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  • What happens when inclusion loses its limits?

    What happens when inclusion loses its limits?

    In higher education, few concepts have accelerated and expanded as dramatically as inclusion.

    What began as a tightly defined commitment to enabling students with disabilities to participate on equitable terms has evolved into something far broader, more ambitious, and increasingly vague.

    It is now treated as a moral imperative, a performance metric, a strategic direction, a pedagogic philosophy, and an institutional identity.

    Inclusion is invoked with confidence and urgency, yet rarely interrogated with the precision that universities would normally demand from ideas that shape policy, resource allocation, and everyday academic work.

    As a result, it’s become a shifting and unfocused ideal whose ever-expanding theoretical basis risks rendering its practical implementation unmanageable and, at times, incoherent.

    Not a rejection

    This isn’t a rejection of inclusion – it’s an attempt to address what inclusion is becoming. An umbrella concept that absorbs disparate agendas, a rhetorical device that legitimises policy, and a shield that obscures the widening gap between educational aspirations and the realities of institutional capacity.

    It’s essential to recognise that inclusion expanded for understandable reasons – entrenched inequalities in recruitment, attainment, belonging, and graduate outcomes demonstrated that earlier, narrower models left many students structurally disadvantaged.

    These concerns were real, and they demanded more than minimal compliance. But as the concept expands without restraint, the very idea of what’s “reasonable” becomes stretched to the point where clarity dissolves and feasibility collapses.

    Where it started

    Historically, inclusion in higher education centred on the notion of reasonable adjustments, grounded in law and shaped by considerations of necessity, proportionality, and practicality. These provided targeted interventions – lecture capture, extended deadlines, accessible buildings – designed around identifiable needs. The principle was pragmatic, bounded, and tangible.

    Over time, though, inclusion has been recast in ways that go far beyond these original commitments. Increasingly, it’s treated as a universal promise – a guarantee that every student, regardless of background, preference, psychological disposition, or socio-cultural identity, will experience higher education without encountering barriers, discomfort, or inequity.

    In practice, this shift is visible in policies that extend far beyond disability – the blanket introduction of “inclusive assessment” models that limit exams, require universal flexible deadlines, or favour coursework-only structures, often justified on the grounds that they reduce inequity rather than because they support specific pedagogic goals.

    This evolution has transformed a rights-based approach into something closer to an all-purpose institutional obligation, where every expression of challenge or dissatisfaction risks being reframed as evidence that inclusion has failed, and every failure becomes justification for further expansion. That trajectory produces an impossible mandate that no institution can fully satisfy.

    Mission creep

    The inflation of inclusion has taken several forms. As the term has broadened, it’s become synonymous with maximal institutional responsiveness, and ordinary aspects of learning – moments of uncertainty, academic struggle, or cultural unfamiliarity – are increasingly interpreted as problems requiring institutional intervention rather than as inherent features of intellectual development.

    Some departments now pre-emptively remove or sanitise challenging materials – texts dealing with violence, empire, or identity – because they fear that student discomfort may be framed as exclusionary or unsafe. Staff report avoiding topics that might generate emotional strain, not because the material is inappropriate, but because the institutional climate encourages risk-avoidance in the name of inclusion.

    At the same time, inclusion has shifted from a framework aimed at widening participation and removing barriers to one that implicitly seeks to eliminate differential outcomes, drawing universities into a logic that treats divergence in student experience or performance not as a reflection of diversity or academic challenge but as evidence of structural shortcomings.

    Alongside these shifts, inclusion has been elevated into a moral identity for universities, reducing a complex set of tensions to a simplistic dichotomy in which institutions are either inclusive or exclusive, with little room for legitimate limits. Yet inclusion, discomfort, and intellectual difficulty can – and often must – coexist, and the task is to manage that tension rather than eliminate it.

    The capacity problem

    As inclusion intensifies, universities are expected to reorganise teaching, assessment, communication, and campus culture to accommodate an ever-widening array of expectations. Yet institutions aren’t infinitely adjustable – they operate with finite resources, finite pedagogical flexibility, and finite staff capacity.

    The assumption that universities can continually re-engineer their practices to meet every evolving preference risks creating an expanding cycle in which expectations grow faster than institutions can respond. The recent proliferation of mandatory EDI training modules, for instance, often positions inclusion as requiring continual curricular redesign, staff behavioural modification, and extensive administrative reporting – expectations that far exceed the original aims of removing concrete barriers.

    As the gap widens, the perceived failure to deliver becomes itself a rationale for expanding inclusion further, generating an escalating cycle of promise and disappointment.

    The chill on teaching

    This dynamic imposes significant burdens on academic staff, who must manage the tension between pedagogical rigour and the need to anticipate and respond to an increasingly diverse set of affective, cultural, and practical expectations. It also encourages the avoidance of difficult or contentious material, since any emotional discomfort may now be interpreted as a failure of inclusion.

    The rise of universal content warnings – now sometimes extended to standard curriculum texts or canonical material – illustrates this drift well. What began as a specific support measure for trauma-related needs increasingly operates as a universalised expectation that all discomfort is problematic.

    Paradoxically, a concept designed to widen participation begins to narrow the intellectual terrain, making courses safer, smoother, and less demanding at the expense of the challenge and complexity essential to higher learning.

    The quiet consensus

    The sector rarely acknowledges the possibility that inclusion, if allowed to expand indefinitely, may begin to undermine education itself. Without clear conceptual boundaries, inclusion risks becoming a universal mandate that treats all discomfort as harmful, all difference as disadvantage, and all expectations as justified.

    When every aspect of academic life becomes a potential site for inclusion-related intervention, the concept loses definition and becomes impossible to operationalise. Acknowledging this doesn’t mean romanticising discomfort or denying the reality of educational inequalities – rather, it requires recognising that an over-extended inclusion agenda can unintentionally flatten the distinctions between necessary support, valuable challenge, and unreasonable accommodation.

    The pursuit of infinite inclusion transforms a valuable principle into an unmanageable ideal.

    Inclusion as alibi

    What’s most concerning is the extent to which inclusion is increasingly used as an all-purpose justification for policy change. Proposals ranging from assessment redesign to campus conduct rules to staff training programmes are routinely framed as necessary for inclusion, even when their connection to meaningful access or equity is tenuous.

    In some institutions, internal debates about anonymous marking, curriculum reform, or lecture recording policy are effectively short-circuited because the label “inclusive” confers automatic moral authority. The rhetorical power of inclusion discourages dissent, stifles debate, and positions policy decisions as morally self-evident rather than contestable.

    In this way, inclusion becomes an alibi – an unquestionable rationale that masks uncertainty, disagreement, or competing priorities. When a concept assumes such unassailable status, its intellectual value is diminished, because it becomes difficult to challenge and therefore difficult to refine.

    Drawing the line

    For inclusion to remain a coherent and defensible principle, it needs to be re-grounded – and that requires renewed clarity about its purpose and limits. It has to distinguish itself from broader aspirations related to comfort, preferences, and outcome parity, and acknowledge that educational environments are inherently demanding, that intellectual difficulty isn’t a sign of systemic exclusion, and that learning sometimes requires discomfort.

    It also needs to recognise the legitimacy of staff and institutional constraints, and the need to preserve pedagogical integrity even while addressing inequality – because institutions simply can’t accommodate every conceivable expectation without compromising coherence, quality, or mission. Above all, inclusion must be understood as serving education rather than substituting for it.

    What comes next

    The sector is at a point where inclusion has become indispensable to institutional identity and strategic discourse, yet its conceptual boundaries have become increasingly diffuse. Unless this trajectory is confronted with rigour and honesty, the widening gap between the expansive theories of inclusion and the practical realities of institutional capacity will continue to destabilise both.

    The challenge isn’t to choose between inclusion and rigour, but to develop an approach capable of holding these aims in tension – one that’s ambitious but sustainable, principled but not absolute, supportive but not all-consuming.

    Many of the practices gathered under the banner of inclusion aren’t inherently problematic – many are necessary and overdue. The difficulty is that higher education still lacks any shared framework for determining where inclusion appropriately ends, and without boundaries, even well-intentioned adjustments can drift into an ever-expanding mandate that overwhelms academic purpose.

    A recalibrated, better-defined approach is now essential – inclusion should illuminate the purpose of higher education, not eclipse it. Only by clarifying its limits can the sector protect both the integrity of inclusion and the integrity of education itself.

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  • Richard Bland College Board Removed

    Richard Bland College Board Removed

    The Virginia Senate rejected the confirmation of all seven Richard Bland College board appointments on Tuesday morning, effectively removing the entire Board of Visitors in a sudden move.

    With little public discussion, the Democratic-majority Senate voted 21 to 19 on Tuesday to approve an amended list of gubernatorial board appointments, which excluded the Richard Bland College board picks. The vote means that those board members, appointed by former Republican governor Glenn Youngkin, are officially gone after serving seven months in their roles, a stint that included hiring an interim president earlier this month.

    Youngkin appointed Richard Bland’s inaugural board members in July. The public two-year college in Virginia has only had its own board since last summer; it was previously governed by a committee comprised of William & Mary board members, a structure that dated back to the 1960s, when Richard Bland College was founded as an extension campus. However, the General Assembly approved legislation last year that allowed Richard Bland to have its own board.

    Under Virginia law, board members are allowed to serve following their appointment, even if they haven’t been confirmed. The inaugural board has held several meetings since its first in August, and the next one is scheduled for April. But now that the Richard Bland picks have been officially rejected, a new slate of appointments will have to be appointed before a meeting can be held.

    “The entire board was replaced. It appears our terms expired not by calendar, but by election cycle,” Christopher Winslow, one of the board members, wrote to Inside Higher Ed by email.

    Another former board member, John Rathbone, said, “The Board of Visitors serves at the pleasure of the General Assembly, and we respect the wisdom of their decision in this matter.”

    While Youngkin heavily favored GOP donors and conservative political figures in his board picks, his nominees at Richard Bland broke from that practice. An Inside Higher Ed review found that more Richard Bland board picks have donated to Democrats than Republicans. And while Youngkin tapped multiple former Republican lawmakers to serve on Virginia’s various boards, his picks at Richard Bland were more bipartisan. Youngkin appointed three members with political pasts: James W. Dyke Jr., who served as Virginia education secretary under a Democratic governor; Winslow, who previously held county office as a Republican; and Petersburg mayor Samuel Parham, an Independent who broke from the Democratic Party several years ago.

    “Richard Bland College was granted an independent governing board by the 2025 Virginia General Assembly, and that Board performed their duties with great care and stewardship,” President Debbie Sydow told Inside Higher Ed. “The midyear transition is disruptive, but I am confident that Governor [Abigail] Spanberger’s appointed board will be equally conscientious in their stewardship of Richard Bland College.”

    The Democrats’ rejection of multiple board appointments has essentially handed Spanberger more control over who sits on university boards, a power she flexed on day one of her term, when she appointed 27 board members at the University of Virginia, George Mason University and Virginia Military Institute.

    While Richard Bland was hit the hardest by Tuesday’s rejections, other state institutions also saw board picks shot down. Notable names rejected include Eric Cantor, a former Republican U.S. representative whom Youngkin had appointed to the William & Mary board, and Michael Poliakoff, president and CEO of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, who had been tapped to serve on Longwood University’s board.

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  • He refused to censor his syllabus — so Texas Tech cancelled his class

    He refused to censor his syllabus — so Texas Tech cancelled his class

    Texas Tech leaders have somehow convinced themselves that race and gender are not legitimate topics to discuss in a psychology class. That’s absurd on its face: You can’t teach human behavior while treating basic dimensions of human identity as off-limits.

    Will Crescioni, a lecturer in Texas Tech’s Department of Psychological Sciences, submitted his course materials for his honors-level psychology course the same day the Texas Tech system issued a memo ordering universities to review courses and ensure faculty do not “promote or otherwise inculcate” certain ideas related to race and gender.

    Just over a month later — and only two days before the semester began — his course was scrapped. His offense? Refusing to alter his course content. 

    In emails with his department, Crescioni defended his approach. Instead of picking and choosing which of his course materials may violate the system memo, Crescioni submitted all of his course materials for review. He also explained a basic fact about teaching: In psychology, as in many disciplines, topics like race and gender are not confined to a single lecture slot. They surface throughout the semester because they are integral to the subject. Anyone who has taken a serious college course understands this. Classes are often wide-ranging and exploratory. They don’t always fit neatly into bureaucratic boxes. Forcing a professor to tiptoe around a ban on promoting such topics will inevitably warp a course, severely compromising a professor’s teaching. 

    Stripping out discussion of race and gender that “enhances the quality of a course,” Crescioni argued, would mean abandoning his responsibility to “design the best courses” he can. He refused to teach a redacted version of his psychology course required by the system memo. In plain terms, he would not intellectually neuter his own class. 

    The result: no more class.

    This outcome serves no one, and is precisely why efforts to ban particular ideas from the classroom are so dangerous. As FIRE has long argued, targeting specific viewpoints for suppression infringes on faculty members’ constitutional rights and their authority to shape their own pedagogy. In some areas, it can make it impossible to teach a course with any academic credibility.

    Crescioni’s case is only the latest in a disturbing pattern. And more cancellations are no doubt on the horizon. The Texas Tech Board of Regents is meeting at the end of February, when additional courses could face the chopping block. The nebulous process and lack of clear standards only deepen the chill already settling over campus.  

    And the chill came on fast. According to the Texas Tribune, Texas Tech cancelled two upper-level psychological sciences courses — Ethnic Minority Psychology and Close Relationships — within days of the Dec. 1 memo. 

    On Feb. 10, FIRE wrote to Texas Tech outlining our concerns: 

    Under any basic understanding of academic freedom, faculty must have substantial breathing room to use a wide range of pedagogical techniques and materials to teach. Nor is academic freedom FIRE’s sole concern with Texas Tech’s decision; prohibiting faculty from discussing specific pedagogically relevant ideas or materials discussed in the classroom also constitutes unlawful viewpoint discrimination, an ‘egregious’ form of censorship.

    Universities exist to test ideas, not to pre-clear them. When administrators begin combing through syllabi for disfavored concepts, the damage extends beyond any single canceled class. Faculty learn the lesson quickly. So do students. The result is a campus climate defined less by inquiry than by caution — and that’s a cost no serious institution of higher education should be willing to bear.

    If you are a public university or college professor facing investigations or punishment for your speech, contact FIRE’s Faculty Legal Defense Fund: Submit a case or call the 24-hour hotline at 254-500-FLDF (3533).

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  • Fandom’s lighthouse in a sea of censorship

    Fandom’s lighthouse in a sea of censorship

    Sheridan Macy is a policy analyst at FIRE with a policy background in human rights as well as environmental and immigration law.

    Debates over free expression often center on government power and the First Amendment. But in fandom communities and other niche online subcultures, the boundaries of speech are shaped by moderators, platform policies, and evolving group norms. Within these intensely participatory spaces, decisions about what is acceptable can determine which voices are amplified and which are pushed aside. In these environments, cultural gatekeeping and platform rules often define who gets heard.

    When Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893, fans lost their minds. They wrote angry letters to Doyle and his publisher, they wore black armbands in the streets as if a real person had died, they even began writing and publishing their own unauthorized stories about the beloved detective. The practice of fanfiction is as old as storytelling itself. The Aeneid builds on Homer’s Iliad, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet reimagines a poem by Arthur Brooke, and Dante’s Inferno is sometimes described as “self-insert” fanfiction of the Bible. But like any form of artistic expression, fanfic has long faced creative restraints.

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    In 1981, for example, Lucasfilm sent letters to Star Wars fanzine publishers saying they were free to continue — so long as they didn’t include pornographic stories. Nor has moving from print to the internet resulted in a landscape free from constraints. Often, fanfic platforms remove content without warning based on input by platform owners, advertisers, or the public. FanFiction.Net purges adult content despite having an “M” rating for mature stories, and has banned entire genres including self-inserts, scripts, songfics, and audiofics (“fic” meaning a work of fanfiction). The platform Wattpad has removed LGBT stories from the Warrior Cats series after parents complained and targeted LGBT content more broadly. 

    Recognizing the risks to free expression, fans founded Archive of Our Own in 2008 with a clear mission: “Maximum inclusiveness of fanwork content.” Unlike other fanfic platforms, AO3 maintains a strong opposition to creative restrictions. The site imposes only two content requirements: all work must be fan-made and users cannot claim other people’s work as their own. Based in the United States, AO3 now serves more than 10 million users, supports dozens of languages, and hosts over 16.7 million works across more than 76,000 fandoms. Time magazine named AO3 one of the 50 Best Websites of 2013. And in 2025, Forbes listed it as one of the world’s best fanfic sites, alongside FanFiction.Net.

    To help users avoid content they don’t want to see, AO3 offers a robust tagging system with ratings and content warnings, allowing readers to filter or mute specific themes while authors can choose to post works without rating them at all.

    But sexual content is just one common target. Within fandom communities, calls for censorship are growing louder, with other targets including depictions of racism or other forms of discrimination, abuse, violence, or underage characters dealing with “adult” topics. 

    Once-common fandom maxims like “don’t like, don’t read” or “ship and let ship” (let bygones be bygones, but applied to character relationships, or “ships”) have given way to claims that depicting harmful behavior in fiction necessarily encourages it in real life. This mirrors a broader cultural trend FIRE has written about — the collapsing distinction between words and violence. 

    In some cases, fans have even gone so far as to reinvent something akin to the Hays Code, a Hollywood self-censorship rulebook that was in use from the 1930s to 1960s, instructing early moviemakers on how to avoid offending America’s moral watchdogs. Fans have argued, as Hays did in its time, that depictions of morally questionable behaviors are only okay if they are punished within the story. An adulterous character must see the error of their ways. A villain must face consequences. The abuser cannot be portrayed sympathetically, even for a chapter.  

    The underlying concerns driving these restrictions aren’t entirely baseless — research on media effects shows that repeated exposure to certain content can normalize attitudes, particularly among younger audiences. And platforms do face real legal and ethical questions about hosting mature material, even if fictional. But AO3 argues that categorical content bans only create more problems than they solve. In its FAQ, it explains, “Biased enforcement of content rules has been shown to occur even when the purpose of the rule is to push back against discrimination. For example, rules intended to reduce racial hate speech on social media often end up being disproportionately enforced against racial minorities speaking out against racism.”

    They’re not wrong. In fact, this has played out repeatedly. In 2018, for example, Tumblr’s adult content ban disproportionately flagged art by black creators while missing actual pornography.

    Fans also point out that writing about darker themes like child abuse, racial discrimination, or sexual assault can be cathartic for survivors. Psychologists have found that journaling and creative writing can help people process trauma, and such practices are often used in therapy for PTSD and related conditions. When asked why it doesn’t remove extremely offensive content, AO3 offers a blunt defense of creative freedom:

    Our mission is to host transformative fanworks without making judgments based on morality or personal preferences. If it’s a fictional fanwork that is legal to post in the United States, then it is welcome on AO3. This approach is intended to reduce the risk that content will be removed as a result of cultural or personal bias against marginalized communities.

    We recognize that there are works on AO3 that contain or depict bigotry and objectionable content. However, we are dedicated to safeguarding all fanworks, without consideration of any work’s individual merits or how we personally feel about it. We will not remove works from AO3 simply because someone believes they are offensive or objectionable.

    In fandom communities, the forces shaping speech are platform policies and ever-evolving community norms. Unlike the constitutional clashes that define disputes over government power, these conflicts play out in message boards and comment threads. The stakes may appear smaller than heavy-handed government regulation, but for the people involved, they shape who gets to participate and what ideas are allowed to take root.

    AO3 has made its website a bulwark in an online landscape increasingly shaped by censorship and moral panic, distinguishing itself as a lighthouse in the storm. As a private platform, it retains the right to set and enforce its own rules, just as users remain free to express themselves. That tension between platform discretion and user expression may not be a constitutional crisis, but it is a reflection of how cultural and platform values shape today’s digital spaces.

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  • FIRE statement on Stephen Colbert’s James Talarico interview and continued FCC pressure

    FIRE statement on Stephen Colbert’s James Talarico interview and continued FCC pressure

    On Monday, Late Show host Stephen Colbert said CBS refused to allow him to air his interview with Texas Democratic senate candidate James Talarico, following the Federal Communications Commission’s Jan. 21 announcement to enforce the equal time rule on late night and daytime talk shows. The shows previously had been considered exempt from equal time requirements under the law’s exemption for news interviews. 

    The following statement can be attributed to FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere:

    America is not made freer when the government leans on someone’s First Amendment rights. Brendan Carr’s FCC is continuing its streak of naked partisanship by wielding the agency’s power in new and laughable ways. 

    By putting pressure on late night talk shows critical of the Trump administration while openly admitting that conservative talk radio is immune from the FCC’s ire, he’s making himself the poster boy for big government putting its thumb on the scale of political debate.

    Candidate interviews have long been exempt from “equal time” rules for good reason. It would be wrong if a Democratic administration demanded conservative talk radio hosts give equal airtime when they interview candidates, and it’s wrong for the Trump administration to demand the same of late night talk show hosts. 

    Carr used to say that the FCC cannot act as the nation’s speech police, but now that he is chairman he has worn the badge proudly. Hypocrisy is not a virtue.

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  • The Real Cost of IT Inaction in Higher Ed

    The Real Cost of IT Inaction in Higher Ed

    Technology expectations in higher education have never been higher. Students expect seamless digital experiences, faculty rely on stable, integrated systems to teach and conduct research, and institutional leaders need real-time data to make informed decisions.

    Yet many colleges and universities remain stuck, held back by aging infrastructure, limited budgets, or the belief that maintaining the status quo is safer than change.

    From where I sit, that belief is one of the most expensive misconceptions in higher ed today.

    IT inaction isn’t neutral. Standing still doesn’t preserve resources; it quietly drains them. Over time, those costs compound in ways that are harder to see, harder to control, and far more disruptive than proactive modernization.

    The hidden costs of doing nothing

    When institutions delay IT investment, the consequences rarely show up as a single line item. Instead, they surface as inefficiencies spread across budgets, teams, and timelines.

    Legacy systems are a prime example. Redundant platforms often require duplicated effort, separate maintenance contracts, and manual reconciliation between systems that should be integrated.

    Hardware that’s past its lifecycle can lead to unexpected outages and emergency spending that exceeds planned budgets. Older systems also demand specialized support, which is increasingly difficult and expensive to find as vendors phase out end-of-life technology.

    What’s most costly, though, is time.

    IT teams spend countless hours keeping outdated systems afloat by troubleshooting avoidable issues, applying workarounds, and responding to preventable failures. That’s time not being spent on strategic initiatives that improve efficiency, student experience, or institutional resilience.

    I often describe it this way: Maintaining legacy systems is like pouring money into a leaky boat just to stay afloat, not to move forward.

    Security vulnerabilities and reputational risk

    When it comes to cybersecurity, the cost of inaction is especially serious.

    Legacy systems that lack consistent monitoring pose a heightened security risk. Outdated software, fragmented technology environments, and limited visibility create prime opportunities for cyberattacks — particularly for institutions that handle sensitive student, faculty, and financial data.

    Compliance becomes more difficult in these conditions. Meeting FERPA, HIPAA, and other regulatory requirements is far more complex when systems aren’t integrated or consistently managed. Non-compliance doesn’t just carry financial penalties. It can threaten accreditation and erode institutional trust.

    The fallout of a breach extends well beyond remediation costs. Reputational damage can deter prospective students, strain donor relationships, and take years to repair.

    Simply put, institutions don’t want to make headlines because of a cybersecurity lapse they could have prevented.

    Ready for a Smarter Way Forward?

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    Missed opportunities for strategic growth

    IT inaction doesn’t just introduce risk. It actively limits growth.

    Students move seamlessly across digital platforms in every part of their lives. When institutional systems don’t integrate, the student experience becomes fragmented, support slows down, faculty shoulder unnecessary administrative burdens, and leaders lose the data visibility needed to intervene early or plan strategically.

    I’ve seen institutions stuck on legacy SIS infrastructure that prevents modern integrations altogether. The result is manual reporting, delayed insights, and staff hours spent pulling data instead of using it.

    Outdated environments also restrict access to emerging technologies like AI, automation, and advanced analytics. These are tools that could drive efficiency, personalize engagement, and support enrollment and retention strategies. Without a scalable IT foundation, even well-intentioned growth initiatives increase cost and complexity instead of reducing them.

    IT staff burnout and talent drain

    The impact of chronic IT underinvestment is deeply human.

    Internal IT teams in under-resourced environments operate almost entirely in reactive mode. They’re constantly firefighting by responding to outages, security alerts, and system failures, all while knowing the underlying risks remain unresolved.

    That’s exhausting, and over time, it erodes morale.

    Talented IT professionals want to innovate. They want to build, improve, and contribute strategically. When their work is limited to keeping aging systems alive, frustration builds, and burnout follows. Eventually, institutions lose people they can’t easily replace.

    Recruitment becomes harder as well. Prospective hires can quickly identify an organization with no clear IT roadmap. They understand what that environment demands, and many choose to look elsewhere.

    This is where managed IT support can fundamentally change the equation.

    By shifting routine monitoring, maintenance, and after-hours support to a trusted partner, institutions reduce daily stressors on internal teams. Proactive management prevents crises before they escalate. Internal staff regain the capacity to focus on strategy, innovation, and meaningful institutional impact.

    Inaction is a choice (an expensive one)

    One of the biggest misconceptions I hear from higher ed leaders is that modernizing IT is too expensive, too complex, or too disruptive.

    The reality is that institutions are already paying for IT. They’re just paying in less visible and far less controlled ways. They’re paying through staff turnover, downtime, security exposure, and through leadership time spent managing exceptions instead of advancing strategy.

    Modern IT investment isn’t about chasing the latest technology. It’s about stabilizing operations, reducing risk, and making costs predictable. It’s a decision about institutional capacity, long-term resilience, and the people who make both possible.

    If I had 60 seconds with a higher ed president or CFO, I’d say this: The decision isn’t whether you’re spending on IT. That spend is already happening. The real question is whether you want it to be controlled and strategic, or hidden and reactive.

    Moving forward with confidence

    Higher education is navigating unprecedented change. Institutions that succeed won’t be the ones that avoid investment. They’ll be the ones that built strong, flexible foundations capable of supporting their mission long-term.

    If your institution is feeling the strain of outdated systems or reactive IT, now is the time to act. Collegis partners with colleges and universities to stabilize operations, reduce risk, and build IT environments designed for what’s next through our Managed IT Services for higher education.

    Innovation Starts Here

    Higher ed is evolving — don’t get left behind. Explore how Collegis can help your institution thrive.

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  • Snakes and Ladders: gamifying educational research to enhance practice

    Snakes and Ladders: gamifying educational research to enhance practice

    by Lucy Panesar

    I write here about an example of higher education research that has been gamified to enhance inclusive practices at the University of Kent. The original game of Snakes and Ladders had its origins in a ritual Indian game of knowledge, evolving to entertainment, and now again to education.

    Student Success Snakes and Ladders is a University of Kent staff development game I created with research associate Dr Yetunde Kolajo in 2024, to support colleagues to understand student barriers and identify appropriate solutions. It takes the classic Snakes and Ladders board game and adds cards explaining the reason for a student downfall or advancement. These scenarios were derived from longitudinal research by Hensby, Adewumi and Kolajo (2024) that tracked the higher education journey of 25 students in receipt of the Academic Excellence Scholarship (AES) at Kent. The AES research reveals factors influencing student retention, continuation and attainment along with associated institutional supports.

    We adapted Snakes and Ladders to gamify the AES research findings in a way that develops inclusive student support practices. Our version of the game rests on principles of “serious play” (Rieber et al, 1998), in the way that it supports players to understand and respond to the real lives of students with care, respect and a sense of collective responsibility. The classic Snakes and Ladders game we’ve adapted has a rich history in both entertainment and educational contexts, and this encouraged us to adapt it for our purposes.

    We have run Student Success Snakes and Ladders with over 200 colleagues now. When we ask who’s played Snakes and Ladders before, nearly everyone says yes, whatever their background, due to the game’s international popularity. And like many popular traditions in British culture, the game made its way to the UK via British colonialism. As a half-Indian Brit, it was a pleasure but no surprise to learn from Wikipedia that Snakes and Ladders originated in ancient India as Moksha Patam and came over to the UK in the 1890s.

    The image is a Jain version of Snakes and Ladders called Jnana Bazi or Gyan Bazi from India, 19th century, Gouache on cloth (Wikicommons).

    Mehta (cited in Aitken, 2015) explains: “Just as the board game of chess was designed to teach the strategies of war, so Snakes and Ladders was played ritually as Gyanbaji, the Game of Knowledge, a meditation on humanity’s progress toward liberation.” Topsfield (2006) explains how variants have been found across Jain, Hindu and Sufi Muslim sects in India and describes how: “… pilgrim-like, each player progresses fitfully from states of vice, illusion, karmic impediment, or inferior birth at the base of the playing area to ever higher states of virtue, spiritual advancement, the heavenly realms, and (in the ultimate, winning square) liberation (mokṣa) or union with the supreme deity.”

    This paints quite a different picture to the fun game of chance most of us played as children. Topsfield outlines how the game developed from its Indian spiritual origins into a more moralistic English children’s game in the late 1800s and then into the modern simplified derivatives familiar to us now.

    While the game is still played mainly for fun, it has continued to serve educational purposes across the globe. Snakes and Ladders is used to teach Jawai script in Malaysian primary schools (Shitiq and Mahmud, 2010); to promote moral education learning systems in Nigeria (Ibam et al, 2018); for Covid awareness training (Ariessanti et al, 2020), sex education (Ahmad et al, 2021) and to promote healthy eating in Indonesia (Thaha et al, 2022). An article on Snakes and Ladders being used for anatomy training in Iran concludes that the method “can excite the students, create landmarks for remembering memorizing methods and can improve their team work” (Golchai et al, 2012). In the UK, Snakes and Ladders has been used to facilitate Dignity in Care training by Caerphilly Council (2024).

    Inspired by these other examples of ‘serious play’ (Rieber et al, 1998), Yetunde and I adapted the game to develop inclusive student support practices at Kent. We bought existing copies of the board game and added bespoke snake and ladder cards, each with different scenarios from the AES research. When players fall on a snake or ladder, they read a corresponding card to understand the scenario leading to that advance or decline.

    Before sliding down any snakes, players can use a blank “Catch” card to propose an intervention to mitigate the snake and allow the student to stay put. This element prompts colleagues to collaborate to enhance inclusive and equitable practices, reinforcing values inscribed in the Advance HE Professional Standards (2023). If players fall on a yellow square, they can pick up a “Campus” card to reveal and discuss an aspect of campus life in relation to student success.

    Student Success Snakes and Ladders has been well received by Kent staff, including academics, and has proved to be an effective way of using institutional research to enhance student support practices. Our next step is to embed the game within mandatory training for academic and support staff across the university, to ensure that more students are supported to avoid slippery snakes along their higher education journey.

    Dr Lucy Panesar is a UK-based educator and educational developer focused on the development of inclusive and equitable higher education practices. Her first teaching role was at the University for the Creative Arts and her first educational development role was at the University of the Arts London, where she led various projects promoting curriculum decolonization. Since 2022, she has been a Lecturer in Higher Education at the University of Kent, supporting academic and curriculum development across the disciplines.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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  • As a head of institution I need people to tell me when they think I’m wrong

    As a head of institution I need people to tell me when they think I’m wrong

    It’s now 30 years since I started my first academic role, and many of the most useful conversations I’ve ever had have been ones where people have disagreed with me.

    Quite often, I discover that I’m wrong and they’re right, and I get to adapt my thinking, learn, and improve. Occasionally, I’m right and they’re wrong, and I’m reminded of the need to communicate better and to empathise with different viewpoints. Very often, though, we decide that we’re both wrong, and we walk away with a much better understanding of the complexity of the problem we both thought we had solved. In contrast, many of my biggest mistakes have come when I’ve been overconfident because I’ve been bolstered by agreement.

    So, in my first six months as vice chancellor at Keele University, I’m taking what is perhaps a slightly unusual step of actively trying to get people to disagree with me as much as possible. If you read the higher education press, including Wonkhe, you might think that most vice chancellors find it very easy to get people to disagree with them. But what I’ve noticed is that in your first year, people are often extremely welcoming and supportive – and sometimes that means they don’t tell you that you’re wrong as often as they should.

    Constructive non-alignment

    As we set out to develop a new strategy for our University, I’m introducing the Keele Debates to try to raise the level of disagreement to something that is genuinely productive. These debates are designed to bring together people from across education, business, public policy and civic life to discuss the societal issues affecting higher education and the role universities can play in addressing them.

    The intention with the Keele Debates series is to create a space where disagreement is constructive and where different perspectives can be explored in a way that generates practical insight rather than simply reinforcing existing positions.

    The series focuses on some of the biggest challenges facing universities today, including internationalisation, artificial intelligence, graduate employability, and inclusivity. We want to encourage honest discussion across the sector about how universities need to adapt if they are to remain relevant, competitive, and sustainable.

    These topics have been curated to reflect the complexity of the situation our sector is facing in 2026, and the many varied and intertwining issues which not only have an impact on higher education, but one another. We live in a world where increased globalisation coexists with more division about immigration, and the increased pressure to adopt AI and automated technologies coincides with a graduate job market that has never been more competitive, and universities are under even more pressure to prepare their students for life after their degrees.

    These are the sort of challenges we want to grapple with in these debates, and hopefully by doing so we can ultimately strengthen the sector as a whole; but the journey there will demand these difficult conversations. Higher education has a profound and transformative impact on society, but precisely because of that influence, universities must be open to challenge, scrutiny and debate, and be willing to ask difficult questions about how they serve students, communities and the wider world.

    Hot topic

    Our first debate – The Global University: Are we exporting education or exploiting students? – brings together speakers from across the sector and beyond including a former universities minister and the chief executive of Universities UK Vivienne Stern. By bringing together such diverse and often opposing voices, ones with very different experiences and viewpoints, we hope to surface ideas that help universities respond more effectively to the challenges and opportunities ahead.

    Ultimately, universities exist to help solve society’s most pressing problems and to enhance the lives of our students, staff and communities. For that to remain true, we need to be willing to challenge our own assumptions, listen to perspectives that we may not immediately agree with, and be open to changing our minds. For me, encouraging people to tell me that I’m wrong feels like a good place to start.

    Find out more about the Keele Debates and sign up to attend or access the livestream here.

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  • Flood the Zone

    Flood the Zone

    As the Class of 2026 prepares to enter the workforce this summer, they—like last year’s graduates and those already in the job market—are facing what economists now call a “low hire, low fire” economy. Whether this is driven by AI or other economic factors remains hotly debated, but the causes are beside the point for new grads looking for jobs postgraduation in an economy marked by a pullback in early-career hiring.

    While higher education cannot unilaterally fix the current job market, we can pull out all the stops to help prepare our students for the reality they now face.

    “The Agility Imperative,” a 2025 survey of 1,030 employers published by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, reinforces what higher ed thought leaders already understand—that students increasingly need diverse experiential opportunities to be competitive in today’s rapidly evolving labor market.

    While the report’s numbers are encouraging, there remains a gap between employers’ belief in the importance of key skills versus their confidence that higher education institutions have adequately prepared students to apply them. For example, 95 percent of surveyed employers agreed that it was somewhat or very important for college students to emerge with the ability to apply their knowledge to the real world. However, only 78 percent felt that students are already somewhat or very well prepared to do so. A smaller but still notable gap occurred regarding teamwork, with 95 percent of employers believing it to be somewhat or very important and 82 percent believing that students were prepared to apply it in real-life settings.

    The good news is that, despite the many clickbait headlines to the contrary, employers continue to say that colleges are doing a good job building these important skills. But we still have more work to do in closing the preparation gaps in these key skill sets that employers highly value. The question is: How do we provide all students with the opportunity to develop these in-demand skills?

    Many students face significant barriers that make the traditional internship experience inaccessible. Some struggle to afford the housing or transportation needed to participate in on-site internships, particularly in expensive metro areas, while others are unable to find time for in-person commitments among packed athletic, academic and extracurricular schedules.

    And, to make matters worse, the number of available internships has been dropping 10 to 20 percent per year since 2022. Each posted internship on the most widely used platform now receives between 100 and 300 applications. We can’t keep putting all our eggs in this one (shrinking) basket.

    At UVA, we set out to tackle this challenge. Our strategy calls for flooding the zone—that is, providing students with an expanded set of flexible, accessible, options for career-connected learning beyond just the traditional summer internship experience.

    For example, UVA’s Career Academies offer an accessible, no-cost option for students seeking to explore a range of careers and build relevant career experience that fits into their busy schedules. These experiences pair virtual, asynchronous employer projects with free access to Google Career Certificates over scheduled academic breaks, ensuring students emerge with both practical knowledge and direct experience. While open to all, these experiences prove particularly valuable to student athletes and club leaders, whose schedules during term are often constrained by their commitments to their respective programs.

    Tristen Davin, a third-year data science student and student athlete, discovered Career Academies through his athletic adviser. As a swimmer with a rigorous summer training schedule, Davin was unable to commit to an in-person internship. However, his experience in Career Academies enabled him not only to tackle real-world applications of his data science skills, but to work with other students—including fellow student athletes—toward a common deliverable. “Doing this has made me realize that everyone has different schedules, everyone does different things, and just finding a time to put aside to actually do a project can turn out really well,” Davin reflected. The career academy, he said “is low stress, and also, you get a lot out of it.”

    UVA’s Career Academies also provide students with direct employer interaction, allowing them to gain a profound understanding of company operations and culture without having to travel to an office. Third-year computer science major Amrit Kaur, who serves as the mentorship chair of UVA’s Women in Computing Sciences club, enjoyed learning directly from a CEO as part of a data modeling project. “Working with an employer was cool because we had scheduled calls and I got a feel of what it’s like in the real world when you’re really working with these teams,” remarked Kaur.

    As in traditional internships, the significance of these interactions extends far beyond the internship period. Kayla Kim, a third-year data science major, later sourced an internship with her Career Academy employer, El Locale, after an offer from a government agency was rescinded during a hiring freeze. In addition to providing relevant career experience, the flexibility of her extended internship with El Locale provided her the opportunity to upskill without disrupting her academic schedule.

    UVA’s Career Academies don’t just provide an opportunity to build practical, lifelong skills—they also help students build résumé-worthy experiences that make them more competitive in their job searches. The Agility Imperative report reminds us that employers continue to place a high value on hands-on, applied experiences across a range of relevant workplace settings. Further, employers are increasingly viewing microcredentials such as Google Career Certificates as indicators of a student’s commitment to lifelong learning and continuous upskilling. In response to exploding demand from both students and employers, this summer we are offering a new Career Academy called AI4VA focusing specifically on applying AI skills in workplace settings.

    The age-old advice about not putting all your eggs in one basket holds just as true today. As the availability and quality of traditional internships declines, we owe it to our students to provide new options to explore their career interests and develop the kinds of in-demand skills and experience that employers are seeking.

    We must flood the zone with multiple options for experiential enrichment, meeting students where they are, on their own time and with a range of offerings that fit in with their schedule, constraints and priorities.

    Kemi Jona is the vice provost for Online Education and Digital Innovation at the University of Virginia, where he advances the university’s digital education strategy, helping to shape UVA’s vision for online education in alignment with UVA’s position as one of the nation’s leading public research universities.

    Jaden Bernard is the strategic initiatives coordinator for UVA Online Education and Digital Innovation. She leads OEDI’s communications efforts and has spearheaded numerous digital and AI innovation pilots for UVA students, faculty and staff.

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  • Student Loan Visual Trackers Should Be Restored (opinion)

    Student Loan Visual Trackers Should Be Restored (opinion)

    Since the end of the student loan payment pause, navigating repayment for borrowers in income-driven repayment (IDR) plans has been exceptionally difficult. About 13 million borrowers—roughly 39 percent of those serviced by the Department of Education—are enrolled in IDR plans.

    These borrowers confront a policy landscape marked by uncertainty and change. In 2023, the Biden administration rolled out the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan by automatically enrolling borrowers who were participating in the Revised Pay as You Earn (REPAYE) plan and encouraging borrowers from other IDR plans to enroll in SAVE. But in July 2024, a court halted implementation of the SAVE program and the Biden administration effectively stopped communicating with these borrowers. Moreover, a federal appellate court ruling raised the question of whether forgiveness under the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) and former REPAYE programs may be illegal, throwing extreme amounts of uncertainty into millions of borrowers’ lives.

    Compounding uncertainty, a recent proposed settlement between the Trump administration and the state of Missouri would effectively end the SAVE program. However, borrowers cannot simply return to REPAYE and must apply to temporarily go to PAYE, as Congress has phased these programs out while creating another IDR plan called the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP), which will launch this coming July. Unfortunately for current borrowers, the RAP plan is less generous, as monthly payments will likely be higher and forgiveness is delayed to 30 years instead of 20 to 25 years.

    Borrowers who must transition from SAVE could have to wait more than 25 months as millions of applications must be processed by ED, which has intentionally been hobbled. This layering of disruption compounds uncertainty on top of long-standing operational failings: Even when fully staffed, ED has a documented history of miscounting qualifying payments and other IDR tracking errors, mistakes that have already delayed forgiveness for borrowers who should have qualified.

    Since the SAVE stay, government guidance to servicers has also been inconsistent. At the same time, servicers such as the Higher Education Loan Authority of the State of Missouri have been accused of and sued for practices including mishandling forgiveness applications and deflecting borrower calls—adding yet another layer of uncertainty for borrowers navigating an increasingly complex and quickly changing system.

    However, one low-cost, high-impact tool briefly offered a measure of relief: visual progress trackers. Implemented by the Biden administration in January 2025, these trackers increased transparency by displaying borrowers’ IDR qualifying payment counts and estimated time to forgiveness. Before implementation, my work presented to the Office of Federal Student Aid and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau documented strong demand for these low‑cost, transparent tools, and the trackers represented a rare, direct response to borrowers’ needs.

    Unfortunately, the trackers were removed in April 2025 by the Trump administration. Despite earlier assurances from the secretary of education that they would be reinstated, there appears to be no plan to restore them —another clear sign that this administration has been an unreliable partner for higher education. When the government removes these tools, it allows the system to operate with less scrutiny and leaves borrowers with less clarity—an outcome that appears deliberate.

    Visual trackers do more than improve transparency and accountability— they reduce borrowers’ distress and uncertainty. In surveys and in‑depth interviews, borrowers consistently describe how opaque rules, shifting plans and unclear progress toward forgiveness produce chronic financial and psychological strain. The stakes are high. In my survey work, roughly 19 percent of borrowers reported suicidal ideation, nearly four times the national adult rate of 5.3 percent—underscoring how financial distress and repayment uncertainty becomes a public health issue.

    Most IDR borrowers also faced negative amortization, so balances would grow over 10 to 25 years and the pressure compounds rather than eases. By contrast, as borrowers near forgiveness, their distress typically falls. Credible, predictable, time‑bound milestones represented on visual trackers are likely to meaningfully reduce financial and psychological strain and help people navigate a confusing, often changing system.

    Simply stated: Removing the trackers was not only an administrative choice to obfuscate oversight—it also likely heightened borrower uncertainty and eliminated a source of psychological relief, which has a wide range of individualized and societal spillover effects.

    Restoring the trackers requires urgent, nonpartisan action: It is an evidence‑based, low‑cost and low-touch step to restore transparency, hold the government and loan servicers accountable, and reduce borrower uncertainty, which has become a public health concern. Trackers provide predictable milestones, ease financial and psychological strain, and create a clear audit trail borrowers can use to verify their progress and trust the system.

    Reinstating trackers would immediately reduce anxiety for millions, improve borrower decision‑making and restore a simple, effective mechanism for transparency and accountability that tangibly improves well‑being. Removing the visual trackers and refusing to reinstate them is simply indefensible: It corrodes public trust and amounts to willful neglect of borrowers’ financial and mental well‑being.

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