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  • ACE strikes a fighting stance at annual conference

    ACE strikes a fighting stance at annual conference

    WASHINGTON, D.C.—Hundreds of higher ed leaders packed into the Kennedy Center for the annual American Council on Education conference this week, snapping photos of the large bust of the cultural center’s namesake, President John F. Kennedy, in the foyer. Some joked that it would soon be replaced by Donald Trump’s likeness, given the current president’s takeover of the Kennedy Center board, a move announced Wednesday.

    But it was Trump’s attempted takeover of higher education that was foremost on the minds of attendees.

    The Republican president, now in his second nonconsecutive term, dominated conference discussions as speakers grappled with how to interpret and respond to a vision for higher education that has been marked by cuts to research funding and personnel; the decimation of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; and efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.

    “We’re under attack,” ACE president Ted Mitchell said in his opening remarks.

    He pointed to a flurry of executive orders and other recent actions that have caused “confusion and dismay” across the sector, as the Trump administration attempted to freeze federal funding and change research reimbursements, creating financial uncertainty for colleges.

    “These executive orders are an assault on American opportunity and leadership,” Mitchell said.

    He warned that such changes could destabilize higher education by undermining research, innovation, intellectual independence and autonomy.

    “The flurry of these threats [is] designed to cower us into silence,” he said.

    Mitchell also noted that ACE, along with other associations and several research universities, filed a lawsuit Monday against the National Institutes of Health for attempting to cap reimbursements for indirect research costs. While that lawsuit is pending, a federal judge has already prevented the cap, at least temporarily, in response to other litigation.

    In the face of such chaos and instability, Mitchell emphasized the importance of unity, urging conference goers to beware of attempts to sow discord among institutions. “We will only succeed if we stick together,” he said.

    He also pushed back on Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which have already led some colleges and universities to scrub DEI language from websites, shutter offices and cancel events.

    “We can’t be apologetic of diversity. We just can’t,” Mitchell said.

    But even as he blasted some of Trump’s recent actions, he noted that ACE is also seeking common ground with the administration.

    “I continue to believe that there are important areas of policy where we can and must work with this administration. We will work to find those openings wherever we can,” Mitchell said.

    His remarks came a day after dozens of college presidents attended ACE’s inaugural Hill Day, where they met with congressional staff to learn and advocate for policy priorities.

    The Policy Outlook

    The notion of higher education being under siege was prevalent across numerous sessions, including in a Thursday policy update from Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations and national engagement at ACE, who broke down recent actions and Republican priorities.

    Fansmith noted that Trump has sought to reshape higher education through a series of executive orders, investigations and attempts to defund and destabilize the sector.

    “We are not used to the wheels of government moving this quickly and impactfully,” he said.

    Despite the sense of alarm roiling the sector, Fansmith said “growing opposition” has emerged. In some cases, it’s been bipartisan, with congressional Republicans joining Democrats in expressing concern over how changes to federal funding or research dollars may harm their local institutions and employers.

    Additionally, Fansmith pointed out that the Trump administration has been sued repeatedly—at least 58 times, by his count—and that successful lawsuits have slowed the president’s rapid-fire attacks.

    Fansmith also noted that Trump’s nominees to lead the Department of Education, Linda McMahon as secretary and Nicholas Kent as under secretary, are more seasoned operators than other Trump World figures. McMahon’s Senate confirmation hearing took place Thursday.

    “She is not a firebrand; she is not the person who is going to blow things up,” Fansmith said, noting McMahon’s background as a longtime professional wrestling executive and prior head of the Small Business Association during Trump’s first term. But given Trump’s desire to dismantle or diminish the Education Department, McMahon “may be ordered to blow things up,” he said.

    Of Kent, a former for-profit college advocate and past staffer for Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, Fansmith said he was “very passionate, deeply informed and highly intelligent.”

    Hope Amid the Challenges

    The conference also touched on a range of challenges beyond the turbulence of the Trump administration, including free speech, campus antisemitism, demographic changes and more.

    In a discussion Wednesday, Wesleyan University president Michael Roth weighed in on the state of free speech in higher education and questioned recent efforts by Trump to go after universities for alleged antisemitism, including threats of investigations and financial penalties.

    Roth, who is Jewish, acknowledged the existence of some antisemitism on college campuses, but argued that Trump’s efforts to address it were “disingenuous”—more of a cover for going after pro-Palestinian protesters who expressed concern about the bloodshed in Gaza.

    While he noted that college leaders need to be cautious, he advised them not to cower.

    “Not standing up for your mission in the long run won’t help your institution,” Roth said.

    In a panel Thursday on the challenge that shrinking demographics pose to higher education, experts noted enrollment pressures will continue as the number of high school graduates continues to decline. But rather than a demographic cliff, higher education will likely see a gentler slide, they said.

    Nathan Grawe, an economics professor at Carleton College, argued that the enrollment decline “won’t hit us all at once” but rather “little by little,” with incremental challenges year over year.

    Other panelists noted that workforce challenges won’t diminish along with the number of high school graduates, meaning that colleges will need to focus on enrolling and retaining more adult learners.

    For all the doom and gloom surrounding the policy discussions, the conference concluded on a high note. In his closing remarks, Freeman Hrabowski, an ACE Fellow and president emeritus of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, emphasized the importance of hope.

    He encouraged attendees to “use our heads and our hearts” to meet the moment, reflecting on his experience in 1963, when at the age of 12 he was jailed for participating in a civil rights march in Birmingham, Ala. Looking back more than 60 years later, Hrabowski said it was his faith and determination that helped him know then that “we would be OK.”

    He encouraged others to channel their own optimism amid turbulent times.

    “Don’t you dare allow the toxicity of some people to leave you hopeless,” Hrabowski said.

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  • Researchers’ comfort, uses of AI vary by region, discipline

    Researchers’ comfort, uses of AI vary by region, discipline

    Most researchers are interested in using artificial intelligence in their work, and 69 percent believe AI skills will be critical within two years. However, more than 60 percent say a lack of guidelines and training present a barrier to their increased use of AI, according to a study the publishing giant Wiley released last week.

    The study asked nearly 5,000 researchers worldwide about how they currently use AI, and the findings revealed variations by geography, discipline and career phase.

    It found that 70 percent of researchers want clearer guidelines from publishers about acceptable uses of AI, and 69 percent want publishers to help them avoid potential pitfalls, errors and biases.

    Although the vast majority of researchers had either heard of or used Open AI’s ChatGPT, only about a third had heard of other popular tools, such as Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, and even fewer used them.

    And among those who do use AI, fewer than half use it for its top five uses, which include help with translation (40 percent), proofreading and editing scholarly papers for publication (38 percent), brainstorming/ideation (26 percent), reviewing large amounts of information (24 percent), and discovering the latest relevant research (24 percent).

    The study also found geographic variations in AI use.

    Researchers in China and Germany were most likely to have used AI to support their work—59 percent and 57 percent, respectively—compared to a global average of 45 percent. In the Americas, which includes the United States, only 40 percent of researchers surveyed said they have already used AI to conduct or write up research.

    Researchers also expressed differences in enthusiasm for adopting the tools now, depending on field and career phase.

    Among the early adopters of AI were researchers in computer science (44 percent), medicine (38 percent), corporate (42 percent) and health care (38 percent), as well as early-career researchers (39 percent). Business, economics and finance researchers (42 percent), and those in the academic sector (36 percent), wanted to keep pace with the average rate of use and adoption.

    Finally, researchers in the life sciences (38 percent), physical sciences (34 percent) and government sector (34 percent), as well as late-career researchers (34 percent), were more likely to take a more cautious approach and favor later adoption of AI.

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  • Six ways to build trust between college presidents and students

    Six ways to build trust between college presidents and students

    A May 2024 Student Voice survey found 28 percent of college students say they have “not much trust” in their president and other executive-level officials, which was 18 percentage points higher than students’ distrust in professors and 13 percentage points higher than their trust in academic department leaders.

    An additional 19 percent of students said they were not sure if they trust their president, for a total of 52 percent of students indicating they have at least some trust in their campus executives.

    Students at private nonprofit institutions were mostly likely to say they did not have much trust in their president (48 percent) compared to their public four-year peers (30 percent) or those at two-year institutions (18 percent).

    “Trust is in very short supply on campuses. We do not see deeply trusting environments on campus very quickly,” said Emma Jones, executive vice president and owner of higher education consulting group Credo, in a Jan. 29 webinar by the Constructive Dialogue Institute. “By and large, I find campus leaders to have incredibly trustworthy behavior … but they are not trusted in their environments.”

    Institutional leaders can employ a variety of strategies and tactics to gain greater trust.

    Creating a foundation: A 2024 report from the American Council on Education found presidents are in agreement that trust building is a key competency for being a campus leader. Presidents told researchers they need to be present with their constituents, create opportunities for various stakeholders to share their views on issues related to the institution and surround themselves with diverse voices, according to the report.

    In the webinar, experts shared what they believe helps build trust between executive-level administrators and the students they serve.

    • Demonstrate care. Humanity is a key factor in trust, in which a person recognizes the uniqueness of each person and builds relationships with them, Jones explained. During this present age, it is particularly important for campus leaders to see and acknowledge people for their humanity.
    • Watch your tone. Generic or trite messages that convey a lack of empathy do not build trust among community members, said Darrell P. Wheeler, president of the State University of New York at New Paltz. Instead, having transparent and authentic communication, even when the answer is “I don’t know,” can help build trust in a nebulous period of time, Jones said.
    • Engage in listening. “People want you to be compassionate, but they really want to have their own space at times to be able to express where they are [and] not for you to overshadow it by talking about yourself in that moment,” Wheeler said during the webinar.
    • Create space to speak with students. Attending events to listen to students’ concerns or having opportunities for students to engage in meetings can show attentive care, Victoria Nguyen, a teaching fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told Inside Higher Ed.
    • Foster healthy discourse. While presidents should strive to be trusted among their community members, too much trust can be just as destructive as too much distrust, Hiram Chodosh, president of Claremont McKenna College in California, said in the webinar.
    • Trust yourself. Earning trust requires self-trust, Chodosh said, so presidents should also seek to cultivate their own trustworthiness.

    Presidential Engagement: College presidents can step outside their offices and better engage with learners. Here are three paths they are taking.

    1. Being visible on campus. Creating opportunities for informal conversation can address students’ perceptions of the president and assist in trust building. Some presidents navigate campus in a golf cart to allow for less structured interactions with students. The University of South Alabama president participates in recruitment trips with high schoolers, introducing himself early.
    2. Hosting office hours. Wheeler of SUNY New Paltz hosts presidential office hours for students once a month in which they can sit down for coffee and chat with him. Students can sign up with a QR code and discuss whatever they feel called to share. At King’s University in Ontario, the dean of students hosts drop-in visits across campus, as well.
    3. Give students a peek behind the curtain. Often, colleges will invite students to participate as a trustee or a board member, giving them a voice and seat at the table. Hood College allows one student to be president for a day and engage in ceremonial duties and meetings the president would typically hold.

    We bet your colleague would like this article, too. Send them this link to subscribe to our weekday newsletter on Student Success.

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  • Essay on the play “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” (opinion)

    Essay on the play “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” (opinion)

    A brief announcement: After 20 years of writing “Intellectual Affairs” for Inside Higher Ed, I am retiring at the end of the month—from the gig, that is, not from writing itself. The final column will run in two weeks.

    Going to a play at the height of COVID-19 was effectively impossible, but I managed to see two productions of Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning in the fall of 2020. The first performance was via Zoom. The actors did what they could, but the suspension of disbelief was never a viewer option. Heroes was then produced by Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater and “captured digitally as a site-specific production, created in a closed quarantine ‘bubble’ at a private location in the Poconos, following strict health guidelines,” as press materials stated at the time.

    Set at a small Catholic college in rural Wyoming during the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency, Heroes centers on four friends (two men, two women) who reunite at a college function, a few years after graduation. They all admire a professor who has been appointed as president of the college. She joins them around two-thirds of the way through the play; one of the four is her daughter.

    The audience quickly picks up that Transfiguration College of Wyoming has a curriculum based on the Great Books, with a strong dose of conservative theology—not least on matters of sexual morality. And the lessons have gone deep. None of the four has drifted away from the faith, or skewed to the left, although one is clearly more troubled by punitive rhetoric than the rest.

    The play’s title alludes to a pop-sociological theory of history as moving through a cycle of four periods, each about two decades long. Since graduation, one member of the group has become a fairly successful figure in right-wing media (likely she has Steve Bannon on speed dial) and an ardent believer in the apocalypse promised by the fourth turning.

    “It’s destruction,” she says. “It’s revolution, it’s war. The nation almost doesn’t survive. Great example is the Civil War, and the economic crisis before that. Or the Great Depression and World War II. And it’s right now. The national identity crisis caused by Obama. Liberals think it’s Trump. It’s the fight to save civilization. People start to collectivize and turn against each other. It seems like everything’s ending—we’re all gonna die. No one trusts each other. But the people who do trust each other form crazy bonds. Somehow we get through it, we rise from the ashes …”

    The phoenix that emerges? An era of security, conformity and prosperity. The apocalypse has a happy ending.

    When the play premiered off-Broadway in 2019, reviewers often imagined the discomfort it would presumably give New York theatergoers—plunged into a continuous flow of red state ideology, with no character challenging it. But the play did more than that. The figures Arbery puts on stage are characters, not ventriloquist dummies. They have known one another at close proximity for years and formed “crazy bonds” of great intensity.

    Their conversation is rooted in that personal history as well as in Transfiguration College’s carefully tended vision of Judeo-Christian Western civilization. The playwright creates a good deal of inner space for the actors to occupy and move around in. When I finally got to see Heroes of the Fourth Turning onstage, in person, there were moments that felt like eavesdropping on real people.

    What comes out of a character’s mouth at times echoes well-worn culture-war talking points—many unchanged now, almost eight years after when the play is set. At the same time, the characters clash over points of doctrine and ethical disagreement, and express very mixed feelings about the MAGA crusade. The closest thing to an expression of enthusiasm for the new president (then and now) is when a character calls Trump “a Golem molded from the clay of mass media … Even if he himself is confused, he has the ability to spit out digestible sound bites rooted in decades of the work of the most brilliant conservative think tanks in the country.”

    This is cynical, but also naïve. When the president of the college appears before her adoring former students, she recites some points they have undoubtedly heard from her many times:

    “Progressivism moves too fast and forces change and constricts liberty. Gridlock is beautiful. In the delay is deliberation and true consensus. If you just railroad something through because you want it done, that’s the passion of the mob. Delaying is the structure of the [republic], which is structured differently in order to offset the dangers of democracy. I believe in slowness, gridlock.”

    She’s a fictional character, but I still wonder what she’s made of the last few weeks.

    Not long after Heroes opened in 2019, Elizabeth Redden wrote an in-depth article for Inside Higher Ed about Wyoming Catholic College, the not-so-veiled original for the play’s Transfiguration College. Arbery’s father was the college’s president at the time. All of which goes some ways toward explaining how a one-act play can evoke so palpably a college that is also a counterculture.

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

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  • AI frees us to teach citation styles differently (opinion)

    AI frees us to teach citation styles differently (opinion)

    Receiving 15 student inquiries about citations in two weeks drives me to despair.

    The technicalities of citation style have emerged for students as a prime concern: Students require reassurance and instruction on where to put a period or a quotation mark, how to cite a quote within an interview within a book, or the amount of margin space appropriate for a heading.

    I do not blame them for their concern. I do blame the way we teach style guides, whether MLA or APA or Turabian or otherwise: as a collection of at-times maddeningly opaque rules that, to students, seem solely designed to satisfy the whims of the academy.

    But we don’t have to continue in this manner. AI can provide not only a way out, but also an opportunity to reconceptualize the way we teach citation style more generally.

    Defined by the Modern Language Association as “a set of standards for writing and documentation used by writers to find and evaluate information,” style guides promise consistency and structure, a coherent orientation to research. Yet as a general rule, students experience style as a practice of bewildering inconsistency.

    Consider in-text citations in MLA and American Psychological Association style. MLA citations follow an author-page format; APA follows author-date. Reference pages, headers and even title pages require different formatting between style systems. And even within a single style guide, new editions introduce iterative changes over time.

    For students switching citation styles between courses or even trying to remain within one style system, keeping track of the mechanics can prove frustrating. In the introduction to the APA seventh edition in 2019, students were encouraged to contact their institution or professor about which version of the style guide to use, with dual use of the sixth and seventh editions in place from 2019 through 2021. Students using RefWorks to create a bibliography can currently choose from among 15 bewildering versions of APA style and 10 for MLA—almost assuredly without fully understanding the iterative differences between each.

    Little wonder that the Purdue Online Writing Lab—that bastion of style sanity both for the beleaguered professoriate and overwhelmed students—remains one of the most-used educational sites in the world, with its citation style pages receiving the most visits. And yet in spite of this resource and a slew of others, including websites like Citation Machine that promise easy style formatting, students continue to struggle.

    In this milieu, style guides can begin to seem a bit silly. Inconsequential, even: an exercise in mechanics and parentheticals, or a game in which scholarship, as Aimée Morrison writes in Composition Studies, becomes perceived as nothing more valuable than “an error-free response to a prompt.”

    This is dangerous thinking.

    Academic integrity matters. Entering the scholarly conversation and attributing work properly matters. Style serves as more than a mechanical exercise. At its best, style facilitates a way of thinking and being in scholarship, supporting scholars to orient themselves within the broader academy.

    In a long-ago literature class that I taught at Ohio University, one of my students asked a question that has remained with me ever since: “What even is the MLA?”

    Having paid my substantive dues, both literal and figurative, to that organization for the bulk of my professional career, it never occurred to me that students might not know. But the majority of them were astonished to realize the MLA and the APA were actual organizations made of real human beings, with missions and philosophies informing the style rules that governed their essays.

    This revelation transformed the students’ relationship to citation style. They stopped focusing on the mechanical trivia and instead peppered me with questions, including one that opened up a week’s worth of class discussions: Why does APA focus on year of research while MLA focuses on author?

    That wasn’t the only inquiry. They wanted to know why Chicago used so many footnotes, how citation styles impacted readability, why MLA doesn’t require a title page and what these styles expressed about expectations in their field.

    In short: Everyone makes us cite our work, but on what principles do these expectations operate?

    The resulting discussions established an unexpected understanding among my students of how citation style should function and how all those seemingly random mechanics of various style systems actually emerge from deep, intentional thinking about research and the scholarly record. The practice of viewing citation style as a matter of scholarly identity and orientation, rather than as a series of mythological labors in the name of Real Scholarship, made a critical difference to their approach.

    I was pleased to see that my undergraduate students emerged from that term with far better papers. They cited their research well and with enthusiasm; they evaluated and integrated sources with mastery; their postpaper reflections evidenced a scholarly joy that I see all too rarely in the classroom. I had the sense that, for the first time, many of them understood why they were doing what they were doing.

    Yes, I still had to correct the periods in their parentheticals and the lack of italics in bibliographies at the end of the term. But that experience led me to realize that mechanics aren’t the critical aspects of style that students need to understand—and that AI can serve as a great remedy for these errors.

    If citation style is about more than arbitrary mechanics, if it is about more than jumping through grammatical and technical hoops to prove mastery, then allowing AI to pinch-hit frees students to shift their focus from granular details to the intricacies of evaluating sources, thinking through if and how to cite a work, and embedding their own research and voice in a broader scholarly tradition.

    Indeed, students already rely on websites and applications to mechanically format their bibliographic citations. An AI editor can surely serve as a similar supplement to adjust minor mechanics where needed: a period here, a missing parenthesis there, the addition or deletion of italics, indentations.

    This neither releases students from the burden of expertise nor opens a Pandora’s box of AI use. Gating AI use in this way emphasizes the value of the writing and revising process, as well as offering students the opportunity to engage AI as thoughtful scholars. As a benefit, students learn in a low-stakes way to engage AI thoughtfully, a critical skill in the workforce.

    Most importantly, students and professors with this safety net can breathe a little easier. Freed from the panic of formatting citations, students can focus on the issues that matter the most and polish a final project to a high standard. Revision transforms, too, from “a checklist of corrections that must be taken in” to useful, in-depth prompts that promote writing craft and deep inquiry. And faculty can offer high-quality feedback on content, tone and the scholarly approach rather than spend hours correcting the fine details of a bibliography.

    At their best, style guides serve as a reflection of scholarly value. To write in APA style, MLA or Chicago, or even the dreaded “house style” used by some journals or publications, makes a statement about what a discipline or a publication prioritizes: what they deem worthy of inclusion or neglect, what constitutes readability and what matters to the academic record.

    To focus only on minutiae runs the risk of dismissing those rich and complex concepts. Better by far to invite students into this academic conversation, elaborating on the distinctions and philosophies of practice inherent in the way we cite literature, than to represent citation style as an arbitrary practice of rote and meaningless work. AI can expedite this process and facilitate this work in a way that is of great value both to students and to faculty.

    So please, bookmark the Purdue Owl website. Dog-ear the relevant pages in the necessary handbook or style guide of choice. Feel free to inculcate a style pet peeve, or to long for the earlier style guide edition now lost to time. But if institutional approach permits, take advantage of the relative freedom that AI can offer to break away from the granular focus on details to a broader and more integrated view of how and why citation style matters—even, and especially, when we can’t remember where the period goes.

    Brandy Bagar-Fraley is program chair for the master of science in advanced professional studies program and doctoral lead faculty at Franklin University, where she oversees doctoral writing courses. She serves as a member of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession, and her current research seeks to integrate student perceptions of generative AI into AI-focused pedagogy and departmental approaches.

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  • How might HEIs and government build collaborative advantage to address climate change

    How might HEIs and government build collaborative advantage to address climate change

    • By Professor Katy Mason, PVC Dean at the University of Salford’s Business School.

    We’re at a crucial moment in our fight to address climate change, with limited time to end the irreversible damage to our planet. However, higher education institutions (HEIs) could play a more pivotal role on the road to net zero.

    Climate-related challenges are considerable and require both technological innovation and the reorganisation of our society and economy. Universities are in a strong position to drive these transitions, but because of the required pace of change, they need to do so in collaboration with government. For example, universities are well positioned to mobilise the STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) and technical expertise required to evolve the way energy is generated, stored and distributed, as well as the SHAPE and social practice expertise to support the social transitions required to transform energy production and consumption. This broad range of expertise, uniquely perhaps, sits under one organisational umbrella: the HEI.

    Reducing carbon footprint with research

    HEIs have been working, increasingly over recent years, to structure and support multi, inter and transdisciplinary research, in ways that will ultimately support the reduction of our carbon footprint to deliver net zero.

    The formation of UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) has supported many of these initiatives. In April 2018, UKRI brought together the UK’s seven research councils, Innovate UK, and Research England, into a single organisation to support the distribution of government funding for impactful, interdisciplinary research.

    Accelerating a green growth economy through collaboration

    Climate change mitigation and building the UK’s resilience to climate change impacts has been a central tenant of UKRI’s attention, with funding calls driving collaboration between academics, industry and government. But interdisciplinary research, on its own, is not enough. HEIs and government will have to find new ways of collaborating if we are to accelerate a green growth economy.

    There are examples of successful collaboration. The Government’s Open Innovation Team is a platform that supports academic-policy collaboration, curating academic expertise to support and inform policy initiatives. Similarly, the United Nations PRME (Principles of Responsible Management Education) platform supports and accelerates the sustainability of current and future business leaders in Business and Management education. However, at present, its take-up is piecemeal and patchy.  Much more collaboration is needed if we are to make a difference to climate change. 

    Recognition of the advantages afforded by collaboration is long-standing. As far back as 2000, Vangen and Huxman were developing a theory of collaborative advantage, arguing that goals, trust, culture and leadership had to be aligned enough – despite differences and tensions – if advantages were to be gained.[i] In this regard, collaboration is often inconsistent, with inherent contradictions and mutually exclusive elements caused by inevitable differences between partners. While it is these differences that often generate advantage, they require time and investment in understanding. This is perhaps why we have not invested sufficiently in making such partnerships work.

    Breaking down barriers to collaboration

    The contrasting cultures of academics and policymakers may certainty make collaboration difficult: the epistemologies-in-use (how knowledge, evidence and rigour are framed) are different; the production and use of knowledge objectives is different; and the rules of identity and belonging to the home-culture are different.

    However, as Beech et al. argue, we can take advantage of these significant cultural differences if HEIs develop a new kind of platform that acts as a learning zone in which key cultural rules of academics and policymakers are suspended (not ‘solved’).[ii] This will enable different groups to contribute and extract learning insights as if they were collaborating with shared understanding, when this may only partially be the case.

    In pursuit of creating a new kind of learning platform, HEIs, particularly those leading knowledge exchange and engagement initiatives, might usefully adopt this set of design principles:

    • Valuing difference and not seeking to resolve it;
    • Having the purpose of supporting others’ endeavors in their home-culture by providing knowledge resources;
    • Be willing to aggregate and disaggregate ideas and evidence in novel ways; and
    • Be willing to suspend judgement of the other and the self to encourage people to step outside their normal modes of interaction

    These design principles will likely help knowledge exchange leads catalyse innovation and accelerate the adoption of cutting-edge practice by bringing local, regional and national policymakers together with academics to advance solutions to overcome climate change obstacles.

    ‘Making Britain a clean energy superpower’

    Academics and policymakers are explicit in their ambition to tackle climate change. The UK Government states one of its key missions as ‘making Britain a clean energy superpower’ by ‘creating jobs, cutting bills and boosting energy security with zero-carbon electricity by 2030.’

    Driven by government monies directed towards UKRI for this purpose and by researchers’ concerns, passions, and expertise, some universities have built up significant industrial and third-sector networks to support the development and transformation of our greening economy.

    For example, researchers at Lancaster, Swansea, Imperial, and Salford have been studying the farming sector and its potential transformation through agrivoltaics. Agrivoltaics co-locate high-quality food and green energy production on the same land while simultaneously aiming to secure biodiversity net gain. This is a complex and ambitious agenda that will contribute to more than the ‘clean energy’ challenge.

    Agrivoltaics requires expertise in physics to understand solar panel efficiency, reliability and maintenance, while plant science knowledge is essential to understand food nutrition and biodiversity complexities. In addition, social science expertise is required to understand the design and transformation of the farming sector, the development of a circular economy for solar panels, and how the proliferation of markets might reconnect across the entire food and energy production and consumption systems to ensure sustainability.

    To uncover ‘what works’ will ultimately require us to collaborate with those seeking to use agrivoltaics and all those involved in solar panel production and management upstream and downstream of the supply network.

    My involvement in this project has been exciting, frustrating and demanding. I suspect that we could have significantly accelerated our impact if we had not lacked access to a platform that systematically supported policy-academic engagement. In line with our research that shows the desire and difficulty for policymakers to engage with researchers, it seems there is much more we can do, as HEIs to support this.

    [i] Huxham, C., & Vangen, S. (2013). Managing to collaborate: The theory and practice of collaborative advantage. Routledge.

    [ii] Beech, N., Mason, K. J., MacIntosh, R., & Beech, D. (2022). Learning from each other: Why and how business schools need to create a “paradox box” for academic–policy impact. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 21(3), 487-502

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  • The Power of Students’ Stories – Faculty Focus

    The Power of Students’ Stories – Faculty Focus

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  • The Power of Students’ Stories – Faculty Focus

    The Power of Students’ Stories – Faculty Focus

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  • Ohio Senate passes bill to ban DEI and faculty strikes at public colleges

    Ohio Senate passes bill to ban DEI and faculty strikes at public colleges

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    The Ohio Senate on Wednesday passed a far-reaching higher education bill that would ban the state’s public institutions from having diversity, equity and inclusion offices or taking positions on “controversial” topics.

    The bill, known as SB 1, would also establish post-tenure reviews, ban strikes by full-time faculty, and require colleges to publish a syllabus with the instructor’s professional qualifications and contact information for every class.

    Colleges that fail to comply could lose or see reduced state funding.

    The state Senate advanced the legislation in a 21-11 vote largely along party lines — all nine Democrats opposed it, as did two Republicans. The vote came just a day after hundreds of critics spoke out against the proposal during an hourslong hearing Tuesday.

    The second life of SB 83

    Ohio is one of several conservative-controlled states looking to more tightly control their public colleges. But SB 1 is notable for how much it would overhaul the state’s public higher education, including aspects that have traditionally been left to college leaders’ discretion.  

    For example, colleges would be unable to make institutional statements on any topic the bill deems politically controversial, such as “climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.”

    The bill would create a mandatory U.S. history college course with prescribed readings, like the U.S. Constitution and at least five essays from the Federalist Papers.

    The state Senate advanced a similar 2023 bill, SB 83, from the same lawmaker,  Republican state Sen. Jerry Cirino. Even though Republicans controlled both chambers of the Legislature and the governor’s mansion in Ohio, the legislation never made it to a vote in the House.

    But times have changed. Matt Huffman, the previous Senate president and a strong supporter of the bill, is now the speaker of the House. Gov. Mike DeWine told local news outlets he was likely to sign the bill, pending a final review, should it make it to his desk.

    SB 1 also goes further than its predecessor. The new bill would ban DEI offices and scholarships altogether, while the previous version only sought to prohibit mandatory DEI trainings and offered exemptions. And SB 1 includes a ban on full-time faculty strikes — a provision that was removed from SB 83 in an effort to assuage labor unions and win House approval.

    Faculty reactions

    Faculty groups and free speech advocates have opposed SB 1 just as they did SB 83. They argue it would chill free speech, hurt recruitment and retention of both students and faculty, and interfere with academic freedom.

    The bill calls for colleges to “ensure the fullest degree of intellectual diversity” on campus and cultivate divergent and varied perspectives on public policy issues, including during classroom discussion.

    “Nothing in this section prohibits faculty or students from classroom instruction, discussion, or debate, so long as faculty members allow students to express intellectual diversity,” the bill says.

    The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio lambasted the “intellectual diversity” requirements in a statement Tuesday.

    “At best, this language is the micromanaging of individual courses and instructors by the General Assembly,” said Gary Daniels, the group’s chief lobbyist. At worst, he said, it will require all sides of every issue to be evenly presented by instructors, “ignoring their First Amendment right to academic freedom.”

    Cirino sought to cut off some of those criticisms when he reintroduced the bill as the first measure of Ohio’s new legislative session, which started Jan. 6. 

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  • OfS is starting to better understand the student interest

    OfS is starting to better understand the student interest

    Part of the point of having a regulator focused on students, rather than – say – a funding council or a department, was always about acting in “the student interest” rather than, say, the “provider” interest.

    But ever since HEFCE started talking about “the student interest” back when it made the Quality Assurance Agency bid to become its quality assurance agency, there’s always been a vague sense that “the student interest” is only ever really definable by reference to what it isn’t, rather than what it is.

    Can you define “a seminar”? Maybe not. Is 150 people in a room “a seminar?” Nope. And so on.

    In theory, once you know what “the student interest” actually is, you can then embed it into regulatory priority setting, regulatory design and regulatory activity.

    It’s a laudable principle, but as the idea hit reality it turned out that the sheer diversity and complementarity of student interests are not easily understood or quickly realised.

    As the Office for Students (OfS) has dealt with “monster of the week” framings of freedom of speech and grammar in assessment, a common criticism has been that student interest has been “ventriloquised” to back (sometimes questionable) ministerial priorities.

    And in areas where the body it has been using to define the student interest has gone against the views of ministers – for example on decolonisation and inclusive curricula – there appears to have been a concerning tendency to silence competing voices.

    Have students historically been able to trust OfS to advocate for their interests? It’s not entirely clear. The publication of new research into student priorities is therefore supposed to centre aspects of the authentic student voice within regulation and policy.

    Research findings

    OfS has worked with polling companies and conducted its own surveys and focus groups to gather information. Sources include:

    • Polling conducted by Savanta (1,761 students and graduates)
    • Two online focus groups conducted by YouGov
    • A YouGov online survey (750 responses) with prospective students, current students and graduates
    • An online focus group with students from small and specialist providers, arranged with the support of GuildHE
    • The Office for Students Student Panel

    Though this is a fair amount of evidence, OfS is clear that what is presented is a snapshot – the interests and priorities of students will evolve in future. The outputs from this exercise have helped to shape the recent OfS strategy – future strategic thinking would need to be shaped by more recent examples of this kind of engagement.

    The research is presented in four themes, covering student experiences and expectations, the idea of students as consumers, student interests in the long and short term, and the relationship between the student interest and the public interest.

    As presented, each section offers headline findings and key results from polling followed by a range of illustrative quotes from individual students.

    Students expect a high quality education that “reflects their financial investment and the promise that was made to them” – this includes opportunities to engage in social and extra-curricular activities. Academic and personal needs should be supported, and students also expect opportunities that will help their future careers.

    Yougov polling found that 79 per cent of undergraduates believed that university had either met or exceeded their expectations – 91 per cent felt they would end up with a credible qualification, 90 per cent felt they would leave with credible knowledge of their subject area.

    In contrast students do not feel they have received sufficient one-on-one support from staff, and have experienced disruption from the Covid-19 restrictions on activity and industrial action. More widely, the cost of living has had an impact on studies (60 per cent of students polled by Savanta agreed) – students were clear there is insufficient financial support available. And there is a persistent feeling that tuition fees are too high – 60 per cent felt their degree represented value for money.

    Specific issues have included difficulties in finding suitable and affordable accommodation, and a lack of mental health support for those who need it. Savanta polling suggested that 28 per cent of undergraduates felt contact hours had been insufficient to support their learning, 32 per cent of undergraduates had issues with the way their course has been taught, and 40 per cent said that one of the three biggest influences on their success was financial support.

    I was promised x amount of hours in person and I wasn’t able to due to strikes/Covid. Online lectures/seminars were not fruitful at all. (Male, 23, graduate, YouGov focus group)

    You can’t do anything without your health and with the stress that can come with the intense study and financial restraints of university life it is particularly important that the university supports students so they can maintain good wellbeing. (Male, 20, higher education student, YouGov focus group)

    Lots of different things can influence student interests. Cultural differences can mean some students might need varying levels of support to properly enjoy university life. Socioeconomic backgrounds for example can require that students will have an interest in needing either more financial support or the ability to balance part time work with studies.’ (Female, 23, higher education student, YouGov focus group)

    As signalled over the summer, students as a whole do not like the term “consumer”, feeling that the term implied education could be bought rather than acquired through personal effort. That said, there was an identification with the idea of “student rights” – both in terms of promises being met and access to refunds.

    And the idea of students as “investors” in their education was not viewed favourably either – students don’t consider their financial contribution as a choice, preferring to think about how they invest their time and effort.

    Students are not really given consumers rights, as seen by Covid year students who want money back. If you are given a false promise … there should be a way to complain … but [there] is not really. (Female, 18, further education student, YouGov focus group)

    It is much more difficult to complain, and essentially impossible to claim a refund. (Female, 20, higher education student, YouGov focus group)

    I have a right to get what I was expecting when I signed up for the degree… This means having teaching provision in line with what was advertised. (Female, 20, higher education student, YouGov focus group)

    There is a slight preference (60 to 40 per cent) for a provider focus on long-term rather than short-term student interests.

    By “short term”, students mean their day-to-day experiences – so stuff like academic support, progression and success, costs of living, and mental well being. “Long term” interests extend beyond graduation, revolving around career preparation and progression, skills for employment, and networking.

    I think in the short-term, academic and pastoral support with exams and coursework deadlines is most important, as well as general support with aspects of student life such as managing finances, finding accommodation etc. (Female, 20, higher education student, YouGov focus group)

    For me long-term encompasses the whole of the time I spend at university and then the years after where my degree affects my career progression etc. (Female, 23, higher education student, YouGov focus group)

    You’ll have spotted that there’s less information in these sections as we go on – the last one gives another inconclusive split – according to students, providers should focus on delivering student benefits (66 per cent) rather than public benefits (36 per cent).

    There were “a number of perceived conflicts” between student and public interest – these were “related” to tuition fees and accommodation, but we are not told what they are precisely.

    From the focus group quotes we can deduce that there is a public interest in developing graduates. The public interest may be to minimise student debt, while individual students might benefit by not paying off loans – the public might not like student accommodation blocks in city centres, while students do.

    That these hang off a mere handful of focus group quotes is frustrating and limits the usefulness of the insights. That “provider interest” is missing is also frustrating – plenty of students will argue with themselves and each other about the extent to which their personal interests can conflict with those of “the university”.

    I think a long-term interest of developing inquisitive, interested graduates who want to continue to learn about and critically analyse the world around them is an incredibly important part of a robust society. (Female, 33, higher education student, YouGov focus group)

    Student debt is a clear conflict of interest between students and the public interest. It is in the public interest to minimise student debt as a lot of it is not paid off by the students, however an individual student is benefiting by not paying off their student loans. (Female, 20, higher education student, YouGov focus group)

    Student accommodation is another example. Generally, members of the public don’t like having large student accommodation blocks built in city centres, however many students would like to live close to university and of course, in a cheaper accommodation. (Female, 20, higher education student, YouGov focus group)

    Also frustrating is the extent to which the findings seem to assume that students can’t or won’t consider their community or collective interests – understanding the extent to which, for example, student A is prepared to cross-subsidise student B’s mental health support or more expensive teaching probably matters much more than knowing who’s thinking short-term or longer-term, when surely pretty much everyone has both rattling around in their head.

    So what?

    For anyone who works with students, or has met students, none of these findings will come as a huge surprise. There are many formal and informal surveys of students and graduates, and this new research largely acts as a way of reinforcing what is already known.

    For critics, not being able to see the underpinning polling data raises all sorts of questions – like what was asked, who was asked, when were they asked it, what the differences were by characteristic or provider type, and how the results were weighted – partly because one way for a regulator to prioritise is by focussing in on those most at risk, or most unhappy, and so on.

    It’s also possible to raise an eyebrow at some of the conclusions that OfS Director for Fair Access and Participation John Blake draws from the research. When he says, for example, that he has “discovered” that students have two categories of expectation – one relating to their experiences of higher education (what studying feels like) and the other relating to what it gets them in the future – you are left thinking “well what else would they have expectations about” if not “good job the whole of your quality improvement medals scheme, a review of which involved a shed ton of research with students, also framed things in terms of experience and outcomes”.

    It’s possible to have expectations that are too high given OfS’ form, legal remit and the realities of day to day expectations. Jim often notes that while students’ unions will carry out plenty of research into “the student interest”, they’re still going to run a freshers fair, a course rep system and elect some full-time sabbatical officers in March – just as for all the research that providers do on their strategies, they pretty much all still vow to deliver excellent teaching, groundbreaking research, something something knowledge exchange and civic, and something something buildings HR and finance. For all the high blown rhetoric about change on inception, OfS is still a cruise ship not a speedboat.

    One thing that does still feel missing is not so much the recognition that diverse students have different priorities and interests – that does come out vividly in Blake’s blog – but that when you have a fixed remit and limited resources, you do have to prioritise. Add in that sometimes diverse interests are opposed, and you then have to set out how and who makes the calls, and then demonstrate that that has impacted what you do and how you do it. You do get the sense that there are passionate people in there who recognise that – but that there’s still a way to go in delivering the old “whole provider strategy” thing inside OfS.

    There’s also the partner question. Perhaps the newly souped-up interest board will get to do some of this, but if you take that two-thirds/one-thirds split on student v public interest, the point about student as partner is that they are seen both as capable of holding both thoughts in their head at once, and capable of contributing to a discussion about how you find a way through what can feel like a contradiction. It’s true on freedom of speech v freedom from harm , it’s true on “high academic standards” v “supporting students to succeed”, and true on the often contested balance between student feedback and academic authority. Education is always co-produced, even if one side is young and paying for it and the other “provides” it.

    Nevertheless, while eight years in is a bit late to be properly considering how the “student interest” is defined strategically, this is a good start. Over the coming year it says it will share further student insight based on polls and engagement that it has done – that might be on a topic with direct links back into its regulation, or something of regulatory interest to OfS but where it’s not yet planning direct regulation, or unable to act directly. The theory of change is that that sort of information can suggest areas of focus for providers (and while it doesn’t say so, for ministers) and support informed choice by students.

    If nothing else, it should allow students and their representatives to test whether the issues they’ve spoken on – on accommodation, on support, on their rights, and on value for money – will be acted on meaningfully by a regulator that is starting to realise just how important keeping promises to students is.

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