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  • Will the student protection stable door ever get closed?

    Will the student protection stable door ever get closed?

    The Office for Students (OfS) has published new polling on students’ perceptions of their providers’ response to financial challenges.

    I say new – it was actually carried out last April – but regardless of the delay, given the scale of job losses in the sector over the past year, we are very much in no shit Sherlock territory when it comes to the headlines.

    83 per cent of those polled thought that cost-cutting measures had changed the experience they felt they’d been promised – often through larger class sizes than expected, greater use of online learning, or reduced access to academic resources and student support.

    Around a quarter reported changes in support services, including services/funding offered via the SU, IT and technical support, or academic support services.

    Around two in five perceived impacts on access to academic resources and the quality of teaching, and a reduction in extracurricular activities, and 46 per cent of those polled expressed concern about the potential closure of their course or department – and nearly half were unaware of their options if that happened.

    An accompanying blog post remixes material from the new strategy, linking Ambitious, Vigilant, Collaborative and Vocal to the findings.

    Students might well ask whether “a little bit quicker than glacial” should be added to the list.

    They noticed

    Savanta conducted an online survey of 1,256 students studying at OfS-regulated universities and colleges in England, with fieldwork running 8-15 April 2025. The sample was designed with quotas on age, sex and ethnicity to match HESA data and the OfS Access and Participation dashboard, with all reported subgroup differences statistically significant at the 95 per cent confidence level and a margin of error of +/- 3 per cent.

    Just over half (52 per cent) of respondents reported noticing cost-cutting measures at their institution, with 56 per cent aware of perceived financial risks. Awareness was significantly stratified by student characteristics – older students (25+) were more likely than younger students to notice measures (58 per cent vs 48 per cent), as were postgraduates compared to undergraduates (60 per cent vs 44 per cent).

    Male students were also significantly more likely to be aware of financial risks than female students (67 per cent vs 47 per cent). Those already aware of financial risks were significantly more likely to notice measures than those not aware (62 per cent compared to 38 per cent).

    Students reported becoming aware of changes through multiple channels. Some received formal communications from their providers:

    The university management board sent out emails explaining various cost-cutting measures. (Undergraduate)

    Others learned through staff:

    My teachers told me about lay-offs. (Undergraduate)

    Many noticed changes through direct observation – reduced opening hours, cuts to society funding, larger classes:

    I noticed reduced hours of opening on the music studios and the library. (Undergraduate)

    I noticed the cuts in extracurricular because of my societies I was involved in, they got less funding from the university, so many activities that took place over the past few years are not happening anymore. (Postgraduate)

    For some, the changes were impossible to miss:

    It was obvious given that the previous master’s class had five students, and this one has over 50. Social media platforms also discussed it. (Postgraduate)

    Others pieced together the picture from multiple sources:

    I noticed some of these changes firsthand, such as the longer waiting times for counselling services and the reduced number of extracurricular activities. However, I was also informed about some of the cost-cutting measures through the university’s student union newsletter and social media channels, which reported on changes to IT support services and careers advising.” (Postgraduate)

    Impacts and differences

    Among students who noticed cost-cutting measures, the most commonly reported impacts related to staffing – 44 per cent observed changes to staff availability and capacity, while 40 per cent reported increased class sizes, with postgraduates significantly more likely to report the latter (44 per cent vs 35 per cent of undergraduates).

    There are fewer staff and bigger classroom sizes, and there are lots of cutbacks on IT equipment. (Postgraduate)

    Beyond the academic core, 38 per cent noticed changes to financial support availability, and 93 per cent of those noticing any measures highlighted changes to support services.

    Postgraduates were significantly more likely to notice changes to careers and employability services (24 per cent vs 15 per cent) and IT/technical support (29 per cent vs 20 per cent). Those aware of financial risks were more attuned to “indirect” measures such as changes to placements (28 per cent vs 15 per cent) and academic and pastoral support (24 per cent vs 14 per cent).

    The perceived impact was predominantly negative – 39 per cent cited a negative impact on academic resource quality, 35 per cent on extracurricular activities, and 34 per cent on teaching quality. The report notes that some of these findings were “difficult to interpret and/or implausible”, suggesting respondents may not always have been clear what the question was asking.

    A striking 83 per cent of students reported noticing a gap between the experience they believed had been promised at enrolment and the reality – with postgraduates feeling this more acutely (90 per cent vs 77 per cent of undergraduates).

    The report notes an important distinction between institutional promises and student expectations – though the question referred to institutional commitments, responses mixed unmet personal expectations with unfulfilled promises.

    Class sizes featured prominently:

    I was promised a class of 15 but now there are 25 students per class. (Undergraduate)

    Classes are much larger than expected and some courses and/or resources they promised were either cut or moved online due to budget cuts. (Undergraduate)

    The shift to online delivery was a recurring theme:

    When I enrolled, I was promised access to regular in-person lectures and state-of-the-art facilities. However, due to the budget cuts, many of my lectures were moved online. (Postgraduate)

    Many lectures were moved online permanently after the pandemic even though we were back on campus. (Postgraduate)

    Support and resources also fell short of expectations:

    The support I get as a student has reduced compared to what I was told I would get when I enrolled. (Undergraduate)

    They promised to provide us with all the learning equipment in school, but now I have to bring my own laptops. (Undergraduate)

    My university experience has differed quite a bit from what was initially promised, mainly because of some minor cost-cutting measures. When I enrolled, they promised modern facilities and extensive student support. There is limited access to academic support, and modern facilities like labs and student spaces have seen budget cuts. (Postgraduate)

    Financial pressures compounded the sense of broken promises:

    Tuition fees increased slightly, but alongside living expenses and unexpected costs, it’s a lot more than I anticipated when enrolling. (Undergraduate)

    Prices have gone up for food and accommodation, and unexpected fees for items like printing. (Undergraduate)

    The consequences for student decisions are notable – a quarter (25 per cent) said they were more likely to consider dropping out, 36 per cent were considering transferring, and 24 per cent considering deferring.

    Postgraduates were more likely to consider transferring than undergraduates (43 per cent vs 30 per cent), as were minority ethnic students compared to white students (41 per cent vs 33 per cent), and male students compared to female students (41 per cent vs 32 per cent).

    Awareness of financial risks significantly amplified these inclinations – 29 per cent of those aware were considering dropping out compared to 19 per cent of those unaware, and 43 per cent were considering transferring compared to 29 per cent.

    Preparedness and support

    Students were more likely to be unaware of what would happen should their course close than aware (48 per cent vs 44 per cent), with this lack of awareness particularly pronounced among undergraduates (53 per cent) compared to postgraduates (43 per cent), and among females (54 per cent vs 40 per cent of males).

    A majority (56 per cent) were unaware of their provider’s published student protection plans – rising to 68 per cent among undergraduates and 72 per cent among those not aware of financial risks. Males reported higher awareness of student protection plans than females (45 per cent vs 30 per cent).

    Concern about potential course or department closure sat at 46 per cent overall, with higher levels among postgraduates (59 per cent vs 34 per cent of undergraduates), those aged 25+ (64 per cent vs 36 per cent of 18-24 year olds), male students (51 per cent vs 42 per cent), and minority ethnic students (53 per cent vs 42 per cent).

    Subject differences were notable – engineering and technology students were most likely to be concerned (64 per cent vs 46 per cent average), while those studying subjects allied to medicine were among the most unconcerned (66 per cent vs 52 per cent average).

    When asked what support they would expect in a closure scenario, 61 per cent anticipated help transferring to another institution and 60 per cent expected support to complete their course. Clear guidance about available options was anticipated by 51 per cent.

    Notably, those unaware of financial risks had higher expectations of support than those who were aware – 71 per cent of those unaware expected transfer support compared to 53 per cent of those aware, and 66 per cent expected course completion support compared to 55 per cent. Females consistently had higher expectations than males across all support measures.

    On priorities for what providers should protect, 56 per cent said quality of teaching, followed by financial support options (47 per cent), student support services (47 per cent), and academic and pastoral support (39 per cent). Female and white students were more likely to prioritise teaching quality (59 per cent vs 52 per cent for male and minority ethnic students respectively).

    Minority ethnic students were distinctive in being equally likely to prioritise financial support options as teaching quality (51 per cent and 52 per cent) – the only demographic subgroup where this was the case. Those unaware of financial risks were consistently more likely to say each aspect should be prioritised than those who were aware.

    Financial hares and promises tortoises

    One way to read this – especially when it’s read in conjunction with the polling OfS published last year on awareness of rights – is that there is a material risk that to achieve savings, providers have been engaged in widespread breach of contract, effectively depending on students not understanding or feeling able to exercise their rights to pull off the changes. The respective risks have been weighed.

    The student on the Clapham Omnibus might both pose that as a hypothesis, and then ask what OfS has done about that serious risk to the student interest. I expect they’d find the relative focus on phonecalls to VC on their financial sustainability with occasional opinion-polled snapshots of the sort here a disturbing comparison for a “student, not provider” interests regulator.

    It’s never unhelpful to have this sort of stuff written down – and if OfS feels it needs to prove (as with its reasonable adjustments and student rights research) that what student leaders have been telling it through panels and its “student debrief” events is true via polling, so be it.

    But notwithstanding the “jam tomorrow” in the blog on what will now be done with the results, there are important questions surrounding priorities, pace and the idea of the student interest during a period of significant cuts.

    I could go back further than this, but a Susan Lapworth board paper from 2019 (then Director of Regulation, now outgoing CEO) identified almost identical concerns – and acknowledged that the regulator’s existing tools were insufficient to address them.

    The paper noted that “students are not clear about what they are buying, in terms of quality, contact time, support, and so on” and that “students’ consumer protection rights are not enforced when what they have been promised, in terms of quality, contact time, support, and so on, is not delivered.”

    It explicitly framed the outcomes the OfS should be seeking in terms of student expectations being met – that teaching quality, contact time, academic support, learning resources and financial support should all be “appropriate and as they had expected.” Six years later, 83 per cent of students report a gap between what they believed they had been promised and the reality.

    The 2019 paper also raised concerns about the burden of enforcement falling on individual students, questioning “whether a model that relies primarily on individual students challenging a provider for a breach of contract places a burden on students in an undesirable way.” It acknowledged that “the contractual relationship between students and providers is unequal” and that “it is not easy for students to identify instances where they have not received the service they were promised and to seek redress.”

    The paper proposed developing new work to address the failings that appears never to have manifested – and the 2025 survey finds a majority of students unaware of student protection plans, and significant proportions now considering dropping out, transferring or deferring as a direct consequence of the gap between expectation and experience.

    Promises, promises

    Even if we put our fingers in our ears over the pandemic, if forward to 2024 and 2025, John Blake’s work on “the student interest” was surfacing identical themes. In a speech to the SUs Membership Services Conference in August 2024, he acknowledged that OfS still has “challenges delivering that centrality of student interest” and that “students have not always felt the confidence in our regulation that they should.” He was explicit about what students were telling him:

    They tell us they are not getting the teaching hours they were promised, they tell us their work is not marked and support offered in a timely fashion, they tell us they don’t have the time resources and opportunities to get involved in the extracurricular activities so prominently featured in the prospectus and crucially, students tell us frequently that if they are unhappy about any of these things too often, their university or college does not respond speedily and effectively.

    Research then published by OfS in February 2025 reinforced the findings – 28 per cent of undergraduates felt contact hours had been insufficient, 32 per cent had issues with how their course was taught, and 40 per cent said financial support was one of the three biggest influences on their success.

    On both teaching and learning and accommodation, mental health support, and the cost of living, students reported consistent shortfalls. Yet the research also highlighted that students feel powerless to seek redress when promises are broken:

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

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

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

    The 2025 Savanta survey – along with the work it out in December on student awareness of rights – puts numbers to this picture. 83 per cent noticing a gap between promise and reality, a majority unaware of student protection plans, and significant proportions considering dropping out, transferring or deferring. The regulator has known what the problems are for some time.

    Surprise, surprise

    OfS’ own financial sustainability reporting makes clear that the sector’s response to financial pressure is directly affecting students. Its May 2025 report documented a third consecutive year of declining surpluses and liquidity, with modelling suggesting that without mitigating action, up to 200 providers could be in deficit by 2027-28.

    Roundtable discussions with finance directors revealed how providers were responding – providers acknowledged they had “a limited ability to continue to cut costs and maintain value for money for students”, with some having to consider “course closures” and “rationalisation”.

    The report also noted that “students appear to be less prepared for higher education than previously”, resulting in “increasing attrition rates and the need for greater ongoing pastoral support” – support that “often has significant cost implications, requiring specialist trained staff resource.”

    Last March, students told OfS exactly what the survey would later find. OfS it was “at this very early stage of the project” to understand the impact of financial challenges on students, and wanted student “insight and advice” to “shape up the things that we might look at.”

    Libraries had been “cut down” with “reduced hours” – with one student noting they were “unable to use the building after 5pm including the library” meaning “students on placement are heavily affected.” There had been a “reduction in support services and support staff”, with “staffing being pared back to the bare minimum” and classes being cancelled outright.

    The impact on remaining staff was palpable – “less passionate than they used to be, some of the cuts impacting their morale” – resulting in “delay in responding to student queries” and “customer service not as good for students.” Students reported a “reduction in tests for neurodivergent students”, changes to “extension and deferral policies” meaning students were “no longer able to get extensions and deferrals”, and disruptive “changes in supervisors.”

    One student simply noted their “course is now totally different to when I came.” Perhaps most tellingly, students said they were “unable to raise issues” because “staff saying that it’s out of their hands.”

    OfS promised that “your input today will be used to shape our approach to protecting students in the face of University and college cutbacks” and that:

    “this isn’t just an exercise that we will do now and think is really interesting… we will be looking at these and seeing what we can do and we will feedback what we’ve done at a future debrief event.

    You might have thought that almost a year on, another student event on consumer rights would have been a good time to feedback on what was done. Not so much.

    Students on the call were told that OfS would be working on some “real steps” towards meaningfully strengthening student protections – a consultation on changes to the regulatory framework in Easter.

    With time to feed in and the usual months of delay between consultation close and publication, plus some time to make changes, we’re probably looking at 2028.

    Worse – even on issues OfS has previously been clear about – attendees got vague. Asked whether students were entitled to refunds over strike action, the answer was:

    I’m going to not answer that right now because you may know that there is a test case in the courts, by UCL students, about this very issue. Um, so I’m going to wait for the outcome of that.

    Can we imagine Arif Ahmed giving a similar response in the context of Sussex’s judicial review of its fines last year? We cannot.

    I have written a lot of articles on these issues since OfS’ inception. Every so often OfS announces progress, an intention to act, a new way to frame the issues or whatever. Now and again, I get optimistic. But real action has been thin – there’s only so many broken promises before it’s reasonable to conclude that nothing will ever change.

    The time that students really do need protection is not when the sun is shining – it’s when the cuts are on. It is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that OfS is waiting for the financial sustainability horse to fully bolt before it even gets close to closing the student protection stable door.

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  • Florida Now Accepting Public Comment on H-1B Visa Hiring Ban

    Florida Now Accepting Public Comment on H-1B Visa Hiring Ban

    Florida took another step Thursday toward banning all its public universities from hiring foreign workers on H-1B visas.

    The committee of the state university system’s Board of Governors will now take public comments for two weeks on a proposed prohibition on hiring any new employees on H-1Bs through Jan. 5 of next year. The vote from a committee to further the proposal was a voice vote, with no nays heard from any committee member. The proposal will come back to the full board for a vote after the public comment period ends.

    If enacted, Florida would become the second state to ban the use of H-1B visas at public universities. Texas governor Greg Abbott announced a one-year freeze earlier this week—a move that prompted pushback from faculty.

    The state bans come after President Trump placed a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa applications in September (international workers who are already legal residents aren’t required to pay the fee). The next month, Florida governor Ron DeSantis ordered the state’s universities to “pull the plug on the use of these H-1B visas.” Fourteen of the Board of Governors’ 17 members are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate.

    DeSantis complained about professors coming from China, “supposed Palestine” and elsewhere. He added that “we need to make sure our citizens here in Florida are first in line for job opportunities.”

    Universities use the program to hire faculty, doctors and researchers and argue it’s required to meet needs in health care, engineering and other specialized occupations. Some conservatives contend that the program is being abused.

    Discussion about the proposed ban lasted about 15 minutes Thursday, during which no committee member strongly advocated for the policy. Much of the time consisted of the board’s only faculty voting member and its only student voting member—neither of whom are members of the committee—reading off their objections to the move. Among their concerns: university system leaders’ plans to collect information on the H-1B program during the hiring moratorium, instead of collecting the data before making a decision.

    Kimberly Dunn, chair of the statewide Advisory Council of Faculty Senates and the faculty board representative, said institutions and the university system “rely on the H-1B process to recruit world-class talent to our institutions.”

    “Whether it is a pediatric cancer surgeon or a globally recognized researcher, these individuals directly contribute to Floridians’ health, safety and economic success,” Dunn said. “In many cases, the H-1B visa is the only viable pathway for bringing this level of expertise to our state.”

    “Limiting our ability to recruit the very best talent in the world risks undermining the excellence that has positioned our system as a national leader,” Dunn added. She said the reputational damage from the ban could outlast the yearlong moratorium.

    She urged the system to collect the data before pausing hiring new H-1B visa workers.

    Carson Dale, Florida State University’s student body president and chair of the Florida Student Association, said he believes that “American taxpayer dollars should support hiring Americans whenever possible.”

    “Where I part ways is with the mechanism chosen here,” Dale said. “This is not a neutral reform; it is a categorical restriction that determines who we are allowed to consider regardless of who is most qualified.”

    He said the prohibition undermines Florida universities’ commitment to “merit” and goes against other actions that Florida has taken, including scaling back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives because “we believed they risked interfering with merit-based selection.”

    “This regulation has the practical effect of excluding otherwise highly qualified candidates before individual merit can be assessed,” Dale said. “That matters because the labor market for advanced research talent is global.”

    He said Trump’s $100,000 fee was already implemented “to deter overuse and protect U.S. workers.” He noted Elon Musk, along with other entrepreneurs, came to the U.S. from overseas.

    “Top-tier candidates are not going to pause their careers to wait on a single state,” Dale said. “When Florida removes itself from consideration for an entire hiring cycle, those candidates accept offers elsewhere.”

    Last fiscal year, according to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services database, the federal government approved 253 H-1B visa holders to work at the University of Florida, about 110 each at Florida State University and the University of South Florida, 47 at the University of Central Florida, and smaller numbers at other public institutions.

    Ray Rodrigues, the university system’s chancellor, told the committee that if the H-1B hiring pause is approved, his office and the universities “will be studying the cost of the H-1B program as well as how the program is used by our universities, including identifying the areas where the program is currently being used and whether those areas are of strategic need.”

    He also said the study will look at whether employers have used the program to bring in employees who are “paid less than market wage.” He added that the system plans to work with universities to identify other areas that should be included in the study.

    Alan Levine, chair of the Nomination and Governance Committee, which considered the proposal, appeared to acknowledge the issues that a blunt yearlong ban on H-1B hires could cause.

    “I would encourage the universities—if an issue arises that’s unforeseen, particularly in areas like medical schools, faculty, engineering, where we have contracts with the Defense Department, things like that—where there’s issues that become an issue of concern for you, please bring those to the chancellor so that we can make a decision about how to address it,” Levine said. “We can always bring the group back together again if we need to.”

    “Certainly there are physician shortages, and there’s needs particularly in high-acuity specialties in health care and medicine, and certainly there’s issues in certain STEM areas like engineering, so it’s understood,” Levine said. “The goal here is to collect information.”

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  • The American people fact-checked their government

    The American people fact-checked their government

     

    This essay was originally published by Persuasion on Jan. 28, 2025.

    On Oct. 17, 1961, tens of thousands of Algerians marched through the streets of Paris in peaceful defiance of a discriminatory curfew imposed by the French state. Police opened fire, beat protesters, arrested them en masse — and, in some cases, threw people into the Seine, where they drowned. Historians later called it “the bloodiest act of state repression of street protest in Western Europe in modern history.” At least 48 — but possibly hundreds — were killed.

    Yet for decades, the official story minimized the violence. The death toll, it was claimed, was three. Police had acted to defend themselves. The protesters were terrorists.

    The French state actively buried the truth. Records were falsified. Evidence suppressed. Investigations blocked. Publications seized. The paper trail was shaped to match the story.

    In 1999, the French Public Prosecutor’s Office concluded that a massacre had taken place, but only in 2012 did President Hollande acknowledge it on behalf of the French Republic. This is the danger of a public sphere without a distributed capacity to challenge official accounts in real time: It is difficult to imagine that the events of Oct. 17 could have been hidden for so long if thousands of protesters and bystanders had carried smartphones, livestreamed the crackdown, and uploaded footage as the bodies hit the water.

    Paris 1961 is a historical warning. Minneapolis 2026 is its modern counterpoint.

    Within hours of the killing of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents on Jan. 24, top officials attempted to shape the narrative. They placed the blame squarely on the victim, with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem claiming that Pretti “approached” ICE officers with a gun and was killed after he “violently resisted” attempts to disarm him. White House Senior Advisor Stephen Miller called Pretti “an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.” FBI Director Kash Patel said, “You don’t have a right to break the law and incite violence.”

    In other words, Pretti supposedly posed a threat and paid the price.

    But something happened that couldn’t have happened in France in 1961. As bystander footage spread across social media, the official narrative began to collapse. Videos appeared to show a cellphone in one of Pretti’s hands and no gun in the other. Officers also appeared to remove his holstered gun — legally carried — before he was shot several times. It then emerged that Pretti was an ICU nurse with no criminal record — hardly the prototype of a terrorist.

    The official account was clearly at odds with the best available evidence. Four days after the shooting, the Trump administration is already scrambling to save face, cast blame, and “de-escalate” the ICE presence in Minnesota.

    The current obsession with misinformation tends to focus on the public: online mobs, foreign influencers, flaming trolls. But history suggests a more inconvenient truth: in times of crisis, disinformation often comes from above. Governments, including democratic ones, have powerful incentives to shape information. When a state agent shoots a citizen, the response is rarely “Let’s expose ourselves to transparency.” It is often the opposite: to control the narrative, limit scrutiny, discourage dissent, and frame the event in morally legitimizing terms.

    What should our response look like? The Pretti case offered an answer — not only through the videos, but through something else that happened almost simultaneously: the public correction of powerful figures, at scale. Within hours the statements by Miller, Noem, and Patel — and even the official @DHSgov account — had all received Community Notes on X, a platform that, ironically, has become increasingly central to the populist right and is owned by Trump ally Elon Musk.

    This is where social media performs a civic function.

    When platforms label content as “false” in a top-down fashion, many users interpret it as bias — “truth policing” by corporate gatekeepers in cahoots with governments. But the Community Notes system is different. It is crowdsourced, asking volunteers to add context and sources to misleading posts. An open-source algorithm decides which notes become visible, and, crucially, prioritizes notes that gain support from users with different political perspectives. The point is not unanimity — it’s cross-ideological agreement sufficient to clear a threshold of credibility.

    This is what makes bottom-up correction hard to dismiss as partisan censorship. It involves a distributed group of users reaching a form of consensus, often by pointing to credible reporting. It can create a positive feedback loop: journalism supplies verifiable facts; the crowd amplifies and contextualizes them; the overall information environment becomes more resilient.

    Early research into the impact of crowdsourcing is promising. Studies have found high accuracy rates for Community Notes in specific domains like COVID-19 content, and a significant share of notes cite high-quality sources.

    More broadly, crowdsourced fact checking reflects an important principle: when trust in elite institutions collapses, a purely expert-driven model may fail or even backfire. Politically diverse crowds can sometimes do what “authoritative” gatekeepers cannot: persuade skeptics that a correction is legitimate.

    Crowdsourcing is not a silver bullet. The search for a single, decisive fix for disinformation is a “modern mirage” that often serves as a pretext for giving authorities new powers they will inevitably abuse. But the promise of crowdsourcing suggests we should bet on pluralism: multiple, overlapping checks that strengthen the public’s ability to verify claims without empowering any single institution — especially the state — to control the boundaries of permissible speech. The mainstreaming of crowdsourced fact-checking across social media platforms should function as a disincentive to brazen lying by politicians and political influencers.

    In Paris in 1961, the state could suppress evidence, control archives, intimidate media, and deflect until public attention faded. In Minneapolis in 2026, video evidence traveled faster than the official storyline — and distributed networks of verification made it harder for powerful figures to rewrite reality without pushback.

    This is what a free society should aim for: not a perfect public sphere without falsehoods (which has never existed), but a public sphere with enough openness, transparency, and decentralized checking power to ensure that lies — especially from the top — cannot become the permanent record.

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  • Podcast: Demand, Disabled students, medicine

    Podcast: Demand, Disabled students, medicine

    This week on the podcast we examine what a rise in UK university applicants really tells us about the future demand for higher education.

    With UCAS reporting a 4.8 per cent increase in applications at the January deadline, driven largely by a demographic peak in 18-year-olds, we explore whether this represents a genuine resurgence in demand or a temporary population effect.

    Plus we discuss new evidence on disabled students’ experiences in higher education, including concerns that pandemic-era accessibility is being rolled back, and the implications of the Medical Training (Prioritisation) Bill — from pressure on NHS training places to uncertainty for students studying medicine abroad through UK-linked programmes.

    With Mark Leach, Editor-in-Chief, Wonkhe, Alex Stanley, Vice President for Higher Education at the National Union of Students, Dani Payne, Head of Education and Social Mobility at the Social Market Foundation, David Kernohan, Deputy Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Mark Leach, Editor-in-Chief, Wonkhe.

    You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, Deezer, RadioPublic, Podchaser, Castbox, Player FM, Stitcher, TuneIn, Luminary or via your favourite app with the RSS feed.

    On the site

    Universities need to get a grip on reasonable adjustments

    How will the Medical Training (Prioritisation) Bill affect universities and students?

    What does the 2026 January deadline data show?

    Transcript (auto generated)

     

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  • California prohibits its teachers from talking about a student’s gender identity to their parents. That raises First Amendment concerns.

    California prohibits its teachers from talking about a student’s gender identity to their parents. That raises First Amendment concerns.

    Can a state bar public school teachers from talking to a student’s parents about their minor child’s gender identity without the child’s consent? That’s the question presented by Mirabelli v. Bonta, an ongoing constitutional challenge to a California state policy that prohibits public schools from communicating with parents about their child’s in-school choices regarding their gender identity. 

    In Mirabelli, parents and teachers challenged California’s policy on a variety of constitutional grounds, alleging it violated the teachers’ First Amendment rights to free speech, the teachers’ and parents’ First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion, and the parents’ substantive due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. 

    In late December, a federal district court sided with the plaintiffs, issuing a permanent injunction against what it deemed the state’s “policy of secrecy when it comes to a student’s gender identification.” After California appealed, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit stayed the district court’s permanent injunction earlier this month. In turn, the plaintiffs filed for emergency relief from the Supreme Court of the United States, asking it to reinstate the injunction. 

    The district court and Ninth Circuit both focused primarily on the merits of the substantive due process and free exercise claims. Other courts considering similar questions have, too (and have reached varied conclusions). That focus is unsurprising, given the competing interests at play. The religious liberty group Becket argues in its amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court, for example, that California’s policy interferes with parents’ right to direct the religious upbringing of their children, and therefore the right to free exercise should control the case’s outcome. But as the Court considers the plaintiffs’ request, it’s worth considering a few points about the free expression interests implicated by policies like California’s. 

    A government policy that bars public school teachers from communicating with parents about their children, particularly young children, warrants skepticism. Absent extraordinary circumstances — such as allegations of parental abuse — public schools shouldn’t keep important information about students from their parents. While class is in session, schools operate in loco parentis — in place of the parent. But that authority ends when the bell rings, and it cannot justify state-enforced silence. 

    Muzzling teachers presents problems, too. It’s true that public grade-school teachers are government employees. And when they speak in that capacity, their First Amendment rights generally take a back seat to the government’s interest in educating students. But as the district court correctly recognized, the government’s authority to control what public school teachers may say shouldn’t extend so far as to prevent them from delivering truthful information to parents about the students in their care. 

    Silencing teachers grants the government a dangerous degree of control over what parents know about what’s happening after students walk through the schoolhouse gate. Mandating information black-outs puts teachers in a difficult position; as the district court put it, “when a parent asks directly, the teachers are compelled to avoid answering.” It also sets a troubling precedent. Today, the ban is on gender information; tomorrow, it might bar talking about what K-12 students are (or aren’t) learning in class. And telling students that the government is a trusted keeper of secrets — especially secrets the government promises to keep from parents — teaches them a worrying lesson about the role of the state in our democratic society. 

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  • 4 policy trends that should be on college leaders’ radars in 2026

    4 policy trends that should be on college leaders’ radars in 2026

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    While 2025 may be in the rearview mirror, the policy upheaval that defined the year is not. Higher education experts warn that more disruption lies ahead as the Trump administration continues efforts to reshape the sector, wielding tools ranging from civil rights investigations to regulatory changes. 

    College leaders should brace for more federal government pressure, including through novel avenues, such as accreditation. And they should also expect continued attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. 

    Below, we’re rounding up four big policy shifts we’ll be watching — and some expert predictions on how they’ll unfold — for the year ahead. 

    Accreditation steps into a limelight it’s not used to

    On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump called college accreditors a “secret weapon” in a war against a higher education system he painted as being rife with “Marxists maniacs,” an unfamiliar level of scrutiny for the field. 

    “It’s not just unusual for Trump, but unusual for any presidential campaign to have a whole speech dedicated to accreditation,” said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education. “It’s generally kind of a quiet corner of policy.”

    As president, Trump signed an executive order in April to reopen reviews of new accreditors at the U.S. Department of Education while blasting existing accreditors’ DEI standards. The order mandated that accreditors require institutions to use program data on student outcomes “without reference to race, ethnicity, or sex.”

    At the same time, the order called for requiring “intellectual diversity” in faculty — a term left undefined in the order but often used as code on the right for hiring more conservatives. 

    The Education Department followed up with guidance aimed at easing the path for colleges seeking to switch accreditors and plans to reshape accreditation regulations this spring. 

    Beyond policymaking, the Trump administration has occasionally sought to pressure institutions through their accreditors. 

    In July, two federal agencies notified Harvard University’s accreditor that the Ivy League institution may no longer meet its accreditation standards. 

    That was based on the administration’s claims that Harvard was “deliberately indifferent” to the harassment of Jewish and Israeli students on its campus — claims that a federal judge has found failed to justify funding freezes the government deployed to pressure policy changes at Harvard. 

    The administration used a similar tactic with Columbia University’s accreditor, prior to inking a deal with the university to settle its Title VI investigations. 

    Some accreditors have made changes favored by the Trump administration. The WASC Senior College and University Commission, New England Commission of Higher Education and American Psychological Association have permanently or temporarily dropped DEI standards for institutions.

    The stakes for institutional and academic independence are high. “They’ve been trying to force institutions to adopt policies and make choices that align with their viewpoints, and that’s a big problem,” Fansmith said. He added that the country has never used accreditors “as a tool for implementing the political views of the party in power.”

    More practical questions hang in the air about the Trump administration’s plans, including its push to recognize new accreditors. 

    “Would they have the same standards applied to them as they would for other accreditors?” asked Nasser Paydar, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which lobbies for the sector. “That’s a big unknown.” 

    He noted that accreditors would welcome additional competition given the size of the higher ed field. “There’s room for it

    Paydar also pointed to the administration’s emphasis on student and graduate outcomes. 

    “The department is indicating they want to make sure accreditors focus on student outcomes. It’s wonderful,” he said. But he also pointed to different student outcomes among different types of colleges and programs. The country needs teachers and social workers, for example, but they tend to earn less.

    Specifics about how the administration plans to incorporate outcome standards into accreditation remains unknown. “We want to find out as to how they’re planning to do this because whatever that is is going to influence how universities behave and going forward,” Paydar said. 

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  • AI in edtech: The 2026 efficacy imperative

    AI in edtech: The 2026 efficacy imperative

    Key points:

    AI has crossed a threshold. In 2026, it is no longer a pilot category or a differentiator you add on. It is part of the operating fabric of education, embedded in how learning experiences are created, how learners practice, how educators respond, and how outcomes are measured. That reality changes the product design standard.

    The strategic question is not, “Do we have AI embedded in the learning product design or delivery?” It is, “Can we prove AI is improving outcomes reliably, safely, and at scale?”

    That proof now matters to everyone. Education leaders face accountability pressure. Institutions balance outcomes and budgets. Publishers must defend program impact. CTE providers are tasked with career enablement that is real, not implied. This is the shift from hype to efficacy. Efficacy is not a slogan. It is a product discipline.

    What the 2026 efficacy imperative actually means

    Efficacy is the chain that connects intent to impact: mastery, progression, completion, and readiness. In CTE and career pathways, readiness includes demonstrated performance in authentic tasks such as troubleshooting, communication, procedural accuracy, decision-making, and safe execution, not just quiz scores.

    The product design takeaway is simple. Treat efficacy as a first-class product requirement. That means clear success criteria, instrumentation, governance, and a continuous improvement loop. If you cannot answer what improved, for whom, and under what conditions, your AI strategy is not a strategy. It is a list of features.

    Below is practical guidance you can apply immediately.

    1. Start with outcomes, then design the AI

    A common mistake is shipping capabilities in search of purpose. Chat interfaces, content generation, personalization, and automated feedback can all be useful. Utility is not efficacy.

    Guidance
    Anchor your AI roadmap in a measurable outcome statement, then work backward.

    • Define the outcome you want to improve (mastery, progression, completion, readiness).
    • Define the measurable indicators that represent that outcome (signals and thresholds).
    • Design the AI intervention that can credibly move those indicators.
    • Instrument the experience so you can attribute lift to the intervention.
    • Iterate based on evidence, not excitement.

    Takeaways for leaders
     If your roadmap is organized as “features shipped,” you will struggle to prove impact. A mature roadmap reads as “outcomes moved” with clarity on measurement, scope, and tradeoffs.

    2. Make CTE and career enablement measurable and defensible

    Career enablement is the clearest test of value in education. Learners want capability, educators want rigor with scalability, and employers want confidence that credentials represent real performance.

    CTE makes this pressure visible. It is also where AI can either elevate programs or undermine trust if it inflates claims without evidence.

    Guidance
    Focus AI on the moments that shape readiness.

    • Competency-based progression must be operational, not aspirational. Competencies should be explicit, observable, and assessable. Outcomes are not “covered.” They are verified.
    • Applied practice must be the center. Scenarios, simulations, troubleshooting, role plays, and procedural accuracy are where readiness is built.
    • Assessment credibility must be protected. Blueprint alignment, difficulty control, and human oversight are non-negotiable in high-stakes workflows.

    Takeaways for leaders
    A defensible career enablement claim is simple. Learners show measurable improvement on authentic tasks aligned to explicit competencies with consistent evaluation. If your program cannot demonstrate that, it is vulnerable, regardless of how polished the AI appears.

    3. Treat platform decisions as product strategy decisions

    Many AI initiatives fail because the underlying platform cannot support consistency, governance, or measurement.

    If AI is treated as a set of features, you can ship quickly and move on. If AI is a commitment to efficacy, your platform must standardize how AI is used, govern variability, and measure outcomes consistently.

    Guidance
    Build a platform posture around three capabilities.

    • Standardize the AI patterns that matter. Define reusable primitives such as coaching, hinting, targeted practice, rubric based feedback, retrieval, summarization, and escalation to humans. Without standardization, quality varies, and outcomes cannot be compared.
    • Govern variability without slowing delivery. Put model and prompt versioning, policy constraints, content boundaries, confidence thresholds, and required human decision points in the platform layer.
    • Measure once and learn everywhere. Instrumentation should be consistent across experiences so you can compare cohorts, programs, and interventions without rebuilding analytics each time.

    Takeaways for leaders
    Platform is no longer plumbing. In 2026, the platform is the mechanism that makes efficacy scalable and repeatable. If your platform cannot standardize, govern, and measure, your AI strategy will remain fragmented and hard to defend.

    4. Build tech-assisted measurement into the daily operating loop

    Efficacy cannot be a quarterly research exercise. It must be continuous, lightweight, and embedded without turning educators into data clerks.

    Guidance
    Use a measurement architecture that supports decision-making.

    • Define a small learning event vocabulary you can trust. Examples include attempt, error type, hint usage, misconception flag, scenario completion, rubric criterion met, accommodation applied, and escalation triggered. Keep it small and consistent.
    • Use rubric-aligned evaluation for applied work. Rubrics are the bridge between learning intent and measurable performance. AI can assist by pre scoring against criteria, highlighting evidence, flagging uncertainty, and routing edge cases to human review.
    • Link micro signals to macro outcomes. Tie practice behavior to mastery, progression, completion, assessment performance, and readiness indicators so you can prioritize investments and retire weak interventions.
    • Enable safe experimentation. Use controlled rollouts, cohort selection, thresholds, and guardrails so teams can test responsibly and learn quickly without breaking trust.

    Takeaways for leaders
    If you cannot attribute improvement to a specific intervention and measure it continuously, you will drift into reporting usage rather than proving impact. Usage is not efficacy.

    5. Treat accessibility as part of efficacy, not compliance overhead

    An AI system that works for only some learners is not effective. Accessibility is now a condition of efficacy and a driver of scale.

    Guidance
    Bake accessibility into AI-supported experiences.

    • Ensure structure and semantics, keyboard support, captions, audio description, and high-quality alt text.
    • Validate compatibility with assistive technologies.
    • Measure efficacy across learner groups rather than averaging into a single headline.

    Takeaways for leaders
     Inclusive design expands who benefits from AI-supported practice and feedback. It improves outcomes while reducing risk. Accessibility should be part of your efficacy evidence, not a separate track.

    The 2026 Product Design and Strategy checklist

    If you want AI to remain credible in your product and program strategy, use these questions as your executive filter:

    • Can we show measurable improvement in mastery, progression, completion, and readiness that is attributable to AI interventions, not just usage?
    • Are our CTE and career enablement claims traceable to explicit competencies and authentic performance tasks?
    • Is AI governed with clear boundaries, human oversight, and consistent quality controls?
    • Do we have platform level patterns that standardize experiences, reduce variance, and instrument outcomes?
    • Is measurement continuous and tech-assisted, built for learning loops rather than retrospective reporting?
    • Do we measure efficacy across learner groups to ensure accessibility and equity in impact?
    Latest posts by eSchool Media Contributors (see all)

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  • UNC Plans to Define What Academic Freedom Is—and Isn’t

    UNC Plans to Define What Academic Freedom Is—and Isn’t

    In 2024, the chair of the statewide University of North Carolina Faculty Assembly and the UNC state system embarked on a fraught mission at a fraught time: writing “a consensus definition” of academic freedom for the entire university system.

    Academic freedom scholars have themselves long disagreed over what academic freedom does and doesn’t protect. And UNC’s mission came at a time of increased attacks on the concept from the federal and state governments as well as institutions. (The UNC system itself has been accused of infringing academic freedom.)

    Now, late next month—more than a year after the effort began—the UNC Board of Governors is set to vote on a lengthy definition. It promises many of the protections contained in other descriptions of academic freedom, but it’s drawn opposition from the state’s American Association of University Professors arm over both the express limits it places on that freedom and what the AAUP calls vague language that could be used to further restrict classroom teaching.

    “Academic freedom is not absolute,” the proposed new definition says.

    “Academic freedom is the foundational principle that protects the rights of all faculty to engage in teaching, research/creative activities, service, and scholarly inquiry without undue influence,” the definition says. It goes on to say academic freedom includes the right to teach and research “controversial or unpopular ideas related to the discipline or subject matter.” It also includes parameters saying what academic freedom isn’t.

    On Wednesday, a board committee forwarded this definition to the full board. It’s an extensive expansion of the system’s currently two-paragraph “Academic Freedom and Responsibility of Faculty” policy. The committee discussion lasted about five minutes, with no dissent or questions from committee members.

    Andrew Tripp, the system’s senior vice president for legal affairs and general counsel, told committee members Wednesday that the system had commissioned Wade Maki, the Faculty Assembly chair, “and others” to develop “what we hoped would be a consensus definition of academic freedom.”

    Tripp added that “we’ve had one of the more collaborative and lengthy processes in developing code that I’ve seen in my tenure here.”

    Maki, for his part, told committee members, “All stakeholders have been involved. It is a great example of what we often refer to as shared governance.”

    But there isn’t full consensus. The state chapter of the national AAUP, which wrote the landmark 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, is objecting.

    And while Maki’s Faculty Assembly approved sending a definition to the system in October, the UNC system—before presenting the proposal to the board—added extensive language, including the “academic freedom is not absolute” line and definitions of what academic freedom isn’t. The system also added a section on academic freedom for students.

    In an email to Inside Higher Ed, a system spokesperson wrote that “the draft from the Assembly” was “shared with System staff, with provosts from across the System, with chancellors, and with student groups to gather additional feedback. The added language reflects input from those stakeholders and speaks to the fact that academic freedom is a shared responsibility.”

    The North Carolina Conference of the AAUP took issue with these additions, saying they add vague language that could harm academic freedom. The disagreement represents yet another argument across the nation about what this crucial phrase means at a time when it’s under threat.

    “The impulse to fence in academic freedom should be disregarded and eschewed,” lawyers for the AAUP wrote this week to system officials. “The convenience of defining an academic freedom ‘box’ is antithetical to case law, our constitutions, and historical approaches.”

    Outside the ‘Parameters’

    Under the proposed definition, the “parameters of academic freedom” won’t include teaching “clearly unrelated to the course description,” “using university resources for political or ideological advocacy in violation of university policy,” or “refusing to comply with institutional policies or accreditation standards.”

    It also stresses the areas where administrators share with faculty a “right and responsibility to implement the University’s mission,” including the responsibility to “ensure that faculty activities support the university’s mission and meet accreditation standards” and to “intervene when faculty conduct violates professional norms, creates a hostile learning environment as defined by policy and law, or undermines the institution’s educational objectives.”

    Further, it says, “Management is responsible for resource allocation and program viability,” including approving and eliminating programs and setting “broad curricular frameworks.” And the section on student academic freedom says, among other things, “Students are free to take reasoned exception to concepts and theories presented in their classes … even as they continue to be responsible for learning assigned course content.”

    The AAUP’s lawyers noted the proposed definition doesn’t define institutional mission or policies referenced, or what a hostile environment is. They wrote that such language “does little to clarify key terms, leaving open the possibility for certain actors to retaliate against instructors with whom an institution, an administrator, or an outside party disagrees, thereby increasing the threat of self-censorship.”

    The attorneys also raised concern about the definition’s requirement for teaching to be “related” to the subject matter or discipline for it to be protected by academic freedom.

    “Part of higher education is connecting ideas learned in the classroom to other disciplines and current events,” they wrote. “An ethnomusicology instructor exploring the musical traditions of the Middle East may deepen their students’ knowledge and understanding by exploring how political conflicts in the region affect the culture of the people who live there.”

    And as for the student academic freedom protections, the AAUP said it’s concerned the language “could be weaponized against faculty members with whom a student or an outside actor disagrees,” noting particularly that there’s no definition of what a student taking “reasoned exception” means.

    Abbey Hatcher, who resigned from her associate professor position at UNC Chapel Hill on Dec. 31 but who remains an AAUP member, took issue with both the policy-development process and its result.

    Hatcher noted that the Faculty Assembly never voted on the added parameters around academic freedom, which she said essentially require pledging “fealty to the institutional mission.” She said, “All the parameters are basically threats to what faculty should or should not do.”

    “They’re trying to be as imprecise as they can about what might be disfavored one day because it gives them leeway to retaliate in different ways,” she said, adding that “there was no additional value of the academic freedom ‘consensus definition,’ and there’s a clear downside in that it was co-opted to add additional language around parameters.”

    But Laura Beltz, policy reform director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which gave input on the definition, said it’s generally “in good shape.” She said that “with any policy, there’s going to be risk of application issues,” but specifics help administrators apply policies.

    In an email, a UNC system spokesperson said, “Free inquiry is and will remain a core value for the University of North Carolina. It was the elected Faculty Assembly’s initiative to consider a more detailed definition to help guide faculty, administrators, and students in understanding both the privileges and the obligations of academic freedom.”

    Maki, the Faculty Assembly chair, told Inside Higher Ed after Wednesday’s meeting that his body will provide further input on the definition before the Board of Governors vote. He acknowledged that not all faculty agree with it.

    “There are faculty who believe that academic freedom essentially is not something that has any limits … There are faculty who do not believe that academic freedom is subject to law and policy,” he said. “But, as a practical matter, we cannot expect a state university system to endorse a policy that says no other policy can bump into this.”

    Maki said defining academic freedom in policy will protect faculty from legislators or board members, who when confronted with a university controversy might otherwise simply say, “We now determine whether it’s OK or not, we’re in the power position, and there’s no code that limits that decision.”

    “Vagueness empowers the powerful,” Maki said. “And, right now, that’s not us.”

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  • Minneapolis’s Community Bonds Are Being Tested

    Minneapolis’s Community Bonds Are Being Tested

    When Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, University of Minnesota graduate and U.S. citizen, was killed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Minneapolis last weekend, it was a shot heard round the country. He was the second U.S. citizen to be killed by federal agents this month, after Renee Good was shot and killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on Jan. 7. Pretti and Good were killed while bearing witness to the harassment, raids and illegal detentions of immigrants in Minneapolis and across the state.

    As I watch masked federal agents rip apart Minneapolis and the social fabric of our country, I wonder how we will recover. Pretti and Good were shot trying to protect their neighbors. But will the bridges that community leaders, college outreach programs and policymakers built between immigrant communities and their adoptive homes crumble under the weight of the federal government’s crackdown?

    It brings to mind my own experience serving as a trustee for a charity working to improve the lives of Black and ethnic minority women in east London for a few years after the pandemic. Through that work I saw higher ed’s community outreach in a new way. As a higher ed journalist, I had covered this part of universities’ missions before, but I had never seen it from the community perspective. Queen Mary University of London works with the charity Women’s Inclusive Team on a range of health-care projects with the goal of using research and policy to address health equity gaps—a pernicious problem in the U.K., as it is here.

    The partnership also serves to build trust in mainstream medical services among Somali and Bangladeshi communities in the borough of Tower Hamlets. This work has ripple effects. These women and their families felt more integrated into the community and were more likely to seek help from public services in other areas of their lives, such as escaping domestic violence or accessing job support from the council.

    This network of university researchers and local clinicians also helped systems of power see these women. The charity’s CEO worked tirelessly to be a voice for the community. She served as inequality commissioner for the local council and as an independent adviser to the Metropolitan Police. As in many U.S. cities, Black youth in London are more likely to be stopped and searched by police than their white peers. Keeping the lines of communication open between law enforcement and the Somali-majority Black community in Tower Hamlets was imperative for their safety and gave people a voice in how they were policed.

    Universities in Minneapolis are doing similar work to build partnerships in their communities. For more than 16 years, the University of Minnesota’s Somali, Latino, Hmong Partnership for Health and Wellness—SoLaHmo—has conducted nearly 50 health research studies and trained over 1,000 community members, students and faculty in research.

    The University of Minnesota Public Safety Network has partnered with organizations like the Somali Youth Link to train young people in conflict resolution and how to administer lifesaving medication in the case of overdoses. UMN Public Safety even partnered with the organization to host a community iftar during Ramadan last year, and Augsburg University engages with its immigrant neighbors in Minneapolis through its Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship and trains young people to participate in its East African Policy Debate League.

    But no matter how tightly connected immigrant communities are to their neighbors and the institutions of power, once trust is broken, it is hard to regain. That’s why Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara apologized to the Somali community for comments he made connecting “East African kids” to crime last November. The city’s latest horror is that on steroids.

    Universities and colleges can be anchors for their communities, but the partnerships that researchers at the University of Minnesota, Augsburg University and others across Minneapolis have built are being tested. The two CBP officers who killed Pretti have been placed on administrative leave, and the agency’s “commander at large,” Greg Bovino, has been demoted back to his old job in California. It feels like a turning point in this dark chapter for our country, but the full damage won’t be clear until communities and neighborhoods in Minneapolis have time to heal. Hopefully the foundations the researchers and community leaders have laid mean residents won’t be starting from square one.

    Sara Custer is editor in chief at Inside Higher Ed.



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  • Florida Introduces “Sanitized” Sociology Textbook

    Florida Introduces “Sanitized” Sociology Textbook

    Sociology faculty at Florida International University are outraged that their department is requiring them to use a state-approved textbook to teach an introductory course as part of the university’s general education curriculum.

    They say the state’s process for developing the textbook and new course framework was opaque, rushed and designed to pressure universities into adopting censored learning materials without a legal directive to do so.

    Furthermore, the textbook—a heavily edited version of an open-source sociology textbook titled Introduction to Sociology 3e—now makes only cursory mentions of important sociological concepts regarding race, gender, sexuality and other topics that have drawn Republican ire. Faculty say it whitewashes the field’s key principles, diminishes the quality of education for students and intensifies the state’s attacks on academic freedom.

    “ [Students] will be getting a sociology text, a sociology course without a soul,” Matthew Marr, an associate professor of sociology at FIU who has refused to teach the course this semester, said at an FIU Faculty Senate meeting last week. “It’s been scraped out. It is a sanitized version of the course.”

    Florida’s War on Sociology

    Inside Higher Ed reviewed a copy of both the original textbook and the new one and found numerous substantive changes.

    Compared to the original 669-page textbook, the new version is just 267 pages. Unlike the original, the state-approved version doesn’t include chapters on media and technology, global inequality, race and ethnicity, social stratification, or gender, sex and sexuality. It also scraps a section on the government-led genocide of Native Americans. And while the original uses the word “transgender” 68 times and “racism” 115 times, the former term appears only once in the new textbook and the latter six times.

    “There are no discussions of systemic or structural racism, a core concept in sociology,” read a Jan.16 letter that 19 faculty members in FIU’s Global and Sociocultural Studies Department sent to their Faculty Senate’s academic freedom committee and the United Faculty of Florida’s FIU chapter. “Not only are these omissions an incorrect representation of the field, but they also fail to prepare students for majors and graduate education that require or recommend introduction to sociology.”

    The state’s creation of the new textbook is the latest battle in Florida’s ongoing campaign to assert control over university curricula. State leaders have taken special pains to discredit the field of sociology, which the American Sociological Association defines as “the study of social life, social change, and the social causes and consequences of human behavior.”

    In 2023, the Florida Legislature passed Senate Bill 266, prohibiting general education courses from including topics that “distort significant historical events,” teach “identity politics” or are “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.”

    Later that year, Florida’s then–education commissioner, Manny Díaz Jr.—who is now president of the University of West Florida—singled out sociology, posting on X that the field “has been hijacked by left-wing activists and no longer serves its intended purpose as a general knowledge course for students.” Florida governor Ron DeSantis has characterized the discipline as “very mushy,” “highly ideological” and “not the type of academic rigor that we’re looking for and that our Founding Fathers would have thought essential to be educating folks.”

    In January 2024, the Florida Board of Governors, which oversees all 12 public institutions in the State University System of Florida, voted to remove sociology from the state’s approved core course requirements. One year later, the board removed hundreds of additional courses, including many focused on race and gender, from general education offerings at all state universities.

    Even so, individual universities could choose to keep sociology and other courses as part of their campus-level general education offerings, which some universities—including FIU—chose to do. (At FIU, that tier of courses is called the University Core Curriculum, or UCC.)

    Culture War Crossfire

    At last week’s Faculty Senate meeting, Jennifer L. Doherty-Restrepo, FIU’s assistant vice president for academic planning and accountability, said the board approved all of FIU’s UCC courses—including the introductory sociology course, known as SYG2000—last January. But in July, the board sent a memo to all State University System campuses asking to review the textbooks, syllabi and other course materials that would be used to teach Introductory Sociology during the fall 2025 semester. (Materials for some psychology courses were also flagged but have since been remedied and approved, according to Doherty-Restrepo.)

    The review found that none of the course materials aligned with state statutes, but the board provided the university only “vague” feedback on which parts were noncompliant, Doherty-Restrepo said. The university requested additional guidance on how to teach sociology in compliance and suggested the creation of a working group to provide recommendations, she added.

    Soon after, the state launched the sociology working group, composed of four faculty members and four Board of Governors administrators, including Dawn Carr, a sociology professor at Florida State University; Quing Lai, a sociology professor at FIU; Phillip Wiseley, a sociology professor at Florida SouthWestern State College; Jason Jewell, chief academic officer and vice chancellor of strategic initiatives for the Board of Governors; and Emily Sikes, vice chancellor for academic and student affairs for the board.

    (The full composition of the committee is not publicly available information. The Board of Governors did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s numerous questions about the working group or the new textbook.)

    Within a month of convening, however, the working group was caught in the cross fire of Florida’s culture wars.

    “Today, I took immediate action against [Phillip Wiseley] … by removing him from the statewide sociology course workgroup after reports confirmed that he was using instructional materials promoting gender ideology, a direct violation of state statute,” Anastasios Kamoutsas, Florida’s education commissioner, wrote in an Oct. 30 post on X. “I am also recommending the college president take further disciplinary action to ensure this never happens again.”

    (Inside Higher Ed attempted to contact Wiseley for comment, but a message sent to his college email address bounced back as undeliverable.)

    In their letter to the faculty union and Faculty Senate, FIU sociology faculty pointed to Wiseley’s dismissal as evidence that the working group “was not valid” and that the “four sociologists who were in the workgroup participated under the clear threat of discipline.”

    ‘Merely a Resource’

    The working group nevertheless moved forward. While creating a new textbook wasn’t the group’s original charge, Carr, the Florida State sociologist, told Inside Higher Ed that it emerged as the best immediate solution for keeping the sociology course as part of the institution-level general education curriculum.

    “To ensure that faculty had materials to teach the course, we wanted to provide a basic set of course materials that complied with general education requirements,” she wrote in an email. “The idea was to provide our colleagues with a stop-gap solution to avoiding losing the course from the general education curriculum. Our concern was that it is much more challenging to reinstate a course after being cut as a general education course at the state level than to improve and elevate course materials over time.”

    By Dec. 3, the working group had completed the draft sociology framework ensuring compliance with state law and would soon provide a “resource”—the textbook—to support it, according to an email from state administrator Sikes.

    Every provost has since seen a copy of the new textbook, though not all sociology departments have chosen to adopt it.

    “I don’t know what other campuses have done with this, but the University of Florida accepted it as merely a resource and recommendation,” Evan Lauteria, an assistant instructional professor of sociology at UF, told Inside Higher Ed. “After insight from the college and the department, [we] will not be using them.”

    He decried the state for trying to pressure universities into using those specific materials.

    “It’s unclear if they have the legal foundations to stand on to require adoption of these materials, but they are hoping universities cave quickly,” he said. “That would lay the groundwork for them to do it in other disciplines.”

    Emails obtained by Inside Higher Ed show that both FSU’s and FIU’s sociology departments are using the state-approved course materials this semester.

    FIU Faculty Blindsided

    But FIU faculty didn’t get word of the change until days before the spring semester started.

    Initially administrators thought the sociology course had until fall 2026 to comply with the state law, according to a Jan. 1 email to department faculty from Chair A. Douglas Kincaid. But then the Board of Governors moved up the compliance deadline to spring 2026, he wrote, and vowed to review all syllabi and readings. To that end, he said the provost and dean “requested” that the department use the state-approved course materials this semester. (State authorities have since followed through with their syllabus review.)

    The only way to avoid using the textbook moving forward, he added, would be to remove the course from the university’s general education offerings.

    CHUYN/iStock/Getty Images

    The announcement blindsided the mostly adjunct faculty who had already prepared their courses for the semester, pinning them between “a rock and a hard place,” Zachary Levenson, an associate professor of sociology, told Inside Higher Ed.

    “If we take Intro to Sociology out of the gen ed curriculum and teach it the way we want, then certain students won’t be able to take it for credit and our enrollments are going to fall to point where [the state] can say we’re not doing anything and abolish the department,” he said. “Or we could remove it and risk low enrollment to make a statement.”

    After some debate, “this semester, adjuncts teaching the class are having to comply,” Levenson said. “But going forward, we’re going to figure something out, like potentially shifting tenured faculty to teach the class and other classes that are subject to the Board of Governors’ intervention.”

    Unanswered Questions

    Beyond FIU, faculty all over the state are raising questions about the contents of the new textbook, the committee that created it and what exactly they are—and aren’t—allowed to teach.

    FSU sociology professor and textbook author Carr was scheduled to address some of their concerns Monday at a webinar hosted by the Board of Governors. Among the dozens of questions submitted in advance, faculty asked, Are the reasons why the other books were banned or considered in violation of the law written down somewhere? Can you provide a list? How should instructors respond if topics or perspectives that are not covered in the textbook are raised during class discussions?

    But the Board of Governors canceled the meeting without explanation hours before it was set to begin.

    “This is a completely opaque process,” said Robert Cassanello, president of the United Faculty of Florida. “They know they have their pants down and if they put themselves under any kind of scrutiny the justification and rationale for all of this will collapse. They’re doing their best to keep all of this out of the sunshine.”

    Which is why, he added, it’s “incumbent on [faculty] not to participate in assisting the Board of Governors in attacking our academic freedom and curbing our curricular decisions.”

    And based on what he knows, Florida’s attempts to control university course content probably won’t stop with sociology.

    “I have it on good authority that next year they’re going to look at the psychology and American history textbooks,” Cassanello said. “It’s an assault on critical thinking.”



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