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  • Demand for Jewish Employee Lists Unconstitutional (opinion)

    Demand for Jewish Employee Lists Unconstitutional (opinion)

    The Trump administration’s effort to use the problem of antisemitism on campuses as an excuse to bend universities to its will has been well documented. Reaching into its bag of tricks, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sent a subpoena to the University of Pennsylvania last July seeking the names of Jewish employees who’d filed complaints alleging antisemitism or discrimination based on religion or ancestry/national origin, as well as employees affiliated with its Jewish studies program, Jewish organizations or community events.

    When the university refused, the EEOC filed a lawsuit. It asked a federal judge to enforce its subpoena.

    It claimed to need the personal information about Penn’s Jewish employees to investigate claims that Penn engaged in “unlawful employment practices by allowing antisemitic harassment to persist and escalate throughout its Philadelphia campus and creating a hostile work environment for Jewish faculty and staff.”

    On Jan. 20, Penn responded by calling the EEOC’s demand “extraordinary and unconstitutional.” It was right to do so.

    As three University of Pennsylvania faculty members note in an op-ed in The Guardian, “If history teaches us anything, it is that making lists of Jews, no matter the ostensible purpose, is often a prelude to their and others’ persecution … Even if the EEOC is collecting Jewish community members’ personal data in a good-faith effort to ensure safety, lists of Jews can later be leaked, or deployed to other, more sinister ends.”

    Such concerns seem particularly warranted at a time of rising levels of antisemitism and violent hate crimes against Jewish Americans. One recent survey found that “one-third (33 percent) of American Jews say they have been the personal target of antisemitism—in person or virtually—at least once over the last year.” Moreover, “Nearly six in 10 (56 percent) American Jews say they altered their behavior out of fear of antisemitism” in 2024.

    In its suit, the EEOC said it is investigating “a pattern of antisemitic behavior that has been publicly displayed throughout Respondent’s campus.” It claimed that the list of Jewish employees would enable it to reach out to them: “Throughout its investigation, the EEOC has endeavored to locate employees exposed to this harassment and to identify other harassing events not noted by Respondent in its communications, but Respondent has refused to furnish this information, thereby hampering the EEOC’s investigation.”

    But what the EEOC is offering, many Jewish employees at Penn do not want.

    As the three Penn faculty members pointed out in their Guardian op-ed, “Jewish and non-Jewish community members at Penn and beyond have united to support the university’s resistance to compiling and releasing data about members of campus Jewish organizations, the Jewish studies department, and individuals who participated in confidential listening sessions and surveys about antisemitism.”

    On Jan. 20, the Penn Faculty Alliance to Combat Antisemitism, an association whose membership consists predominantly of Jewish faculty, asked permission to file a friend-of-the-court brief opposing the EEOC’s effort. Their brief, which they appended to their request, pointed out that “disclosure of sensitive information about the members of Jewish organizations … burdens Jewish association rights, unintentionally echoing troubling attempts in both distant and recent history to single out and identify Jews—a historically persecuted minority.”

    While expressing appreciation for the “EEOC’s concern regarding antisemitism on university campuses,” the alliance noted that by requesting lists of Jewish employees, the EEOC was “exacerbating the fear and uncertainty of Jewish faculty at Penn.” It called the EEOC’s subpoena “an ill-designed means for addressing workplace antisemitism, particularly because the agency could accomplish its goals in ways that would better protect the university’s Jewish faculty and staff, as well as their First Amendment rights.”

    “Ill designed” is one way to put it, but more important is the point that Jewish faculty at Penn make about the burden on association rights and their fear. As for many Americans, that fear is in part based on mistrust of the Trump administration.

    It is born of the administration’s growing record of disregard for constitutional rights and basic human dignity, and of its seeming willingness to do anything to accomplish its goals.

    Almost 70 years ago, the United States Supreme Court made clear that the government cannot demand and force an organization to turn over its membership list absent a “compelling justification” for doing so. In NAACP v. Alabama (1958), the court found that Alabama’s request for the NAACP’s membership list “trespasses upon fundamental freedoms,” ruling that “the effect of compelled disclosure of the membership lists will be to abridge the rights of its rank-and-file members to engage in lawful association in support of their common beliefs. “

    In that case, the court recognized what it called “the vital relationship between freedom to associate and privacy in one’s associations.”

    The University of Pennsylvania, in its response to the EEOC lawsuit, says that the EEOC “seeks to invade employees’ private affairs and compel the disclosure of their associations without articulating any compelling interest justifying that serious burden on First Amendment rights.” It went on to say that “if the information demanded were somehow made public, the individuals identified on the lists could face real risk of antisemitic harm.”

    And, similar to the case with the NAACP, Penn suggested that disclosure of membership in Jewish organizations “will have a substantial chilling effect on the association with Penn Jewish organizations and participation in Jewish life on campus.”

    The EEOC’s effort to access such information is clearly unconstitutional. It is now up to the courts to stop that effort.

    Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.

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  • How Many More Americans Need to Die? A Prediction.

    How Many More Americans Need to Die? A Prediction.

    In a press conference following the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Veterans Affairs ICU nurse, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey presented a reasonably provocative question that I have posed numerous times at various junctures over my 50-year lifespan as a Black man and career as a social scientist: “How many more Americans need to die?”

    I remember asking this same question when police officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Sonya Massey and so many other unarmed Black people. I wondered the same thing when George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old Black boy. Minnesota governor Tim Walz declared in a press conference this week that Pretti’s shooting is an “inflection point” for our nation.

    As protests erupted around the world in summer 2020, many people thought that Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd also was an inflection point in long-standing demands for police accountability and reform. To date, Congress still has not passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which former California congresswoman Karen Bass introduced in 2021.

    During the COVID-19 pandemic, I remember watching the daily death toll trackers. I kept asking myself and others, “How many more Americans need to die?” Meanwhile, the U.S. president was proposing unscientific remedies. “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” Donald Trump said in an April 2020 White House briefing. “I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”

    As it turns out, ultraviolet light cleansings and bleach-infused cocktails did not reduce infections and deaths in the U.S. In fact, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center, more than 1.1 million people across our nation died from COVID-related illnesses, the highest of any country in the world. Brazil was a distant second with 699,276 fatalities. Did that many Americans have to die?

    I often teach, write and speak about racialized health disparities. Like COVID, most other diseases disproportionately kill Black Americans. As I regularly review statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal data sources, I repeatedly ask how many more of my people need to die before elected officials, taxpayer-supported public health agencies, doctors and health-care professionals, philanthropic foundations, and other entities aggressively dismantle the deeply researched systemic forces that cyclically place Black people at highest risk of preventable deaths.

    The maternal mortality crisis is one example that I frequently highlight. For years, CDC data have shown that Black women die in childbirth at exponentially higher rates than do white women. Specifically, the death rate is consistently more than three times higher for Black women. In 2023, the federal agency reported that in comparison to the previous year, death rates worsened for Black expectant mothers, while they improved for white women.

    Here is my prediction: Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions more Americans will senselessly die during this era of underappreciation for scientific evidence and facts, race-neutral policymaking, politicized or nonexistent investigations, and insufficient efforts to hold elected officials accountable for governmental negligence and fatal acts of violence.

    Last year, the Trump administration canceled an unprecedented number of research grants spanning a range of topics. They also stopped investing in long-standing federally funded data-collection activities and programs that focused on diversity, equity and inclusion. Many federal agency websites were scrubbed of charts, tables and statistics that showed racial disparities between Americans on health outcomes and other metrics. Inevitably, cuts to scientific inquiry into the causes and cures of racial inequities in cancer diagnoses will exacerbate gaps in who lives and who dies from cancers. The same is most certainly true of other diseases.

    Discarding decades of evidence from vaccine researchers will increase the spread of deadly diseases. Refusing to take climate science seriously will result in more severe climate disasters that kill people in the U.S. and across the planet. Federal cuts to HIV research and prevention will likely reverse decades of progress—more people will die from AIDS-related illnesses. Dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development will surely affect lifesaving care delivered around the world. All these executive actions, policy choices and funding reductions occurred during the first year of Trump’s second presidency.

    Nonpartisan pursuits of scientific knowledge in university labs and other trustworthy spaces like the CDC are irrefutably important—but so too are rigorous, credible investigations into catastrophes that result in mortalities. Within hours of Pretti’s and Renee Good’s killings in Minneapolis, Trump, Vice President JD Vance, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and other federal officials blamed the slain Americans for their fatalities. Their abrupt conclusions were not based on investigations. It is plausible that the lack of such inquiries will empower immigration agents and other law enforcement officers to unnecessarily kill more people. Knowing that the White House will defend their actions, no matter what, will compel more, not fewer of them to engage in acts of violence that result in fatalities.

    Uncontaminated facts about mortality are essential. Without them, more people will die and there will be less accountability for preventable losses of life. Good and Pretti did not have to die. The unarmed Black people whom police officers have killed did not have to die. Likewise, neither the more than 1.1 million Americans with COVID infections nor the countless people of color whom other racialized health inequities killed had to die. Tragically, there will be numerous others.

    Shaun Harper is University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Public Policy and Business at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership. His most recent book is titled Let’s Talk About DEI: Productive Disagreements About America’s Most Polarizing Topics.

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  • Indiana University Football (and Others) Just Need to Go Pro

    Indiana University Football (and Others) Just Need to Go Pro

    Writing at The Wall Street Journal, former federal prosecutor and longtime television writer/producer Jonathan Shapiro calls Indiana University president Pamela Whitten the school’s “MVP.”

    Shapiro is also the author of How to Be Abe Lincoln: Seven Steps to Leading a Legendary Life, which is described as being “written for those who don’t just admire Lincoln but want to emulate his rational, practical approach to law, love, leadership and life.”

    As an apparent expert in character, one might wonder which of President Whitten’s accomplishments has Shapiro singing her praises.

    Is she the MVP for calling in Indiana state troopers to arrest protesting students on her campus, an action that included snipers on the roof of a campus building?

    Is President Whitten the MVP for IU’s attempt to enforce a “no-trespass” order on a group of IU faculty, grad students and alumni, which led to institutional sanctions, sanctions that were later invalidated on First Amendment grounds in a federal court?

    Is she the MVP for being subject to an April 2024 faculty no-confidence vote brought over a petition that charged the administration with “encroaching on both academic freedom and shared governance,” including a failure to resist an Indiana state law directly attacking tenure and other faculty protections?

    Maybe Shapiro was thinking of the decision to fire the university director of student media and adviser to the Indiana Daily Student newspaper prior to declaring that the print edition could no longer print “news” and instead be limited to “event guides.”

    (This restriction was ultimately reversed following widespread objections from students, faculty, alumni and other people who care about free speech.)

    I won’t pretend suspense any further, because we all know what is most notable about Indiana University in this moment. Shapiro was praising Pamela Whitten for her stewardship of the Indiana University football team, which recently completed its season as undefeated national champions, a feat all the more amazing given that Indiana University has, historically, been the losingest football team in the history of the Big Ten.

    Shapiro praises Whitten for being “quicker than most to adapt to the new world order in college athletics” and being “adept at finding talent,” including hiring coach Curt Cignetti and, after his initial successes, nailing him down with a salary of $11.6 million a year, which required “weathering a storm of criticism.”

    The increased attention and revenue realized through this success is, in Shapiro’s mind, an unalloyed good and even necessary compared to the alternatives. As he says, “Nobel Prizes are nice, but the physics department’s fan base will never kick in for a new cyclotron.”

    By his biography, Shapiro seems like a person invested in character and justice and protecting the foundational rights of Americans. He was educated at Harvard, Oxford and Berkeley. But in this man’s opinion, what makes a college president an MVP is the success of the football team.

    Jonathan Shapiro’s opinion piece is hardly the most important or dispositive evidence that there must be some reckoning when it comes to the major revenue sports and the institutions that host them, but reading it felt like a bit of a tipping point to me, indicating that there is no future where the same person can lead both the entity that is striving for a national championship in football or basketball and an institution of postsecondary education.

    It’s all too big. There’s too much money, and the incentives between education and major revenue-generating athletics—always tenuous—are now almost entirely misaligned.

    If anyone needs additional evidence, how about Duke University suing a student, Darian Mensah, in attempt to keep him at the school so he could remain their starting quarterback, fulfilling a two-year, reportedly $8 million contract? The parties settled the dispute and Mensah is now heading to Miami, his third school and this year’s runner-up to IU, with two years of eligibility remaining.

    Let me pause to say that I 100 percent support student athletes being paid absolutely as much as they are able, and that Mensah and other players who transfer to more promising athletic and financial opportunities are doing nothing wrong. Anyone who laments this state of play should aim all of their ire at the NCAA and its member universities, who had a chance to craft a system that paid students for their labor but refused to do so.

    In a way this relatively ungoverned and ungovernable system, which also has former professional basketball players being cleared to return to college, is more clarifying than if the NCAA had allowed athletes to certify and bargain collectively. The attitudes of people like Jonathan Shapiro only reflect reality: The activity that most matters when it comes to many universities is sports.

    But that primary importance of sports cannot co-exist with an educational institution under the same leadership. I would like to hear a serious argument rooted in reality that makes this case, because I cannot see it.

    The good news is that there are some relatively clear frameworks that can point the way to better futures for both aspects of the contemporary university, athletics and academics.

    Clearly football, and men’s and women’s basketball (and potentially other sports that can be run profitably), should be spun off as independent for-profit entities. They will be required to share some portion of gross revenue with the originating institution in exchange for rights to the name and jersey and facilities, but otherwise they will be run separately according to their highest purpose—winning games. These entities will be “owned” through some combination of the institution and a separate body of alumni/boosters/whatever. (There’s lots of ways to structure this as a corporate entity. Perhaps the unique structure of the Green Bay Packers could be used as a model.)

    The people running the revenue-generating athletics entity will not report to the university president. They will be accountable to the same structures we find in other professional sports, like team presidents or boards of governors. Players will be eligible to simultaneously attend credit-bearing courses at the affiliated university, but they will not be required to do so while they are rostered as an athlete. Players will receive a guaranteed five-year scholarship credit to return to the institution for the pursuit of a degree following the end of their athletic career.

    We may need a salary cap and reductions in roster size—college football teams often have more than double the number of players as NFL teams. The current Division I teams that don’t have the resources necessary to compete as a for-profit entity will drop back into subdivision that remains genuinely amateur, closer to the structure of college sports from several decades ago.

    Big-time teams unshackled from the nonprofit entity that hosts them will be allowed to go whole hog on revenue-generating and value-increasing activities.

    All I am proposing is that we recognize these sports for what they have become and then allow them to be what they are without trying to maintain a relationship between two entities that have no reason to be conjoined beyond tradition.

    Something like what I describe here is inevitable, though in the worst case scenario we simply allow the football team to swallow the educational mission, much like President Whitten has apparently achieved with Indiana University, only on a national scale.

    This has the potential to be a win-win for both sports and academics and, at its best, will be a reversal of the era when subsidies from the academic side have been used to support athletics.

    All it’s going to take is a critical mass of rich and important people to nudge us that way. For those of us who don’t belong to those groups, our job is to make sure the tribute paid to the remaining academic entity is sufficient to do our work.

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  • Six steps to data strategy transformation

    Six steps to data strategy transformation

    This blog was kindly authored by Melissa Bowden, Senior Content Writer & Editor at Kortext.

    Aston University saw its highest-ever level of admissions for 2025 / 26, with over a 20 per cent increase in admissions over the past two academic years.

    How? Through a multi-faceted plan anchored through the development of laser-sharp insights to be able to make more informed decisions quicker.

    Helen Blaikie, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Aston, explained her approach to transforming the university’s data strategy in a recent interview.

    1. Create a data culture

    When Helen joined Aston in 2020, data was largely seen as a compliance requirement necessary for regulatory reporting. It was being used to tick boxes, not drive decision-making.

    Like many institutions, data was held in silos throughout the university with no single source of truth, which made it hard for people to access – or trust – the information they needed.

    For Helen, it was essential to tackle the way data was managed, shared and governed in order to build the foundations of a real, trusted data culture across the institution.

    For many universities, their data strategy is defensive. At Aston, we’ve taken the view that data requires an offensive strategy.

    2. Build a case for change

    To begin a real shift, there had to be a strong reason for change. The appointment of a new Vice-Chancellor, Professor Aleks Subic, in 2022 was a catalyst.

    By setting out the university’s 2030 strategy, he established clear, measurable goals. Helen says that universities often create ‘warm and fluffy’ strategies, but without tangible outcomes, they’re hard to act on. Defining Aston’s 54 measures of success changed this.

    The new strategy became a ‘North Star’ and completely reframed conversations. Now, leaders were actively asking for data to understand their performance against targets.

    3. Secure buy-in from senior leadership

    For Helen, getting the support of senior leadership was non-negotiable. She worked closely with the executive team to establish exactly what they needed to achieve the measures of success.

    Developing the 2030 data dashboard was a key project – big in size and scale. It was high priority, highly visible and every executive had a part to play in making it work.

    But the effort paid off. Every quarter, Aston’s leaders sit down together to review progress, challenges and next steps with data driving the conversation. The dashboard has enabled the right environment for data to make a real impact.

    I think senior leadership binds everything. That’s one of the key pillars for creating a data culture. If you don’t have senior leadership buy-in, it just won’t work.

    4. Put people at the centre

    The shift spread across the university. Helen spoke about data at numerous town halls and leadership meetings – then something changed. Leaders started actively championing data themselves, sharing how solutions developed by Helen’s team had made a difference.

    Two factors were crucial in effecting this wider change: communication and training.

    Helen set up coffee and cake meetings with people across the university to understand the problems they were trying to solve and the solutions she could put in place to support them. Aston has also invested in staff training. Nearly 30 per cent of staff have now completed a ‘data for business’ course, facilitating cross-team conversations about using data to improve outcomes and developing confidence in using that data. [HB1] 

    5. Think big, but start small

    Aston’s admissions team were natural data champions, so working with them early on was an obvious choice. By collaborating closely, Helen’s team were able to develop data solutions that helped admissions tackle long‑standing challenges around confirmation and clearing.

    For courses with restricted places, having fast, accurate data meant better decisions and smarter targeting of applicants most likely to enrol. By adding governance, training and clear guidance, Helen’s team showed what was possible, earning real credibility.

    This success opened the door to doing even more. However, rather than implementing an institution-wide data quality programme, Helen saw the importance of ‘eating the elephant one chunk at a time’. As each solution is built, issues are surfaced in context and tackled alongside data stewards from the relevant team to build data quality and trust one step at a time.

    Start with one use case, prove out the value, and then rinse and repeat.

    6. Select the right technology partners

    Finally, Helen’s strategy involved selecting external technology partners to provide tools that support in-house solutions. Aston staff needed quick, easy access to trustworthy data – not a system where the planning team were inundated with endless requests for reports.  

    The university focused on finding the right partners: those who understood Aston’s context, spoke the same language and weren’t just trying to sell software for software’s sake.

    For Helen, it was all about collaboration and capability. By choosing technology partners with deep sector experience, Aston can build on existing expertise – rather than reinventing the wheel – and achieve its aspiration to be a sector leader in teaching, research and enterprise.

    Delivering data transformation

    The transformation of Aston’s data strategy was not a simple, straightforward process. There’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution either; every university is different.

    But Helen’s final message on delivering data transformation is clear: start with real problems, deliver value quickly, and bring people along with you.

    Kortext is a HEPI Partner. Helen Blaikie is speaking at Kortext LIVE on 11 February 2026 in London. Join Helen at this free event to discover how Microsoft and Kortext are helping Aston to deliver data-driven strategic change. Find out more and secure your seat here.

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  • On a college campus in Minneapolis, a sense of danger and anxiety prevails

    On a college campus in Minneapolis, a sense of danger and anxiety prevails

    by Paul Pribbenow, The Hechinger Report
    January 30, 2026

    Spring semester at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, where I serve as president, began with the sound of helicopters on January 20 — one year after the second Trump inauguration, two weeks after the killing of Renee Good, and four days before the shooting of Alex Pretti. 

    Our campus in the heart of the city is seamlessly integrated with the surrounding neighborhood, so what happens in Minneapolis reaches into the heart of Augsburg. The city offers our students extraordinary opportunities for learning and service; in every discipline, the city acts as an extension of the classroom. 

    The reverse is also true, and what is happening in higher education and in our city right now is unprecedented — a word that has risked losing its meaning through overexposure. Yet I don’t know how else to describe how profoundly the so-called “Operation Metro Surge” has affected our students, faculty, staff, neighbors and community.

    A sense of danger and anxiety permeates Minneapolis. The ongoing federal operation in our streets, the targeting of immigrant communities and the killings of U.S. citizens by federal agents raise profound questions about what justice looks like in practice.

    Related: Fear, arrests and know your rights: How one school district is grappling with ICE coming to town 

    I often think about what this moment means for all of us who serve as college presidents. I firmly believe that we have been called to stand for the historic values that have defined higher education in our democracy for more than 250 years.

    Those values — human dignity, academic freedom, social mobility and the rule of law —must be our North Star no matter what challenges we face. 

    I sincerely hope my colleagues around the country will not face the distressing challenges we have experienced here in Minneapolis. But if they do, perhaps there is something to be learned from our story about what it means to be called to lead in a moment such as this.

    Aside from the helicopters, spring term opened with an unusual quiet on campus. Many more students than usual opted for online classes: After Good was killed, Augsburg immediately pivoted to increase virtual options for students — adding several new online course offerings and increasing caps on existing online courses.

    For some, this decision is about personal safety; others are caring for siblings or family members after a parent was taken by ICE. Some had no choice but to take a temporary leave of absence for the spring; others moved into emergency housing on campus to avoid the risks of a daily commute. 

    In this fraught time, our goal is prioritizing in-person learning as much as possible, while allowing individuals the flexibility to make the best choices they can for their own circumstances. This calculus looks different for every student, faculty member and staffer.

    This work is ongoing, and our academic advisors continue to meet one-on-one with students to navigate the thorny problem of making satisfactory academic progress in a time of personal and collective crisis. 

    At Augsburg, as on many college campuses throughout the U.S. that serve a large number of low-income and first-generation students from diverse backgrounds, these questions are not hypothetical. Our students have been stopped and interrogated by agents in unmarked cars while crossing from one campus building to the next. 

    Many of our Somali American neighbors — including those with citizenship or legal status — are afraid to go out in public, fearing harassment, detainment, or worse. Swatting attacks that have targeted educational institutions around the Twin Cities have prompted multiple evacuations of campus buildings. 

    Most chillingly, ICE  has detained several Augsburg students, including one on campus following a tense confrontation with armed agents in early December. 

    Navigating all of this has been relentless and exhausting. As with any community, Augsburg students, faculty, and staff have diverse viewpoints, including about how best to respond to our current moment. 

    But a truth we hold in common is that education is resistance — not to any political party or administration, but to the forces of dehumanization, violence, and injustice, wherever they are deployed. 

    I am not naïve enough to believe that simply being educated in a university with a deep commitment to the liberal arts will cultivate in the hearts of students that love of the world and their neighbors; they each must make that choice. 

    Related: Opinion: Colleges must start treating immigration-based targeting as a serious threat to student safety and belonging

    But for better or worse, the city is our classroom. Our students are receiving a crash course in what my colleague Najeeba Syeed calls a “lived theology of neighborliness.” 

    In the midst of this crisis, we know that educating students for lives of service has been our core purpose for 157 years. This moment, while difficult, is one we are called to meet in the long arc of higher education’s role in our democracy. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

    Paul C. Pribbenow is the president of Augsburg University.

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected]. 

    This story about Minneapolis and ICE raids was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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  • What SUs can learn from the QAA’s report on assessment practice at Glasgow

    What SUs can learn from the QAA’s report on assessment practice at Glasgow

    The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) has published a report setting out their findings of a Targeted Peer Review (TPR) of the University of Glasgow.

    This explainer mentions death by suicide. If you are affected in any way by reading this, please call Samaritans for free on 116 123 (UK and Republic of Ireland).

    The review follows a student death by suicide after a grade error found systemic failures in academic standards at the university.

    A Targeted Peer Review is an outcome of the Scottish Quality Concern Scheme (SQCS) where there is evidence of issues relating to academic standards or the quality of the student experience. It exists to support a timely resolution of concerns, safeguard risks and explore potential weaknesses and systemic risks to academic standards the student experience.

    After the relevant notifications were made a site visit took place in October 2025 which included eight meetings with staff, students and a presentation delivered by the university,

    The SFC submitted a concern to the SQCS in July 2025 on the basis of academic standards. It followed an internal investigation at Glasgow in response to the death of a student. The internal review was focused on the school where the student had been studying but the issues identified extended beyond that school.

    A Targeted Peer Review then took place and identified areas for development and weaknesses in the areas reviewed which indicated systemic risks at the university.

    Jim has more commentary on the main site but here’s the takeaways for SUs.

    Complex and misunderstood regulations

    The first problem area the team found was long, dense and complex assessment regulations and guidance, with some calculation mechanisms maintained locally in schools and often using locally derived spreadsheets. The team also identified that the assessment regulations were not effective in securing consistent interpretation and decision-making across the university and therefore was a risk to academic standards. Because calculations took place locally, there was a greater possibility of variation and error.

    The TPR team met with assessment officers and external examiners who reported little to no formal training on the assessment code and instead a reliance on local briefs and practice. They also heard that familiarity with the code was “on-the-job” rather than mandatory training.

    The team found controls for consistent understanding and application but no assurance of its reach or usage. This inconsistency in application, interpretation and understanding of regulations was identified as a key risk to academic standards.

    When considering how the university awards outcomes that are calculated and recorded consistently they found the university is moving away from diverse, local spreadsheets and towards central calculator routes and records. The calculation and recording of grades is getting better but is still in transition, the TPR recommended a rigorous review of the exam board spreadsheet before assessments in the 2025-26 academic year.

    Worryingly the team found that when a point credit is awarded, there is no formal mechanism to demonstrate all intended learning outcomes have been met. The report references the 75 per cent rule which is where on a course level, the minimum requirement for the award of credit is the submission of at least 75 per cent of the course’s summative assessment. The gap between learning outcomes and awarding credit was heightened when the 75 per cent rule was enforced, although senior staff confirmed that there is unplanned removal of this rule.

    One of the recommendations included strengthening scrutiny and oversight of exam boards, making minutes templates compulsory, short pre-board readiness checklists, explicit alignment statements for local or PSRB requirements and regularly auditing minutes.

    Extension requests

    To unpack this section we need to understand a few local definitions. Glasgow had a previous good cause policy (GC) which was a process for students to report extenuating circumstances that may have affected their ability to take or perform in exams or submission of assessments. The university also had a wider extension request process.

    Both the GC and extension request processes had been under active review since 2021 and had been a key manifesto promise for several student officers.

    The problems with the GC policy were about inconsistency of application, leading to confusion for students. The team also identified problems with students struggling to access support pathways, fragmented digital infrastructure, inconsistent operation of processes, potential for single points of failure and complex evidence requirements, all presenting barriers for students seeking support.

    The university was in the process of creating a new extenuating circumstances policy but were trying to integrate it into a wellbeing policy and wider strategic priorities which was being completed in consultation with the Student Representative Council.

    The new EC policy was implemented in the 25-26 academic year and includes short-term extensions and any extenuating circumstances with a single digital portal for all claims. The team met with staff who were concerned about resourcing of the new policy due to an increase of student referrals to the wellbeing and safeguarding teams. They recommended the university ensure resourcing to meet the operational demands by the end of semester two of the 25-26 academic year.

    The team found no evidence the previous GC policy was applied consistently, again suggesting a risk to academic standards and quality of the student experience. The previous model was decentralised and opted on a case-by-case basis which increased the likelihood of inconsistent decision making.

    Student communications

    The university acknowledged shortcomings in award outcome communications in the internal investigation. Currently each school uses a series of local templates to communicate award or progression outcomes to students but the team was made aware that a project co-created with students will create new format and content of outcome and progression letters. The letters are to include next steps are communicated consistently and include appropriate signposting to wellbeing and support services.

    The university also now has an institutional commitment to “compassionate communication,” following the Academic Registrar’s Council framework. The TPR team found no evidence of the extent of the coverage of the framework and staff who met with the team had limited awareness of the training.

    There was an emphasis on the importance of considering the tone, timing, content and speed of communications. The team recommended a coordinated approach to embedding these principles across all relevant academic and professional service areas to ensure consistency of practice. This is a classic example of a policy, no matter how good it might be, not being effective if monitoring, evaluation and enforcement isn’t built in.

    Student engagement

    In terms of the proposed changes within the scope of the concern, the team asked to what extent they’ve engaged with students. The university informed student representatives at the Student Representative Council (SRC) of the tragic circumstances that led to the internal investigations and any movement on policy was done with student reps or on committees where they were present.

    For the code of assessment and guide, despite being a staff-facing document there are aspects which are meant to be accessible to students. Some students highlighted that elements of it were unclear and raised a lack of clarity on how their grade point average was calculated. Staff from the advice centre at the SRC also highlighted the most common area of student confusion was understanding how grades are calculated. How students’ grades and overall classification is calculated is often a topic of the hidden curriculum and requires work to make it more accessible – those who know how the system works can better play it.

    Assessment regulations therefore need to be made accessible to students, using a handbook, for example. The TPR team recommended that the institution co-designs guidance with students to ensure critical elements of assessment regulations are communicated to students in an accessible, digestible and valuable way.

    When it comes to the new EC policy the university should consider a variety of approaches to make students aware of the support and consider how other student-facing policies can be implemented using similar initiatives.

    The team recognised the university’s commitment to student representation and recommended they continue to evolve their approach to student voice that ranges from consultative to collaborative across all levels of the institution.

    What next?

    The university will complete an action plan based on the report’s recommendations which will be monitored by the QAA. The university will be required to notify the QAA when actions are complete with evidence.

    There’s lots of recommendations across the report that will likely reflect asks of SUs and their officers. What this report does is position these as minimum standards to prevent risks to academic standards and the quality of the student experience which in turn sets new standards for the sector to follow.

    SUs want to look at how the university is responding to the findings and to what extent they are compliant with existing assessment regulations. Things like inconsistent processes, poor record-keeping and maladministered exam boards should be ringing alarm bells. And as the report emphasises, these changes need making immediately, not on a two or three year time scale.

    For frameworks like the compassionate comms work, the materials existed at Glasgow but without the necessary steps in place to ensure anyone actually used them. How many common misconceptions are there when it comes to assessment regulations, how do they vary across schools or faculties and to what extent is this leading to variable practice.

    And for SUs lobbying on extenuating circumstance policies, how can it be more joined up, accessible and integrated with wellbeing strategies to ensure students can access and be signposted to timely support.

    Read more

    Scottish Quality Concerns Scheme: Targeted Peer Review University of Glasgow

    Scotland orders sector-wide assessment review after Glasgow QAA findings

    Who has the time to care – or feel cared for?

    We’ve read every university’s policy on extensions and late submission. Here’s what we found

    Students taking resits need specific support

    From playground to lecture hall – working with schools to support wellbeing throughout education

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  • Adapting the Library of Congress Tool for Place-Based Learning – Faculty Focus

    Adapting the Library of Congress Tool for Place-Based Learning – Faculty Focus

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  • Higher education postcard: vice chancellors and all that

    Higher education postcard: vice chancellors and all that

    Higher education is not like other sectors. One way in which this is apparent is the different terminology used for the leadership roles in universities and colleges. Let’s have a look.

    Firstly, who’s in charge? If you look at UK universities’ governance documents, often the highest office by precedent is the chancellor. The word chancellor, I find, comes from old French, and was the court usher who controlled access to the monarch or to judges, the term coming from cancellus, or lattice work, being the bars in the screen dividing the king/judge from hoi polloi.

    But chancellors in universities are nowadays honorary and ceremonial roles, although at first they probably did more day-to-day. For example, Oxford’s first chancellor may have been appointed in 1201, its first vice chancellor in 1230. There’s twenty-nine years of stuff to be done between those dates, and the chancellor must have been in the frame for doing some of that.

    In any event, chancellors are now ceremonial. But they have pro-chancellors and vice chancellors. Both terms mean, literally, on behalf of the chancellor, but from different Latin roots. Pro chancellor roles tend to be chair of the university’s governors, but do not play a part in the executive leadership of the university. Vice chancellor roles are – almost universally – the executive leader of the university.

    (Incidentally, vice in the meaning of “on behalf of” was one of the first university Latin words I learnt. In my first job, at Senate House, University of London, minutes would record, for example, “Dr Bloggs vice Dr Smith” – that is, Dr Smith had sent a substitute. I never learnt Latin at school, on account of attending the ur-bog-standard comprehensive in Sheffield, so I’ve picked it up from working in universities, where it remains the first language for some.)

    You’ll also meet pro in pro-vice chancellors; sadly it’s not in this sense the opposite of am, like in pro-am golf tournaments. Add in deputy and you can have deputy pro-vice chancellor, which is a little like assistant chief to the chief assistant.

    Moving back up the ladder, there’s a trend for some universities now to have a vice chancellor who is also president. This follows the US usage, where the head of institution is sometimes the chancellor, and sometimes the president. The issue, apparently, was that on some trips overseas, US hosts would wonder why they were only talking to an assistant, not to the CEO. So being vice chancellor and president is becoming more common, particularly but not exclusively, I think, in Russell Group universities.

    And in colleges you have many titles. As I noted, I started my career in higher education at the University of London, and there you have a provost, a rector, a master, a warden, several principals, several directors, and several presidents, sometimes just president and sometimes president and something else. All of this stems from the individual history of the colleges: for example, Goldsmiths’ warden title comes from the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, which supported its foundation back in the day.

    And I bet you think that I’ve forgotten Scotland, which, of course, has a different history, with four universities established before union with England in 1707. And in Scotland principal is the dominant title for the head of institution. Twelve have principals (and probably principles as well), five have vice chancellor and principals, and one has a director. Scotland also has several rectors, but these aren’t the head of institution like the rector of Imperial (or indeed of Sunderland Polytechnic as was) but are a ceremonial figurehead elected by students.

    Here’s a jigsaw of the postcard. It hasn’t been sent, so I can’t put a specific date on it.

    And is it an actual person? Eyeballing the potential candidates, I think it might be a portrait of Arthur James Mason, Professor of Divinity, Master of Pembroke College 1903–12, and Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 1908–10.

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  • What gets lost when the first draft is always polished?

    What gets lost when the first draft is always polished?

    Something has shifted.

    I recognised immediately that the email in my inbox had been written with the help of AI. The message was structured, measured, and neatly aligned with the conventions of academic communication.

    There was nothing inappropriate about it. If anything, it stood out for its clarity. My immediate response was not irritation but reflection.

    Something fundamental in the landscape of student communication had shifted, and the implications were not merely technological.

    What struck me most was not the technology itself, but what it revealed about students’ relationship to academic communication.

    For many, AI has become the safest place to begin shaping their academic voice – a space where they can get help without fear of sounding incompetent, impolite, or out of place.

    However, with AI becoming the first point of contact, it also significantly reshapes how students build confidence, seek support, and come to understand themselves as legitimate participants in academic life.

    Email writing has long played a low-key, unacknowledged role in higher education. It shapes the quality of interactions between students and staff, influences how confident students feel when seeking support, and often serves as a first step in their academic identity formation.

    Yet it has rarely been at the forefront of academic and professional skills requiring structured teaching. Instead, tone, clarity, and cultural norms tend to be acquired informally, often with uneven outcomes.

    The shift in student email practices, however, did not occur overnight. It emerged in distinct waves. The earliest emails may have missed certain academic conventions, but they reflected something important – the unfiltered, often anxious, and deeply human nature of student expression.

    Hello Dear Tutor, please can you help me with XYZ!!!”

    What followed was a period in which translation apps and early AI-adjacent tools began shaping student messages. These drafts were typically literal, tonally inconsistent, or overly formal – sometimes more cumbersome than the messages students hoped to refine.

    By 2024, a third wave appeared – emails that were grammatically precise but noticeably mechanical, with phrasing that felt oddly detached or mismatched to the emotional context.

    The most recent wave, however, is markedly different. Today’s AI-assisted emails display tone, register, and interpersonal warmth that align strikingly well with UK higher education communication norms.

    They are clearer, easier to respond to, and more polished than many human-written counterparts – yet their increasing fluency raises questions about what may slowly be lost when AI mediates the first layer of human communication.

    Over the course of a three-year structured personal tutor pilot for postgraduate taught students, I delivered lecture-style workshops on email etiquette and intercultural communication across three cohorts – sessions designed to help students navigate tone, clarity, structure, and cultural awareness in their correspondence.

    These workshops were well received and often revealed the specific areas where students felt uncertain. But over time, as AI-generated drafts became more polished, student feedback pointed to a shift – they were less concerned with the mechanics of email writing and more interested in developing the judgement required for sensitive or complex interactions.

    Students increasingly arrived with structurally sound drafts but lacked confidence in how to handle the interpersonal dimensions of communication. This change has influenced how I teach these sessions and reflects a wider sector trend – as AI takes on the mechanical aspects of communication, pedagogical attention is moving toward the interpretive and relational elements that technology cannot replicate.

    Unequal support

    Universities have never been wholly indifferent to the communication needs of students. The presence of English for Academic Purposes tutors, academic skills tutors, study skills teams, and personal tutoring structures demonstrates a longstanding recognition of the complexities students face, particularly in an international setting.

    These roles bring linguistic, cultural, and interpersonal expertise into academic environments in ways that strengthen student experience and foster meaningful connection.

    However, what has changed recently is where students turn first for support. A student unsure about how to phrase a sensitive request, or anxious about sounding impolite, once came to a tutor for reassurance. Increasingly, their first point of reference is an AI tool.

    Students describe this shift not as a shortcut but as a source of confidence – a way to express themselves without fearing misinterpretation, judgement, or linguistic missteps.

    For international students navigating unfamiliar communicative conventions, and for home students who have not been explicitly taught professional email writing, the appeal is obvious.

    AI offers a sense of linguistic security – an initial framework that enables communication to begin – echoing findings from Jisc and Advance HE surveys which show that students often feel uncertain about tone, clarity, and how their messages will be interpreted.

    As sector guidance increasingly frames AI literacy as part of students’ digital capabilities, there is a risk that communication is treated as a technical skill rather than a relational one – something that can be optimised rather than learned through reflection and support.

    What AI can’t do

    In many cases, AI-generated messages are easier for staff to interpret. They arrive with clearer structure, fewer ambiguities, and a tone that aligns more closely with academic expectations. This has practical benefits – misunderstandings reduce, responses are quicker, and students feel more able to reach out.

    Yet beneath these advantages lie deeper pedagogical questions. Before the widespread use of AI, a substantial part of my work as a personal tutor involved helping students formulate messages that required sensitivity, boundary-setting, or careful negotiation. These conversations were not specifically about vocabulary or grammar – they were about judgement – understanding what to disclose, how much to say, how to position oneself, and how to communicate with integrity in complex interpersonal contexts.

    Consider the example of a student struggling with group dynamics. An AI tool might produce a concise, polite email requesting guidance, but this does not equip the student to navigate the underlying challenge – describing the issue accurately, advocating for fairness, protecting relationships with peers, and anticipating the consequences of escalation.

    These are sophisticated communicative decisions that depend on confidence, self-awareness, and the ability to read social context. AI at this current stage cannot develop those capacities.

    This distinction is critical. Although AI can generate language, it cannot cultivate the reflective judgement students require to express themselves authentically and ethically, which is arguably imperative to the development of their critical thinking skills.

    Dependency or gap?

    Some worry that students may become overly reliant on AI or that their individuality may be flattened by formulaic phrasing. These concerns are not without merit, but they require nuance.

    Many students who lean heavily on AI do so because they were never formally taught the communicative norms of academia. Their “dependency” reflects systemic gaps in the provision of communication education more than any inherent shortcoming.

    Others fear that AI obscures intercultural difference. While AI can smooth the surface of communication, it does not – and cannot – replace the development of intercultural understanding. Students still need to learn how communication functions within and across cultural contexts, even if AI helps them begin those conversations with greater confidence.

    With appropriate guidance, students can learn not to accept AI-generated outputs uncritically but to review, adapt, and personalise them. The tool becomes a starting point in a process of learning and refinement rather than an end product in itself.

    A starting point

    The most constructive approach is to understand AI as one element within a broader ecology of communication support. Students may begin with an AI-generated draft, but it’s imperative to spotlight that human judgement should remain indispensable. Here, the educator’s role shifts toward helping students decide when AI-generated phrasing is appropriate, when it is insufficient, and when a situation requires a more nuanced or personalised approach.

    This does not diminish the importance of academic communication support. Rather, it redefines it. Workshops and tutorials that once focused on sentence-level clarity may now need to prioritise higher-order skills – articulating uncertainty, navigating conflict, expressing boundaries, and understanding the ethics of communication in digital environments.

    Small reflective exercises can deepen this learning, prompting students to consider why they phrased a request in a particular way, what outcomes they were hoping for, and how AI either supported or limited their intentions.

    Teaching judgement

    If we accept that AI will remain embedded in student communication practices, then support systems must evolve accordingly. This does not mean discouraging AI use. Rather, it means situating AI within a broader pedagogical framework that helps students engage with it critically and responsibly.

    Educators might place greater emphasis on discerning when AI-generated phrasing is contextually appropriate, understanding how tone functions in sensitive or emotionally charged interactions, recognising when AI output should be revised, supplemented, or entirely set aside, and developing a professional voice that reflects authenticity, clarity, and ethical judgement.

    These shifts align communication support more closely with the realities of academic and professional life, where clarity can be assisted by technology but meaning must still be crafted by the human mind.

    AI has undoubtedly made some aspects of student communication easier. It has reduced uncertainty, accelerated clarity, and enabled students to express themselves in ways that feel more confident and secure. Nevertheless, the deeper work of communication – the development of judgement, voice, and relational understanding – remains firmly within the human domain.

    The task for higher education is not to resist AI but to understand how it reshapes the conditions under which communicative skills are learned. Our responsibility, therefore, should be to ensure that students are able not only to send clear messages but to navigate the complexities of academic and interpersonal life with confidence and integrity that are valuable assets for their future both personally and professionally.

    The key issue, then, is not whether students use AI to write emails, but whether higher education continues to take responsibility for teaching the judgement that surrounds communication. As AI absorbs the mechanics of clarity and tone, educators must focus more intentionally on helping students navigate uncertainty, vulnerability, boundaries, and ethical self-expression.

    The development of judgement, voice, and interpersonal understanding remains firmly within the human domain – and at the heart of higher education’s purpose.

    AI may draft the email, but it cannot teach students who they are in the process of writing it.

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  • Universities should be positive disruptors on trans inclusion

    Universities should be positive disruptors on trans inclusion

    On 16 April 2025, the Supreme Court handed down its judgment in For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers, ruling that under the Equality Act 2010 a woman is defined by biological sex.

    This ruling has had a profound impact on organisations, with both Girlguiding and the Women’s Institute actioning policies that are possibly trans-exclusionary.

    While these organisations may not wish to be trans-exclusionary, they have felt pressured by law to enact some kind of policy that aligns with the current ruling.

    And while the Supreme Court ruling provides a definition of sex in law, it offers little guidance on how this should be operationalised within multi-layered institutional settings such as universities.

    Confusion reigns

    Several higher education institutions have already attempted to pass policy that aimed to be as inclusive as possible of transgender and gender non-conforming students.

    However, one example – the University of Leicester – has faced legal action because of its trans-inclusive policies.

    As an academic working in a university as both an associate lecturer and co-director of equality, diversity, and inclusion, I have observed universities’ initial responses to these policies.

    They largely consist of confusion in the first instance, followed by lengthy engagement in various working groups with two aims – first, to follow the new, somewhat unclear policy to the letter, and second, to try to maintain or create a trans-inclusive environment.

    This is difficult because the policy simultaneously requires single-sex spaces while stating that transgender discrimination is wrong. The emergence of multiple working groups, delayed policy decisions, and divergent institutional responses speaks to the uncertainty universities are now facing – placing higher education institutions in the difficult position of balancing a newly clarified legal definition with long-standing commitments to inclusion, equality, and student welfare.

    The confusion around this ruling is likely having an impact on professional relationships between transgender and cisgender members of university communities across the UK.

    Why relationships matter

    Forming professional relationships is key for members of universities – acting as a pathway to hearing diverse voices in the university community and implementing appropriate policy.

    As a psychologist specialising in relationships between dominant and marginalised groups, I am well-versed in the evidence base for why creating an inclusive environment with supportive relationships is important.

    Rather than assessing the legal merits of the decision, my focus is on how its interpretation is shaping institutional behaviour and action.

    One key part of enacting inclusive behaviour is through strengthening supportive relationships between members of the university community. Supportive relationships are key for enhancing health by reducing stress and improving coping mechanisms – to name one important mechanism highlighted by relationships researchers such as Julianne Holt-Lunstad.

    All people experience everyday stress one way or another, whether it’s the car breaking down, the bus being late, or power outages. However, transgender people – and indeed other marginalised groups – experience additional stressors through a process called minority stress.

    In its simplest terms, this can be defined as the extraneous additional stressors experienced by the marginalised, including transphobia, specific forms of discrimination, and intentional misgendering.

    Through forging reassuring and kind relationships with transgender people, and indeed marginalised groups in general, we can create an inclusive university environment that bolsters the health of its community.

    Positive disruptors

    This is where we as academics come in – as educators, researchers, and experts. We have the power as institutions to go against the grain and say “this is not right.”

    We can dive into the evidence base – we can see that transgender and gender non-conforming people have an estimated 45 per cent suicidal ideation rate, we can see that the majority of crime is not committed by transgender and gender non-conforming people, we can see that crime estimated to be enacted toward transgender people is at twice the rate of cisgender people, or plausibly four times due to hate crime being under-reported.

    As universities we can be – to borrow a term from Julie Hulme – positive disruptors. Encouraging and enabling transgender joy is essential to creating a positive experience at university which helps improve feelings of gender congruence. We can fight this misinformed policy through our actions, we can create spaces that are safe for transgender students and staff, we can be the bastion of inclusivity and uphold what universities truly are – safe spaces for complex debates and places of learning.

    Some principles

    Considering the lack of any guidance, I have included some here which are largely based on principle.

    The first step in being a positive disruptor is through including transgender and gender non-conforming people in the policymaking of universities from staff and student populations.

    Another recommendation is ensuring that transgender and gender non-conforming people are empowered in these spaces through any necessary champions or allies that can bolster their stance and ensure their voice is heard.

    Lastly, universities should strive to make their spaces democratic and transparent to their members from all walks of life.

    These are but a few recommendations, but as foundational principles and practices they can help disrupt the status quo in a positive direction for our university communities.

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