Tag: Career

  • Tulane Environmentalist Resigns Amid Research “Gag Order”

    Tulane Environmentalist Resigns Amid Research “Gag Order”

    An environmental researcher at Tulane University resigned Wednesday after accusing campus officials, reportedly under pressure from Gov. Jeff Landry, of issuing a “gag order” that prevented her from publicly discussing her work, which focused on racial disparities in the petrochemical workforce.

    “Scholarly publications, not gag orders, are the currency of academia,” Kimberly Terrell, the now-former director of community engagement at Tulane’s Environmental Law Clinic, wrote in her resignation letter. “There is always room for informed debate. But Tulane leaders have chosen to abandon the principles of knowledge, education, and the greater good in pursuit of their own narrow agenda.”

    Terrell’s resignation comes amid wider efforts by the Trump administration and its allies to control the types of research—including projects related to environmental justice—academics are permitted to pursue and punish campus protesters for espousing messages the president and other public officials disagree with.

    “It started with the pro-Palestinian activism on our campus and others across the country. It’s emboldened a lot of political leaders to feel they can make inroads by silencing faculty in other areas,” Michelle Lacey, a math professor and president of Tulane’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Inside Higher Ed. “That was the catalyst for creating a climate where university administrators are very nervous, especially now as we see the government pulling funding for areas of research they don’t like.”

    Last spring, Landry praised Tulane president Michael Fitts and university police for removing students who were protesting Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Soon after, the Legislature passed a provision creating harsher punishments for protesters who disrupt traffic, which Landry later signed into law.

    Landry, a Republican aligned with Trump, has a history of trying to exert control over the state’s public higher education institutions.

    Last summer, he enacted a law that allows him to directly appoint board chairs at the state’s public colleges and universities. And in November, following Trump’s election, Landry publicly called on officials at Louisiana State University to punish a law professor who allegedly made brief comments in class about students who voted for the president.

    Landry’s office denied to the Associated Press (which first reported on Terrell’s resignation) that it pressured Tulane to silence research from the law clinic. Michael Strecker, a Tulane spokesperson, also told the outlet that the university “is fully committed to academic freedom and the strong pedagogical value of law clinics” and declined to comment on “personnel matters.”

    Strecker added in a statement that Tulane administrators have been working with the law school’s leadership on how the law clinics could better support the university’s education mission.

    “Debates about how best to operate law clinics’ teaching mission have occurred nationally and at Tulane for years—this is nothing new,” Strecker said. “This effort includes most recently input from an independent, third-party review.”

    But Terrell’s account of the events that led to her resignation call the universities’ academic freedom commitments into question, while also implying that Landry—and powerful industry groups—wield some influence over private higher education institutions in the state.

    And it’s not something Tulane, a private university in New Orleans, should tolerate, Lacey said.

    Kimberly Terrell

    “The academic freedom of all university researchers must be unequivocally defended at both public and private institutions,” Lacey wrote in a statement. “This includes the right to conduct and disseminate research that may be unfavorably viewed by government officials or corporate entities. Political demands to stifle controversial research are an affront to the advancement of knowledge and open exchange of ideas, as is the voluntary compliance with such requests by university leadership.”

    The latest controversy at Tulane stems from a paper Terrell published April 9 in the peer-reviewed journal Ecological Economics. Her research found that while Black people in Louisiana are underrepresented in the state’s petrochemical workforce, they are overexposed to toxic pollutants the industry releases into an area of the state between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as “Cancer Alley.”

    But according to emails obtained by Inside Higher Ed and other outlets, Fitts worried that publicizing Terrell’s research and the clinic’s other work, which includes legal advocacy, could jeopardize funding for the university’s $600 million plan to redevelop New Orleans’ historic Charity Hospital into residential and commercial spaces as part of a broader downtown expansion plan.

    As Terrell explained in her resignation letter, Fitts and other top Tulane executives were at Louisiana’s state capitol on April 16 lobbying for the project when “someone accused the university of being anti–chemical industry” and cited her study, which was receiving media attention after it was published the week prior. According to Terrell, “the story that came down to me through the chain of command was that Governor Landry threatened to veto any bill with funding for Tulane’s Charity project unless Fitts did something about the Environmental Law Clinic.”

    ‘Complete Gag Order’

    After that, Terrell says, she was “placed under a complete gag order,” which the emails appear to confirm.

    “Effective immediately all external communications that are not client-based—that is, directly related to representation—must be pre-approved by me,” Marcilynn Burke, dean of Tulane’s law school, wrote in an April 25 email to law clinic staff. “Such communications include press releases, interviews, videos, social media postings, etc. Please err on the side of over-inclusion as we work to define the boundaries through experience.”

    A week later, on May 4, Burke wrote another email to clinic staff explaining that “elected officials and major donors have cited the clinic as an impediment to them lending their support to the university generally and this project specifically,” referring to Fitts’s plans to redevelop the old hospital. Terrell wrote that when she pleaded her case to Provost Robin Forman, “he refused to acknowledge my right to freely conduct and disseminate research” and also “let slip that my job description was likely going to be rewritten.”

    Terrell described the entire law clinic as being “under siege” and said she would rather leave her position “than have my work used as an excuse for President Fitts to dismantle the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic.”

    Other academics, free speech experts and environmental justice advocates also believe Tulane’s moves to silence Terrell’s work amounts to an attack on academic freedom with implications beyond the campus.

    “The administration of Tulane University, far from standing up for academic freedom, is participating in the effort to suppress free inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge by scientific methods,” Michael Ash, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “Any effort to reduce academic freedom for Dr. Terrell either by changing her job classification or by redefining whether the protection applies is a blatant and un-American attempt to suppress the type of free inquiry that has made this country great.”

    Joy Banner, co-founder and co-director of the Descendants Project, a community organization that works in Cancer Alley, added that the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic is a vital public health resource.

    Without the clinic, “it would be far more difficult to show the racially discriminatory practices of the industry, from preferential hiring practices to a pattern of concentrating pollution in majority Black neighborhoods,” she said in a statement. “President Fitts must commit to protecting it at all costs.”

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  • Tenn. Lawsuit Puts Hispanic-Servings’ Fate on the Line

    Tenn. Lawsuit Puts Hispanic-Servings’ Fate on the Line

    Two years after its Supreme Court victory against Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill, Students for Fair Admissions has a new target in its sights: Hispanic-serving institutions. On Wednesday, the advocacy group joined the state of Tennessee in suing the U.S. Department of Education, arguing that the criteria to become an HSI are unconstitutional and discriminatory. The move is distressing HSI advocates, who hoped to see the institutions left out of the political fray.

    To qualify as an HSI, a college or university needs to have a student body comprised of at least 25 percent Hispanic students and enroll at least 50 percent low-income students, or more than other comparable institutions, among other criteria. No Tennessee institutions operated by the state meet the threshold and are thus prohibited from applying for HSI-specific grants—even though they serve Hispanic and low-income students, according to the Tennessee attorney general and SFFA. As a result, the federal designation criteria amounts to discrimination, and Tennessee universities and students suffer as a result, the plaintiffs argue.

    They also say Tennessee institutions find themselves in an “unconstitutional dilemma”: Even if they wanted to, they argue, they can’t use affirmative action to up their Hispanic student enrollments since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against using race as a factor in college admissions. That 2023 decision resulted from lawsuits SFFA brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

    “The HSI program is particularly egregious in terms of how it treats students based on immutable characteristics,” Tennessee attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti, who’s representing the state in the suit, told Inside Higher Ed. “It is just manifestly unfair that a needy student in Tennessee does not have access to this pool of funds because they go to a school that doesn’t have the right ethnic makeup.”

    The lawsuit calls for “a declaratory judgement that the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements are unconstitutional” and “a permanent injunction prohibiting the [Education] Secretary from enforcing or applying the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements when making decisions whether to award or maintain grants to Tennessee’s institutions of higher education.”

    HSI proponents may be jarred by the legal challenge, but they aren’t entirely surprised. Conservative think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and the American Civil Rights Project have previously proposed abolishing enrollment-based minority-serving institutions (MSIs), including HSIs and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander–serving institutions, which are defined as enrolling 10 percent of students from these groups.

    “It was only a matter of time before the anti-DEI movement hit the enrollment-based MSIs,” said Gina Ann Garcia, a professor who studies MSIs in the school of education at the University of California, Berkeley. “It still was a punch to the gut.”

    2 Sides At Odds

    Congress established the HSI program in the 1990s to improve the quality of education at colleges and universities that disproportionately serve Latino students, who were concentrated at colleges with relatively fewer financial resources. They’ve historically enjoyed bipartisan support. Last year, the federal government appropriated about $229 million for the country’s roughly 600 Hispanic-serving institutions; $28 million of that funding went to 49 of the HSIs that applied for the competitive grants.

    Deborah Santiago, co-founder and CEO of Excelencia in Education, an organization that promotes Latino student success, believes the lawsuit mischaracterizes the program and its role in the national higher education landscape. She said it’s in the country’s “self-interest” to invest in colleges and universities with limited resources that serve a growing student population with stubborn degree-attainment gaps.

    “If a disproportionate number of students of any background are at an institution that has a high enrollment of needy students, low educational core expenditures and serves a high proportion of students that that could benefit from that [funding] to serve the country, I don’t think that’s discriminating,” she said.

    She also stressed that the grant program “doesn’t explicitly require any resources to go to a specific population” but funds capacity-building efforts, like building new laboratories and facilities, that benefit all students at the institution.

    The HSI program is a way “to target limited federal resources and meet the federal mandate of access for low-income students,” she said. “We know that it costs more to educate Hispanic students, because they’re more likely to be low income and first gen, so college knowledge, student support services—all of that takes institutional investment.”

    But opponents of HSIs don’t buy it.

    Wenyuan Wu, executive director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, a think tank and watchdog organization focused on promoting “equal rights and merit,” firmly believes enrollment-based minority-serving institutions are discriminatory and applauded the lawsuit as a step in the right direction.

    She argued that HSI funding has gone to efforts specifically to support Latino students, including some she sees as “ideological.” For example, the University of Connecticut at Stamford proposed using the funding to start a program called Sueño Scholars, to “recruit, support and mentor undergraduate Hispanic, other minority, low-income, and high-need students” to enter teaching graduate programs and included a goal of “developing and sustaining antiracist orientations towards teaching and learning,” according to the department’s list of project abstracts.

    Wu asserted that putting federal money toward efforts like these is a problem. She’d rather see the funds designated for HSIs channeled into Pell Grants or other supports for low-income students.

    “Taxpayer funds should not be used to engage in racial balancing, and that’s exactly the kind of behavior that has been incentivized by MSIs,” said Wu, who is also chair of the Georgia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

    Possible Outcomes

    Robert Kelchen, head of the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, believes the lawsuit has “a possibility of success.” It was filed in a conservative-leaning federal district court in Knoxville, and Tennessee seems to have shown it has legal standing, he said.

    Even “if the court here in Knoxville doesn’t agree, another state could choose to file a similar lawsuit in their district court as well,” he said. Ultimately, “the question is, can they find one court that agrees with the plaintiffs’ interpretation.”

    The move by Tennessee comes just a week after the federal government successfully sued Texas to eliminate in-state tuition for undocumented students—a policy Republican state lawmakers had tried but failed to end. The Texas attorney general celebrated the challenge, siding with the U.S. Department of Justice in a matter of hours, and a judge promptly quashed the two-decade-old state law. (Stephen Vladeck, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, called the episode “transparently collusive.”)

    Kelchen believes the Tennessee lawsuit is following a similar playbook. He expects to see more red states and conservative organizations sue the Education Department on issues where they align “to get rid of things that neither of [them] like,” he said—though in Tennessee’s case, it’s unclear how the department will respond.

    Skrmetti told Inside Higher Ed that “from Tennessee’s perspective, this is not part of a broader strategy to influence education policy. This is about discrimination against Tennessee schools because of the ethnic makeup of their student bodies.”

    If the plaintiffs win, it’s unclear whether that would mean changing the federal definition of an HSI to eliminate a Hispanic enrollment threshold or axing the HSI program altogether. The implications for other types of enrollment-based minority-serving institutions are also hazy.

    Skrmetti is open to multiple options.

    “At the end of the day, there’s [HSI] money out there to help needy students, and we want to make sure that needy students can access it regardless of the ethnic makeup of the schools they’re at,” he said. “There are a couple different avenues I think that could successfully achieve the goal operationally. We need to just get a declaration that the current situation does violate the Constitution.”

    Santiago, of Excelencia in Education, said there’s room for “thoughtful discussion” about reforming or expanding requirements for HSI grant funding, but she believes “it needs to come from the community.”

    She also pointed out that the lawsuit is against the Department of Education, which administers HSI funding but doesn’t control it—Congress does. So the department doesn’t have the power to end the funding.

    Nonetheless, “it would be foolish to not take it seriously,” she said.

    Garcia, the Berkeley education professor, said that while she’s not a lawyer, she believes there are legal questions worth raising about the lawsuit, particularly the way it leans on the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in admissions.

    She pointed out that HSIs tend to be broad-access or open-access institutions that admit most applicants, rather than selective institutions explicitly recruiting Latino students; only about two dozen of the 600 HSIs are highly selective, she said. So, the assertion that HSIs have any connection to the affirmative action ruling is up for debate, she said.

    Skrmetti believes it’s a cut-and-dried case.

    “You can’t make determinations about the allocation of resources based on ancestry or skin color or anything like that without inherent discrimination,” he said. “We need to help all needy students. And the HSI designation is an obstacle to that.”

    Garcia believes that regardless of whether the lawsuit is successful, it’s already done damage to HSIs by dragging them—and enrollment-based MSIs in general—into the country’s political skirmishes over diversity, equity and inclusion.

    “I’ve been just watching HSIs fly a little bit under the radar,” she said. “They don’t come up a lot” in national conversations about DEI. But the lawsuit “brings HSIs into the light, and it brings them into the attack.”

    She worries that students are the ones who will suffer if HSIs no longer receive dedicated funding.

    HSIs “are often underresourced institutions,” she said. “They’re institutions that are struggling to serve a large population of minoritized students, of students of color, of low-income students, of first-gen students. We’re not talking about the Harvards and the Columbias.”

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  • Data Shows Attendance Improves Student Success

    Data Shows Attendance Improves Student Success

    Prior research shows attendance is one of the best predictors of class grades and student outcomes, creating a strong argument for faculty to incentivize or require attendance.

    Attaching grades to attendance, however, can create its own challenges, because many students generally want more flexibility in their schedules and think they should be assessed on what they learn—not how often they show up. A student columnist at the University of Washington expressed frustration at receiving a 20 percent weighted participation grade, which the professor graded based on exit tickets students submitted at the end of class.

    “Our grades should be based on our understanding of the material, not whether or not we were in the room,” Sophie Sanjani wrote in The Daily, UW’s student paper.

    Keenan Hartert, a biology professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, set out to understand the factors affecting students’ performance in his own course and found that attendance was one of the strongest predictors of their success.

    His finding wasn’t an aha moment, but reaffirmed his position that attendance is an early indicator of GPA and class community building. The challenge, he said, is how to apply such principles to an increasingly diverse student body, many of whom juggle work, caregiving responsibilities and their own personal struggles.

    “We definitely have different students than the ones I went to school with,” Hartert said. “We do try to be the most flexible, because we have a lot of students that have a lot of other things going on that they can’t tell us. We want to be there for them.”

    Who’s missing class? It’s not uncommon for a student to miss class for illness or an outside conflict, but higher rates of absence among college students in recent years are giving professors pause.

    An analysis of 1.1 million students across 22 major research institutions found that the number of hours students have spent attending class, discussion sections and labs declined dramatically from the 2018–19 academic year to 2022–23, according to the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium.

    More than 30 percent of students who attended community college in person skipped class sometimes in the past year, a 2023 study found; 4 percent said they skipped class often or very often.

    Students say they opt out of class for a variety of reasons, including lack of motivation, competing priorities and external challenges. A professor at Colorado State University surveyed 175 of his students in 2023 and found that 37 percent said they regularly did not attend class because of physical illness, mental health concerns, a lack of interest or engagement, or simply because it wasn’t a requirement.

    A 2024 survey from Trellis Strategies found that 15 percent of students missed class sometimes due to a lack of reliable transportation. Among working students, one in four said they regularly missed class due to conflicts with their work schedule.

    High rates of anxiety and depression among college students may also impact their attendance. More than half of 817 students surveyed by Harmony Healthcare IT in 2024 said they’d skipped class due to mental health struggles; one-third of respondents indicated they’d failed a test because of negative mental health.

    A case study: MSU Mankato’s Hartert collected data on about 250 students who enrolled in his 200-level genetics course over several semesters.

    Using an end-of-term survey, class activities and his own grade book information, Hartert collected data measuring student stress, hours slept, hours worked, number of office hours attended, class attendance and quiz grades, among other metrics.

    Mapping out the various factors, Hartert’s case study modeled other findings in student success literature: a high number of hours worked correlated negatively with the student’s course grade, while attendance in class and at review sessions correlated positively with academic outcomes.

    Data analysis by Keenan Hartert, a biology professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, found student employment negatively correlated with their overall class grade.

    Keenan Hartert

    The data also revealed to Hartert some of the challenges students face while enrolled. “It was brutal to see how many students [were working full-time]. Just seeing how many were [working] over 20 [hours] and how many were over 30 or 40, it was different.”

    Nationally, two-thirds of college students work for pay while enrolled, and 43 percent of employed students work full-time, according to fall 2024 data from Trellis Strategies.

    Hartert also asked students if they had any financial resources to support them in case of emergency; 28 percent said they had no fallback. Of those students, 90 percent were working more than 20 hours per week.

    Four pie charts show how working students often lack financial support and how working more hours is connected to passing or failing a course.

    Data analysis of student surveys show students who are working are less likely to have financial resources to support them in an emergency.

    The findings illustrated to him the challenges many students face in managing their job shifts while trying to meet attendance requirements.

    A Faculty Aside

    While some faculty may be less interested in using predictive analytics for their own classes, Hartert found tracking factors like how often a student attends office hours was beneficial to helping him achieve his own career goals, because he could include those measurements in his tenure review.

    An interpersonal dynamic: A less measured factor in the attendance debate is not a student’s own learning, but the classroom environment they contribute to. Hartert framed it as students motivating their peers unknowingly. “The people that you may not know that sit around you and see you, if you’re gone, they may think, ‘Well, they gave up, why should I keep trying?’ Even if they’ve never spoken to you.”

    One professor at the University of Oregon found that peer engagement positively correlated with academic outcomes. Raghuveer Parthasarathy restructured his general education physics course to promote engagement by creating an “active zone,” or a designated seating area in the classroom where students sat if they wanted to participate in class discussions and other active learning conversations.

    Compared to other sections of the course, the class was more engaged across the board, even among those who didn’t opt to sit in the participation zone. Additionally, students who sat in the active zone were more likely to earn higher grades on exams and in the course over all.

    Attending class can also create connections between students and professors, something students say they want and expect.

    A May 2024 student survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab found that 35 percent of respondents think their academic success would be most improved by professors getting to know them better. In a separate question, 55 percent of respondents said they think professors are at least partly responsible for becoming a mentor.

    The SERU Consortium found student respondents in 2023 were less likely to say a professor knew or had learned their name compared to their peers in 2013. Students were also less confident that they knew a professor well enough to ask for a letter of recommendation for a job or graduate school.

    “You have to show up to class then, so I know who you are,” Hartert said.

    Meeting in the middle: To encourage attendance, Hartert employs active learning methods such as creative writing or case studies, which help demonstrate the value of class participation. His favorite is a jury scenario, in which students put their medical expertise into practice with criminal cases. “I really try and get them in some gray-area stuff and remind them, just because it’s a big textbook doesn’t mean that you can’t have some creative, fun ideas,” Hartert said.

    For those who can’t make it, all of Hartert’s lectures are recorded and available online to watch later. Recording lectures, he said, “was a really hard bridge to cross, post-COVID. I was like, ‘Nobody’s going to show up.’ But every time I looked at the data [for] who was looking at the recording, it’s all my top students.” That was reason enough for him to leave the recordings available as additional practice and resources.

    Students who can’t make an in-person class session can receive attendance credit by sending Hartert their notes and answers to any questions asked live during the class, proving they watched the recording.

    Hartert has also made adjustments to how he uses class time to create more avenues for working students to engage. His genetics course includes a three-hour lab section, which rarely lasts the full time, Hartert said. Now, the final hour of the lab is a dedicated review session facilitated by peer leaders, who use practice questions Hartert designed. Initial data shows working students who stayed for the review section of labs were more likely to perform better on their exams.

    “The good news is when it works out, like when we can make some adjustments, then we can figure our way through,” Hartert said. “But the reality of life is that time marches on and things happen, and you gotta choose a couple priorities.”

    Do you have an academic intervention that might help others improve student success? Tell us about it.

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  • A Few Words About Trustees (opinion)

    A Few Words About Trustees (opinion)

    University governing boards are the black boxes of higher ed. As with marriages, the only people who know what they’re really like are the ones in the relationship. Sometimes not even them.

    Like most faculty members, I knew almost nothing about the Board of Trustees at my regional public university, other than hearing my colleagues rail against their hiring decisions. In my nearly two decades on the faculty, we’ve had six presidents. That should tell you something.

    After a no-confidence vote in a previous president, the board held a public Zoom session where faculty, students and community members gave them hell. I watched, embarrassed. At the board’s request for further comment, I wrote a letter explaining from my limited perspective how things had gotten so bad.

    The next day, a trustee emailed to thank me and asked if I’d be willing to talk. I was. I knew some of my colleagues had go-out-drinking relationships with board members. I have never been cool, so I was, of course, flattered. (Frailty, thy name is Rachel.)

    The trustee asked if there were other faculty members they could contact. I gave names. We kept in touch. Eventually, the board fired the president and hired someone new. The trustee would occasionally reach out. We’d talk about campus issues—but also books and dogs. Our conversations made me feel seen and valued—a rarity for me.

    Only when I began writing a weekly newsletter for Inside Higher Ed, having confidential and off-the-record conversations with sitting presidents, did I realize that my friendly back channel might not have been entirely kosher. Recently, I finally looked at our board’s bylaws. They said, essentially, that trustees aren’t supposed to go around the president to make requests of university employees.

    Oops.

    That rule is there for a good reason. While it is theoretically great for trustees to be more knowledgeable about the institutions on whose boards they serve, their main functions are fiduciary and to hire and (increasingly often) fire the president, who is responsible in turn for educating them. Most faculty and staff will have plenty to say if asked (I sure did) but will have only a limited perspective on the administrative realities (which never stops us from opining). And some board members, like some of us faculty, just like to stir up shit.

    That was not the case with the trustee at my university, who loved the institution, was smart and caring, and wanted only to understand and help make things better. But the reason for bylaws is because not everyone acts honorably. Or is even informed. One thing I’ve learned: Many board members (and some presidents) don’t pay much attention to those pesky board documents. And they’re rarely updated. I just heard from a current president that when he came into the job, the bylaws stated that documents were to be sent electronically. By telegram!

    In the last two years, I’ve heard plenty of stories about good relationships between presidents and helpful boards working together to lead all sorts of different types of institutions. Those tales are happily dull.

    Frequently, though, I’ve heard horror stories about board behavior. Trustees reliving their frat years, getting hammered and passing out on the president’s couch. Grabbing butts and commenting on legs. Weighing in on clothing and jewelry choices. But not all offenses are so blatant. More often, presidents tell me about covert alliances between trustees and executive team members who want to undermine the president—and get away with it because of personal relationships. Or the board members who go around the president to talk to faculty (um, right).

    I have come to believe that many of the problems in higher ed are a result of the fact that there’s no real oversight of trustees, and often not even a shared understanding of what they’re supposed to be doing. There are associations and consultants, but the institutions that seek them out are the ones who already know they need help, and only because things are seriously messed up. Most “training” happens after everything goes pear-shaped and someone with a title and willingness to spend some coin brings in the consultants.

    You’d think leaders would recognize a dysfunctional board. But as one of those consultants likes to say, when you’ve seen one board, you’ve seen one board. Many presidents don’t realize they are in an abusive relationship until they move on (by their own choice, or not) and realize that the next board isn’t like the last. That’s when it hits: Oh. That wasn’t normal.

    Boards sometimes bring in a president to shake things up or solve a big problem (there’s no money in the budget). But when a place is used to doing things a certain way—especially if there’s been a long-serving president—the new person often ends up being blamed for making everyone feel uncomfortable. When trustees start hearing complaints from their golf buddies about how their alma mater is “changing too much” or faculty vote no confidence, guess who takes the hit?

    Some say big boards are better—fewer people means fewer checks on the loudest voices. Most trustees are used to being in charge and seeing quick results. Higher ed doesn’t work that way. And we haven’t even started talking about shared governance. (That’s a whole other can of night crawlers.)

    Presidents have to walk a fine line: Give the board enough information to fulfill their duties without overwhelming them. Some create board books of many hundreds of pages and hope no one reads too closely. Others spoon-feed just what’s needed so they can take advantage of the real expertise and wisdom of the board members. Good trustees are curious and thoughtful. But not all of them got the memo that this is a governing role, not a management one. (Same is true for shared governance.)

    As with faculty development, those who are eager to get better at their jobs attend learning sessions and those who most need training rarely show up. The bullies call themselves “critical thinkers.” A former president–turned–consultant told me that in the old days, other board members would call out bad behavior. Now, she says, when the flamethrowers show up, everyone else suddenly finds their phones fascinating.

    Good trustees know their role. One I’ve spoken to told his president, “If I ever feel like I’m running the place, I know it’s time to find a new president.” That’s what a good marriage sounds like—mutual trust, healthy boundaries, a sense of being on the same team without Monday-morning quarterbacking.

    But like all relationships, presidencies can sour. Many presidents have had great relationships with strong, supportive board chairs. But then the chair rotates. Or a new crop of trustees arrives. Suddenly, everything changes. And there’s no way to explain what happened—only that it did.

    That’s when we see the press release that says the president “resigned abruptly.” The board thanks them for their service, announces an interim and closes the door behind them. In a few recent cases, the interim is the board chair, who then takes over as president.

    Which is why seasoned presidents negotiate their contracts like they’re signing a prenup. Because as with any marriage, you want to believe it’s forever—but you’d be wise to plan for the day one of you decides to walk away.

    Rachel Toor is a contributing editor at Inside Higher Ed, where she writes and edits the Insider membership newsletter The Sandbox.

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  • Trump Following Orbán’s Playbook, Says President of Ousted U

    Trump Following Orbán’s Playbook, Says President of Ousted U

    Shalini Randeria, president and rector of the Central European University, has warned that the Trump administration is working from the “playbook” of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, describing the legal uncertainty faced by U.S. universities as the government’s “intended outcome.”

    Now based in Vienna, CEU was forced out of Budapest after Orbán’s Fidesz government implemented a series of legal measures in 2017, which the European Court of Justice later ruled were “incompatible with E.U. law.”

    The 2020 ruling came too late for CEU, however, which had relocated to Austria the previous year. “That’s one of the problems of using law courts to stop the machinations of soft authoritarian regimes,” Randeria told Times Higher Education. “Courts are slow and unpredictable, even though we had a very strong case.”

    “There was a lot of legal uncertainty created by Orbán, and this is exactly the same playbook which is being used by the Trump administration,” she said, pointing to the court battle between Harvard University and the government as an example.

    “They introduce a flurry of laws and administrative measures that universities can then go to court against. It’s unclear what will happen at the end, and this chaos and unpredictability is really the intended outcome.”

    Randeria described legal uncertainty as particularly problematic for organizations that work on “long-term cycles,” such as universities. “It makes any rational decision-making, any financial planning or academic planning, impossible,” she said.

    “When we admit students now, we admit them to complete a four-year degree, or a two-year master’s, or a doctoral degree in five or six years. We are thinking and planning way ahead,” she said. “If you don’t know what the legal status of your institution will be in two years, you cannot in good faith advertise to and recruit students.”

    Attracting faculty, too, requires long-term certainty, Randeria continued: “When you have this sword of Damocles hanging over your head, not knowing whether you’ll be able to run the university efficiently and fairly on a consistent basis, it’s very, very difficult to recruit faculty.”

    After the “traumatic period” of forced relocation, CEU has “performed really well academically,” Randeria said, securing “competitive research funding both within Austria and, as usual, within Europe.”

    Obtaining consortium grants, such as those awarded by the Austrian Science Fund, has “allowed us to anchor ourselves in Austria, not in competition with the very vibrant academic scene here and its research institutions and universities, but in partnership with them.” The university did not lose any faculty in the move, she noted, and “recruitment and admission numbers didn’t fall.”

    Nevertheless, Orbán’s pursuit of the CEU—part of a larger campaign against its philanthropist founder, George Soros—has yet to run its course, Randeria said. Fidesz’s proposed “national sovereignty” law, which would allow the government to penalize or shut down organizations receiving “foreign funding,” “could be used against CEU’s continuing activities” in Budapest, she warned, namely, research conducted at the CEU Democracy Institute.

    U.S. vice president JD Vance has expressed explicit admiration for Orbán’s higher education policy, calling his approach, which has also seen control of state universities transferred to government-aligned foundations, “the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities.”

    “What right-wing populists all over have done is stamp universities as ivory towers of elite privilege, and this is not true,” Randeria said. In response, “we need to mobilize public support on a very large scale.”

    “As institutions, we need to put a lot more focus on outreach and communication,” she told THE, with the goal of ensuring the public “really understand what universities do, and why they are the backbone of a functioning liberal democracy.”

    U.S. universities must “not let themselves be divided one against the other,” Randeria advised. “I don’t think you can protect yourself as an institution on your own. It has to be a collective resistance against this kind of intervention into university autonomy and academic freedom.”

    “One should be prepared for some very, very strong institutional solidarity of universities across the board.”

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  • Could Uncertainty in Higher Ed Be a Catalyst for Change?

    Could Uncertainty in Higher Ed Be a Catalyst for Change?

    As colleges navigate major disruption—from a loss of federal funding to AI advancements—they’re also being forced to grapple with persistent questions around their role in skills training, trust in their institutions and how to keep pace with digital learning innovations.

    At Digital Universities, a convening of more than 150 faculty, teaching and learning administrators, and education-technology experts, attendees came away with a sense of urgency to meet this moment of unpredictability and uncertainty.

    “It’s revealing the tensions between different goals, aspirations and larger challenges that may be implicit but are still there,” said Trey Conatser, assistant provost for teaching and learning at the University of Kentucky and director of UK’s Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching.

    “Some of those things are what it means to adapt to enrollment challenges and how we negotiate our identities as institutions of higher education, as stewards of a storied, scholarly mission in light of changing business models, as well as negotiating our relationships with industry partners, the public and public officials.”

    Glenda Morgan, an education-technology market analyst, told Inside Higher Ed that she was reassured that “people are actually talking about this stuff—this moment of uncertainty” throughout the conference’s programming.

    “AI is making clear some of the issues and fractures and making all of these problems that have probably been there for a long time more apparent, visible and urgent,” she said.

    For example, “AI brings questions about cheating to the forefront, but it really highlights that our assessment systems are so outdated … Testing factual information has never been the point; it’s always been application. But AI is making that more urgent now.”

    Trust in Higher Ed

    In a panel discussion on privacy, AI and cybersecurity, speakers highlighted another long-standing issue that AI is pushing to the surface: trust. Morgan said that while today’s students seem generally comfortable sharing their data with outside entities, they may be increasingly skeptical about how their own institutions are using or even “surveilling” their data.

    Panelist Josh Callahan, chief information security officer for the California State University system, later told Inside Higher Ed that cybersecurity concerns in the era of AI are stoking conversations that should have happened decades ago.

    “We were all busy doing the things, building technology into teaching and learning, and we had a lot of assumptions and really didn’t engage in some of these conversations,” he said. “And now it’s becoming unavoidable, because it’s embedded. And we are at a crisis point in a lot of ways, in terms of our trust in institutions—not just higher ed.”

    Teaching in the Age of AI

    At the two-day event in Salt Lake City organized by Inside Higher Ed and its parent company, Times Higher Education, attendees also considered how to respond to the threat to entry-level white-collar jobs posed by the evolution of AI—a risk articulated by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last month when he predicted AI could wipe out half of those positions within just five years.

    During a discussion on leveraging workforce partnerships for future skills, Sarah DeMark, vice president of academic portfolio at the fully online Western Governors University, said WGU’s instruction and curriculum model is informed by employment data and focused on helping students both develop and effectively market the skills they learn in college. “It’s not just about degree completion, it’s about getting a job,” she said. “One of the big opportunities [institutions] have is transparency around the skills and competencies students are gaining through the courses and programs they’re taking.”

    Hollis Robbins, special adviser for humanities diplomacy at the University of Utah, offered a different perspective on workforce preparation, saying faculty should be able to do more than teach skills and information in the age of AI, when students no longer need a professor to learn easily accessible, established information.

    “My own view is that AI is going to be teaching general education courses,” she said. With that in mind, “it’s important to reconfigure their business models to double down on faculty expertise and say that’s the value of what [students] are paying for.”

    Meanwhile, in a discussion about getting the most out of teaching with AI, Zawan Al Bulushi, an assistant professor of education at the University of Arizona, said that she sees generative AI as a “friend” that offers shortcuts for professors who may feel overwhelmed by their workloads. She uses it to craft lesson plans that strike the right tone with students and create visually appealing lecture slides that keep students engaged.

    “The best educators won’t be replaced by AI,” she said. “But those who use it well will redefine what’s possible.”

    Bulushi is an outlier among most faculty, however, as many institutions still have no formal AI policy supporting students and faculty in engaging with the technology.

    Recent findings from Inside Higher Ed’s survey of chief information officers showed that more than half of CIOs say their institution hasn’t adopted institutionwide formal policies or guidelines for the use of AI tools for general use. And 31 percent said their institution hasn’t adopted any policy or guidelines in the areas of instruction, administrative tasks, student services or research assistance.

    “If you don’t have a policy, then it’s a little bit like the wild, wild West. Entities like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft are all competing, and they’re all telling you that they’re the answer,” Marvin Krislov, president of Pace University, said in the opening plenary. “But there doesn’t seem to be regulation on the federal level and there doesn’t seem to be consensus in higher education. At least on an institutional level, I hope people will start—if they haven’t already—grappling with [AI].”

    Maricel Lawrence, innovation catalyst at Purdue Global, advised institutions to consider why they want to use new AI technologies before jumping headfirst into adoption.

    “We need a larger conversation about what it means to learn and how to advance student success,” she told Inside Higher Ed. “AI could help us in many ways, but it shouldn’t be that we’re starting the conversation with AI.”

    Sara Custer and Colleen Flaherty contributed to this report.

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  • How Higher Ed Marketers Can Lead With Creativity

    How Higher Ed Marketers Can Lead With Creativity

    Colleges and universities continue to compete for attention across countless platforms; this scattershot approach often comes at the expense of cohesion. But simply adding more content—made easy within the decentralized environment of many campuses—isn’t a solution to deeper strategic and directional challenges. In the famous words of Merry Baskin, “Like a shark, brands must move forward or die.” For colleges and universities, that forward motion begins with centering courageous, strategic creativity as a core operating principle and with higher education marketing leaders creating a system to ensure all are moving in the correct direction.

    I have argued that creativity continues to drive commercial value, however, investing in the intangible up front can be difficult when budgets remain static. So, our focus isn’t on only proving that creativity adds value but also showing how investing in it up front can maximize the value it creates. We need a framework for higher ed marketing leaders to establish a system for defining and embedding a culture of creativity across teams. This will help teams create more effective work and collaborate with agencies in support of institutional goals.

    Modeled loosely on WARC’s creative effectiveness ladder, this three-phase framework should help marketing leaders not only spark creativity but also systematize it as a shared method. First, start by defining what creativity means within our unique institutional contexts instead of a loose collection of ideas. Then, develop the systems, roles and language that bring that definition to life. Finally, diffuse those practices across teams and departments to embed creativity into the fabric of institutional strategy.

    Step 1: Define

    Start by establishing the foundation for creative effectiveness by aligning on what creativity means, how it’s measured and why it matters. This will bring clarity to metrics, principles and strategic outcomes so creative work can be evaluated with purpose.

    Create a shared set of key measures for creative effectiveness

    Marketing leaders must establish clear, institution-specific indicators of what effective creativity looks like. No matter how rigorous the approach, consistent application and ensuring these measures are aligned are most important. Example measures include:

    • Brand recall: Did prospective students or alumni remember the name of the institution after seeing an ad? This indicates a clear connection to the brand.
    • Distinctiveness scores: In focus groups, ask audiences to compare your marketing to peer institutions—does your work stand out or feel generic? No matter the medium, attention is the first barrier to more effective work.

    Determine principles of creative effectiveness

    Determining principles of creative effectiveness means articulating the core beliefs and standards that guide all creative work across the institution. These principles serve as guardrails—ensuring that creativity remains consistent, purposeful and aligned with institutional values. When widely understood and adopted, they help teams evaluate work objectively and make more confident, collaborative decisions. Examples can be directional:

    • Brand prominence: Brand or branding must be present within the first three seconds.
    • Distinctive assets: Consistently use the school’s signature color palette, typeface and photographic style—even on social platforms—to maintain visual recognition. Stay on brand, not on trend.
    • Commit to creativity: Use longer durations, more media channels and consistent storytelling over time to drive cumulative impact.
    • Emotional truth wins: Campaigns should connect emotionally with audiences; stories of real students often outperform statistics.

    Align key measures of effectiveness to marketing KPIs

    Marketing leaders should evaluate creative work using engagement-based metrics—such as time on page, view-through rates, social saves and content shares. These go beyond impressions to signal true resonance and provide a shared set of indicators for what effective creativity looks like in practice.

    Step 2: Develop

    Once effectiveness is clearly defined, leadership should build the internal systems to support and scale it. This phase is about ensuring teams are equipped to execute in practice.

    Identify critical roles within the institution

    First develop a network of collaborators: content producers, enrollment leaders, advancement partners, institutional researchers and/or agency teams. Map out who holds creative influence across the institution and define the roles they play in shaping, supporting and evaluating creative work. Clarity will empower contributors and reinforce accountability.

    Create a shared language for evaluation

    Marketing leaders need a consistent, responsive way to evaluate creative work. By building in intentional check-ins throughout the creative process, teams can replace feelings with shared language that sharpens feedback and improves outcomes.

    Leaders should consider three stages of evaluation:

    • Pretest: Introduce a lightweight, consistent method to test creative ideas before launch. This might include quick student feedback loops, internal scoring rubrics or pilot testing in key markets.
    • Platform: Centralize creative assets, guidelines and effectiveness learnings into a shared, accessible platform.
    • Pulse: Establish a regular cadence for reviewing the performance of creative work both in-market and in internal perception.

    Step 3: Diffuse

    With creativity defined and the right systems in place, the final step is to diffuse that culture across the institution. To drive real institutional value, creative effectiveness must be shared, socialized and scaled across departments, disciplines and decision-makers.

    Identify key working groups to deliver creativity workshops

    Start by identifying key teams or departments—enrollment, advancement, student life, academic units—that shape public-facing messages or student experiences. Bring them into the fold through collaborative workshops that unpack creative principles, show examples of effective work and introduce shared evaluation tools.

    Develop measurement frameworks aligned to department-level KPIs

    Creativity becomes powerful when its effectiveness is measured in context. That means helping individual departments or units tie creative performance to their own goals—whether it’s growing attendance at student events, boosting open rates on fundraising emails or improving reputation scores for a new academic program. By co-creating simple measurement frameworks with each team, marketing leaders position creativity as a strategic asset.

    Build a best-in-class repository for cross-campus learning

    Finally, celebrate and scale what works. Create a living archive of standout creative work, from bold campaigns to scrappy social posts that have delivered results. Share the backstory: What was the challenge? What was the idea? What impact did it have? This becomes a source of inspiration, a tool for onboarding new team members and a tangible way to reinforce these new values.

    By defining what creativity means, developing the systems to support it and diffusing its value across campus, marketing leaders can turn creativity into a measurable, repeatable driver of effectiveness.

    Christopher Huebner is a director of strategy at SimpsonScarborough.

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  • Higher Ed Should Be Very Cautious About AI “Partnerships”

    Higher Ed Should Be Very Cautious About AI “Partnerships”

    There have been several points during this era of AI availability in education where I’ve been genuinely shocked that something that seems to me to be clearly out of bounds or incredibly rash is viewed by others as quite workable, or even desirable.

    One of these is so-called AI peer review. Granted, academic research is not actually my thing, but I was under the impression that the goal of research and peer review is to deploy the reasoned judgment of subject matter experts in adjudicating whether or not a proposed new contribution is worthy of being heard and disseminated.

    The key words there are “reasoned judgment,” something a large language model may be able to simulate but cannot actually do. I am aware the system of academic peer review has become strained to breaking for all kinds of reasons, but I cannot fathom how taking a system that’s predicated on reasoned judgment and outsourcing it to a simulation is acceptable, and yet I am aware some people believe this is a solution to the peer-review bottleneck.

    Another no-go in my book that is being pursued with some measure of enthusiasm by others is outsourcing grading and response to student writing to generative AI. I do not know how to ask students to write something that is not going to be read, because I think even the most enthusiastic AI folks will admit that large language models do not read or communicate with intention the way humans do. It’s simply a betrayal of the student-instructor compact.

    I had another moment of pause while reading a recent New York Times feature on OpenAI’s push onto college campuses, featuring the California State University system’s partnership, which will make ChatGPT available to its 460,000 students in pursuit of “the nation’s first and largest A.I.-empowered university system.”

    I’ll tell you what gave me pause. For the last, what … 18 months … we’ve been receiving testimonies from many faculty across many disciplines declaring that ChatGPT (and its cousins) are essentially injecting poison into the classroom dynamics around learning, and here is one of the largest university systems in the country saying, “Let’s make sure every student gets a nice healthy dose of the stuff.”

    I can testify firsthand from the talks and faculty development workshops I’ve been giving around preserving the experience of writing to communicate and learn that this worry is very real. While the people I’ve been interacting with are engaged and adaptable, and many of them are actively exploring how generative AI could aid their students in their learning, I have yet to meet the person who thinks they have it all figured out.

    While I try not to be judgmental about these things, I can’t help but read what’s being described in that Times story and think, “That’s nuts.” This is why I’m thankful for reporting like what appears in the Times, because it gives me a chance to better understand the mindset of people who see the world so differently from me.

    While there are several examples of faculty who make use of generative AI tools in their courses and one example of a student who uses ChatGPT as a study aid, the primary voice in the article is Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education.

    Formerly at Coursera, an early company that promised and failed to revolutionize education, Belsky has as her charge to create “AI native universities.” How you feel about these initiatives may depend on how you reflexively respond to that phrase. My response is some mix of “ugh” and “yikes.”

    One of the drier paragraphs in the entire article struck me as the most important thing we should be considering about these initiatives:

    “OpenAI’s push to A.I.-ify college education amounts to a national experiment on millions of students. The use of these chatbots in schools is so new that their potential long-term educational benefits, and possible side effects, are not yet established.”

    A national experiment on millions of students. I don’t know—to me, that sounds risky or reckless or heedless. I can’t quite decide which is the best descriptor.

    Belsky says OpenAI is starting to look into these issues. At a conference late last year she remarked, “The challenge is, how do you actually identify what are the use cases for A.I. in the university that are most impactful? And then how do you replicate those best practices across the ecosystem?”

    Good questions. Thank goodness we’re simultaneously experimenting on millions of students. This is a very good way to generate reliable data.

    A large language model would have a hard time detecting the sarcasm in that previous sentence, but I hope it’s clear to my human readers.

    For the privilege of making its 460,000 students available to OpenAI, the Cal State system is paying $17 million over 18 months. In the grand scheme of university budgets this does not sound like much, but for a perpetually strapped system like Cal State, every dollar counts. Martha Lincoln, an anthropology professor at San Francisco State reacting to the announcement, told a SiliconValley.com reporter, “This is so deeply distressing. It’s absolutely shocking. For a while we didn’t even have regular paper in our copier: It was all three-hole punch. We don’t have enough counselors on our campus. When students have mental health concerns, they’re waitlisted for weeks if not months.”

    All this is happening against a backdrop of AI companies that have overtly declared their goal is to subsume the vast majority of economic activity to their technology. Economic activity means jobs, labor, and here is a system that is supposed to empower people heading into the workforce hastening their own obviation by partnering with the company that aims to subsume those jobs to their technology.

    Personally, I think Altman is well over his skis with AI hype, but he isn’t shy about his intentions

    Ohio State apparently looked at Cal State and said, “Hold my beer,” declaring that starting in the fall, using AI in class will be a requirement. Ravi V. Bellamkonda, executive vice president and provost, announced, “Through AI Fluency, Ohio State students will be ‘bilingual’—fluent in both their major field of study and the application of AI in that area.”

    There are two important questions that go betting in this statement:

    1. Is working with AI in a field of study equivalent to learning a new language? And,
    2. If it is like a new language, what does fluency look like?

    We don’t have answers to either of these questions. We don’t even know if they’re the right questions to ask because we don’t know if treating AI competency through the lens of fluency even makes sense!

    Normally, I find the relatively slow pace of change in how higher ed institutions shift orientations frustrating, but in this case, it is the sudden lurch by some schools toward an AI-inevitable future that is baffling. It appears to be a by-product of swallowing AI hype whole. This is Ohio State president Ted Carter: “Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we live, work, teach and learn. In the not-so-distant future, every job, in every industry, is going to be impacted in some way by AI.”

    Where is the evidence of this? For sure, we’ve seen signs of some impacts, particularly around entry-level jobs, but we also may be looking at a scenario where AI is, in the words of Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (co-authors of AI Snake Oil) “normal technology,” where the diffusion of AI through industry and society is going to follow a similar timeline to other powerful general purpose technologies like electricity and the internet.

    I am a strong believer that we must be AI-aware while carefully and purposefully experimenting with this technology, keeping student learning at the center of the equation. The overwhelming preponderance of evidence rooted in both present and past experience suggests that if (or when) generative AI has a demonstrative positive effect on student learning, this positive effect will be apparent and unambiguous. If (or when) this happens, access to the benefit will not be scarce and institutions can adjust accordingly.

    This leap into a future that does not yet exist and that we have only a limited idea of what it might be like is beyond shortsighted and has the potential to unnecessarily harm students while also delaying the ultimate adjustments that will be necessary for higher ed institutions to survive.

    Partnering with or funneling customers to companies that aim to obviate your existence and exploit your work to develop their applications while paying them for the privilege—I know I said I was trying to not be too judgmental—but, honestly, that’s nuts.

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  • A Call for Moderate Voices on DEI (opinion)

    A Call for Moderate Voices on DEI (opinion)

    In 2020, I was asked to sign a pledge that felt more like an empty confession of guilt than a productive call to action—an admission that my university, and I, were complicit in white supremacy. Signing the pledge, backed by our Faculty Senate, meant acknowledging “the University of Cincinnati is an institution founded on white supremacist values in a country founded on the same … that we have benefitted and continue to benefit from white supremacy through the opportunities, advancements, inclusion, sense of self-worth, and freedom it has allowed us … that in our complicity [with white supremacy] we have likely contributed to emotional suffering in Black people, including UC faculty, staff, and students.” The roster of university employees who signed the pledge would be posted publicly.

    I was told that my discontent was just a symptom of my white privilege and spent ample time exploring whether this was true. I put in the work, a popular phrase at the time, by reading How to Be an Antiracist and White Fragility. Maybe I had missed something and Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo would provide clarity.

    The ideas I found were poorly constructed and dehumanizing. Ideology aside, signing a public loyalty pledge felt dystopian and counterproductive. I imagined myself as a first-year student of color who saw that my white faculty had signed a pledge admitting that the education system was designed for me to fail and that they had actively supported my failure. Why bother trying to succeed when university employees were willfully admitting to violating my civil rights?

    Over the next couple of years, I chose to remain silent whenever these ideas resurfaced out of fear that speaking out could jeopardize my career. I was told that my silence was complicity, and indeed I had been complicit in letting these toxic ideas echo without so much as a whimper. As the 2020s stretched onward, though, I noticed the loudest and most extreme voices that sometimes dominated the conversation were largely ignored, and their demands were not met. Despite calls by a vocal few, there wasn’t much appetite on campus for the “antiracist discrimination” that Kendi called for or the white saviorism promoted by DiAngelo.

    The university held firm in its moderate approach to diversity, equity and inclusion and mostly expanded resources for all students without restricting access by identity group. It is worth noting that most DEI initiatives and offices on campus offer noncontroversial services like tutoring, mental health counseling and accessibility services like sign language interpreters. But the public and politicians were forming their opinions of DEI based on the voices of those with the megaphones and lucrative book contracts.

    Last year, I enrolled in a graduate program in urban educational leadership and dived into the very discussions I had avoided for so long. I read the foundational critical race theory literature, one of the predominant theories in the DEI realm. Although I found many ideas with which I disagreed, I also found a robust field that has much to offer in terms of the ways we think about educating our students, understanding the needs of diverse communities and working together to create better opportunities for everyone. Most importantly, when I actively pushed back on concepts that I found disagreeable, it resulted in great discussions with instructors and in developing more robust ideas. I discovered there is room for debate in the DEI space and my own silence had been self-imposed.

    Many of my classmates are running the very DEI programs under threat by legislation and funding cuts. These programs provide educational resources to the underemployed and mentorship and financial resources to students who desperately need it, and they encourage student civic engagement—the very thing lauded by the Ohio Senate bill banning DEI offices and the use of DEI considerations in hiring, scholarships and trainings. (The bill, signed by the governor in March, goes into effect at the end of this month.)

    Since 2020, I have been slowly forced to confront my own fundamental assumptions that might have once led me to support legislation like Ohio’s Senate Bill 1. Blockbuster voices like Kendi’s and DiAngelo’s are not reflective of the everyday practices within my institution, and the few moments that deterred me from speaking were just moments, likely caused by the same flavor of polarization that impacts the entire country. Polarization is not just a higher ed problem, but a national problem that has been simmering for more than a decade.

    Current legislation targeting DEI upholds the most radical media-amplified voices as representative of the whole, even though these voices have been largely unsuccessful on many public campuses. Our university is not Columbia or Harvard, yet it seems as if legislators are attempting to punish our institution for the sins of its private counterparts. But when there are no loud moderate voices, how can we expect the public to see anything other than the extremes?

    I find myself at a crossroads again. I could stay silent, as I did in 2020, but the silence of moderate voices has gotten us here, and silence will only result in negative outcomes for our students, faculty and staff. The time for silence is over—was over—long ago. The caricature of higher ed that you see in political rhetoric is not reflective of my university. We must be more vocal in challenging the narrative that our institutions are ideologically captured.

    We still have much work to do in higher ed, and it’s not good enough to simply resist legislation without acknowledging the need for a renewed call for moderation. This moderation only comes when those with diverse viewpoints work together to ensure the success of all our students. This means reaffirming our commitment to understanding and addressing the unique needs of our student populations.

    We must also come to terms with emerging research that shows some practices designed to challenge oppression on campus may promote its proliferation and thoroughly analyze the impact of our actions on student success. To quote U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

    We need brave, diverse voices and productive disagreement, not legislation, to bolster higher education’s mission to pursue the truth for the sake of human flourishing.

    Chris Cooper is unit head and professor in the Engineering and Applied Science Co-op Program at the University of Cincinnati.

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  • Tennessee Sues to End HSI Requirements

    Tennessee Sues to End HSI Requirements

    The state of Tennessee filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education on Wednesday seeking to nix traditional requirements for Hispanic-serving institutions’ federal designation and grant funding. The state is joined by Students for Fair Admissions, the advocacy group whose lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action in college admissions.

    The plaintiffs argue it’s unconstitutional and discriminatory for the Education Department to designate grants for Hispanic-serving institutions, defined as colleges and universities where at least a quarter of students are Hispanic. Today, about 600 colleges and universities meet the criteria for the federal designation, established by Congress in the 1990s.

    The lawsuit laments that Tennessee higher ed institutions serve Hispanic and low-income students but don’t receive grants intended for HSIs because they don’t meet the enrollment threshold. As a result, the plaintiffs argue, Tennessee institutions find themselves in an “unconstitutional dilemma”—they want to enroll more Hispanic students to earn HSI status, but using race as a factor in admissions would be illegal.

    “Funds should help needy students regardless of their immutable traits, and the denial of those funds harms students of all races,” the lawsuit reads.

    The plaintiffs seek “a declaratory judgment that the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements are unconstitutional” and “a permanent injunction prohibiting the [Education] Secretary from enforcing or applying the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements when making decisions whether to award or maintain grants to Tennessee’s institutions of higher education.”

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