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  • How U.S. Universities Reproduce Global Inequality

    How U.S. Universities Reproduce Global Inequality

    In the public imagination, universities are bastions of knowledge, debate, and progress. Yet beneath the veneer of research and scholarship lies a more troubling reality: many American institutions of higher education are deeply enmeshed in structures of global power, empire, and inequality. From elite research universities to sprawling public institutions, higher education in the United States not only reflects the hierarchies of the world it inhabits but actively reproduces them.

    The complicity of universities is neither incidental nor simply a matter of individual choices by administrators. As scholars have noted, the mechanisms of institutional power are deeply structural. Economic and geopolitical pressures shape research priorities, hiring practices, and funding relationships. Academic capitalism, which treats universities as competitive, profit-driven enterprises, has become the norm rather than the exception (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2022). Faculty labor is increasingly precarious, tenure-track opportunities are scarce, and institutional priorities are subordinated to external market logics. The consequences are profound: the promise of knowledge as a public good is eroded, and access is increasingly limited to those already advantaged by class, race, or geography.

    U.S. universities’ entanglement with empire is global in scope. Historical patterns of colonialism persist in the form of research agendas, partnerships, and international collaborations that favor dominant powers. The post-apartheid South African university system, for example, demonstrates how neoliberal pressures reshape higher education into corporatized, commodified institutions, constraining equity and social justice efforts (Jansen, 2024). Similarly, elite U.S. institutions reproduce intersectional inequalities, privileging white male scholars while marginalizing women and scholars from the Global South, consolidating a global hierarchy of knowledge production (Smith & Rodriguez, 2024). Knowledge itself becomes a commodity, valued not for its capacity to enlighten or empower but for its capacity to reinforce global hierarchies.

    Military and defense connections illustrate another dimension of complicity. ROTC programs, defense research contracts, and partnerships with intelligence agencies embed universities directly within state power and the machinery of imperial control. Students from working-class backgrounds may see military scholarships as pathways to mobility, yet these programs impose long-term obligations, exposure to systemic discrimination, and moral risk, binding individuals to structures that serve national and corporate interests rather than individual or public welfare (Johnson, 2024). By providing both material incentives and ideological framing, universities shape not only research and discourse but also life trajectories, often in ways that reproduce existing inequalities.

    Technological developments exacerbate these trends. The rise of artificial intelligence in global education exemplifies digital neocolonialism, where Western frameworks dominate curricula and knowledge production, marginalizing non-Western epistemologies (Lee, 2024). Universities, in adopting and disseminating these technologies, participate in global systems that enforce cultural hegemony while presenting an illusion of neutrality or progress.

    Critics argue that U.S. higher education’s complicity is most visible during crises abroad. In Venezuela, universities have hosted panels and research collaborations that echo dominant U.S. policy narratives, while largely ignoring humanitarian consequences (Higher Education Inquirer, 2025). During conflicts in Yemen and Gaza, partnerships with foreign institutions and the enforcement of donor or corporate agendas frequently coincide with silence on human rights abuses. Even when individual scholars attempt to challenge these norms, institutional pressures—funding dependencies, prestige incentives, and market logics—often constrain their capacity to act.

    The structural nature of this complicity means that reform cannot be solely individual or performative. Transparency in funding, ethical scrutiny of partnerships, and protection for dissenting voices are necessary but insufficient. Universities must critically examine their embeddedness within global systems of extraction, surveillance, and domination. They must ask whether the pursuit of prestige, rankings, or revenue aligns with the purported mission of fostering equitable knowledge production. Only through systemic, structural change can institutions move from passive complicity toward active accountability.

    The implications of these dynamics extend beyond academia. Universities train professionals, shape policy, and generate research that informs global decision-making. When they normalize inequality, silence dissent, or serve as instruments of state or corporate power, the consequences are felt in classrooms, clinics, policy offices, and across global societies. Students, researchers, and communities are both shaped by and subjected to these power structures, often in ways that perpetuate the very inequalities institutions claim to challenge.

    In exposing these patterns, recent scholarship has provided both a theoretical and empirical foundation for critique. From analyses of academic capitalism and labor precarity (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2022) to examinations of global knowledge hierarchies (Smith & Rodriguez, 2024) and digital neocolonialism (Lee, 2024), researchers have mapped the pathways through which higher education reproduces systemic inequality. By integrating these insights, scholars, students, and policymakers can begin to imagine alternatives—universities that truly serve knowledge, equity, and global justice rather than empire and market logic.

    Higher education’s promise has always been aspirational: the idea that knowledge might liberate rather than constrain, enlighten rather than exploit. Yet in the current landscape, universities often do the opposite, embedding global hierarchies within their governance, research, and pedagogical frameworks. Recognizing this complicity is the first step. Confronting it requires courage, structural awareness, and a commitment to justice that extends far beyond the walls of the academy.

    References

    • Higher Education Inquirer. (2025). Higher Education and Its Complicity in U.S. Empire. https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/11/higher-education-and-its-complicity-in.html

    • Jansen, J. (2024). The university in contemporary South Africa: Commodification, corporatisation, complicity, and crisis. Journal of Education and Society, 96, 15–34.

    • Johnson, M. (2024). The hidden costs of ROTC and military pathways. Higher Education Inquirer. https://www.highereducationinquirer.org/2025/11/the-hidden-costs-of-rotc-and-military.html

    • Lee, C. (2024). Generative AI and digital neocolonialism in global education: Towards an equitable framework. arXiv:2406.02966.

    • Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2022). Not in the Greater Good: Academic capitalism and faculty labor in higher education. Education Sciences, 12(12), 912.

    • Smith, R., & Rodriguez, L. (2024). The Howard‑Harvard Effect: Institutional reproduction of intersectional inequalities. arXiv:2402.04391.

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  • Udemy, Coursera to Merge in $2.5B Deal

    Udemy, Coursera to Merge in $2.5B Deal

    Coursera and Udemy both launched during the MOOC boom of the early 2010s.

    Allison Shelley/Complete College Photo Library

    To keep pace with advances in generative artificial intelligence technology, two big online learning companies are planning to merge in a deal valued at $2.5 billion.

    Coursera announced its plans to absorb Udemy in a news release Wednesday; both companies launched during the massive open online course provider boom of the early 2010s. Coursera, which offers a variety of courses, certifications and degrees, expects the all-stock merger to be finalized by the second half of 2026 and to generate more than $1.5 billion in annual revenue.

    Combining the two companies is also estimated to save $115 million in operating costs over the next two years and allow for sustained investment in “AI-driven platform innovation, rapid product development, and durable growth initiatives,” according to Coursera’s statement.

    Since Open AI launched ChatGPT three years ago, nearly every industry has moved to incorporate generative AI into its operations, and higher education is no exception. Although still contentious, students and faculty are increasingly using generative AI to help with research, writing and studying; a number of universities have launched campuswide AI partnerships with technology companies. In addition, learning management systems are touting their new AI capabilities, and employers say they want AI-ready graduates.

    Greg Hart, CEO of Coursera, said the companies are merging to better help learners, instructors, and enterprise, university and government customers keep up with the changes.

    “We’re at a pivotal moment in which AI is rapidly redefining the skills required for every job across every industry. Organizations and individuals around the world need a platform that is as agile as the new and emerging skills learners must master,” he said in the release. “By combining the highly complementary strengths of Coursera and Udemy, we will be in an even stronger position to address the global talent transformation opportunity, unlock a faster pace of innovation, and deliver valuable experiences and outcomes for our learners and customers.”

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  • How Excessive Phone Use Can Hinder Student Success

    How Excessive Phone Use Can Hinder Student Success

    Many of today’s college students are digital natives, having grown up in a world dominated by cellphones, the internet, social media and rapid technological advancements.

    Coming of age alongside smartphones, however, has been linked to high rates of mental health concerns among Gen Z. A 2024 brief by the National Center for Health Statistics found that half of teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17 spent four or more hours on screens per day, and those teens were more likely to experience anxiety or depression symptoms. In 2025, 32 percent of college students reported moderate or severe levels of anxiety and 37 percent said they experience moderate or severe depression, according to the Healthy Minds Study.

    As a result, more primary and secondary schools are introducing phone-free policies to improve children’s interpersonal skills and mitigate the harms of social media on their developing brains.

    At some colleges and universities, students, faculty and administrators have identified opportunities to encourage healthy device habits and promote student success.

    By the numbers: Students, in large part, are aware of their heavy device use and its potential link to poor academic outcomes.

    A fall 2025 survey by Echelon Insights found that 54 percent of U.S. students say they spend five hours or more on recreational screen time, including scrolling social media, streaming or gaming. Of those students, 18 percent say they spend over six hours on their devices doing non–coursework-related tasks.

    Another 2025 study of smartphone use surveyed students in the U.K. and found that among young adults aged 18 to 22, 73 percent spend more than four hours on their phone each day. Over three in four students also believe their smartphone negatively impacts their academic performance.

    Finding ways to unplug, however, is difficult.

    One research study from San Jose State University found that students who logged daily social media use reported a slight decrease in overall screen time over the course of a month, but simply monitoring screen time didn’t change the students’ high internet use. A Northwestern study of Americans who deactivated their Facebook account found leaving the platform did improve their mental health, but many just spent their time on other platforms rather than go offline entirely.

    DIY: A 2023 survey of college students found that over 80 percent of respondents believe colleges and universities should do more to support breaks from technology. For practitioners looking to support students who are glued to their phones, other institutions and experts offer interventions that can encourage them to disconnect from devices.

    • Encourage sleep. Excessive screen time is linked to poor health outcomes; it has been shown to disrupt students’ sleep and energy levels as well as their emotional health and cognition. First-year seminar instructors at the New York Film Academy require incoming students to complete a sleep log. Students track how many hours they sleep in a week, and the log provides a space for reflection and links healthy habits to academic and personal performance.
    • Provide tech breaks. Fluid Focus’s survey of U.K. students found that 67 percent of students struggle to disconnect while they’re at home studying; an additional 16 percent said they have trouble disconnecting “during class.” Faculty and staff can help make it possible by assigning classroom activities that don’t require a device or creating phone-free class sessions.
    • Establish phone-free environments. New York University’s president announced this fall that the university would implement device-free spaces, classes and events at campuses in New York, Shanghai and Abu Dhabi. Wyoming Catholic bans phones outright on campus; it also limits students’ internet access in the dorms to college emails and selected websites for class. Students leave their phones at the student life center and can check them out before they leave town.
    • Support student leadership. The fear of missing out can also hinder students from spending less time on their smartphones, according to U.K. survey respondents. Some colleges and universities house student clubs that promote device-free engagement.
    • Provide incentives. Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Texas at Austin evaluated how an app that rewards students for staying off their phone during class could change behaviors. They found that app users were more likely to be focused, attend class and be satisfied with their academics, but weren’t necessarily more likely to study using the time saved by staying off their phone.

    Do you have a wellness intervention that might help others promote student success? Tell us about it.

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  • Safeguarding the Integrity of College Sport

    Safeguarding the Integrity of College Sport

    In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a ban on state-authorized sports betting, opening the floodgates to an industry that dumps billions of dollars into state budgets. According to the American Gaming Association, Americans wagered $119.84 billion on sports events in 2023, up 27.5 percent from the previous year. Professional leagues attract the highest betting volumes, but gambling in college sports is growing, according to Jim Borchers, president and CEO of the U.S. Council on Athletes’ Health (USCAH) and chief medical officer for the Big 10 Conference.

    Digital platforms, gamification and prop betting are driving this boom, he says. A former Ohio State football player, Borchers argues the influx in gambling threatens the integrity of college sports and risks athletes’ mental and emotional health. Name, image and likeness payments, combined with media revenue-sharing, contribute to a new reality for college sports that is more transactional than ever, with huge sums of money flowing in and out.

    To help students and institutions respond to the new environment, USCAH developed an accreditation process mapped to the National Collegiate Athletics Association’s best practices and standards of care. USCAH launched the program in September and is already working with 40 institutions at every level of college athletics from the power four conferences (the Big 10, SEC, Big 12 and ACC) to Division III institutions.

    Gambling is now an integral part of college athletics, Borchers acknowledges, but he is hopeful the new accreditation system will guarantee that student athletes’ health isn’t lost along the way.

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    Q: In 2018, the Supreme Court ended the federal ban on sports gambling. From your vantage point, how has that changed gambling in college athletics?

    A: It’s been in the back rooms and dark corners, but I think gambling always existed, and there was always a concern around integrity in sport. But in the last five to seven years, gambling has exploded, and it’s really become part of the fabric of sport, so much so that many people consider it like a video game. It’s so easy make a wager on so many different things in sport. And it seems like it’s just a normal part of what goes on. So the technology piece of it—the predictive markets, the prop bets, the things that go beyond “is Team A going to beat Team B by a certain number of points?”—have a huge effect on the individual and that’s something that we have to take into account when we think about how this affects sport.

    Jim Borchers, president and CEO of the U.S. Council on Athletes’ Health and chief medical officer for the Big 10 Conference

    Q: Prop betting is where gambling gets more sophisticated, but also a bit wacky. How does prop betting, in particular, affect athletes?

    A: It gets really wacky because you’re betting on things that individuals may or may not do, or things that you would expect them to do in real time during the course of a game. I’ve explained it to people as: If you play a team sport and the overall objective is to play well and have your team win, you can have a good outcome. You and your coach could feel like you played pretty well. But if you didn’t meet these prop bets, all of a sudden you start seeing negativity around the way you performed, and you start thinking, “Wait, am I really doing what I should be doing?”

    How does that affect someone who’s 18 or 20 years old? It creates a whole outside amount of stress that obviously can become pretty specific for the individual. It can be very harassing. It can be malignant. It can be damaging. And I think that’s where you’ve seen a lot of the movement to try to get prop bets and predictive markets out of the sport betting market. But I just don’t think that’s realistic. The train has left the station, and we need to think of different ways to address it.

    Q: Especially because these betting companies buy TV ads during the games. Gambling is totally integrated in the college sport business. There’s just no way that you can separate them.

    A: And their number one market is males, ages 18 to 24. They give you free bets. They’re trying to create habits. Gambling, in and of itself, can be a very addictive and malignant behavior and lead to all sorts of health issues and personal issues. But there are a lot of people who don’t think anything of, “Yeah, I’ll take 20 bucks and make a few bets and see if I can hit something this weekend.” I think they see that as part of the fun of sport, rather than being invested in the sport or the game itself.

    Q: Give me some examples of the impact you’ve seen gambling have on student athletes.

    A: This whole financial marketplace now exists in college athletics—even high school athletics now has NIL payments—and so sport as a financial vehicle is growing, and these markets are growing, and that causes them stress. Young athletes are developing physically and mentally. Do we expect them to have a skill set to manage that financial stress like an adult, or the experiences and the ability to develop that skill set? I think it is misguided.

    You add into that the pressure of outside influences who now have their own financial market where they’re making these bets and providing those bets. And they can make comments to that person directly either on social media or direct messaging. It’s easy for me as a 55-year-old to say, “I’ll just turn my phone off,” but that’s not how these folks operate. It impacts their mental and emotional health, and that impacts their performance. We know athletes have to be physically, mentally and emotionally well to perform at their best.

    Q: You mentioned that these betting agencies are focusing on 18- to 24-year-old men, and I would take a guess that most of the games they’re betting on are football and men’s basketball. Is there enough discussion about this being an issue for males in particular?

    A: I don’t think there’s enough discussion at all, because the focus gets drawn away from the actual event. The other piece of it is, oftentimes, it’s peer groups that are engaging in these behaviors. It’s people that athletes see on campus or in their classes. It’s led to more isolation and more silos. College athletes feel like they have to wall themselves off from all of those parts of the college experience that are important to the overall development of a young adult.

    Look, higher education serves a lot of roles. There’s a knowledge base and building a foundation in a field of study. But there’s developing as a young adult through social interactions—being on your own for the first time and learning to engage in the community and interact with people with similar beliefs or maybe different beliefs. I think you’re seeing athletes become more isolated and unable to participate in that. In some way it’s stunting their development, and they leave college then, as young adults, without having had a lot of those experiences.

    Q: Division I sports and the big four conferences are where we see big sums of NIL payments and revenue sharing. Is gambling concentrated in those areas of college sport too?

    A: Gambling is universal. There’s a marketplace for everything. With the recent NCAA basketball issue you saw how it seeps down into schools, where people would have thought, wow, really, people are betting on these events? It’s misguided to think this is only happening at the highest level of sport. And I think it’s misguided to think that athletes themselves aren’t invested in it and doing it.

    Q: I even read a story about a bus driver who saw an athlete was limping and then capitalized on that.

    A: Yeah, information and the ability to gain information is key. You’re seeing people go to all sorts of lengths to try to find out information. And that introduces a whole different set of malignant consequences to that part of this industry. They’re trying to find out information from the individuals: people that are working with the medical staffs, as you mentioned, a bus driver. Are you a food services person? Are you doing something with athletes where you’re able to garner some information and pass that information off? And then there are the athletes themselves. If they are being approached for information and maybe think, “Well, I’m just giving an injury update on someone,” but they don’t realize the effect that’s having in the larger environment around wagering and sport.

    Q: To your point about integrity earlier, the amount of money in college athletics points to a greater question around the integrity of college athletics as a whole. Where is this all going?

    A: To me, it’s asking, “What is the purpose of sport?” Is sport, and your ability to participate in a sport and be good in sport, a financial vehicle? And if it is, what role does it play in education-based athletics? In the United States, sport is so much a part of what the community is and how people identify with an institution. But the financial markets are creating a transactional nature to it. I think most college athletes just want sport to continue to be part of their college experience, because it’s what they’ve known. They want to go to school, have a peer group and play a sport they enjoy. When it becomes a financial vehicle, there’s a whole different aspect to sport because now your efforts and what you’re doing in sport are objectively equated with a dollar amount.

    And how do we reconcile those two? It’s really challenging. Now that you have athletes in college making seven figures, they’re probably the financial engine for their families. Their purpose and why they’re there has changed. Not that sport hasn’t always been a big part of the collegiate experience, but if you’re paying somebody a million dollars or $500,000 to participate in sport, I don’t think they’re going to have much focus on any of the other reasons why they’re in college.

    Q: From my conversations with university leaders, it’s clear they’re not happy about how much money is flowing through athletics. But here we are. What can colleges do?

    A: Our most recent initiative is accreditation for athletic departments on health, safety and well-being. The other reality is I don’t know that athletic departments are complex enough to handle those and all the issues around the financial part of the business. Now there’s a whole different risk profile to sport when people are making this kind of money. I think you’re going to see more lawsuits because there’s going to be lost wages or an inability to earn income.

    We have to acknowledge that and then be very transparent about what the expectations are when people come to sport. As much as we want to say college athletics is still a relationship-driven industry where parents and their kids made an investment in going to school to play sport because they built great relationships with coaches or felt great about the institution, we’ve now allowed this transactional nature to take place. There are representatives, agents and other influences in college athletics. We have to allow it to be part of what we’re talking about every day, and thinking about as an athletic department or an institution. Unless you think of it that way, you’ll have outcomes that you’re just not prepared for.

    Q: Where did the accreditation standards come from?

    A: A group of higher education leaders asked the U.S. Council for Athletes’ Health about 18 months ago to develop an accreditation program that shows institutions are meeting best practices and standards of care based on the NCAA roadmap. We met with legal and education experts and have developed a program that focuses on ongoing self-study and assessment and education. It’s a four-year process. We’ve met with the NCAA and they acknowledge that it meets their best practice standards. We feel like accreditation is a step in the right direction because it’s something people in education understand—this is a four-year cycle, we educate people every year on these topics, we do a self-study every year, and once every four years, we do a more comprehensive self-study with an audit or an evaluation from the accrediting body, where we share our information and get feedback.

    Q: For academic accreditation, you either get access to Title IV funding or you don’t. Is there an incentive for what you’re talking about here?

    A: The incentive, in my opinion, is the risk and liability that exists if you’re not doing this. Because as somebody who sits in as an expert in cases, when there are unwanted outcomes, it’s the system failure that is the biggest issue. And it’s a reputational harm. I tell people all the time—you drop your child off at a daycare for eight hours a day. Would you drop your child off with coaches or with other people that aren’t going to meet best practices? It’s a process that you should be invested in and, if you choose not to be invested in it, that says something about what you’re doing.

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  • A Better Way to Approach Antisemitism on Campus (opinion)

    A Better Way to Approach Antisemitism on Campus (opinion)

    For humanities faculty, the past five years have felt like a relentless assault on our ability to do our jobs. We have endured COVID, generative AI, budget cuts, and bitter fights over the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s war on Gaza. At times it has been a challenge to remain human, let alone humanistic: to calm the nervous system enough to read a book, refine an argument, or show up for our colleagues and our increasingly fragile students. Now we are facing the Trump administration’s effort to gut-renovate our universities under the pretext of “combatting antisemitism.” With local enablers paving the way, that destruction may yet succeed.

    In February of this year, a few colleagues and I co-founded a group called Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff (CJFS), which now has more than 200 members on more than two dozen campuses. Our group, which is predominantly made up of academics at Massachusetts colleges and universities but includes members from across New England, is one of several such efforts nationwide that have coalesced into a new National Campus Jewish Alliance. We recognize that Jewish safety is inseparable from the safety of all people, and we work to foster academic environments that reduce antisemitism by treating educators as partners, not as suspects. I’d like to share a few examples of what this looks like in practice.

    Fearmongering Versus Tea

    As a Jewish professor of Arabic at Boston University, I mentor students with many different identities: Arab, Jewish, both or neither. After Oct. 7, 2023, I watched them struggle to metabolize the horrors in Israel and Gaza. They identified with various “sides” of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; what they shared was a sense of helplessness and a hunger for facts and insights beyond those found on Instagram. They needed contact with solid reading material, with trusted adults and, above all, with each other. My colleagues and I were in pain too. By mid-October, a few of us began meeting to discuss how to nurture a respectful and humane campus climate for ourselves and our students.

    As we looked around for helpful approaches, we noticed one very unhelpful one: Keep people constantly triggered so their brains can’t process new information or perspectives.

    Instead of trying to lower the temperature after Oct. 7, one influential institution on our campus immediately began stoking fear of antisemitism. On Oct. 18, they sent out an email telling students to record and report all instances of “antisemitism and anti-Zionism.” They encouraged students to submit videos and screenshots of their classmates. They conflated antisemitism and anti-Zionism, strongly implying that criticism of Israel’s government threatened the identity and even the safety of Jewish students at BU. They ignored the inconvenient facts that a great proportion of anti-Zionists at BU are Jewish and that nationwide, plenty of Israel supporters are antisemitic. Even worse than this bad-faith conceptual stew was the subtext. We know you’re scared. We know you feel everyone hates you. Although this university has 4,000 Jewish undergraduates, you’re basically alone and unsafe here. But don’t worry; we have your back. This gaslighting maneuver only stoked the anxieties it purported to calm.

    What my colleagues and I did instead was much smaller in scale. Four tenured humanities professors (all moms, as it happened) started gathering students for tea. We chose to work together because we did not agree about what was happening or should happen in the Middle East, but we respected and liked each other. Each of us personally invited a few students, for a total of about 12 per gathering. This was not an advertised event but a series of private teas. My colleagues brought concerned Muslim and Arab students, liberal Zionist students, and eventually some leaders of BU Students for Israel and the Hillel. I invited Arabic learners from various backgrounds and some pro-Palestinian students I knew, including some leaders of Students for Justice in Palestine. (Others, who had been doxxed, were scared to come.) We brought substantial and slightly awkward snacks, things like pistachios, clementines and pomegranates to keep people’s hands busy. We sat around in armchairs, more conversation circle than summit meeting. And we made one ground rule: For these 90 minutes you can’t talk about the region, which we can’t fix, but only the BU campus, which we share.

    When we passed a timer around the room, giving every student and faculty member 60 seconds to say what was on their minds, everyone heard at least one thing they didn’t expect. One male Jewish student who sometimes wore a kippah and sometimes didn’t told of how differently people looked at him in those two situations. The Muslim women—hijab-wearing or not—understood. As trust grew, students felt comfortable asking each other questions like, “Why do people tear down posters of Israeli hostages?” or “Why did your group blast disco music over our die-in?”

    The last tea occasioned two tiny breakthroughs. One student suggested BU’s “Jewish trustees and donors” were blocking the student movement to divest from Israel. Really? Together we checked the website: In fact, two of our most senior trustees are Arab. The student was taken aback, changing her view without ever being accused of antisemitic bias; everyone learned something. Later, a Palestinian student asked a pro-Israel Jewish student what the word “Zionism” meant to him. He began defining it, starting with “the right of the Jews to have self-determination in their ancestral homeland, Eretz Yisrael.” As she looked confused, he blushed and stammered, using more Hebrew words she didn’t understand. Finally he stopped: “I’m sorry, I’ve never had to explain this before. I’ve always been in Jewish schools or camps or Hillel or places where everyone just understood what Zionism means.” The conversation moved on. The next day he and his roommate came to my office to worry that he had not “represented his side” well enough; we talked for an hour; I assured him that he represented only himself, a student trying to learn and figure out what he believed. I doubt his politics changed, but the moment of aporia made everyone more human. When CJFS organized a Freedom Seder the next April, both he and his roommate came.

    Administrators have asked us how to scale up this effort. My long-term hope is to train students and colleagues to be peer educators in their own networks. But it would need to start small, with faculty and staff who trust each other. There are no shortcuts.

    Policing Versus Conversing

    Such efforts may soon be complicated by a harmful state-level effort by the politicians and legacy Jewish groups who make up the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism, which was established by the state legislature in 2024 and has been touted as a model for other states.

    The Commission furthers a nationwide plan to advance a program of what is fair to describe as “Don’t Say Palestine” policies. It aligns with the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) state-by-state Jewish Policy Index, which calls for such commissions, and follows the exact playbook of the Israel advocacy group ICAN (the Israeli-American Civic Action Network), which aims to bring hyperlocal pro-Israel advocacy to cities, towns and school boards, especially in blue states. A Massachusetts state senator has praised ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt for encouraging the establishment of the commission; ICAN has boasted of its influence on the process.

    One reason our group, Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff, has grown so fast is that everyone can see the Trump administration weaponizing antisemitism to attack universities and degrade civil rights. But another reason is anger at this state-level commission right here in our beloved Massachusetts, which has taken its eye off actual antisemitism and focused instead on policing discourse about Israel.

    The Commission conflates Jewishness with Zionism, pushing the incoherent and dangerously vague International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism and other sloppy ideas. But a deeper problem is its punitive approach, which focuses on policing a boundary of what is and isn’t antisemitic. In its 13 months of hearings, the Commission has modeled the punitive approach by attacking educators, publicly haranguing the (Jewish) president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) for two hours last February over some materials on an MTA website. In its final report, released in November, the Commission aims to institutionalize the punitive approach by creating a mechanism through which members of the public can report “problematic curriculum” in K-12 schools, as well as an anonymous reporting system for suspected acts of bias in K-12 schools “which may not rise to the level of a hate crime.” If adopted in any city or town, these measures will create an unpedagogical climate where teachers are afraid to teach and students hesitate to speak up in class: No one wants to be reported as an antisemite, even if the charge is disproven later. At best, such a climate will only drive anti-Jewish bias underground; at worst, because schoolchildren and college students are sensitive to hypocrisy, it will spark resentment and feed an anti-Jewish backlash. Several Concerned Jewish colleagues have written movingly on this commission’s dangers; CJFS has released a Shadow Report detailing its faulty assumptions and missteps.

    The question is what to do instead. What is a humane, pedagogical response to rising tensions and the ambient normalization of bigotry in all forms? Again, learning can happen only in an environment of respect and trust.

    Let’s take an example of casual classroom antisemitism. In March 2024, my Core Curriculum class was reading Foucault and discussing the Panopticon surveillance regime. When the talk turned to Internet culture and public discomfort with social media, one normally tuned-out student suddenly piped up: “The Jews want to ban TikTok. They’re against its pro-Palestine content.” The Jews. Because we all automatically love Israel and hate free speech? Luckily, I was the teacher; I could explain why it was incorrect to say some entity called “the Jews” either wanted or were able to control social media. I could cite a 2020 Pew research poll saying 41 percent of Jewish Americans are emotionally unattached or weakly attached to Israel. (Among secular Jews, that figure is 67 percent.) I could point out that the great majority of Israel’s U.S. supporters are not Jewish at all: One Evangelical lobby group, Christians United for Israel, claims ten million members, 2.5 million more than the total number of Jews in America. If this discussion happened today, I could cite a survey from The Washington Post finding that about 4 in 10 American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. And because I feel safe in my classroom—because my university does not endorse the conflation of Jewishness with Zionism—I could personally vouch that many Jewish people disavow nationalism altogether.

    Now, let me share an example of misperceived classroom antisemitism from my 40-person general education course, War in Arabic Literature and Film. The course confronts some difficult material set in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine. We learn how war can harden sectarian identifications and gender roles. We read some American and Israeli authors as sidelights. We do a lot of social-emotional scaffolding and role-taking; students sit in small discussion groups, and I collect exit notes.

    One student, a self-described “proud Zionist,” was a wonderful presence in the course’s fall 2024 first run. But one day she was crying after class, and her exit note said: “I loved this course and was about to recommend it to all my Jewish friends, but now I can’t, because I feel today’s discussion was antisemitic.” That day’s session had focused on Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, a stunning Israeli film about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, paired with a student presentation on Edward Said’s classic essay, “Permission to Narrate.” (Incidentally, Waltz violates the IHRA definition of antisemitism, comparing the Sabra and Shatila massacre to Auschwitz.)

    I caught up with my student and we talked for an hour in the street and in my office. Raised to sincerely experience criticism of Israel as antisemitic, she felt hurt by the student presentation. I did not try to tell her about Edward Said’s humanistic outlook, deep empathy for Jewish victims of the Holocaust, or anything else. Instead, trusting her seriousness and troubled by her distress, I suggested: What if she was upset not by the reading material, but by the frame? Would she have preferred me to assign the Said essay as a primary source to analyze rather than an authoritative secondary source for a presentation? She said yes, that would be different. I offered to revisit that part of my syllabus the following year, empowering students to talk back to Said if they wished. She contributed enthusiastically to class for the rest of the semester.

    I am so grateful that this brave young woman shared her concerns with me rather than running to a dean, a “problematic curriculum” hotline, or a politico-religious organization, as students are being urged to do. By talking to each other honestly like intelligent adults, we both learned something.

    These experiences have convinced me that policing “antisemitic” speech about Israel is not only unjust but deeply counterproductive: it breeds suspicion between well-meaning people, making it harder for us to unite when genuine neo-Nazism rears its head. You can’t stamp out antisemitism, fear of Palestinians, or any other prejudice; only slow heart-changing conversations can melt it away. So, to foster a campus climate of real inclusion, we need to convene and converse, not record and report. The details are tricky, but teachers and students can figure them out together. Our administrations and governments just have to give us the respect, job security and academic freedom to do so.

    Margaret Litvin is an associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University and a co-founder of Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff.

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  • The civic university movement at an inflection point: reflecting on the National Civic Impact Accelerator’s legacy

    The civic university movement at an inflection point: reflecting on the National Civic Impact Accelerator’s legacy

    This blog was kindly authored by Adam Leach, Programme Director and John Fell, Policy and Partnerships Manager, at the National Civic Impact Accelerator at Sheffield Hallam University.

    As the National Civic Impact Accelerator (NCIA) programme concludes this month, we find ourselves at a critical juncture for the civic university movement. After three years of intensive work gathering evidence, developing tools, and supporting universities to deepen their civic engagement, we have learnt a profound lesson: no single formula produces civic university success, but there are proven waypoints that can guide institutions through challenging terrain.

    The timing could not be more important

    The conclusion of the NCIA arrives at a moment of acute tension. On one hand, the Secretary of State for Education has made civic engagement one of her five top priorities for higher education reform. Bridget Phillipson’s November 2024 letter to university leaders was unequivocal: institutions must:

    play a full part in both civic engagement, ensuring local communities and businesses benefit fully from your work; and in regional development, working in partnership with local government and employers.

    On the other hand, many higher education institutions are facing deficit, and NCIA research has revealed the fragility of civic infrastructure within universities. Civic teams are being disbanded, staff on short-term contracts are not being renewed, and years of carefully built community partnerships are at risk. As one participant in our research observed:

    If you are sitting in rooms with leaders of councils and hospitals, for that to be a junior role is a big ask, especially if it is a junior role on a temporary contract.

    This paradox – increased civic responsibility amid deepening financial pressures – represents perhaps the most significant challenge facing the civic university movement.

    What the NCIA has delivered

    The NCIA programme, led by Sheffield Hallam University in partnership with the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE), the Institute for Community Studies, City-REDI at the University of Birmingham, and Queen Mary University of London, set out to answer a fundamental question: what works in civic engagement, for whom, and in what contexts?

    Our flagship output is the Civic Field Guide, which distils three years of evidence gathering into 14 practical waypoints organised across seven terrains: People, Place, Partnership, Policy, Practice, Purpose and Process. These waypoints emerged not from theory alone but from the generous sharing of universities across England, who were honest about both their successes and setbacks. Think of our waypoints as signs on a coastal path – they help you understand where you are and what direction you are heading, but they do not walk the path for you.

    Each waypoint addresses critical challenges. One focuses on embedding civic engagement as a core university mission, rather than leaving it to a few passionate individuals – what we call the ‘passion trap’. Another waypoint explores measuring civic impact through both quantitative metrics and qualitative narratives, recognising that numbers alone cannot capture how civic initiatives transform real lives. A third encourages universities to position communities as equal partners through co-design and lived experience, rather than as passive recipients of university expertise.

    Beyond the Field Guide, we have created a wealth of freely accessible evidence, tools and resources. Our Action Learning Programme brought together civic practitioners from across the UK. We have funded innovative civic projects testing new approaches, and we have produced a comprehensive Civic Impact Framework identifying seven domains where universities can make a difference.

    The honest answer

    After three years and significant investment, have we finally cracked civic university success? No. The legacy of the NCIA will not be our outputs and guidance, but what people do with them, and how they use them to  make changes in their places and communities. Civic work is highly place-responsive and context-specific. What succeeds in Sheffield may not work in Southampton. The power to change lies with practitioners and academics applying these insights to their unique contexts.

    Looking ahead: policy proposals for sustainability

    As the NCIA concludes, new structures are emerging to sustain the momentum. Following six years of leadership from Sheffield Hallam University, the NCCPE will steward the Civic University Network into its next phase, ensuring that NCIA resources remain accessible. The Civic 2.0 initiative establishes a consortium of UK universities with the University of Birmingham hosting a national policy hub.

    Yet sustainability requires concrete policy action at institutional, regional and national levels:

    For universities: Civic engagement must move from the margins to the core of institutional strategy. This means long-term budgets for civic teams, senior leadership accountability for delivering civic commitments, and treating community relationships as strategic assets, not expendable add-ons.

    For Government: The devolution agenda and creation of combined authorities create opportunities to embed universities as anchor institutions in regional policy frameworks. Universities should be crucial partners in regional development strategies, with dedicated funding streams for civic infrastructure.

    For funders: Research England and UK Research and Innovation should maintain dedicated civic capacity funding beyond individual programme cycles. The civic infrastructure requires sustained investment, not stop-start project funding.

    The Government’s explicit political support for universities’ civic role creates opportunities that were unimaginable a decade ago. But opportunity must translate into sustainable structures. Universities that demonstrate clear local value will have stronger voices in regional and national policy discussions and stronger support during crises.

    Keeping civic central

    The NCIA has provided navigation tools. Universities now possess comprehensive evidence about what works, practical frameworks for action, and a growing community of civic practitioners willing to share their learning. The question facing the sector is whether institutions will commit to using them despite financial pressures.

    The future of civic engagement depends on universities recognising that their purpose is about contributing meaningfully to the places they call home and the communities they serve. The civic university movement has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Now comes the hard work of keeping it there.

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  • A new model moves research in a more democratic direction – It could be faster and fairer too

    A new model moves research in a more democratic direction – It could be faster and fairer too

    Research quality is the dark matter of the university sector. It is hard enough to assess research after it has been done, research funders must find some way to evaluate proposals for projects which don’t exist yet. The established model for this is external expert review, combined with a panel stage where proposals, and their reviews are discussed, and hard choices made.

    UK researchers will be familiar with this via our own UKRI, and everyone who has had a funding application rejected will recognise that the reviews received may be partial or mis-directed. This speaks to the idiosyncrasy and variability in individual judgments of what makes a good project, and has downstream consequences for what ultimately gets funded.

    Research from the Dutch research council published last year showed what everyone suspected – two panels making the decision about the same proposals would end up funding different projects. The results were better than complete random selection, but not by much.

    The capriciousness in funding awards has even led some to propose selecting by lottery among proposals judged to be eligible – a procedure known as partial randomisation and currently being trialled by a number of funders, including the British Academy.

    Pressure

    Issues with grant review aren’t limited to variability between individual reviewers. The pressure on researchers to win funding is driving an increased number of applications, at the same time as funders report it being harder and harder to identify and recruit reviewers. One major UK funder privately reports that they have to send around 10 invitations to obtain one review. Once received, quality of reviews can be variable. Ideally the reviewer is both disinterested and expert in the topic of the proposal (two factors which are inherently in tension), but scarcity of reviewers often leaves funders forced to rely on a minority of willing reviewers. At the same time many researchers are submitting applications for funding without reciprocating by providing reviews. These same issues of peer review are similar to those that beset journal publishing, but in research funding the individual outcomes are far more consequential for careers (and budgets).

    A model of funding evaluation which promises to address at least some of these issues is distributed peer review (DPR). Under DPR, applicants for a funding scheme review each other’s proposals. It’s an idea that originated in the astronomy community, where proposals are evaluated to allocate scarce telescope time (rather than scarce funding), and it is also common for conference papers, particularly in computer science, but the application to evaluating proposals for funding is still in its infancy.

    At the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) we have a mission to support funders to become more experimental in their approach – to both use strong evidence on what can work in the funding system, but also to run experiments to generate that evidence themselves. A core member of the international consortium of 19 funders which funds RoRI is the Volkswagen Foundation, a private German funder (and completely independent of the car manufacturer).

    When they decided to trial distributed peer review, running a parallel comparison of DPR and their standard process of external review and decision by an expert panel, we were able to partner with them to provide independent scientific support for the experiment. The result is a side by side comparison of how the two processes unfolded, how long they took, how they were experienced by applicants and which proposals got funded.

    Positive expectations

    Our analysis showed that before they took part, applicants mostly had positive expectations of the process. Each proposal was assessed by both methods, and eligible to be funded if selected by either method. When the results came in, we saw some overlap between the proposals funded under DPR and by the standard panel processes. The greater number of reviews per proposal also allowed the foundation to give considerable feedback to applicants, and allowed us greater statistical insight into proposal scoring. Our analysis showed that no number of reviews would make the DPR process completely consistent (meaning we should expect different proposals to be funded if it was run again, or if it was compared to the panel process). Many applicants enjoyed the insight reviewing other proposals gave them into the funding processes, and appreciated the feedback they got (although, as you would expect this was not universal, and applicants who ended up being awarded funding were happier with the process than those who weren’t). From the foundation’s perspective it seems DPR is feasible to run, and – if run without the parallel panel stage – would allow a large reduction in the time between the application deadline and the funding award.

    It’s an incredibly rich data set, and we are delighted the foundation has committed to running – and evaluating – the DPR process over a second round. This will allow us to compare across different rounds, as well between the evaluation by DPR and by the panel process.

    DPR represents an innovation for funding evaluation, but one that builds on the fundamental principle of peer review by researchers. The innovation is to move funding evaluation in a more democratic direction, away from the ‘gatekeeping’ model of review by a small number of senior researchers who are privileged to sit on funder’s review panels. It ensures an equal distribution of reviewing work – everyone who applies has to review, and as a consequence widens and diversifies the pool of people who are reviewing funding applications. The Foundation’s experience shows that DPR can be deployed by a funder, and the risks and complaints – of unfair reviews, unfair scoring behaviour and extra work required of applicants – managed.

    Flaws and comparisons

    Ultimately, the judgement of DPR must be on how it performs against other funding evaluation processes, not on whether it is free of potential flaws. There definitely are issues with DPR, which we have tried to make clear in our short guide for funders who are interested in adopting the procedure. These include if, and how, DPR can be applied to calls of different sizes and if proposals require specialist review which is beyond the expertise of the cohort applying. A benefit of DPR is that it scales naturally (when there are more applications there are, by definition, more available applicant-reviewers). The issue of how appropriate DPR is for schemes where proposals cover very different topics is a more pressing one. It may not be right for all schemes, but DPR is a promising tool in the funding evaluation toolkit.

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  • It’s the higher education Christmas movie and TV guide 2025

    It’s the higher education Christmas movie and TV guide 2025

    There’s nothing on the telly this Christmas.

    There never is. But if, like me, you have trouble switching off from work but also enjoy being slumped in front of the box with a tub of Heroes (Quality Street are now banned in our house), I have good news.

    I’ve picked out films and TV shows released this year that either have something to say about higher education, are set on campus and/or depict contemporary student life.

    You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll shell out for a VPN, you’ll wonder why Disney thinks Nani should abandon her sister for college, and you’ll almost certainly switch off, which is what the break is for – eventually.

    Other than the fantastic but final season of Big Boys, it really was slim pickings again this year from a UK perspective – which reminds us that whatever else the BBC, ITV and C4 are doing, it’s not higher education.

    Before you take to the comments, I’ve not put in books or podcasts. I do enough reading in this job, and I edit ours, so my appetite for either is fairly thin – but do pop suggestions below if there are any.

    You’re welcome – and apologies in advance if you’re at work over the next couple of weeks.

    Julia Roberts heads to Yale (sort of – it’s actually filmed in Cambridge but set in New Haven) as a philosophy professor whose star student accuses her colleague of sexual misconduct. If you enjoyed the discomfort of Cate Blanchett in “Tár” but wished it had more Ivy League networking and dialogue about whether university should be a “safe space” or not, this is your Boxing Day sorted. Roberts delivers a line about education being meant to make you uncomfortable, not a “lukewarm bath”. Arif Ahmed will be thrilled.

    Guillermo del Toro got his passion project made, and it’s a meditation on academic hubris. Oscar Isaac plays Victor as the ultimate postdoc gone wrong – brilliant, egotistical, and convinced his research will change the world. The university scenes feature actual professors listed in the credits, though they don’t seem to have undertaken that optional supervisor training. Jacob Elordi brings surprising depth to the Creature, who arguably just needed better student support services.

    This documentary about the 1988 Gallaudet University protests is the year’s essential viewing for anyone who thinks student activism doesn’t achieve anything. Directed by Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim, it shows how four students shut down their campus and changed history, forcing the appointment of the university’s first deaf president. The board chair who supposedly said “Deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world” will have you chanting “Deaf Power!” from your sofa.

    If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if someone tried to remake The Sopranos but set it in a Turkish university’s literature department, Bir Zamanlar İstanbul will be right up your street. Ali and Seher – a final-year Turkish Literature student and journalism student respectively – meet during a campus debate on whether crime is driven by society or personal choice, and the series quickly turns into a mafia thriller. It’s another one of those shows that casts 35-year-olds as undergraduates, but at least the debate scene offers a rare glimpse of Turkish academic culture before everyone starts shooting at each other. And just under the surface there’s some fascinating “western culture” v traditional Islamic values themes to get into too.

    Where did all the campus high-jinks go? It’s sign of the time that so many titles on this list are bleak – this Spanish show follows 18-year-old Javi as he navigates university after personal tragedy, and shows students dealing with grief, anxiety, and the pressure to experience the perfect university experience. The six half-hour episodes are eminently bingeable and capture the forced intimacy that comes from being thrown together with strangers who you’re told will be friends for life, but in reality are barely friends for the whole of freshers.

    Leo Woodall plays Edward Brooks, a Cambridge PhD student whose work on prime numbers could apparently unlock every computer in the world, which would be quite the REF impact if true. The eight-episode thriller sees him team up with an NSA agent after his supervisor dies under suspicious circumstances, and it’s very much The Imitation Game meets Good Will Hunting but with added paranoia about research security. Shot on location in Cambridge, critics moaned about its “uneven pacing” and “leaden dialogue,” which does suggest the writers have captured the authentic Cambridge tutorial experience.

    French singer Nolwenn Leroy stars as Fanny, a biologist who returns to teach at the University of Rennes’s biological field station at Paimpont (fictionalised as the “University of Brocéliande”) twenty years after her best friend disappeared and she was the prime suspect. When history repeats itself with another disappearance, we get six episodes of Gallic noir. The series was shot entirely on location at the real university and in the mystical Brocéliande forest, giving us gorgeous establishing shots of campus buildings. It’s particularly refreshing to see academic staff portrayed as accomplished professionals rather than the usual depiction of hapless eccentrics, though the murder rate does suggest their risk assessments need work.

    This is a reboot of the cult Russian sitcom “Univer” that brings five freshmen to Moscow State University’s legendary 510th dormitory block, where returning characters like rector Pavel Zuev try to make MVGU “the best university in the country”. The new students are proper Gen Z types who understand TikTok but not why they need to attend lectures, while dealing with the usual comedy of errors that comes from communal living. It’s basically Fresh Meat for the Soviet education system, and comes with the side plot dish of a wealthy student sponsor opening a dumpling restaurant on campus.

    Muriel Robin plays Louise Arbus, a psycho-criminology professor who solves murders with the help of four carefully selected students. Now in its second full season with new episodes in 2025, it’s like How to Get Away with Murder but only with more wine and fewer actual murders. The students function as a kind of Greek chorus explaining criminology concepts while their professor employs what I’ll describe here as questionable methods. Lots of vintage Volkswagens to look at too.

    It’s a Disney remake nobody wanted, but it puts Nani’s dilemma into policy reality. Her marine biology scholarship becomes the story of care work squeezing out opportunity. The ending has her heading off to university, while Lilo stays with Tūtū as her guardian. Higher education only looks like a choice when someone else is there to pick up the unpaid labour.

    If you’ve been missing the “American discovers themselves at Oxbridge” genre since Saltburn, here’s Sofia Carson learning about poetry and terminal illness. Her performance has been universally panned as “stiff” – one reviewer called her and her co-star “beautiful looking puppets going through motions” – but the film does feature that hidden church in Amsterdam if you’re planning a European city break. The student-supervisor romance is romanticised in ways that feel quite dated these days, and the idea that American students would be treated like a novelty at Oxford suggests the writers have never visited.

    The superhero university returns with our protagonists now framed as terrorists while the actual villain becomes dean. For me at least, it’s a fun satire of how university leaders someone chuck their own students under the bus. The handling of actor Chance Perdomo’s death (his character dies from the neurological toll of his powers) is genuinely moving, and the new villain Dean Cipher is basically every smooth talking university manager you’ve ever met, but with better hair.

    Eva Victor off of TikTok makes her directorial debut with this fractured narrative about a professor dealing with trauma. Shot in Ipswich, Massachusetts, it’s been doing the festival circuit and dividing audiences who either find it “nuanced and brilliant” or “self-pitying mumblecore.” I just thought it was boring.

    The final season of Jack Rooke’s masterpiece begins with the gang on holiday in Faliraki before returning to Brent Uni for their terrifying final year. It’s easily both the funniest and most devastating thing on television, dealing with Danny’s mental health crisis and Jack’s Princess Diana poetry with equal sincerity. If you don’t cry at the ending, you will need to check you still have a pulse. Jon Pointing deserves awards for his portrayal of male depression, and the show remains the gold standard for depicting that specific third-year feeling of everything ending before it’s begun.

    Odessa A’zion (who’s apparently going to be massive) plays a scholarship student facing expulsion after her father’s death, who deals with it by pool-hopping through Chicago’s wealthy suburbs instead of attending her make-or-break meeting. It’s “The Breakfast Club” meets “Booksmart” meets class warfare, with a healthy dose of Malort (if you know, you know). The film captures the emptiness of a campus over the summer – no catering open and the wrong kind of quiet…

    A French philosophy student navigates her Muslim faith, her emerging lesbian identity, and the commute between the Parisian banlieue and the Sorbonne. Based on Fatima Daas’s autobiographical novel, it’s been doing the festival circuit to acclaim, though reviews get it right when they say the pacing is “deliberately contemplative” (nothing happens for ages). Stick with it for some thoughtful A&P parallels – the university serves as both escape and alienation, a place where she can be herself but never quite belong.

    Netflix threw a lot of money at this Japanese series about a college drummer recruited by the “Amadeus of Rock” for his new band. Takeru Satoh learned to actually sing and play guitar for the role, the campus (actually a private management uni in Tokyo) looks amazing and the music slaps. The romance subplot is however dire, not least because the male band members have better chemistry with each other than with the female lead.

    Amazon’s take on the 2022 University of Idaho murders focuses on the victims rather than the killer (still on trial when released) – which is fine, but makes for an oddly unfinished documentary. The interviews with the Dean of Students show a management completely overwhelmed by the media circus, while the exploration of how TikTok sleuths made everything worse should be mandatory viewing for anyone teaching crisis communications.

    George Clooney produced this documentary about decades of sexual abuse by team doctor Richard Strauss and the wrestling coaches who allegedly knew. It’s harrowing viewing – a real lesson in how institutional harbouring works – and multiple reviewers single out current congressman Jim Jordan’s alleged complicity, making this essential context for American politics watchers.

    Season 2 of South Africa’s answer to “Euphoria” has more chaos in the Pantera residence. Four young women navigate koshuis culture, drug dealing to pay fees, and the casual trauma of South African university life. It’s dedicated to the late rapper Angie Oeh and features enough Afrikaans slang to make subtitles essential even for Dutch speakers. The show’s frank depiction of everything from abortion to assault has made it a massive hit on Showmax while horrifying conservative viewers, which is usually a good sign.

    It’s a merger! Due to budget cuts, a university merges its engineering department with its modelling department, forcing computer science students to share space with fashion students. The protagonist, Ju Yeon San, is a brilliant coder who treats human emotion like buggy software that needs fixing. When campus celebrity Kang Min Hak – famous from a dating show but unable to operate a laptop – accidentally destroys her computer, he becomes the test subject for her new AI dating programme, LOVE.exe. A cautionary tale for those engaged in wedging modules together to create “interdisciplinary” programmes.

    The Dutch have made a #MeToo university drama, focusing on a young lawyer forced to re-examine her “consensual” relationship with her thesis supervisor when he’s accused of abuse by current students. Based loosely on real University of Amsterdam scandals, it features a charismatic predator (Fedja van Huêt is terrifyingly good) and asks uncomfortable questions about power and consent.

    Benito Skinner (of TikTok fame) created this series about a closeted freshman football player desperately trying to maintain his facade. Filmed in Toronto pretending to be America, featuring actors who are clearly 30 pretending to be 18, it nonetheless captures something real about the exhausting performance of identity that university demands. Reviews praise its “chaotic energy” and “intentionally unlikeable characters” – it certainly reminded me of those lads lads in the sports clubs that roam around in jackets.

    A mockumentary that follows a struggling junior college cheerleading team in Oklahoma. Kristin Chenoweth plays an assistant coach with aggressively toxic positivity, while the rest of the cast nail a specific community college/clearing energy of “we’re all here because we couldn’t get in anywhere else.” Wholesome chaos.

    Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut adapts the memoir of a competitive swimmer turned writer navigating trauma through a non-linear narrative. Jim Belushi plays Ken Kesey running a writing workshop, and reviews are divided between “visionary” and “pretentious,” with one critic comparing it to “watching someone’s therapy session through a kaleidoscope.” It took them 10 years to finish it, and it very much felt like a decade watching it.

    A soapy “vertical” (watch it on your phone Grandad) mini-series that dives into the high-stakes, exclusionary world of elite university Greek Life. The plot follows a student at a top-tier university who becomes entangled in a volatile love triangle, struggling to balance a relationship with her boyfriend while maintaining a secret affair with a fraternity president. Starring K-Ledani, Amalie Vein, and Ellen Dadasyan, the show explores the social stratification of campus culture, where maintaining one’s reputation in the “elite social scene” often comes at the cost of personal integrity. Ideal for a hangover.

    Fees! An Indonesian student accepts a polygamous marriage to fund her Korean study abroad dreams. It’s based on a hit novel and was the first Indonesian film shot on location in Korea, combining K-drama aesthetics with conservative Islamic values. The student finance crisis that drives the plot feels painfully real even if the solution doesn’t.

    This documentary follows tech millionaire Bryan Johnson as he spends $2 million a year trying to reverse aging. The contrast between his son preparing for university naturally while Bryan frantically tries to reclaim his youth through supplements and plasma exchanges is weirdly poignant. Academics from Harvard and Birmingham pop up to point out the obvious flaws in his methodology while he ignores them, making this basically a film about the dangers of having too much money and not enough peer review.

    Student protests

    If you’re in the mood for student protest cinema, 2025 has a clutch. As Quatro Estações da Juventude (Four seasons of youth) spent a decade documenting Brazilian students fighting to keep their university funded while completing their degrees, creating an archive of a generation that refused to give up. Inner blooming springs captures Georgian students at Tbilisi State University moving between lecture halls and tear gas during the Foreign Agents law protests, with the director as part of the friend group being filmed, blurring the line between documentation and participation.

    And Wake up, Serbia! gains exclusive access inside Belgrade’s University of Dramatic Arts during the student uprising, showing how the campus became the nerve centre of resistance against authoritarianism. All three refuse to romanticise protest – they show the exhaustion, the infighting, the way movements fragment when the cameras leave, and the specific courage required when your education becomes inseparable from your politics.

    This Finnish documentary deserves more attention than it’s getting. An Australian neurodivergent man called Andrew Clutterbuck appears in Helsinki and somehow becomes the darling of Aalto University’s innovation ecosystem. They love him when he’s being disruptive and bringing that “entrepreneurial energy” that the strategic plan talks about. Then something tragic happens (the film’s coy about what), and suddenly Mr Innovation is yesterday’s news. Nine psychiatric diagnoses later, the “happiest country in the world” can’t find a bed for him.

    And the rest

    I’ve not had time to catch everything, obviously. Tiny Toons Looniversity finished with the characters getting degrees in “Toonery” from ACME Looniversity [insert Mickey Mouse degrees joke here]. Night of the dead sorority babes exists and features cannibal witches running a sorority and some nudity. There’s also Shutter, where past university crimes return as literal ghosts, The family plan 2, where Mark Wahlberg’s daughter studying in London kicks off an European heist (you’ll not be hankering for Family Plan 1), and College of the dead does exactly what it says on the tin.

    Happy viewing, and if you’re struggling to stream any of these, HMU and I’ll put you in touch with Firestick Dave down the road from me 😉

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  • Students in Wales deserve better protection from Medr

    Students in Wales deserve better protection from Medr

    Medr, the new higher education regulator in Wales, carried out an initial consultation around a year ago on its regulatory system.

    It has now produced more detailed proposals in this area and is inviting consultation responses. In the proposed regulatory approach, most requirements will apply from August 2026, with some coming into force a year later.

    Medr aims to “establish minimum expectations for compliance” and to ensure ‘that non-compliance is addressed with proportionate intervention’. Despite this, on the basis of what is in the consultation documents, Medr’s proposed regulatory approach does not outline minimum expectations for compliance in relation to gender-based violence in HE.

    The regulatory condition on “staff and learner welfare” within Medr’s proposed regulatory system covers “policies, procedures and services that promote and support staff and learner wellbeing and safety”, the latter term encompassing “freedom from harms” including harassment, misconduct, violence (including sexual violence) and hate crime (all defined in Medr’s Glossary of Terms).

    But mandatory regulatory action on addressing sexual harassment, or gender-based violence more widely, is not mentioned in the proposals and any requirements for data collection are left unclear.

    Nor does it appear that Medr are planning to publish a stand-alone regulatory condition on gender-based violence or carry out independent data collection in this area. This is particularly surprising as Medr has previously requested data reporting from HEIs on policies, training, prevention activities, and definitions used in this area (in November 2024).

    The data reported to them was, they stated, going to be used (among other things) to “inform our policy and registration developments”. In the documents shared as part of the consultation, it is not clear whether or how this data has been drawn on to develop the draft regulatory strategy.

    Nor has there been any mention of a forthcoming regulatory condition on gender-based violence, and indeed it would be counter-intuitive to introduce a regulatory system now only to amend it in a year or two’s time. We have to assume, therefore, that this is the totality of Medr’s proposed regulation in this area.

    By contrast, the Office for Students in England – Medr’s regulatory sibling – has introduced a specific regulatory condition (E6) for addressing ‘harassment and sexual misconduct in higher education, in force since 1st August 2025. It has also gathered and published data to inform this approach (which both Jim and I have written about on Wonkhe).

    But from what has been published so far on Medr’s proposed regulatory approach, there will be nothing comparable to what is in place in England, let alone to stronger frameworks such as in Australia.

    This is an urgent public health issue. There are around 149,000 students in Wales. Extrapolating from these numbers using Steele et al.’s study of Oxford University – the most robust we have methodologically in the UK at present – we would expect that around 29,800 students would experience attempted or forced sexual touching or rape every year.

    This figure does not include students who may experience stalking, sexual harassment (online or offline) or non-sexual forms of intimate partner abuse – so the total number of students who experience gender-based violence would be higher than this.

    Indeed, the Crime Survey of England and Wales consistently finds that students are roughly twice as likely as other occupational group most likely to experience stalking, sexual violence and domestic abuse.

    If Medr’s proposals are implemented in a similar form to the consultation version, a two-tier system will come into force between England and Wales. Requirements will be in place for English universities to train all staff and students, prohibit staff-student intimate relationships, and implement ‘fair’ processes for handling complaints, among other provisions. In Wales, none of these provisions will be required.

    Linking up with Wales’ national strategy

    These gaps are especially surprising in the context of a strong Welsh national strategy on Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (VAWDASV), which has a lot of material that is relevant to higher education institutions.

    For example, Objective 2 is to “increase awareness in children, young people and adults of the importance of safe, equal and healthy relationships and empowering them to positive personal choices” and objective 4 is to “make early intervention and prevention a priority”.

    Overall, the strategy takes a public health approach to VAWDASV, prioritising data-driven efforts in this area.

    Unfortunately this approach is not clearly linked up with Medr’s regulatory approach. Medr’s consultation document does state that:

    To comply with this condition, providers must […] take account of other expectations such as those of Welsh Government (Annex B, p.71-2)

    However, the objectives of the national VAWDASV strategy do not appear to have informed the development of the proposed regulatory system. There is no discussion, for example, of early intervention and prevention, nor any clear route through which Medr could require HEIs to take action in this area.

    Staff and learner welfare

    As noted above, staff and learner welfare is the regulatory category that covers “harassment, misconduct, violence (including sexual violence) and hate crime”. The regulatory conditions Medr proposes are that:

    • All tertiary providers must conduct an annual staff and learner welfare self-evaluation
    • The annual staff and learner welfare self-evaluation must be approved by the providers’ governing body or equivalent

    These provisions demonstrate the reliance on self-evaluation in Medr’s approach. But Medr will not scrutinise or even see the self-assessments that are carried out by HEIs, only asking for the action plans produced as a result of these self-evaluations to be submitted to them. Medr “will only call in self-evaluations if concerns and risks are raised or identified.”

    This creates a catch-22 situation. It allows gender-based violence to remain invisible within HEIs if they choose not to collect data or self-evaluate in relation to it. The only consistent data collection in this area is the Crime Survey of England and Wales, which does not disaggregate data by institution, or allow for urgent risks to be identified, so this is not helpful for assessing an institution-level approach.

    Other than that, there is currently no mandatory data collection within or across higher education institutions in Wales relating to gender-based violence experienced by students or by staff.

    As a result, within the existing data landscape, there is no way in which concerns or risks can be raised or identified by Medr. Under the proposed regulatory system, HEIs will have discretion as to whether or not they choose to include issues relating to gender-based violence in their self-evaluation.

    If they choose not to include gender-based violence, they will be able to self-evaluate and create an action plan that does not mention this issue – and still remain compliant with Medr’s regulatory approach.

    Perhaps people can report “issues and concerns” directly to Medr? Unfortunately not. Medr states on their website that:

    We might become involved in issues with regulated institutions: which charge excess full-time undergraduate fees; which fail to comply with fee and access plan requirements; whose quality of education is inadequate; which don’t comply with the Financial Management Code; or which don’t comply with their Prevent duty.

    Gender-based violence is not included in areas in which Medr will “become involved”. Complaints made directly to Medr will not, therefore, provide any basis on which Medr will assess HEIs’ compliance on staff and learner welfare relating to gender-based violence.

    To sum up, the approach outlined in the consultation document means that cases of gender-based violence may not be visible in institutional or sector-level data. They will only emerge via survivors and activists raising issues via mainstream media or social media after failures have already occurred, as is currently being exemplified in mainstream media reporting.

    Complaints

    Often, the only way in which gender-based violence becomes visible to an institution is through complaints. The regulatory approach to complaints policies and data reporting is therefore important to scrutinise.

    Medr’s proposed condition of regulation on complaints procedures states that:

    …All providers registered with or funded by Medr must have in place a procedure for investigating complaints made by learners and former learners about an act or omission of the provider, and take reasonable steps to make the procedure known to learners.

    That’s all. There is no provision in the regulatory approach that requires such complaint processes to be demonstrated to be effective. Furthermore, the “primary source of monitoring for this condition” will be providers’ self-declaration they have met the compliance requirements.

    There is no requirement for regular review of complaints processes on the basis of feedback or information-gathering to assess their effectiveness. This is inadequate.

    There is a brief mention of the Office for the Independent Adjudicator for HE (OIAHE):

    Medr will consider data relating to complaints numbers, patterns and trends. For providers within the complaints scheme of the Office of the Independent Adjudicator, data will be sourced via the scheme.

    This is to be welcomed, especially as the OIAHE is currently consulting on its guidance for handling harassment and sexual misconduct complaints. But it is insufficient as the sole mechanisms for gathering data on complaints, and it is important to note its limitations.

    My research has demonstrated that in relation to complaints of staff-student sexual misconduct – a serious risk to student welfare and to equality of opportunity – students have been unable to access the services of the OIAHE to escalate their complaint because they are unable to complete the complaints process at their own institution.

    This leads to risk to student welfare (both those reporting and others who might be targeted by the same staff member); and reputational risks for the sector as well as individual higher education institutions, as students who are unable to gain safety or remedy by using existing complaints and regulatory structures are obliged to remain in unsafe, harmful situations (or drop out), and may turn to the media to raise awareness of their situation and protect others.

    This is a particularly urgent issue in Wales due to a recent High Court case from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (RWCMD) taken out by two students, Sydney Feder and Alyse McCamish, where the RWCMD was found to have failed in its duties to follow its own policies or to investigate issues with a reasonable duty of care. This case was unusual in that the two students who took forward this case had the resources and knowledge to do so and were willing and able to fight a six-year battle to get their case through the courts.

    Based on my research with students and staff who have reported gender-based violence to their institutions, there are many other failures from higher education institutions across the UK that could lead to similar legal challenges, but with very short time limits, insufficient legal aid, and the absence of a culture of taking legal action in the UK in this area, these cases have tended not to be taken forward.

    Student complainants should not have to go through multiple rounds of complaints process at their HEI and then the OIAHE, taking months or – more often – years, in order to access safety and remedy during their studies.

    A further issue is the need for a mechanism for students, staff, and their advocates to be able to alert the regulator to issues of serious concern with safety, where they have not been able to raise issues within complaints processes.

    For example, where a staff member is targeting students with sexualised or harassing messages, but the university are failing to stop the behaviour, leading to students being unable to safely access teaching and learning, with serious risks to student welfare. There are also potential situations where safety concerns could lead to student or staff suicide, where urgent action may be needed to prevent very serious outcomes, in line with the crucial campaign for a duty of care in UK HE by #ForThe100.

    If sufficient action is not being taken by the institution to address student/staff safety, there needs to be a mechanism via which these concerns can be escalated. There is no provision for this in current regulations.

    Reportable events

    More familiar concerns from across UK HE are also evident in the proposed regulatory system. Universities in Wales, as “exempt charities” are regulated by Medr instead of the Charity Commission.

    However – as we have previously raised as an issue in England, and as Mary Synge has outlined in detail in relation to broader legal arguments – this has led to HEIs being much more lightly regulated than the rest of the charity sector.

    In relation to in relation to safeguarding and sexual harassment/abuse, this is a particularly urgent issue. Unfortunately, the regulatory proposals embed these different standards of regulation for HEIs compared to other charities in relation to “reportable events”, i.e. incidents that the regulator needs to be informed about.

    Charity Commission guidance states that “you should report an incident if it results in, or risks, significant harm to people who come into contact with your charity through its work […or] harm to your charity’s work or reputation”.

    A related document gives examples of what to report including an allegation that a staff member has physically or sexually assaulted or neglected a beneficiary whilst under the charity’s care; or an allegation that a trustee, staff member or volunteer has been sexually assaulted by another trustee, staff member or volunteer.

    Medr’s proposed regulatory approach retains the language of “significant harm” without defining what this means, without giving examples of what to report, and without naming sexual assault or safeguarding issues. It does, however, outline a separate category of “notifiable events” that include “a matter relating to the provider’s compliance with the Prevent duty”.

    This approach – as with the Office for Students’ approach in England – is unjustifiable given the high levels of gender-based violence occurring in higher education. The regulatory approach should be amended to align with the Charity Commission guidance.

    The issues outlined in the Charity Commission guidance would constitute a serious risk to the operation of an HEI in its charitable function, and as such must be overseen by the regulator. At the very least, Medr’s regulatory approach needs to clarify what constitutes ‘significant harm’. This should include incidents that could constitute serious sexual harm.

    Furthermore, it is unclear why “notifiable events” include breaches of compliance relating to the Prevent duty, but not other legal duties such as breaches of equalities, health and safety, or safeguarding legal duties.

    Moving beyond self-regulation of HEIs

    The proposed regulatory approach states that “monitoring activity” will allow Medr to ascertain “whether providers are meeting their Conditions of Registration and/or Funding, and whether any regulatory concern or risk is emerging”.

    As the regulatory approach stands, this claim is inaccurate in relation to gender-based violence – without any data being reported to Medr in this area, or even gathered by HEIs in many cases, there is no way in which Medr will be able to assess any risks in this area.

    There can be no charitable institutions in the UK where the risks of sexual violence, exploitation and abuse are higher than in universities. Gender-based violence in higher education is a major public health concern and should also be a high priority when considering equal access to education. As such, HEIs should be subject to the most stringent regulation.

    If Medr considers that the regulatory strategy more broadly is not the right place to set out these more detailed requirements, a further regulatory condition from Medr in this area on HEIs’ responsibilities in relation to gender-based violence should be published.

    However, the Office for Students already have an explicit regulatory condition in this area and I can’t see a good reason why Medr should wait any longer before taking such a step. Either way, within this consultation document, the foundations need to be laid to enable this work to be done. The regulatory strategy proposed, as it stands, will leave the higher education sector to continue to self-regulate around issues of gender-based violence, despite evidence of high prevalence.

    A further point that should be considered in a regulatory approach is transparency. This is crucial because transparency and openness are a primary concern for students who report gender-based violence to their HEI. But HEIs are unlikely to take these steps towards transparency without the regulator requiring them to do so.

    In recognition of this need for regulators to require transparency, in a recent review for the Higher Education Authority of the Irish Government’s national framework for Ending Sexual Violence and Harassment (ESVH), the Expert Group (which I chaired) have recommended that

    Institutions publish information on ESVH work as part of their public EDI reporting, including anonymised data on formal reports and outcomes, good practice case studies, an evaluation of education and training initiatives, and other relevant data.

    This recommendation looks likely to be adopted nationally in Ireland, requiring all HEIs to take this step in the coming years. However, in the Medr regulatory strategy, “transparency, accountability and public trust” is only discussed in relation to “governance and management”.

    While Medr states more generally that they “encourage a culture of openness and transparency” this appears to only relate to reporting from HEIs to Medr – not to relationships between HEIs and their staff and student body. A fundamental shift is therefore needed in order to move towards greater transparency around institutional data reporting and actions on gender-based violence.

    Overall, Medr appear to be relying on data on gender-based violence to emerge via existing, inadequate, data sources, or to allow HEIs to choose whether and how they gather this data. Such an approach will not be effective – if you do not directly and explicitly gather data about gender-based violence, it will remain invisible, not least because those who experience even the most severe forms of gender-based violence often do not label their experiences as such.

    More generally, this approach goes against the direction of travel internationally in higher education policy in relation to gender-based violence, leaving Welsh students and staff underserved compared to their peers in England, Ireland, France, Australia, and elsewhere.

    This means that future generations of students and staff will continue to be at risk. Medr must be much bolder in order to fulfil its stated approach to regulation of “clear, enforceable rules that establish minimum expectations for compliance” in relation to gender-based violence in HE.

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  • New HEPI Debate Paper: ‘A Baker’s Dozen: Thirteen years of book reviews on higher education, 2013 to 2025’

    New HEPI Debate Paper: ‘A Baker’s Dozen: Thirteen years of book reviews on higher education, 2013 to 2025’

    Author:
    Nick Hillman

    Published:

    HEPI’s final publication of 2025 takes a timely look back to reflect on a period of profound change in higher education policy and debate.

    A Baker’s Dozen: Thirteen years of book reviews on higher education, 2013 to 2025 (HEPI Debate Paper 42), written by HEPI’s Director Nick Hillman OBE, brings together 30 book reviews published since higher undergraduate tuition fees first came into effect in 2012/13. This moment marked the beginning of an era that reshaped higher education across the UK: from the removal of student number controls to the creation of the Office for Students, with lasting consequences for the sector.

    The collection spans books by leading academics, politicians, commentators and international figures, as well as a cultural perspective from beyond the policy world. Authors reviewed include Peter Mandler, Alison Scott-Baumann, David Cameron, Wes Streeting, David Goodhart, Sam Freedman, Richard Corcoran, Ben Wildavsky and David Baddiel. Together, the reviews chart how debates about higher education, the state, students, institutions and free speech have evolved over more than a decade.

    Organised into five thematic sections, the debate paper offers both a historical record and a platform for renewed discussion. With further reform on the horizon, new leadership at the Office for Students and elections in Wales and Scotland approaching, this Debate Paper offers an important moment to consider how we arrived at the current policy landscape and how debate should develop next.

    You can read the press release and access the full debate paper here.

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