Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background (current title, professional milestones, professional history, education, research works, hobbies, etc.)
I am a Certified Medical Assistant with 39 years of industry and education experience combined. I worked in a family practice clinic for 10 years, emphasizing patient care while completing clinical and laboratory skills. Changing my focus to leadership, I then worked as a lead in the nursing/lab departments and as a Clinical Manager, prior to switching careers. In 2001, I was hired as a full-time educator, Practicum Coordinator and Program Director at Century Community and Technical College in White Bear Lake, MN.
I have a diploma in medical assisting and am certified through the American Association of Medical Assistants (AAMA.) I also have a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in community psychology. In spring 2005, I completed the TES (Teacher Education Series) courses at the University of Minnesota, earning my teaching license in vocational education.
I enjoy bringing my career experience into the classroom and making a difference in students’ lives. In addition to being Program Director, I teach both clinical and laboratory courses, a medical assistant refresher course through CECT and Administrative Procedures for Medical Assistants, both in-person and online. Additionally, in my role as the Practicum Coordinator, I oversee all of the clinical externship/practicums for the program. In addition to sitting on numerous committees and work groups over my career span, I have also authored the past four editions of “Medical Assisting: Administrative and Clinical Competencies.”
In my free time I enjoy hiking, camping, reading, music, gardening, entertaining and spending time with family and friends.
Tell us about the Medical Assistant program at Century College. What are the most rewarding aspects of teaching the program?
The Medical Assistant program at Century College has grown significantly since I started in 2001. Originally, I was teaching classes with approximately five students and a total of 8-10 students overall in the program. Today’s classrooms have 20 students in each, for an overall total of 120 students enrolled in the program. We have two courses (Administrative Procedures and Pharmacology) which students can take prior to starting the program. We hold practicums/externships every spring and summer. Fall sessions are available for any students who may have stopped out and returned.
There are several rewarding things about teaching in the MA program. These include seeing the students understand the concepts, excel at the skills, complete the program course, pass the certification exam and get their first job as a medical assistant. Their success is my success. As of date, I’ve had over 1000 students graduate from the program. I couldn’t be prouder of that fact.
What are the biggest challenges?
As for challenges, I’d say the biggest is keeping the enrollment up. We don’t have an abundance of students enrolling. I’d love to see that change. I love seeing high school graduates, people looking for a career change or just people in general who want to contribute and make a change in people’s lives, join the field. Another challenge is teaching up to 20 different levels of students in one classroom and being able to meet the needs of all learners. Depending on their preparedness level prior to joining the program, it can be challenging at times.
How has the Medical Assistant program changed over the past few years? How have you adapted your teaching to reflect those changes?
Having to adjust to the learning levels of individual students has been quite a change over the years. I always take it to them and say, “Tell me how you learn best,” and “How can we help you to be successful in your learning path?” We have created language guides using many of the terms found in the coursework to help students comprehend the content better. We have developed an ambassador program within our program where peer-chosen students serve as classroom leaders to assist the faculty with study groups and program outreach.
I am always researching the best practices and making changes so students can learn better. We survey the students and make changes based off their feedback. We also meet with every single student each semester to work on affective skills. Students set goals to keep their education and learning on track for success.
My work has always revolved around wanting to have the best for the students. My students are great at telling me what they need and how materials we have help them learn the content necessary to be a successful MA. I wanted a product that made learning easier for both the student and the educator, while including all the required standards and assessments. When I first started in education back in 2001, I couldn’t find a product that had everything I felt students needed or I needed as an educator. I was having to supplement quite a bit and create a lot of my own materials to meet the needs. I was fortunate when I voiced these issues to a Cengage product developer. They were willing to listen and invited me to join them in creating content. Here I am close to 20 years later, continuing to do so.
“Medical Assisting: Administrative and Clinical Competencies,” 10th Edition is a proven, competency-based learning system with a 40-year history of success. The text associates each learning module with the needs of students and the demands of the workforce. It’s a personalized experience rather than a one-size-fits-all model. The text is written in an interesting, easy-to-understand format and covers the knowledge, skills, behaviors and values necessary to prepare students to become thriving, multiskilled medical assistants.
This textbook can be used in a variety of settings:
A structured classroom
Individualized instruction of learning — much of the content and format is appropriate for self-study
On-the-job training in a provider’s office, where the learning package serves as a supplement to employee instruction and as a resource manual
Certification exam preparation
I would advise instructors to ask for training on this product and all the ancillaries that are available with it. Don’t try and do it all alone. There are many educators using the product. There’s also on-demand online training and virtual training that can be set up to help them get started. There are so many tools that can make their lives and educational experience easier.
How does MindTapconnect to your text? How do you use it in your courses? What are your suggestions for professors getting started with MindTap?
This textbook also includes an updated MindTap. We’ve reviewed all activities and assessment questions to ensure alignment with the 10th edition objectives.
New features and updates include:
Medical Assisting Virtual Skills activities: Included in select chapters, these activities walk students through performing various skills in the medical office, from effectively addressing patient questions on the phone to assisting with a variety of patient exams and procedures.
Medical Office Simulation Software (4.0): This updated software features a Demographics screen, six new activities and ICD-10-CM and CPT codes.
Medical Assisting Exam ReviewOnline (4.0): This software is fully updated.
Image labeling activities: Each chapter in Unit 2: Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Body includes new image labeling activities.
I use some of the exercises in MindTap as part of the students’ graded course materials. Some of the content is for student practice only. They can use it at their leisure. The competency checklists are all downloadable and customizable. You can add or remove any content to fit you and your students’ needs. In my student surveys, over 95% comment on how MindTap is one of the best resources they’ve used throughout the program. MOSS is a great way to get students acclimated to electronic record information entry. And the MAERO certification review questions assist my students with passing their certification exams successfully.
How do you see this text deepening students’ engagement with medical assisting and fostering more active engagement with core concepts? What is the most significant takeaway students will carry with them after using this textbook?
The text is such a great resource for the students in so many ways. It’s not just a textbook needed for a course. It has a wealth of information that enables them to make connections between the content and the hands-on skills needed to perform the tasks of a medical assistant. I run into students in the field all the time. Over 1000 past students are out in the workforce. They’re still using the text as a resource well after they have completed the program and are employed.
Having a variety of exercises in MindTap makes learning so much more meaningful and fun for students. I have yet to meet a student who did not find value in the text and the ancillary resources that go along with it. In fact, I hear from employers that use it when past students bring it in to refresh their own employees on updated skills that they may not have been aware of. I like to think of it as a gift that keeps on giving.
Michelle Blesi is a Certified Medical Assistant, Program Director and faculty member in the Medical Assistant Department at Century College. She has a diploma in medical assisting and is certified through the American Association of Medical Assistants AAMA. She also has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in community psychology. She completed the TES (Teacher Education Series) courses in spring 2005 at the University of Minnesota. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2021-2022 League Excellence Award and the 2016 Minnesota State: Academic and Student Affairs Division Excellence in Curriculum Programming Award.
Are you an academic open to making an impact with your research in creative ways? Dr. Walter Greason is back on The Social Academic podcast with artist, Tim Fielder. They created The Graphic History of Hip Hop, a graphic novel taking the education sector by storm. When I asked, “did you expect this kind of response from your book?” It was a definite no. The ripple effect of engagement and impact The Graphic History of Hip Hop is creating for students is inspiring.
Hi, I’m Jennifer van Alstyne. The Social Academic podcast shares interviews with academics and people in Higher Education. When The Graphic History of Hip Hop was announced, Walter and Tim got billions of views that has helped their book and style of sharing history reach people around the world. I’m excited to share this featured interview with you.
Jennifer van Alstyne: Hi everyone, I’m Jennifer van Alstyne and welcome to The Social Academic. Dr. Walter Greason is back for another interview and he brought his collaboration partner for The Graphic History of Hip Hop, Tim Fielder. I’m so happy you’re both here. Tim, would you introduce yourself for people?
Tim Fielder: Hello, I am Tim Fielder. I’m a visual Afrofuturist and graphic novelist who has had the pleasure to work with the endowed chair at Macalester College, Dr. Walter Greason.
Dr. Walter Greason: You’re hilarious, man.
Tim: We’re going to ride him like that. We’re going to ride him. He just got it about a month ago and every time, you used to be Dr. Walter, now he’s the endowed chair Dr. Walter Greason.
Jennifer: Oooh! [Laughing]
Tim: So we’ll see. So we’ve been riding him. He earned it though. I’m so proud of him. It makes me look good to work with Walter because Walter is so accomplished in what he does, not just being a hip hop scholar, generally a nice guy, a unashamedly justice, social justice warrior, and he keeps me, he’s an all-star, north star. And he makes all of us around him work harder. He makes us want to aspire to work harder. And by just the association alone, having done The Graphic History of Hip Hop has made me a better artist and has brought me, you know you think, “Oh, this would just be a freelance job.” Nah. Having done this book with Walter has exposed me to opportunities that I could not have dreamed up. So it has been a true, true ride.
Walter: I appreciate you.
Tim: He’s still crazy though, don’t get it mixed and twisted.
Walter: I appreciate you, you know, really. Anything I bring is a reflection of the people that I work with. And y’all are two of the folks that make me so inspired every single day. For Tim, the way his genius manifests in the production of the work. And I’ve seen it now firsthand, in person. God, its got to be like six years since we first did that thing with N Square. But man, like his ability to touch people’s soul and to move them, to find something extraordinary in themselves that they couldn’t see before he drew them. That, that is just a miracle every single time it happens.
And Jennifer, the work that you’ve done that I’ve seen you put together since our time back in New Jersey. You are doing that with these shows, with this effort to motivate people.
And I want to specifically congratulate you for the amazing series you’ve done recently with Sheena Howard. That’s another colleague of mine going back many years. And so just, this is like family for me to be with y’all. And I couldn’t do the kinds of things I try to do without y’all being out here in the world and showing me different ways to go about making things happen.
Collaboration of academic research and art
Jennifer: That really brings up this amazing collaboration that you did together. I’m curious, it sounds like you worked on something six years ago. What inspired your collaboration and decision to actually work together to create something different, to create something unique?
Tim: Go ahead Walter, you can start. I’ll hold the prop up.
Walter: So Graphic History of Hip Hop, we got invited to put that together by the New York City Public Schools in December of 2022. But prior to that, so Tim and I met in, um, it was Jackson, Mississippi at the Planet Deep South Afrofuturist Conference. Which was just a convocation of talent that has changed the world in, in very literal terms.
This was years before the Black Panther movie debuted. This was long before most people around the world knew what Afrofuturism was. So this was an event that was life-changing for everyone there just to be together, but Tim took the photo that symbolizes the event. And so many, many decades from now, when we are no longer here and people are telling the story of Afrofuturism, it’s going to be Tim’s. Not just his images, but his photography that actually tells the story of how the movement has grown and how it had this impact. That photo still lives in all of our hearts cause his skills with the selfie are unmatched. That was one of the moments where I was like, “This dude has got it. Whatever he’s got, I need to stay in touch and be a part of it.” A couple of years later I want to say 2020, 2021, we got invited by Reynaldo Anderson. No, 2022.
Tim: Oh yeah, I’m sorry. That was Yonkers.
Walter: Then we were trained in technically how to be futurists by a consulting group that works with the Air Force. They were working on how to imagine a world without nuclear weapons.
That’s what convinced me that I had to work with Tim. I’m there talking about all this policy and structural reform. How do we actually build a safer world for the future? And he instantly created visualizations of the things we were talking about. I was like, “Dear God, like that’s, that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”
I made a note that the next opportunity I had to ask him to do something I would. Sure enough, December 2022 managed to catch him around Christmas time. He was like, “Oh, this dude, I don’t know. We’ll see.”
He came on board and was like, “All right, I’ll take a shot. I’ll take a shot.” And man, it has just been warp speed, Star Trek ever since just every day. Some amazing new thing happens for us. This has been spectacular. I’m sorry, Tim. You tell the story better than I do.
Tim: No, no, no. He’s right. It’s just, that’s the thing. I’m not the fastest artist out there. You know, I can do fully rendered work. I use advanced technology. I use everything available to me on my work. But unlike other projects I’ve worked on, this project doesn’t seem to want to die.
We did South by Southwest (SXSW). Was there and I thought, ‘Okay, we’re done. That’s it. It’ll slow down.’ Then, you know, we did the Spin Magazine, they featured us in their December physical issue. Told us, “Well, you guys won’t be in the online version, just in the print version.” Then without announcement, bloop, it just pops up in the online version. That’s what it’s been. It’s been that kind of thing that seems to be an experience in perpetual momentum.
Tim: And it’s been that kind of experience. I know so much more about hip hop that I did when I started. I’m not Walter. I’m not a scholar like that, but I have been forced to learn about the form and it has made me a better artist as a result. A dramatically better artist.
We’ll see what happens, you know. But in 2022, he called me and we put it together. First, it was like a floppy. We thought it was a 100,000 copies of this floppy distributed into the New York City School System. Then we were told it was a 150,000 copies. But we learned two weeks ago that it was 200,000 copies. Is that correct, Walter?
Walter: Yeah, that’s what Joe’s been talking about.
Tim: 200,000 copies, which is kind of frightening. But you know, hey, what you going to do, say, “Don’t put 200,000 copies of that book in those schools.” You know? So it’s in there and then we’re working on Volume 2 now.
Our partner, Christina Hungspruke LaMattina partnered with us and we decided to do this here, which is the full-on graphic novel version. So that 24 page version became a 92 page graphic novel, which of course was done, it wasn’t planned like that. I always use this joke, it will be good.
Never request a timeline from a historian
Tim: Never request a timeline from a historian. Don’t do that. It’s like, really, I didn’t know what that meant when someone told you, “Well, you, what do you mean? Don’t give them a timeline. Don’t ask them for a timeline.” They should know. No, it has nothing to do with what they know. They will go above and beyond.
The book was out, there was a lot of media. People would download it. We were on TV and everything, traveling around. We did this New York tour. It was insane. And Christina is like, “We got to do something else because they’re giving the book away,” because it was free. The DOE (Department of Education) version was free. Right? So you can download it right now.
But we wanted to start a company. So we started a company miraculously named The Graphic History Company. Seems so self-explanatory. So we did that. Yes, we did that.
I asked Walter, “Hey man, I need you to give me a timeline because I’m going to put it on the website. And I’m thinking, ‘he’ll do it by decades, you know: the 70s, 90s. It would just be a few paragraphs and I could do it.
This guy comes back a day later with 45 years worth. And I’m like, oh my God. Cause I mean, I just remember saying, “There’s no way I’m putting this on the website. This is the graphic novel. This is the expanded version.” And of course we added dates, moved stuff around. I think it starts in 1964 and it goes all the way to 2006. This is just Volume 1. We could not finish the entire history of hip hop in one volume. We’re doing 3 and it still won’t be done. But it’s as far as we going to take it.
But yeah, it changed my life. I thought when I did it, this is going to be a basic freelance job. It has utterly failed in that department. A career defining moment for me, for sure.
Book adoptions from every major city school district in the country
Walter: Yeah. We knew we had to do something big. We knew we had to do something bigger.
We knew we had to do something big because when we went to Queens and the middle schoolers stormed over the tables. They grabbed us and pulled us to the floor, demanding that we sign copies. We give them more copies. Like it was, Tim was very wise to get a hold of video from the teachers who witnessed the mass assault. It’s just been this thing where we go to DC, we go to Virginia, we go down to Louisiana. Tim was just at South by Southwest in Texas.
Everywhere we go, the energy around this book is so enormous. And that’s the thing. It’s not just in the New York City schools. We’re getting adoptions from every major city school district in the country. I was just talking with somebody in London who’s talking about adoptions over there. It’s far larger than anything we anticipated when we first started trying to put it all together.
Walter: It’s when either a school or a district looks at their student body, looks at their curriculum and says, “Oh, we need this to be part of what we teach.” And so the hundreds of thousands of copies in New York City, they’re just there on demand for everybody in the city.
Then we have folks in Richmond who have written an extraordinary lesson plan that have made it not just available for Virginia, but they’ve made it easy for teachers to teach it everywhere. And so the teachers start clamoring for it because frankly, the educational effect is unparalleled.
Students that are grade levels behind in reading all of a sudden become intensely excited readers and they catch up to grade level. The kids that are at grade level, they start jumping years ahead because they can’t stop reading.
It’s not just literally the history of hip hop. It’s the combination of the art, the music that we discuss, and then underneath all of it is the history that then they learn, they internalize, they memorize cause they literally just can’t stop reading it. It goes on to everything else that they’re trying to learn. It gives them a love of learning and reading that they didn’t have as intensely before.
Art and graphic novels by Tim Fielder
Jennifer: What about working with Tim, what about making this visual makes it more effective not just for young students who are sounds like knocking you down because they’re so excited. Like that’s amazing. But as an adult reading this book, this was fascinating for me to learn about this history and to experience it in a visual way. So I’m curious, what about that partnership was most creative? Or, what lit your spark together?
Walter: So Tim has done a couple books. Yeah. She asked me what the joy of working with you is given your amazing skills. So I’m definitely going to jump on that.
When it comes to Tim’s work and looking at either Matty’s Rocket or Infinitum, which are his books that he did, was really well known before he ever started talking with me for real.
You see in his art, this kind of vibrancy of each individual. But I love in Infinitum, the way that he took his vision of an undying main character and he turns that into this, this experience where you’re looking through the man’s eyes and you’re feeling the kind of arrogance initially. You’re feeling like the embodied intellect, the suffering that comes to be inflicted on the character. It is so visceral that when Tim is crafting work, this is what I was saying about doing portraiture of individuals, is they see things about themselves that they never saw before.
That’s this amazing gift that comes through the production of graphic art. And particularly his skill is that it taps into something that is unique to all of us and often something that we don’t appreciate until we see it reflected back. So now that that’s been for me as a historian, as a scholar who writes about forgotten people in places, to see them just recognized and just presented in a way that other people can encounter them and understand them is astonishing on its own. But then when the people themselves see the way that they’re represented and the way that the joy pours out of them. That they become so excited about what they want to say and how they want to add more to what we’ve done. There’s no better gift. Tim talks often when we go around these places about the way people respond with good will and are just thrilled to connect with us.
As much as I love doing history and can do history well in various contexts, that’s primarily his art. His art is what makes the connection that then inspires the joy and the excitement. And so I’m going to give all the credit because you know, Tim is very, very kind and then, will shy away. But he knows my stuff is full of really deep and hard things to grapple with. People can get overwhelmed by it. He is extraordinarily good about keeping the joy of the process at the center. And that’s what really makes folks most excited to do these things with us.
Making an impact in education with The Graphic History of Hip Hop
Tim: Thank you for that. I appreciate that, brother. However, now let me interject. So the very nature of a graphic history, it’s not a graphic, it’s not a history that’s told just with prose. It’s about the marriage and the dance between the written word and the picture. Right? So it really is a form that is totally unique. It’s a comic book, right? But graphic novels are longer-form comic books. And it really is a longer form where you’re telling a self-contained story as best you can where you’re trying to convey the same level and depth of written narrative by coupling it with the visual narrative.
That’s not an easy thing to do because obviously the academic thing is that, you know, you do a book, 200 people read it and that’s considered a norm. The idea of doing this book, at least for me, was about taking that very learned academic style,(…) right? Which the floppy was initially done for 11th graders.
And then the challenge when we expanded it actually broadened, as far as I’m concerned, broaden it so that it can expand to different ages and people who were much older because we began to deal with more and more and more obscure stuff in the story. So you had your Arsenio Hall, which was, oh, everybody knew Arsenio Hall. But then you have that thing where certain acts I had never heard of. But doing within a context. I forget, who was the one…What’s the one with the World Trade Center?
Walter: That’s not a group. That’s Immortal Technique. That’s Immortal Technique, a basically New York City rapper at the turn of the century and still does amazing work today.
Tim: Exactly. But the way we did that image, we had to juxtapose with the World Trade Center accident because hip hop is not some separate part of culture. It’s a part of the world of black culture. American culture. Latino culture. It’s world culture.
And so the challenge for me was taking this very real kind of real dense, almost Tom Clancy level geopolitical perspective and seeing how he intermixed it with hip hop history. My job was how do I make this stuff look good and be informational? So it’s not just dealing with it. It’s like, yes, you want the images to look good, but you also want them to serve as an infographic if you will.
That kind of blend of those things and I have to say, has absolutely made me a better artist. I know I keep repeating that. But I think it’s made the field of graphic history move for me. There are other books out there. March, you know, just goes on and on out there, Maus that are great. But I’m very proud of this book because it’s moved this form, right? Which in this time of day, you got book bans and all like things like that.
Our book has been able to somewhat survive because doesn’t even really matter your political background. Everybody listens to hip hop. It literally cuts across the board and to be involved with such a project that succeeds on an artistic level, but then it begins to potentially and progressively affect public policy.
That’s when you really getting in the grease because then it’s not just a vanity project based on entertainment. You’re influencing the way people run their school systems, the way they’re running their interactions with their educators. There’s a reason why we just were the keynote at the Minnesota Council for Social Studies thing. And it’s because beyond the fact that, you know, we’re nice guys. We’re always going to have fun. We’re going to bring the joy, bring the fun.
There’s still this context that the teachers can not only get the information, but they get information from how we present that they can take back to the classroom. And I think that, that’s what allows what Walter and I do together. I’ve done some talks before, not a lot. But the last year and a half, we’ve done a lot of these things and we’ve refined at such a point now that now we’re probably going to start bringing music, some form of that into the presentation. That’s literally where we’re at. I’m sorry, that was a droning on answer to your question.
Jennifer: I loved it, especially because what you each gained from this collaboration by working with each other was a spark that really rippled. It had like ripple effects for education systems, for students, for other educators that are seeing themselves in what you’ve done in the sense that like, “Oh, maybe I could do something like that too. Maybe I could create something that’s a little different. That’s not maybe the traditional academic monograph, but still has the potential to influence public policy and practice.”
Tim: It’s in comics or the sequential art medium has the ability to connect with people. It allows people to move into the process of reading much more easily. And this is not just for kids, it’s for adults too.
But I believe particularly due to the travels that Walter and I are engaging, and like I said there have been other graphic novels before that. But because we pretty aggressively…I would have maybe tried to like, well not really. Nah, we pretty aggressively engaged the education sector. I mean, very aggressively in terms of both the local school systems, but then on the college level. So we’re doing all of it at the same time. I know, so much more. Like I didn’t even know there was a convention system for social studies. I didn’t know that. I thought, “Well, it was just-.” But like no, they have their whole convention scene too.
I believe that we are now starting to influence other academics to take the job because they’re using what we do as a model.
Jennifer: Yes.
Tim: It’s not like some stand off thing where you have some larger than life figure. It’s just regular dudes, you know, who are out there. I mean, well, the endowed chair will never be regular. But you get my point though. We’re regular guys who are doing our work and other academics are seeing that “we can do that too.” So it’s all for them. The field of what could be told is unending.
Jennifer: What felt different about creating this book and seeing it out there, seeing it in the hands of students as opposed to your academic monographs. And I’m not saying like some books are better than others, but I’m curious how it felt in terms of that actual interaction with the readers?
Walter: Oh, it’s amazing. So you know me from my work in education and that’s different for me than it is for some other professional historians is that they go in to primarily do their research and to write their books. And teaching is secondary if not third place among their priorities. For me, the teaching is first. That’s always been it. I was teaching in P-12 systems for 17 years before I became a higher ed academic.
Jennifer: I didn’t know that.
Walter: Yeah, this is now 20 years. No, more than that. 27 years since I taught my first college class. And so this has just been a journey for me that is rooted in education. And so the connection with students, connection with families is my top priority. It’s the reason why I teach at Macalester College in St. Cloud, it’s an institution that shares those values and is committed to the education first.
And then everything else, just like in my life, flows from that foundation, that basically I teach so that I can do more research, so that I can do more service in communities around the world. And that’s the way my life is built. To then come up and find a tool like the graphic, like graphic history generally no matter what subject it covers.
But specifically The Graphic History of Hip Hop that shows the commitment that shaped who I am. I would never be who I am without hip hop. And then from there to then grow that out and have that effect spread to people in every part of the world. When we first launched this almost a year ago, we had billions of engagements. Like 3-4 billion engagements from people online looking for, “What is this? What is this content? How can we get a hold of this? How can we use it?”
That’s why we have connects in Germany, and Japan, and New Zealand, and all these other places that are pulling on what we do. This morning, some folks from Senegal were in my ear about “we need this as part of our national education curriculum.” They speak French, they want French copies. So we got to figure out, how do we reword everything in French?
It’s just amazing to me because that’s the highest priority, is that we got to do things that other educators never even attempt to. The other professors that I work with who have had the kind of success that I’ve had in college, they typically say to me routinely, “I only write for 2 other people. You know, there’s me and there’s 2 other experts that that’s who I care what they see. And then how do they understand what I’ve written?”
A big group here in St. Paul has, someone approached me yesterday and was like, “there are like 20 people who can really understand the quality of the work that I do.” And that’s pretty much the academic standard, is that you have a small group of people that you share kind of a community of knowledge.
But this is very different. My community of knowledge grew most rapidly through social media, kind of leading up to the Black Panther release and Afrofuturism. A lot of the work I did on racial violence, these things gained really global audiences. But the practice and the application of this knowledge through The Graphic History of Hip Hop is unprecedented. And so the people read it, they feel it, it moves them emotionally. None of the other books I’ve done have that same kind of impact.
Tim: I have to say that Christine and I, our other partner. First of all, you have to understand for him to say what he said. It took a long time for us to get into that point. I am so proud of him because he’s now, you know, hey, dyed in the wool academic. There’s a certain standard. You have to get your citations right. And all the big wig technical words that I don’t know what they mean. This guy was that. He is that guy.
What I am so proud of him with doing is he has found a way to maintain his integrity with that and blend it with this mass form. And I think frankly, what’s beyond the obvious that many, many, many more people are reading his stuff than almost any academic on the planet with the exception of a handful.
The thing that makes what he’s doing so important is that it’s actively affecting social change in the schools. Think about it. How many people can actually write a book where they can cite that school systems are adopting the book on multiple levels, right? We’re asked to talk about it all over the country, right? There are other countries asking us to utilize this modality. How many people, academic or no, get to have that level of effect?
Jennifer: Did you expect that kind of response when you started this project or was it more of a surprise? Either of you? No, Walter’s face is like, no!
Tim: Hell no. Hell no. I expected, I’m going to be honest with you. Like I said, initially I thought, “this will be a great freelance job. The money is good.” I’ll do it and I’ll be known as that. And that’ll be it. And it won’t take over my life.
It actually took over my life. It took over my other projects, which have not made my other editors very happy, but it really did. And I’m so glad it did because again, it’s made me a better artist.
There are different sectors of the publishing world when it deals with comics. You have the direct sales market, which is Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, but that industry is actually imploding now as we speak. It’s because the primary distributor has gone under and started to sell off the assets. So local comic book shops no longer, it’s difficult for them to get access to content. And you know how the marketplace works. The more difficult you make it for your potential customers to get access to your content, you know, that feeds itself.
But then there are these other aspects. There is the academic market. There’s the graphic novel market, which we’re in. But we braced academic and the graphic novel market. And then there’s manga. So we do graphic novels and academic. Right? So what we’ve done is allowed us to have this ability to be able to effectively surf. And I use that word, both worlds, both waves, if you will. And it, but I couldn’t have told them, “Look guys, we should publish through Ingram.” And that was the best I could do.
But after a while, it is now taking a life of its own to where The Graphic History Company is a multimedia company. It really is. It’s a multimedia company and it’s allowed me as an operator. I have interest in marketing and promotion because I talk a lot, as you can see. But what it’s done is allowed me to be able to practice muscles I never thought I would have been able to practice. Due to this book has gotten me in the Washington DC SET. I never thought that would happen, but it did. You know, it did. It’s allowed us to be approached. We’ve been in the Smithsonian. We’ve been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And I’m listening up and thinking, yeah, that’s right. We did that. And it’s all because of this book.
Buy the book
Illustration by Tim Fielder
Jennifer: If you are watching this, it’s time to get your copy of The Graphic History of Hip Hop. And it sounds like, is the graphic novel version also like, can I buy that?
Tim: Yes.
Jennifer: Okay. I’m going to go out and get my copy of the graphic, graphic novel version too because I want to see all of the things that didn’t fit into this one. I’m really excited to see your art, Tim and Walter, to see this breadth of history that I knew nothing about to really dive into it. It’s exciting for me. And for everyone who’s watching, if you’re someone who has an idea or a dream about a book project and maybe it’s not going to look the way that your traditional academic edited collection or monograph is going to look, it sounds like this could be a real opportunity to create the change you want to see in the world. For Walter and Tim, it really sounds like it went beyond your expectations.
Walter: It’s amazing. And I do think you have the graphic novel one. Yours I think is 90 pages. Looks like the hardcover. I’d be amazed if you had the floppy because that didn’t, not many got out of New York.
Jennifer: Oh yeah, no, this is 89 [pages]. Yeah. I want the hardcover version. That’s what I’m asking about. Yeah.
Tim: So you got hardcover and softcover version, 92 pages. And you know, the hardcover can be used as a weapon in a pinch. So really something there for everyone.
Jennifer: Amazing. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we wrap up? I want to give you time for anything else you’d like to share.
Walter: Just that I love the work you do, Jennifer. And anytime we can do anything to support the work, and especially the way that you have served the academic sector has been spectacular.
I want to encourage all of my colleagues, everyone who is doing this work out here to come and visit with you because it is absolutely essential for us to build all the different kinds of careers we have based on the knowledge that we’ve acquired.
Jennifer: Thank you!
Tim, anything you’d like to share?
Tim: Yeah, presently working on Volume 2, which I hope to have some day before my hair grows back. And we’ll have that out and out to the public. And then got to work to Volume 3and hopefully some news, please Lord, I’ll be hearing very soon. I’ve been bothering Walter about why haven’t we heard anything. So if that happens the way I want, it’ll be really interesting, but I’m not going to jinx it.
Jennifer: Fingers crossed.
I wish you both all the best with your collaborations and your own initiatives in the future. This has been such an interesting conversation for me. I can’t wait to share it with people.
I hope they all go out and get The Graphic History of Hip Hop because this is, wow. I mean, it’s just so colorful and engaging and memorable. I think that even if you’re not someone who identifies as a graphic novel reader, maybe you don’t read comics that are in other things, this can still really be engaging. And it was surprising for me to see how into it I got knowing very little about hip hop. Thank you so much for coming on The Social Academic.
Illmatic Consequences: The Clapback to Opponents of Critical Race Theory—edited by Dr. Walter Greason and Danian Darrell Jerry has been honored with the 2025 Anna Julia Cooper and C. L. R. James Prize for Outstanding Research in Africana Studies at the National Council for Black Studies (NCBS) Conference.
Bios
Walter Greason
Dr. Walter Greason, Ph.D., DeWitt Wallace Professor in the Department of History at Macalester College is the preeminent historian of Afrofuturism, the Black Speculative Arts, and digital economies in the world today. Named one of “Today’s Black History Makers” by The Philadelphia Daily News, Dr. Greason has written more than one hundred academic articles and essays. His work has appeared on Huffington Post, National Public Radio, and The Atlantic among other popular, professional and scholarly journals. He is also the author, editor, and contributor to eighteen books, including Suburban Erasure, The Land Speaks, Cities Imagined, Illmatic Consequences, and The Black Reparations Project.
From 2007 – 2012, Dr. Greason was an advisor to Building One America, the coalition that designed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009). He also served as the Founding President of the T. Thomas Fortune Foundation, an organization that saved the National Historic Landmark dedicated to the leading, militant journalist of the nineteenth century. Dr. Greason’s digital humanities projects, “The Wakanda Syllabus” and “The Racial Violence Syllabus”, produced global responses in the last six years. His work in historic preservation and virtual reality continues to inspire new research around the world. Dr. Greason currently writes about the racial wealth gap and the patterns of economic globalization.
Dr. Greason is currently serving as a special consultant to the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
@WalterDGreason
Tim Fielder
Tim Fielder is an Illustrator, concept designer, cartoonist, and animator born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and raised in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He has a lifelong love of Visual Afrofuturism, Pulp entertainment, and action films. He holds other Afrofuturists such as Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Pedro Bell, and Overton Loyd as major influences. He is the creator of the graphic novels INFINITUM: An Afrofuturist Tale, published by HarperCollins Amistad in 2021, and the Glyph Award-winning ‘Matty’s Rocket.’ Fielder is also known for participating in the Carnegie Hall Afrofuturism Festival exhibit ‘Black Metropolis’ and The Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture exhibit ‘AFROFUTURISM: A History of Black Futures’.
Born in 1983 in the southern neighborhoods of Santiago, Chile, Francisco Tapia Salinas—better known as Papas Fritas—emerged as an influential figure in contemporary art despite having limited formal training. Tapia’s unconventional path led him to become an internationally recognized artist, but it was his provocative 2014 performance piece, Ad Augusta per Augusta (“To the Elevated by the Difficult”), that catapulted him to fame and solidified his place in the global art scene.
The title of the work was a direct reference to the motto of the now-defunct University del Mar, a private institution that had been shut down by Chile’s Ministry of Education. As the university’s closure left hundreds of students with substantial debt but no degree, Tapia was moved to take action. In an audacious statement of solidarity, he planned to “destroy the promissory notes and IOUs” that had burdened these students, who were trapped by years of financial obligations despite not completing their education.
On the day of the performance, Papas Fritas and a group of students seized the campus and stole documents worth over 500 million Chilean pesos (roughly equivalent to millions of dollars in student debt). The artist then set the documents on fire, offering the ashes as a powerful visual symbol of resistance and a rejection of the deeply privatized educational system. Tapia’s act of defiance was followed by his self-reporting to the authorities.
In a poignant five-minute video shared widely, Tapia declared, “It’s over, it’s finished. You don’t have to pay another peso of your student loan debt. We have to lose our fear, our fear of being thought of as criminals because we’re poor. I am just like you, living a shitty life, and I live it day by day — this is my act of love for you.” His words resonated deeply, especially among the university’s students, who were legally able to disavow their debts as a result of his intervention.
The minimal legal consequences Tapia faced in light of local legislation underscored the paradox of a system that prioritizes privatization over the well-being of its citizens. His artistic intervention, which boldly confronted both the educational establishment and Chile’s deeply entrenched financial inequities, has since been hailed as an iconic piece of contemporary Chilean art.
Ad Augusta per Augusta remains a testament to Tapia’s unflinching commitment to social justice, and his work continues to provoke discussions on the intersection of art, activism, and the privatization of education in Latin America.
Gathering and assessing the quality of information is one of the most effective ways to develop media literacy, critical thinking and effective communication skills. But without guidance, too many young people fail to question the reliability of visual images and overly rely on the first results they find on Google.
That’s why News Decoder has been working with the Swedish nonprofit, Voice4You, on a project called ProMS to create a self-guided digital tool that guides students in writing news stories.
The tool, called Mobile Stories, is now available across Europe. It takes students step-by-step through the journalistic process. Along the way, they gain critical thinking skills and a deeper understanding about the information they find, consume and share.
It empowers students to develop multimedia stories that incorporate original reporting for school, community or global audiences, with minimal input from educators. It comes with open-access learning resources developed by News Decoder.
After a decade of success in Sweden, Voice4You partnered with News Decoder to help make the tool available across Europe and the globe. Throughout the ProMS project, new English language content suitable for high schoolers was developed and piloted in 21 schools in Romania, Ireland and Finland. The Mobile Stories platform has demonstrated remarkable potential in building student confidence and media and information literacy by providing a platform and an opportunity to produce quality journalism.
From story pitch to publication
Using the new international version of Mobile Stories, students have already published 136 articles on mobilestories.com, with another 700 currently in production. Their topics range from book reviews and reporting from local cultural events to in-depth feature articles on the decline in young people’s mental health and child labor in the fast fashion industry.
“The tool looks like a blogging platform and on every step along the way of creating an article, students can access learning materials including video tutorials by professional journalists from around the world, articles and worksheets,” said News Decoder’s ProMS Project Manager Sabīne Bērziņa.
Some of these resources, such as videos and worksheets are open access, available to all.
University and College Union (UCU) staged a national marking and assessment boycott (MAB) – delaying graduations, job starts, and transitions to postgraduate study.
UCU members took the action to tackle disputes including headline pay, gender and minority ethnic pay gaps, staff workload and the casualisation across the sector.
Whenever there’s industrial action, the hope in Carlow St is that students will see the bigger picture – but this time around, at least for some students in some universities, the impact was significant. At the time, UCU estimated that 30,000 students were unable to graduate on time or were affected in some other way.
In the aftermath, the Commons Education Committee held a mini inquiry to investigate the impact – it wrote to the then Conservative government to raise concerns about the lack of data, the role of the Office for Students (OfS) and the lack of clarity over students’ rights, and the eventual (post election) reply was predictably weak.
Now, two years on, OfS has published research that was commissioned to develop an understanding of what the impacts were from a student perspective – along with guidance for institutions on protecting the interests of students during industrial action, and a webinar event planned for mid-May on the regulator’s expectations on how providers should support students before, during and after industrial action.
OfS first ran a text-based focus group via YouGov in July 2024 that discussed short- and long-term impacts, what information they got from their institutions, and how those institutions handled the situation. A quantitative survey followed that gathered 763 responses (279 undergrads, 284 postgrads, and 200 graduates) that had been studying at impacted institutions during the boycott. You’d not be diving into demographic splits on that sample size.
The polling drilled into how the industrial action affected their academic lives – immediately and over time – along with the comms they received from their universities, and how they viewed their rights as students.
On the top line
In a “topline” results report and associated student insights brief, we learn that the industrial action caused delayed or unmarked coursework (53 per cent) and exams (46 per cent), reduced lecture time (68 per cent), and decreased contact with staff.
Most impacted students reported negative effects on academic work quality (49 per cent) and grades (42 per cent). The MAB’s psychological impact was significant – with 41 per cent reporting increased stress, 32 per cent experiencing poorer mental health, and 15-18 per cent noting negative effects on their social lives.
One student is quoted as follows:
I was waiting for the result of a resit that the progression of my masters’ depended upon but it was delayed so much I had to pay for the next module and would not get the results until halfway through.
International students faced particular challenges, with visa uncertainties arising from delayed results and qualifications. Some students couldn’t attend graduation ceremonies because their results came too late:
I didn’t manage to get graduation tickets in time due to how late results were, so I didn’t have a graduation ceremony.
Communication varied considerably across institutions – with most updates coming through emails (65 per cent) rather than during lectures (22 per cent). Students rated information from individual lecturers (78 per cent satisfaction) more highly than university-wide communications (64 per cent satisfaction).
Many students in the focus group:
…were not told which of their modules would be affected, or when they would get their marks and feedback.
OfS says that the institutional response was inconsistent across the higher education sector. Students directly affected by the MAB expressed significantly higher dissatisfaction (54 per cent) with their university’s handling of the situation compared to unaffected students (18 per cent). Just 46 per cent of affected students received alternatives or compensation, primarily through “no detriment” policies adapted from those developed during the Covid era (26 per cent).
Financial compensation and rights awareness was low – with only 30 per cent knowing they could request it, and a mere 9 per cent successfully receiving any. The boycott also negatively impacted perceptions of education quality (38 per cent reporting a decrease) and value for money (41 per cent reporting a decrease), with one student noting:
I ended up with a [postgraduate diploma] instead of my MSc, and I came out with a merit instead of a distinction.
The brief does note that universities employed various mitigation strategies, including awarding interim degree classifications, guaranteeing minimum classifications, improving mental health support, reallocating marking responsibilities, and engaging with employers to request flexibility for affected graduates.
Were they OK? Some students felt their institutions responded well, others reported that the experience contributed to decisions not to pursue further studies or work in higher education, with 42 per cent reporting decreased trust in their universities.
Behind the screams
Much of that won’t come as a surprise – although the sheer scale of the suggested impacts, as well as their depth and breadth on individual students (esp rer mental health and international students) ought to invigorate debates about the morality of the tactic, and how universities handled it to limit legal or financial exposure.
Re-stressing that it’s not OfS’ role to intervene in labour disputes, Blake expresses concern about how strikes and the MAB disrupted students’ academic experiences, notes inconsistencies in institutional responses, sets out an aim to establish clearer expectations for fair treatment for all students in any similar future scenarios.
And there’s a fascinating section on compensation:
We want to be clear that we don’t see compensation as a substitute for the holistic experience of intellectual, professional and personal development that a student should expect from their higher education. Institutions should continue to focus their efforts during industrial action on delivering the education that students expect. The inclusion of an expectation in relation to compensation does, though, reflect the rights students have under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.
Given that many students got neither, the clear implication is that a large number of students should have received both.
Six principles
The core of the guidance letter then manifests in six principles:
Providers must remove contractual terms that inappropriately limit liability to students during staff industrial action or other circumstances within the provider’s control, as these breach consumer protection law.
Effective contingency plans must be developed to minimise disruption to students during industrial action, ensuring plans are actionable, timely, and protect qualification integrity.
When implementing contingency plans, providers should prioritise education delivery by: first avoiding impacts on students; if not possible, making minimal changes; and if necessary, providing timely repeat performance of missed teaching or assessment.
Fair compensation must be paid when contingency plans fail to deliver promised aspects of student experience, particularly for missed teaching without timely replacement, delayed assessment marking, or delayed progression decisions affecting jobs or visa status.
Clear communication with students is essential, including transparent information about rescheduled activities or compensation, with proactive identification of eligible students rather than requiring them to submit claims.
Providers must submit reportable events about industrial action to the Office for Students (OfS) in accordance with established regulatory requirements.
It’s an interesting list. The first one on the inclusion of industrial action in so-called “force majeure” clauses in student contracts – which limit liability for events that are outside of the predictability or control of of providers – is a long-running passive-aggressive row between the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and OfS on one side, and providers on the other.
OfS has previously published a referral to National Trading Standards involving the University of Manchester’s contract – but my spreadsheet suggests that there’s a large number of providers that either haven’t seen that, or are digging in for a battle over it.
That may be partly because those sorts of clauses – and CMA’s advice on them (which OfS requires providers to pay “due regard to”) – are a key point of dispute in the ongoing Student Group Claim, the UCL portion of which won’t get to court until early 2026.
From a student point of view, if those clauses shouldn’t exist, the snail’s pace of enforcement on this is as baffling as it is frustrating.
There won’t be many providers that weren’t developing contingency plans, notwithstanding that they can always be improved – and the one-two-three-four punch of avoid, adjust, repeat or compensate reflects (and translates) the position under consumer law.
Of course some will argue that a legal duty to undertake any/all of those steps under consumer law depends on those force majeure clauses not existing or being unlawful – and as it stands there’s a major silent standoff that’s unhelpful.
Even if you just look at compensation, the survey fails to differentiate between compensation paid for breach of contract, and “goodwill” payments where no such breach has been accepted by providers. As far as I’m aware, the former was vanishingly rare.
The other issue, of course, is with punch three of four – where university managements satisfy themselves that once a dispute is over, teaching or support is rescheduled “because we told them to”, despite the fact that most heads of department find it hard to actually implement those instructions with UCU members.
The “proactive identification of eligible students” for “repeat performance” or compensation is interesting too – especially over the latter, providers have long relied on students having to make complaints in order to get redress. This not only depends on the breach of contract or not issue being resolved, it also raises questions for universities’ legal advisors and insurers about the relative risks of doing as John Blake says, or waiting for students to raise concerns.
But as well as all of that, there’s three things we ought to be surprised not to see.
What’s missing?
For a set of documents seeped in the translation of consumer protection to a higher education setting, there’s nothing on the extent to which any alternative arrangements in a MAB – especially alternative arrangements over marking – should still be carried out with reasonable skill and care. Academic judgement can’t be challenged, but only if that judgement has been carried out in the way we might expect it to be by people who know their onions. That was a major issue in the dispute for plenty of students, even if it wasn’t a big issue in the polling.
The second is the lack of answer to the questions raised both in the polling and by the Commons Education Committee – which concern students’ understanding of what their rights are. If OfS thinks that it can vaguely pressure providers into proactively identifying students entitled to wads of cash, it’s misunderstanding the countervailing pressures on providers in similar ways to those identified by Mills and Reeve over provider collapse. And as I often say on the site, good regulatory design considers how individuals come to understand (or access information) on their rights should they need to use them without having to access a regulator or complaints adjudicator – there’s nothing on any of that here.
But the third is the lack of a clear link to the regulatory framework, and the lack of any enforcement carried out over what must amount to failings. If the guidance is grounded in OfS’ rules, students might well say “well what action have you taken given that the problems were widespread?”
If it’s not grounded in OfS’ powers, providers might well say “well notwithstanding that we like to look nice, why would we magnify the efficacy of an industrial action tactic if we don’t really have to”.
It’s all very well for OfS to be “give them guidance” mode, but over this set of issues the financial impacts of compliance with something that sounds contested, and partly voluntary, could be huge both in an individual dispute and in the long-term. That all (still) needs bringing to a head.
Spending on higher education facility operations is keeping up with inflation, but it has yet to return to what it was before and during the pandemic, according to a report by construction data company Gordian.
Capital spending is also up, but because the backlog of needs is so high, the spending increase has only slowed the pace of growth in unmet needs; it hasn’t led to progress in closing the gap, the report said.
“Planned project costs [are] outstripping available and allocated budgets, tempering the impact of even the most well-meaning and thoughtfully directed dollars,” according to The State of Facilities in Higher Education, released this week.
Dive Insight:
Colleges and universities across the United States are facing a systemic enrollment gap driven by a projected drop in the number of high school graduates as well as broader cultural changes in which households are rethinking the value of higher education
“Difficult choices that [institutions] have been talking about for several years now are upon them,” the Gordian report noted. “Most sustaining models involve reimagining the institution as a smaller place with reductions in employees and property to align spending with revenue. Alternatives demonstrated over the past decade would include merger, sale or dissolution.”
Despite the long-term trends, 27% of colleges are expanding, although at a modest 3% rate on average. Some are growing because they’re seeing an increase in students, but others are building out because they don’t have high repair and replacement costs. “They are not yet feeling the pressure financially to keep up with what they have already built,” the report says.
Where institutions are renovating or replacing obsolete buildings, “these enhancements are being implemented with … thought to the costs to sustain that investment and healthy caution about a future with great uncertainty,” the report noted.
When the pandemic ended, schools quickly upped their spending on renovations — increasing spending 26% between 2021 and 2023. Spending is still relatively strong, but growing at a lower rate, Gordian said. Despite the spending, a funding shortfall of more than 32% persists.
“The gap between what is being invested and what is needed to sustain the institutional assets … will continue to grow,” the report said
The backlog of capital renewal projects is more than $140 per gross square feet, up 2% from the previous year and up from just under $125 per gross square feet two years ago, according to the report.
Spending on operations is a bright spot — up 4.5% year over year. That rate is higher than inflation, but it’s still below what it was before the pandemic, and operational costs are rising.
“There may have been legitimate opportunities to cut back on spending based on innovation, enrollment decline or program changes,” the report said. “But there are usually going to be drivers outside of the department’s immediate control like salaries and wages, utility costs and any number of commodities expenses which continue to drive costs upward.”
The Department of Homeland Security is formalizing a policy to search the social media accounts of all foreign applicants for U.S. visas or other benefits, according to a memo issued Wednesday morning.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will collect applicants’ social media handles and scour their accounts for any “antisemitic activity.” Social media content “endorsing, espousing or promoting antisemitic terrorism, antisemitic terrorist organizations, or other antisemitic terrorist activity” is now “grounds for denying immigration benefit requests.”
“This will immediately affect aliens applying for permanent resident status, foreign students and aliens affiliated with educational institutions linked to antisemitic activity,” the memo continued.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio proposed the policy last month, drawing criticism from free speech advocates. Others objected to the broad scope of the proposal, which included not just visa applicants but also current residents and green card holders. The new policy is just as broad.
The news comes after weeks of escalating attacks on international students, many of whom have had their visas and legal resident status revoked for pro-Palestinian speech under an obscure legal clause that allows the secretary of state to determine if a visa holder is a “foreign policy threat.” An Axios report found that the State Department was already using artificial intelligence to scan student visa holders’ social media accounts looking for the allegedly antisemitic speech referenced in the new memo.
Many more students have had their visas revoked over minor criminal infractions; others have no clear understanding why their status was terminated.
An Inside Higher Ed analysis found that nearly 450 students have had their visas revoked as of Wednesday afternoon. Follow along with our interactive map and tracker.
Both the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are slashing funding support for graduate students and early-career researchers as President Donald Trump continues dramatic federal budget cuts.
On Tuesday, Nature reported the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program awarded 1,000 fellowships—fewer than half of the record-setting 2,555 fellowship offers it made in 2023, and the second-smallest number of awards since 2008.
Prior to this year, the fellowship program’s stated goal was to “ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce,” though the Trump administration has since replaced the word “diversity” with “strength.”
Since 1952, the NSF’s fellowship program has funded more than 75,000 master’s and Ph.D. students pursuing science degrees. Fellows receive five years of funding, which includes a $37,000 annual stipend and the cost of tuition. The fellowships are highly competitive; of the more than 13,000 applicants who apply each year, only about 16 percent typically get an award. While the cuts made it even more competitive this year, a record 3,018 applicants also received “honorable mentions,” which don’t come with an award but can boost a CV nonetheless.
Over the past two weeks, the NIH has also canceled numerous institutional and individual training grants, including many that support scientists from underrepresented communities, according to The Transmitter.
The outlet reported that a chemistry professor at the University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras Campus received a letter from the NIH terminating funding for the Undergraduate Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement because the award “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”
That justification is now central to a federal lawsuit researchers and advocacy groups filed against the NIH last week, which among other points argues that the Department of Health and Human Services (the NIH’s parent agency) hasn’t yet adopted rules that would allow it to terminate an award for not effectuating agency priorities.
Other terminated NIH training programs, according to The Transmitter, include the Maximizing Access to Research Careers program, which funded undergraduate researchers; the Post-Baccalaureate Research Education Program; the Bridges to the Doctorate program, which trained master’s students; the Initiative for Maximizing Student Development, which supported graduate students; and the Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award, which aided postdoctoral researchers.
“Greetings! You’ve been added to our journal’s editorial system because we believe you would serve as an excellent reviewer of [Unexciting Title] manuscript …”
You probably get these, too. It feels like such emails are propagating. The peer-review system may still be the best we have for academic quality assurance, but it is vulnerable to human overload, preferences and even mood. A result can be low-effort, late or unconstructive reviews, but first the editors must be lucky enough to find someone willing to do a review at all. There should be a better way. Here’s an idea of how to rethink the reviewer allocation process.
The Pressure on Peer Review
As the number of academic papers continues to grow, so do refereeing tasks. Scientists struggle to keep up with increasing demands to publish their own work while also accepting the thankless task of reviewing others’ work. In the wake, low-effort, AI-generated and even plagiarized reviewer reports find fertile ground, feeding a vicious circle that slowly undermines the process. Peer review—the bedrock of scientific quality control—is under pressure.
Editors have been experimenting with ways to rethink the peer-reviewing process. Ideas include paying reviewers, distributing review tasks among multiple reviewers (on project proposals), transparently posting reviews (already an option for some Nature journals) or tracking and giving virtual credits for reviews (as with Publon). However, in one aspect, journals have apparently not experimented a lot: how to assign submitted papers to qualified reviewers.
The standard approach for reviewer selection is to match signed-up referees with submitted papers using a keyword search, the paper’s reference list or the editors’ knowledge of the field and community. Reviewers are invited to review only one paper at a time—but often en masse to secure enough reviews—and if they decline, someone else may be invited. It’s an unproductive process.
Choice in Work Task Allocation Can Improve Performance
Inspired by our ongoing research on giving workers more choice in work task allocation in a manufacturing setting, it struck me that academic referees have limited choices when asked to review a paper for a journal. It’s basically a “yes, I’ll take it” or “no, I won’t.” They are only given the choice of accepting or rejecting one paper from a journal at a time. That seems to be the modus operandi across all disciplines I have encountered.
In our study in a factory context, productivity increased when workers could choose among several job tasks. The manufacturer we worked with had implemented a smartwatch-based work task allocation system: Workers wore smartwatches showing open work tasks that they could accept or reject. In a field experiment, we provided some workers the opportunity to select from a menu of open tasks instead of only one. Our results showed that giving choice improved work performance.
A New Approach: Reviewers’ Choice
Similar to the manufacturing setting, academic reviewers might also do better in a system that empowers them with options. One way to improve peer review may be as simple as presenting potential referees with a few submitted papers’ titles and abstracts to choose from for review.
The benefits of choice in reviewer allocation are realistic: Referees may be more likely to accept a review when asked to select one among several, and their resulting review reports should be more timely and developmental when they are genuinely curious about the topic. For example, reviewers could choose one among a limited set of titles and abstracts that fit their area of domain or methodological expertise.
Taking it further, publishers could consider pooling submissions from several journals in a cross-journal submission and peer-review platform. This could help make the review process focus on the research, not where it’s submitted—aligned with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. I note that double-blind reviews rather than single-blind may be preferable in such a platform to reduce biases based on affiliations and names.
What Can Go Wrong
In light of the increased pressure on the publishing process, rethinking the peer-review process is important in its own right. However, shifting to an alternative system based on choice introduces a few new challenges. First, there is the risk of authors exposing ideas to a broader set of reviewers, who may be more interested in getting ideas for their next project than engaging in a constructive reviewing process.
Relatedly, if the platform is cross-journal, authors may be hesitant to expose their work to many reviewers in case of rejections. Second, authors may be tempted to use clickbait titles and abstracts—although this may backfire on the authors when reviewers don’t find what they expected in the papers. Third, marginalized or new topics may find no interested reviewers. As in the classic review process, such papers can still be handled by editors in parallel. While there are obstacles that should be considered, testing a solution should be low in risk.
Call to Action
Publishers already have multi-journal submission platforms, making it easier for authors to submit papers to a range of journals or transfer manuscripts between them. Granting more choices to reviewers as well should be technically easy to implement. The simplest way would be to use the current platforms to assign reviewers a low number of papers and ask them to choose one. A downside could be extended turnaround times, so pooling papers across a subset of journals could be beneficial.
For success, the reviewers should be vetted and accept a code of conduct. The journal editors must accept that their journals will be reviewed at the same level and with the same scrutiny as other journals in the pool. Perhaps there could be tit-for-tat guidelines, like completing two constructive reviews or more for each paper an author team submits for review. Such rules could work when there is an economy of scale in journals, reviewers and papers. Editors, who will try it first?
Torbjørn Netland is a professor and chair of production and operations management in the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics at ETH Zurich.
Corequisite educational models are tied to higher pass and completion rates for students compared to remedial education, but ensuring learners are passing college-level courses often requires additional institutional investment.
Middle Georgia State University reimagined its corequisite education model to embed tutors, peer mentors and success coaches in entry-level math courses. Now, students who are falling behind are identified on a weekly basis, allowing for targeted and individualized outreach.
After the first term of the initiative, passing rates grew over 10 percentage points and withdrawals decreased, encouraging the university to scale the intervention to English courses and, starting next fall, STEM courses with high failure—D or F—or withdrawal rates.
What’s the need: Middle Georgia State offers 29 sections of its corequisite math course, Qualitative Reasoning. The course has seen stagnant success rates over the past few years, even though the number of students enrolled in corequisites grew, said Deepa Arora, senior associate provost of student success at Middle Georgia State.
Students who didn’t pass the class were less likely to stay enrolled and progress, prompting institutional leaders to consider new ways to engage these learners.
How it works: The solution was to create a support network of professionals who assist learners.
Faculty members are at the center of the initiative, flagging at-risk learners who are missing goals or failing to submit work.
From there, student success coaches, who are embedded in the course’s learning management system, reach out to those students to share resources, create a success plan and make referrals. Coaches also initiate a follow-up a week later to see if students have completed any action.
Depending on the student’s area of weakness, success coaches funnel them to one of two types of student employee: an embedded tutor or a peer mentor.
Embedded tutors address primarily academic concerns, such as low grades. Tutors attend class sessions, provide content-specific coaching and host review sessions as well as set up appointments for learners who need additional assistance, Arora said.
Corequisite learners who may be missing or not participating in classes are referred to a peer mentor, Arora said. In addition to teaching academic skills, peer mentors focus on a student’s sense of belonging and connection to the institution. They facilitate workshops, provide referrals to other support resources and connect students with classmates.
Both tutors and mentors are paid positions for which students must meet certain qualifications: They need to have passed the relevant course, be enrolled at least part-time and fulfill role-specific training.
Building better: The staffing changes were supported by revenue from tuition increases over the past two years. Faculty buy-in was also essential. “Faculty collaboration and cooperation with the success team was an integral part of the initiative and led to the development of a support ecosystem for the student,” Arora said.
Prior to implementing the new model, faculty members were briefed on the initiative’s design and asked to provide feedback and meet with the success coaches to build relationships.
Faculty didn’t receive any specific training other than guidance on how to identify at-risk students—those missing classes, earning low grades or failing to engage. Campus leaders also encouraged professors to send weekly communication regarding student performance and share related information about content with the success coach assigned to their section, Arora said.
The impact: The initiative succeeded in its goal of improving student pass rates: 73 percent of students who attempted the course in fall 2024 passed, a 14-percentage-point increase from the previous fall’s rate. (Excluding withdrawals, 77 percent of fall 2024 students passed the course.)
One trend the university noted was that the students who did fail were primarily in the online sections, suggesting that improvements to the in-person experiences were moving the needle.
Additionally, the connection between faculty and success coaches broke down institutional silos through ensuring timely identification of barriers and sharing of best practices. Success coaches appreciated being embedded in the learning management system, as it gave them greater insight into where the students needed help.
Support staff also noted increased student use of resources.
What’s next: After the initial positive results, university leaders chose to extend the initiative this term to include all sections of Composition I and its corequisite support courses. “The plan is also to extend this strategy to all sections of Anatomy and Physiology I and II where additional support is needed to improve their success rates,” Arora said.
The university will also invest in additional focus on online courses to close success gaps there.
Do you have an academic intervention that might help others improve student success? Tell us about it.
