionally, the UK received top marks in the Academic Readiness dimension, measuring the preparedness of a country in regard to the future of work. The UK’s success in the QS World University Rankings by Subject allowed it to flourish here.

However, the UK must not rest on its laurels. Higher education in other markets globally is innovating at a far more rapid rate than in the UK. The reputational strength of the UK – built on its history and tradition of delivering excellent teaching and learning – is unlikely to be the key driver of satisfaction going forward.

The UK was slightly less successful than its closest rivals in the areas of Future of Work and Economic Transformation.

Future of Work measures how well the job market is prepared to meet the growing demand for digital, AI and green skills, using 1Mentor data of over 280m job postings worldwide.

Economic Transformation analyzes whether a country has the infrastructure, investment power, and talent available to transition to industries driven by AI, digital transformation, green technologies and high-skilled work. This indicator used data from the World Bank Group, UNESCO Institute for Statistics and the Education Policy Institute.

This lower score is reflective of the slow-to-no economic growth seen in the UK over the past decade and the tightening of the public purse strings strangling investment in R&D and new business innovation (evidenced by decline not only in public but also private sector funding in the UK).

The latest economic forecasts signal a further period of stagnation for the UK economy might be on the horizon.

Just as the importance of investment in future skills cannot be understated, nor can the importance of higher education in AI breakthroughs and innovation.

Funnelling research innovation down the value chain into industry has been the bedrock of economic innovation worldwide. Without Stanford University, there would be no Silicon Valley. In Germany, the universities of Stuttgart and Tübingen are key in the country’s Cyber Valley initiative. If Melbourne didn’t have its outstanding higher education institutions, the city would not hold the crown of tech capital of Australia.

The QS Future World Skills Index highlights the example of South Korea, where there is a correlation between increasing numbers of young adults attaining tertiary education and GDP growth.

The UK government’s new AI Opportunities Action Plan, announced earlier this week sets out a clear ambition strategy to maintain Britain’s position as one of the world’s AI superpowers and has been widely welcomed by industry.

The prime minister says his government will make it easier for experts to come to the UK via its talent visas and for future leaders to learn here. Tens of thousands of additional AI professionals will be needed by 2030, he has said.

The Government also wants to ‘increase its share of the world’s top 1,000 AI researchers’ and will launch an AI scholarship scheme to support 100 students to study in the UK.

While the UK was also top in Europe for talent creation, with 46,000 students graduating from an AI-relevant higher education program ahead of Germany in terms of absolute numbers with 32,000, the UK is still behind Finland on a per capita basis. Without specific policy and commitment, the UK risks losing its leading position.

The UK is missing ‘frontier conceptual, cutting-edge companies‘. DeepMind, the AI research laboratory, was one such company that was founded in the UK before being acquired by Google in 2014. But where was it established? The three co-founders meet while studying at University College London.

The new AI Growth Zones the government has announced, with the first starting in Culham, will need to engage universities up and down the country. Higher education must also be closely involved in the Digital and Technology Sector Plan, which is set to be published in the coming months.

The government has also previously pledged to become a green energy superpower. The QS Future World Skills Index suggests that both the UK’s job market and its higher education system is well set up to capitalise on that opportunity.

To succeed, government policy, the needs of industry and higher education curricula must all align to create an environment where the country can succeed and be future-ready.

Economies and higher education systems that invest in high-quality academic programmes in AI, digital and sustainability are setting themselves up for long-term success.

For the full QS World Future Skills Index: https://www.qs.com/reports-whitepapers/world-future-skills-index

The UK Spotlight is available here: https://www.qs.com/reports-whitepapers/uk-spotlight-qs-world-future-skills-index

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January 17, 2025