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The case against impartial university teaching
“I don’t share my political or religious perspectives at work; I never have”, asserted my experienced professorial colleague over an informal coffee. “A bit of shame, but kind of admirable, right?”, I thought.

I recalled a politics lecturer during my time as an undergraduate, who, like seemingly most of that generation of academics (1990s-00s), believed in impartiality and explicitly stated his liberal neutrality when presenting challenging topics: may the best arguments win. The problem was that through reading his online bio and finding his works in the library, one could very quickly discern his political and philosophical leanings!

When I began teaching philosophy at the same university a few years later, I too attempted to feign neutrality; neither sharing my political nor religious leanings, nor ethnic or cultural heritage. It wasn’t the done thing. Autobiography and self-disclosure had no place in the philosophy seminar room.

I’ve since thawed. I’m now leaning far more towards disclosure than when I started teaching. I long held neutral impartiality as the gold standard of instruction, whereby challenging – and perhaps controversial – topics were discussed, but the educator held the space for students to explore perspectives, without sharing their own. This, while often the received wisdom, and certainly well-intentioned, is, I now reflect, limited.

For an academic to be teaching on a module, especially if they’ve created it, means they’re very likely to be published in that field of inquiry. Engaged students will find such materials, understand their lecturer’s perspectives, and recognise when they’re playing devil’s advocate in sessions. Furthermore, given that we teach face to face, and not in confession booths, the visibility of us as lecturers often speaks volumes; students will make an array of assumptions. For example, if in a session led by the university’s chaplain, it’s safe for students to assume that they’re a member of the Church of England.

Kelly’s heuristic quartet

There is a case to be argued for “committed impartiality” as per Social Scientist Thomas Kelly’s (1986) heuristic quartet:
- Exclusive neutrality: The educator takes a neutral position and eschews any potentially controversial issues; i.e. appropriate in a school context, but too reductive for HE.
- Exclusive partiality: The educator takes a biased position; i.e. traditionally a big no no. Think here of educators who use their classes to enact their activism.
- Neutral impartiality: The educator is impartial and neutral, encouraging students to explore controversial issues; i.e. the gold standard of HE instruction based on received wisdom.
- Committed impartiality: The educator takes a biased position while also being impartial; i.e. seen with scepticism by those who practise neutral impartiality. This is a potentially slippery slope into exclusive partiality.
While referring principally to the teaching of “controversial” topics in school education, I think the quartet can be helpfully adapted to fit the context of contemporary HE teaching in the social sciences and humanities. Kelly claimed that owing to its contradictory position, “committed impartiality” is the most defensible course of action for educators to engage in teaching controversial issues. This is because it requires the educator to put their cards on the table and encourage debate without claiming an unbiased standpoint.

Wading

When discussing loaded issues such as race, sexuality and religious perspectives, perhaps this is where the received wisdom about steadfastly refusing to disclose shines through and avoids the – especially contemporary – quagmire of a shallow form of identity politics and virtue signalling that can sometimes turn into a form of oppression Olympics? The “disclosure dilemma” is, of course, ultimately a personal, context bound one.

In the context of schools, the issue of disclosure is much more vexed, given that teachers are effectively agents of the state who have a moral duty to avoid prosletysing given the power dynamic of the classroom (I recall the example during COvid-19 of a teacher in Nottinghamshire getting national attention for encouraging students to write letters of frustration to the then PM).

While school curricula are obviously created by groups of individuals with political agendas, in HE we too have areas of expertise, interest, and passion. In an increasingly regulatory framework, the dissemination of our darlings is bound by legislation such as the Equality Act (2010), and The Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act (2023). Furthermore, to adhere to these acts within a localised context, my employer has a university dignity policy, mission statements, and, within my department, enacts the Chatham House Rule. We also provide trigger warnings to create inclusive learning environments.

Tightrope

This discussion has implications for those in the social sciences, especially those who deal, like I do, with explicitly political content (I recognise that the personal is also the political). Of course, navigating the tightrope between committed impartiality and exclusive partiality is tricky. The received wisdom is valuable insofar as it helps the educator to avoid this balancing act. But when the educator has a specialism that speaks to a political issue of the day, it is arguably upon them to do so. For example, in March 2023 I was teaching a session for final year UG students on migration in the context of international education when the Gary Lineker “issue” kicked off. I had a well-informed perspective on that issue, and it linked neatly to the scheduled taught content that day. It’s fair to say that I teetered on that tightrope between committed impartiality and exclusive partiality!

The challenge is not about self-censorship in the service of an apparently noble ideal of neutral impartiality, but enacting personal commitment and setting the groundwork for civic debate. Deciding to disclose may have the intended learning outcome of rapport building, modelling particular behaviours or perspectives, humanising oneself, normalising situations, or problematising a set of affairs; it’s about practising the messy craft of educating, and being open to self-transformation.

Risk aversion

I’m sure others could make equally compelling cases for different positions within, and outside of, Kelly’s heuristic quartet. I think a primary driver behind neutrality is, rather than a noble but impossible quest for untainted discourse, perhaps one of nervousness; nervousness of being seen as doctrinaire or unduly influencing students’ perspectives?

Overall, the disclosing instructor must consider their visibility in terms of gender, age, physical presence, professional titles etc. that starkly reinforce a power imbalance between student and academic, aka judge, jury and executioner in terms of grades and longer-term prospects. Where the stakes are high boldness of speech, disclosing personal leanings in a learning environment are worth the risk.
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March 5, 2025
Govs. DeSantis, Hochul threaten academic freedom with political interference
It’s no secret that politicians are getting more involved in higher education. And while some level of involvement with how colleges and universities operate is appropriate given the amount of taxpayer money spent on campuses, nobody should be surprised to learn that greater political involvement can pose academic freedom risks.

Last Monday, for example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the creation of Florida’s own Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), named after the Trump Administration’s Elon Musk-led initiative to cut federal spending. The Florida task force is to conduct “a deep dive into all facets of college and university operations and spending and make recommendations to the Board of Governors and State Board of Education to eliminate any wasteful spending.”

There are viewpoint-based decisions that governors and legislatures have to make about colleges as part of the political and appropriations process. But the more granular those decisions, the more they threaten to substitute academic judgment with political judgment.

During his live announcement, DeSantis expanded on what he called “the DOGE-ing of our state university system,” saying it would include “examining courses, programming, and staff” with an aim towards helping students gain “meaningful employment.” But the governor also, troublingly, made clear that he’s continuing to take aim at a particular set of viewpoints:

[S]ome of the ideological studies stuff, we just want to prune that and get that out, and we want to make sure that these universities are really serving the classical mission of what a university should be. And that’s not to impose ideology.

Politicians have long complained about taxpayer money spent on what they see as frivolous academic pursuits — the proverbial degree in “underwater basket weaving” — but what DeSantis posits goes further. This task force won’t simply be focused on (say) eliminating majors that offer no real job prospects. Rather, it will seek out courses involving “ideological studies stuff,” presumably by reviewing course descriptions or syllabi, that in the task force’s view is not worth teaching.

That’s not just an invitation to viewpoint discrimination — it’s an explicit mandate.

It’s not hard to see how this could threaten academic freedom by pressuring faculty members to substitute state-level politics for their academic judgment.

For example, let’s say the University of Florida’s Chinese Studies department decides that, to understand contemporary China, students need to take a class on Marxist-Leninist political thought. It’s easy to see how this could be relevant given that China is a Communist country. It’s also easy to see how an outside agency like Florida DOGE might view this as an effort to propagandize students into Marxism.

What’s the likely result?
- Most obviously, the department might decide to avoid conflict with the government by eliminating the class altogether despite believing it was needed, therefore impoverishing students’ education.
- Even if it did decide to require the class, the department is likely to pressure its instructor not to include things that look pro-Marxist, regardless of whether the professor thinks it would be the best material for the course. That poorly serves students and limits a professor’s ability to engage in the intellectual pursuit of teaching, to boot.
- Finally, even if the department were to offer the class without compromising on content, its instructor will most certainly feel “in the crosshairs,” restricted from following his or her academic conscience lest he or she get the class eliminated through an incautious word.
Colleges should not be immune from investigations into waste and abuse. And there are viewpoint-based decisions that governors and legislatures have to make about colleges as part of the political and appropriations process. But the more granular those decisions, the more they threaten to substitute academic judgment with political judgment. It remains to be seen whether this is how Florida DOGE will actually operate, but the governor’s remarks create plenty of cause for concern.

Lest there be any doubt that governors of any party are capable of interfering in isolated academic decisions if given the opportunity, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (no friend of DeSantis) last Tuesday ordered the immediate removal of a CUNY-Hunter College job posting for a professor of Palestinian Studies. Hochul also ordered “a thorough review of the position to ensure that antisemitic theories are not promoted in the classroom.”

The job listing certainly listed plenty of controversial topics, calling for a “historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality.” Yet the very next sentence stated, “We are open to diverse theoretical and methodological approaches.”

Critics are unlikely to believe that the job was really open to scholars with diverse approaches to whether, say, Israel is an “apartheid” state. Maybe it was, maybe not. But one can’t make that determination simply based on the language of the listing, and there is no reason to believe that the governor of New York is (or should be expected to be) the best-qualified person to make that call.

Faculty members are supposed to be hired because they are subject-matter experts who have the ability and knowledge in the field to make informed academic judgments. Readers may recall that Winston Churchill famously opined that democracy is “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” That’s just as true when it comes to academic faculty making academic decisions — like it or not, there are no better alternatives. Even if one believes a particular group of public college faculty is, itself, making decisions that harm higher education, as DeSantis and Hochul both seem to believe, there’s one thing we can know for sure: transferring that job to politicians will only make it worse.
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March 4, 2025
Statement on President Trump’s Truth Social post threatening funding cuts for ‘illegal protests’

President Trump posted a message on Truth Social this morning that put social media and college campuses on high alert. He wrote:

Colleges can and should respond to unlawful conduct, but the president does not have unilateral authority to revoke federal funds, even for colleges that allow “illegal” protests.

If a college runs afoul of anti-discrimination laws like Title VI or Title IX, the government may ultimately deny the institution federal funding by taking it to federal court, or via notice to Congress and an administrative hearing. It is not simply a discretionary decision that the president can make.

President Trump also lacks the authority to expel individual students, who are entitled to due process on public college campuses and, almost universally, on private campuses as well.

Today’s message will cast an impermissible chill on student protests about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Paired with President Trump’s 2019 executive order adopting an unconstitutional definition of anti-Semitism, and his January order threatening to deport international students for engaging in protected expression, students will rationally fear punishment for wholly protected political speech.

As FIRE knows too well from our work defending student and faculty rights under the Obama and Biden administrations, threatening schools with the loss of federal funding will result in a crackdown on lawful speech. Schools will censor first and ask questions later.

Even the most controversial political speech is protected by the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court reminds us, in America, we don’t use the law to punish those with whom we disagree. Instead, “[a]s a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

Misconduct or criminality — like true threats, vandalism, or discriminatory harassment, properly defined — is not protected by the First Amendment. In fact, discouraging and punishing such behavior is often vital to ensuring that others are able to peacefully make their voices heard.

However, students who engage in misconduct must still receive due process — whether through a campus or criminal tribunal. This requires fair, consistent application of existing law or policy, in a manner that respects students’ rights.

President Trump needs to stand by his past promise to be a champion for free expression. That means doing so for all views — including those his administration dislikes.

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March 4, 2025
Edward Peck’s performance at the Education Committee

There’s something wonderfully postmodern about Edward Peck’s committee hearing ahead of his likely appointment as the next chair of the Office for Students.

While the first chair of the regulator, Michael Barber, arrived with a fully documented quasi-academic theory of delivery – and while the second, James Wharton, brought a certain kind of political cunning – Edward Peck has a fully fledged multi-disciplinary research-informed theory of leadership as performance.

How should we understand leadership as performance?

The idea of performativity – broadly speaking that the descriptive language we use in a given situation has a direct impact on the situation itself – has informed a conceptualisation of leadership as a performance that interrelates both with the wider ideas of what it is to be a leader and the narrower immediate context as a particular leadership “act”. This shifts the focus on leadership from a kind of all-powerful “strongman” (with the consequent cod-psychological popular literature on essential attributes of successful leaders available at an airport near you) to something more subtle around relationships, language, and behavior across multiple settings as shaping experiences of leadership.

Leaders – in other words – are sensemakers, both in terms of explaining (and thus shaping) reality for those around them, and in collaboratively situating activities carried out by an organisation within this negotiated reality. Sometimes these acts can be almost ritualistic (“is” performance) like in representing the university at a graduation ceremony where roles and norms are predetermined.

At other points these are more spontaneous (“as” performance) a narrative (a pre-existing conceptualisation of an experience or situation) enacted to an audience in response to an everyday stimulus – something like a discussion of university finances during a spontaneous conversation with a member of staff on campus).

Not an actual theatre

This isn’t a literal assertion that leadership is theatre – that it is a kind of scripted reality that lacks authenticity – but the idea that the actions of leaders reiterate (and thus endorse) organisational norms and organisational cultures. So when Peck repeatedly qualified his responses to the education committee with reference to what the OfS had learned in eight years of regulatory activity, and in his need to understand the way in which the legal framework in which regulation takes place has been interpreted he is situating himself as a part of an ongoing story rather than attempting to begin telling a new one.

This is likely to be important to those who might think a return to a HEFCE-like situation in which leaders were former vice chancellors and things were, apparently, nicer (they weren’t nicer, but this is the story some like to tell) – Peck is entering the stage in the middle of the play and is clearly looking to be an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary chair.

What he does seem to want to do, in narrative terms, is to use more of the language that institutional leaders themselves use within regulation. In Peck’s performativity theory – these linguistic shifts are important in that they themselves have an impact on the collective understanding of what is going on.

Usually about six

The best example of this was, inevitably, about university finances. To Peck there are “usually about six” things that universities do to balance income with expenditure in times of financial constriction – he didn’t name the six, but the impression he was looking to give is that these are well-known and familiar interventions among those who run universities. With this frame, he was able to put the onus on universities rather than regulators to act (“a lot of institutions are still on this journey”), allowing him the appeal to accepted wisdom in being clear that it was not for the Office for Students to bail out universities, and to go further to suggest that if there was a credible route to sustainable business it would be visible to banks (and, I guess, other lenders) and it should not be for the government to create a “moral hazard” by stepping in.

Committee member Manuela Perteghella pushed him on what he had specifically learned from what Nottingham Trent University had done to stave off financial problems (NTU ran a £9.5m surplus last year, but saw around a 10 per cent reduction in student numbers this year). The first example he reached for can again be traced back to the way he has written about leadership in the past – he made much of the need to “be clear with colleagues” about the problems that the university was facing and do so regularly and openly (there is a quarterly town hall meeting).

As a leader you do have the chance to control the narrative – and this shapes the way problems are understood. Peck noted the problems that other providers had faced in submitting unrealistic income or recruitment projections to the Office for Students – grand (if broad) plans that made any subsequent need for economy harder to sell internally. He was able to sell a 10 per cent reduction in staff numbers at NTU on the basis of needing less staff to teach less students (based on historical precedent) – and being clear about recruitment problems early allowed him to say that all these job losses would be voluntary.

The historical precedent – an appeal to a quantifiable and shared memory within the organisation – also made it easier to make the case for a lower staff headcount maintaining the quality of education. If, after all, we could teach this number of students at an acceptable level a few years back with this number of staff, why can’t it be done in 2025?

Independence day

One of the stories that has become accepted fact about the Office for Students is that it is too close to the government – reverse regulatory capture, if you like. The Behan report (and to a lesser extent the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee report) undermined this assumption a little – there are examples of places where OfS pushed back against the department, although the very nature of the beast means that such independence is rarely visible in public.

As chair Peck would clearly need to work with government on the underpinning policy framework – hinting at a “new” policy under development for release in the summer, most likely the much-heralded “HE reform” package – but emphasised that “operational” decisions would be independent, and that his network of contacts across the sector would help OfS build better relationships with institutions.

Again, this isn’t new – or even particularly notable – but it’s another pointer to his explanatory mode of leadership. It suggests that the problem is one of communication, and he even suggests his own ability to communicate as the solution. Virtuoso performance as leadership. When we get to the actual structural changes there’s a sense that OfS has been on the right track recently – revamped student panels, more student surveys. The only novelty is a promised re-engagement with NUS.

Curtain call

There’s a lot of stuff that would remain in a Peck-led OfS: he’s keen on B3 as driving value for money, keen to get stuck in on regulating modular provision, feel like we are in the right place on freedom of speech given recent changes, pleased with TEF and access and participation plan (though he asked a fascinating question around what happens to those who register with UCAS – he is interim chair there, currently – but are not placed by the end of the cycle).

For much of this, regulation is a matter of establishing codes of practice and ensuring that the actions of universities are within these bounds – Peck’s government work on student mental health should have provided the clue there. The codes themselves set the stage, the universities act within those boundaries. You could argue this as legalism, but it makes more sense as freedom within set parameters, something which universities (and indeed academics) will find comfortingly familiar.

In their 2009 book, “Performing Leadership” Peck and Helen Dickinson (now a professor at the University of New South Wales) cite one compelling example (an unpublished conference paper by Druckett from 2007) of the way the performance of a particular style of management has an impact on lived experience of university staff.

the case study… illustrates that the assertion, arguably the over-assertion, of the hierarchical and individualist ways of organising by senior management is generating negative feedback from the academics in the organisation. The consequences of not allowing the isolate and enclave approaches to contribute adequately to the organisational settlement may be having, or have in future, significant detrimental consequences for the university.

The classic postmodernist understanding of the organisation, in contrast, is one of multiple narratives within a common framework. If you feel that OfS has been too deterministic – too rules based rather than risk based – within the first eight years, the way in which Peck (and whoever he chooses as a senior executive team) allows other voices to fill the stage will be fascinating to watch.

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March 4, 2025
ensure college grads gain higher incomes

Seventeen years ago, the Lumina Foundation set out to try to raise the percentage of working-age U.S. adults with a college credential from 38 percent to 60 percent by 2025.

It didn’t reach that goal, though it was only short a few percentage points; today, 55 percent of individuals between the ages of 25 and 64 have a college degree or short-term credential, an increase that Lumina CEO Jamie Merisotis called “one of the most significant but least recognized success stories of the past decade and a half.”

But times have changed since 2008, Lumina’s leaders said during a news briefing Monday, and in developing a new goal for the coming 15 years, they chose to focus not only on college attainment, but also on making sure that people’s college degrees help them find success and prosperity in their careers.

That’s why the foundation’s new goal aims to increase the number of adults in the labor force who have a “credential of value”—meaning they have earned a college credential and now make an income at least 15 percent more than the national average for high school graduates—to 75 percent by 2040. That number lines up with various labor projections, such as a Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce report, released earlier this year, that anticipated that 72 percent of jobs will require postsecondary education or training by the year 2031.

Lumina’s leaders decided to focus on earnings in large part because of Americans’ lack of confidence in the value of higher education. Polls by Gallup and Lumina have shown that a major reason people don’t think a degree is worth the high cost of attending college is because they don’t believe higher education sets people up well to be successful in the workforce.

“Our view is that we’ve got to do more to transform higher education workforce systems in order to meet human talent needs, in order to expand economic prosperity for individuals and for families and for communities,” said Merisotis. “Today, we have to make sure higher education literally serves more people better.”

Currently, only 44.1 percent of the U.S. labor force—which includes members of the military and those who are looking for work—has a college degree or certificate and earns at least 15 percent more than those with just a high school diploma, according to the foundation’s analysis of Census data. Those rates are significantly lower for Native American, Hispanic and Black people, and higher for white and Asian people.

The foundation laid out four pillars it plans to prioritize to reach that 75 percent goal: continuing to expand access to college, promoting student success and retention, redesigning college and workforce readiness to better support today’s students, and ensuring the credentials students receive do, in fact, pay off.

Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at the education equity nonprofit EdTrust, lauded the foundation for turning its focus to college value—and for providing a definition of what a valuable credential actually is.

“The return-on-investment piece is under serious scrutiny nationally,” he said. “Including a metric that measures outcome—that measures income as an outcome—pushes folks to think about the return on investment of higher education that I think is a much-needed data point”—though he noted that earning 15 percent more than high school graduates, who made an average of about $38,000 in 2023, seems like “a low bar.”

(Courtney Brown, Lumina’s vice president of impact and planning, said at the media briefing that the 15 percent figure was determined in consultation with multiple labor economists.)

Lumina’s quest to increase credentials of value will be a boon not only to graduates, but also to employers seeking to recruit talent they can trust will have the job skills to succeed in their role, according to Shawn VanDerziel, president and CEO of the National Association of Colleges and Employers. In an email to Inside Higher Ed, he called the project a “worthy goal” and a “win-win” for graduates and employers.

“The education landscape is changing and how adults are consuming education is changing,” he wrote in an emailed statement to Inside Higher Ed. “With Lumina’s assistance, I hope we can expand the speed at which our educational institutions can evolve to meet the changing needs of employers and their focus on skills-based hiring.”

Charles Ansell, vice president for research, policy and advocacy at Complete College America, noted that while he appreciated the foundation’s focus on the value of credentials, he was also happy Lumina hadn’t shifted its focus away from attainment entirely.

“College attainment is still the best predictor of the higher wage outcomes,” he said. “If you have full-time-student graduation rates hovering in the 20s at best in the community college space … it’s hard to get economic mobility. It’s still extremely important to put that attainment goal itself first and not to lose sight of quantifying that college completion.”

As for whether the 75 percent goal seems achievable? That’s irrelevant, Ansel argued, because it’s simply what needs to happen to keep the country’s economy and democracy healthy.

“We should never lie to ourselves about what we need to do,” he said. “I don’t find it unrealistic—it’s what we need to do.”

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March 4, 2025
The disruptive idea of the university

by Rob Cuthbert

“Ideas of the university in the public domain are hopelessly impoverished. ‘Impoverished’ because they are unduly confined to a small range of possible conceptions of the university; and ‘hopelessly’ because they are too often without hope, taking the form of either a hand-wringing over the current state of the university or merely offering a defence of the emerging nature of ‘the entrepreneurial university’.”

Fifty years on from the Robbins Report, that was how Ron Barnett began Imagining the University in 2013, and it seems that nothing much has changed since then. Stefan Collini had written a much-cited book, What are universities for?, in 2012, which as the Guardian review said (Conrad, 2012) was “heavy on hand-wringing and light on real answers”. Tom Sperlinger, Josie McLellan and Richard Pettigrew wrote Who are universities for? Remaking higher education in 2018, which despite its respectable intentions was more akin to what Barnett called a ‘defence of the emerging nature of the entrepreneurial university’, aiming in the authors’ words to “make UK universities more accessible and responsive to a changing economy.”

By 2019 Raewyn Connell was taking a rather different tack in The Good University: What Universities Actually Do and Why It’s Time for Radical Change:

“… what should a ‘good university’ look like? … Raewyn Connell asks us to consider just that, challenging us to rethink the fundamentals of what universities do. Drawing on the examples offered by pioneering universities and educational reformers around the world, Connell outlines a practical vision for how our universities can become both more engaging and more productive places, driven by social good rather than profit, helping to build fairer societies.”

Simon Marginson and his colleagues in the Centre for Global Higher Education have pursued a broad programme to conceptualise and promote the idea of the public good of higher education, but in his interviews with English university leaders:

“Nearly all advocated a broad public good role … and provided examples of public outcomes in higher education. However, these concepts lacked clarity, while at the same time the shaping effects of the market were sharply understood.”

His sad conclusion was that:

“English policy on the public good outcomes of higher education has been hi-jacked, reworked, and emptied out in Treasury’s long successful drive to implement a fee-based market.”

This means that everyday pressures too often drive us back to either handwringing or apologetic entrepreneurialism, or some mixture of the two. Even Colin Riordan, one of the most thoughtful of VCs during his tenure at Cardiff, could not break the mould:

“What are universities for? Everybody knows that universities exist to educate students and help to create a highly educated workforce. Most people know they’re also the place where research is done that ends up in technologies like smartphones, fuel-efficient cars and advanced medical care. That means universities are a critical part of the innovation process.”

These ideas sell the university short, and leave their leaders and managers ill-equipped to live the values they need to protect.

We are entering an era when Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem determined to ‘move fast and break things’, as the Facebook motto once had it. Mark Zuckerberg tried to move on ten years ago to “Move fast with stable infrastructure”, but it seems that Elon Musk didn’t get the memo, as the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ cuts huge swathes through and – as it presumably hopes – out of US government. Whether or not DOGE succeeds we will soon discover, but the disregard for stable infrastructure may well prove fatal to its own efforts.

People would not normally accuse a university of moving fast, but what some might see as an excessive concern for stable infrastructure perhaps conceals the speed at which universities move to break existing ideas and understandings. The pursuit of truth may be an imperfect way to describe the aim of the university, but as an academic motivation it suffices to explain how one way of understanding will sometimes rapidly give way to another. Yes, we know that some paradigms hang on doggedly, often supported long past their sell-by date by academics with too much invested in them. But usually and eventually, often more suddenly, the truth will out.

How can universities best protect their distinctive quality, of encouraging open-minded teaching and research which will create the most favourable conditions for learning, individually and collectively? Strategies and academic values have their place, they might even constitute the stable infrastructure that is needed for a university to flourish. But the infrastructure needs to be built on a simple idea which everyone can comprehend. And that simple idea has to be infinitely flexible while staying perpetually relevant – here is one I prepared earlier:

“Many people can’t shake off the idea that management in higher education is or at least it should be about having clear objectives, and working out what to do through systematic analysis and ‘cascading’ objectives down through the organisation. They want to see the university as a rational machine, and the manager as a production controller, because Western scientistic culture has encouraged them to think that way.

The best way to deal with that way of thinking is to agree with it. You say: yes, we must focus on our key objective. In teaching our key objective is personal learning, development and growth for students, a process which cannot be well specified in advance. In research our key objective is the generation of new knowledge. So in higher education the key objective in each of our two main activities is the generation of unpredictable outcomes. Now please tell me what your key performance indicators will be.”[1]

The fundamental test of performance for a university is that it generates unpredictable outcomes. An infinitely flexible, endlessly relevant idea that everyone can understand – and always disruptive. That is why higher education matters – not just training students for the economy, not just innovation in research for economic growth. Universities need to keep generating unpredictable outcomes because that is their unique function as open public institutions, and that is what their wider society needs and deserves.

Rob Cuthbert is editor of SRHE News and the SRHE Blog, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics. Email [email protected]. Twitter/X @RobCuthbert.

[1] Text taken from inaugural professorial lecture; Rob Cuthbert, 7 November 2007

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Categories: Higher Education, Policy and HE | Tags: idea of the university, innovation, innovation and change, measuring outcomes, Performance targets, public good, role of universities, universities and society | Permalink.

Author: SRHE News Blog

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March 4, 2025
AGB leader resigns abruptly after six months

Less than a year into the job, Framroze Virjee is out as president and CEO of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.

Virjee retired, a decision that was effective Saturday, according to an email from Ross Mugler, chair of AGB’s Board of Directors, who has been tapped as acting president and CEO.

“Fram shared that after working diligently to further the organization’s mission, he determined that the president/CEO role at AGB did not align operationally with his personal and professional goals, and he decided to step down from the organization. The AGB Board of Directors accepted his resignation and offered its appreciation for his accomplishments during his tenure,” Mugler wrote in a Monday email.

In a message to AGB staff, Virjee wrote, “This was a difficult decision and not one that I made casually, but instead only after careful consideration and thought. As I leave AGB, I remain committed to its mission of supporting excellence in board governance and leadership and remain dedicated to the value of higher education in the lives of students, our communities, and our nation.”

Virjee, president emeritus of California State University, Fullerton, formally started in mid-August after his predecessor, former AGB president and CEO Henry Stoever, resigned amid plagiarism allegations in late 2023.

AGB did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed on Monday about Virjee’s sudden exit, but the organization’s website has been updated to reflect the leadership change.

“As a result of this announcement, I have agreed to serve as acting president and CEO while the AGB Board of Directors finalizes details regarding new leadership,” Mugler wrote Monday.

Mugler recently retired as commissioner of the revenue for Hampton, Va., a post he held for more than three decades. Mugler has been on AGB’s board since 2018 and was appointed five times to Old Dominion University’s Board of Visitors.

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March 4, 2025
Findlay, Bluffton merger called off

Almost a year after the University of Findlay and Bluffton University publicly shared plans to merge, the deal is off, both institutions announced last week, citing various challenges.

The University of Findlay, the larger and financially stronger of the two private, religiously affiliated institutions in northwest Ohio, was the one to call off the merger. Its Board of Trustees voted last week not to move forward with the plan, according to a statement from the university.

“Some higher education organizations may find mergers the best path forward,” University of Findlay president Katherine Fell said in the statement announcing the decision. “For us, due diligence in this case has demonstrated that partnering in key ways is a better solution.”

A Sudden Change of Plans

Sticking points on the deal were college athletics and, relatedly, financial aid.

When the merger plan was initially announced, both institutions intended to combine operations but maintain certain elements of their identities. For example, Findlay would remain affiliated with the Churches of God, General Conference, and Bluffton would stay with Mennonite Church U.S. Athletics would also stay separate; Findlay planned to compete as the Oilers at the NCAA Division II level, while Bluffton would continue in the NCAA’s Division III under the Beavers moniker.

But that proved difficult, according to Findlay’s statement, which noted that regulations require a separate process for financial aid distribution “and prohibit the sharing of resources and sports facilities, resulting in fewer synergies in those areas than originally anticipated.”

The statement said that Findlay will continue to seek strategic partnerships. Asked for more information, Fell told Inside Higher Ed by email that “while Findlay is open to continuing these types of collaborations with Bluffton, we extend that potential for collaboration to other higher education institutions that are looking for creative ways to engage and serve students, employees, and stakeholders.”

A Bluffton spokesperson said by email that the two universities “do not have any type of formal partnership in the works at this time.”

In their own statement on the deal being called off, Bluffton officials noted that the due diligence process was beneficial in helping the university move forward, even though the merger did not come to fruition despite a year of work.

“While the outcome of this vote was not within Bluffton University’s control, we remain confident, optimistic and steadfast in our commitment to the future of our institution,” Cheryl Hacker, chair of the Bluffton University Board of Trustees, said in a statement issued last week.

Though she acknowledged feeling “a moment of disappointment” in the failed merger, Hacker added that Bluffton “continues to be financially stable, strategically independent, and well-prepared for the future.”

The move to drop the merger was unexpected; a frequently asked questions page on Bluffton’s website said that the university was “shocked and disappointed by this change in direction.”

The FAQ page also noted that “Bluffton University is not privy of [sic] the reasoning behind the decision.”

As Bluffton moves forward in the aftermath of the aborted plan, it will do so without President Jane Wood: she resigned Wednesday, the same day Findlay’s board voted down the merger.

Financial Imbalance

On paper, Findlay is the stronger of the two institutions.

Its endowment was valued at $67.8 million in the latest publicly available audit. Findlay has also stayed in the black, operating with positive revenues generated during its last 10 fiscal years.

Bluffton’s endowment was valued at $29.3 million in the latest publicly available audit, down from $37.6 million in the previous fiscal year. It has operated at a loss in six of the last 10 fiscal years.

In terms of enrollment, Findlay is much larger, reporting a head count of 5,057 students in fall 2023, compared to 678 for Bluffton, federal data shows.

What’s Next?

Despite the abrupt change of plans, Bluffton officials have sought to dispel speculation that closure is imminent, noting on the FAQ page that it has “a solid foundation, and is well-prepared for future growth and success.”

Not long ago, both institutions seemed fully on board with the merger.

In a FutureU podcast interview recorded in January and published last week, the presidents of both universities appeared committed to moving forward, but they noted various frustrations with the effort—particularly the glacial process, which both leaders said they wanted to speed up.

“We believe in this merger,” Fell said at the time. She noted in the podcast that the two universities were “already setting up shared services, which are going to benefit us tremendously.”

In her email to Inside Higher Ed, Fell wrote that the two universities “have collaborated to share guest speakers, cover sabbatical leave, offer additional course options for students, fill low-enrolled course sections, host events for our local communities and provide students with joint cross-cultural experiences.” At the same time, she noted, the two institutions have “explored cost sharing of administrative services but have not yet implemented those.”

On the podcast, Fell expressed impatience with the change of control required for a merger, noting “frustrations embedded in the process,” which could take from 18 months to three years to complete, limiting what the two institutions could achieve before approval. She added the process “will certainly cost us a few hundred thousand [dollars]” but “we have had good fortune in having internal grants and funding sources” to aid with merger costs.

“There is reason for frustration—not blame,” Fell said on the podcast.

The proposed merger between Findlay and Bluffton isn’t the only partnership to fall apart in recent years—even in the state of Ohio.

Last year Notre Dame College, a private Catholic institution, announced it was closing after the strategic partnership it sought with the much larger, public Cleveland State University never materialized.

Elsewhere, in 2023, Trocaire College scuttled its planned acquisition of nearby Medaille University, in Buffalo, N.Y., leading Medaille to announce its closure the very next week.

Some colleges have managed to survive independently after reversing course, including the Portland, Ore.-based National University of Natural Medicine and Seattle’s Bastyr University, which called off merger plans in late 2023.

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March 4, 2025
Higher ed botched response to anti-DEI guidance (opinion)

While much of the now-infamous Valentine’s Day Dear Colleague letter from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights was vague and void of specific information, the following sentence was crystal clear:

“The Department intends to take appropriate measures to assess compliance with the applicable statutes and regulations based on the understanding embodied in this letter beginning no later than 14 days from today’s date, including antidiscrimination requirements that are a condition of receiving federal funding.”

Despite the letter’s clear language to the contrary, higher education leaders and the media (including the higher ed press) did the math and declared Feb. 28 “deadline day” for diversity, equity and inclusion programs in higher education. “Deadline day,” read one story. “The clock is running out,” claimed another. An Associated Press story ran with the lead “Schools and colleges across the U.S. face a Friday deadline to end diversity programs or risk having their federal money pulled.” What ensued was a self-made crisis characterized by spirited debates and ill-advised anticipatory compliance with the yet-to-be-announced changes to enforcement of Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Seasoned veterans knew better. The most likely “next step” indicated by the department was presumed to be further communication from OCR about the “measures to assess compliance” that were promised in the letter.

And that is exactly what happened. On March 1, the department issued a press release and FAQ document elaborating on the Dear Colleague letter. The FAQ elaborates on the new administration’s intention to use a novel and expansive interpretation of the 2023 Supreme Court decision in SFFA v. Harvard, an admissions case in which Chief Justice John Roberts opined that diversity-related goals within higher education can be “commendable” and “plainly worthy.” It answers questions about how the department will receive complaints. In short, the department did exactly what it stated it would do within the 14-day timeline. The so-called deadline was a chimera, an artifact of the confusion and fear created by the letter’s politically charged context and lack of specificity.

While it leaves many key questions unanswered, the FAQ does favorably settle several unclear points raised by the Dear Colleague letter.

Question 8 asks, “Are Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs unlawful under SFFA?” The answer is no. Only if those programs discriminate on the basis of race, color or national origin do they violate the law. The answer further clarifies what we have known all along: “Whether a policy or program violates Title VI does not depend on the use of specific terminology such as ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ or ‘inclusion.’” The department declares in unambiguous language that it cannot deem certain words “illegal,” nor are phrases such as “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion” or “belonging” a violation of nondiscrimination obligations.

Question 9 asks, “Does this mean that students, teachers, and school employees may not discuss topics related to race or DEI under Title VI?” Again, the answer is no. Only if those classroom discussions create “hostile environments through race-based policies and stereotypes” do they violate the law. The answer makes clear, “Nothing in Title VI, its implementing regulations, or the Dear Colleague Letter requires or authorizes a school to restrict any rights otherwise protected by the First Amendment.”

The 14-day window between the Dear Colleague letter and the FAQ did not pass without some productive and inspirational advocacy. Notably, Paulette Granberry Russell and the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education won a significant legal victory in federal district court, achieving a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement activities and the withdrawal of funding based on anti-DEI executive orders.

The American Council on Education submitted a persuasive letter to OCR—signed by 71 national higher education organizations—requesting that the Dear Colleague letter be rescinded and that the department engage with the higher education community to ensure a clear understanding of the legal obligations of colleges and universities—a rare example of higher education speaking with one voice on this topic.

The rest of the frenetic activity in this two-week time span was less productive. Despite many thoughtful suggestions to the contrary, some colleges and universities hastily undertook “audits” and website “scrubbing” of programming they thought might possibly be covered in the OCR’s forthcoming communications. A careful review of the FAQ document is likely to reveal that much of this was an unnecessary overreaction.

From my perspective, the most harmful occurrence was an unproductive debate over institutional responses to the letter. Most of these took the shape of a false dichotomy between courage and cowardice. In my estimation, the institutions that stayed the course and waited for guidance from OCR were not courageous, but rather prudent. Conversely, the institutions that moved to action were not universally motivated by fear or cowardice, but rather by institution-specific realities of board governance, state and local politics, and individual risk assessments. At the end of the day, it was context and not courage or cowardice that motivated institutions.

With a published methodology for compliance assessment now communicated, the department has answered a few of the lingering questions outlined on Valentine’s Day. Most notably, the FAQ provides a clear statement on how the Dear Colleague letter will be enforced.

The answer to Question 14 clarifies that the department will use existing case-processing procedure—which includes due process for institutions and the possibility of a voluntary resolution agreement—and links to a newly revised Case Processing Manual. It is now the job of institutions that are committed to building “inclusive and diverse campus communities”—as the ACE letter penned by Ted Mitchell so eloquently states—to prepare a spirited defense of their programming by demonstrating that their efforts do not violate federal civil rights law.

Steve Robinson is president of Lansing Community College.

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March 4, 2025
Three in five students see themselves customers of their college
Public confidence in higher education is declining. Even students, most of whom say they’re getting a quality education, question the value of a degree with respect to affordability. Such doubts increase higher education’s vulnerability to the threats it’s currently facing. All this evokes the long-running debate over whether higher education can be viewed as a public good. And when revisiting that debate, it’s instructive to know what students expect from their college or university—specifically, whether they consider themselves not just students but also customers.

In Inside Higher Ed’s first-ever Survey of College and University Student Success Administrators, released last fall, 71 percent of administrators said that undergraduates at their institution consider themselves customers (most of these administrators also agreed that parents of students consider themselves customers).

But what do undergraduates themselves say? According to a new analysis of IHE’s annual Student Voice survey with Generation Lab, nearly the same share of students—65 percent—consider themselves customers of their institution in some capacity, defined in the survey as expecting to have their needs met and be empathized with because they are paying tuition and fees.

Some 41 percent of the survey’s 5,025 two- and four-year student respondents say they see themselves as customers both in their classes and across campus. Another 13 percent consider themselves customers only in their classes, while 11 percent view themselves as customers only outside of class, when interacting with staff and administrators across campus.

Methodology

Nearly three in 10 respondents (28 percent) to Inside Higher Ed’s annual Student Voice survey, fielded in May in partnership with Generation Lab, attend two-year institutions, and closer to four in 10 (37 percent) are post-traditional students, meaning they attend two-year institutions and/or are 25 or older. The 5,025-student sample is nationally representative. The survey’s margin of error is 1.4 percent.

Respondents include over 3,500 four-year students and 1,400 two-year students. Sixteen percent are exclusively online learners, and 40 percent are first-generation students.

Top-line findings from the full survey are here and the full data set, with interactive visualizations, is available here. The main annual survey asked questions on academic success, health and wellness, the college experience, and preparing for life after college.

How satisfied are students as customers of their institution? When those who do not identify as customers (n=1,744) are asked to wear that hat for a moment, nearly half (45 percent) say they’re somewhat satisfied with their institution. Another quarter (23 percent) are very satisfied. The rest are neither satisfied nor unsatisfied (19 percent), somewhat unsatisfied (9 percent), or very unsatisfied (3 percent).

What about students who do identify as customers (n=3,280)? The satisfaction numbers are very similar, but this group is slightly less likely to have high satisfaction; 45 percent, the plurality, are somewhat satisfied with their institution and an additional 18 percent are very satisfied. Twenty percent are neither satisfied nor unsatisfied, some 13 percent are somewhat unsatisfied and very few (4 percent) are very unsatisfied.

The results are relatively consistent across sector and a swath of student characteristics. However, two-year college students are less likely than four-year college students to say they consider themselves customers both in classes and when interacting with staff and administrators outside of class, at 35 percent versus 43 percent, respectively.

The higher-education-as-public-good debate typically centers on whether higher education meets the common criteria for a public good: nonexcludability, meaning it’s accessible to everyone, and nonrivalry, meaning one person’s use of the good the doesn’t limit others’ ability to use it.

In this sense, counting students as customers of higher education hurts the public good argument: How can one be a customer of a public good? And concerns about a creeping customer service dynamic in higher education have long worried scholars, including the authors of a 2010 paper in the International Journal for Educational Integrity arguing that a facile customer service model of higher education undermines the instructor-learner relationship by reducing it to transactional, vendor-vendee connection—one in which the institution meets the student’s expressed needs in exchange for payment. (Think grade inflation and more.) The name of that paper kind of says it all: “The Customer Isn’t Always Right: Limitations of ‘Customer Service’ Approaches to Education, or Why Higher Ed Is Not Burger King.”

But is thinking of students as customers—and students thinking of themselves as customers—a universally bad thing?

Alternative Models

Various scholars have proposed alternatives to the customer service model of higher education.

Student as client: Scholar Keith B. Murray, for instance, proposed in a December Inside Higher Ed opinion piece that it’s better to think of students as clients. Whereas vendors need to appeal to customers via a product at an attractive price point, he wrote, in “client-type transactions, exchange of time, effort and money by the consumer is predicated on one party’s professional expertise and advice.” Typical client-based vendor examples include “physicians, dentists, financial advisers, tax preparers, accountants, veterinarians, therapists and professors,” he added.

Faculty and staff as stewards: Scholar Jeffrey Vetrano, in responding to Murray’s piece, also in Inside Higher Ed, advocated for a stewardship framework.

“Faculty and staff at institutions of higher education are stewards of both our students and their educations. As such, we take personal responsibility for granting them every opportunity to succeed, by maintaining strong ethics as identified in Murray’s article. As stewards, every action we take is for the care and development of our students, and we strive for much more than a client/vendor relationship.”

Luke Hobson, an instructional design leader and online lecturer with his own education podcast and blog, actually encouraged institutions to think of students as customers last year, citing these five reasons:
- Focus on quality
- Responsiveness to needs
- Enhanced accountability
- Market competitiveness
- Feedback loop for continuous improvements
Summing up all these points, Hobson wrote in a blog post that the “most significant factor” here was to “emphasize caring. A business cares about their customers. Without them, they can’t survive.” Moreover, he said, “The greatest educators I can think of share this trait in that they cared. They were passionate. They were there for the students and to see them succeed. They could all have different styles of teaching, but at the end of the day, they served their students. It’s this mentality that will keep students engaged in the learning environment.” Indeed, existing research links instructor caring to student trust and sense of belonging, both of which are associated with student success. Quality nonclassroom student support services also promote student success.

Hobson also wrote that it’s “crucial to maintain a balance. Education is not a typical consumer good, and the primary goal of a university should be to educate and foster intellectual development, not just to satisfy customer demands. Students are coming to learn because they don’t have all the answers. They want to get better and they are seeking the expertise from the institution. The focus should be on helping them to reach their goals.”

‘Polarizing’ Idea

A year later, Hobson recalls that post being his most polarizing ever, based on the feedback he got (some loved it, others hated it). But while he acknowledges the concerns of his peers—that, for example, a customer-focused model could hurt student autonomy by shifting the responsibility for learning onto institutions—his own views haven’t changed.

Reviewing the Student Voice data, Hobson imagines that students who describe themselves as customers believe they’re “paying for the ultimate learning experience,” defined by a “comprehensive blend of academic rigor, personalized support and opportunities for professional and personal growth.”

In this light, students expect “the best the university has to offer, including engaging faculty interactions, meaningful assignments, timely feedback and an overall environment that fosters intellectual and practical development,” he continues. They also “anticipate that this education will serve as a pathway to their future goals and aspirations. The effort they invest in their learning, they hope, will directly correlate to the outcomes they receive,” in the form of knowledge, skills or career opportunities.

This model has parallel benefits for institutions, Hobson adds, in that it encourages a focus on quality, including in online education; responsiveness to student feedback and a general feedback loop for continuous improvements to the learning environment; accountability for delivering “value for tuition and aligning institutional actions with expectations for academic rigor and integrity”; and market competitiveness by virtue of providing exceptional experiences.

Jhenai W. Chandler, vice president for research and policy at NASPA-Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, who also reviewed the Student Voice data, says she understands the impulse to think about students as customers or even clients. And she’s recently been on the student side of this conversation, helping two people close to her choose a college based on their very different needs and wants: Chandler’s own mother returned to community college to advance specific career goals, while her high school daughter is exploring colleges based on their ability to deliver a well-rounded education both in and outside the classroom.

Still, Chandler worries that framing the student as customer can sometimes reinforce “harmful misconceptions about the nature of higher education, particularly in a time when our field is under political scrutiny.”

Instead of using terms such as “client” or “customer,” “we need to focus on a more meaningful conversation about the value we provide and the outcomes we generate for students and society,” she says. Higher education’s value is “rooted in evidence that shows how students’ lives and communities improve after degree completion, whether it’s an associate, bachelor’s or graduate degree. We have a responsibility to communicate this impact effectively—through data, outcomes and success stories—to students, parents, industry leaders and policymakers.”

Chandler adds this: “Language and terminology can often be our worst enemies in this conversation, as the terms we use are not always understood outside of the academic world. We need to be intentional about the way we communicate, especially as we navigate misconceptions about what students expect from us.”

What do you think students who view themselves as customers—in classes or of their institution as a whole—expect from professors and/or administrators or staff across campus? Are the expectations typically reasonable ones? Tell us about it.
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March 4, 2025