Tag: Education

  • PowerSchool Got Hacked. Now What? – The 74

    PowerSchool Got Hacked. Now What? – The 74


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    Were you a current or former student in the last few decades? Or a parent? Or an educator? 

    If so, your sensitive data — like Social Security numbers and medical records — may have fallen into the hands of cybercriminals. Their target was education technology behemoth PowerSchool, which provides a centralized system for reams of student data to damn near every school in America.

    Given the cyberattack’s high stakes and its potential to harm millions of current and former students, I teamed up Wednesday with Doug Levin of the K12 Security Information eXchange to moderate a timely webinar about what happened, who was affected — and the steps school districts must take to keep their communities safe.

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    Concern about the PowerSchool breach is clearly high: Some 600 people tuned into the live event at one point and pummeled Levin and panelists Wesley Lombardo, technology director at Tennessee’s Maryville City Schools; Mark Racine, co-founder of RootED Solutions; and Amelia Vance, president of the Public Interest Privacy Center, with questions. 

    PowerSchool declined our invitation to participate but sent a statement, saying it is “working to complete our investigation of the incident and [is] coordinating with districts and schools to provide more information and resources (including credit monitoring or identity protection services if applicable) as it becomes available.”

    The individual or group who hacked the ed tech giant has yet to be publicly identified.

    Asked and answered: Why has the company’s security safeguards faced widespread scrutiny? What steps should parents take to keep their kids’ data secure? Will anyone be held accountable?

    Watch the webinar here.


    In the news

    Oklahoma schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, who says undocumented immigrants have placed “severe financial and operational strain” on schools in his state, proposed rules requiring parents to show proof of citizenship or legal immigration status when enrolling their kids — a proposal that not only violates federal law, but is likely to keep some parents from sending their children to school. | The 74

    • Not playing along: Leaders of the state’s two largest school districts — Oklahoma City and Tulsa — rebuked the proposal and said they would not collect students’ immigration information. Educators nationwide fear the incoming Trump administration could carry out arrests on campuses. | Oklahoma Watch
       
    • Walters filed a $474 million federal lawsuit this week alleging immigration enforcement officials mismanaged the U.S.-Mexico border, leading to “skyrocketing costs” for Oklahoma schools required “to accommodate an influx of non-citizen students.” | The Oklahoman
       
    • Timely resource guide: With ramped-up immigration enforcement on the horizon — and with many schools already sharing student information with ICE — here are the steps school administrators must take to comply with longstanding privacy and civil rights laws. | Center for Democracy & Technology

    A federal judge in Kentucky struck down the Biden administration’s Title IX rules that enshrined civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ students in schools, siding with several conservative state attorneys general who argued that harassment of transgender students based on their gender identity doesn’t constitute sex discrimination. Mother Jones

    Fires throw L.A. schools into chaos: As fatal wildfires rage in California, the students and families of America’s second-largest school district have had their lives thrown into disarray. Schools serving thousands of students were badly damaged or destroyed. Many children have lost their homes. Hundreds of kids whose schools burned down returned to makeshift classrooms Wednesday after losing “their whole lifestyle in a matter of hours.” | The Washington Post 

    • At least seven public schools in Los Angeles that were destroyed, damaged or threatened by flames will remain closed, along with campuses in other districts. | The 74

    Has TikTok’s time run out? With a national ban looming for the popular social media app, many teens say they’re ready to move on (and have already flocked to a replacement). | Business Insider

    Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta restricted LGBTQ+-related content from teens’ accounts for months under its so-called sensitive content policy until the effort was exposed by journalist Taylor Lorenz. | Fast Company

    Students’ lunch boxes sit in a locker at California’s Marquez Charter Elementary School, which was destroyed by the Palisades fire on Jan. 7. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

    The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday announced the participants in a $200 million pilot program to help schools and libraries bolster their cybersecurity defenses. They include 645 schools and districts and 50 libraries. | FCC

    Scholastic falls to “furry” hackers: The education and publishing giant that brought us Harry Potter has fallen victim to a cyberattacker, who reportedly stole the records of some 8 million people. In an added twist, the culprit gave a shout-out to “the puppygirl hacker polycule,” an apparent reference to a hacker dating group interested in human-like animal characters. | Daily Dot

    Not just in New Jersey: In a new survey, nearly a quarter of teachers said their schools are patrolled by drones and a third said their schools have surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities. | Center for Democracy & Technology

    The number of teens abstaining from drugs, alcohol and tobacco use has hit record highs, with experts calling the latest data unprecedented and unexpected. | Ars Technica


    ICYMI @The74

    Librarians Gain Protections in Some States as Book Bans Soar

    RFK Jr. Could Pull Many Levers to Hinder Childhood Immunization as HHS Head

    Feds: Philadelphia Schools Failed to Address Antisemitism in School, Online


    Emotional Support

    New pup just dropped.

    Meet Woodford, who, at just 9 weeks, has already aged like a fine bourbon. I’m told that Woody — and the duck, obviously — have come under the good care of 74 reporter Linda Jacobson’s daughter.


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  • Johns Hopkins, Caltech settle in antitrust lawsuit

    Johns Hopkins, Caltech settle in antitrust lawsuit

    Johns Hopkins University and the California Institute of Technology agreed to settle in a federal antitrust lawsuit that alleges 17 wealthy institutions, known as the 568 Presidents Group, illegally colluded on financial aid formulas and overcharged students for years.

    Late Friday, JHU settled for $18.5 million and Caltech for $16.7 million, according to court filings. Both were more recent additions to the group, which was established in 1998. Johns Hopkins joined in November 2021, and Caltech in 2019.

    The class action lawsuit was filed in January 2022 and initially implicated Caltech along with Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Emory, Georgetown, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt and Yale Universities; Dartmouth College; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and the Universities of Chicago, Notre Dame and Pennsylvania.

    Johns Hopkins was added to the lawsuit in March 2022.

    After Friday’s court filing, 12 of the 17 institutions have settled. Altogether the settlement amounts add up to nearly $320 million. Vanderbilt had the largest settlement: $55 million.

    The five remaining defendants in the lawsuit—Cornell, Georgetown, MIT, Notre Dame and Penn—have denied wrongdoing and continue to fight the antitrust case in court. The 568 Presidents Group name is a reference to a carve-out in federal law that allowed member institutions to discuss financial aid formulas with immunity from federal antitrust laws due to their need-blind status. Congress created that exemption following a 1991 price-fixing scandal that involved all eight Ivy League universities and MIT.

    The legislative carve-out expired in 2022, and the group subsequently dissolved.

    However, plaintiffs have argued that defendants did consider financial circumstances and made decisions based on family wealth and donation history or capacity, often admitting students on “special interest lists” with substandard transcripts compared to the rest of accepted classes.

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  • HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (January 17, 2025)

    HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (January 17, 2025)

    Transformation of education

    The McDonaldisation of higher education in the age of AI

    Yoonil Auh, J. University World News. December 11th, 2024.

    Reflection on how AI’s impact on higher education aligns with the principles of McDonaldisation (efficiency, calculability, predictability and control), what opportunities and challenges it creates, and how institutions are responding

    Decolonization

    AI and digital neocolonialism: Unintended impacts on universities

    Yoonil Auh, J. University World News. July 12th, 2024. 

    The evolution of AI risks reinforcing neocolonial patterns, underscoring the complex ethical implications associated with their deployment and broader impact

    Workforce preparation

    As workers seek guidance on AI use, employers value skilled graduates

    Ascione, L. eCampusNews. December 9th, 2024.

    A new Wiley survey highlights that 40% of respondents struggle to understand how to integrate AI into their work and 75% lack confidence in AI use, while 34% of managers feel equipped to support AI integration

    California students want careers in AI. Here’s how colleges are meeting that demand

    Brumer, D. and Garza, J. Cal Matters. October 20th, 2024. 

    California’s governor announced the first statewide partnership with a tech firm, Nvidia, to bring AI curriculum, resources and opportunities to California’s public higher education institutions. The partnership will bring AI tools to community colleges first.

    Let’s equip the next generation of business leaders with an ethical compass

    Côrte-Real, A. Times Higher Education. October 22nd, 2024. 

    In a world driven by AI, focusing on human connections and understanding is essential for achieving success. While AI can standardize many processes, it is the unique human skills – such as empathy, creativity, and critical thinking – that will continue to set individuals and organizations apart.

    How employer demand trends across two countries demonstrate need for AI skills

    Stevens, K. EAB. October 10th, 2024. 

    Study reviewing employer demands in the US and in Ireland to better understand how demand for AI skills differ across countries, and examine if these differences are significant enough to require targeted curricular design by country

    Research

    We’re living in a world of artificial intelligence – it’s academic publishing that needs to change

    Moorhouse, B. Times Higher Education. December 13th, 2024.

    Suggestions to shift mindsets towards GenAI tools to restore trust in academic publishing

    Teaching and learning

    The AI-Generated Textbook That’s Making Academics Nervous

    Palmer, K. Inside Higher Ed. December 13th, 2024. 

    A comparative literature professor at UCLA used AI to generate the textbook for her medieval literature course notably with the aim to make course material more financially accessible to her students – but the academic community reacted strongly

    GenAI impedes student learning, hitting exam performance

    Sawahel, W. University World News. December 12th, 2024.

    A study conducted in Germany using GenAI detection systems showed that students who used GenAI scored significantly lower in essays

    The renaissance of the essay starts here

    Gordon, C. and Compton, M. Times Higher Education. December 9th, 2024. 

    A group of academics from King’s College London, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Sydney and Richmond American University came together to draft a manifesto on the future of the essay in the age of AI, where they highlight problems and opportunities related to the use of essays, and propose ways to rejuvenate its use

    These AI tools can help prepare future programmers for the workplace

    Rao, R. Times Higher Education. December 9th, 2024.

    Reflection on how curricula should incorporate the use of AI tools, with a specific focus on programming courses

    The future is hybrid: Colleges begin to reimagine learning in an AI world

    McMurtrie, B. The Chronicle of Higher Education. October 3rd, 2024.

    Reflection on the state of AI integration in teaching and learning across the US

    Academic integrity

    Survey suggests students do not see use of AI as cheating

    Qiriazi, V. et al. University World News. December 11th, 2024. 

    Overview of topics discussed at the recent plenary of the Council of Europe Platform on Ethics, Transparency and Integrity in Education

    Focusing on GenAI detection is a no-win approach for instructors

    Berdahl, L. University Affairs. December 11th, 2024

    Reflection on potential equity, ethical, and workload implications of AI detection 

    The Goldilocks effect: finding ‘just right’ in the AI era

    MacCallum, K. Times Higher Education. October 28th, 2024. 

    Discussion on when AI use is ‘too much’ versus when it is ‘just right’, and how instructors can allow students to use GenAI tools while still maintaining ownership of their work

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  • How AI Has Gone To The Dogs

    How AI Has Gone To The Dogs

    One highlight from FETC’s Startup Pavilion is Florida-based Scholar Education, which uses AI chatbot dogs to help tutor students and give feedback to teachers. How it works: A friendly AI-powered classroom assistant provides academic guidance and encourages engagement. The AI dogs will deliver daily reports to parents so they can see feedback on their kids’ learning, creating a direct line of communication between home and school. See it in action for yourself:

    Kevin Hogan
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    Want to share a great resource? Let us know at [email protected].

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  • Historians’ council vetoes Gaza scholasticide condemnation

    Historians’ council vetoes Gaza scholasticide condemnation

    The American Historical Association’s top elected body has shot down a resolution opposing scholasticide in Gaza, after members who attended its annual convention approved the statement early this month by a 428-to-88 margin.

    The association’s elected council, which has 16 voting members, could have accepted the resolution or sent it to the organization’s roughly 10,450 members for a vote. Instead, the council rejected it as the official position of the association.

    Jim Grossman, the association’s executive director and a nonvoting member of the council, said the Thursday afternoon vote was 11 to 4, with one abstention. He said the meeting was over Zoom.

    The rejected resolution had condemned the U.S. government’s funding of Israel, saying it “has supplied Israel with the weapons being used to commit this scholasticide” and that Israel “has effectively obliterated Gaza’s education system.” Scholasticide is defined as the intentional eradication of an education system.

    The resolution also called for a permanent ceasefire and for the association to form a committee to help rebuild Gaza’s “educational infrastructure.”

    In a written explanation of the veto, the council said it “deplores any intentional destruction of Palestinian educational institutions, libraries, universities and archives in Gaza.”

    However, it considers the resolution to be a contravention of AHA’s “constitution and bylaws because it lies outside the scope of the association’s mission and purpose.” The constitution, the council noted, defines that mission and purpose as “the promotion of historical studies through the encouragement of research, teaching and publication; the collection and preservation of historical documents and artifacts; the dissemination of historical records and information; the broadening of historical knowledge among the general public; and the pursuit of kindred activities in the interest of history.”

    Grossman said the vote to approve that explanation was 10 to zero with three abstentions, after some members left the meeting following the veto vote. He said he couldn’t reveal who voted which way in either tally because the discussion was confidential.

    “We consider it imperative that council members be able to speak freely and candidly during the meeting, and that’s why they’re not recorded and that’s why we do not quote any individual council members,” Grossman said. “And they did speak freely and candidly.”

    Van Gosse, a co-chair and founder of Historians for Peace and Democracy, which wrote the resolution, said “we are extremely shocked by this decision, and disappointed.” He said, “It overturns the democratic decision at that huge [conference] business meeting and the landslide vote.”

    Anne Hyde, a council member and a University of Oklahoma history professor, said she voted to veto “to protect the AHA’s reputation as an unbiased historical actor,” noting that the organization does congressional briefings. She also said the current war in Gaza “is not settled history, so we’re not clear what happened or who to blame or when it began even, so it isn’t something that a professional organization should be commenting on yet.”

    Asked why she didn’t support sending the resolution to the full membership for a vote, Hyde said, “As a council member, you really are thinking about the full 10,000 people, and it includes high school teachers, people who teach in really difficult circumstances and who don’t agree about this issue.” She said, “You could imagine all kinds of scenarios” where a full membership vote “still wasn’t representative.”

    This marks the second time this academic year that the top body of a major scholarly organization has shot down a pro-Palestinian resolution before the group’s full membership could vote on it. In the fall, the Modern Language Association’s executive council rejected a resolution that would’ve also accused Israel of scholasticide—and would’ve gone further by endorsing the international boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israeli policy.

    Unlike the American Historical Association, the Modern Language Association Executive Council, which has different bylaws, axed that resolution before its convention this month even began.

    In February 2022, the AHA council did approve a statement on another current war. It condemned “in the strongest possible terms Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine” and said, “This act of overt military aggression violates the sovereignty of an independent Ukraine, threatening stability in the broader region and across the world.”

    The statement rebutted Russian president Vladimir Putin’s historical justifications for the invasion, saying, “Putin grossly simplifies and distorts Ukraine’s history, essentially erasing its distinct past and rendering it indistinguishable from Russia.” The statement ended with this: “We vigorously support the Ukrainian nation and its people in their resistance to Russian military aggression and the twisted mythology that President Putin has invented to justify his violation of international norms.”

    Grossman told Inside Higher Ed Friday that “the Ukraine statement was purely historical. It was well within our scope.” He said, “No serious professional historian in the United States considers Putin’s historical explanation to be anything close to accurate history, so the war itself was based on an abuse of history, and that’s what our statement addressed.” There’s “no such consensus” among U.S. historians on the situation in Gaza, he said.

    Two pro-Israel organizations, the American Jewish Committee and the Academic Engagement Network, said they sent a joint letter to the council Thursday urging the veto. The letter calls the scholasticide accusation “preposterous.”

    “There is no evidence to suggest that Israel is deliberately and systematically targeting the Palestinian educational system for destruction,” the letter said. “The resolution blatantly ignores the fact that Hamas routinely launches rockets from, and houses its weapons and fighters in, civilian structures and facilities.”

    The organizations wrote that “as an institution, the AHA should steer clear of weighing in on contentious political conflicts, particularly when so many members vehemently disagree.” They said such resolutions can “create a hostile and unwelcoming environment for scholars and students who identify as Zionists and those with strong personal, academic and professional ties to Israel.” They further argued that “the association would be better served by adopting a stance of political neutrality on geopolitical issues.”

    This story has been updated.

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  • How five colleges recognize the National Day of Racial Healing

    How five colleges recognize the National Day of Racial Healing

    Racial healing circles, or opportunities for community members to share stories and connect on a human level, are common activities for the National Day of Racial Healing. This year is the ninth observance of the holiday.

    AJ Watt/E+/Getty Images 

    Over the past two decades, higher education has grown exceptionally diverse, enrolling students from all backgrounds and offering opportunities for education and career development for historically underserved populations.

    This diversification of the students, staff and faculty who make up higher education also offers opportunities for institutions to promote justice and racial healing through intentional education and programming. One annual marker of this work is the National Day of Racial Healing.

    The background: The National Day of Racial Healing was established by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation in 2017 as part of the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) initiative to bring people together and inspire action to build a more just and equitable world.

    The day falls on the Tuesday after Martin Luther King Jr. Day and is marked by events and activities that promote racial healing. Racial healing, as defined by the foundation, is “the experience shared by people when they speak openly and hear the truth about past wrongs and the negative impacts created by individual and systemic racism,” according to the effort’s website.

    On campus: The American Association of Colleges and Universities encourages institutions to “engage in activities, events or strategies to promote healing and foster engagement around the issues of racism, bias, inequity and injustice in our society,” according to a Dec. 18 press release. AAC&U partners with 72 institutions to establish TRHT Campus Centers, with the goal of developing 150 self-sustaining community-integrated centers.

    Some ways institutions can do this is through organizing activities, inviting faculty to connect course material to racial healing during that week, coordinating events or sharing stories on social media, according to AAC&U.

    Here’s how colleges and universities, many that host TRHT Campus Centers, plan to honor the National Day of Racial Healing.

    • Baldwin Wallace University in Ohio will host two Jacket Circles for students to participate in storytelling and deep listening to build empathy and compassion. The University of Louisville, similarly, will host Cardinal Connection Circles.
    • Emory University in Georgia will hold a three-day event, beginning on Jan. 21, that includes a keynote, lunch-and-learn panel discussion, racial healing circles, and a dinner experience.
    • Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York system, will host its first National Day of Racial Healing this year, which includes healing circles, roundtable discussions and art-based initiatives.
    • The TRHT Center at Northern Virginia Community College will partner with the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors to issue a formal proclamation in a public forum, acknowledging the importance of the day, a tradition for the two groups.
    • The University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa will take a pause today to recognize the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom, as well as the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the National Day of Racial Healing. The event, Hawai‘i ku‘u home aloha, which “Hawai‘i my beloved home,” honors the past, present and future of the islands.

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  • Turbulent times require both immediate and long views

    Turbulent times require both immediate and long views

    I don’t remember where I heard this bit of wisdom, if I read it in a book or someone else told it to me, but it’s something I’ve carried around for a while now: There’s always going to be a next, until there isn’t.

    My interpretation is a kind of combination of “this too shall pass” with “time marches on,” along with a reminder of the certainty that at some point all things and all people cease to exist.

    (I find that last bit sort of comforting, but maybe I’m weird that way.)

    It comes in handy when thinking about both exciting and difficult times. What is happening in a moment is not eternal, and something else will be coming along. In order to make that next thing as positive and beneficial as possible, we have to deal with both the present and those possible futures.

    I think this mindset might be helpful to anyone who is considering the coming couple of years for higher education and bracing for the possible impact of a presidential administration that appears hostile to the work of colleges and universities and intends to bring this perceived hostile group to heel. I’m concerned that many institutions are not considering that there’s always going to be a next, and short-term accommodations are going to result in long-term problems.

    What comes next will be far worse than it needs to be.

    It’s strange to think that institutions that are so well established with such long histories should act with such fragility in the face of present uncertainty, but there are signs of what scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder calls “obeying in advance” everywhere.

    As reported by IHE’s Ryan Quinn, Texas A&M, along with other public higher ed institutions in the state, following threats ginned up by right-wing conservative billionaire-backed activist Christopher Rufo, has ended their participation in the PhD Project, a conference meant to help increase the number of doctoral students identifying as “Black, African American, Latino, Hispanic American, Native American or Canadian Indigenous.”

    The institutions had previously participated for a number of years but have now rescinded their sponsorship because of Texas law SB 17, banning DEI programs at public universities. Texas governor Greg Abbott threatened to fire A&M president Mark Welsh. Welsh folded, issuing a statement that said, “While the proper process for reviewing and approving attendance at such events was followed, I don’t believe we fully considered the spirit of our state law in making the initial decision to participate. We need to be sure that attendance at those events is aligned with the very clear guidance we’ve been given by our governing bodies.”

    The intention behind these attacks by Rufo and his backers is to, essentially, resegregate higher education under an entirely twisted definition of “fairness.” This point of view is ascendant, as multiple states have banned so-called DEI initiatives, and the rolling back of affirmative action in college admissions has already resulted in a decline in Black first-year students, something most pronounced at “elite” institutions.

    So, this is now, but in acting this way now, what’s likely to be next? Will Texas A&M regress to a de facto policy of segregation? Is this healthy for the institution, for the state of Texas?

    I grant that it is possible that a program of resegregation is consistent with the desires of a majority of the state’s citizens and the elected legislators are simply reflecting the desire of their constituency. If so, so be it … I guess. I wonder how long the institutions can last when it allows Chris Rufo or Elon Musk or Charlie Kirk or any other outside individual or group to dictate its policies. Is this a good precedent for whatever is next?

    There’s going to be a next. What happens now will give shape to what that next might be. I worry that the folks making decisions believe there is only the now, not the next.

    Thankfully, most of us do not have to make consequential decisions that impact many people working in large institutions, but we can use this framing in considering our individual fates as well.

    In a couple of weeks my next book, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, will be in the world. I’ve invested a lot in this book, not just time and effort, but some measure of my hopes for my career and the impact my ideas may have on the world of writing and teaching writing.

    It is a fraught thing to invest too much into something like a single book. Books fail to launch all the time, as I’ve experienced personally … more than once. Finding the balance between investing sufficient effort to take advantage of the now, while also recognizing that I will have to do something next, has been a bit tricky, but necessary.

    Maybe what’s next will be closely related to the now: more speaking, more workshops related to my vision for teaching writing, a truly tangible impact on how we collectively discuss these issues after being more of a gadfly and voice in the woods. But also, maybe this is closer to the end of a cycle that started with a previous book.

    To calm my worries, I spend time thinking about what would be next if 50 percent or even 90 percent of what I now do for my vocation and income dried up. This is what I did when it became clear that teaching off the tenure track was not going to continue to be a viable way forward—a process that has put me in this moment.

    Imagining a next, I think I would call my local School of Rock and see if they needed someone to teach kids the drums, and I also would get to work on a novel that’s been rolling around my head. I picture that possible next, and while there is a sadness that what I’m hoping to achieve now did not come to fruition, I can also envision real pleasure in that other path.

    To preserve their essential mission, institutions must be prepared for turbulence and change by knowing there will be a next. To survive in this time, individuals must both be present in the now and consider what might have to happen next.

    Not easy, but always necessary.

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  • Review of Adamson’s “A Century of Tomorrows” (opinion)

    Review of Adamson’s “A Century of Tomorrows” (opinion)

    The name of an ambition more than it is of a body of knowledge, the term “futurology” is attributed by one source on word origins to Aldous Huxley. The author of Brave New World is a plausible candidate, of course; he is credited with coining it in 1946. But a search of JSTOR turns up an article from three years earlier suggesting that Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West made him the pioneer of “what one may hope will sometime develop into a real science of ‘Futurology.’”

    The author of that article was a political scientist and émigré from Nazi Germany named Ossip K. Flechtheim, then teaching at the historically Black Atlanta University; the article itself was published in a historically Black scholarly journal, Phylon. He soon decided that his idea’s time had come.

    By 1945, writing in The Journal of Higher Education, Flechtheim advocated for futurology both as an emerging line of interdisciplinary scholarship and as a matter of urgent concern to “the present-day student, whose life-span may well stretch into the twenty-first century.” He was optimistic about futurology’s potential to advance knowledge: Maintaining that “a large number of scholars” concurred on “the major problems which humanity would face” in the coming decades, he announced that “predict[ing] the most probable trends is a task which we have the means to accomplish successfully today.”

    But as Niels Bohr and/or Yogi Berra famously put it, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Flechtheim went on to publish landmark contributions to the incipient field of study, surely expecting that a proper social science of the future would be established by the turn of the millennium. But on this point, as in most cases, subsequent history only confirms the Bohr-Berra conundrum.

    One rough metric of futurology’s public-intellectual salience over time is how often the word appears per year in publications stored in the Google Books database. The resulting graph shows barely any use of the term before about 1960. But with the new decade there is a sudden burst of activity: a period of steep acceleration lasting about two decades, then collapsing dramatically over the final years of the 20th century. The JSTOR search results show much the same pattern.

    And so it is that Glenn Adamson’s A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present (Bloomsbury Publishing) approaches the subject with not so much skepticism about futurology’s prospects as a certain irony about its very status as a distinct kind of knowledge. The author, a curator and a historian, attaches Flechtheim’s neologism as a label to a kaleidoscopic array of efforts to anticipate the shape of things to come, whether by analyzing statistical trends, through artistic creativity or in experimentation with new ways of life. The book concentrates on the United States and the 20th century, but inevitably the larger world and earlier history shape the book, which also reflects some 21st-century pressures as well.

    Plenty of science fiction novels have done better at imagining life in subsequent decades than think tank projections made in the same era. But comparing prognostications for relative accuracy is not Adamson’s real concern. Whatever means it may employ, the futurological imperative is always to respond to current reality—to its perceived failings or potentials, to the opportunities and terrors looming over the world or lurking just out of sight. Adamson writes that “every story about the future is also a demand to intervene in the present.” The forms of intervention considered include political movements, religious revivals, market research, scenarios for thermonuclear war, hippie communes, the insurance industry and time capsules assembled for future generations to ponder (to give an abbreviated list).

    The future’s uncertainty provides a blank screen for projecting contemporary issues in reimagined form and the opportunity to imagine alternatives. (Or to imagine inevitabilities, whether of the encouraging or despairing kind.)

    The author takes futurology to have emerged in the 19th century as a response to concerns previously the domain of religious traditions. Utopia and dystopia provide fairly obvious secular analogues to heaven and hell. But there is more to it than that. “For those who no longer saw the future as a matter of revealed truth,” Adamson writes, “new forms of authority stepped in to fill the gap. This is where the futurologists would come in. They would not only make claims about what lies ahead but also somehow persuade others of their ability to see it.”

    The grounds for claiming such authority proliferated, as did the visions themselves, in ways resistant to linear narrative. Instead, the author pulls seemingly unconnected developments together into thematic clusters, rather like museum exhibits displayed in partly chronological and partly thematic order.

    For example, the futurological cluster he calls the Machine includes the organization Technocracy, Inc., which in the early 1930s won a hearing for its plan to put the entire economy under the control of engineers who would end the waste, bottlenecks and underperformance that had, they purported, caused the Depression.

    Enthusiasm for the Technocracy’s social blueprints was short-lived, but it expressed a wider trend. Futurologists of this ilk “set about creating self-correcting, self-regulating systems; conceptually speaking, they became machine builders.” Under this heading Adamson includes enthusiasts for “the Soviet experiment” (as non-Communist admirers liked to call it), but also the market-minded professionals involved in industrial design, especially for automobiles: “The advance planning of annual model changes was a way to humanize technology, while also setting the horizon of consumer expectation.”

    Whereas the Machine-oriented visionaries of the early 20th century had specific goals for the future (and confidence about being able to meet them), a different attitude prevailed after World War II among those Adamson calls the Lab futurologists. The future was for them “something to be studied under laboratory conditions, with multiple scenarios measured and compared against one another.” Some of them had access to the enormous computers of the day, and the attention of people making decisions of the highest consequence.

    “Prediction was becoming a much subtler art,” the author continues, “with one defining exception: the prediction of nuclear annihilation, a zero multiplier for all human hopes.”

    Those who thought life in a Machine world sounded oppressive offered visions of the future as Garden, where a healthier balance between urban and rural life could prevail. A corresponding horror at Lab scenarios spawned what Adamson calls Party futurology. This started in Haight-Ashbury, fought back at the Stonewall and generated the radical feminist movement that still haunts some people’s nightmares.

    Missing from my thumbnail sketch here is all the historical texture of the book (including a diverse group of figures, leading and otherwise) as well as its working out of connections among seemingly unrelated developments.

    As mentioned, the book is centered on 20th-century America. Even so, “Flood,” the final chapter (not counting the conclusion), takes up forces that have continued to accumulate in the early millennium. Flood-era futurology is not defined either by climate change or digital hypersaturation of attention. The main element I’ll point out here is Adamson’s sense that futurology’s own future has been compromised by an excess of noise and meretricious pseudo-insight.

    The floods of dubious information (from too many sources to evaluate) make it harder to establish reality in the present, much less to extrapolate from it. Filling the void is a churn of simulated thought the author calls Big Ideas. “By this,” he writes, “I mean a general prediction about culture at large that initially feels like an important insight, but is actually either so general as to be beyond dispute, or so vague as to be immune to disproof.” Much better, on the whole, is to study the record of futurology itself, with its history as a warning against secular fortune-telling.

    Scott McLemee is Inside Higher Ed’s “Intellectual Affairs” columnist. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca magazine and a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education before joining Inside Higher Ed in 2005.

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  • Montana State president to lead APLU

    Montana State president to lead APLU

    The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities named Montana State University president Waded Cruzado as its next president, according to a Thursday news release.

    Cruzado, who has served as chair of APLU’s Board of Directors since 2021, will formally step into the top job at APLU on July 1. Cruzado has led Montana State University since 2010, and last August that she would retire in June 2025.

    She replaces outgoing president Mark Becker, who has led APLU since 2022.

    “Throughout my life, the history and the impact of land-grant universities and public higher education have provided me, and countless students and families, with inspiration and a call to action. I’ve seen firsthand the life-changing opportunity our public universities provide to their students, their communities, the country, and the world,” Cruzado said in the news release.

    Cruzado, who was a first-generation college student, is a native of Puerto Rico.

    Gary May, chancellor of the University of California, Davis, who led the search committee that hired Cruzado, described her as “an exceptional leader who brings deep experience in successfully leading a public and land-grant university to impressive new heights.” May also noted her familiarity with the organization given her time as chair of APLU’s Board of Directors.

    (The headline was corrected to reflect that Cruzado is retiring before going to APLU.)

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  • Rise in college applications driven by minority students

    Rise in college applications driven by minority students

    The number of first-year applicants this cycle is up 5 percent over January of last year, according to a new report from Common App, and overall applications rose 7 percent.

    The growth was buoyed by a sharp uptick in underrepresented students: Latino applicants increased 13 percent, Black applicants by 12 percent and first-generation applicants by 14 percent. Asian applicants rose by 7 percent, while the number of white applicants didn’t change.

    A Common App analysis also found that the number of applicants from low-income neighborhoods increased more than those from neighborhoods above the median income level—by 9 percent, compared to 4 percent. And the number of applicants who qualify for a fee waiver is up 10 percent so far.

    Geographically, applicant trends seemed to follow broader demographic trends; they surged by 33 percent in the Southwest, with a 36 percent boost in Texas alone, while every other region remained relatively stable. The Western region saw applicants decline by 1 percent.

    In general, students are applying to about the same number of schools as last year, with only a 2 percent increase in applications per student. Public institutions have received 11 percent more applications, while private ones have received 3 percent more.

    For the first time since 2019, domestic applicant growth outpaced that of international applicants, with the former increasing by 5 percent and the latter slowing to 1 percent. Certain high-volume countries experienced steep declines: The number of applicants from Africa fell by 14 percent, and Ghana in particular saw a 36 percent decrease. Applicants from other increasingly popular source countries for international students surged; Bangladesh, for instance, saw 45 percent growth.

    The number of applicants who submitted test scores was about even with the number who didn’t. For the past four years, since test-optional policies were implemented in 2020, no-score applicants have significantly outnumbered those who submitted scores, but institutions returning to test requirements may be swinging the pendulum back.

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