Tag: Career

  • Top lawyer targets tenure after being sued for ignoring it

    Top lawyer targets tenure after being sued for ignoring it

    Kansas lawmakers are considering a bill that would sap tenure of its meaning for faculty at the state’s public colleges and universities.

    House Bill 2348, introduced this month in the Kansas Legislature, doesn’t specifically say it would ban tenure. But according to the proposed law, “any special benefits, processes or preferences conferred on a faculty member” by tenure “can be at any time revoked” by a higher education institution or the Kansas Board of Regents, which governs the state’s public universities. It also says tenure wouldn’t “create any entitlement, right or property interest in a faculty member’s current, ongoing or future employment.”

    The bill would end such rights not just for future “tenure” earners but for already tenured professors, too. Mallory Bishop, a nontenured instructor at Emporia State University who serves as faculty president, said HB 2348 would “remove the core premise of tenure,” which is “you cannot be fired without cause.”

    “The bill itself seems to remove everything except the name of tenure,” Bishop said.

    It’s part of a growing trend among Republican lawmakers in multiple states seeking to weaken or eliminate tenure in public institutions. Ohio’s Senate passed a bill this year that would weaken tenure, though the House hasn’t yet followed suit. So far, no state has fully banned tenure at public institutions.

    But the Kansas bill is noteworthy for its origins. The Board of Regents and the state’s two top research universities publicly oppose it. So where did it come from?

    Steven Lovett, general counsel for Emporia State University, says he wrote it. And the top of the bill includes one sentence saying a lawmaker requested it on Lovett’s behalf.

    The bill materialized after Emporia State suffered a setback in its continued defense against a federal lawsuit filed by 11 tenured professors whom the university decided to lay off in 2022. A judge—rebuffing the university defendants’ request to toss out the suit—allowed the faculty to move forward with their allegations that they weren’t provided sufficient due process. Emporia State officials, including Lovett himself, are among the defendants in the continuing suit.

    Those faculty were among 23 tenured professors whom Emporia State laid off, citing financial pressures and other possible reasons. The university’s handling of the situation led the American Association of University Professors to censure the institution. The controversy presaged layoffs over the past two years by other U.S. universities, which also cited financial concerns and didn’t spare tenured faculty. West Virginia University made headlines in 2023 for axing a swath of tenured faculty, followed by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and Western Illinois University.

    A university spokesperson wrote in a statement to Inside Higher Ed that Emporia State supports tenure and that Lovett’s “submission of this bill comes as a surprise to the university.” But the statement also defended Lovett’s “constitutional right” as “a private citizen” to submit the legislation.

    The statement doesn’t say whether the university supports or opposes the bill. Emporia State didn’t provide an interview or respond to written questions about its position on the legislation.

    Bishop said she’s asked top university officials for their stance but hasn’t received an answer; she said university president Ken Hush told her in a private conversation that even if the bill were to pass, “tenure still exists.” Lovett—saying he was commenting as a private citizen—has told lawmakers that universities that speak out against the bill are violating state law.

    And while the university says it was surprised by Lovett’s submission of the bill, an online video of an earlier legislative hearing shows Hush appearing to urge lawmakers to support similar legislation not long before his top lawyer introduced it.

    Reversing a Court Loss?

    The university attempted to dismiss the laid-off professors’ lawsuit by arguing that tenure didn’t give them a “property right” to continued employment. “Property right,” or “property interest,” is a legal term, and if tenured professors possess this right, it could mean they should have received due process before being ousted, in accordance with the 14th Amendment.

    In December, a U.S. district court judge in Kansas allowed the case to progress, ruling that the professors’ legal complaint sufficiently alleged that the faculty did have so-called property rights to keep their jobs. The case continues.

    As the Kansas Reflector previously reported, a Kansas House Higher Education Budget Committee member asked Hush about the suit during a Jan. 31 hearing. According to a video of the proceedings, Hush said the property right ruling “means an entitlement and job forever, until this is settled in some form. Obviously, as a state agency, we’re working with the attorney general on this. And the other option to correct that is via legislation.”

    About a week later, House Bill 2348 appeared at the request of Representative Steven K. Howe—who chairs the committee Hush spoke to—on behalf of Lovett. Howe declined to comment for this article.

    The bill, however, is currently before the House Judiciary Committee—not Howe’s committee. Lovett advocated for the legislation during a Feb. 11 Judiciary hearing, in which he was introduced as “Mr. Steven Lovett, private citizen.” Lovett told the lawmakers the university didn’t encourage him to write the bill “and had no knowledge of it before I submitted it.”

    He said the bill “eliminates the property right of tenure but not tenure itself.” The idea that tenure is a property right “obligates Kansans to a long-term, unfunded fiscal liability,” he said, adding that the due process required to oust tenured faculty “costs even more.” He argued the First Amendment makes tenure and due process unnecessary to protect academic freedom.

    “A nontenured faculty member enjoys as much legal protection to pursue academic freedom as a tenured faculty member,” he said. Tenure “primarily results in nothing more than personal gain.”

    Lovett said Board of Regents members echoed part of his arguments amid the lawsuit filed by the laid-off professors, arguing that any universities that opposed the bill would be violating state law that says the board manages public universities. As of now, though, a judge has dismissed all board members as defendants, leaving only Lovett, Hush and one retired Emporia State official facing the lawsuit.

    At the end of his speech, Lovett, who’s also an associate professor of business law and ethics at Emporia State, publicly renounced the tenure the university gave him.

    Doug Girod, chancellor of the University of Kansas, followed Lovett at the lectern.

    “I don’t believe I’m breaking the law, because I am here with the full knowledge of my board,” Girod said. Eradicating “meaningful tenure” would mean losing “our best faculty, and we will not be able to replace them,” he said.

    After Kansas State University’s president spoke against the bill, Blake Flanders, the top administrator at the Board of Regents, told lawmakers the board is also against it, citing similar recruitment and retention concerns. Further, his written testimony suggested he doesn’t buy Lovett’s argument that he’s acting as a private citizen.

    He pointed out that Board of Regents policy requires legislative proposals from institutions it governs first be presented to the board for approval “before being submitted to the Legislature.” He wrote, “That policy was not adhered to in the case of this bill.” A board spokesperson didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed an interview or answer written questions about whether the board is pushing for Lovett to be disciplined.

    Even if the bill passes, it’s unclear whether it would actually help Emporia State in its current suit or erase the meaning of tenure for other Kansas faculty who have already earned it. J. Phillip Gragson, attorney for the laid-off professors, said in an email that that would be unconstitutional.

    “While the state can certainly commit higher education academic and economic suicide by passing a bill that eliminates tenure prospectively only if it wants, the state cannot take away tenure rights from those professors who have already obtained tenure without due process,” he wrote.

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  • 6 steps to a future-focused blueprint: Supporting students in making career decisions

    6 steps to a future-focused blueprint: Supporting students in making career decisions

    The OECD’s (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) study on teenage career uncertainty underscores a growing concern: 40% of 15-year-olds lack clear career plans, a figure that has risen by over 50% since 2018. This uncertainty is linked to poorer employment outcomes in adulthood, particularly for students with lower academic performance. The study emphasizes career development programs can significantly reduce this uncertainty by helping students explore interests and align education with potential career paths. However, data from PISA 2022 shows that too few students participate in such initiatives, suggesting a need for broader access and promotion of these programs. 

    The issue that frequently comes to the forefront is the potential disconnect between and among CTE programs, counseling, and academic standards-based classrooms. In conversations, all appear to believe in the interconnectedness of these three areas, yet they are often separate and distinct for a variety of reasons. Helping students prepare for their lives after school and for potential careers needs to be an integral part of all school’s educational vision. This is often demonstrated in graphics and words through a school’s mission, vision, and Portrait of a Graduate. 

    How can educators bring CTE, counseling, and standards-based classrooms together? Let’s look at six strategies through the lens of a curricular-focused learning environment: 

    Facilitating Career Exploration, Awareness, & Application 

    Counselors play a vital role in the success of all students, helping students identify their strengths, interests, and values through a variety of tools including interest assessments and career inventories. They provide one-on-one or group sessions to help students explore specific careers tied to their interests. These activities can guide students toward careers featured in classrooms, courses, and programs. 

    Interdisciplinary Career Units 

    Career exploration and application opportunities can be easily woven into all subjects. What students are learning in the classroom and the passions they are discovering can be connected to potential careers they may want to consider. For example, math classes could include performance tasks around topics such as financial literacy or architecture, requiring teamwork and communication to solve problems. Language Arts related careers could include a grant writer, social media marketer, public relations specialist, or a journalist with projects and lessons easily connected with essential content related to reading, writing, speaking, and listening. 

    Partnerships between CTE programs and general education teachers can help align these activities with broader learning goals and within and across career clusters and pathways. 

    Project-Based Learning (PBL) 

    Incorporating an instructional strategy such as PBL is something that is common for CTE teachers. Using this pedagogy and incorporating future-ready skills can involve students working on complex, real-world problems over an extended period, requiring them to think critically, collaborate, and communicate effectively. Defined utilizes career-themed projects that can be integrated across subjects, such as developing a marketing plan in business classes or designing solutions for community issues in science. These experiences make skills relevant to future careers while aligning with academic standards. 

    Embedded Communication Training 

    Incorporating oral presentations, team discussions, research, and report writing into assignments across all subjects ensures consistent practice. Weaving active communication strategies into learning activities helps students practice collaboration and interpersonal skills. Projects that require students to do presentations and/or build communication documents that are informative or persuasive promote formative and summative assessments of communication skills. 

    Assessment & Reflection 

    Self-reflections and teacher feedback through the lens of reflecting on the real-world connected processes and content applications to careers through their learning can be powerful “a-ha” moments for students. The use of rubrics for evaluating skills such as problem-solving can help teachers guide students as they practice skills throughout their learning experience. Evidence of practice and growth over time can also be part of an evidenced-based portfolio for the student. Bringing these ideas together can help students understand the interconnectedness between careers, content, skills, and projects. 

    Collaboration with Employers & Community Partners 

    Schools can establish partnerships with local businesses to provide interactive career days, mentorship programs, and soft skills training. Exposing students to the workplace through job shadowing, internships, or part-time work enables them to understand real-world career dynamics. When possible, incorporating on-site visits through field trips can help introduce students to different work environments and let them see first-hand the connections between school-based learning and future opportunities. 

    Bringing professionals into classrooms for workshops or mentorship allows students to practice skills in real-world contexts. Additionally, business and industry experts can work collaboratively with a curriculum team to create performance tasks, projects, and virtual internships to help students bridge the world of work, academic standards, and skill development and practice. 

    To learn more about how you can support and engage your students in career-connected deeper learning, please click here

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  • Why grad students should prioritize friendships (opinion)

    Why grad students should prioritize friendships (opinion)

    How important is friendship to you? According to a Pew Research Center study in 2023, 61 percent of U.S. adults said having close friends is extremely or very important for people to live a fulfilling life, which is much higher than the share who said the same about being married (23 percent), having children (26 percent) or having a lot of money (24 percent). Meanwhile, almost one in three Americans feel lonely every week.

    In this context, perceptions of workplace friendships are evolving as the world of work transforms. Working professionals consider having a best friend at work to be even more important since the start of the pandemic and the dramatic increase in remote and hybrid work. Younger generations, such as millennials and Gen Zers, want to curate authenticity and set boundaries. They may prioritize job satisfaction and mental health over other traditional factors. How do those new priorities relate to friendship?

    In addition to well-being benefits, having friends at work can contribute to an individual’s professional development and workplace performance. Working in an environment that fosters vulnerability, as friendships often do, enables individuals to challenge themselves in ways they may otherwise avoid.

    The topic of friendship at work often focuses on the postgraduate workforce. We argue for the importance of applying the same principles to the graduate student and postdoctoral experience. We discuss ways in which graduate students and postdoctoral scholars can benefit from prioritizing friendships and essential interpersonal skills, which can lead to a more robust academic experience and support network.

    Navigating Challenges and Life After Graduate School

    Studies show that strong relationships at work are linked to a lower risk of burnout, better mental health and fewer traumatic experiences. Having peer friendships helps graduate students and postdoctoral scholars cope with the rigorous nature of their academic training. Although the demands of this training can make it difficult to prioritize one’s social life, intense work environments in group settings also provide many opportunities for like-minded individuals to get to know each other beyond the immediate tasks at hand.

    Cultivating such relationships helps students and scholars to navigate the challenges of graduate school and/or their postdoctoral training and work with the benefit of a support system. Sometimes people struggle to comprehend the unique and specific nature of graduate training. Having peers in the same environment allows one to work through challenges and problems with someone who knows firsthand the context of what they are experiencing.

    As graduate students and postdoctoral scholars face points of transition, either at the beginning or end of their training, many will leave their current support network and find themselves in need of building new connections. Yet, fulfilling friendships can take time and effort to build. Friendships formed in graduate school can provide an incredible form of support for any moment in life and can have lifelong implications for personal and professional careers. In fact, many of us in the workplace still talk to friends we made during our graduate school years and cherish the memories we built based on understanding and trust.

    Strengthening Academic Research and Performance

    A significant portion of the research on workplace friendships highlights the increase in performance and productivity that results from the presence of such relationships. Happiness leads to increased performance across the board. Developing friendships among peers can result in an increase in potential collaborators for opportunities such as co-authorships, conference presentations or interdisciplinary research. It can also happen the other way around—connections that begin as professional collaborations may turn into friendships.

    The two of us writing this article are real examples of how developing friendships within the workplace can provide benefits to one’s career growth. We met as colleagues and quickly found commonalities in our personal interests and professional goals. While our jobs took us to different institutions, a robust co-writing dynamic emerged from the foundations of our friendship. Our story is similar to that of many scholars who write with their friends.

    Developing Transferable Skills

    Creating meaningful connections also helps graduate students and postdoctoral scholars strengthen key transferable skills that are relevant in preparing for diverse career paths. Consider three that come to mind:

    • Communication: For many friendships, there is a sense of comfort that develops over time. This bond encourages an ease in conversations lacking in other types of interactions. Friends can be a sounding board when you are attempting to process your thoughts and put them into words for an external audience.
    • Collaboration: Some graduate students and postdoctoral scholars may conduct solitary research with little opportunity to work within a team or group setting, especially in the humanities. Identifying opportunities to collaborate with friends helps to develop the ability to contextualize one’s responsibilities within a broader project. This cultivates a skill that employers often prioritize in the hiring process: collaboration or teamwork.
    • Cultural competency: Another benefit to fostering workplace friendships is becoming more aware of different lived experiences from your own. While it is possible to do this through less personal interactions, friendships allow you to share life stories and perspectives and build deeper connections. Expanding your perspective will allow you to become a stronger scholar (during your time in graduate school or postdoctoral training) and professional (whatever your postgraduation plans may be) in an increasingly diverse world.

    Implications for Career Development

    Of course, there are some challenges to keep in mind with workplace friendships. These may include: trusting someone too soon and oversharing, participating in gossip and rumors, and in-group pressure to fit in, which ultimately leads to exclusion of some through group homogeneity and barriers to opportunities. Other challenges exist for individuals with marginalized backgrounds. The lack of diversity or representation in certain disciplines can further feelings of isolation and take a greater toll on one’s well-being.

    Those of us working with this unique population can make an intentional effort to facilitate meaningful relationship-building and address the challenges above through educational programming. Professional development events for marginalized populations often provide a “third space” for individuals to connect in a critical mass, breathe and celebrate, and identify role models and peer collaborators. The University of Maryland system’s Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate is a great example of community-building.

    Another viable option for educators and institutions to consider is to leverage the power of peer or near-peer mentoring. Research highlights the importance of mentoring constellations, which acknowledge the varying needs of a mentee and how mentoring relationships differ in structure or intensity. While a “vertical mentor” may be more senior in an organization and offer guidance to mentees based on career progression or life stages, a “horizontal mentor” refers to a peer at a similar career level who shares the mentee’s experiences and challenges. At the University of Maryland, College Park, the Graduate School has created a near-peer mentoring program that focuses on interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing between a doctoral student and a postdoctoral scholar over a year. This program promotes a culture of mentoring where both parties can develop self-awareness and build skills critical to their respective careers.

    Finally, how can graduate students and postdoctoral scholars go about making friends at work? Begin by prioritizing relationships in the spaces you occupy, especially during moments of uncertainty. Then, attend and leverage university programming around well-being, professional development and mentoring, to meet people with similar interests and values. Next, look carefully within your high-touch professional relationships, and consider how proximity, similarity, and reciprocity can help you facilitate the initiation and development of a friendship.

    Yi Hao is the program director of career and professional development at the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, and a member of the Graduate Career Consortium—an organization providing an international voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders.

    Mallory Neil is the director of industry partnerships for the College of Science at Clemson University.

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  • Education Dept. allows some civil rights inquiries to restart

    Education Dept. allows some civil rights inquiries to restart

    After pausing most civil rights investigations, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is resuming some inquiries, but only those related to disability-based discrimination, according to a memo obtained by ProPublica.

    Those involving race or gender will remain on hold, the nonprofit news organization reported.

    The investigation freeze, which had been in place for a month, forbade OCR staffers from pursuing discrimination complaints that had been submitted by thousands of students at schools and colleges across the country. In fiscal year 2024, the office received 22,687 complaints—37 percent of which alleged discrimination based on disability.

    “I am lifting the pause on the processing of complaints alleging discrimination on the basis of disability. Effective immediately, please process complaints that allege only disability-based discrimination,” Craig Trainor, the office’s acting director, wrote the internal memo that was sent to employees, most of whom are attorneys.

    A spokesperson for the department declined to respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

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  • ABA suspends DEI standards for accreditation

    ABA suspends DEI standards for accreditation

    The American Bar Association is suspending diversity, equity, and inclusion standards for the law schools it accredits amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown on DEI efforts, Reuters reported.

    An ABA council reportedly voted on the change Friday, suspending DEI standards through August as the organization—which accredits nearly 200 law schools—considers permanent changes.

    ABA officials did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.

    The change comes as the ABA has clashed with the Trump administration in recent weeks, accusing the president of “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself” in issuing rapid-fire executive orders that have targeted DEI and birthright citizenship, and sought to shrink the federal government through mass firings and other actions that some legal scholars have deemed unlawful.

    In the aftermath, the Trump administration barred political appointees to the Federal Trade Commission from holding ABA leadership posts, participating in ABA events, or renewing their memberships. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson accused the ABA of a “long history of leftist advocacy” and said “recent attacks” on the administration made the relationship “untenable.” 

    State officials have also pressured ABA to drop its DEI standards. In January a group of 21 attorneys general, all from red states, sent a letter to the ABA urging it to drop DEI standards.

    The ABA has reportedly been reviewing its standards on DEI since 2023, when the U.S. Supreme Court upended affirmative action with its ruling in favor of Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

    Some Republican officials have celebrated the ABA’s move. “This is a victory for common sense! We are bringing meritocracy back to the legal system,” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X.

    ABA’s suspension of DEI standards comes after the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology dropped diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility from its accreditation criteria.

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  • Judge extends block on controversial NIH cuts

    Judge extends block on controversial NIH cuts

    A federal judge Friday extended a temporary block on the National Institutes of Health’s plan to slash funding for universities’ indirect research costs amid a legal battle over the policy change.

    The nationwide block, which U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley put in place Feb. 10 soon after a coalition of state attorneys general, research advocates and individual universities sued the agency, was set to expire Monday. But it will now remain in place until Kelley has time to consider the arguments the plaintiffs and NIH presented at a hearing Friday morning.

    It’s unclear when Kelley will rule. But after the two-hour hearing, she said she certainly “has a lot of work to do” to before making a decision.

    “This case is not about whether as a policy matter the administration can target waste, fraud and abuse,” Katherine Dirks, an attorney for the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, told the judge during the hearing. “It’s contrary to the regulations which govern how these costs are determined and how these payments are disbursed. If there were an intention on the administration’s part to change the mechanism by which those occur, there’s a process for it—a statutory process and a regulatory process. Neither of those were followed here.”

    But the NIH’s legal team said the agency has the right to unilaterally cap reimbursements for costs related to research—such as hazardous waste removal, facilities costs and patient safety—at 15 percent. 

    “This is not cutting down on grant funding,” said Brian Lea, a lawyer for the NIH, said at Friday’s hearing. “This is about changing the slices of the pie, which falls squarely within the executive’s discretion.”

    Counsel for the plaintiffs, however, argued that the policy is unlawful and, if it’s allowed to move forward during a protracted litigation process, will cause “irreparable harm” to university budgets, medical breakthroughs and the patients who may not be able to enroll in clinical trials as a result. 

    “A clinical trial is for a lot of people a last hope when there’s not an FDA–approved medicine that will treat their condition. Any minute that they’re not enrolled in that trial brings the risk of irreparable harm,” said Adam Unikowsky, an attorney for the plaintiffs. “Part of these institutions’ mission is serving these patients, and this cut will irreparably harm their ability to fulfill that mission.” 

    Since 1965, institutions have been able to periodically negotiate their reimbursement rates directly with the federal government; university rates average about  28 percent. However, rates can vary widely depending on factors such as geographic cost differences and the type of research, and some institutions receive indirect reimbursement rates of more than 50 percent of their direct grants. 

    Although the NIH argued in court that indirect costs are “difficult to oversee” as a justification for cutting them, the plaintiffs refuted that claim, pointing to a complex negotiation process and regular audit schedule that’s long been in place to ensure the funds are being used to support NIH research. 

    In fiscal year 2024, the NIH sent about $26 billion to more than 500 grant recipients connected to colleges—$7 billion of which went to indirect costs. 

    Saving or Reallocating $4B?

    This isn’t Trump’s first attempt to cap indirect costs, which Elon Musk—the unelected billionaire bureaucrat overseeing the newly created Department of Government Efficiency—recently characterized as a “rip-off” on X, the social media site he owns.  

    In 2017, Congress rebuked President Trump’s attempt to cap indirect costs, and it has written language into every appropriations bill since specifically prohibiting  “deviations” from negotiated rates. Given that, Kelley asked the Trump Administration’s legal team, how in his second term, Trump “can unilaterally slash these previously negotiated indirect cost rates which Congress prevented him from doing previously?” 

    “The money that is saved—it’s not being saved, it’s being reallocated—will be taken from indirect costs and filed into new grants that will be using the same funding formula,” said Lea, who told the judge he was using air quotes around the word saved. “The money is not being pocketed or being shipped somewhere else. It’s being applied back into other research in a way that best fits NIH and what will best serve the public’s health.”

    But Lea’s claims that the money will simply be reallocated contradicted the NIH’s own social media post from Feb. 7, which said the plan “will save more than $4B a year effective immediately,” and Kelley asked for an explanation.  

    In response, Lea said the NIH’s “tweet was at best sort of a misunderstanding of what the guidance does.” 

    The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, did not immediately respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment on whether it plans to issue a widespread public correction on social media and its other platforms to clarify its policy and inform taxpayers that their plan to cap indirect costs is not intended to save them any money. As of Friday afternoon, the post was still up on X.

    Layoffs, Canceled Clinical Trials

    But Unikowsky, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said that funneling money away from indirect costs would still harm the nation’s esteemed scientific enterprise, which is grounded in university research. 

    “Indirect costs are real costs associated with doing research,” said Unikowsky, pointing to the California Institute of Technology as an example. The institute spent $200 million to build a state-of-the-art laboratory and is counting on indirect cost reimbursements from the NIH to help pay off the debt it incurred to construct it. 

    “There’s going to be a hole in Cal Tech’s research budget” and the “money is going to have to come from somewhere else,” Unikowsky added.

    Unikowsky also listed nine different institutions, including the Universities of Florida, Kansas and Oregon, that have said they will have to lay off skilled workers who support medical research, including nurses and technicians, if the cap goes into effect. 

    Lea, the lawyer for the Trump Administration, countered that destabilizing university budgets doesn’t amount to immediate and permanent harm warranting injunctive relief on the rate caps. 

    “That’s not an irreparable thing, or else every business that’s in a money pinch could just come in and get an injunction,” he said. “I understand that many institutions would prefer to use endowments and tuition for other purposes, but unless they’re barred from doing so—and the inability to do so would cause some non-monetary harm—that’s not irreparable harm.”

    Although Kelley gave no indication on when or how she plans to rule, some university leaders who listened to the hearing came away optimistic that she’ll favor the plaintiff’s arguments. 

    “We look forward to the judge’s ruling,” said Katherine Newman, provost at the University of California which is one of the universities suing the NIH. “[We] maintain our position that the Administration’s misguided attempt to cut vital NIH funding is not only arbitrary and capricious but will stifle lifesaving biomedical research, hobble U.S. economic competitiveness and ultimately jeopardize the health of Americans who depend on cutting-edge medical science and innovation.”

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  • A ‘Dear Colleague’ Letter in Defense of DEI, by Shaun Harper

    A ‘Dear Colleague’ Letter in Defense of DEI, by Shaun Harper

    Dear Colleague:

    The U.S. Department of Education’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights issued a “Dear Colleague” letter last week that overflowed with misrepresentations of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in our nation’s educational institutions. The threat of losing federal funding has understandably spooked many of you. It is clear to others and me that inciting such fear, as opposed to actually holding institutions accountable for doing right by students and employees whom racial discrimination most persistently harm, was the aim of the Department’s letter.

    I am writing to publicly furnish guidance that I have privately offered to principals, superintendents, college and university presidents, education governing board members, and journalists over the past seven days. But before doing so, I start with a question that I posed in this Forbes article more than a year ago: “What sense does it make to know something is a lie and to have examples of what’s actually true, yet deliberately hide those truths for fear of what liars might do?” Much of what was conveyed in the Department’s letter was largely untrue—at best based on anecdotes, not on credible evidence systematically collected from surveys of students and employees, or from rigorous analyses of discrimination reports disaggregated by race.

    To be sure, persons (no matter how small in number) who experience discrimination, harassment, abuse, and other forms of injustice deserve protections and remedies from their educational institutions and the federal government. But the Department’s letter insists that it is white and Asian students who are most on the receiving end of these experiences. A corpus of evidence published over five decades makes irrefutably clear that Asian American, Black, Indigenous, Latino, and multiracial students and employees most often experience racism on campuses. Paradoxically, the Department’s letter calls for the elimination of policies, offices, programs, and activities that aim to address those historical and contemporary norms. This is guaranteed to result in more discrimination, harassment and abuse. In addition, racialized opportunity and outcomes disparities that disadvantage people of color will widen and new racial inequities will emerge.

    Here are 11 actions I recommend for higher education institutions that are truly committed to anti-discrimination and anti-racism:

    1. Maintain mission fidelity: Many college and university mission statements have long included language about fostering inclusive learning environments, preparing students for citizenship and work in a diverse democracy, and other values that qualify as DEI. If and when the Department probes an institution, you must be prepared to show how and why various DEI efforts are essential for mission actualization.
    2. Show your work: The Department’s letter will compel many of you to hide, rename, or altogether discontinue DEI initiatives. I insist on doing the opposite. Now is the time to showcase DEI activities to confirm that they are not the racist, divisive, discriminatory, and anti-American activities that obstructionists erroneously claim.
    3. Show your racial equity data: Transparency about racial disparities in student outcomes and various employee trends should be used to justify the existence of DEI policies and programs. Black undergraduate men, for instance, are often at the bottom of most statistical measures of educational progress and performance; my and other scholars’ research confirms that it is not because those students were undeserving of admission or are academically less capable. Data like these could help justify the need for Black male student success initiatives.
    4. Show racial discrimination data trends: Educational institutions are required to have reporting and investigation processes for claims of racial discrimination. As previously noted, the Department’s letter makes is seem as if white and Asian students are being most routinely discriminated against. It might just be that your campus data shows something different. It is important to present year-over-year trends, as opposed to a one-time snapshot. These data could be used to justify the existence of various DEI policies and programs.
    5. Assess the campus racial climate: The National Assessment of Collegiate Campus Climates (NACCC) is a suite of peer-reviewed, expert-validated quantitative surveys that are administered to every student or employee at a participating institution, including white people. Whether you use the NACCC or some other data tool, now is the time to formally assess the climate to determine if and how persons from different racial groups are experiencing the institution. The NACCC has been administered on hundreds of campuses over the past six years—very few white respondents have reported what the Department’s letter alleges. It is important for institutions to provide climate survey data about which groups most frequently encounter discrimination, harassment, abuse, and exclusion.
    6. Rely on evidence: A dozen highly respected researchers contributed to Truths About DEI on College Campuses: Evidence-Based Expert Responses to Politicized Misinformation, a report published last March. This document is just one of several hundred research-based resources (including peer-reviewed studies published in top academic journals) that confirm the educational and democratic value of DEI in higher education. You should use these evidence-based resources to justify the continuation of your institution’s policies and programs.
    7. Insist on evidence: DEI attackers make numerous untrue and exaggerated claims about what is occurring on campuses. Educational leaders have the right to insist that outside accusers furnish evidence of widespread discrimination, harassment, and abuse. Data sources must be rigorous, trustworthy, and verifiable. One-off examples and small numbers of anecdotes ought not be accepted as evidence of pervasive wrongdoing. Imagine if someone told lies about you as an individual person—you would demand proof. Institutions that have committed themselves to DEI deserve this, too.
    8. Articulate consequences: As the federal government, state legislators, and others scrutinize campus DEI efforts, it behooves leaders and employees not only to amplify the value of these policies and programs, but also to forecast what would occur in their absence. For example, how the discontinuation of a first-year transition program for Indigenous students would widen first-to-second-year persistence rate disparities between them and peers from other racial groups. Or how financially devastating lawsuits would be to institutions if less attention was paid to improving the workplace climate for the groups of employees whom years of investigations data confirms experience the highest levels of discrimination and harassment on campus.
    9. Ensure reporting equity: The Department’s letter includes a link to this webpage where “anyone who believes that a covered entity has unlawfully discriminated may file a complaint with OCR.” It is important for white and Asian American, as well as for Black, Indigenous, Latino, and multiracial people to know this reporting site exists. If it is distributed through only a limited number of cable news and social media channels, then there is a chance that those who experience discrimination most often will not be aware of its existence. It is similarly important to remind students and employees of how to access campus-level reporting resources.
    10. Humanize DEI professionals: As many DEI professionals were being fired from their federal jobs last month, I recognized their humanity in this TIME article. I specifically noted the following consequences for them: “Some of these workers now won’t be able to afford daycare for their kids or elder care for their aging parents. Others have children in college whose tuition payments are suddenly in limbo because of politics. Some will lose their healthcare benefits. Too many of these workers will struggle to find other jobs because of the false narratives that are being told about DEI.” Professionals who do DEI work everywhere, including in higher education, deserve greater protections from their employers. These innocent people deserve colleagues like you who use your platforms to communicate threats to their lives and careers.
    11. Form coalitions: The tone of the Department’s letter is serious. It has many people scrambling on their individual campuses. We need institutions to come together to collectively strategize, defend their DEI commitments, push back and sue. Attempting to do this in isolation will not yield the macro-level outcomes that our democracy and its educational institutions deserve. Last fall, I launched the National DEI Defense Coalition. So far, hundreds of scholars, leaders, and DEI professionals have contributed. In the next few weeks, I will publicly announce ways for others to participate. But meanwhile, please leverage existing networks (professional associations, athletic conference memberships, and so on).

    These are not the only ways institutions can defend DEI policies and programs, but my hope is that they provide some helpful guidance in response to the Department’s letter as well as to other politicized misinformation, disinformation and anecdotal exaggerations about who is being most frequently discriminated against on campuses.

    For Democracy,

    Shaun Harper

    Shaun Harper is university professor and provost professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership.

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  • College English classrooms should be slow (opinion)

    College English classrooms should be slow (opinion)

    In a minorly famous letter to the duchess of Sutherland, Henry James advises that The Ambassadors should be read “very easily and gently,” specifying that his correspondent should ideally “read five pages a day.” At this pace, the duchess would have taken almost exactly 13 weeks to finish the book if she read every day of the week. One imagines that the novel would be tucked into otherwise inaccessibly glamorous, luxurious days for the duchess, days filled with, among other comforts, corresponding with James about how to read his latest novel.

    Five pages a day is very slow reading, but most of us would love to approach our reading at a more leisurely pace, if not a pace determined so prescriptively. On the other side of the spectrum of reading experiences, one finds the average student in college English classes—both undergraduate and graduate. To use my experience as an example, I was at the nadir of my reading life as an undergraduate English major; as someone who naturally reads quite slowly, I spent many nights of my undergraduate career standing at my dresser so I wouldn’t fall asleep while reading. (I couldn’t afford, and doubt I had ever heard of, a standing desk at that point in my life, and my dresser was the tallest piece of furniture in my room.)

    While doing this, I often took notes blindly in a notebook with my right hand while I held whatever book I was reading in my left. I would reread my notes the next morning to help me remember what I had read the night before. I loved the books I was reading, and I wanted to succeed in the classes I took, but I was also, by trying to read upward of 500 pages a week, making myself miserable.

    I don’t blame the professors who assigned the reading—all of them were gifted pedagogues, and not all of them assigned too much reading. They, too, inhabited a culture in which they were expected to work quickly and fulfill numerous demanding institutional roles (years later, I still remember one of my undergraduate professors saying she worked around 70 hours a week).

    Now that I’m on the other side of the academic experience, however, I’ve come to realize that each of us is responsible for resisting a culture that is, by all accounts, making students anxious, depressed and—dare I say it—unproductive at unprecedented rates. Students in undergraduate classes are primed to work quickly. Almost every part of their life—their experience on social media, their online shopping, their use of ChatGPT to complete assignments and their selection of a route on Apple Maps—is designed to help them reach tangible and intangible destinations as quickly as possible. Most students, meanwhile, are terrible at working slowly.

    As academicians, we’re constricted, of course, by all the reasonable and unreasonable demands placed on us by work, family and the other important parts of life, and when we read—especially when we read for professional, critical purposes—we read and work as quickly as possible, that “possible” being an ever-nebulous boundary toward which we strain and suffer while still trying to produce quality work. As professors, if we read books like The Ambassadors, we’re likely to read them in bursts and chunks—butcherly words that sound as unappealing as the process of reading a dense, beautiful novel in such a manner actually is.

    While we cannot, in the immediate future, totally alter the institutional structures of postsecondary liberal arts education, there are still things that English professors can do to resist the pressure for speed. Chief among them is to design a classroom that encourages our students to go slow.

    In their 2016 book, The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber challenged the culture of speed in academia by advising faculty to work more slowly, a laudable goal, but one that critics pointed out was a luxury that untenured faculty simply couldn’t enjoy. The problem, of course, is that the people who design a job decide how much work ought to be accomplished in a given time frame, and untenured faculty have little control over the amount of work they are expected to produce to attain job security. However, what almost all professors, regardless of contract status, do have control over is how much work we require within a given time frame from the students we teach. In other words, we should design classes that treat our students in a way that we’d like our institutions to treat us.

    As English professors, our job is not to encourage quick thinking but to foster thorough, imaginative and critical thinking. To do this, we must design our courses to foster and prompt slow work that breaks students out of the habits of expediency they have developed throughout their time in school. Designing classes that foster intentional slowness takes effort, but it also means that we can craft the kinds of spaces that make literature enjoyable and show students the value and beauty of literary texts when they are encountered in an environment suitable for literary consumption.

    A slow classroom can take several forms. In the slow classes I’ve taught, it means requiring students to purchase paper copies of the texts we read and to keep a real, physical journal in which they respond to prompts weekly outside of class. I also do something in these classes that I wish someone had done for me when I was a student: I make it clear that they should spend a certain amount of time on work for my class outside the classroom but that they should also give themselves a cutoff time, especially when it comes to reading for class. I tell them that I take around two or three minutes to read a page of a novel well, sometimes more if the prose is dense, and that they should plan for each page of reading to take three to four minutes. I also tell them that if they make time to read and don’t finish, they shouldn’t panic; they should move on with their day and enjoy the nonacademic parts of their life.

    Most importantly, I assign less reading. Of course, I’d love to live in a world where my students have thoroughly read the English literary canon (whatever that means), but more than anything, I want them to have read something and to have read it well. To this end, I try to assign between 20 and 30 pages of reading per class meeting, which amounts to around 10 to 15 pages per day, not too far from James’s edict. Rather than just assigning this reading and hoping for the best, I explain to my students about why I assign this number of pages, talk to them about creating and choosing a time and space to read in their daily lives, and describe the process of reading in my class as one they should understand as a reprieve from the time-pressured demands of other courses.

    In class, I designate much of our time together as technology-free in order to make space for the rich and meaningful conversations that occur most fruitfully when we aren’t distracted by notifications from our phones and laptops. Students engage in small group and classwide discussions, and I challenge them with daily questions that push them out of their comfort zones. I task them with coming up with steel man arguments in support of cultural and fictional villains, I ask them to articulate what makes a good life by finding evidence for and theories of good lives in their reading, and I frequently make them dwell with a given scene until we’ve extracted every last bit of sense (and often a bit of senselessness) from it.

    We tackle around one question a day, if we’re lucky. But the answers and questions we walk away with are finer and fuller than the formulaic answers that students give when they’re in a hurry. In return for designing my class in a way that allows students to work slowly, I expect around the same amount of essayistic output in terms of page numbers, but I design essays to be completed slowly, too, by scaffolding the work and requiring creative responses to prompts to encourage the slow, critical thinking and writing that English professors long to read and rarely encounter. I’ve received work that was thoughtful and occasionally even beautiful, work that couldn’t have been written by AI.

    In many ways, my experience of earnestly trying to read around 500 pages of fiction a week as an undergraduate might seem anachronistic. Professors across disciplines have noted the apparent inability of students to engage with any extended reading, whether this means they’re not reading at all or that they just ask ChatGPT to do the “reading” for them. The irony of worrying—as many academics seem to be doing these days—that students will use artificial intelligence to read or write for them is that many undergraduate classes require students to work like machines, to read and write at a breakneck pace, a demand that prompts the ridiculous phenomenon of classes on speed reading, which many universities advertise and which are also available online (the one I’ve linked here is accompanied by the terrifying motto “Reading at the Speed of Thought™”).

    In a discipline for which the core method is close reading, the idea of students reading a novel as quickly as possible ought to make English professors shudder, and while it’s not necessary to dedicate an entire semester to a single novel, we ought to see course design as part of the solution to students rushing through their work. In an age that privileges fast work, near-constant availability and answers on demand, the slow English classroom is a reprieve, a space where deep, creative and inspired thought is given the time it needs to blossom.

    While our students will likely never occupy the rarefied spaces that the duchess of Sutherland enjoyed when James wrote to her in 1903, with our guidance and course design, they can experience the joy, power and, yes, the luxury of reading and writing slowly. We just have to give them the time.

    Luke Vines is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University. He recently began serving as the assistant director for academic support at Berry College.

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  • More calls for Michigan colleges to end Chinese partnerships

    More calls for Michigan colleges to end Chinese partnerships

    More Republican politicians are calling for colleges to end their partnerships with Chinese universities.

    U.S. representatives John Moolenar and Tim Walberg wrote letters to the presidents of Eastern Michigan University, Oakland University and the University of Detroit Mercy demanding that they cancel their partnerships with institutions in China, expressing concerns that sensitive research could help the Chinese military advance its technological capabilities.  

    “The university’s [People’s Republic of China] collaborations jeopardize the integrity of U.S. research, risk the exploitation of sensitive technologies, and undermine taxpayer investments intended to strengthen America’s technological and defense capabilities,” Moolenar and Walberg wrote in all three letters. “You must immediately terminate these collaborations.”

    Pressure is mounting on U.S. higher ed institutions to cut ties with Chinese partners, whether in research collaborations, exchange programs or branch campus initiatives.

    Moolenar and Walberg’s letters come a few weeks after the University of Michigan ended a 20-year partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In September, Moolenar wrote a similar letter to Michigan president Santa Ono demanding an end to that collaboration after five Chinese international students were caught taking photos of training exercises at nearby Camp Grayling, where the state National Guard trains.

    EMU has partnerships with Beibu Gulf University and Guangxi University; Oakland partners with Changchun University of Science and Technology, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry, and Beijing Information Science and Technology University; and Detroit Mercy offers dual-degree programs with Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Yancheng Institute of Technology and Anhui Polytechnic University.

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  • College presidents stay mostly silent on Trump

    College presidents stay mostly silent on Trump

    In his first month, President Donald Trump has upended federal research funding and taken aim at race-conscious programs amid a flurry of executive orders and other actions.

    While some higher ed associations and universities have responded with lawsuits, college presidents, for the most part, have watched in relative silence. Some have released statements on changes to their institutions’ federal funding or diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, but those announcements have mostly been vague, with little mention of the political forces driving the changes. Few college leaders have publicly criticized the president’s efforts to overhaul the sector to match his vision.

    The muted or mostly nonexistent response comes as campuses have increasingly grappled with how to navigate political events since last spring’s pro-Palestinian protests, when students demanded their leaders speak up about the war between Israel and Hamas. That seems to have quelled interest in taking institutional positions. Any pushback college leaders voiced during Trump’s first term has been largely replaced by silence.

    The Presidents Speaking Up

    Still, there have been some notable exceptions to the trend.

    Michael Roth at Wesleyan University and Patricia McGuire at Trinity Washington University—two notoriously outspoken presidents—are among those who have voiced alarm about Trump’s attacks on the sector.

    Roth has written op-eds calling on his fellow college presidents to “weigh in when they see the missions of their institutions” and the health of their campus communities “compromised.” He also shared his thoughts on speaking up at the American Council on Education conference last week, noting that he tries “not to speak about the president directly” but rather the need to stand up for institutional values when they are threatened by external forces, such as Trump.

    McGuire remains an outspoken presence on social media and in interviews.

    Other leaders have spoken forcefully to their constituents about Trump’s interference.

    Following a recent and widely panned Dear Colleague letter that declared race-conscious programming, resources and financial aid illegal, Case Western Reserve University president Eric Kaler wrote in a message to campus that “this expansion to include all aspects of campus life appears to be a gross overreach of the Supreme Court decision and may be challenged in the legal system.” He added that the university “will remain firmly committed to our core values.”

    Some presidents at minority-serving institutions have added their voices to the mix.

    David Thomas, president of Morehouse College, a historically Black institution, told CNBC last month that Trump’s attempted freeze on federal funding represents an “existential threat.” He also called out an executive order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion, telling MSNBC that “we must be a point of resistance to that effort to essentially teach untruths.”

    Thomas, who is retiring in June, suggested a second Jim Crow era was coming, which he called “a reaction to the progress of people of color and others who have been disenfranchised.”

    Presidential Silence

    But as most presidents have remained silent, some critics have blamed institutional neutrality, the concept that universities should refrain from making statements on social or political issues. The movement seemed to boom last year as pro-Palestinian protests spread nationally and students often called on presidents to make public statements.

    Roth, speaking at ACE, cast institutional neutrality as “a vehicle for staying out of trouble.”

    The American Association of University Professors has also taken a critical view of institutional neutrality, writing in a lengthy statement earlier this month that it “conceals more than it reveals.”

    Joan Scott, professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study who was part of the AAUP group that crafted the statement on institutional neutrality, is also critical of presidential silence in the face of what she described as an attack by the Trump administration on higher education.

    “I think there is no question that the target is the university mission as we’ve known it, and that very few people are speaking up,” Scott said. “And in fact, I would say that institutional neutrality is being used as a kind of protective stance for those administrators who are not speaking up.”

    A frequent refrain from campus leaders who have adopted institutional neutrality is that they would speak up when the core institutional mission is threatened, which experts argue is happening. However, most presidents are not speaking up despite perceived threats to the core mission.

    Inside Higher Ed contacted 10 universities with institutional neutrality policies, all among the wealthiest in the nation, with multibillion-dollar endowments. Only Yale University provided a statement, though some others shared prior messages from their presidents to the campus communities regarding the federal funding freeze and Trump attacks on DEI. Of those messages, none directly connected their concerns to the Trump administration or said what was driving federal actions.

    “The university is working to understand the scope and implications of the recent [Dear Colleague] letter and remains committed to the mission, to the principles of free expression and academic excellence, and to supporting the community,” Yale spokesperson Karen Peart wrote by email. “President [Maurie] McInnis and Provost [Scott] Strobel sent a message to the Yale community that addresses recent developments from the federal government. President McInnis has also shared a message to the community about the university’s commitment to the research mission.”

    Yale did not answer specific questions sent by Inside Higher Ed.

    Scott believes presidents are conducting a balancing act—one she views as cowardly. She argues that many are more concerned about “short-term risks,” such as an increase to the endowment tax or the loss of federal funding, than “the long-term risk” that “higher education as we’ve known it disappears or is put on hold” through the remainder of Trump’s four-year term.

    “What we’re watching is a struggle on the part of university administrators to balance some commitment to the mission—the attacked mission of the university—and some anxiety about the funding that keeps the mission going, even as the mission is being undermined,” Scott said.

    Jeremy Young, director of state and higher education policy at PEN America, a free expression group, takes a more charitable view of college presidents remaining mum on Trump’s actions.

    Speaking up is fraught with risks, Young argues, ranging from punitive actions by the Trump administration to pushback from trustees. Instead, he thinks leaders should organize a unified sector response.

    “If you’re looking to individual presidents to face off against the power of the U.S. government, you’re looking in the wrong place,” Young said.

    He believes associations are leading the fight and urges them to collaborate more, arguing that organizations need to stick together to flex collective strength. That’s the only way “higher ed will be strong enough to be able to respond effectively,” he said.

    But just because presidents aren’t speaking up doesn’t mean they have to cower, he said.

    “I think the one thing that’s easy is that presidents shouldn’t overinterpret the law,” Young emphasized. “They shouldn’t comply in advance. You look at the Dear Colleague letter—it’s very clear in the letter that it does not have the force of law. There is an attempt here to scare presidents, and they should avoid being scared into doing things that aren’t required.”

    He stressed the importance of maintaining normalcy and core values on campus. One area where college presidents could improve is on their internal messaging, he said. As political pressures mount on higher ed, it’s vital that administrators communicate with constituents “to reassure them that they have their backs.”

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