Tag: Career

  • Lessons of the Fountain Pen (opinion)

    Lessons of the Fountain Pen (opinion)

    For the past two years, during the twilight of my academic career, I have become a devotee of the fountain pen, often pondering this seemingly retro act of putting pen to paper.

    Composing again by hand forced me to admit how often I succumb to the internet’s never-ending temptations. In the past, some of my best prose has come forth at 40,000 feet, while I was strapped in for a long flight—with no contact outside the streaking metal tube. But the wily digital devil never rests. Most jets now offer Wi-Fi, enticing you to check your email or the Yankees–Red Sox score as you cross the North Atlantic.

    My longing to write by hand, though, was undermined by largely illegible penmanship, a lifelong consequence of my naturally lefty self having been forced to write right-handed. No pen ever seemed to work for me, and I have tried most. Gel pens are the worst, producing a script that even I cannot decipher. Even so, during a research trip to Europe in fall 2022, where Wi-Fi was often unavailable, I found myself relying on a bound notebook during the day and my computer at night. The illegibility of my notes and journal entries made typing them out especially onerous and time-consuming, all the more so after I had returned home two months later. Then I remembered a fountain pen that my mother had gifted me so long ago—was it for my 50th birthday in 2005?—that its ink cartridges had dried up. A trip to Staples yielded a small pack, and I realized right away that there was enough friction between the nib and page to slow me down—enough for me to be able to decipher what I had written.

    Like most brainstorms, this one proved ephemeral. To write by hand and then enter text into a computer—with my mediocre keyboarding skills—was just too burdensome. Those who started their academic journeys during the typewriter era will remember with a whiff of despair those late-night, hours-long sessions spent typing the final draft. Correction tape, erasable bond, Wite-Out—my heart sinks just listing those essential tools from another era. If you want a taste of those times, just sample the acknowledgments in academic books or dissertations from the decades before computers, in which women, typically wives, are thanked for having typed the manuscript. The acknowledgements from Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad, which I just pulled from a shelf, reflect more rarefied academic circumstances, as the author notes the grant provided by the English Department at Columbia University “for the typing of the manuscript.”

    And then a light went off as I sat in my study, one that has changed my life as a writer. After struggling with incipient carpal tunnel syndrome a few years ago, I purchased voice recognition software. Dragon Naturally Speaking was powerful, especially if you spoke in complete phrases and sentences. My copy of the software is now old—it will not work with Windows 11—but proved a godsend with unexpected benefits. While dictating my notebook pages, I could hear the awkward sentences; I could conjure the better word on the spot, and I could detect those places where the tone needed adjusting. Sometimes inspiration would bless me and a new sentence or two would emerge like Athena.

    I’m no neo-Luddite longing to smash all computers, even when Windows or MS Word betray me, as they so often do. I recognize the realities and benefits of our digital age. But wielding a fountain pen these past two years has prompted me to wonder whether some challenges the humanities face regarding writing and reading might be overcome by heeding the pen’s simple lessons.

    The Importance of Touch

    For millennia the act of writing has been tactile. From Babylonian cuneiform on clay tablets to elaborate Medieval script on vellum and modern calligraphy on heavyweight wedding stationery, writing has always meant touching the surface, with words being physically imprinted as the pen journeys across. When I write well, my hands seldom leave the page. And when I stop to consider the right word or a more felicitous phrase, my pen often poises a mere quarter inch above, ready to strike.

    Compare this to composing on a laptop, where pauses can lead to disaster. Distractions fill your field of vision—apps, task bars, weather forecasts and seemingly never-ending notifications that another email has arrived or another appointment looms. When you grasp for the right combination of words, it’s all too easy to seek them beyond the screen, or, even worse, to succumb to the program suggesting what it believes should come next. And unless you are vigilant about shutting off endless features, the software will insist upon indicating that you just misspelled a word or used a questionable grammatical construction. Most of us then dutifully correct the “mistake,” only to lose the rhythm and even essence of our prose. More and more, the virtual page seems to be doing the writing.

    The Value of Tangibility

    We have all had the experience of composing and revising a document on a computer only to lose the effort because of a crash, a software freeze or a moment of forgetfulness in which we clicked “no” instead of “yes.” What might have seemed so real to us for an hour or more vanishes like a genie who returns to his bottle without granting our wish.

    When I compose by hand, my efforts are right in front of me. The crossed-out word—which turns out to be the right one—can still be recovered. The history of moving paragraphs, those arrows and circles that sometimes fill the page, are not lost as they would be in computer drafting. Even more satisfyingly tangible for me, however, is the physical evidence of my labors: the blue ink stains on my right hand, the ritual of refilling my pen from the bottle when I have gushed out a pool of words, the celebratory occasion when I empty a bottle of ink and need to open a new one. A similar mood of celebration arises when I fill the last page of my wide-ruled notebook and place it on the shelf next to its predecessors. Scrolling through thousands of documents and folders on my computer is certainly a humbling experience, as they represent the literal steps in a multidecade academic journey, but I regret not having found my fountain pen niche many years before. What a collection those notebooks would’ve been.

    The Pleasures of Portability

    Coinciding with my return to compositional roots has been my regular presence at a place where my words seem to flow so easily, the Hall Street Bakery in Grand Rapids. During my sabbatical, I was there at least five days a week and now continue to show up on nonteaching days. All I need is my notebook, a folder with ideas or drafts, a full pen and my regular—a large house coffee and a cranberry-almond scone—to set me up for a solid hour of writing. Conversations bubble from nearby tables, kids run around hopped up on sugar, drivers retrieve DoorDash orders—all set against the occasional counterpoint of the hissing espresso machine—and I am in my element. No need for Wi-Fi passwords or the elusive table next to an electrical outlet. I can walk across the room to speak with someone, order a refill, visit the men’s room—all without fearing that my laptop will disappear. And spilling coffee on my notebook or dropping it onto the floor is a minor inconvenience, not an expensive technological catastrophe. Traveling light, I can sweep up my possessions in an instant and head out the door.

    The Relevance to Reading

    In thinking about writing as a physical act that produces something you can hold, I recognized anew how relevant these same qualities are to reading. We seem today to be awash in words, yet paradoxically find ourselves in the midst of a reading crisis that extends from the youngest learners to those at America’s universities.

    An article by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” convinced me that my experience with the fountain pen might be relevant to the challenges she describes.

    Horowitch reports that students at elite colleges, who have already proven their ability to read complex texts, seem less and less able (or willing) to read long literary works. She mostly ascribes this to high schools emphasizing standardized tests, to teens distracted by smartphones and to college students who view their educations in strictly transactional terms, as means to specific, often exceedingly specific, ends—which seldom include pushing through Middlemarch.

    She may be right, but the teachers and faculty she interviewed offer little beyond assigning shorter texts: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening instead of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye instead of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. A book or two at most from The Iliad or Paradise Lost.

    Let me argue, though, that the very elements I associate with composing by hand—its tactile and tangible nature, its simple conveniences—should be drawn upon when encountering long, complex and sometimes life-changing texts. And that the cool distance of the digital interface works against these very qualities.

    Yes, I know it is possible to put all your books on a single device where you can search and annotate the texts. Even if you lose your Kindle, your digital library can be retrieved from the cloud. Yet the experience of reading on the screen tends to flatten all writing, making each screen much like any other, so that the unique feel and heft of Moby-Dick, for example, is lost, making Melville’s incandescent prose indistinguishable from any Substacker’s, and probably less visually enticing.

    Even if you can resist distraction on your laptop, you never get the sensory experience unique to each book: how it feels in your hands, how its page design pulls you in or pushes you away, how its very smell when brand-new or decades old can evoke its distinctive qualities, how the satisfying sound of turning pages reaches a crescendo when you get to the end and close the cover with a resonant thump. Like the angry slam of a telephone receiver, it’s a sound beyond our digital age. And it all leads to a final moment when you place the book on a shelf to stand as a tangible reminder of your ever-changing reading life—no internet connection required.

    The physical book, that container that our society, try as it might, cannot cast into the electronic darkness, will live on. At least I hope so. A recent visit to my university’s beautiful library leaves much room for doubt. In the popular Mary Idema Pew Library Learning and Information Commons—sorry, but that’s its official name, sans commas—hundreds of students gather at any given time. But to stroll through its busy floors soon makes this book lover feel like Diogenes in search of an honest man. My lamp has seldom shined upon a student with a physical book in hand; instead, they tap and scroll their way through reading assignments in much the same way they engage daily life.

    I see them as we share the bus that travels between our university’s two campuses, filling each moment with the small screens they find far more interesting than the passing world—the season’s first snowflakes, the glow cast upon the road as dusk approaches, the deer in a harvested cornfield who look up with more curiosity than my fellow travelers.

    With a sigh—and nod to the deer—I open my copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, touching its familiar pages with my ink-stained hands, and try to remember to text my wife that I’m on my way.

    After 37 years as a professor of English at Grand Valley State University, Rob Franciosi recently retired to devote his time to writing.

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  • The Contest Over Fairness in Higher Ed (opinion)

    The Contest Over Fairness in Higher Ed (opinion)

    My 5-year-old recently told me it was unfair that her teacher makes her write from left to right “like everyone else.” She’s left-handed, and for her, it smudges the ink and feels awkward—while her right-handed friends have no problem. I affirmed her frustration. It is harder. But I also knew that was discomfort, not injustice.

    If she told me her school never included stories with Black or Indian characters—her own identities—or skipped over Black history and Diwali while celebrating Halloween and Christmas, I’d respond differently. That’s not just about feelings. That’s curricular erasure—structural invisibility embedded in education.

    Higher education is now facing a similar test of discernment. In recent weeks, the American Bar Association, under pressure from the Trump administration, suspended its DEI accreditation requirement for law schools. The University of Michigan shuttered its DEI programs. And Harvard University received a sweeping federal demand to dismantle its DEI programs, reorient admissions and hiring, and submit to ideological audits.

    Harvard’s decision to reject the federal ultimatum—even at the cost of more than $2 billion in research funding—offers a rare but vital example of institutional clarity. Harvard said no to the false equivalence now dominating our public discourse: the notion that discomfort is the same as discrimination.

    Critics claim that DEI efforts create an exclusionary climate and reflect a lack of “viewpoint diversity,” framing a commitment to racial equity as an ideological litmus test. But that framing ignores history, context and the actual purpose of DEI work, which at its best corrects for the unfairness of cumulative white advantages built into college admissions, curriculum and culture in higher education. It treats the discomfort that arises when racism is named as equivalent to structural exclusion. And then, under that pretense, the federal government now imposes its own litmus test—seeking to dismantle the very practices aimed at addressing structural harm.

    Now that federal litmus test is extending into faculty hiring. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, under the Trump administration, has launched an investigation into whether Harvard’s hiring practices discriminate against white men and other traditionally overrepresented groups. Cloaked in the language of civil rights enforcement, the inquiry reflects a disturbing reversal: Efforts to address long-standing exclusion are being reframed as exclusion themselves. Rather than confronting the structural realities that have kept academia disproportionately white and male, this investigation uses claims of “reverse discrimination” to undermine the very mechanisms created to correct inequity. It’s a strategic misreading of fairness—one that turns tools of justice into instruments of suppression.

    Similar to my daughter calling left-handed writing “unfair” because it invokes feelings of discomfort and victimization—despite the absence of structural exclusion—DEI’s powerful opponents manipulate the language of fairness to justify conformity and suppress interventions that respond to actual harm. “Race neutrality” is the legal fiction of our time, much like “separate but equal” was in another era. Both erase history in favor of surface-level parity and use the language of justice to obscure harm. We saw this logic in the Students for Fair Admissions ruling, which restricted race-conscious admissions. But as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent, the deep racial disparities we see today were “created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day.” The issue isn’t too much talk about race—it’s our refusal to hear it.

    Now, under the guise of neutrality, institutions are being pressured to abandon DEI work, censor curricula and silence student voices. And many institutions are acting as if this call is guided by law. But the SFFA decision didn’t ban DEI programming or prohibit race-based affinity spaces, racial climate assessments or the consideration of lived racial experiences in admissions essays.

    This is interpretive overreach: stretching legal decisions out of fear. In doing so, institutions compromise not only their policies, but their principles. But there’s another path—what I call interpretive reimagination. It’s the ethical clarity to meet ambiguity with purpose, not retreat. To respond not only as a matter of compliance, but of mission. And this discernment—the ability to differentiate between discomfort and structural harm—is at the heart of racial literacy. It means recognizing that not every claim of unfairness is equal and that treating them as such can perpetuate injustice. That discernment is essential for educators and institutions.

    What we’re witnessing is not just a policy shift. It’s a redefinition of fairness—one that casts efforts to name inequality as divisive, while branding ideological control as “viewpoint diversity.” That redefinition is being enforced not just through rhetoric, but through decrees, audits and intimidation. Harvard’s refusal matters—not because the institution is perfect, but because it disrupted the pattern. It reminded us that higher education still has choices. The contrast with Michigan and the ABA is instructive. When institutions comply pre-emptively, they legitimize coercion. They don’t just narrow the space for justice—they help close it.

    Fairness, equity and justice are not settled ideas. They are contested. And higher education is not outside that contest—it is a primary site of it. To meet this moment with integrity, we must refuse the fantasy of neutrality, name systems of advantage and commit to teaching truth, even when that truth is inconvenient. The difference—between choosing caution or courage—will depend on whether we, as educators, can practice the kind of discernment that parents are called to every day. Because, ultimately, this isn’t just about legal compliance or institutional risk. It’s about whether the stories we tell about fairness will include all of us—or only those already at the center.

    Uma Mazyck Jayakumar is an associate professor of higher education and policy at the University of California, Riverside. She served as an expert witness in SFFA v. UNC, and her research was cited in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion to the Supreme Court’s landmark affirmative action case.

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  • Faculty Survey Shows Need for Digital Accessibility Support

    Faculty Survey Shows Need for Digital Accessibility Support

    The U.S. Department of Justice introduced the Americans With Disabilities Act final rule for digital accessibility in 2024, requiring public colleges and universities to follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines for ensuring that online programs, services and activities are accessible. These laws require institutions to update inaccessible documents and ensure new content follows accessibility requirements.

    A recent survey by Anthology found that faculty members feel they lack sufficient support and access to resources to create an accessible online classroom environment, and they have a general lack of awareness of new ADA requirements.

    Anthology’s survey—which included responses from 2,058 instructors at two- and four-year colleges and universities across the U.S.—highlights a need for professional development and institutional resources to help faculty meet students’ needs.

    Supporting student success: Expanding accessibility isn’t just mandated by law; it has powerful implications for student retention and graduation outcomes.

    Approximately one in five college students has a disability, up 10 percentage points from the previous decade, according to 2024 data from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. A majority of those students have a behavioral or emotional disability, such as attention deficit disorder, or a mental, emotional or psychiatric condition.

    While a growing number of students with disabilities are enrolling in higher education, they are less likely than their peers without a disability to earn a degree or credential, due in part to the lack of accessibility or accommodations on campus.

    Survey says: Only 10 percent of faculty believe their institution provides “absolutely adequate” tools to support students with disabilities, and 22 percent say they consider accessibility when designing course materials.

    Instructors are largely unaware of the ADA’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines; one-third of survey respondents said they are “not at all” aware of the requirements, and 45 percent said they were aware but “unclear on the details.”

    When asked about the barriers to making course content accessible, faculty members pointed to a lack of training (29 percent), lack of time (28 percent) and limited knowledge of available tools (27 percent) as the primary obstacles.

    A lack of awareness among faculty members can hinder student use of supports as well. A 2023 survey found that only about half of college students are aware of accessibility and disability services, though 96 percent of college staff members said the resources are available.

    In Anthology’s survey, 17 percent of instructors said they were unaware of what tools their institution provides to help students access coursework in different formats, and 30 percent said they were aware but didn’t share information with students.

    Less experienced faculty members were more likely to say they haven’t considered accessibility or were unaware of ADA requirements; one-third of respondents with fewer than two years of teaching experience indicated they rarely or never consider accessibility when creating materials.

    One in four faculty members indicated more training on best practices would help them make their digital content more accessible, as would having the time to update and review course materials.

    Improving accessibility: Some colleges and universities are taking action to empower faculty members to increase accessibility in the classroom and beyond.

    • The University of North Dakota in spring 2023 created an assistive technology lab, which trains faculty and staff members to make course resources accessible. The lab, led by the university’s Teaching Transformation and Development Academy, offers access to tech tools such as Adobe Acrobat Pro and the screen-reader software Job Access with Speech, for course content development. Lab staff also teach universal design principles and conduct course reviews, as needed.
    • The State University of New York system created the SUNY Accessibility Advocates and Allies Faculty Fellowship program in January, designating 11 fellows from across the system to expand digital accessibility and universal design for learning practices at system colleges. Fellows will explore strategies to build a culture of access, share expertise and experience, connect with communities of practice, and design a plan to engage their campus community, among other responsibilities.
    • The University of Iowa built a new digital hub for accessibility-related resources and information, providing a one-stop shop for campus members looking for support. The university is also soliciting questions from users to build out a regularly updated FAQ section of the website. Iowa has a designated Accessibility Task Force with 10 subcommittees that address various applications of accessibility needs, including within athletics, communication, health care, student life and teaching.
    • Colorado State University has taken several steps to improve community compliance for accessibility, including offering free access to Siteimprove, a web-accessibility assessment tool that helps website developers and content managers meet accessibility standards and improve digital user experience. Siteimprove offers training resources to keep users engaged in best practices, as well as templates for creating content, according to CSU’s website. The university also has an accessibility framework to help faculty members bring electronic materials into compliance.

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  • Why Faculty Buy-In Is the Key to Scale

    Why Faculty Buy-In Is the Key to Scale

    Developmental education reform has made significant strides in the past two decades, however, if the goal is equity, completion and lasting change in gateway courses, the work to reform developmental education isn’t done—not even close. Nationally, states have passed laws and higher education systems have issued mandates requiring the use of specific high-impact practices and restricting the offering of standalone remedial courses.

    Institutions have redesigned placement systems to incorporate multiple measures and, with growing popularity, have begun using self-directed placement. Corequisite models, where students receive concurrent support for a gateway math or English course, have received increased attention and expansion. Using just-in-time content support and devoting time to student success techniques, corequisite courses have proven to support students’ retention rates.

    While we know which practices are impactful, it is still common for them to be used alongside traditional approaches, such as stand-alone developmental courses and high-stakes placement tests. That is, these practices are not the default means of how students interact with gateway courses; they are an option. There are many reasons for this lack of scale, with skepticism from faculty being a common refrain from those in academic leadership.

    Recent research reinforces what many of us in the trenches already know: Corequisite support is a powerful tool, but it is not the only solution to gateway course reform; it was never going to be. Without scaled and nuanced implementations, corequisite models are not enough on their own. Too often, states and institutions have pursued top-down solutions without sufficient attention to the people who impact scaled implementation the most: faculty.

    In fact, reformers and leaders in higher education spaces may have overlooked the hardest and arguably most important part: the classroom. If gateway course reform is the goal, we have to shift from a mainly structural reform emphasis (e.g., pathways, corequisites and placement) to incorporating classroom reforms that impact curriculum, instruction and assessment. These changes are some of the most difficult ones to make but are also the ones that have shown to matter the most. Structural reform is essential, but so is reform in the space where learning occurs.

    Why Early Reforms Didn’t Get Higher Education to a New Normal of Scale

    Early corequisite reform efforts found initial momentum by engaging supportive policymakers and system leaders and by using clear levers for change such as legislation or funding changes. However, even where reforms have been adopted, outcomes have been mixed. Completion rates have increased in some states but remain below expectations set in goal initiatives, such as Illinois’s 60 by 25 and Tennessee’s Drive to 55. Despite a broad commitment to increasing equity in higher education, equity gaps by race, income and age persist. In states with strong shared governance structures or influential faculty unions, the pace of reform has been slower and more complex.

    The common thread I’ve come to realize is this: Significant faculty cooperation and intentional faculty involvement are key to successful reforms at scale. I’ve seen this firsthand during my career in Illinois as a tenured math professor for many years who was also a union member and went on strike in 2015. Faculty have an incredible impact on students’ learning experience and outcomes; as such, faculty should be involved in the decision making that impacts them directly. However, in faculty-driven systems, the reality is that change is harder and takes longer. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

    My company, Almy Education, has worked with dozens of institutions across governance models and states. We have learned that scaled reform comes from meaningfully working with faculty. While that work may be more challenging than going around faculty, it will allow an institution to get the roots of what can hold back a scaled implementation. We’ve found when we intentionally integrate faculty as part of the institutional conversation, we can achieve the following:

    • Decide what courses and materials to remove or shift away from, not only add new ones.
    • Choose how many courses and sections of stand-alone developmental courses will be retained, even if that may mean someone’s position at the institution changes.
    • Determine how the class schedule needs to evolve to better support student needs and outcomes.
    • Adjust student intake practices to the institution that have the greatest impact on outcomes, even if it means a shift in human and financial resources.
    • Prioritize use and maintenance of data tools so that ongoing decision making is well informed.
    • Set the expectation that academic and student affairs will continually work together to improve gateway course success, not in silos or temporarily during an initiative.

    To reach scale, administrators, staff and faculty have to work together in an ongoing fashion as well as compromise for the greater good of student outcomes. We all have to own our roles in contributing to the aforementioned bulleted barriers when it comes to higher education reform. While usually unintended, they are barriers nonetheless. Reducing and removing these barriers to change often requires having hard conversations. The conversations are not always comfortable, but the results for students are worth it.

    More students complete gateway math and English courses and establish course momentum when developmental education reform is implemented at scale and improved upon over time. Scaled reform allows for more students to complete two-year degrees and certificates and/or transfer to complete a four-year degree. Increased student completion results in well-prepared adults in the workforce, the outcome nearly everyone in higher education is working toward.

    How to Effectively Integrate Faculty Into Your Reform Initiatives to Achieve Success at Scale

    So how do administrators, staff and faculty work together on scaling gateway course reform, especially when resistance occurs? Many faculty are not resistant to reform; they are resistant to being handed a one-size-fits-all solution from someone who doesn’t understand their students, classrooms or institutional realities. Research has shown that there isn’t one particular way to implement reforms like corequisites that work the best; finding the best solution is a process that must include faculty in deliberate ways.

    Faculty are also exhausted. The post-pandemic classroom is more demanding than ever, with student engagement seeming to be at an all-time low. Asking faculty to make massive changes without the support to do so can bring a reaction of resistance. Similarly, student affairs staff are also stretched thin with insufficient staffing and higher demands from students. They, too, need resources to make adjustments at scale that impact gateway course outcomes.

    To minimize resistance and thoughtfully add support where it can have the most impact, there are tangible ways to assist faculty and staff with scaling implementation of gateway course reform at the institutional and classroom levels. In our work across two-year and four-year institutions, we’ve observed what works:

    • Custom strategies tailored to each institution’s context, culture and capacity based on best practice and its own data.
    • Embedded professional learning that supports both pedagogy and content that’s ongoing, not one-and-done.
    • Support for using backward design strategies with gateway curriculum and instruction from the perspective of student needs, career pathways and transfer goals.
    • Staffing and funding so that corequisites are paired with intentional support, providing not just more time, but better use of time.
    • Deliberate use of corequisites where they make sense, alongside better-designed stand-alone options for a small number of students who may need them.
    • Pathways that provide clarity to connect math courses to students’ actual goals and are implemented purposefully, not as an option.
    • Focus on throughput, not just pass rates, and disaggregated outcomes that can support equity work.

    This next phase of gateway course reform requires the higher education industry to go deeper. We will have to face the structural barriers and the pedagogical ones. We must be willing to say the quiet parts out loud and have difficult conversations. We must be brave enough to make decisions and ultimately changes that work for the good of the students. Those changes should have broad support, but they may not make each individual at an institution content 100 percent of the time. Doing this work is not simple or easy. But it is necessary if we want real reform at scale that lasts.

    Kathleen Almy is the CEO and founder of Almy Education, specializing in gateway course reform at scale.

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  • Bastyr University Plans to Sell Campus

    Bastyr University Plans to Sell Campus

    Cash-strapped Bastyr University is selling its campus in Washington State in an effort to stabilize its shaky finances, which landed the institution on show cause status with its accreditor earlier this year.

    Bastyr’s Board of Trustees approved a plan last week to list the campus for sale.

    The Washington campus is located on 50-plus acres outside Seattle; the university also maintains a site in San Diego. Officials wrote on a frequently asked questions webpage that the “sale of the [Washington] campus will restore financial health to our university, allow continued movement forward with our strategic plan and is intended to positively impact our accreditation status.”

    The FAQ page emphasized that selling the campus does not mean Bastyr is closing.

    Rather, “Financial infusion makes the university more stable and allows us to better weather the fluctuations of the academic environment should a crisis occur,” officials wrote. They also noted Bastyr “cannot afford to maintain and modernize the main campus building” and that “the university occupies less than 50% of its space, but must fund 100% of campus upkeep.”

    The FAQ indicated that either a full or partial sale of the campus is possible. 

    Despite the sale, a move will likely be years away; officials wrote on the FAQ page that Bastyr plans to lease the campus for “up to a few years to allow for a thoughtful and phased transition.”

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  • Penn State Proposes Seven Campus Closures

    Penn State Proposes Seven Campus Closures

    Pennsylvania State University is weighing a plan to close seven of its 19 Commonwealth Campuses, which its governing board is expected to vote on in a virtual meeting Thursday.

    The campuses proposed for closure are Dubois, Fayette, Mont Alto, New Kensington, Shenango, Wilkes-Barre and York. Altogether, those campuses enroll just under 3,200 students. Penn State York, which had 703 students last fall, has the largest enrollment among the seven.

    If approved, the campuses will be shut down by the end of the spring 2027 semester.

    Penn State president Neeli Bendapudi announced the plan in an email Tuesday after several media outlets had already identified the seven Commonwealth Campuses targeted for closure.

    “I believe the recommendation balances our need to adapt to the changing needs of Pennsylvania with compassion for those these decisions affect, both within Penn State and across the commonwealth, in part because of the two-year period before any campus would close. As we work through the next steps, we will be taking steps to support every student in any needed transition and, we will take every step to provide opportunities to faculty and staff to remain part of Penn State,” Bendapudi wrote in a statement shared with the proposal.

    Penn State announced in February that it would consider closing some campuses due to declining enrollment. Officials reviewed 12 campuses for closure before settling on seven.

    While some trustees have pushed back on the proposal, they appear to be in the minority.

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  • Becoming AI Literate This Summer

    Becoming AI Literate This Summer

    Perhaps you just haven’t had time to keep up with the advent of agentic AI. Or you simply didn’t realize that AI is not just a fad in higher education; rather, it is our best hope to survive the pervasive budget cuts and dropping enrollments. Or, perhaps based on your look at AI tools in 2023, you found them too unreliable and subject to hallucinations to take them seriously. Here’s hoping that this summer provides you a bit of time spread across the season to catch up with the technology and begin the fall term with the knowledge and experience to make AI the best professional assistant you have ever had.

    Instead of facing a stack of projects and problems alone, you will have a Ph.D.-knowledge virtual assistant working at speeds far exceeding human thought:

    “According to OpenAI, o3 earned a record-breaking score on the ARC-AGI visual reasoning benchmark, reaching 87.5 percent in high-compute testing—comparable to human performance at an 85 percent threshold. The model also scored 96.7 percent on the 2024 American Invitational Mathematics Exam, missing just one question, and reached 87.7 percent on GPQA Diamond, which contains graduate-level biology, physics, and chemistry questions.”

    These assistants work 24-7, without vacation or holiday breaks. At the end of long day of work, you can pose complex problems to an advanced deep research model and it will conduct research, compose a detailed report, and prepare follow-up questions while you are eating dinner (I have experienced this myself; reading the results over dessert is so much more satisfying). I have also awakened in the early hours of a Sunday morning with a great idea to pursue for work. I tapped it in directly to one of the advanced models and awakened to a 20-plus-page report complete with comprehensive citations and suggestions for further research later that morning.

    AI developers have made great strides in avoiding hallucinations and off-target results. Among the improvements are the utilization of retrieval-augmented generation, a natural-language processing technique that taps an expansive database to “enhance the context and accuracy of generated text.” Those who may have stopped using AI because of errors of the past will be surprised to see the far more consistent and accurate results of today. Despite these improvements, I continue to recommend that users submit nearly identical prompts to two or three of the leading models of AI. Although my motivation for that recommendation primarily is that you are likely to gain additional, useful information from the added results.

    Today, most of the leading models provide multimodel features that can input, process and output various types of data beyond text, such as images, audio and video. This enables engaging the prompter via voice communication. It supports the generation of stunning images and rather brief video segments. Google’s Notebook LM tool accepts input documents and related media about which it can create a podcast, allow listeners to ask questions and get audio responses, create crossword puzzles based on your lecture notes, and even create virtual debates.

    The tools I most commonly use are those from OpenAI, particularly o3; those from Google, particularly Gemini 2.0 Flash for general work and Gemini 2.5 Pro for detailed research; and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet. However, there are many more models available today that may better meet your needs or preferences. One of the projects I have been pursuing lately is tracking research, new treatments and other emerging information about a particular disease. I am using Gemini 2.5 Pro and ChatGPT o3, running updates every week. The results have been comprehensive and well cited. Notably, ChatGPT o3 noticed that I had been asking for reports every Tuesday and asked if I would like it to run the same prompt every Tuesday and email the results to me. Such an action could be considered elementary agentic AI, in which the tool can analyze needs, create a plan of action and with permissions take autonomous actions:

    “Agentic AI is an AI system that acts autonomously, adapts in real time, and solves multi-step problems based on context and objectives. They are built of multiple AI agents that leverage large language models (LLMs) and complex reasoning. This enables them to have enhanced decision-making abilities and natural language understanding, facilitating more effective and intuitive user interactions.”

    The power of AI agents is only beginning to be realized; 2025 has been dubbed the year of the agent. It is anticipated that millions of agents will be created by the end of the year. Their potential is enormous, reaching beyond the individual to take actions on behalf of a human.

    So, how can you get on top of this AI trend this summer? Prompt engineering—asking questions in proper context, detail and format—is a good place to begin. You might consider enrolling in one of the many low-cost or free prompt engineering online classes. The Google Prompting Essentials course is $49 through Coursera. It takes just a few hours, and successful completion results in a certificate. There are also a number of YouTube videos that condense the contents of the microcourse. You may want to browse the Coursera catalog section on prompt engineering, which lists scores of classes from industry leaders, commercial vendors, colleges and universities that last from a few weeks to a few months in length. Many provide professional certificates.

    I suggest you begin a course—many are self-paced—or one of the informal YouTube videos, then begin using the tools at every possible opportunity. Iterative prompting is the name of the game. Try reframing the prompt, providing additional information and including examples of what you are seeking for the tool to better understand your expectations.

    Use your one or two chosen tools as often as possible. Ignore non-AI search tools for a while. You will notice that AI searching gets right to the best solutions rather than first listing the responses in order of those who paid for their place in the search response, as using Google to ask a question does.

    Searching topics as they arise four or five times a day, refining each of those search prompts to better understand the capabilities of each tool, and searching across a wide variety of topics and disciplines will advance your expertise and comfort with AI. By the time classes begin in the fall, you will be prepared to save much time and effort by using AI. You will also be able to integrate AI into your daily routine, become more productive and share your expertise with your colleagues and students.

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  • Students Learn to Talk With Strangers

    Students Learn to Talk With Strangers

    Higher education is designed to be a space for open inquiry and disagreement, but encouraging students to engage in constructive dialogue can be a challenge.

    A January survey by the American Association of Colleges and Universities found that a majority of faculty believe they should intentionally invite student perspectives from all sides of an issue, and that they encourage mutually respectful disagreement among students in their courses.

    Students, however, are less likely to say that they’re exercising these muscles. A 2022 survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that 63 percent of students felt too intimidated to share their ideas, opinions or beliefs in class because they were different than those of their peers. About 84 percent of respondents agreed that students need to be better educated on the value of free speech and the diversity of opinion on campus.

    A course at the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego pushed master’s students out of their comfort zone by engaging them in challenging and vulnerable conversations. The class, Crossing the Divide, taught by Sarah Federman, associate professor of conflict resolution, took nine students on a two-week trip across the southern U.S. in May 2024, starting in California and ending in Washington, D.C. Throughout the journey, students visited historic sites, interacted with strangers, discussed polarizing topics and learned to develop empathy across differences.

    In this episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader spoke with Federman to learn more about her class, the trip and some of the lessons she learned about engaging students in constructive dialogue.

    An edited version of the podcast appears below.

    Q: We are talking today about a course that you created that is designed to help students create connections during polarizing times. I wonder if you can back us up to the genesis of this course and where the idea originally came from.

    Sarah Federman, associate professor of conflict resolution at the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, University of San Diego

    A: Sure. So I had been working on a book about the French National Railways, its role in the Holocaust and how it tried to make amends. I won this Amtrak writing residency—which doesn’t exist anymore, which is a big tragedy; I hope they start it again.

    I got to crisscross the United States on a train while editing the book. And I didn’t really get much editing done, because it was so much fun just seeing the country, binge-watching the country, talking to strangers, getting off at the stops. And I thought, oh, man, if I ever have a chance to teach—because I didn’t have a teaching job at that point—I was like, I want to pick everybody on the train. This would be the best classroom. So that’s where the idea came from.

    Q: Why a train specifically? There are a lot of ways to get across the U.S., and our rail system isn’t the best compared to some other nations. Why was it so inspiring to use the train?

    A: I don’t know if you’ve noticed how loud flights are. I put in my earplugs because it’s so loud, if you even wanted to talk to somebody—and you only have the person next to you. You’re trying to decide if you want to talk to this person for six hours or not. It’s much more closed, and you can’t see much for most of the flight, so that doesn’t really allow the kind of socialization and visibility, although you do get to see below you and the sense of what you’re flying over.

    The car, you just have your road buddies, so maybe you’ll talk to people at a gas station or a restaurant or an electric charging station, but you can choose not to. But people who go on the train for these longer trips have chosen it for the experience, and so there’s an openness and an adventure attitude that makes people really friendly. So that’s why train.

    Our trains are not fast. We don’t have high-speed trains, so you see the country kind of slowly, which is actually really nice. You roll by towns, and you get to think about the people. In France, you know, you go by so fast you can barely see anybody you know, because your eyes are like [darting].

    Q: That’s awesome. Tell me about the course design when it came to building this and mapping out, literally, where you wanted students to go.

    A: I actually hired a student to help me. We spent a year and a half planning this trip, because the trains stop at weird times—like, we really wanted to go to Yuma, for example, but the train arrived there at 3 a.m.; we’re not gonna arrive at 3 a.m. So we had to pick some of [the destinations] based on when the trains left, and also what we could do in these different sites and how different they would be, one from the other, and how different they would be for the students. Like, what would be the most different we could expose you to? So those were all the things we had in mind.

    We started in San Diego, and we took a train up to Los Angeles—and that train is amazing. You just watch surfers and dolphins, all the way up to L.A., and then there were all these people on the train. So we talked to those strangers. And then L.A., Tucson, Houston, New Orleans, Birmingham, took a stop in Montgomery, and then D.C., where we ended in front of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence [at the National Archives]. But in each of those stops, we [got] off and went to smaller places.

    Q: When it came to preparing students to engage with others, what kinds of conversations were you hoping they had? Was there any sort of guidance on how to engage with other people?

    A: [The students] were most nervous about talking to strangers. They’re like, “We’re gonna have to do what?” They were terrified.

    I remember the first night we were in the L.A. train station getting ready for our first overnight train to Tucson, and like, that was just the nerves of, like, “Oh my god, oh my god. What are they gonna say?”

    We read a really helpful book by Mónica Guzmán, [I Never Thought of It That Way] [that] talked about how to talk [and] why you want to talk across difference. It’s a cute book. It’s really accessible. There are some drawings in it and the students really connected with that.

    Once they got over [the fear], it was really easy, but in a way, they almost needed the invitation to talk to strangers from me. I can tell you about some of the conversations, but that was the biggest fear.

    One thing I’ll say is I knew that the strangers would enrich their lives, but I did not anticipate how much [the students] would enrich the other people on the train. I saw them lighting up other people. We’re nervous about how other people are gonna see us, but we also don’t realize the gift we are to other people.

    Q: That’s really cool. I was also curious about the students. You took nine students in the spring of 2024. Were they from San Diego? Were they from everywhere? Was this a trip that was exposing them to new and different parts of the U.S.?

    A: Great question, because I really was wondering that, too.

    Some of the students had really traveled, but they hadn’t traveled in the U.S., in the same way, or they’d driven across maybe quickly. We had a few U.S. citizens, a Canadian, [all] different ages, like 22 to … we had some older folks.

    It was a really nice mix, but again, people haven’t really seen our country in that way, or we’re just trying to get from point A to point B, we’re just trying to see what this country looks like. So I think for almost all of us [it was new]. I actually hadn’t been to half the stops.

    Q: How was that for you, navigating those spaces for the first time alongside your students?

    A: It was a good lesson. They were so great, so they rolled with it. But I was like, it would have been really helpful to know … I mean, they’re so competent, and we all figured things out, but I think it would have been [better] if I’d known the space better. Next time I’ll be able to get different speakers [to speak with students], knowing where we have more time, knowing distances.

    But actually, I think in a way, it made me fresh, too, and it kept me open. Like, “OK, I’m the leader, in a sense, but we’re co-learning and co-creating this experience.”

    Q: One of my favorite parts of student experiential learning is that reflection piece—getting students to sit down, maybe write about it or talk through those experiences. What was that reflection piece like?

    A: I gave everyone a journal with a sticker for our class, and everyone had writing assignments. One student made this beautiful scrapbook; they took napkins from places and [wrote] all over.

    Every morning on WhatsApp, I’d write the writing prompt of the day that would have them reflect upon where we’d been. Did they anticipate a place to be a particular way and then it wasn’t?

    The most surprising outcome of the writing exercise for me was I asked them at the end to rate which cities they would want to live in, and for many students, Birmingham, Ala., ended up in the top two.

    Q: Wow. Why was that?

    A: I know, and you wouldn’t think that from students who are studying in San Diego on the coast. You’d think they’d want to be on the coast, maybe. But they thought [Birmingham] was super livable. They’d made all these great parks. It was affordable, it was relaxed, it had great arts, it had a university. And so they’re like, “I can live here.” And I know one of the stresses for younger people is like, “How can I afford to live in a place?” And they saw it, and they’re like, “I could live and thrive here.” And that helped me understand what was on their minds.

    Q: We talk a lot about flyover states in travel, like, these are just places that you pass through. But I think having that intentionality to show students, Birmingham, Ala., actually has really cool things, and you’d never know unless you got off the train or got out of the car and looked at it. I hope it sparked a bit of adventure in these students, at least, to maybe explore areas that they wouldn’t typically.

    A: I hope so, too, and really that they now are anchored in what they saw in these places, and so when they hear about them in the news, or this and that, they have their own experience as well, to anchor any other stories they’re hearing.

    Q: I love that you mentioned media, or how we consume stories about places that are unfamiliar, because that was one of the goals [of the course]: to create empathy with people who might be different, demographically or in their living situation or their political views.

    I know that was a big driver in this, creating conversations in a challenging time for our country. I wonder if you can talk about that growth, or that experience that you saw students having to step out of their own comfort zones and learn and empathize with others.

    A: I think we wanted to get [experiences] and we will, next time, get even more experiences.

    I took them to the 16th Street Baptist Church, which is the famous church where a bomb exploded during the civil rights movement and four little girls were killed. And then I was like, “Well, I think it’s Sunday, so we might as well go to church,” and some were like, “Oh my god, we’re not gonna do that,” like, terrified, “Oh my god.” This is a famous church. Let’s just, like, see what they have to offer, and see what they’re talking about.

    We were so lucky. There was a really young pastor. He was like, 22, and we were sitting there in terror. And then it was like, “Oh, that was actually kind of interesting.” But that was a real out-of-your-comfort-zone [moment].

    For example, there’s a lot of collective, understandable concern about climate change and the fossil fuel industry, and when you meet the people who are in the industry, they’re not evil people. Most of the people who work in it or work in offshoots of it, it’s where they grew up. This is what’s there. These are the jobs. And so you start to realize, “Oh, right, these are people who have a job or are raising a family,” and it helps to stop the deep othering. You can still be tough on the problem, but that idea of being soft on the people.

    We had a guy [in the class] who was a marine. He’s a big guy, so he had the courage to go up to this other really big guy on the train. He was filled with tattoos and stuff, and they had a great conversation. The [stranger] apparently, trained with Mike Tyson or something. But he was like, “I was even nervous around this guy.”

    We were really demographically different as a group. Like, we had gender differences, ethnic differences, so you got to see and be like, “Now, when you move through that space, what did you notice? What did you notice?” And that was fun, too. It wasn’t designed that way. It was just who signed up for the class, but that was fun to see. We made some surprising friends along the way.

    Q: Do you have a favorite anecdote or interaction that you or a student had?

    A: One of the nice things about the overnight train is that you have to eat meals with different people, with strangers. We met this couple, a doctor and her husband, and we got really chatty with them. One of the students said she spent the evening talking to this woman and just like, cried out, like all the things she’s worried about in the world. And she said, “This woman consoled me.” Her name is Consuelo. She’s like, “[Consuelo] helped me heal my heart in such a powerful way.”

    And we then ran into them. We met them in Tucson, we ran into them in New Orleans on the street. We had this happy reunion, because we had all talked to them and benefited from them. And there’s some things, I don’t know if you’ve ever found this, but sometimes you can share more easily with a stranger. And so there were a lot of conversations, like the marine ended up learning how to make, like, essential oils and candles. I was like, given this little crystal from somebody. Students were up knitting with people, playing card games at night with strangers.

    Of course, when there’s a lot of uncertainty, we close up, and fear makes us quiet, and then that just allows more fear, more distrust, and it’s a spiral. So we went with an intention to not do that. We wanted to enjoy each other, and we wanted to enjoy this country, and we really did. I mean, we had no problems with anybody, actually, on the whole trip. I mean, I don’t think we created any problems.

    Oh, actually, we did have one sort of contentious conversation on the way to L.A. that was pretty funny …

    Q: That’s pretty early in the trip to have it, too.

    A: Yeah, I forget what I said, but she was, like, not having it. I think she was really against electric vehicles or something. I just didn’t expect it. So I was like, “Oh yeah, OK, yeah, no, it’s true. The batteries are a problem. I’m with you.”

    Q: If you had to give advice or insight to somebody else who wants to do something similar, maybe not that long of a trip or that far across the country, but what really made the experience work? Is there anything you would do differently?

    A: Great question, especially as I’m looking to plan one for next May. It definitely doesn’t have to be long, like, even a short trip—I mean, the longer trips, you have people who are touring and so they’re, like, more open—but I would have students sit next to different people and I would have the group be small enough that the students talk to different people.

    I don’t know if listeners have heard of Bryan Stevenson, who wrote Just Mercy and created the Legacy of Slavery museum, but I just heard him give a talk in San Diego a couple weeks ago, and he was talking about the importance of being in proximity to the people who are having the experiences. The closer you can get students—we went to Homeboy Industries, which is the largest gang rehabilitation center in the world. It’s in L.A., and they got to talk to some of the people who were in that program, and the stories, like … I could never recreate that.

    It’s doing that piece, getting them in proximity and creating opportunities for them to have one-on-one little conversations with them, like, “Hey, I had this question,” so I think that’s important.

    I’m taking a bunch of students into prison in a couple weeks to also get in proximity to the people we don’t hear from. So I’d say a smaller group, be in proximity.

    You can also have, like, for Homeboys, we [spoke with] somebody who was in recovery, but we also had a criminologist with us, so she could talk about the systems and he could talk about the lived experience. So it’s nice to have both.

    Q: I think there can be a narrative that people writ large, but especially young people, do not want to engage with people that are different from them. And I wonder, just based on your experience with this trip, and then also some of this other work that you’re doing taking students into prisons, how we can combat that narrative and reaffirm that it is important to speak across differences, and that people are eager to learn how to do that?

    A: I’m with you. I understand. I don’t love to dive right into difference. But I think the starting point is that we actually have a lot more in common than is different. Like, we focus on the difference, and that creates a lot of pain and separation.

    I mean, I bet we’re all even close with people with whom we really disagree on certain things, but it just doesn’t come up, like we just talk about, you know, the Venn diagram, where we overlap, right? But there’s parts of us that don’t quite fit.

    So you can always find connection really easily. You talk about the weather, you can complain about a train being late, or even something silly, and then just bond over that, and then just let it roll.

    I think going headlong into difference is a hard place to start when there’s no trust in the relationship, and even when there is, you kind of want to edge your way around it. But I think we all need to learn it; I need to learn it, too. I’m better at it in some contexts than others, like when I’m surprised, like that woman [who opposed electric vehicles], I was like, “Wait, OK, hold on, I didn’t know I was gonna run into difference right here.” But it’s a practice, so I don’t know, maybe I teach what I most need to learn. So I’m learning it with the students. It’s a great process, and it’s just so great to be open about it.

    But I think what we end up finding is that we have a lot more in common. Like, when you get under the top issues and, like, what do people care about? They want to feel safe. They want their families to be healthy. They want to be healthy. They want to feel prosperous. They want to enjoy what they’re doing. They want their kids to thrive. They want clean air—like, ultimately, under it all, are we really that different? I don’t know.

    Q: That’s great. Higher education is doing its best to be more constructive when it comes to dialogue and embracing students with differences and teaching how to have productive conversations on campus. Because we’ve seen—I think, especially in the past year and a half—how escalations can happen on campus. So I like that this is a microcosm of, “Here’s how you take this [skill] out into the real world. Here’s how you practice. Here’s how you do it in a safe way with friends, and then go forth and do.”

    A: Yeah. In class, I have students create role-plays about conflicts that they’re interested in, with lots of different perspectives. So students get to practice talking with people who have different views, but we’re all acting, and they get to try on different views. I think that’s good in the classroom, too, when you can’t get on a train right away, role-plays where students can experience difference when acting, and no one has to take responsibility for different viewpoints.

    Q: It’s Jane Doe saying those things, not me, Ashley.

    A: Exactly! “Jane said that, I dunno.”

    Got Leads?

    If you live in or have connections to places and spaces in the Southwest or Southern U.S. that hold cultural, national or personal significance that you think would be an interesting and educational stop for her class next spring, Federman said readers can email her.

    Q: What’s next? You mentioned another trip coming up in May—what are you hoping and planning for?

    A: Yeah! That’s gonna be the 250th anniversary of the country, so that’s going to be a very interesting time. We’ll still plan to do it in May. We’ll do a similar route, but I’m thinking of some different ways to do it that tie into those themes, glories and traumas of our 250-year history. I think that’s sort of the theme I’m gonna go with.

    I definitely want to do more with talking to strangers. I want to go, if they’ll let us in, to like a pancake breakfast at a church, or some kind of county fair or a rodeo. We want to get into small-town things. We’re a small group, so we won’t be overwhelming, but just to really get a sense of a place.

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  • So You Want to Be a Disrupter (opinion)

    So You Want to Be a Disrupter (opinion)

    The need for higher education to be disrupted is felt everywhere. The demographic cliff, profound changes to financial models, emergence of artificial intelligence, the public’s loss of confidence and leadership challenges are all commonly cited reasons as to why business cannot continue as usual. Yet, there is usually little discussion of what disruption means and how it feels to actually do it.

    Disruption is a fundamental change in the way an institution operates, ideally motivated by a desire to reposition in order to take advantage of future opportunities. It is inherently controversial because it changes the status and welfare of existing stakeholders in favor of others. If the politics were not so difficult, the reforms would likely have already been undertaken. Budget cuts, while sometimes necessary, are usually not disruption because they are often responsive to immediate shortfalls without reflecting a forward vision. The hiring freeze, one of the most common tactics when addressing fiscal challenges, is the very antithesis of the disruption ideal, because retaining those who happen to be employed at the moment and not bringing in new people only acts to preserve existing structures at the cost of change.

    Higher education is not accustomed to disruption. Since World War II, colleges and universities in the United States have been in the enviable position of meeting most challenges by expansion—adding new faculty, departments, institutes and schools—because of enrollment growth, generous support from donors, government aid and the international standing of U.S. schools. Now, all that is under threat.

    Like many administrators, I have been involved in many difficult decisions to deny tenure, institute layoffs and cut budgets. However, I have also had the opportunity to participate in two truly disruptive exercises from which I learned much.

    In 2006–07, as provost of Miami University in Ohio, I helped lead the effort to abolish the School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS), have its faculty reassigned to other academic units, end its residential component and create a new academic unit in the College of Arts and Sciences. The SIS had been an excellent idea when established in the early 1970s, as interdisciplinary studies was relatively uncommon. However, by the mid-2000s, the need for research and teaching that breached traditional disciplinary barriers was widely understood, and there were ever-increasing examples at Miami and elsewhere. In addition, the age structure of the faculty meant that we would have needed to hire a significant number of new professors in a relatively underenrolled university division for it to remain viable.

    The decision was certainly controversial, as we were bombarded by letters of outrage, faculty resolutions, seemingly endless hostile cartoons in the student newspaper and outbursts during ceremonies. During the years when the program was taught out, SIS students at graduation made sure they told me how little they thought of me as we shook hands on the platform.

    As president of American Jewish University in Los Angeles—a position I just stepped down from after seven years—I helped lead the process in which we sold our Bel Air campus to a local school in 2024. The campus was situated in a beautiful neighborhood, but, especially after the pandemic, we were no longer hosting a residential undergraduate program, and our graduate programs had either gone online or could be better located in another part of Los Angeles. Rising property insurance, increased security costs and the prospect of having to expend significant funds on deferred maintenance propelled us to sell the campus so that we could use the university’s assets for better and more productive purposes.

    This decision was also very controversial. The campus had been the site of the university for decades and many in the community had fond associations with it, even if they had not visited for many years. The original buyer was a private educational company, and there was dismay that we were not selling to another Jewish institution (although we eventually did when the first buyer pulled out). The local community was vociferous in its reaction to the initial sale, and many of our supporters, including major donors, were very critical of the decision.

    It was hardly a surprise that I was the target of a significant amount of criticism given that I was the leading public proponent of both disruptions. University administrators may not like incessant public disparagement, but it comes with the job and the salary. Still, it was a considerable adjustment from my previous life as a professor. Many businesses prepare their leaders for conflict through very intentional professional development. Higher education does little to nothing to prepare leaders for the very real aggravations of public fights.

    It is therefore important to have your own kitchen cabinet to not only get good advice and serve as a sounding board, but also to provide the necessary emotional support when things get difficult. Harry Truman said about Washington that if you want a friend, get a dog. However, on campuses and in communities, there will be wise people who are willing to be friendly advisers and will, in fact, appreciate being consulted.

    I was surprised at the collateral damage. Faculty and board members who were proponents of the decisions also received threats and public criticism. I felt bad that allies who had stepped up because they also thought it was the right decision were hurt. I’m not sure that there was a way around it. Still, insulating, to the maximum extent possible, those helping to enable the disruption is not only the right thing to do, but critical to promoting further disruption in the future.

    Others were afraid of becoming collateral damage. I remember asking one faculty member at Miami who expressed enthusiasm for our decision if he would support me in public. He replied that he, and many others, would not, even though they knew it was the right decision, because they did not want to antagonize their colleagues who were also their neighbors, fellow church members and parents on their kids’ Little League team. Administrators who are trained to believe that the most logical, best-supported argument will win the day have to recognize that the social bonds of the university community—one of an institution’s greatest strengths in most circumstances—will mean that they will have less support than they think they should have on the basis of who is right.

    The communications challenges of disruptive change are also immense. In both instances, we thought that we had perfectly logical arguments about how to use scarce resources—faculty and money—in far better ways. We told ourselves and the world that this is exactly what universities should be doing. However, those who would be hurt, either directly or because their association with the school or campus would be cut, were enraged, and both easily identifiable and mobilizable.

    In contrast, the “winners” were future students and faculty who did not even know what was being done on their behalf. A good communications strategy is critical, but you should be under no illusions: You may lose, or seemingly lose, the public battle, at least judged by the volume of complaints. It is critical to remember that the biggest process challenge in many disruptions is that the reforms are being done on behalf of those who at the moment have no voice. The public conversation should be evaluated accordingly.

    In the end, governing boards make the final decision, and I was gratified that both my boards endorsed the disruptions I had helped engineer. Ensuring that the eventual deciders are fully informed of the logic of the proposal and are willing to face public opprobrium is absolutely critical. Trustees usually do not sign up for being central players in very public, fraught dramas where they are yelled at in public and insulted at parties and at their country club. A component of the attraction of being on a board is to be part of a bucolic academic community with which one has close personal ties. However, boards are demanding that colleges change, and trustees will have to understand that they will be in the fray during very public disputes.

    Napoleon said, “If you start to take Vienna, take Vienna.” It is possible to win big fights even if you feel personally distraught at the abuse you have taken, if your friends and people you care about are battered, and if your very logical public arguments are dismissed. Higher education can overcome the challenges to disruption and we can engineer paths to much brighter futures. That is, in the end, what will save us.

    Jeffrey Herbst is president emeritus at American Jewish University.

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  • Five colleges Impacting Black Student Achievement

    Five colleges Impacting Black Student Achievement

    A recent report from the Campaign for College Opportunity notes strategies and programs that support graduation outcomes for students from historically underrepresented backgrounds.

    Tashi-Delek/E+/Getty Images

    Higher education can be an agent for positive change in students’ lives, providing personal, intellectual and socioeconomic growth opportunities. But not all of these outcomes are realized by every student.

    An April report by the Campaign for College Opportunity outlines some of the challenges Black students face in pursuit of higher education, as well as measures that colleges can take to address disparities in completion and persistence rates.

    What’s the need: Since fall 2019, Black enrollment in higher education has declined more rapidly than that of other races. Black students currently make up about 10 percent of all undergraduates enrolled in the U.S., but roughly 14 percent of the total U.S. population.

    Once enrolled, Black students are also less likely to complete a degree compared to their peers, which students of color say is tied to high costs, a lack of support and forms of racial discrimination, according to a 2023 survey.

    Among U.S. adults, about 32 percent of Black Americans have completed some college but have yet to earn a bachelor’s degree—four percentage points higher than the average American (28 percent) but roughly the same as people belonging to two or more races (32 percent), Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (32 percent), and American Indian and Alaska Native populations (34 percent).

    Despite the challenges students of color face while pursuing a degree, most learners say college is worth it in the long run for their careers. Still, balancing academics and other obligations, strains on mental health and feelings of isolation can be unexpected costs associated with college, according to a 2024 report from the Pell Institute.

    DEI Under Attack

    Since Trump retook office in January, his administration has sought to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion practices. A Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter from the Department of Education to colleges and universities sought to issue guidance on which race-based practices besides those used in admissions—which the Supreme Court struck down in 2023—would no longer be permitted. The letter cited scholarships and programs that were exclusively available to students based on their race. An FAQ page from the department notes that race or cultural heritage education or celebrations are not prohibited, so long as they are open to everyone on campus.

    Federal courts blocked enforcement of the Dear Colleague letter in April.

    Recommendations: Based on existing research, the report authors outlined six strategies to improve Black student outcomes.

    1. Demystify the college experience. High school partnerships and pathway programs, including summer programs and dual-enrollment opportunities, can positively impact Black students’ college trajectories.  
    2. Improve transfer. Invest in two-year colleges as access points and transfer launchpads for Black students who may want to earn a bachelor’s degree at four-year institutions. Additionally, strong partnerships between two- and four-year colleges can address culture gaps and ensure the four-year institution is equipped to help Black and other transfer students thrive.  
    3. Address college affordability. Institutions should invest in avenues and resources to ensure Black students, and others, can pay for tuition, fees, technology, supplies, living experiences and other costs associated with college. “Having a robust portfolio of grants, scholarships and other financial support for Black and low-income students is essential,” according to the report. Students of color are also more likely to report basic needs insecurity, so creating holistic financial resources that ensure students have suitable food, housing and transportation is critical. 
    4. Invest in representation. Establishing “Black-affirming” spaces, including resource centers, honors colleges, studies programs and media and art collections can improve students’ sense of belonging on campus, as well as counter negative stereotypes regarding Black students. Similarly, ensuring Black students have a seat at the table for decision-making processes allows them opportunities to advocate for their needs. 
    5. Prioritize faculty development. Centers for teaching and learning can provide educators with resources and guidance on how to best serve underrepresented minority groups, including Black students. 
    6. Create co-curricular learning opportunities. Faculty-led research, pre-apprenticeship programs and workforce development programs can engage Black students on campus and give them the necessary skills to launch their careers.  

    Examples of success: In addition to highlighting initiatives that can promote student success, the report also names five institutions that have developed effective programs to improve Black student outcomes.

    1. Compton College provides no-cost food to students through a variety of ways, including an on-campus food pantry, a partnership with the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank and free meals at the Everytable Cafeteria on campus. The college also broke ground on its first student housing facility earlier this year, creating more opportunities to minimize the risk of housing insecurity or homelessness for vulnerable students.
    2. Last year Sacramento State University established the Black Honors College, which provides wraparound support for students interested in learning about Black history and culture. The program, which is open to all students, celebrates Black excellence through mentorship by hand-selected faculty and staff, designated housing and personalized support for participants.
    3. The City University of New York created the Black Male Initiative in 2005, an inclusive 15-project initiative focused on improving enrollment and graduation rates of students from underrepresented populations. Most recently, the program has evolved to include wellness and career development.
    4. Spelman College invested millions of dollars in promoting holistic student wellness, in part by creating a new fitness center and introducing fitness classes, cooking demonstrations and mental health workshops. The initiative is designed to address health concerns that disproportionately impact Black women, including high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer and strokes.
    5. The University of California, San Diego, is home to the Black Academic Excellence Initiative, which strives to improve the experiences of Black students, faculty and staff members on campus. The initiative provides scholarship funds for students and has established a hub for historically Black fraternities and sororities, called the Divine Nine.

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