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  • Make Universities Great Again – HEPI

    Make Universities Great Again – HEPI

    ***Join HEPI and Jisc at 2pm next Monday, 27 January for a webinar on ‘Competition or collaboration’ in the higher education sector: you can register here.***

    On the day that Donald Trump is inaugurated as US President for the second time, with JD Vance as his Vice-President, HEPI Director of Partnerships Lucy Haire reviews Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy – and asks what it can teach us about his attitudes to universities.

    It is not a new publication, but it has taken on new significance. JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis was published in 2016, well before anyone had an inkling that the author would be the US Vice-President nine years later. I read this autobiography of Vance’s youth to try to better understand one of the most powerful men in the world. 

    Five things that saved JD Vance

    The basic story of the first thirty or so years of Vance’s life reflects a challenging upbringing in Middletown, Ohio, a community in economic decline. Born to a mother struggling with addiction, Vance grew up amid instability, surrounded by school dropouts, joblessness and crime.

    Vance attributes his escape from a stricken trajectory to five main themes.

    First, his steadfast grandparents,  especially ‘Mamaw’ who eventually raised him.

    Second, the US Marines, which instilled discipline.

    Third, his girlfriend and future wife, Usha, who refined his social skills.

    Fourth, his own grit and drive.

    Fifth, universities, of which JD Vance attended two. 

    He says of Ohio State University:

    Ohio State’s main campus in Columbus is about a hundred miles from Middletown… Columbus felt like an urban paradise. It was (and remains) one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, powered in large part by the bustling university that was now my home. OSU grads were starting businesses, historic buildings were being converted into new restaurants and bars, and even the worst neighbourhoods seemed to be undergoing revitalization.

    This passage could be taken straight from the pages of a US equivalent of UPP Foundation’s excellent Kerslake Collection on the economic and social benefits that universities have on their local communities. It chimes entirely with the sentiment in the UK’s Secretary of State for Education, Bridgit Phillipson’s recent letter to UK universities. 

    Vance explains how the majority of his education was paid for by the G.I. Bill, a US law that provides a range of benefits for veterans. Yet he still had to take on three jobs to pay for his living costs, a scenario which we know has become increasingly common in the UK. HEPI’s seminal report, the Student Minimum Income Standard, produced with the support of Technology1 in spring 2024, showed that student maintenance loans now fall well below what students actually need to live on. Students therefore have to look elsewhere for support. HEPI and AdvanceHE’s long-running annual Student Academic Experience Survey showed that for the first time in 2024, the majority of students in the UK now take on paid work to make ends meet.   

    Vance and his grandmother’s navigation of the financial aid forms highlighted their unfamiliarity with university bureaucratic processes, a case-study in inclusive admissions.

    I had puzzled through those financial aid forms with Mamaw … arguing about whether to list her as Mom or as my ‘parent/guardian’. We had worried that unless I somehow obtained and submitted the financial information of Bob Hamel (my legal father), I’d be guilty of fraud. The whole experience had made both of us painfully aware of how unfamiliar we were with the outside world.

    Furthermore, Vance discusses that, as a US Marine veteran, he was a mature student at Ohio State, so a few years older than most classmates. Some irritated him with their lack of real-world experience; one disparaged soldiers deployed to Iraq, where Vance had served. Vance decided that he wanted to accelerate his studies and arranged to fast-track his course so that he could graduate in just under two years. 

    This serves as a reminder about the challenges of ensuring that university classes are inclusive and accommodate diverse students. It also touches on the concept of fast-track degrees which remain quite rare in the UK. 

    Vance’s declared thinking about which law school to choose after Ohio provides still more food for thought for widening participation professionals. He didn’t consider Yale, Stanford or Harvard at first, the ‘mythical top three’, assuming he didn’t stand a chance of acceptance. But he changed his mind when he heard about a new law graduate hailing not from the ‘top three’ forced to wait tables for lack of other opportunities.

    Vance still would not try for Stanford as it required him to obtain a personal sign-off from the Dean at Ohio State which he dared not request. He got into Yale where he clearly acquired imposter syndrome and conflicting identities: was he an Ivy League student or Hillbilly kid? He was unnerved by the sense of entitlement among his mainly upper-middle-class peers, by some snobbery among the academics and by the extensive networks his fellow students could tap into when it mattered.

    He is nevertheless very appreciative of the whole experience, revelling in the stellar roster of famous visiting speakers, imposing architecture and the chance to edit the Yale Law Journal. He held his own academically, was taken under the wing of Professor Amy Chua and fell in love with one upper-middle-class student, Usha, his future wife. There are pages of his Yalie reflections on educational, economic and cultural upward mobility which foretell his move into politics.     

    I did not expect to find so many insights into the structure, funding and culture of the higher education system in this book. Some reviewers of Hillbilly Elegy say that it is not a completely true nor fair account of JD Vance’s experiences, that it over-emphasises the role of personal grit and determination in facilitating upward mobility, and that much of it is at odds with sentiments that Vance has expressed more recently. Nevertheless, if Vance is encouraging us to value higher education, recognize its crucial role for individuals and communities and to strive to get its systems and culture right for those with challenging backgrounds, then that is all to the good. Deep down, Vance knows that universities will help to Make America Great Again.

    For more information about the US university system, take a look at this recent HEPI report supported by the Richmond American University London.

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  • Why Data Alone Won’t Improve Retention – Faculty Focus

    Why Data Alone Won’t Improve Retention – Faculty Focus

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  • Keep talking about data | Wonkhe

    Keep talking about data | Wonkhe

    How’s your student data this morning?

    Depending on how close you sit to your institutional student data systems, your answer may range from a bemused shrug to an anguished yelp.

    In the most part, we remain blissfully unaware of how much work it currently takes to derive useful and actionable insights from the various data traces our students leave behind them. We’ve all seen the advertisements promising seamless systems integration and a tangible improvement in the student experience, but in most cases the reality is far different.

    James Gray’s aim is to start a meaningful conversation about how we get there and what systems need to be in place to make it happen – at a sector as well as a provider level. As he says:

    There is a genuine predictive value in using data to design future solutions to engage students and drive improved outcomes. We now have the technical capability to bring content, data, and context together in a way that simply has not been possible before now.”

    All well and good, but just because we have the technology doesn’t mean we have the data in the right place or the right format – the problem is, as Helen O’Sullivan has already pointed out on Wonkhe, silos.

    Think again about your student data.

    Some of it is in your student information system (assessment performance, module choices), which may or may not link to the application tracking systems that got students on to courses in the first place. You’ll also have information about how students engage with your virtual learning environment, what books they are reading in the library, how they interact with support services, whether and how often they attend in person, and their (disclosed) underlying health conditions and specific support needs.

    The value of this stuff is clear – but without a whole-institution strategic approach to data it remains just a possibility. James notes that:

    We have learned that a focus on the student digital journey and institutional digital transformation means that we need to bring data silos together, both in terms of use and collection. There needs to be a coherent strategy to drive deployment and data use.

    But how do we get there? From what James has seen overseas, in the big online US providers like Georgia Tech and Arizona State data is something that is managed strategically at the highest levels of university leadership. It’s perhaps a truism to suggest that if you really care about something it needs ownership at a senior level, but having that level of buy-in unlocks the resource and momentum that a big project like this needs.

    We also talked about the finer-grained aspects of implementation – James felt that the way to bring students and staff on board is to clearly demonstrate the benefits, and listen (and respond) to concerns. That latter is essential because “you will annoy folks”.

    Is it worth this annoyance to unlock gains in productivity and effectiveness? Ideally, we’d all be focused on getting the greatest benefit from our resources – but often processes and common practices are arranged in sub-optimal ways for historical reasons, and rewiring large parts of someone’s role is a big ask. The hope is that the new way will prove simpler and less arduous, so it absolutely makes sense to focus on potential benefits and their realisation – and bringing in staff voices at the design stage can make for gains in autonomy and job satisfaction.

    The other end of the problem concerns procurement. Many providers have updated their student records systems in recent years in response to the demands of the Data Futures programme. The trend has been away from bespoke and customised solutions and towards commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) procurement: the thinking here being that updates and modifications are easier to apply consistently with a standard install.

    As James outlines, providers are looking at a “buy, build, or partner” decision – and institutions with different goals (and at different stages of data maturity) may choose different options. There is though enormous value in senior leaders talking across institutions about decisions such as these. “We had to go through the same process” James outlined. “In the end we decided to focus on our existing partnership with Microsoft to build a cutting edge data warehouse, and data ingestion, hierarchy and management process leveraging Azure and MS Fabric with direct connectivity to Gen AI capabilities to support our university customers with their data, and digital transformation journey.” – there is certainly both knowledge and hard-won experience out there about the different trade-offs, but what university leader wants to tell a competitor about the time they spent thousands of pounds on a platform that didn’t communicate with the rest of their data ecosystem?

    As Claire Taylor recently noted on Wonkhe there is a power in relationships and networks among senior leaders that exist to share learning for the benefit of many. It is becoming increasingly clear that higher education is a data-intensive sector – so every provider should feel empowered to make one of the most important decisions they will make in the light of a collective understanding of the landscape.

    This article is published in association with Kortext. Join us at an upcoming Kortext LIVE event in London, Manchester and Edinburgh in January and February 2025 to find out more about Wonkhe and Kortext’s work on leading digital capability for learning, teaching and student success.

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  • A higher education institution’s relationship with technology crosses all its missions

    A higher education institution’s relationship with technology crosses all its missions

    Universities have a critical role to play at the intersection of academic thought, organisational practice, and social benefits of technology.

    It’s easy when thinking about universities’ digital strategies to see that as a technical question of organisational capability and solutions rather than one part of the wider public role universities have in leading thinking and shaping practice for the benefit of society.

    But for universities the relationship with technology is multifaceted: some parts of the institution are engaged in driving forward technological developments; others may be critically assessing how those developments reshape the human experience and throw up ethical challenges that must be addressed; while others may be seeking to deploy technologies in the service of improving teaching and research. The question, then, for universities, must be how to bring these relationships together in a critical but productive way.

    Thinking into practice

    The University of Edinburgh hosts one of the country’s foremost informatics and computer science departments, one of the largest centres of AI research in Europe. Edinburgh’s computing infrastructure has lately hit headlines when the Westminster government decided to cancel planned investment in a new supercomputing facility at the university, only to announce new plans for supercomputing investment in last week’s AI opportunities action plan, location as yet undetermined.

    But while the university’s technological research prowess is evident, there’s also a strong academic tradition of critical thought around technology – such as in the work of philosopher Shannon Vallor, director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and author of The AI Mirror. In the HE-specific research field, Janja Komljenovic has explored the phenomenon of the “datafication” of higher education, raising questions of a mismatch and incoherence between how data is valued and used in different parts of an institution.

    When I speak to Edinburgh’s principal Peter Mathieson ahead of his keynote at the upcoming Kortext Live leaders event in Edinburgh on 4 February he’s reflecting on a key challenge: how to continue a legacy of thought leadership on digital technology and data science into the future, especially when the pace of technological change is so rapid?

    “It’s imperative for universities to be places that shape the debate, but also that study the advantages and disadvantages of different technologies and how they are adopted. We need to help the public make the best use of technology,” says Peter.

    There’s work going on to mobilise knowledge across disciplines, for example, data scientists interrogating Scotland’s unique identifier data to gain insights on public health – which was particularly important during Covid. The university is a lead partner in the delivery of the Edinburgh and south east Scotland city region deal, a key strand of which is focused on data-driven innovation. “The city region deal builds on our heritage of excellence in AI and computer science and brings that to addressing the exam question of how to create growth in our region, attract inward investment, and create jobs,” explains Peter.

    Peter is also of the opinion that more could be done to bring university expertise to bear across the education system. Currently the university is working with a secondary school to develop a data science programme that will see secondary pupils graduate with a data science qualification. Another initiative sees primary school classrooms equipped with sensors that detect earth movements in different parts of the world – Peter recounts having been proudly shown a squiggle on a piece of paper by two primary school pupils, which turned out to denote an earthquake in Tonga.

    “Data education in schools is a really important function for universities,” he says.”It’s not a recruiting exercise – I see it as a way of the region and community benefiting from having a research intensive university in their midst.”

    Connecting the bits

    The elephant in the room is, of course, the link between academic knowledge and organisational practice, and where and how those come together in a university as large and decentralised as Edinburgh.

    “There is a distinction between the academic mission and the day to day nuts and bolts,” Peter admits. “There is some irony that we are one of finest computer science institutions but we had trouble installing our new finance system. But the capability we have in a place like this should allow us to feel positive about the opportunities to do interesting things with technology.”

    Peter points to the university-wide enablement of Internet of Things which allows the university to monitor building usage, and which helps to identify where buildings may be under-utilised. As principal Peter also brought together estates and digital infrastructure business planning so that the physical and digital estate can be developed in tandem and with reference to each other rather than remaining in silos.

    “Being able to make decisions based on data is very empowering,” he says. “But it’s important that we think very carefully about what data is anonymised and reassure people we are not trying to operate a surveillance system.” Peter is also interested in how AI could help to streamline large administrative tasks, and the experimental deployment of generative AI across university activity. The university has developed its own AI innovation platform, ELM, the Edinburgh (access to) Language Models, which is free to use for all staff and students, and which gives the user access to large language models including the latest version of Chat-GPT but, importantly, without sharing user data with OpenAI.

    At the leadership level, Peter has endeavoured to put professional service leaders on the same footing as academic leaders rather than, as he says, “defining professional services by what they are not, ie non-academic.” It’s one example of the ways that roles and structures in universities are evolving, not necessarily as a direct response to technological change, but with technology being one of the aspects of social change that create a need inside universities for the ability to look at challenges from a range of professional perspectives.

    It’s rarely as straightforward as “automation leading to staffing reductions” though Peter is alive to the perceived risks and their implications. “People worry about automation leading to loss of jobs, but I think jobs will evolve in universities as they will elsewhere in society,” he says. “Much of the value of the university experience is defined by the human interactions that take place, especially in an international university, and we can’t replace physical presence on campus. I’m optimistic that humans can get more good than harm out of AI – we just need to be mindful that we will need to adapt more quickly to this innovation than to earlier technological advances like the printing press, or the Internet.”

    This article is published in association with Kortext. Peter Mathieson will be giving a keynote address at the upcoming Kortext LIVE leaders’ event in Edinburgh on 4 February – join us there or at the the London or Manchester events on 29 January and 6 February to find out more about Wonkhe and Kortext’s work on leading digital capability for learning, teaching and student success, and be part of the conversation.

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  • Daring students to take risks and be wrong is key to solving the campus culture wars

    Daring students to take risks and be wrong is key to solving the campus culture wars

    Goodbye then, the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act parts A3, A4, A7 and parts of A8 – we hardly knew you.

    The legal tort – a mechanism that seemed somehow to be designed to say “we’ve told the regulator to set up a rapid alternative mechanism to avoid having to lawyer up, but here’s a fast track way to bypass it anyway”, is to be deleted.

    The complaints scheme – a wheeze which allowed an installed Director for Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom to rapidly rule on whatever it was that the Sunday papers were upset about that week – will now be “free” (expected) to not take up every dispute thrown its way.

    Students themselves with a complaint about a free speech issue will no longer have to flip a coin between a widely respected way of avoiding legal disputes and an untested but apparently faster one operated by the Director which was to be flagged in Freshers’ handbooks. The OIA it is.

    Foreign funding measures – bodged into the act by China hawks who could never work out whether the security services, the Foreign Office or the Department for Education were more to blame for encouraging universities to take on Chinese students – will now likely form part of the revised “Foreign Influence Registration Scheme” created by the National Security Act 2023.

    A measure banning universities from silencing victims of harassment via a non-disclosure agreement will stay, despite OfS saying it was going to ban NDAs anyway – although nobody seems able to explain why their use will still be fine for other victims with other complaints.

    And direct regulation of students’ unions – a measure that had somehow fallen for the fanciful idea that their activities are neither regulated nor controlled by powerless university managements and the Charity Commission – will also go. The “parent” institution will, as has always been the case, revert to reasonably practicable steps – like yanking its funding.

    As such, save for a new and vague duty to “promote” free speech and academic freedom, the new government’s intended partial repeal of legislation that somehow took the old one two parliaments to pass – a period of gestation that always seemed more designed to extend the issue’s prevalence in the press than to perfect its provisions – now leaves the sector largely back in the framework it’s been in for the best part of 40 years.

    That the Secretary of State says that all of the above is about proceeding in a way that “actually works” will raise an eyebrow from those who think a crisis in the academy has been growing – especially when the government’s position is that the problem to be fixed is as follows:

    In a university or a polytechnic, above all places, there should be room for discussion of all issues, for the willingness to hear and to dispute all views including those that are unpopular or eccentric or wrong.

    Actually, that was a quote from Education Secretary Keith Joseph in 1986, writing to the National Union of Students over free speech measures in the 1986 act. But Bridget Phillipson’s quote wasn’t much different:

    These fundamental freedoms are more important—much more important—than the wishes of some students not to be offended. University is a place for ideas to be exposed and debated, to be tried and tested. For young people, it is a space for horizons to be broadened, perspectives to be challenged and ideas to be examined. It is not a place for students to shut down any view with which they disagree.

    The message for vice chancellors who fail to take this seriously couldn’t have been clearer – “protect free speech on your campuses or face the consequences”. But if it’s true that for “too long, too many universities have been too relaxed about these issues”, and that “too few took them seriously enough” – what is it that that must now change?

    Back to the future

    There is no point rehearsing here the arguments that the “problem” has been overblown, centring on a handful of incidents in a part of the sector more likely to have been populated by the lawmakers and journalists whose thirst for crises to crack down on needs constant fuel. And anyway, for those on the wrong end of cancellation, the pain is real.

    There is little to be gained here from pointing out the endless inconsistencies in an agenda that seemed to have been designed to offer a simplistically minimalist definition of harassment and harm and a simplistically maximalist definition of free speech – until October 7th 2023 turned all that on its head.

    There isn’t a lot of benefit in pointing out how unhelpful the conflation between academic freedom and freedom of speech has been – one that made sense for gender-critical academics feeling the force of protest, but has been of no help for almost anyone involved in a discipline attempting to find truth in historic or systemic reasons for other equality disparities in contemporary society.

    Others write better than me, sometimes in ways I don’t recognise, sometimes in ways I do, about the way in which the need to competitively recruit students, or keep funders happy, or to not be the victim of a fresh round of course cuts inhibits challenge, drains the bravery to be unpopular, and is the real cause of a culture of “safetyism” on campus.

    And while of course it is the case that higher education isn’t what it was – which even in its “new universities” manifestations in the 1960s imagined small parts of the population engaging in small-group discussions between liberal-minded individuals able to indulge in activism before a life of elitism – I’ve grown tired of pointing out that the higher education that people sometimes call for isn’t what it is, either.

    What I’m most concerned about isn’t a nostalgic return to elite HE, or business-as-usual return to whatever it was or wasn’t done in the name of academic freedom or freedom of speech in a mass age – and nor is it whatever universities or their SUs might do to either demonstrate or promote a more complex reality. I’m most concerned about students’ confidence.

    The real crisis on campus

    Back in early 2023, we had seen surveys that told us about self-censorship, pamphlets that professed to show a culture of campus “silent” no platforming, and polling data that invited alarm at students’ apparent preference for safety rather than freedom.

    But one thing that I’d found consistently frustrating about the findings was the lack of intelligence on why students were responding the way they apparently were.

    For the endless agents drawing conclusions, it was too easy to project their own assumptions and prejudices, forged in generational memory loss and their own experiences of HE. Too easy to worry about the 14 per cent of undergrads who went on to say they didn’t feel free to express themselves in the NSS – and too easy to guess “why” that minority said so.

    As part of our work with our partners at Cibyl and a group of SUs, we polled a sample of 1,600 students and weighted for gender and age.

    We found that men were almost ten percentage points higher than women on “very free”, although there was gender consistency across the two “not free” options. Disabled students felt less free than non-disabled peers, privately educated students felt more free than those from the state system, and those eligible for means-tested bursaries were less confident than those who weren’t.

    In the stats, those who felt part of a community of students and staff were significantly more likely to feel free to express themselves than those who didn’t – and we know that it’s the socio-economic factors that are most likely to cause feelings of not “fitting in”.

    But it was the qualitative comments that stuck with me. Of those ticking one of the “not free” options, one said that because the students on their course were majority white students, they “often felt intimidated to speak about certain things”.

    Another said that northern state school students are minorities – and didn’t really have voices there:

    Tends to be posher middle class private school educated students who are heard.

    Mature students aren’t part of the majority and what I have said in the past tends to get ignored.

    Many talked about the sort of high-level technical courses that policymakers still imagine universities don’t deliver. “Engineering doesn’t leave much room for opinion like other courses”, said one. “Not a lot of room in my degree for expression” said another.

    And another gave real challenge to those in the culture wars that believe that all opinions are somehow valid:

    My course doesn’t necessarily allow me to express my freedom as everything is researched based with facts.

    Ask anyone that attempted to run a seminar on Zoom during Covid-19, and you get the same story – switched-off cameras, long silences, students seemingly afraid to say something for fear of being ostracised, or laughed at, or “getting it wrong”.

    As a former SU President put it on the site in 2023:

    This year there have been lecture halls on every campus stacked with students who don’t know how to start up a conversation with the person sat next to them. There were emails waiting to be sent, the cursor flashing at the start of a sentence, that the struggling student didn’t know how to word… This question is whether or not the next generation is actually being taught how to interact and be comfortable in their own skin… They have to if they’re claiming to.

    Freedom from fear?

    The biggest contradiction of all in both the freedom of speech and academic freedom debates that have engulfed the sector in recent years was not a lack of freedom – it was the idea that you can legislate to cause people to take advantage of it:

    In lectures and seminars there is often complete silence. The unanimity of asking a question or communicating becomes daunting when you’re the only one.

    Fear you’ll be laughed at or judged if you get it wrong

    In terms of lectures, the students in my class feel shy to share opinions which affects me when I want to share.

    Again this is a personal thing I don’t often like expressing my points of view in person to people I don’t know very well. Also they probably won’t be listened to so I don’t see the point.

    I feel very free amongst my other students in our WhatsApp groups (not governed by the university). However, freedom of expression in support sessions often ends up not occurring as everyone is anxious due to how the class has been set up.

    Once in class I simply got one word mixed up with another and the lecturer laughed and said. ‘yes…well…they do mean the same thing so that has already been stated.’ Making me and also my fellow students reluctant to ask any questions at all as we then feel some questions are ridiculous to ask. How are we to express our thoughts if we feel we will be ridiculed or made to feel ridiculous?

    For those not on programmes especially suited to endless moral and philosophical debates, a system where the time to take part in extracurriculars is squeezed by part-time work or public transport delays is not one that builds confidence to take part in them.

    The stratification of the sector – where both within universities and between them, students of a particular type and characteristic cluster in ways that few want to admit – drives a lack of diversity within the encounters that students do have in the classroom.

    And even for those whose seminars offer the opportunity for “debate”, why would you? Students have been in social media bubbles and form political opinions long before they enrol. And Leo Bursztyn and David Yang’s paper demonstrates that people think everyone in their group shares the same views, and that everyone in the outgroup believes the opposite.

    As Harvard political scientist David Deming argues here:

    Suppose a politically progressive person offers a commonly held progressive view on an issue like Israel-Palestine, affirmative action, or some other topic. Fearing social sanction, people in the out-group remain silent. But so do in-group members who disagree with their group’s stance on that particular issue. They stay silent because they assume that they are the only ones in the group who disagree, and they do not want to be isolated from their group. The only people who speak up are those who agree with the original speaker, and so the perception of in-group unanimity gets reinforced.

    Deming’s solution is that universities should tackle “pluralistic ignorance” – where most people hold an opinion privately but believe incorrectly that other people believe the opposite.

    He argues that fear of social isolation silences dissenting views within an in-group, and reinforces the belief that such views are not widely shared – and so suggests making use of classroom polling tech to elicit views anonymously, and for students to get to know each other privately first, giving people space to say things like “yes I’m progressive, but my views differ on topic X.”

    Promoting free speech?

    Within that new “promote” duty, it may be that pedagogical innovation of that sort within the curriculum will make a difference. It may also be that extracurricular innovation – from bringing seemingly opposed activist groups on campus together to listen to each other, through to carefully crafted induction talks on what free speech and academic means in practice – would help. Whether it’s possible to be positive about EDI in the face of the right to disagree with it remains to be seen.

    Upstream work on this agenda might help too – it’s odd that a “problem” that must be partly about what happens in schools and colleges is never mentioned in the APP outreach agenda, just as it’s frustrating that the surface diversity of a provider is celebrated while inside, the differences in characteristics between, say, medical students and those studying Business and Management are as vast as ever.

    Students unions – relieved of direct scrutiny on the basis that they are neither “equipped nor funded” to navigate such a complex regulatory environment – might argue that the solution is to equip them and fund them, not remove the regulation. They might also revisit work we coordinated back in 2021 – much of which was about strengthening political debate in their own structures as a way to demonstrate that democracy can work.

    Overall, though, someone somewhere is going to get something wrong again. They’ll fail to act to protect something lawful; or they’ll send a signal that something was OK, or wrong, when they should have decided the opposite.

    As such, I’ve long believed that the practice of being “wrong” needs to be role-modelled as strongly as that of being right. If universities really are spaces of debate and the lines between free speech and harassment are contested and context-specific, the sector needs to find a way to adjudicate conflict within universities rather than leaving that to the OIA, OfS, the courts or that other court of public opinion – because once it gets that far, the endless allegations of “bad faith” on both sides prevent nuance, resolution and trust.

    Perhaps internal resolution can be carried out in the way we found in use in Poland on our study tour, using trusted figures appointed from within – and perhaps it can be done by identifying types of democratic debate within both academic and corporate governance that give space to groups of staff and students with which one can agree or disagree.

    If nothing else, if Arif Ahmed is right – and “speech and expression were essential to Civil Rights protestors, just as censorship was their opponents’ most convenient weapon”, we will have to accept that “nonviolent direct action seeks to… dramatize an issue that it can no longer be ignored” – and it has as much a place on campus as the romantic ideals of a seminar room exploring nuance.

    Lightbulb moments need electricity

    But even if that helps, I’m still stuck with the horse/water/drink problem – that however much you promote the importance of something, you still need to create the conditions to take up what’s on offer. What is desired feels rich – when the contemporary student experience is often, in reality, thin. What if the real problem isn’t student protest going too far, but too few students willing to say anything out loud at all?

    Students (and their representatives) left Twitter/X/Bluesky half a decade ago, preferring the positivity of LinkedIn to being piled-onto for an opinion. Spend half an hour on Reddit’s r/UniUK and you can see it all – students terrified that one wrong move, one bad grade, one conversation taken the wrong way, one email to a tutor asking why their mark was the way it was – will lead to disaster. The stakes are too high, and the cushion for getting anything wrong too thin, to risk anything.

    Just as strong messages about the importance of extracurricular participation don’t work if you’re holding down a full-time job and live 90 minutes from campus, saying that exploring the nuances of moral and political debate is important will fall flat if you’re a first-in-family student hanging on by a thread.

    Much of this all, for me, comes back to time. Whatever else people think higher education is there to do, it only provides the opportunity to get things wrong once the pressure is off on always getting things right. Huge class sizes, that British obsession with sorting and grading rather than passing or failing, precarious employment (of staff and students) and models of student finance that render being full-time into part-time are not circumstances that lead anyone to exploring and challenging their ideas.

    Put another way, the government’s desire that higher education offers something which allows horizons to be broadened, perspectives to be challenged and ideas to be examined is laudable. But if it really wants it happen, it does have to have a much better understanding of – and a desire to improve – the hopeless precarity that students find themselves in now.

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  • The Business Plots, Then and Now

    The Business Plots, Then and Now

    In 1933, a group of American businessman planned a coup to take down the new President, Franklin Roosevelt. In this scheme, General Smedley Butler would be tasked with orchestrating the overthrow. This attempted coup was called the Business Plot.  

    College students today may ask, so what’s so important about this moment in history?  The point is that we have entered an era again where big business has a dominating influence over American politics. In the case of the 1933 moment, the coup was reactive. American business had failed, a Great Depression was in progress, and businessmen were fighting to maintain control, a control that they were used to having under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. The man tasked to lead the plot, General Butler, squashed it before it happened. And the story largely faded away. 

    Eight years later, in 1941, the US would be fighting a world war against global fascism and imperialism.  In the aftermath of the war, a stronger nation would arise. Today, we are also a nation facing intense competition and conflict, this time against China, Russia, India and other nations, with global climate change being a factor that wasn’t apparent back then. 

    In 2024, US business people, some of the richest people in the world,
    did something similar, but more proactive and less controversial. Today, folks, in general are OK with American businessmen pulling the strings. The most wealthy man have succeeded where big banks and big business failed before. And they have elected a friend. Today, cryptocurrency is booming. The stock market is booming for now. Unemployment is at record lows–for now. Big business has managed to gain greater control of the US government with little or no uproar. 

     

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  • LA Wildfires Reduce Classrooms to Ashes, Uproot Students’ Lives – The 74

    LA Wildfires Reduce Classrooms to Ashes, Uproot Students’ Lives – The 74

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  • LA Schools Reopen, But Recovery Will Be Long and Painful – The 74

    LA Schools Reopen, But Recovery Will Be Long and Painful – The 74


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    It was just after 1 am when Los Angeles charter school superintendent Ian Mcfeat started getting text messages and phone calls at a relative’s house where he was sheltering from the fires. 

    His neighbors said his house was burning down in the wildfires – along with his entire Altadena neighborhood of Los Angeles.

    Aveson School of Leaders, which McFeat runs and where his kids attended school just three blocks from his house, was also burning.

    Unable to sleep, Mcfeat drove away from his in-law’s house that he’d been evacuated to and made the drive back to Altadena.

    He drove through the fire lines and into his neighborhood to see if he could salvage anything, save anyone, or put out the fires that had raged on the east side for more than 48 hours straight, and decimated the Palisades in the west. 

    He was greeted with a scene out of a horror movie. Fueled by a violent windstorm and piles of brush left from a particularly wet winter last year, the firestorm was like a tornado shooting flames, blasting through his neighborhood.

    “It was like driving through a bomb scene,” said Mcfeat. “There were homes exploding. I probably shouldn’t have been there.” 

    Despite the devastating losses, Mcfeat can’t imagine not rebuilding his home and school right where they were in Altadena. But the road to recovery will be a long and painful one.

    “No doubt about it. We are going to rebuild,” said Mcfeat. Aveson has started a GoFundMe. At this point, a new site for the school has not been identified. The district hasn’t been able to help them yet.

    “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” said Mcfeat.

    The wildfires that burned Los Angeles this month are the costliest and most destructive in the city’s history, displacing more than 150,000 residents and killing at least 25 people. Two massive blazes fed by windstorms, the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire, simultaneously scorched the city from the sea to the mountains, filling the air with vast plumes of ash and smoke.

    As the wind and flames began to retreat last week, and firefighters gained control of the fires, schools began to reopen. And the kids began to return to class.

    The Los Angeles Unified School District, which is by far the largest district of about 80 in Los Angeles County, resumed instruction Monday after being totally closed since last Thursday. Seven schools remain shut because they’re located in evacuation zones. Another three won’t reopen because their buildings were badly burned or destroyed in the fires.  

    Dozens of much smaller districts in Los Angeles County also reopened this week, with the exceptions of two districts, Pasadena Unified, which encompasses Altadena, and La Cañada Unified, which neighbors Altadena to the west. 

    The Eaton fire has destroyed at least five schools but was mostly contained by Friday. 

    Kids from two of the LAUSD schools that burned in the Palisades, Marquez Charter Elementary School and Palisades Charter Elementary School, were placed, with intact school rosters, in close-ish LAUSD school buildings that already had other schools in them.

    The students who attended the burned schools were given their own entrances, classrooms and courtyards for kids to play. When parents dropped them off at class this week, there were a lot of tearful reunions.

    Families from Palisades Charter were somber, but excited to return to normalcy with their new space located inside of Brentwood Science Magnet School.  

    Joseph Koshki, a parent from the Palisades whose son attends third grade at Palisades Charter, walked holding hands with his son to their new classroom at Brentwood Science, which had been stacked with balloons.

    “When he saw his school burned on the news he was crying for days,” Koshki said of his child. “But when he heard that he was going to his new school with his old friends, he was so happy”.

    Nina Belden, a parent of a Palisades Charter student who had made an emergency evacuation from her house in the Palisades with her family, said it was important for the students at her daughter’s school to stay together and receive in-person instruction.

    “We were worried they were going to do something like remote learning,” said Beldon.

    Marquez Charter, which also burned in the Palisades fire, has a long history in the community, having opened in 1955 when the Palisades still had a frontier feel, before the neighborhood became a favorite of Hollywood stars and media execs.

    For Victoria Flores, who works as a paraeducator at Marquez, the school is part of her family. Flores went to Marquez when she was in elementary school, and her mother works in the cafeteria.

    “It was my home away from home. We are devastated by what happened,” Flores said.

    But Flores said she and the rest of the staff were glad to be relocated together at a LAUSD school called Nora Sterry, about ten miles from the burned Marquez campus.

    “We are a really close family,” said Flores. “That’s helped us a lot.”

    Upstairs at Nora Sterry, Clare Gardner’s class had about eight of twenty students show up on the first day of relocation.

    Her third-grade class was playing with clay and Mrs. Gardner, who is a twenty-seven-year veteran of Marquez, held back her tears as she helped students arrive into class.

    “We always call it the Marquez family,” Gardner said as the children greeted each other.

    One boy in Mrs. Gardner’s class said he was happy to be around his friends and teacher but sad about his classroom fish and books, which were lost in the fire.

    Later in the morning, LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho went to visit parents at Nora Sterry.

    After nearly a week off school, Carvalho says attendance is still below normal.

    “I think where that attendance is lacking is in schools that were directly affected” by the fires, Carvalho said.

    Also hurting attendance, Carvalho said, is the fact that many families are enduring temporary relocations, while others lack stable housing entirely.

    LAUSD staff attendance is back to normal, he said, while student attendance is about 88% — down from an average of about 90%, representing about 10,000 fewer students than normal.

     “As conditions of the families begin to normalize and stabilize, those [attendance] numbers will rise,” said Carvalho.

    For other schools in other areas of Los Angeles, recovery may be longer in the making. 

    Bonnie Brinecomb, principal of Odyssey Charter School – South in Altadena, which burned to the ground in the Eaton Fire, estimates that the homes of 40% of the students enrolled in the school also burned.

    Families and school staffers are scrambling to ensure displaced families have food, shelter and clothing, Brinecomb said. Some students are turning up for daycare at a nearby Boys and Girls Club that offered to take them in.  

    Brinecomb said Odyssey has partnered with McFeat’s school Aveson to search for new facilities. But the double loss of students’ homes and the schools’ campuses is a gutpunch.  

    “It’s just heartbreak. Pure shock,” she said. “You don’t even process how bad of a situation just happened.”

    Like Aveson, Odyssey has launched an online fundraiser and Brinecomb says the school will rebuild. How long that will take, though, remains an open question.  

    From the perspective of displaced children and families, the faster things return to normal, the better, said Dr. Frank Manis, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Southern California. 

    The experience of trauma can intensify if routines are disrupted for longer periods, and the intensity of the disruption matters as well, said Manis. Kids who lost their homes to fires may have a harder time bouncing back than those who only lost their schools, he said.    

    “It’s sort of on that spectrum of wartime PTSD, but not as bad,” said Manis. “So what it could lead to is nightmares, difficulty sleeping, and emotional or behavior problems that can last for quite a while.”

    Children fighting post-traumatic stress from the fires may become withdrawn, or act out in class, said Manis. But mostly, he said, the research from past natural disasters shows that even children badly impacted by the fires may begin to feel normal within a few months. 

    “Kids are pretty resilient,” said Manis. “But trauma can disappear for a while, and then it can resurface later. When everyone’s forgotten how bad it was, it can resurface.” 


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  • NCAA Adds Women’s Wrestling as Championship Sport, First Tournament Set for 2026

    NCAA Adds Women’s Wrestling as Championship Sport, First Tournament Set for 2026

    In a historic move for collegiate athletics, the NCAA has officially recognized women’s wrestling as its 91st championship sport, marking a significant milestone for female athletes across the country. The decision, announced at the Association’s annual Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, will culminate in the first-ever NCAA women’s wrestling championship tournament in 2026.

    The sport’s elevation from the NCAA Emerging Sports for Women program reflects its rapid growth and increasing popularity. Currently, 76 NCAA schools sponsor women’s wrestling programs, with an additional 17 programs expected to join in the 2024-25 academic year. More than 1,200 women wrestlers currently compete at the collegiate level, with at least 45% representing diverse or international backgrounds.

    “This means so much to women’s wrestling and to women’s sports in general,” said Kennedy Blades, a University of Iowa wrestler and 2024 Olympic silver medalist. “Since I was a little girl, I dreamed about being an NCAA national wrestling champion. It will fulfill so many little girls’ dreams, including mine.”

    The path to championship status began in 2020 when women’s wrestling joined the NCAA’s Emerging Sports program. The sport achieved the required minimum of 40 varsity-level programs during the 2022-23 academic year, leading to a recommendation from the NCAA Committee on Women’s Athletics in February to advance to championship status.

    To support this initiative, the NCAA Board of Governors has approved $1.7 million in funding to establish the National Collegiate Women’s Wrestling Championships. The competition will feature athletes from all three NCAA divisions competing against one another in a unified tournament format.

    Rich Bender, executive director of USA Wrestling, celebrated the decision, noting that “Women’s wrestling has been an Olympic sport since 2004 and is the fastest-growing sport for young women in our nation.” The sport joins five other former emerging sports that have achieved NCAA championship status since 1994: rowing, ice hockey, water polo, bowling, and beach volleyball.

    “This milestone for women’s wrestling is a declaration that women deserve equitable opportunities to compete, to lead, and to thrive,” said Ragean Hill, chair of the NCAA Committee on Women’s Athletics and executive associate athletics director at Charlotte. “It’s a step toward gender parity in sports and a powerful reminder that when women are given the platform to rise, they inspire generations to come.”

    A dedicated women’s wrestling committee will now work with NCAA staff to develop the framework for the inaugural 2026 championship tournament. The historic decision not only provides new competitive opportunities for female athletes but also strengthens the NCAA’s commitment to expanding women’s sports participation across collegiate athletics.

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  • Biden Issues Historic Posthumous Pardon to Civil Rights Leader Marcus Garvey

    Biden Issues Historic Posthumous Pardon to Civil Rights Leader Marcus Garvey

    In one of his final acts as president, Joe Biden granted a posthumous pardon to Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr., the influential civil rights leader and founder of the UniversalMarcus Garvey Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), clearing his name of a 1923 mail fraud conviction that many have long viewed as unjust.

    The pardon, announced just before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, came after years of advocacy from Howard University School of Law professors and students, led by Professor Justin Hansford, who worked closely with Garvey’s son, Dr. Julius Garvey.

    “In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Marcus Garvey was ‘the first man of color in the history of the United States to lead and develop a mass movement,’” said Hansford, who published Jailing a Rainbow: The Unjust Trial and Conviction of Marcus Garvey last year. “He was convicted of mail fraud in a trial widely recognized as a miscarriage of justice.”

    The pardon effort gained significant support from 21 members of Congress, primarily from the Congressional Black Caucus, who urged Biden to “honor his work for the Black community, remove the shadow of an unjust conviction, and further your administration’s promise to advance racial justice.” Last year, Diverse featured a podcast on the subject. 

    Garvey, Jamaica’s first national hero, was convicted in 1923 on one count of mail fraud related to his role as president of the Black Star Line shipping company. He received the maximum sentence of five years imprisonment and a $1,000 fine.

    The UNIA founder was a pioneering advocate for human rights and Pan-Africanism, building a movement that reached 6 million members across 40 countries.

    The presidential pardon marks the end of a century-long struggle to clear Garvey’s name. Previous attempts included congressional hearings in 1987 led by Representatives John Conyers and Charlie Rangel, who introduced resolutions to exonerate him.

    The exoneration comes 84 years after Garvey’s death in 1940, affirming his innocence and recognizing his significant contributions to civil rights and human rights advocacy worldwide.

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