Tag: Education

Advantages of student information systems in Higher Education
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In this changing landscape, with constant shifts in student demographics, and enrollment behaviors due to globalization, can a rigid administrative process or a legacy student information system foster student success? As higher education decision-makers, provosts, and chief information officers, you know much better. With this as a starting point, the blog intends to discuss the several advantages of student information systems and how an expert solution provider adds to the effectiveness of an overall institution.

The Advantages of Student Information System

A Student Information System (SIS) offers numerous advantages for higher education institutions. An SIS manage and store student-related data throughout their academic journey.

Here are some key advantages of implementing a Student Information System in higher education:

1. A focused student performance

The Student Information System offers a comprehensive and integrated platform with features that today’s students must look for.

With smooth, efficient, and friendly student self-service options, the system rules out the challenges encountered by students while navigating complex administrative processes. Rather, the students have the advantage of focusing on their academics without running around for frustrating services related to their records, accounts, personal information, access to academic policies, registration and degree planning, dates and deadlines, financial aid and scholarships, grades, transcripts, etc.

This online service mode lets students efficiently manage their tasks proactively, positively impacts their institution, and allows them to claim it publicly.

2. Newer insights into student data

To institutions that struggle to collate meaningful and actionable data to make smart decisions, the SIS can be a boon.

Student Information System gives the decision-makers the advantage of key reporting features so institutions gain deeper insights into students’ data related to academics, attendance, assessments, credits, finances, library, grade book, etc. With instant data in hand, the institutional heads can compare, identify trends, report, and work towards continuous improvement towards improvement.

3. A time saver with simplified and streamlined tasks

With role-based dashboard configuration, the entire team of faculty, student, and staff know their priorities that need to be performed, along with the tasks already done and accomplished.

The dashboard helps in reminding which activities an individual needs to perform and which of them are already done. For any action undone, the system keeps sending automated reminders and alerts so the stakeholders stay on track.

With every bit of data highlighted in a single view, users can channel their time and effort for better productivity and growth with minimum effort.

4. A connecting point between faculty, students, and management

Another advantage of the Student Information System lies in its capacity to easily connect Administrators, Teachers, and Parents under a single platform. Often integrated with the parent’s portal, the system sends push notifications and updates regularly about students’ marks, grades, attendance, and overall performance.

On the other hand, the staff, faculty, and parents can interact at different levels using the user-friendly web interface that discusses and improves student performance. Every role in the campus can have roles defined to them, which allows them to access the information they need, securely.

5. Offers unlimited flexibility

Most of the student information systems come with a flexible architecture with room for the greatest level of personalization. This gives institutions a boost to use tools that facilitate system alignment with the way they do things at their institution.

This way whenever the institution faces change, the SISs can change with it through configuration capabilities and a continuous delivery model. Curriculum planning, scheduling, academic policies, grading schemes, finance, billing, and more come with configuration options.

6. Helps institutions envision student success

Student Information System has tools to envision student success throughout the student journey. With successful LMS integration, it can have native engagement tools, enabling students to actively engage in the events that matter the most. Even for students who refrain from openly communicating inside a classroom, these tools instill the confidence to coordinate, raise a query, and get clarified.

Conclusion

Designed solely for higher education campuses, Creatrix Campus Student Information System offers comprehensive tools to make it easier for users to access the records they need to achieve their goals—from admission to alumni and beyond.

We have powerful tools to connect multiple departments on multiple campuses and automate academic processes so your institution can help students succeed. With a lower cost of ownership, easy customization and implementation, straightforward pricing, and customer support options for your institution’s evolving needs, Creatrix SIS helps you manage your campus community easily. Some of our unique features are:
- Intuitive user experience throughout the student lifecycle
- Student data management with reports and dashboards
- Self-service and mobile application capabilities
- Seamless academic planning with student advising
- Agility to change requirements as per institutional needs
To unite your whole campus under an efficient, configurable, easy-to-use application that is delivered in the cloud, contact our team or request a demo.
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February 18, 2025
Three questions for Joe Diamond, CEO of AllCampus
The reason that I wanted to do this Q&A with Joe Diamond, CEO of AllCampus, is that I don’t know too much about AllCampus. I’m frequently asked to speak about the status of the online program management industry, and my lack of knowledge about AllCampus is a blind spot.

Q: Where does AllCampus fit in the OPM ecosystem? How many universities and online programs do you partner with? How is AllCampus differentiated from 2U, Noodle and other companies in this space?

A: “OPM” has come to mean something negative to many because of the high revenue share and highly public shortcomings of the most prominent players in the space. We never felt the term fit us because we are so different from what people associate with OPM—high revenue shares, a one-size-fits-all model and the high up-front costs associated with fee-for-service (FFS) agencies. Yet, it’s fair to say we help schools with a similar range of services and sometimes compete for deals, but we are just so different, which I’ll explain below.

We’re a mission-driven company that has quietly been making an impact for our university partners for 14 years. Our mission is to make education more affordable and accessible for all. We’ve been growing slowly and steadily all along. We didn’t raise hundreds of millions of capital and then go and spend it all on Google ads. We invested in our technology, our people, and prioritized servicing our clients really well. We’ve been highly disciplined and careful with our expansion.

AllCampus offers a flexible and partnership-driven approach rather than a one-size-fits-all model. We help the partner select the best fit for them—from revenue share, fee-for-service and hybrid/co-investment options—and tailor the services to each institution’s unique needs. Our approach prioritizes affordability and accessibility for students and collaboration with our university partners to meet their mission and goals. Beyond supporting online programs, we also help drive campus enrollment through a wide range of media expertise, brand building, consultation and technology solutions that make us more efficient than if the university were to do this on its own. We know that if we aren’t more efficient than a school can be, we are out of business. So, our mission is also at the heart of our business case for our partners.

We have built top-tier programs with schools like UCLA, Northeastern University, George Washington University, the University of Florida and dozens more. Our regional offerings include Indiana Wesleyan University; Middle Tennessee State University; University of Missouri, St. Louis; West Texas A&M and many others. In all, we have about 50 partners, with 25 universities and 140 programs in the bundle of services people think of as OPM.

We service another 25 universities in our Workplace Network, which has over 1,200 programs. On this network, the aim is for low-cost or even no-cost degrees that their employer pays for. The platform gives employees access to programs that help them develop or expand their skill sets, reach career goals, and, for many, return to school to finish their degree. Employees and their employers gain access to a tool that simplifies the complex process of selecting the right program and navigating tuition reimbursement through hands-on guidance. Fourteen million people have student debt and no degree, so we’re certain our Workplace offering can help address that personal crisis for millions and help reduce the education divide in our country.

In short, we’re content with who and where we are, and we don’t mind that we remained under the radar and even an insider like you doesn’t know much about us. It’s probably because we’re just different and less provocative than others that are classified as OPMs. I’m most proud that we have an impeccable reputation for integrity.

Q: How much of the partnerships with universities for online programs are based on revenue share versus fee for service? One of the criticisms of the OPM industry is that the companies take a high percentage of tuition and require long contract lock-ins. How is AllCampus different?

A: Just like OPMs, not all revenue-share agreements are created equal. AllCampus has the lowest tuition-sharing fees in the industry—typically between 25 and 35 percent compared to our competitors at 40 to 50 percent—which enables us to offer universities a cost-effective way to deliver online education.

We are neutral to our partners’ preference between revenue share, FFS, co-investment, hybrid, etc. In fact, we share very detailed pro formas with our partners to transparently understand the trade-offs. Among those trade-offs are contract length and required up-front investment. Those are all levers that the university controls in setting up the agreement with us so that we arrive at a partnership that fits their needs and has their buy-in. As to which model is most popular, most universities opt for revenue share, and to be candid, it would be better for us if it were more balanced, because it would make managing cash easier.

I believe the reason universities usually opt for revenue share is that fee-for-service models place the up-front financial burden on the university. FFS also carries the criticism that it’s a risk-free structure for the vendor (the OPM)—they get their money no matter what and have historically behaved accordingly. We’ve won many frustrated former FFS clients whose prior agencies overpromised and underdelivered. Revenue share has the benefit of pure alignment with student and program success. I will say that our hybrid and co-investment models have been gaining traction, as they seem to strike the right balance for some new partners.

Counter to the narrative for OPMs, at AllCampus, we always advocate for affordable and accessible education for all students. We routinely provide data to help schools evaluate their pricing against the market, ensuring their programs remain accessible, affordable and attractive to students. We often recommend that our partner institutions lower the cost of tuition and have refused to sign partnerships with universities unless they agree to drop the price of their programs. In the end, it’s the ultimate win-win because the university gains in overall revenue, and more students get access to these fantastic programs at a more affordable price.

Q: Where do you see the online degree market going in the next five years? What do you tell university leaders how they need to position their institutions to be competitive?

A: I anticipate the online degree market growing significantly in the next five years. Pre-pandemic projections estimated the market would reach $74 billion by 2025, doubling from $36 billion in 2019. The pandemic accelerated this trajectory and will cause the market to grow well beyond this estimate.

University leaders need to consider a variety of strategies to remain competitive:
- Embracing flexibility and accessibility: With a plateau of traditional undergraduate students, universities should consider attracting adult learners through flexible, affordable and career-focused online programs. Students are demanding more offerings that accommodate a variety of schedules and learning styles. Offering a blend of synchronous and asynchronous courses can help cater to the needs of diverse learners.
- Expanding nondegree and accelerated degree programs: Accelerated degree programs are on the rise due to their lower cost, increased flexibility and changing employer demands. There is also a growing demand for short-term, more skill-specific courses to help students in fields like AI and cybersecurity. Developing these types of programs can help universities attract professionals seeking targeted skill development.
- Aligning education offerings with workplace needs: By carefully analyzing employee market trends and skill gaps, universities can design programs that directly address employer skill demands. Partnering with employers—either independently or through organizations like ours—ensures their new and existing programs attract a broader student base and their outcomes are relevant for the evolving workplace.
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February 18, 2025
39% of colleges rely on donors to address food insecurity
Anabel’s Grocery at Cornell University addresses basic needs insecurity for students.

Jason Koski, Cornell University
College students are more likely to experience food insecurity, compared to the general population, but funding and support for programs that address basic needs in higher education remains limited.

A 2024 survey by Swipe Out Hunger, a nonprofit group that addresses hunger among college students, found while a majority of colleges have a pantry for student supports, most are supported by philanthropy and not the institution.

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The campus leader survey, released last month, included responses from 347 of Swipe’s 850 partner campuses, representing over 766,600 students who engaged with basic needs resources, whether through the food pantry, SNAP enrollment program or a basic needs hub.

The most popular campus support program was a food pantry, with almost all respondents (95 percent) indicating their college offers one for students. In 2024, campus pantries distributed over eight million meals and 687,000 additional items, such as toiletries, diapers or appliance lending.

Campus leaders shared their primary win in the past year was expanding their program (56 percent) and supporting students (20 percent), but only 1 percent of respondents said they had administrative support, and 8 percent indicated they earned additional funding to aid expansion.

In a similar vein, when asked what their primary challenges were, the greatest share identified funding (47 percent), followed by staffing (16 percent), space (11 percent) and support (10 percent).

Two in five campuses identified donations as their primary funding source, which included staff payroll deductions and crowdsourcing. Only 5 percent of campus leaders said they had a dedicated budget from campus as their primary source of funding for programming.

“This severe lack of sustainable funding for antihunger programs is preventing students from accessing the food they need to survive, which in turn affects their ability to stay enrolled,” says Jaime Hansen, executive director of Swipe Out Hunger. “With rising food costs and the lack of government support, campus food pantries and similar resources are becoming the only lifeline for students. If these programs continue to be overburdened and underfunded, we can expect to see less students being able to afford to stay in college.”

A corresponding student experience survey found 40 percent of program users engaged with on-campus services weekly, and an additional 8 percent used resources every day.

The top barriers to accessing nutritious food, students reported, were time constraints due to multiple responsibilities; the cost of meal plans, including on-campus food costs; anxiety about resource scarcity (taking away from peers who need it more); elevated costs of diet-specific foods; and living far away from affordable foods.

Tackling basic needs insecurity: Some of the ways other organizations and institutions are addressing college student hunger include these efforts:
- Believe in Students created an online curriculum to empower faculty to engage in basic needs support, providing relevant data and insights as well as how-to advice and encouragement.
- Community colleges utilize FAFSA data to notify learners of their eligibility for SNAP or other state-level food assistance programs.
- A group of students at Anne Arundel Community College contributed to a faculty-led cookbook featuring students’ nostalgic recipes adapted to utilize campus pantry ingredients.
- New Jersey built a centralized website to help college students identify basic needs resources across the state.
- Virginia Commonwealth University built miniature food pantries, modeled off little lending libraries, to increase access to shelf-safe food items across campus.
How is your campus addressing food insecurity among students? Tell us more.
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February 18, 2025
Haskell Indian Nations U lays off probationary workers

Haskell Indian Nations University, a small tribal college in Lawrence, Kan., laid off nearly 30 percent of its faculty and staff to comply with the Trump administration’s directive to shrink the size of the federal workforce.

An order came through the Office of Personnel Management Feb. 13 to fire all probationary employees who had not yet gained civil service protection.

Haskell is one of two tribal colleges funded by the Department of the Interior. As of fall 2022, the institution had 727 full-time students and employed 146 faculty and staff. Local news reports that about 40 probationary employees have been laid off.

The Haskell Board of Regents said in a statement that it was “closely monitoring the recent directive from the Office of Personnel Management, which has resulted in the termination of certain probationary federal employees across multiple agencies. At this time, the Board has not received confirmation that Haskell Indian Nations University is exempt from these layoffs.”

A member of Haskell’s Board of Regents said the layoffs are in “basically every department on campus”—faculty, student services, athletics, IT and more, according to The Lawrence Times.

The institution has faced recent turmoil, running through eight presidents in six years and being subject to a congressional investigation over failing to address student concerns about sexual assault.

In December, Kansas Republican senator Jerry Moran and Republican representative Tracey Mann put forward legislation to take the college out of the hands of federal oversight and transfer it to a Haskell Board of Trustees appointed by the tribal community.

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February 17, 2025
An opportunity to reframe the DEI debate (opinion)

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleague letter on Friday that instructs college leaders to eliminate any campus activities that directly or indirectly treat students differentially on the basis of race. Others will rightly push back on the logic of the department’s stated justifications, the absurdity of its timing and the accuracy of its examples, but I want to suggest that campus leaders can also take this as an opportunity to enact real change on behalf of all students.

This is a moment for campus leaders to reframe the terms of the current debate over the legitimacy of special diversity, equity and inclusion programs by doing the long-needed work of truly decentering whiteness as the normative identity and experience within so many campus curricula and co-curricular programs.

If we are to truly serve our students regardless of race, and if—as the department’s letter states—we have to put an end to even the subtle ways racial preferences and privileges are attached to seemingly race-blind policies, then watch out. Most campuses have a lot of work to do, and much of it is not going to be to the liking of those who believe that it is DEI programs that make an otherwise level playing field an unfair one.

What the Dear Colleague letter fails to mention is that the proliferation of DEI activities on campuses came about as a more or less conservative compromise position as the population grew more diverse and as students demanded greater access. In treating Black and other minoritized students as “special,” such programs meet the needs of these students in supplementary ways rather than by ensuring that the core curriculum and student life experience are equally useful, meaningful and available to all. If the department insists that we put an end to all DEI programming, then it will also have to support efforts to ensure that whiteness is not smuggled in as the norm or standard.

Early in my teaching career, I saw the ways that DEI programs could be used to reinforce white centrality rather than challenge it. Student demands for a more representative and accurate curriculum were met with resistance by senior faculty uninterested in expanding their own spheres of knowledge. Special courses in “women’s history” or “Black studies” became the compromise position. Rather than revising the canon to reflect the needs of a curious student body, rather than incorporating new scholarship into the university’s core, rather than interrogating the biases and histories of the curriculum, new courses and departments were created while the original ones were left intact. This détente (you teach yours and I teach mine) became the model.

Many of the special programs that the Dear Colleague letter seems to have in mind follow this pattern. They keep in place a curriculum and campus culture firmly centered around the interests and perspectives of white students while offering alternatives on the side. If compromise via DEI activities is no longer an option, then a better solution will have to be found. The diversity of the student body is a fact that will still require a reckoning. Decades of scholarship reveal the many ways whiteness is encoded in supposedly neutral policies and programs, and this will not be magically erased. For many colleges, achieving a campus where white students are not unintentionally given extra opportunities based on their race will require radical change.

My guess is that the department knows this on some level. Otherwise, why is race rather than sex or religion targeted? A sex-neutral campus would have to do away with single-sex housing and sex-segregated sororities and fraternities. A religiously neutral campus could no longer privilege Christian holidays or values.

We should absolutely fight against the many overt inaccuracies of the Dear Colleague letter. And we should fight against both overt and covert expressions of racism and white supremacy. But we need not fight on behalf of compromise solutions to the very real problems that inspired our current DEI campus environment. Instead, we can use this unexpected opportunity to pick up where we left off and ensure that every program, every aspect of the curriculum, every student service is designed with the needs of our very diverse student body in mind. We can stop treating the experiences and needs of white students as the default or the neutral.

What would our institutions look like if normative whiteness were no longer at the center and the need for many of the special DEI alternatives were made moot? Let’s find out.

Marjorie Hass is president of the Council of Independent Colleges.

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February 17, 2025
Social media can benefit college students with disabilities
College students often have a complicated relationship with social media, with a large number of learners active on multiple social media platforms but also aware of the negative mental health consequences social media can have.

Teens receive hundreds of notifications on their phones every day, with over half of one study’s participants receiving more than 237 notifications per day. Nearly one in five teens say they’re on YouTube or TikTok almost constantly, according to a 2023 survey from Pew Research.

A May 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed found one-third of respondents indicated social media was one of the biggest drivers of what many call the college mental health crisis.

A recent study authored by a group of researchers from Michigan State University and published in the Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education evaluates how students with disabilities interact on social media and build social capital.

Researchers found disabled students—including those with autism, anxiety, attention-deficit and/or hyperactivity disorder—were more likely to seek out new relationships and engage in active social media posting, which can advance connectedness and relationships among learners.

The background: While social media can offer users social supports, such as promoting a sense of belonging during times of transition or crisis, it also poses risks for young people, including cyberbullying and online harassment, according to the study.

Previous studies show youth with disabilities experience higher rates of cyberbullying compared to their peers, but students with disabilities are also more likely to report they receive social support through social media, which could be tied to the social isolation they can experience in person.

Existing literature often focuses on the negative effects of social media for young adults with disabilities, but it is not known if there are differences between the experiences of those with and without disabilities and their social media habits.

“Understanding different learners’ experiences with social media could help college faculty, special education professionals, and counselors not only consider using social media to create more welcoming and supportive learning environments but also how they might play a role in building individual learner’s capacity for positive digital participation,” researchers wrote.

Methodology: Researchers conducted a survey of college undergraduates in the U.S. with and without disabilities in fall 2021, collecting data on social media use, social capital and psychological well-being. In total, 147 students responded to the survey.

From this sample, researchers selected five individuals with and five individuals without disabilities to participate in semistructured interviews. Participants were matched based on social media habits and demographic factors, such as gender.

Results: Through postsurvey interviews with 10 students, researchers learned that while both groups of students engage on social media for personal entertainment and to stay connected with people in their social circles, students with disabilities were more likely to say they used social media to initiate and grow relationships.

All five participants without disabilities used Snapchat to interact with friends or keep in touch with loved ones in an informal manner, and all participants used Instagram to stay up-to-date with their peers.

Among the five participants with disabilities, students reported using more social media platforms individually, and these learners were more likely to use TikTok (which in fall 2021 first hit one billion monthly active users compared to Instagram’s then-two billion users) compared to their peers. Students reported using TikTok for watching videos, sharing humor with their friends or participating in larger community building, including professional learning networks or cosplaying.

Students without disabilities were more likely to say social media made no difference on their relationships or that it positively impacted their relationships by allowing them to stay in touch over geographical distances or other barriers.

Similarly, all students with disabilities said social media assisted with their relationships, allowing them to connect with new people, expand their community and help manage their disabilities by connecting with others.

Some respondents with disabilities said they felt more confident to engage with strangers in a safe way online and that social media was an avenue to find like-minded people they wouldn’t ordinarily interact with, allowing them to build new relationships. This was a unique trend to students with disabilities; those without were more likely to say they use social media to engage with people they already had relationships with.

Students with disabilities may have greater challenges with in-person socialization, which researchers theorize makes social media particularly important for these learners, who also said they’re more likely to post on social media versus passively scroll.

Interacting with others in the disability community and breaking stigma around disability was another theme in conversations with disabled students. These interactions could be with peers who share their disability or from medical professionals or support groups who provide new information.

One limitation to the research was social desirability bias, or respondents’ tendency to answer questions in a way that would please researchers, meaning students underreport undesirable behaviors. The sample included only female and nonbinary students, which creates further limitations to the data.

Put in practice: Researchers offered some suggestions for how educators can utilize this data to create a more inclusive learning environment, including:
- Integrating social media into the classroom. While some digital learning platforms have forums for community building, such as a discussion board, these platforms can be less accessible than traditional social media platforms.
- Facilitating personalized learning environments. Higher education leaders can consider ways to use social media to create formal and informal learning experiences in and around courses. These learning environments can also include methods for peer communication and connection, helping make learning more collaborative.
- Engaging on social media themselves. Self-disclosure by professors can help build relationships in the classroom and enhance learning, but instructors must weigh safety, privacy and other legal boundaries in their social media usage. This could be one way to model positive social media usage for students, including how to have productive interactions with others.
In the future, researchers see opportunities for analysis of design, implementation and evaluation of social media interventions for connection among students with disabilities, such as peer mentoring programs, online support groups or digital storytelling. There should also be consideration of the long-term effects of social media use on students’ mental health and well-being.

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February 17, 2025
Why are campuses quiet as democracy is in crisis? (opinion)

A close friend who works at a nearby college asked me why, in 2025, there haven’t been student protests of the kind that we saw during the Vietnam War and after the killing of George Floyd.

She questioned why campuses seem eerily quiescent as events in Washington, D.C., threaten values essential to the health of higher education, values like diversity, freedom of speech and a commitment to the greater good. We also wondered why most higher education leaders are choosing silence over speech.

Deans and presidents seem more invested in strategizing about how to respond to executive orders and developing contingency plans to cope with funding cuts than in exerting moral leadership and mounting public criticism of attacks on democratic norms and higher education.

My students have their own list s of preoccupations. Some are directly threatened and live in fear; some see nothing special about the present moment. “It is just more of the same,” one of them told me.

And many faculty feel especially vulnerable because of who they are or what they teach. They, too, are staying on the sidelines.

All of us may be tempted by what a student quoted by the Yale Daily News calls “a quiet acceptance and a quiet grief.” None of us may see a clear path forward; after all, the president won a plurality of the votes in November. How can we save democracy from and for the people themselves?

I do not mean to judge the goodwill or integrity of anyone in our colleges and universities. There, as elsewhere, people are trying their best to figure out how to live and work under suddenly changed circumstances.

No choice will be right for everyone, and we need empathy for those who decide to stay out of the fray. But if all of us stay on the sidelines, the collective silence of higher education at a time when democracy is in crisis will not be judged kindly when the history of our era is written.

Let’s start by considering the role of college and university presidents in times of national crisis. In the past, some have seen themselves as leaders not just of their institutions but, like the clergy and presidents of philanthropic foundations, of civil society.

Channeling Alexis de Tocqueville, Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld explains that “the voice of leaders in civil society help[s] certify truth,” creating “priceless ‘social capital’ or community trust.” He asks, “If college presidents get a pass, then why shouldn’t all institutional leaders in democratic society shirk their duties?”

In the 1960s and ’70s, some prominent college presidents refused to take a pass. The University of Notre Dame’s Theodore Hesburgh became a leading voice in the Black civil rights struggle. Amherst College president John William Ward not only spoke out publicly against the Vietnam War, he even undertook an act of civil disobedience to protest it.

A half century earlier, another Amherst president, Alexander Meiklejohn, embraced the opportunity afforded by his position to speak to a nation trying to recover from World War I and figure out how to deal with mass immigration and the arrival of new ethnic groups.

At a time of national turmoil, he asked Americans some hard questions: “Are we determined to exalt our culture, to make it sovereign over others, to keep them down, to have them in control? Or will we let our culture take its chance on equal terms … Which shall it be—an Anglo-Saxon aristocracy of culture or a Democracy?”

Those questions have special resonance in the present moment.

But, especially after Oct. 7, college presidents have embraced institutional neutrality on controversial social and political issues. That makes sense.

Yet institutional neutrality does not mean they need to be silent “on the issues of the day when they are relevant to the core mission of our institutions,” to quote Wesleyan University president Michael S. Roth. And, as Sonnenfeld notes, even the University of Chicago’s justly famous 1967 Kalven report, which first urged institutional neutrality, “actually encouraged institutional voice to address situations which ‘threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.’”

Do attacks on diversity, on international students and faculty, and on the rule of law and democracy itself “threaten the very mission of the university”? If they don’t, I do not know what would.

As Wesleyan’s Roth reminds his colleagues, “College presidents are not just neutral bureaucrats or referees among competing protesters, faculty and donors.” Roth urges them to speak out.

But, so far, few others have done so, preferring to keep a low profile.

The silence of college leaders is matched by the absence of student protests on most of their campuses. Recall that in 2016, when President Trump was first elected, “On many campuses, protests exploded late into election night and lasted several days.”

Nothing like that is occurring now, even as the Trump administration is carrying out mass deportations, threatening people who protest on college campuses, attacking DEI, calling for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, ending life-saving foreign aid programs and trampling the norms of constitutional democracy.

Mass protests on campuses can be traced back to 1936, when, as Patricia Smith explains, “college students from coast to coast refused to attend classes to express their opposition to the rise of fascism in Europe and to advocate against the U.S. involvement in foreign wars.”

They were followed by the University of California at Berkeley’s free speech movement in the 1960s and protests against the Vietnam War, including those that occurred after fatal shootings of student protesters at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard. There were anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s, and, more recently, students across the country organized protests against police brutality and racism after George Floyd’s death and against Israel’s military actions in Gaza in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

Though there have been small protests on a few college campuses, nothing like what occurred in response to those events has transpired in 2025.

Students may have learned a bitter lesson from the crackdowns on protesters engaged in pro-Palestinian activism. And many of them are deeply disillusioned with our democratic institutions. They care more about social justice than preserving democracy and the rule of law.

Students may not be following events in the nation’s capital or grasping the significance of those events and what they mean for them and their futures.

It is the job of those of us who teach at colleges and universities to help them see what is happening. This is no time for business as usual. Our students need to understand why democracy matters and how their lives and the lives of their families will be changed if American democracy dies.

Ultimately, we should remember that the costs of silence may be as great as the costs of speaking out.

M. Gessen gets it right when they say, “A couple of weeks into Trump’s second term, it can feel as if we are already living in an irreversibly changed country.” Perhaps we are, but Gessen warns that there is worse to come: “Once an autocracy gains power, it will come for many of the people who quite rationally tried to safeguard themselves.”

Gessen asks us to remember that “The autocracies of the 20th century relied on mass terror. Those of the 21st often don’t need to; their subjects comply willingly.”

At present, college and university presidents, students and faculty must care about more than protecting ourselves and our institutions. We must speak out and bear witness to what Gessen describes and warn our fellow citizens against compliance.

This will not be easy at a time when higher education has lost some luster in the public’s eyes. But we have no choice. We have to try.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.

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February 17, 2025
UTSA launches first-year seminar for veteran students

The transition to college is a challenge for many students as they navigate the bureaucracy of higher education, build community and discern their goals and plans after graduation.

For student veterans, an added challenge can be having too many choices.

“The beauty of the military is they tell you what your path is in life and where you’re going to be assigned, what your job is gonna be,” says Brian Rendell, senior director of academic credentialing, leadership development and marketable skills at University College, part of the University of Texas at San Antonio. “Once you leave that, it’s an open book.”

A new course offering at UTSA helps individuals with military service experience adjust to their life at the university and connect with peers who have similar backgrounds. The course, launched this calendar year, fulfills a general education requirement and provides personalized assistance with obtaining credit for prior learning.

What’s the need: UTSA, located in San Antonio, known as “Military City USA,” Rendell jokes, serves a large number of military-affiliated learners, including offering a robust ROTC program and enrolling dozens of student veterans.

Veterans, compared to their peers, are often older and have complex life experiences.

Student veterans at UTSA shared with campus leaders that they didn’t always feel connected with their peers who came straight out of high school, which pushed administrators to consider other ways to create community for military-affiliated learners.

The course is also designed to help consider their military training from an asset-based perspective.

“What a lot of veterans don’t realize is the military teaches you so many skills,” Rendell says, including teamwork, discipline and hard work, which can assist in academic pursuits. While some careers have a direct application into postmilitary life, such as pilots, “there’s no tank drivers in the civilian world,” so helping students see where their skills and talents could assist them in the future requires some individual attention.

How it works: The course, part of the Academic Instruction and Strategies (AIS) program, provides support and community for veterans for their academic and personal achievement.

UTSA enrolls a large population of military-affiliated students, including ROTC cadets and veterans.

AIS is required for all incoming students with fewer than 30 credits, and the initial Air Force pilot cohort fell within this category, though the course may be open to additional learners in the future, Rendell says.

All AIS courses address academic skills and career planning, but unique to student veterans is one-on-one support from staff to evaluate their past experiences and military training to see where to award credit for prior learning.

The in-person course is exclusively being taught by faculty and staff who are former service members themselves. Rendell, a retired Air Force colonel, is teaching the pilot cohort and has found his shared experiences help break down barriers.

“I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how honest these students have been about the struggles they’ve had in the military or just in life,” Rendell says.

Rendell invited representatives from the Veterans Association and the Student Veteran Association to speak in class, helping build connections across the institution and beyond.

Looking ahead: The initial cohort of AIS student veterans includes five learners, but Rendell anticipates course enrollment to grow quickly due to the university’s large number of military-affiliated students.

Next fall, he anticipates two to three sections of a veterans-only AIS with 20 to 30 learners per class.

Campus leaders will track qualitative feedback from veterans to gauge the impact of the program, as well as CPL awarded to veterans, as measures of success.

UTSA currently has a Center for Military Affiliated Students, which helps with onboarding and financial aid, and is launching a living-learning community on campus for ROTC participants to further connect students physically.

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February 17, 2025
A West Virginia HBCU reviews programs after anti-DEI order

West Virginia State University has been tasked with reviewing its programs and practices after the state’s governor issued an executive order against diversity, equity and inclusion. While other public institutions in the state have to do the same, West Virginia State University is in a somewhat unique position: It’s a public, historically Black institution with a predominantly white student body. The university serves all, but diversity and inclusion are part of its founding mission.

Higher ed experts say that while few public HBCUs are openly discussing the issue, West Virginia State isn’t the only such institution that’s undergoing this kind of review process as DEI bans proliferate. Some argue that subjecting HBCUs to these reviews is counterintuitive in light of their historic mission, raising questions about how such institutions will fare in the current state and federal policy landscape.

West Virginia State launched its review after Governor Patrick Morrisey last month banned state institutions from using “state funds, property, or resources” to “grant or support DEI staff positions, procedures or programs.” He also prohibited mandating DEI statements or any training or programming that “promotes or encourages the granting of preferences based on one person’s particular race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an advocacy organization for free speech rights, castigated the executive order as overly broad and warned it could limit what’s taught in West Virginia classrooms.

The executive order also required “all cabinet secretaries and department heads under the authority of the Governor” to complete a report within 30 days, identifying any positions, procedures or programs based in “theories of DEI.”

In response, West Virginia State University, along with other public universities in the state, submitted a letter outlining diversity-related positions, programs and activities, said Ericke Cage, the university’s president.

“If there are concerns raised by the governor’s office … then we need to work to negotiate possible resolutions,” Cage said, though he expects it won’t come to that.

In the letter, the university’s general counsel, Alice R. Faucett, argued that a comprehensive review found no evidence the university engages in or supports “preferential treatment” based on DEI principles.

At the same time, the response readily acknowledged the university’s history and mission as an HBCU.

“All procedural practices and programs at WVSU are designed to foster an inclusive and equitable environment,” Faucett wrote. They also “promote fairness and equal access while ensuring no group receives preferential treatment. The University remains dedicated to serving all members of the community, particularly those who have been historically marginalized, as part of its longstanding mission.”

The letter highlighted some practices and policies that reflect the university’s “commitment to diversity, inclusion and compliance with state directives.” They included annual Title IX trainings, services for sexual assault survivors, campus presentations on human rights law and email messages recognizing Black History Month, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Women’s History Month and other observances.

Faucett’s response also noted that the university receives some federal grants and privately funded scholarships with “DEI components,” without offering further detail.

Felecia Commodore, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said other public universities have taken a similar approach to DEI bans, arguing to state lawmakers that “there’s nothing to reorganize, because we’re not doing what you’re saying.”

‘Baked Into Who We Are’

Though such DEI reviews might seem fraught for an HBCU, Cage believes the university is likely to come out unscathed—and it may even fare better under the governor’s scrutiny than its non-HBCU counterparts. He noted that West Virginia State doesn’t have a DEI office or specific DEI personnel, a detail also highlighted in the university’s response document.

“When it comes to diversity and inclusiveness, that’s really baked into who we are as an institution as part of our DNA,” Cage said. “At our very core, we are all about being a highly inclusive institution where any student, regardless of their background, can come and get a good-quality education.”

He also emphasized that WVSU’s student population is majority white. University data from fall 2024 shows white students made up about 72 percent of the roughly 3,200 enrollees, while Black students composed about 10 percent, making it hard to argue the HBCU favors one racial group over another. Nationwide, non-Black students made up 24 percent of enrollment at HBCUs in 2020, compared to 15 percent in 1976, a trend that’s sparked discussion within some of these institutions about how to preserve HBCUs’ legacy while attracting and serving an increasingly broad range of students.

Commodore pointed out that, in fact, “HBCUs were some of the only institutions that never had race-based admissions.” HBCUs were founded after the abolition of slavery to educate Black Americans at a time when such students weren’t welcome at other higher education institutions.

For a while, non-Black students “chose not to go to them, but [HBCUs] have been inclusive since their inception,” she said. “If the aim of these reviews of DEI is to ensure that institutions are not discriminating because of race or gender or sex, to ensure that people are not being prioritized or excluded … actually, HBCUs were the model for that.”

Given that history, Cage theorized HBCUs may not be heavily affected by DEI bans for the same reasons he’s hopeful for his own institution: Diversity and inclusion are intrinsic to how these institutions operate, not housed in a particular office or center. At the same time, they serve all students. Non-HBCUs, on the other hand, have made changes over the years, building up supports and services for students of color, which are now at risk.

For “predominantly white institutions [that] have not traditionally or historically had that focus on inclusivity, I think it will be a challenge,” Cage said. “It is important for institutions to be welcoming, to provide support systems for diverse students,” and DEI programs were intended to make sure students from underrepresented backgrounds “felt that they were part of the university community.”

Some non-HBCUs in the state are scrambling to make changes to comply with the executive order. The state flagship, West Virginia University, just a few hours away from WVSU, reported in late January that it would shut down its Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in response to the executive order, a move the governor celebrated as a “win.”

“This is just the beginning of our effort to root out DEI,” Morrisey said in a video announcement about the division’s demise. “That’s going to happen more and more in the weeks and months ahead.”

Concerns Remain

Shaun Harper, University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California and an opinion contributor to Inside Higher Ed, said it’s become “incredibly pervasive” for public HBCUs to have to conduct reviews of their DEI work as state-level DEI bans spread—even if many HBCU leaders aren’t discussing the issue publicly.

And such reviews are extra burdensome for HBCUs, he argued.

“If a predominantly white institution gets that same request, it’s likely a lot easier for them to list their culture centers, their Office of Multicultural Affairs, perhaps the office of the chief diversity officer,” said Harper, who also serves as USC’s Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership. For HBCUs, it’s “impossible, in fact, to catalog everything that would otherwise qualify in any other context as DEI” because most have majority-Black student populations and gear their programming and services toward their student bodies.

“It’s really onerous for presidents and their cabinet members and others on their campuses to even attempt to complete this exercise,” Harper added. “It requires enormous sums of their time.”

Harper doesn’t believe state lawmakers are gunning for HBCUs with anti-DEI bans; it’s more likely they thought very little about how hard it would be for them to list their diversity efforts, he said. Nonetheless, the bans make some public HBCU leaders fear for their state funding if they don’t comply, or if their DEI reviews fail to appease state lawmakers when many don’t have funding to spare.

Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, said part of the challenge with many DEI bans is their “vagueness” and the “chaos” that can create for higher ed institutions.

The wording of some laws and executive orders calls into question, what can an HBCU do “to acknowledge, teach, celebrate, promote, its roots?” she said. “Is celebrating a national holiday”—like Martin Luther King Jr. Day—“is that acceptable?”

Cage said he hasn’t ruled out that some of WVSU’s programs could be at risk—including federal grants with DEI components or privately funded scholarships for students from certain racial backgrounds or geographic areas—as a result either of the governor’s executive order or President Donald Trump’s efforts to root out federal funding for DEI.

“If those privately funded scholarships are put in jeopardy, or if federal grants are eliminated, there will be a direct impact on our ability to support our students or to advance research and innovation on our campus,” he said. “Our students come to us with a thirst for knowledge, but they also come to us with not a lot of financial resources. I can’t tell you where we would come up with the resources to fill that gap.”

While the university is reviewing its academic programs as well, Cage said any changes to curricula or academic programming would fly in the face of the university’s accreditation standards, which require a commitment to academic freedom.

“When it comes to academic freedom and integrity, those are things that we really need to hold the line on,” he said.

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February 17, 2025
Advice on cultivating an interdisciplinary mindset (opinion)
Graduate students often begin their programs immediately after earning an undergraduate degree. Your excitement over a field—whether it was kindled by reading great books, paying attention to current events, the charisma of inspiring faculty members or attraction to the ideas presented in a course—gets you started on a career track that leads through graduate school. It may therefore feel a little late to start thinking about what you would like to do with your life midway through your graduate program. But in fact, it is an excellent time.

People are attracted to research for many reasons, including a fascination with problem-solving, puzzles and ideas; a desire to change the future of some problem impacting the human condition; interest in creating and running a research team; or simply an attraction to Sciencia gratia scientiae—knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

As a Ph.D. student, your research may be focused on the discovery of new principles, or you may focus on the application of existing ideas to solve practical problems. For example, you might focus on influencing policy around polyfactorial problems like poverty or climate impact, designing and testing public health interventions, or defining and implementing best practices in a given field or occupation.

As you move through graduate school, the real-world problems you are most enthusiastic about may begin to feel out of reach. Research that focuses your thinking on application of existing knowledge to bigger-picture problems may leave you disappointed that you are not out on the frontiers, developing new knowledge. At the same time, your peers who have committed to studying the tiny details of an aspect of a problem may wish they could have more of a personal stake in solving its macroscopic elements, making human lives better and influencing policy makers’ decisions.

Free Your Mind

All this raises an intriguing question: How do you build yourself into a scholar who understands a problem at many levels, from atomic to planetary, from femtosecond to geological time scales? Is it even possible—or seemly—for a graduate student to try? Of course it is! You do not have to do every type of work that touches your interests, but it is rewarding to learn about how others are thinking about the things you think about.

To understand this, try this exercise with your own work. What do we not know about your problem of interest? It does not matter if you work on malaria, Jane Austen or the root causes of poverty. The question works no matter where your interests lie. If you start jotting down answers to that question, you should be able to fill a page with unknowns in less time than it takes you to read this week’s “Carpe Careers” in Inside Higher Ed.

Stow your list away for a while, for any duration from lunchtime to a month. Later, take it out and reconsider it. Make a page with three sections and separate the mysteries into:
- Things that you don’t know but believe you can reason your way to a useful hypothesis about;
- Things that you don’t know, but that are probably in your field’s literature;
- Things that you don’t know and suspect nobody knows.
All three of these are interesting lists. You should keep the first one close to you so that you can think about it often. Treat this list like a game. When you would otherwise be playing with your phone, pull out an interesting question and spend a few minutes thinking about how you might solve it, whether with an elegant experiment, brute force or clever analogy. It does not matter much whether you actually pursue any of the ideas that come from list one. Finding ways to solve problems is a core part of your graduate training. Building confidence that many different problems are within your scholarly grasp is invaluable.

Take your second list to the library or a quiet corner and poke at your field’s literature, and then at the broader literature to see what other people have done. Be expansive as you look. If you work on, say, how vibrio bacteria sense the environment, you already keep up with the cholera literature. But what can you learn about how climate impacts the vibrios by looking for cholera in literature? How many novels have cholera as a plot element? When were they written and who was their audience? What does that literature tell you about who was affected by the disease, and where, and when, and why? What does history tell you about the times the books were written and the times that they portray? What was plumbing like in those times and places, or public sanitation? Do you have enough coffee to think deeper about your interests? Do you have enough time? It is well worth the effort, and helps you get to the fun part: list three.

Enter the Matrix

You do not have to be an expert in everything connected to your work. You can gain immeasurably more by becoming part of the vast interconnected thinking that surrounds us all. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,” says the poorly sourced refrigerator magnet quote. To develop traveling companions, develop connections with people who, like you, have interests connected to what you study.

Promoting interdisciplinary research is important to those who take on complex problems ranging from climate change to human psychology. The logistics of stimulating interdisciplinary research are tough because different fields use different languages to describe problems that they may have in common. Those who think about connected ideas are often not only in different disciplines but in different places, whether that means in different colleges, schools and centers within a university or in different types of institutions beyond academe. Try to count the fields that are interested in poverty, from anthropology to architecture. Think of where people practice those fields: in universities, governments, civil society, international organizations, religious groups and more.

As a graduate student, you may not have time to find all those whose insights might be valuable to you. But interdisciplinarity is increasingly important to academic institutions. Yours likely has a number of interdisciplinary centers. Find a list of them and take an afternoon to look them up. If there are several centers near you, it is likely that at least one crosses into your area of interest. Sign up for their Listserv and go to their seminars. Put the limits of your field and your position aside. You are not just a grad student or just a relatively new scholar in your discipline. You are a big thinker interested in big problems. Go forward as an equal and make some new connections. It might change your scholarly life.

Victoria McGovern is the chief strategy officer of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a nonprofit funder with a mission to nurture a diverse group of leaders in biomedical sciences to improve human health through education and research. Victoria is a member of the Graduate Career Consortium, an organization providing an international voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders.
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February 17, 2025