Tag: Education

Resignations, Disagreements With Dean Roil UNC Civics School

Multiple faculty members connected with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s controversial school that had been billed as promoting civil discourse have resigned from leadership roles, citing strong disagreements with the dean who appointed them.

One such professor went so far as to call the School of Civic Life and Leadership an “unmitigated disaster.” The recent group of resignations adds to past departures by professors who said the school’s earlier focus had shifted and narrowed under Jed Atkins, its first permanent dean. Much of the current controversy centers on Atkins’s handling of searches for new faculty.

Atkins, who ran Duke University’s Civil Discourse Project and chaired its classical studies department before moving to UNC a year ago, defended the hiring procedures in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. He didn’t provide an interview.

The school’s birth was mired in controversy. It’s an example of the civil discourse centers—which critics have called conservative centers—that higher education leaders and Republican state lawmakers have been establishing at public universities. For more than two years, debate over the UNC school has been tinged by accusations that its supporters are motivated by conservative politics and its opponents by leftism.

But the recent resignation letters from the school’s former supporters suggest disagreements that resist characterization as a simple left-right divide. The criticism of the faculty search procedures involves allegations that faculty input, including from the school’s search committee and advisory board members, was disregarded.

The university’s media relations arm said that Chapel Hill policy requires four full professors to vote in faculty hirings. The advisory board contained such professors, who predated the school’s creation. But the Chapel Hill spokespeople said that in “all faculty appointment matters, the votes of faculty are advisory to the dean,” whose recommendation eventually goes to the universitywide appointments, promotion and tenure committee that advises the provost. The provost has hiring power, though the Chapel Hill Board of Trustees must approve awarding tenure.

Inger S. B. Brodey, an English and comparative literature professor whom Atkins chose as one of two associate deans, kicked off the recent round of resignations. She wrote to Atkins on Feb. 28 that she still believes strongly in the school’s “original mission, which, as I understand it, includes an emphasis on civil discourse across difference, preparation for citizenship and fruitful lives through studying global great books, promoting scientific literacy and assembling a diverse faculty from many disciplines.”

However, Brodey wrote, the school “has lost sight of its mission in all these areas and is unlikely to make the lasting positive impact that I and the other inaugural faculty had hoped for. For this and other reasons, I hereby resign as associate dean.”

Inside Higher Ed obtained the email and other documents mentioned in this story from sources who were either anonymous or whose identities are known but who requested anonymity.

In January, before that resignation email, Brodey sent Atkins a much longer message on why she was resigning from a faculty search committee. Brodey confirmed the authenticity of both emails to Inside Higher Ed.

“While it may be within the dean’s power to intervene at every stage of the search and add/remove names, overruling the opinions of the committee, I have never seen this power executed outside of SCiLL,” wrote Brodey, using the school’s acronym. She serves in multiple departments of Chapel Hill.

“I don’t have any confidence that the search committee will have any actual effect on the final roster of individuals hired,” she wrote. She also said, “I don’t think this list differs in any substantial way from the list of concerns David enumerated in our last meeting, when he resigned from the search.”

That’s a reference to David Decosimo, SCiLL’s remaining associate dean. Asked for comment, Decosimo replied in an email, “I’m on parental leave this semester, so won’t comment at this time.”

This faculty search, which began in the fall, wasn’t small. Atkins has said it resulted in eight offers to candidates. Brodey was even more critical of the process in an email to The Daily Tar Heel, which reported earlier on her resignation. She told the student newspaper that there were “improprieties, slander, vindictiveness and manipulation” surrounding the search.

Dustin Sebell, a SCiLL professor who chaired the search committee (the three members were him, Brodey and Decosimo), disagreed with Brodey in an email. Sebell wrote that Atkins hadn’t overruled the committee.

“You personally recorded the names of the 20 finalists on behalf of the search committee and emailed them to me,” Sebell wrote. He said, “The committee was fully aware that we had only 16 spots for on campus interviews … it was a mathematical certainty that the dean would exercise some discretion in the selection of finalists from our list.”

On March 7, Jon Williams, a Chapel Hill economics professor, resigned from SCiLL’s advisory board in an email to Atkins, Chapel Hill chancellor Lee Roberts, provost Chris Clemens and vice provost for faculty affairs Giselle Corbie. Williams alleged that Atkins had ignored all advice and that he felt like he was “nothing more than one of four warm bodies to achieve the dean’s shadowed objectives.”

“There is no need for an advisory board if the dean ignores any advice that isn’t simply confirmation,” Williams wrote. “More troubling, over the last six weeks, I’ve seen incivility and dysfunction, biased and unfair processes, a complete disregard for governance, and a willingness to deceive and misrepresent that is unlike anything I’ve witnessed in my 15 years in academia.”

Williams ended with, “I cannot see how SCiLL will emerge from this troubled beginning without new leadership.” He declined an interview with Inside Higher Ed, writing in an email, “I will confirm that I resigned and that my concerns center around” Atkins.

He wrote in his resignation email that he still appreciates “the need for a place on campus for students to learn how to critically evaluate and debate the most challenging and controversial topics. Simply put, I’m often in a tiny minority among faculty in my views and opinions, so I appreciate how difficult students may find it to engage in open discussion.”

Three days after Williams’s resignation from the advisory board, Fabian Heitsch, a physics and astronomy professor, followed suit with his own email to Atkins, Roberts, Clemens and Corbie. Heitsch specifically mentioned issues with personnel decisions, but he didn’t provide many specifics or respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment.

“In my year of service on the advisory board, I have witnessed its advice on personnel decisions being ignored on three separate occasions,” Heitsch wrote. He said, “It seems as if the advisory board is being used only as a formality instead of as a body of experience and strategy.”

Heitsch said the advisory board “is to provide formal advice to the dean and director. As I understand it, formal advice is not limited to providing the votes to confirm leadership’s decisions.” He wrote that he still supports the school’s “original mission” and that he “will gladly continue to serve as a curricular fellow.”

Not the First Resignations

These weren’t the first Chapel Hill faculty who—having come to the university before the school’s creation—affiliated themselves with it only to then reduce their involvement or fully withdraw after Atkins’s appointment, citing a changed direction for the school. One who stepped back last year was Matthew Kotzen, Chapel Hill’s philosophy department chair.

But the newer resignations have come alongside stronger denunciations—at least publicly. And Kotzen himself increased his past public criticism in a statement to Inside Higher Ed.

“The original mission of SCiLL was to model and to teach essential skills related to productive engagement with democratic civic institutions, including respectful dialogue across ideological difference,” Kotzen wrote. “Unfortunately, it has become increasingly clear that Dean Atkins is committed to none of those values.”

Kotzen said Atkins “has an extremely narrow conception of acceptable viewpoints and approaches and has demonstrated almost no openness to feedback from others on the faculty, including those that he himself selected for their role. Dean Atkins has fostered a dysfunctional anti-intellectual culture at SCiLL that rewards hostility, dishonesty and self-righteousness in the pursuit of his ideological and personal aims. That disqualifies him from holding any leadership position at UNC.”

Atkins told Inside Higher Ed in an email that “the advisory committee’s function in faculty searches is to help assess the merits of our finalists and to cast an advisory vote on each finalist.” He wrote, “In SCiLL’s most recent national search, our faculty rigorously evaluated our applicants’ strengths and promise.”

“Finalists traveled to campus from three continents, gave teaching demonstrations to students, presented on their research and engaged with our faculty in more informal settings,” Atkins said. “After these campus interviews, SCiLL’s tenure-line faculty met and voted on our finalists; they recommended a strong slate of candidates for appointment.”

Danielle Charette James, a SCiLL assistant professor, told Inside Higher Ed in an email that “our process was highly collaborative, and the candidates who received offers earned overwhelming, and in some cases unanimous, support from SCiLL’s core faculty.”

Chapel Hill’s media relations arm emailed a statement to Inside Higher Ed saying, “SCiLL’s faculty searches honored all university rules and procedures. Applicants were advanced on the basis of merit and fit with the advertised positions. We are looking forward to welcoming an outstanding group of new faculty to campus next fall.”

‘Dress Rehearsal’

Back in January 2023, Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees passed a resolution asking the campus administration to “accelerate its development of a School of Civic Life and Leadership.” Faculty said they were caught off guard because they didn’t know a whole school was in development. David Boliek, then chair of Chapel Hill’s board, called it an effort to “remedy” a shortage of “right-of-center views” on campus. Clemens, the provost and a self-described conservative, promoted the school.

In the fall of 2023, the Republican-controlled State Legislature passed a law that required Chapel Hill to establish the school. The campus couldn’t back out even if it desired to. Clemens had the final say in hiring Atkins as dean, at least before the Chapel Hill board signed off.

And despite the past faculty objections, current Chapel Hill professors, including Brodey, Kotzen and Williams, affiliated with the initiative.

But faculty aren’t the only ones critiquing the recent faculty search. Clemens, who didn’t return requests for comment for this article, at one point ordered a stop to the faculty searches.

In a January email to Atkins, Clemens said there were financial limitations. Instead of progressing toward hiring tenure-track faculty, Clemens said, “SCiLL should initially focus on hiring teaching track professors to support large enrollments in the general education curriculum.” So, he said, he was canceling the searches.

The provost also seemingly referenced issues beyond budgets.

“Your search committee and voting faculty for these searches is small; smaller even than the number of people you were authorized to hire,” Clemens wrote. “Moreover, some of them have just arrived in Chapel Hill. All new teams must learn to work together, and this ‘dress rehearsal’ has hopefully been a learning experience for all.”

He then wrote, with original emphasis included, “I want to emphasize how important it is for a School of Civic Life and Leadership to serve as a model of civic life and civil discourse. Given the intense scrutiny and attention on this school, everything you do—including faculty searches—must be exemplary, both to give the candidates confidence in SCiLL and to give the rest of the university confidence in those you hire. I will address how we can fulfill those expectations for future searches in collaboration with SCiLL leadership and with HR.”

Clemens sent that on a Friday. But by the following Monday, he said the searches were back on after Chancellor Roberts “committed sufficient funds.”

The criticism of Atkins continues. On Monday, Atkins accepted Williams’s resignation and rebutted his critiques. Williams responded in an email by saying he resigned to protect his reputation, “because SCiLL is currently an unmitigated disaster.”

He accused Atkins of “hiding behind accusations that wokeness has derailed your efforts,” something Williams called “absolutely ridiculous given that you completely lost the support of folks like myself that have spent a decade battling it on campus.”

“It’s your failure alone,” Williams wrote. “Time to own it.”

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March 18, 2025
Publishers Adopt AI Tools to Bolster Research Integrity

The perennial pressure to publish or perish is intense as ever for faculty trying to advance their careers in an exceedingly tight academic job market. On top of their teaching loads, faculty are expected to publish—and peer review—research findings, often receiving little to no compensation beyond the prestige and recognition of publishing in top journals.

Some researchers have argued that such an environment incentivizes scholars to submit questionable work to journals—many have well-documented peer-review backlogs and inadequate resources to detect faulty information and academic misconduct. In 2024, more than 4,600 academic papers were retracted or otherwise flagged for review, according to the Retraction Watch database; during a six-week span last fall, one scientific journal published by Springer Nature retracted more than 200 articles.

But the $19 billion academic publishing industry is increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to speed up production and, advocates say, enhance research quality. Since the start of the year, Wiley, Elsevier and Springer Nature have all announced the adoption of generative AI–powered tools or guidelines, including those designed to aid scientists in research, writing and peer review.

“These AI tools can help us improve research integrity, quality, accurate citation, our ability to find new insights and connect the dots between new ideas, and ultimately push the human enterprise forward,” Josh Jarrett, senior vice president of AI growth at Wiley, told Inside Higher Ed earlier this month. “AI tools can also be used to generate content and potentially increase research integrity risk. That’s why we’ve invested so much in using these tools to stay ahead of that curve, looking for patterns and identifying things a single reviewer may not catch.”

However, most scholars aren’t yet using AI for such a purpose. A recent survey by Wiley found that while the majority of researchers believe AI skills will be critical within two years, more than 60 percent said lack of guidelines and training keep them from using it in their work.

In response, Wiley released new guidelines last week on “responsible and effective” uses of AI, aimed at deploying the technology to make the publishing process more efficient “while preserving the author’s authentic voice and expertise, maintaining reliable, trusted, and accurate content, safeguarding intellectual property and privacy, and meeting ethics and integrity best practices,” according to a news release.

Last week, Elsevier also launched ScienceDirect AI, which extracts key findings from millions of peer-reviewed articles and books on ScienceDirect and generates “precise summaries” to alleviate researchers’ challenges of “information overload, a shortage of time and the need for more effective ways to enhance existing knowledge,” according to a news release.

Both of those announcements followed Springer Nature’s January launch of an in-house AI-powered program designed to help editors and peer reviewers by automating editorial quality checks and alerting editors to potentially unsuitable manuscripts.

“As the volume of research increases, we are excited to see how we can best use AI to support our authors, editors and peer reviewers, simplifying their ways of working whilst upholding quality,” Harsh Jegadeesan, Springer’s chief publishing officer, said in a news release. “By carefully introducing new ways of checking papers to enhance research integrity and support editorial decision-making we can help speed up everyday tasks for researchers, freeing them up to concentrate on what matters to them—conducting research.”

‘Obvious Financial Benefit’

Academic publishing experts believe there are both advantages—and down sides—of involving AI in the notoriously slow peer-review process, which is plagued by a deficit of qualified reviewers willing and able to offer their unpaid labor to highly profitable publishers.

If use of AI assistants becomes the norm for peer reviewers, “the volume problem would be immediately gone from the industry” while creating an “obvious financial benefit” for the publishing industry, said Sven Fund, managing director of the peer-review-expert network Reviewer Credits.

But the implications AI has for research quality are more nuanced, especially as scientific research has become a target for conservative politicians and AI models could be—and may already be being—used to target terms or research lawmakers don’t like.

“There are parts of peer review where a machine is definitely better than a human brain,” Fund said, pointing to low-intensity tasks such as translations, checking references and offering authors more thorough feedback as examples. “My concern would be that researchers writing and researching on whatever they want is getting limited by people reviewing material with the help of technical agents … That can become an element of censorship.”

Aashi Chaturvedi, program officer for ethics and integrity at the American Society for Microbiology, said one of her biggest concerns about the introduction of AI into peer review and other aspects of the publishing process is maintaining human oversight.

“Just as a machine might produce a perfectly uniform pie that lacks the soul of a handmade creation, AI reviews can appear wholesome but fail to capture the depth and novelty of the research,” she wrote in a recent article for ASM, which has developed its own generative AI guidelines for the numerous scientific journals it publishes. “In the end, while automation can enhance efficiency, it cannot replicate the artistry and intuition that come from years of dedicated practice.”

But that doesn’t mean AI has no place in peer review, said Chaturvedi, who said in a recent interview that she “felt extra pressure to make sure that everything the author was reporting sounds doable” during her 17 years working as an academic peer reviewer in the pre-AI era. As the pace and complexity of scientific discovery keeps accelerating, she said AI can help alleviate some burden on both reviewers and the publishers “handling a large volume of submissions.”

Chaturvedi cautioned, however, that introducing such technology across the academic publishing process should be transparent and come only after “rigorous” testing.

“The large language models are only as good as the information you give them,” she said. “We are at a pivotal moment where AI can greatly enhance workflows, but you need careful and strategic planning … That’s the only way to get more successful and sustainable outcomes.”

Not Equipped to Ensure Quality?

Ivan Oransky, a medical researcher and co-founder of Retraction Watch, said, “Anything that can be done to filter out the junk that’s currently polluting the scientific literature is a good thing,” and “whether AI can do that effectively is a reasonable question.”

But beyond that, the publishing industry’s embrace of AI in the name of improving research quality and clearing up peer-review backlogs belies a bigger problem predating the rise of powerful generative AI models.

“The fact that publishers are now trumpeting the fact that they both are and need to be—according to them—using AI to fight paper mills and other bad actors is a bit of an admission they hadn’t been willing to make until recently: Their systems are not actually equipped to ensure quality,” Oransky said.

“This is just more evidence that people are trying to shove far too much through the peer-review system,” he added. “That wouldn’t be a problem except for the fact that everybody’s either directly—or implicitly—encouraging terrible publish-or-perish incentives.”

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March 18, 2025
International Students Navigate Escalating Threats

International students across the country are on edge after a week of arrests, deportations and escalating threats from the Trump administration.

So far the administration’s sights have been set primarily on Columbia University in New York. On March 8, immigration officials arrested recent graduate Mahmoud Khalil, intending to strip him of his green card and deport him for his role in pro-Palestinian campus protests last year. Over the next week, Department of Homeland Security agents raided students’ dorm rooms, arresting one international student and prompting another to flee to Canada.

Elora Mukherjee, a law professor at Columbia and director of its Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, said international students have been flocking to the clinic for guidance: on whether their visas could suddenly be revoked, or if they should avoid traveling, delete their social media accounts or move off campus to make it harder for immigration officials to find them.

She said she’s never seen anything like it.

“Our clinic has been inundated with requests for legal consultation,” she said. “There is a palpable sense of fear among international students on campus.”

Mukherjee said she’s been trying to quell international students’ anxieties. But in the wake of what she called an “unprecedented assault on due process, First Amendment rights and basic human decency,” she isn’t sure how.

“They are worried about what may happen to their student visas. They are concerned that they may not be able to complete their degree programs if they are targeted. They’re wondering how they can make changes to their daily life to reduce the risk,” she said. “I don’t know what I can reassure them of right now.”

Chief among the threats facing international students is the equation of protest activity and other protected speech with “terrorist activity.” In an interview with The Free Press last Monday, an unnamed White House official said that protesting made Khalil a national security threat, justifying his deportation. That strategy, the official added, is the administration’s “blueprint” for deporting other international students.

In a post on Truth Social last Tuesday, Trump said that Khalil’s arrest was “the first of many,” calling international student protesters “not students, [but] paid agitators.”

“We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again,” Trump wrote. “We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.”

Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired Cornell University law professor who specializes in immigration law and international students in particular, said ICE officials’ activity at Columbia is the administration’s opening salvo in a battle against two of its most frequently invoked bogeymen: higher education and immigrants.

“This administration has declared war on immigrants broadly and international students specifically,” he said.

That war is currently centered on Columbia but is likely to spread across higher ed. On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Face the Nation that the administration plans to continue arresting and deporting international student activists. He added that the government is reviewing and revoking more student visas “every day.”

It’s not clear if the Trump administration’s argument will hold up in court. If it does, experts say it would give the executive nearly unchecked power to deport noncitizens for disfavored speech, and there’s likely to be a fierce legal battle over that question. But international students have very few legal protections, Yale-Loehr said, and the administration has ample leeway to justify deporting them.

“International students have the same constitutional rights as citizens, but immigration statutes are very broad and there are many grounds for deportability that could trip you up, even as a green card holder,” Yale-Loehr said. One of those potential grounds, he said, is donating to an overseas charity that the State Department deems suspicious or linked to terrorist activity—as it’s done with many charities for Palestinian children and families affected by the destruction of Gaza.

“It’s easy for someone to unintentionally or unknowingly violate our immigration laws that way and get put into the deportation process,” Yale-Loehr said.

When asked whether Columbia would protect current students approached by ICE or detained on campus, a university spokesperson pointed to a statement from earlier this month and said students were encouraged to familiarize themselves with university protocol in such cases.

“Columbia is committed to complying with all legal obligations and supporting our student body and campus community,” the statement reads. “We are also committed to the legal rights of our students and urge all members of the community to be respectful of those rights.”

The Trump administration is also considering instituting a travel ban similar to the one implemented during his first administration—except greatly expanded, from seven countries to 43, according to an internal memo circulating among media outlets.

Some college officials are urging students not to travel until the details of such a plan become clear. On Sunday, Brown University advised its international student community, and any noncitizen staff and faculty, to avoid leaving the country or even flying domestically over the upcoming spring break.

“Potential changes in travel restrictions and travel bans, visa procedures and processing, re-entry requirements and other travel-related delays may affect travelers’ ability to return to the U.S. as planned,” executive vice president for planning and policy Russell Carey wrote in a campuswide email.

Jill Allen Murray, deputy executive director for public policy at NAFSA, an association of educators advocating for international students in the U.S., decried the student arrests as authoritarian and said they would have consequences for global views on U.S. colleges.

“We as a nation hold dear freedom of speech and the right to protest. These are the very values that draw students from around the world to our shores,” Murray wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “Americans and international students alike will certainly view this as an alarming attempt to crack down on freedom of expression.”

Mounting a Legal Challenge

Mukherjee said that even for students with longtime visa status or green cards, there are no guarantees. Trump’s invocation of an obscure wartime powers act to justify deporting student protesters, she said, is a “dramatic escalation” in anti-immigrant policy. She’s been cautioning students against appearing at protests or participating in research and academic opportunities abroad.

The Columbia students aren’t the first to face potential deportation over pro-Palestine protests. Momodou Taal, a British graduate student at Cornell, was suspended for his activism last fall, and a university official told him he may need to “depart the U.S.” if his F-1 visa was subsequently nullified.

On Sunday Taal filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration challenging two executive orders that empower immigration officials to deport noncitizens whom they determine to be national security threats. He said that threat amounts to unconstitutional repression of free speech.

“The First Amendment is explicit and clear and extremely lucid in that it’s not protection for citizens alone; it is protection for persons within this country,” Taal told Inside Higher Ed.

Taal successfully avoided deportation last year, but since his name has been well publicized, he’s been anticipating a knock on his door from ICE for weeks. He said that’s partly why he chose to pursue a legal challenge: to use his own vulnerability to try to protect other international students.

“I know a lot of people are afraid … and I have had that fear, certainly, that something will happen to me. But I fundamentally reject the idea of sitting and laying in that fear and doing nothing,” Taal said. “This level of oppression is meant to stop people from talking about Palestine. When free speech is attacked, that is not the time to retreat, but rather double down.”

Taal’s lawsuit joins another challenge to the administration’s deportation strategy. Last week legal advocacy groups filed a petition against Khalil’s arrest, and a federal judge ordered that Khalil be kept in the country while he reviews the case.

‘Much Higher Anxiety’

Even before immigration officials raided dorm rooms, international students, recruiters and the institutions that serve them were anxious about President Trump’s second term.

Last fall, colleges urged international students who had left for winter break to return to the U.S. before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, fearing a possible travel ban or student visa suspension. Professionals in international student recruiting tell Inside Higher Ed that the crackdown on foreign students has been gradual but is ramping up fast.

William Brustein, former vice president for global strategy and international affairs at West Virginia University, spent decades in international student recruiting and support. He said that international students in the U.S. have grown increasingly worried in recent years about their freedom to express public opinions, what kind of research they can work on, even their physical safety. Khalil’s arrest, he said, validated and escalated those concerns.

“It just reinforces the sense of caution they have about what they can say in class, what they can post online, even what they can say in the cafeteria or around campus if someone is listening,” Brustein said.

Brustein added that colleges have slashed spending on their international support offices, hampering their ability to respond to students’ needs at moments of crisis.

“Colleges have limited resources, and there’s only so much they can do to help,” he said.

Free speech restrictions and ICE raids aren’t the only challenges facing international students in the U.S. The Trump administration has promised to clamp down on approvals for new student visas, and Congress recently passed the Laken Riley Act, significantly lowering the threshold for visa revocation.

Yale-Loehr said that such policies are beginning to manifest at the border. He’s heard stories of students with clearly marked visas in their passports being pulled aside and held for further inspection in airports across the country, some of them turned away by ICE and forced to challenge the decision from abroad.

“In the past, these students would never have been put into secondary inspection,” Yale-Loehr said.

Mukherjee said that while international students faced some of the same issues with visa crackdowns and travel restrictions under the first Trump administration, there is no comparison to the repressive tactics currently on display.

“I’ve never seen a moment where international students are so worried about what may happen to them if they speak out about injustices in our country and across the world,” she said. “It’s an unprecedented time.”

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March 18, 2025
Democrats Blast McMahon Over Education Department Cuts

Sen. Bernie Sanders, ranking member of the Senate committee that oversees education policy, and 37 Democrats blasted Education Secretary Linda McMahon in a letter Monday, expressing “outrage” and arguing that the “reckless” cuts to her department’s staff last week will be “nothing short of devastating” for America’s students, schools and communities.

“At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when 60 percent of people live paycheck to paycheck, millions of Americans cannot afford higher education, and 40 percent of our nation’s 4th graders and 33 percent of 8th graders read below basic proficiency, it is a national disgrace that the Trump Administration is attempting to illegally abolish the Department of Education and thus, undermine a high-quality education for our students,” Sanders wrote.

The letter noted that less than 24 hours after the reduction was announced, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid temporarily shut down; Education Department workers responsible for fixing it had reportedly been fired.

Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann told the Associated Press that the layoffs didn’t affect employees working on the FAFSA or student loan servicing.

“They are strategic, internal-facing cuts that will not directly impact students and families,” Biedermann said.

But top Democratic appropriators, including Sen. Patty Murray of Washington State and ranking member of the House committee Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, disagreed. In their own letter Monday, they argued that the cuts would impact students’ daily lives and demanded to know how McMahon will uphold the law with a decimated staff.

“Firing the people that ensure states, school districts, and institutions of higher education live up to their legal obligations is neither efficient nor accountable,” the lawmakers wrote. “The President’s disregard for appropriations and other laws and the need for stability and productivity in government creates an imperative for the Department to provide accurate, timely responses on its use and planned use of taxpayer resources provided by the laws passed by Congress.”

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March 18, 2025
Breaking out of Borgentown – the case for hope in higher education

It started, as so many great conversations do, over coffee.

On a chilly January day as we swapped tales of small children and shared cultural touchstones, we found ourselves riffing on the Trolls movie (which it turns out we have both seen a painful number of times). In particular, we found ourselves in Borgentown: a drab, grey world of monotony and drudgery, where fleeting joy depends on eating the vibrant, music-loving Trolls.

There’s an uncomfortable resonance with the current temperature of higher education where we can see the joy and possibility at the heart of education being overshadowed by a grinding sense of the need for survival. The drip-feed of news of more institutions in financial trouble, the dissipation of expectation that the Westminster government would pursue bold action early in its term of office, the existential dread of global geopolitics.

The sense that the sector desperately needs a fresh vision and plan for the future, combined with unease about whether that vision will ever materialise and where it will materialise from. It’s hardly surprising that even relentless chirpy people like us can sometimes feel a bit…Borgeny.

Ode to joy

Mark is an educator and Debbie a policy wonk, but we share the conviction that education should be a joyful act. It is the engineering of possibility, the building of capability, the empowerment of individuals to deliver positive impact in the world. It is an act of creation (and creation by proxy), and any such act is joyous. Done well, policymaking can also be creative and empowering, in the ways it seeks to adjust the conditions for good and desirable outcomes to flourish.

But the mood in higher education often feels very different. It feels negative and ground down, paralysed, even fatalistic. Educators, long asked to do more with less, feel denied, their good ideas drowned out by demands for managerial efficiency. Meanwhile, leaders are navigating hostile, contradictory, resource-constrained times. The result is a collective energy that’s fraught and disempowered. This is dangerous, because fatalism is a trap.

Paolo Freire wrote of the ways that fatalism denies people the ability to imagine change. It leaves us believing that what is, is all that ever can be. Education is the opposite of fatalism – it equips us with the power to critically appraise the way things are and to imagine alternatives. Freire said that the primary goal of educators should be to punctuate fatalism with critical hope. And so there is a double tragedy if even educators are deprived of their potential to imagine and enable better futures. Similarly, policymakers at all levels need to take seriously their responsibility to convene, lead, and enable change, lest fatalism set in and undermine the social fabric.

When we talk to sector colleagues, we see a creeping fatalism that comes with dealing with a proliferation of things that are difficult, not in a stretching or challenging or inspiring way, but in a way that chips away at mental and emotional bandwidth. But we also see lots to get excited about – an underlying energy and continued appetite to engage in imaginative discussion, an empathy for the challenges individuals and teams are facing that is breaking down some of the traditional silos, and a curiosity and openness to finding new ways to solve old problems.

The higher education sector is going through some tough times. It may not look exactly the same as it does now a decade hence, but it retains an extraordinary capacity to shape its own future. And this is where we think there is scope for some “interdisciplinary” thinking to happen.

Coming to a website near you

As Wonkhe’s newest contributing editor, in the months ahead Mark will intentionally explore ideas that seem unachievable on the surface, not to frustrate, but to provoke and to encourage us to see what those ideas tell us about what is possible. We will poke at old orthodoxies – and unsettle some new ones before they sediment fully.

Are our narratives on how research environments benefit students really compelling (really?)? Is our defensiveness around grade inflation obscuring that classifications are just a really stupid way of signalling talent? And while we’re at that, can assessment be freed from the stranglehold of compliance? Is “belonging” already becoming a hollow buzzword? And what happens if we fully lean into AI rather than mitigating it? We’ll play with the notion of “co-creation” as only currently skimming at the surface of possibility – and explore pedagogy as a device to more authentically deliver civic aspirations.

In that spirit, we will also have one eye on policy, and the changes that would be needed to policy to help bring new ideas and thinking into being. Imagining different possibilities has to include tackling questions of what concepts like “quality” and “access” mean in the changing higher education landscape, and what they can or ought to mean in the future, what accountabilities and enabling relationships educators, professionals, and institutions should have and how/the extent to which these can be mediated through policy.

This is not an exercise in naive utopianism, nor is it an attempt to attack the sector. Rather it is an affirmation of the sector’s talent, creativity, and intellectual energy. We want to rally the dreamers, the thinkers, and the doers in education – those who are already innovating, those waiting for permission to dream, and those who believe another world is possible – to prise open the Overton window of what is politically acceptable, and push at the boundaries that various sector sacred cows make appear as if they are set in stone.

If you share our optimism that there is still plenty of creative energy out there that has yet to be tapped, please bring us your own ideas and imagined futures to contribute to the conversation. As the Borgens learn at the end of Trolls, their potential for joy was inside them all along.

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March 18, 2025
Future-Proofing Your Higher Education Ecosystem ebook

Facing challenges in enrollment, retention, or tech integration? Seeking growth in new markets? Our strategic insights pave a clear path for overcoming obstacles and driving success in higher education.

Unlock the transformative potential within your institution – partner with us to turn today’s roadblocks into tomorrow’s achievements. Let’s chat.

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March 18, 2025
Higher Education Cybersecurity Landscape in 2024

Facing challenges in enrollment, retention, or tech integration? Seeking growth in new markets? Our strategic insights pave a clear path for overcoming obstacles and driving success in higher education.

Unlock the transformative potential within your institution – partner with us to turn today’s roadblocks into tomorrow’s achievements. Let’s chat.

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March 18, 2025
Should higher education be thinking in terms of evolution or transformation?

The pervasive sense that five years or a decade or 20 years hence the sector will look radically different might be an exciting topic for panel discussions but it’s not clear whether radical transformation is desirable – not least because the form that transformation might take remains far from clear.

The drivers of change are well-rehearsed: while demand remains strong for higher education participation, as we’ll be exploring at our Secret Life of Students event this week, the traditional student experience is coming under intense pressure as students with diverse backgrounds, needs and aspirations try to wedge their lives into a fairly boilerplate model of higher education study. Most institutions don’t have the money to throw at additional services, or to carry the risks of innovating in how they structure their portfolio. Income from international students could go some way to smoothing out the rough edges but recent events have demonstrated the consequences of building a system on an income stream that’s so variable and subject to a change of direction in the political winds.

The Westminster government’s current higher education policy agenda is a rag bag of “stuff we can all agree on” like access, quality, and civic engagement, and contextual mood music around industrial strategy, skills, devolution, and regional economic growth. Reading between the lines it seems there is a direction of travel towards a more coordinated regional post-18 offer broadly aligned to regional economic growth agendas, but against a punishing economic backdrop nobody’s very clear what this ought to look like, how deeply or broadly it should touch the general HE offer, or how it should happen.

The lack of system-wide or even local coordination is a real worry, as individual institutions make decisions for sustainability and even survival that will have long term implications for the functioning of the system as a whole and the opportunities that are available to students. To give one example: colleges report that what they see as predatory behaviour by universities to try to scoop up the students that might more traditionally be seen in college-based higher education provision is placing that provision under significant strain.

Choices for change

Dealing with the immediate pressures on costs while also staring down the barrel of a call for reform is objectively a very difficult psychological space for higher education to be in. Everyone I speak to is desperate for more time in their day to reflect, digest, make sense, and plan. Something I often find useful when I find the world confusing (an alarmingly frequent occurrence) is some kind of model or map to help me structure my thoughts, especially when time is limited.

I like putting one thing next to another thing and seeing what happens, and so for this case I put change actors on one continuum from individual institutions to multiple organisations in collaboration, and scale of change on the other, from evolution to revolution. I then tried to think of all the “change” activities that are either under way or are being mooted and assigned them to quadrants.

I’ve taken a few things from this exercise.

One is that I think it hugely unlikely that the sector will coalesce into one of the quadrants or even at the top or bottom of the model. I think we will see activity in all four quadrants depending on the context – and I think that policy should seek to support all four forms of change to give the sector the best chance of making a good fist of it. I have found arriving at this conclusion oddly freeing, as it stops the circular argument of advocating any single activity such as income diversification, or merger, or shared services, as a unified answer to the sector’s challenges. It is possible to argue, as we have at Wonkhe, that the policy environment could be more conducive to supporting radical forms of collaboration, without suggesting that all institutions must now hasten to adopt these forms if these do not serve wider missions and objectives. Likewise, it does not necessarily follow that introducing mechanisms to support collaboration would reduce competitive pressures in some parts of the sector or geographies, and the sector may collectively need to make its peace with that.

Another is that it’s noticeable that the activity to the left in the “evolution” space is a much more “comfortable” space for higher education, in the sense that it’s possible to see it already in action and the sector knows how to do it, not that all the activities listed are necessarily things that are desirable in every case. There’s a question, then, about whether, IF substantial change is needed, it’s possible for the accumulation of practices in the evolution space to achieve it – or do we just end up with lots of random examples of interesting practice and not much that is fundamentally different. I instinctively think that policy should accept that the grain of sector practice runs in the direction of evolution rather than transformation, and seek to work with the sector on mapping critical paths towards the change that is desired rather than administering exogenous shocks to the system.

Finally, I’d like to see what new ideas the sector could come up with in the right hand side of the diagram (especially the top right quadrant) – not necessarily to advocate for, but to help open up the conversation and ask meaningful questions of current practice. It’s quite easy to explain why all the ideas in the top right quadrant are unlikely to happen, so another way to come at that question is to ask whether there are other ideas that might be more plausible.

Tone matters here though – for some that idea of transformation is something like a playground, where it’s fun to speculate about different possibilities and might spark some useful thinking. For others, it could carry a much more serious weight of strategic challenge and need to be approached accordingly as likely to have a material impact on people’s lives and working conditions. The stakes are much higher on this side of the evolution to transformation continuum, particularly where an institution is operating in the bottom right quadrant – the risks of failure are real.

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March 17, 2025
Colleges Flag Words Like “Women” to Comply With DEI Bans

“Biases.” “Racism.” “Gender.” “Women.”

Those are just some of the terms colleges and universities are searching for in their databases to ensure compliance with federal DEI bans and similar directives from states and university systems.

Robin Goodman, distinguished research professor of English at Florida State University and president of the university’s chapter of United Faculty of Florida, said her institution is using a list of keywords to review webpages for DEI language in response to federal and state directives. While not all those terms were scrubbed, the list, which has circulated among faculty, disturbed her.

“From my point of view, those words are now dangerous words” that exacerbate a “culture of fear” on campus, she said.

She’s also mystified by which terms did and didn’t make it onto her university’s list, noting that the word “woman” is flagged, but not “man” or “sex.”

Campuses using keyword lists isn’t entirely new. Some state laws have pressured colleges to avoid using certain terms in the past, said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education. But for most campuses, this is a “new space,” as some institutions scramble to comply with federal anti-DEI orders, like the Office for Civil Rights’ Dear Colleague letter, and try to mirror the ways grant-making federal agencies, like the National Science Foundation, have responded.

Colleges and universities are using the same tactics as many federal agencies parsing their grant projects and webpages to comply with federal anti-DEI directives. The National Science Foundation, which temporarily shut down grant reviews, searched for terms like “female” and “male-dominated” in its research grants. The Centers for Disease Control used a list of roughly 20 terms to guide choices about removing DEI-related language from its website. And the Defense Department reportedly flagged tens of thousands of images and web posts for removal because of alleged connections to DEI, including references to service members with the last name Gay and an image of the Enola Gay aircraft, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima during World War II.

Campus administrators taking this approach argue that, when tasked with reviewing massive numbers of webpages and programs, keywords make it easier to arrive at a smaller, more manageable pool to review. Faculty members, on the other hand, are baffled and outraged by the strategy. Some sympathize with campus leaders’ plight but argue it’s alarming to watch universities treat terms like “female” as red flags.

Fansmith doesn’t believe such lists are an ideal strategy.

Flagged word lists are “a very, very, very blunt tool” for “trying to understand academic content or the merits of research grants or projects,” he said.

‘Not a Perfect Approach’

University leaders recognize that devising keyword lists puts campuses on edge, but some argue it’s the most efficient way to respond to an onslaught of anti-DEI directives.

East Carolina University’s interim provost, Chris Buddo, explained at a recent Faculty Senate meeting that the Office of University Counsel crafted a list of terms over several months, initially used to review the university’s web presence to comply with the University of North Carolina system’s Equality Policy, which pared back DEI. (The North Carolina General Assembly also demanded an inventory of DEI trainings from the system in 2023, offering up a list of concepts and terms to guide the audit, including “accessibility,” “bias,” “racism” and “social justice.”)

Then, in February, a UNC system attorney issued a memo prohibiting campuses from mandating courses focused on DEI, referencing Trump’s January anti-DEI executive order. University officials again used a keywords list to search through the course catalog and ensure no general education or major requirements were focused on DEI.

Faculty at the meeting guffawed at some of the words flagged, including “cultural.”

“I know it’s been controversial, and I understand it is not a perfect approach,” Buddo told faculty. “But given the significant amount of content we are being asked to review, we started by using this blunt tool—and I recognize it is a blunt tool.”

He stressed that none of the words on the list are “inherently problematic.”

But “the list was developed as a way to cast the widest possible net, to make sure we could be aware of all the places that we might be viewed as being noncompliant,” he said.

Anne Ticknor, chair of the faculty and a professor in the College of Education at East Carolina University, said her institution has no choice but to comply with the system’s directives, though she tried to ensure that faculty had a say in any changes to course requirements.

“People were fearful that their academic freedom was being infringed upon, since faculty traditionally oversee curriculum, and that includes course titles, syllabus information, course descriptions, content—all of that is typically a faculty’s domain,” she said.

East Carolina officials told Inside Higher Ed in a statement that most courses flagged using the list were “false positives,” meaning that upon review, they weren’t required or didn’t relate to DEI.

Florida State University also emphasized in a statement to Inside Higher Ed that just because the university is using a list of key terms to review webpages and communications doesn’t mean those words or pages are necessarily being removed.

“For example, contrary to media reports, the words ‘woman’ and ‘women’ are easily found throughout the FSU website and have not been removed, nor are they being removed,” the statement read. “Florida State University, like all universities, routinely reviews its messaging to ensure information is up to date and compliant.”

Florida State president Richard McCullough recognized in a March 4 message to faculty and staff that they may have “feelings of uncertainty and concern.”

“While we are confident that our institution currently complies with the law, it is important that our messaging reflects new interpretations and priorities,” he told employees.

Some campus leaders said they crafted flagged-terms lists out of panic.

Officials at High Point University, a private institution in North Carolina, for example, told Inside Higher Ed in a statement that they created a keyword list in a moment of heightened worry last month after the U.S. Department of Education canceled three grants that supported graduate education programs, totaling $17.8 million. The Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter, which gave institutions two weeks to rid themselves of race-conscious programming, exacerbated their concerns about losing federal funding for other programs.

According to The News & Observer, the university circulated a list of 49 terms, including “equality” and “gender,” and called for an audit of course descriptions and syllabi, student handbooks and webpages.

But officials quickly rescinded the move.

“Facing a 14-day deadline, we acted quickly based on our care and concern for students and faculty,” the statement from High Point read, “but clearly we overcorrected.”

Provost Daniel Erb sent an apology to academic leaders on March 2, saying he consulted with legal counsel and “there are no terms or words that you are required to change.”

“While many institutions were working towards removing certain terms and words from websites … our legal counsel has helped clarify that our priority should be on ensuring all our program qualifications and requirements do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religious beliefs, etc.,” Erb wrote. “Therefore, the concern about the language that is used is no longer a focus.”

ACE generally doesn’t recommend universities undertake such language reviews in response to the Office for Civil Rights’ anti-DEI directive, Fansmith said. He believes campuses’ usual processes for reviewing university communications and curricula should suffice.

“The administration has a view of what compliance with civil rights laws means,” which “I don’t think we necessarily believe the law itself supports,” he said.

The Ripple Effects

While harried administrators say the flagged terms are just a guidance tool, faculty members find the reviews burdensome and say they have a chilling effect in the classroom.

Margaret Bauer, professor of English, distinguished professor of arts and sciences and Rives Chair of Southern Literature at East Carolina University, said her department has a Multicultural and Transnational Literatures concentration. She hasn’t done a count, but she expects the word “cultural”—one of the words on the list—comes up in every course description in that concentration. She feels for her colleagues who’ve had to justify courses or explain why they’re false positives. (Bauer is also in the Faculty Senate but stressed that she’s speaking on her own behalf.)

“We’re already all overtaxed with so much bureaucracy,” she said. “Just to add something that’s so ridiculous—it’s really frustrating … We should have been grading or planning class, things that are productive. This was not productive.”

Bauer believes administrators are well intentioned and “want to protect us.”

But “I want them instead to push back … and say, ‘Curriculum is under faculty. And we don’t teach discrimination. We teach the history of it. We’re not doing anything wrong … These words are things our university believes in,’” she said.

Knowing the word list is out there makes concepts feel taboo in the classroom, she said.

“When I’m teaching Southern literature, I’m going to end up talking about the history of oppression, the history of discrimination … I can’t not talk about it,” she said, but she finds herself feeling “more self-conscious” about it. She worries faculty members without tenure might fear for their jobs if they “teach honestly.”

Goodman, of Florida State University, said she also can’t avoid the topics on her university’s flagged-term list.

“I’m a feminist theorist. I’ve written a lot of books, and they all have ‘feminism’ in the title,” she said. “So, I can’t backtrack it now. It’s all out there in the public.”

The flagged-words list—especially combined with recent Florida state laws allowing students to record professors in class and requiring professors to undergo post-tenure review—creates an environment where “faculty feel like they are being gagged in class, and they’re fearful,” she added.

Fansmith isn’t surprised faculty are worried.

Professors are used to “really complicated, detailed and multi-faceted levels of curriculum construction,” he said. “These are professionals who have spent their lives understanding those nuances, those details and why they matter,” so they’re concerned to see coursework in particular “reduced seemingly to a simplistic list of terms.”

He believes word lists are an acceptable, albeit not ideal, tool to use if they’re part of an internal review process “done with the care and attention that universities generally do with matters of curricular review and with respect for academic freedom.”

But “when it’s being mandated from the outside, by the federal government or a state and it’s getting into really perilous ideas of academic freedom and what can be taught, that’s when we start to really worry about what these lists mean and what they represent,” he said.

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March 17, 2025
Federal Cuts Deepen Tennessee State U’s Budget Woes

President Trump’s assault on federal grants is making Tennessee State University’s ongoing financial troubles even worse.

The Tennessean reported last week that the chronically underfunded historically Black university in Nashville is preparing to lose $14.4 million, the remainder of an $18 million grant it received from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. It’s one of hundreds of colleges and universities across the country facing financial uncertainty as the Trump administration moves to cut trillions of dollars from the federal budget.

“This is going to impact our people,” Jim Grady, TSU’s chief financial officer, said at a finance committee meeting Wednesday evening. “We’ll continue to evaluate the volatility … and the potential impact to employees, students and university operations.”

Grady said nothing would change for at least 90 days after receiving notice of the grant cancellation, and it’s not yet clear how many jobs will be eliminated as a result. And that’s not the only federal grant in question, according to The Tennessean.

In February, the U.S. Department of Agriculture—which includes the National Institute of Food and Agriculture—canceled $45 million in federal grants to the cash-strapped university, which eliminated 114 positions last fall amid a looming budget shortfall.

Earlier this month, the USDA restored about $23 million of those grants, though another $115 million could be suspended or frozen. TSU’s federal grants fully fund 62 employees and partially fund another 112.

In the midst of the financial uncertainty, TSU has suspended its search for a permanent president, WKRN reported.

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March 17, 2025